NOTE: You can hear Richard interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on the CBC today; the archive of the interview is here (click on “Listen” under Dawkins’s picture). Ghomeshi chooses to talk almost exclusively about atheism and not about evolution, which shows where people’s interests lie. I defy you to find Dawkins’s statements the least bit “strident”!
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Given that the media pundits are now proclaiming Richard Dawkins as irrelevant, marginalized, and ignored (except by them), it’s curious that his newly-released autobiography is already #11 on the New York Times bestseller list of nonfiction. Who on earth could be buying those books? (Since #1 and #3 are not “nonfiction”, this really makes Richard’s book #9.)
But the Dawkins-baiting continues in the press. It’s no surprise that the Catholic Herald went after him—in a piece called “Michael Faraday would find Richard Dawkins terrifying.” The writer, Francis Phillips, first touts Baroness Susan Greenfield, former director of Britain’s Royal Institution, for her wonderful accommodationism (Greenfield also manages to get in a swipe against dogmatic scientists):
[A Radio 4] interview with Baroness Susan Greenfield, the Oxford neuroscientist, was thought-provoking. Greenfield is against “scientism” and the rigidity of thought that implies science has (or will discover) all the answers in the religious sphere. Although not from a faith tradition, she has an open mind and thinks science should not exclude other questions about the human condition. She quoted Faraday: “There is nothing so frightening as someone who knows they are right.”
Really? Scientists are guilty of that dogmatism and believers are not? What a silly thing to say! Scientists suspect they are right, but don’t know for sure, with the possible exception of things so firmly established, like the composition of the water molecule, that you’d bet your fortune on them. For many other things we merely suspect we’re right. Of course, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury are the ones who know they are right, but you won’t see Greenfield or Phillips criticizing them.
Phillips then refers to a review of Dawkins’s autobiography by Charles Moore in the Torygraph:
Is Greenfield’s fellow Oxford scientist, Richard Dawkins, an apostle of “scientism”? I ask because Charles Moore has written a witty review of Dawkins’s autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder (that word again) in the Telegraph, entitled “How dare God disagree with Dawkins”. The title says it all.
Professor Dawkins is very clever and Moore pays tribute to his “amazing gifts of lucidity and intellectual passion”. But there is a caveat: “His passionate eloquence suggests … something that smacks of the religious zeal that Dawkins says he so detests.” He comments that Dawkins “resembles the preacher rather than the cool-headed thinker”. As well as being a great scientist and writer about science, he is also “a world-famous evangelical missionary against God”. Dawkins should ponder Faraday’s remark.
There’s something ironic about The Catholic Herald criticizing someone for his “religious zeal.” Phillips ends with a bit of tendentious and ridiculous psychologizing:
Having written this I have just stumbled upon a quote I once scribbled down, though without the source: “There are three types of people in the world: those who have plumbed the depths of their eternal void and found Love and those who try in vain to fill this void with temporal pleasure; and then there are those who have not yet touched the core of their infinite loneliness.” I suspect Dawkins is the third type.
Now where on earth would he get that idea? I suspect it’s because Phillips sees “Love” as “love of God” (when you capitalize “Love,” you’re talking about the numinous), and Richard simply doesn’t have that.
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Meanwhile, Moore’s Torygraph review, “How dare God disagree with Richard Dawkins?” is mostly about Dawkins’s “self-centerdness.” That’s an odd way to criticize an autobiography, especially since, if you’ve read it, you’ll find An Appetite for Wonder no more solipsistic than any other autobiography (less, in fact, since it dwells considerably on science):
Unlike [John Henry]Newman, however, [Dawkins] quickly discarded the idea of God. Which left only one absolute and luminously self-evident being – Richard Dawkins.
. . . Dawkins has a generous self-centredness. Everything associated with him is blessed – his parents for giving birth to him, Ali, the ”loyal’’ family servant in colonial Africa, and Balliol College, Oxford, which had the good fortune to admit several generations of Dawkins men. When he admires others, one is made to feel how lucky they are.
All I can say to this is, “read the damn book.” I didn’t get that impression at all. The nastiness that pervades this piece extends even to my beloved fruit flies:
At one point, when describing his researches on the self-grooming behaviour of flies, Dawkins writes: ”Flies are not normally seen as beautiful, but the way they wash their faces and their feet is rather dear.’’ There is something rather dear about the self-grooming behaviour of Richard Dawkins, too.
That’s simply a gratuitous slur. In fact, I found the passage about flies endearing, and I’ve often admired their grooming behavior, which is thorough and, yes, a bit like our own. Why drag in another insult?
Finally comes the inevitable accusation that “Dawkins acts like a religious evangelical.” And again, there’s no sense of irony that these people are implicitly criticizing religion at the same time. But you won’t see them arguing, say, that Pope is “acting like Richard Dawkins.” That’s because it’s okay for the faithful to “know that they’re right.”
But [Dawkins] is, of course, a great scientist, a great writer about science and – though we shall learn more about this in the promised volume two – a world-famous evangelical missionary against God.
. . . But [Dawkins’s] passionate eloquence suggests something else, something that smacks of the religious zeal that Dawkins says he so detests. In the opening paragraph of chapter one, which Dawkins reprints, he says: “Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over 3,000 million years before the truth finally dawned. His name was Charles Darwin.’’ Replace the words ”Charles Darwin’’ with ”Jesus Christ’’, and you will see how strongly, in temperament, Dawkins resembles the preacher rather than the cool-headed thinker. He is Darwin’s St Paul. His anger against God seems to arise not so much from His non-existence as from His effrontery in disagreeing with Messrs Darwin and Dawkins.
This would be hilarious if it weren’t so idiotic. You could replace anybody’s hero with the name “Jesus Christ” and be accused of just the same thing. In fact, Richard is right here: Darwin did dispel millennia of misconceptions and ignorance about the origin and diversity of life. And Dawkins’s words, at least in this passage, are not directed against God (how can you be angry at someone whose existence you reject?), but against creationism. In fact, there’s no anger there at all!
As a palliative for this rancor, here’s a video of a fly cleaning itself. It is rather dear, isn’t it? Would that Phillips and Moore could just as easily scour their minds of unreasoned hatred for outspoken atheists.
British newspaper editor (to reporter): “It’s a slow news day. Why don’t you write a piece criticizing Dawkins for being like a religious person?”
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His critics supply good publicity for Dawkins. Keeps him in the news, makes people curious enough to read more about him. Hard core zealots will not but those with curious minds will want to know more, and those are the ones who may be influenced by freethought.
That isn’t their criticism; they’re accusing him of hypocrisy.
I don’t recall, however, Dawkins ever criticizing “zeal”, but only what one is zealous about.
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Ridiculous criticism of Professor Dawkins. The zealous appreciation of scientific achievements and the wonders of reality is always a good thing.
Indeed. I particularly liked the line about Dawkins considering everyone associated with him as blessed. I get that the reviewer was trying to describe Dawkins as ‘self-centered’, but all I got from that line was an image of Dawkins as someone who had lots and lots of things go right in his life – which is an enviable condition that we should all experience. (There are some criticisms of Dawkins that I think are justified, but all that shows is that having your life go pretty darn well is not a guarantee that a person is “perfect”….which should not be a new revelation for any thinking adult.)
I guess Richard Dawkins just can’t win with these people, when he shows passion he’s painted as a religious zealot and when he’s reserved, he’s not funny enough.
The part about replacing “Charles Darwin” with “Jesus Christ” reaches almost as badly as the fly bit. I can replace “Charles Darwin” with “Iron Man” or “Buffy” too, so what?
He clearly needs to find his “Goldilocks” behaviour…
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Greenfield is an impressive person. I enjoyed several of her older books and she spoke at one of the events I chaired and got the highest scores of any external speaker, covering ideas from her book, Identity (iirc). But I’m afraid she started to go downhill with that book and shows little self-awareness with her statement quoted above; it was her autocratic decisions about the RI and its spending that lie behind her being its former director.
(Oh, I see she was married to Peter Atkins. He’s kind of scientistic. {From an old interview, after stating some firmly held view: “Isn’t that rather arrogant?” “Not if you’re right.”} So there might have been some personal rancour behind that quotation.)
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Isn’t she also well known for running the Royal Institution into the ground?
That’s exactly what I was referring to : “decisions about the RI and its spending…”!
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Thanks Ant, I was reading too quickly too early in the morning.
WHOA!
What is this I see? Is it a definition of “scientism” which doesn’t shilly-shally about with claims that it tries to answer all questions — as if science was horning in on authoritatively prescribing and proscribing ethics, art, and whether you should marry your sweetheart — and instead comes right down to the nitty gritty with the real focus: religion?
Yes. Yes it is. “Scientism” is intrusion of objective critical inquiry into religion, flat out.
Thank you, Baroness.
Thank you, Professor.
They never come up with anything new, do they?
How can science exclude “other questions”? What are “other” questions? Science is not exclusive about questions in themselves; just about what answers to those questions are right (i.e., which provide valid explanations about how the world works).
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I think that those “other questions” are supposed to be questions which ultimately require a purely personal response, like “do I like this music?” or “should I choose a career in dance or accounting?” Tastes and values and other subjective questions.
The Scientism Bogeyman thus is analogous to a bossy parent or other overwheening dictator: “You WILL NOT enjoy rock ‘n’ roll!” or “You MUST make lots of money!” Again, they’re flipping from the Problem-Solving Category (what is true?) to the Smorgasbord Category (who am I?)and pretending scientism scientists want to micro-manage everyone’s personal life.
Are those meaningful questions about “the human condition”. Science can at least tell us why some people do like rock ’n’ roll. Or jazz…
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Meaningful questions about the human condition which are not scientific questions would probably be those which are not about facts per se, but concern choices. If you can look at a conflict or at alternatives and rightfully say “no right, no wrong; just different” then bringing in some objective measure to decide would be out of place.
The “no right, no wrong; just different” category doesn’t include religion, though. That’s where they’re tricksy, they are.
Being assured in your position because of scientific rigor and being assured in your position because of “faith” are two completely different things.
But all the religious see is assuredness – and because they can’t fathom having to prove their positions for themselves, they assume all positions are taken on a matter of “faith.” Until they understand that faith and reason and two diametrically-opposed paths to learning, these kinds of attacks will continue.
Tangentially related: I wouldn’t be so sure to say that “Zealot” by Reza Aslan is not nonfiction. I have read it, and the book does an absolutely fantastic job of separating the historical Jewish peasant known as Jesus from the religious holy Messiah known as Christ. It shows in a very tactful and enlightening way the vacuity of Christian doctrine – all while trying to discover what really happened. If anything, its whole purpose is to FIND the nonfiction buried under the fiction.
Which “historical Jewish peasant known as Jesus” precisely?
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You’re assuming that there actually is nonfiction buried under the fiction. Why on Earth should you do so? Do you also assume that there must be a nonfiction buried under the fictions of Harry Potter or Scientology or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Quetzalcoatl?
The Jesus story set in any other context — including all the pagan stories from which it was shamelessly assembled piecemeal — would be instantly dismissed as fiction. And there not only is no positive evidence supporting a mundane origin to the myth, all ancient evidence we have is dramatically hostile to such an assumption.
Cheers,
b&
Is that the fictional “historical Jewish peasant known as Jesus”?
Speaking of history, which is the first archaeological evidence of judaism?
I see that the first “jewish” graves surface in Alexandria, but they should be the people that was crowded in from the incipient jewish state. The first potential priests could be Herod’s father, himself or his generation. (Whether or not Herod’s large temple build was originally judaist in contrast to his others. I love how judaist ‘historians’ claim its building left ‘the earlier temple’ bereft of archaeological traces.)
So the Jesus of myth would be born to something like a 2nd gen judaist. Hmm…
On the other hand, the jewish historians of the first century describes a couple of sects. So maybe judaism is coeval with christianism.
Being assured in your position because of scientific rigor and being assured in your position because of “faith” are two completely different things.
But all the religious see is assuredness – and because they can’t fathom having to prove their positions for themselves, they assume all positions are taken on a matter of “faith.” Until they understand that faith and reason and two diametrically-opposed paths to learning, these kinds of attacks will continue.
Tangentially related: I wouldn’t be so sure to say that “Zealot” by Reza Aslan is not nonfiction. I have read it, and the book does an absolutely fantastic job of separating the historical Jewish peasant known as Jesus from the religious holy Messiah known as Christ. It shows in a very tactful and enlightening way the vacuity of Christian doctrine – all while trying to discover what really happened. If anything, its whole purpose is to FIND the nonfiction buried under the fiction.
I am willing to consider #1 and #3 to be works of fiction.
ZEALOT, by Nuxxa Jadis. (Scholastic.) A biography of Harry Potter presents him in the context of his times as the leader of a revolutionary movement.
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What I was getting at was the notion that Jesus even existed. There are historians who put up a good argument that he was a myth.
“Ali, the ”loyal’’ family servant in colonial Africa” – what a loaded snide comment. Richard Dawkins is not a racist – he can hardly be blamed for a colonial upbringing with – heaven forfend! – servants!
Mind you the Telegraph once ran an article blaming Dawkins for the slaves purportedly owned by something like his great-great-great grand uncle back in the 18c.
Dawkins can be blamed for anything in the rags.
Personally, I blame Dawkins for WWII, the Plague, and the Crusades.
What do you blame him for?
Cheers,
b&
I blame Dawkins when my hair goes too flat and no amount of product will fix it. It’s all his fault.
Good point.
I blame him for the badly-designed physiology of the human spine that has left me at least a bit uncomfortable for the past few days.
b&
Also, I’m pretty sure that when you eat a lot of sweets and then feel a bit sick after — that’s Dawkins too.
Dawkins is why cats throw up after eating grass.
b&
I blame him for irritating those with an intellect too small but an ego too big to recognise that science teaches one to be very humble in this giant Universe without having some bearded supernatural being interpeted by someone who tells you it has to be like this. And I congratulate him for doing so.
He clearly expresses his love and respect for family members (and I mean that) like Ali. Please read the new book, it’s excellent. I’m about 1/2-way through.
There is something interesting about the lack of curiosity in so many religious people like these critics. Far too many have the idea that we should look but not touch, far better to sit in a hut and stare at a rainbow seeing it as a sign that the universe loves us. If we look closely at the rainbow we find it nothing more than light and water. Then we find out about the behaviour of light and we invent telescopes.
We can see how much damage that did to our magical little loved filled imagined world until the Renaissance. With the telescope we could see that we were not the centre of our solar system, the little points of light all shining directly onto us from the roof above us shone in all directions at distances unimaginable, those that spread this new information, like Giordano Bruno were burned. From trying to understand the magic of reality we kept proving ourselves to be wrong. If we knew we were right we wouldn’t try to understand the rainbow and progress our understanding. Just compare the progress of Science to the progress of religion in the last 500 years.
The Faraday quote does not say Dawkins is terrifying. These critics see Dawkins’ curiosity and passion being used in a manner to teach and understand as terrifying. Passion is only for the religious, wonder is only found from religion, Dawkins is doing it all wrong! He’s advanced the understanding of too many people and they don’t like new information so they’re going to insult those who spread it. Rainbows still love them, telescopes only show them how small they are. Religion doesn’t need to progress, they’ve got all the magnificent buildings and fancy hats we need.
Right. If Richard Dawkins was just as passionate and filled with wonder and articulate about a reality which either pointed to God or didn’t mention the concept one way or the other (because choosing one way or the other is a very personal choice/right) then nobody would mind and the charges of ‘scientism’ would never have come up.
My guess is that the rank is
1.) Scientific understanding AND Theism.
2.) No scientific understanding AND Theism.
3.) Scientific understanding AND the polite agreement to shut up about God.
4.) Scientific understanding AND atheism.
5.) No scientific understanding AND atheism.
Though they probably like that last category as an ideal, especially when coupled with the first.
I agree with everything you have said Alex Shuffell !
I could almost feel sorry for the likes of Charles Moore for his total inability to see the wonder of reality which Richard Dawkins so eloquently reveals to anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think…
Can there be anyone more frightening than a religious zealot who knows they are right ?
Science does not believe itself to be right until there is tried and tested empirical evidence…it is constantly updated with new discoveries etc that is the whole point of science ! That is what is so exciting ! Human endeavour…human curiosity is what drives it. Science does not have all the answers and has never claimed that it does..religion, however KNOWS the answer and it’s the right one. How frightening is that ?!
It is good to see that he is pissing off the right people. If they weren’t so righteous and hostile then Dawkins would be speaking only to those who agree with him.
Recently, a Roman Catholic friend of mine remarked to me what a nice man Dawkins seemed to be. So this may be more of a media thing, I hope.
I haven’t read the autobio but I’ve noticed that its copious pages of many black and white photographs have hardly any of Dawkins himself. (Compare the autobio of any Hollywood actor.) That’s not what I would call an excessively self-referential biography.
If Dawkins’s zeal is “religious”, than IMO it’s of a relatively healthy form of religion. He is deeply concerned about the ways traditional religion short-circuits critical thinking and impairs human empathy. That’s a fine thing to be zealous about.
As I have posted before here, his alleged snideness seems fairly selective- you can see it towards Ted Haggard, but not at all towards the Archbishop of Canterbury nor towards grieving Catholic parents.
If The Catholic Herald has their panties in a twist, then Richard must be doing something right.
b&
Sastra has already singled this out. I, too, am struck by this definition. Obviously, Science will never answer all the questions in the religious sphere, because most of them are only valid in a religious sphere. Science may well invalidate them, though, by discrediting their terms of reference (such as “soul”).
I wonder if these were really Baroness Greenfield’s words, or the author’s. It seems like a useless definition, since clearly Science is NOT trying to answer religious questions. Perhaps they couldn’t come up with a definition of scientism that didn’t wind up sounding too reasonable, like “the application of scientific methodologies to factual statements in religion”?
Maybe I just don’t understand this English English (as opposed to US English) statement, but there seems to be yet another meaning of the term “scientism” being used here. One that I haven’t come across before. It seems to say that “scientism” is a view that some (other) questions about the human condition should not (or can not?) be investigated by science. This seems precisely opposite of the meaning most people who use the term as an accusation have in mind.
They sure like to have it both ways don’t they? If an atheist behaves as a “cool-headed thinker” they are cold and have no appreciation for beauty, art, love, etc…… But, by damn, if an atheist demonstrates passion and wonder for the beauty, majesty and awesomeness of things they are behaving like a religious zealot.
This is grade school playground level argumentation dressed up with marginally more sophisticated word use.
This isn’t an attempt at actually trying to accurately characterize Dawkins. This is not a misread of Dawkins having to do with a good catholic’s idea of “Love” of god. This is an arrogant prick piously, sanctimoniously, putting Dawkins in his place. With intent. Which is, so sadly, lower than that of a righteous believer. Standard tactic.
Few things bring greater comfort than when your enemies deplore your ‘tone-of-voice’! It simply means that they have shot their best and missed, and their quiver is empty, and they have no credible response left.
I came across the ‘tone-of-voice’ complaint when researching Fulop Semmelweis, ‘Savour of Mothers’ who’s researches in doctor’s handwashing led to an astonishing reduction in childbirth mortalities that plagued the nineteenth century. Contemporary medics, wanting to soften the charge of iatrogenesis (doctor-induced illness) that history had put against them, sought to criticise Semmelweis on the grounds that he was a poor agent for change in that he was outspoken, and possibly belligerent, in his promotion of handwashing. It was, they complained, his ‘tone-of-voice’ they could not accept; (implying, of course, that they were just about to make the same discoveries, but his loudness had somehow put him ahead!)
Their defence of their profession is all part of the great ogre that has always stalked medicine, called ‘Historic Medical Revisionism’ (HMR) whereby the sins of the doctors through the ages are swept under the carpet, along with their prayers, chants, leeches, pins, dried lizards, lobotomy forks, hazardous and unnecessary operations, and astrological diagnoses.
So take your ‘Tone-of-Voice’ detractors, Dr Dawkins, and let them reveal their metaphoric bare bums to the amused public, because we all know why. They have lost! Their world is drawing away from them, and is looking sillier by the day, and so they have revived the fig-leaf called ‘Tone-of-Voice’, thinking that it may cover the nakedness of their cult beliefs.
“She quoted Faraday: “There is nothing so frightening as someone who knows they are right.””
This is ironic coming from Susan Greenfield. Ben Goldacre has called her out for going around making claims in the media about the effects on young people’s brains of spending too much time on computer games and facebook. Goldacre has repeatedly challenged her to present these claims in peer-reviewed journals but, as far as I know, she hasn’t.
Spending too much time playing video games and Facebook has got to be better for young people’s brains than the Catholic Herald or anything that involves Catholics.
My son taught himself to read playing video games.
Greenfield seems to have gone a bit loopy. An amateur psychologist might suggest she’s distancing herself from the hard scientism of ex hubby Peter Atkins. Adam Rutherford (editor at Nature, and maker of TV science documantaries)said: “Greenfield has evolved into a figure of great controversy – and sometimes mockery – for persistent vocalisation of her technofears, and simultaneous failure to supply evidence to support her pronouncements, or engage in debate about them. Primarily she has expressed concern about a supposed addiction to various forms of computing.”
“Faraday: “There is nothing so frightening as someone who knows they are right.”
This is not as profound a statement as many might think. The statement can be true if the person who knows themself to be right is actually wrong. But the statement is absolutely false if the person who knows themself to be right is in fact right. Dawkins is quite frequently right. But because he expresses himself with passion and confidence, he is often regarded as arrogant by those who don’t or won’t distinguish between passion and arrogance or between confidence and arrogance.
It is a deepity, as so much religious speech is. In as much as it is true, it is trivial, where it sounds important, it is in fact, wrong.
I note that #1 on this list is Killing Jesus. Within the last 10 days, Mr. O’Reilly published an op-ed piece complaining about all the hate mail he had received from fundamentalist Christians based solely upon the title of his book. I suggest that Prof. Dawkins should consider naming the next installment of his memoirs
Spanking Jesus.
I found the list itself an interesting window into what people are thinking about.
Faraday was a devout christian. I smell a quote mine. Who knows what context was used when he made that quote?
Faraday also said: “Without experiment I am nothing.” [ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday ]
You can hear Dr. Dawkins interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio HERE
I listened to the whole thing and it’s a good interview.
Strident and dogmatic are just examples of the Catholic Herald playing Humpty Dumpty with English language. Thus being outspoken becomes strident and having evidence to back up conclusions is dogmatism. Of course, the laugh is on them.
I’m starting to get sick of these articles. They’re ALWAYS the same. And there’s only so many ways you can point out them being wrong.
Still, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Dawkins himself, constantly misrepresented in every article about him, and always remembered for his atheist activism, which is merely a retirement hobby compared to his scientific work.
The fact that Dawkins is as polite and civil as he is after all the crap he has to put up with makes accusations of rudeness and the like all the more intolerable. In his position, I’d have blown up at these people by now.
The British press always like some preferably intelligent person with strong opnions whom they can stick in a pillory and misrepresent. Before Dawkins, Harold Pinter was the target.
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I liked the interview with Jian Ghomeshi. He asked some tough questions. And it was civil, as Jian usually is.
Atheism is more interesting than evolution, it would seem, at least to Canadian radio.
I liked it too. I think Jian have Richard the opportunity to address a lot of misconceptions. I thought it was cute when Jian asked if Richard had a magic wand, what would he change in the world and Richard remarked on the magic wand which caused Jian to admit that he regretted using that metaphor as soon as he said it and Richard had to assure him that the question was well asked. 🙂
The Christian response to Dawkins and other atheists is sadly typical; which response is invariably, “Stop being so MEAN to us believers!” That’s the best they got.
I am on board totally, except for the flies. I find them rather creepy, actually.