MetaCatholic

I have been reading Darwin’s Angel by John Cornwell.(ISBN 978 1 84668 048 9). Unlike a great many responses to Dawkins, and especially to The God Delusion, this is not a blunderbuss of a logical argument, but a series of ripostes and questions. Cornwell assembles them all under the conceit of writing as Darwin’s guardian angel, now assigned to Dawkins. This conceit allows him both to address Richard Dawkins directly, and by a device so at odds with Dawkins’ rigourous scientism, leave a sense of gentle teasing permanently in the background.

Sometimes this background whimsy spills over into more overt teasing – “You quote yourself (who else?)” (p113). Or after quoting one of Dawkins’ anecdotes about receiving a round of applause for suggesting a religious upbringing is worse than child abuse:

You should not be carried away by the effect of your own charisma and eloquence. A Dublin audience will clap enthusiastically in an effort to bring the most delightful evening to an end so as to make it to the bar before closing time. (p100)

In this spirit his put-downs are also gentle, but nonetheless devastating: “Your book is as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free of false modesty.” (p29) But, together with a number of more penetrating criticisms of Dawkins on questions of good, evil and ethical behaviour, these wry observations also move in the direction of suggesting Dawkins is actually rather naive, and innocent of any real acquaintance with what suffering and misery are like. The picture of the comfortable ivory-tower academic more at home in a word of ideas than reality is only sketched in lightly, but is there nonetheless.

This almost satirical style does not get in the way of some quite rigorously logical probings at specific ideas in Dawkins’ writing. He is particularly forceful on philosophy, and imagination and the arts (picking Dawkins’ uses of Dostoevsky and Yeats apart) as well as having a more than sufficient grasp of the science to interact both positively and negatively with the arguments. Above all, he hammers home Dawkins’ misconstruction of the purposes and nature of religious discourse, and is absolutely clear that God is not another existent being, but the underlying reason for any and all existent being.  Many of his chapters cover the same ground as other answers to Dawkins, but here they are put as short sharp points, questions to ponder rather than knock-down arguments, and elegantly expressed. This style, of overt respect for Dawkins’ achievements and sincerity, combined with subtle undermining of his logic, is more devastating than the more weighty tomes.

One area of his critique that was new to me has just become more topical, the idea that Dawkins lays himself open to charges of anti-Semitism. Quite a few people have already picked up on this quotation from the Guardian:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.

This probably shows a certain political naivety about the “Jewish world conspiracy” stuff more than any defined anti-Semitism, but there’s just enough to be worrying. As Cornwall points out, in dismissing the whole of the Bible, Dawkins relies on a single article, and takes him to task for this dependence on a single source.

If you had set an essay on, say, the independent evolution of eyes, and a student had turned in an essay based on a single source, claiming that the theory of the independent evolution of eyes was wrong, [NB this is a common so-called Intelligent Design trope] would you not be astonished? Would you not send the student back to the library to make a wider survey of the literature? (p78)

But the problem comes from the source of this single article, John Hartung’s essay “Love thy neighbour.”

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that-The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller. [my emphasis]

One might be wary just from the setting of this article on this website which seems committed to a scientific rationale for perpetuating racial distinctions in political life, and calling it free-thinking. In another essay review on the same site Hartung argues that anti-Semitism is an inevitable response to Jewish competitiveness for power. Cornwell, as a former journalist, actually investigates sources, and Dawkins’ source (and its anti-Semitism) should be enough to disturb him, so Cornwell writes

I find it strange that you should have been so reliant on this single source for what forms such an important charge against Judaism and Christianity in your book. (p84)

In connection with this Cornwell at his most serious also points out the potential historical analogy between Dawkins’ regular descriptions of religion as a virus and the rhetoric of Nazi blood-purity. The problem with the language of viral infection is that it entails language of quarantine and eradication programmes. Again, addressing Dawkins directly, he says:

I am not suggesting that you would have anything but contempt and loathing for the “bio-political” ideas that arose in Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; but I want to impress on you the far-reaching potential consequences of likening believers, or any group of people in society, to disease carriers. (p143)

The point is well-taken, and I hope it convinces Dawkins, not necessarily to change his mind, but to moderate his rhetoric. But this may be a serious problem for Dawkins: if you believe all religion equally bad, how do you deal with a race whose identity is rooted in a religious and scriptural story, without also being racist? The Oxford professor seems strangely naive about the company he is keeping, and strangely out of touch with the real world implications and effects of ideas, despite the fact that he lambasts the ideas of believers for inflicting every kind of evil on the world. Cornwell’s examples indeed suggest that you can do worse things in life than bring children up in their parents’ religion.

All in all this book brings something new to the over-full table of Dawkins and his antagonists, and should be welcomed as a delightful read, and a penetrating riposte.