{"id":628,"date":"2010-11-29T19:16:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-29T19:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/in-defense-of-dawkins.html"},"modified":"2010-11-29T19:16:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T19:16:00","slug":"in-defense-of-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/in-defense-of-dawkins.html","title":{"rendered":"In Defense Of Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

It\u2019s my 100th post and so I\u2019m going to get a little serious.<\/p>\n

This weekend I received my copy of the Fall 2010 The Reform Jewish Quarterly<\/i> with its usual mix of insightful and useless commentary.\u00a0 The article that caught my eye and my ire is an essay length review of Richard Dawkins\u2019 The God Delusion<\/i> by Norbert Samuelson, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Arizona State University.\u00a0 As it is the first such essay that I\u2019ve encountered in a Reform movement publication, I was intrigued.<\/p>\n

I was also immediate ticked off by the title of the essay, A New Militant Atheism: Dawkins\u2019s God Delusion<\/i>.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know whether Prof. Dawkins cares, but I just despise the use of the term \u201cmilitant\u201d when applied to atheists.\u00a0 What exactly is \u201cmilitant\u201d about lacking a belief in the supernatural and making your argument in forceful terms?\u00a0 Are committed non-theists not as entitled to put up a defense of our views as are committed theists?<\/p>\n

Here is the first excerpt I want to address (the article is not available online):<\/p>\n

\u2026[H]is own protest to the contrary (p. 393), Dawkins is a scientivist fundamentalist and no less a fundamentalist than his despised Christian fundamentalists.\u00a0 Like all fundamentalists, he exhibits three primary defining characteristics.\u00a0 First, he sees himself engaged in a war for truth that brooks no in-between positions.\u00a0 You must take your stand either with him or against him, and all who are not with him are against him.\u00a0 Second, he sees all issues of dispute in stark bland-and-white terms that bridge no grays.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t enter into Dawkins\u2019s visual map of meaning and relevance.\u00a0 Similarly only Dawkins\u2019s Neo-Darwinism is really science \u2013 to the exclusion of the Mutationism of Thomas Hunt Morgan or William Castle, Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s punctuated equilibrium, and last but not least, the varieties of \u201ctheistic evolution\u201d that dare to reconcile the convictions of modern biologists with traditional religious belief.\u00a0 Third, like Christian fundamentalists he insists that there is only one valid way to read the Scriptures [sic<\/i>], 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I took the time to carefully re-type all of this text because I want to seriously address it.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with the word \u201cscientivist.\u201d\u00a0 My spell checker doesn\u2019t recognize it, but be that as it may, he defines it in a note as \u201csomeone who presents what is really a philosophy as if it is a science.\u201d\u00a0 I still don\u2019t understand it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Perhaps a reader can assist me with this.<\/p>\n

It is when he launches into his claims of Dawkins\u2019 fundamentalism that I recoil.\u00a0 Merriam-Webster presents these definitions of the word:<\/p>\n

\u2026a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental<\/a> to Christian life and teaching<\/p>\n

\u2026a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first definition is clearly inapplicable.\u00a0 Therefore, it must be something like the second that Samuelson is describing.<\/p>\n

Yet the second definition flies in the face of the scientific method.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 No set of basic scientific principles can exist that is not constantly subject to this process.\u00a0 Eventually, a strict adherence to some set of principles will emerge but only insofar as such principles actually work.\u00a0 Even then, new discoveries may partially or completely wipe out those principles.\u00a0 Newtonian physics continues to work.\u00a0 It\u2019s how we send rockets into the sky.\u00a0 Yet the discovery of quantum mechanics challenged and overthrew Newtonian physics as a way to describe the world of the very, very small.<\/p>\n

Samuelson does not rely upon the dictionary to define Dawkins\u2019 supposed fundamentalism, so I must address his claims point by point.\u00a0 Let\u2019s begin with the allegation that Dawkins, like fundamentalists, is engaged in a \u201cwar for truth that brooks no in-between positions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is this solely the domain of fundamentalism?\u00a0 Do humans not constantly engage in debate about the rightness of their propositions over and against those of others?\u00a0 Moreover, what does Samuelson mean by \u201cin-between\u201d positions?\u00a0 If by this, he means to point to his later examples of Maimonides and Cohen, in what way are these in-between positions?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Academic theologies have almost nothing in common with religion as it is popularly experienced.\u00a0 Hermann Cohen\u2019s God is not apprehended by worshippers using the Reform movement\u2019s siddur.\u00a0 Maimonides\u2019 apophatic theology is ignored \u2013 as he perhaps intended \u2013 by those who pore over the Mishneh Torah.\u00a0 I am admittedly far less knowledgable than Samuelson in these areas and I have actually studied them a great deal.\u00a0 What impact does he think these ideas have on the average Jew or Christian?\u00a0 The theistic texts of prayer and scripture are far more influential.\u00a0 These philosophies are \u201cin-between\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Samuelson also seems to think that Dawkins\u2019 rejection of mutationism and\/or punctuated equilibrium represents some kind of orthodoxy analogous to religious fundamentalism.\u00a0 This is actually absurd.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Biologists have been arguing about them \u2013 on the basis of empirical facts that are placed in evidence \u2013 for a very long time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As for his rejection of \u201ctheistic evolution,\u201d Dawkins, as a scientist, need not address mythological claims that insert themselves into scientific theories.\u00a0 It would be like a chef writing down a complicated recipe and adding the ingredient of love.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a real ingredient and it has nothing to do with whether the souffle will rise or not.<\/p>\n

Samuelson\u2019s final proof of Dawkins\u2019 fundamentalism, an argument that has now completely fallen apart, is his literal reading of the bible.\u00a0 Now on this question I feel that I have some real expertise.\u00a0 It is true that neither Rabbinic Judaism nor Roman Catholicism are based entirely on literal readings.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t always make their way of reading it better, nor does it mean that they never read their bibles that way.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The \u201ccult\u201d of the Virgin Mary is one very good example.\u00a0 The detailed and exhaustive rules of kashrut and family purity are another.<\/p>\n

Neither of these approaches veered away from the supernatural, which after all is the kernel of the atheist\u2019s complaint.\u00a0 Both of them produced collections of more sensitive and gentle interpretations right alongside harmful and harsh readings.<\/p>\n

Non-literalism is not a wonderful step away from the supernatural.\u00a0 It\u2019s just another progression in its many manifestations.\u00a0 Did the rabbis replace sacrifice with prayer?\u00a0 Historical and sociological processes would have done so in any case.\u00a0 Did those prayers have any more effect on the real world than sacrifices?\u00a0 Not in any way.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 To the extent that scriptures contain wisdom, it is because their authors were wise.\u00a0 To the extent that they contain ignorance, it is because their authors lived a very long time ago and were quite often ignorant.\u00a0 It is a human document, no more and no less.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I will stop here in hopes that I\u2019ve addressed enough of Samuelson\u2019s essay.\u00a0 I think that when the largest liberal denomination of religious Judaism prints such an attack, it deserves to be answered.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s my 100th post and so I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 The article that caught my eye and my ire is an essay length review of Richard Dawkins\u2019 The God […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,25],"class_list":["post-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-atheism","tag-liberal-religions-and-theologies"],"yoast_head":"\nIn Defense Of Dawkins<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's my 100th post and so I'm going to get a little serious. 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