In Defense Of Dawkins

It’s my 100th post and so I’m going to get a little serious.

This weekend I received my copy of the Fall 2010 The Reform Jewish Quarterly with its usual mix of insightful and useless commentary.  The article that caught my eye and my ire is an essay length review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion by Norbert Samuelson, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Arizona State University.  As it is the first such essay that I’ve encountered in a Reform movement publication, I was intrigued.

I was also immediate ticked off by the title of the essay, A New Militant Atheism: Dawkins’s God Delusion.  I don’t know whether Prof. Dawkins cares, but I just despise the use of the term “militant” when applied to atheists.  What exactly is “militant” about lacking a belief in the supernatural and making your argument in forceful terms?  Are committed non-theists not as entitled to put up a defense of our views as are committed theists?

Here is the first excerpt I want to address (the article is not available online):

…[H]is own protest to the contrary (p. 393), Dawkins is a scientivist fundamentalist and no less a fundamentalist than his despised Christian fundamentalists.  Like all fundamentalists, he exhibits three primary defining characteristics.  First, he sees himself engaged in a war for truth that brooks no in-between positions.  You must take your stand either with him or against him, and all who are not with him are against him.  Second, he sees all issues of dispute in stark bland-and-white terms that bridge no grays.  Only fundamentalist and militant religion is really religion to the exclusion of all intellectually sophisticated forms of religious belief, which includes all academic theology and religious philosophy.  For Dawkins, classical Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, modern Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen, and contemporary Jewish philosophers of biology such as Hans Jonas don’t enter into Dawkins’s visual map of meaning and relevance.  Similarly only Dawkins’s Neo-Darwinism is really science – to the exclusion of the Mutationism of Thomas Hunt Morgan or William Castle, Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium, and last but not least, the varieties of “theistic evolution” that dare to reconcile the convictions of modern biologists with traditional religious belief.  Third, like Christian fundamentalists he insists that there is only one valid way to read the Scriptures [sic], and that is literally, despite the fact that both Rabbinic Judaism and Roman Catholicism are founded on nonliteral readings of the scriptures as the only true readings of these texts.

I took the time to carefully re-type all of this text because I want to seriously address it.

Let’s begin with the word “scientivist.”  My spell checker doesn’t recognize it, but be that as it may, he defines it in a note as “someone who presents what is really a philosophy as if it is a science.”  I still don’t understand it.  If Samuelson is claiming that Dawkins believes that only empirically verifiable evidence can make claims about the way things are and what really exists, I do not comprehend how this merits a new coinage.  Perhaps a reader can assist me with this.

It is when he launches into his claims of Dawkins’ fundamentalism that I recoil.  Merriam-Webster presents these definitions of the word:

…a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching

…a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles

The first definition is clearly inapplicable.  Therefore, it must be something like the second that Samuelson is describing.

Yet the second definition flies in the face of the scientific method.  It is utterly incompatible with the core practice of science to hypothesize, experiment, produce data and analyze such data, subject to constant ongoing peer review.  No set of basic scientific principles can exist that is not constantly subject to this process.  Eventually, a strict adherence to some set of principles will emerge but only insofar as such principles actually work.  Even then, new discoveries may partially or completely wipe out those principles.  Newtonian physics continues to work.  It’s how we send rockets into the sky.  Yet the discovery of quantum mechanics challenged and overthrew Newtonian physics as a way to describe the world of the very, very small.

Samuelson does not rely upon the dictionary to define Dawkins’ supposed fundamentalism, so I must address his claims point by point.  Let’s begin with the allegation that Dawkins, like fundamentalists, is engaged in a “war for truth that brooks no in-between positions.”

Why is this solely the domain of fundamentalism?  Do humans not constantly engage in debate about the rightness of their propositions over and against those of others?  Moreover, what does Samuelson mean by “in-between” positions?  If by this, he means to point to his later examples of Maimonides and Cohen, in what way are these in-between positions?  They are no more than philosophical musings about the nature of God which, if we are honest with ourselves, have no real bearing on any practiced religion.  Academic theologies have almost nothing in common with religion as it is popularly experienced.  Hermann Cohen’s God is not apprehended by worshippers using the Reform movement’s siddur.  Maimonides’ apophatic theology is ignored – as he perhaps intended – by those who pore over the Mishneh Torah.  I am admittedly far less knowledgable than Samuelson in these areas and I have actually studied them a great deal.  What impact does he think these ideas have on the average Jew or Christian?  The theistic texts of prayer and scripture are far more influential.  These philosophies are “in-between” only in the sense that they are flowery ways to deal with claims of the supernatural, to somehow de-supernaturalize them and to reconcile them to the findings of naturalistic science.

Samuelson also seems to think that Dawkins’ rejection of mutationism and/or punctuated equilibrium represents some kind of orthodoxy analogous to religious fundamentalism.  This is actually absurd.  A brief review of the debates over these topics will tell any layperson with some background in natural selection that these are heavily debated concepts.  Biologists have been arguing about them – on the basis of empirical facts that are placed in evidence – for a very long time.  As a matter of fact, Dawkins is quite comfortably in the majority on these two issues, rather than stubbornly holding onto an idea that defies reality which is what actual religious fundamentalists do so well.  As for his rejection of “theistic evolution,” Dawkins, as a scientist, need not address mythological claims that insert themselves into scientific theories.  It would be like a chef writing down a complicated recipe and adding the ingredient of love.  It’s not a real ingredient and it has nothing to do with whether the souffle will rise or not.

Samuelson’s final proof of Dawkins’ fundamentalism, an argument that has now completely fallen apart, is his literal reading of the bible.  Now on this question I feel that I have some real expertise.  It is true that neither Rabbinic Judaism nor Roman Catholicism are based entirely on literal readings.  That doesn’t always make their way of reading it better, nor does it mean that they never read their bibles that way.  For both of those religions, non-literalism has quite often produced a large number of meaningless accretions that are no better than the texts themselves.  The “cult” of the Virgin Mary is one very good example.  The detailed and exhaustive rules of kashrut and family purity are another.

Neither of these approaches veered away from the supernatural, which after all is the kernel of the atheist’s complaint.  Both of them produced collections of more sensitive and gentle interpretations right alongside harmful and harsh readings.

Non-literalism is not a wonderful step away from the supernatural.  It’s just another progression in its many manifestations.  Did the rabbis replace sacrifice with prayer?  Historical and sociological processes would have done so in any case.  Did those prayers have any more effect on the real world than sacrifices?  Not in any way.  The continuing effort of literalists and non-literalists alike to squeeze truths from an ancient text has the ongoing effect of legitimizing those texts as sources of truth.  To the extent that scriptures contain wisdom, it is because their authors were wise.  To the extent that they contain ignorance, it is because their authors lived a very long time ago and were quite often ignorant.  It is a human document, no more and no less.  How it is interpreted does not change that and it does not reveal great wisdom that is perceivable only through one way of reading it or another.

I will stop here in hopes that I’ve addressed enough of Samuelson’s essay.  I think that when the largest liberal denomination of religious Judaism prints such an attack, it deserves to be answered.