Michael Novak, philosopher, conservative and Catholic godbotherer, weighs in here on the Dawkins/Dennett/Harris wave of atheist books.
He's writing for the American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research, but we won't hold it against him. We may perhaps note in passing that he shares this platform with Jean Kirkpatrick and Newt Gingrich, but that's up to him, and we certainly wouldn't want to indulge in any ad hominem attacks on that account, would we?
One of his criticisms is that science was nurtured by the Church, and in the Arab world by Islam. This is true up to a point, but as Dawkins points out, that was because the religious establishment controlled the intellectual world. It was an unequal relationship, in which the rational mind was only allowed to flower when it reached conclusions which religion wanted it to find. Galileo's struggles with Pope Urban VIII are famous, but perhaps less known are the condemnations of the University of Paris in 1277. Concerned about the free thinking going on there, the Bishop of Paris decided to help them in their studies by listing all the things they were to find to be true. The list ran to 219 propositions, covering such subjects as causality, free will and the Aristotelian ideas of the Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd (known as Averroes). The latter was himself persecuted, for rationalist doctrines with conflicted with Islam.
Not that it was always like this, of course. The point, though, is that rational analysis will never sit easily with ideas of revealed truth. Science may have come under the heading of religion for over a millennium, but its real flowering has come after the shackles were removed. This is why it has done better in the west than it has in the Islamic world, where religion won.
He also asks why atheism hasn't been more successful than it has. In northern Europe we don't need to ask this, as he recognises elsewhere, but the persistence of religion obviously needs to be considered.
Dawkins and Dennett expand at some length on evolutionary theories of religion. The main argument goes like this.
When the human brain was evolving, it had to learn to assess sensory input and distinguish between the physical environment, rocks, mud and vegetation, and purposive agents - animals and other humans. Mistaking the rustling of trees for predators is a nuisance, but mistaking predators for the rustling of trees is fatal. Seeing faces in clouds is distracting, but seeing clouds in faces denies you useful information about the people around you. Therefore, brains would have been likely to evolve the habit of overemphasising the degree of purpose around them rather than the reverse.
This accounts for our habit of conversing with inanimate objects, the theory says. It also accounts for our belief that the world is being kind or cruel when good or bad things happen to us, and thus for our religion. There is an old saying to the effect that religion is humanity's attempt to communicate with the weather, and the evolutionary theory of religion is that saying writ large.
I dunno, myself. One of the problems I have with evolutionary psychology is the way it always seems to be trying to find plausible selective arguments for the universal experience of ideas I've never shared, and emotions I've never felt. Maybe I should get out more, but maybe it's not just me.
I think I can account for the persistence of religion with this list. Physical coercion, social pressure, fear of death, fear of hell or divine wrath, a now fortunately historical lack of alternative explanations for physical phenomena, alms, priestly hegemony, charlatanism, epilepsy and psychedelic plants. I have to say I'm not immediately seeing what it is about religion that isn't explained by one or more of the above.
One of the most important factors here may well turn out to be alms. It's very noticeable that the societies who have been most successful in abandoning religion are the ones with reliable Welfare States.
Not that Novak adds anything to this analysis. He declares that Dennett's idea of "natural" is not large enough to comprehend even the heroic fidelity of Natan Sharansky, nor the timeless, liberating power of King David's poignant Psalms but doesn't explain why not.
He talks at quite astounding length about Sharansky, Soviet dissident, scientist and lapsed atheist. Apparently Sharansky found God in the gulag, and was persecuted for it. He berates the secular authors for not considering Sharansky or anyone like him, but fails to produce anything that might convince, except for a description of a prisoner's internal thoughts.
This always happens with religious polemicists. Faced with a lack of evidence for their position, they are always forced back on their own personal experiences, or even more dubiously those of others. Yet despite all their efforts they can never give us a good reason why brain processes should be considered trustworthy in the absence of external verification.
And yet the history of humanity should alert us to the dangers of this. At different times and in different places people have claimed, based purely on their own internal monologues, that Jesus was a chunk of God, hived off from the main body and sent down to live a human life, that Zeus gave birth out of his thigh, that Mohamed wrote the Koran under dictation from an angel, that God puts kings on earth to rule in his name and to defy them is sinful, that the gods will destroy the world unless they receive enough human sacrifice and that the parlous state to which Bristol Rovers have been reduced is somehow undeserved.
How can the religious ignore this lunatic litany, and carry on as if their own experiences were different, privileged?
He also says things like this, about his daughter's experiences at university.
Yet it didn't take my daughter long to see through the pretenses of atheism. In the first place, the fundamental doctrine seemed to be that everything that is, came to be through chance and natural selection. In other words, at bottom, everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility. What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation. She decided that atheists could not accept the implications of their own metaphysical commitments. While denying the principle of rationality "all the way down," they wished to cling to all the rationalities on the surface of things. My daughter found this unconvincing.
Honestly, this man is supposed to be a philosopher, a serious commentator. He complains that secularists show a lack of respect, then he comes out with gibberish like this.
This really shouldn't need saying, but natural selection does not mean that everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility. It means that genes survive by being able to make copies of themselves. Science does not simply claim the principle of rationality, it sets out to demonstrate it. Scientists do not work by putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation. They work by constructing hypotheses and subjecting them to experimentation.
He then goes on to explain what Christianity is actually about. It is about jelly. It is about clouds of nebulous rhetoric, drunk on its own grandiloquence. One is reduced to rereading it over and over again in the hope of squeezing out a soupcon of consistency, or even flavour, without success.
At one point, he says that when its practical implications are compared with those of the Christian viewpoint, evolutionary biology may not be attractive as a way of life. I don't recall ever thinking of evolution as a lifestyle choice. I mainly use it to account for the existence of complex biological entities, personally. I suppose that this may seem a trifling point if you follow the jelly religion, where everything mixes into one great vague melting pot with everything else, but to me it seems germane.
Most damningly, he's so busy spooning out the jelly he makes no attempt to explain the problematic bits of the Bible. Nothing about homophobia, sexism, ethnic cleansing. And yet he describes himself as a Catholic. He can focus on the jelly if he likes, but it's the hellfire that worries us.
Note for US readers - in the UK jelly is the wobbly stuff with gelatine in it, not the fruit and sugar conserve that comes in jars. I believe you call it Jell-O.