“Spiritual” atheists explained: a guest post

September 6, 2011 • 9:10 am

Reader Sigmund has avidly followed the kerfuffle about the “spirituality” of scientists—especially the incessant articles by sociologist Elaine Ecklund, whose work is funded by the Templeton Foundation.  Ecklund, as you may recall (see the link above), has made a career out of arguing, based on her surveys, that scientists are surprisingly religious and spritual.  In both her academic publications and popular articles, Ecklund and her colleagues constantly claim, contra their data, that the moderate degree of religiosity and spirituality among scientists suggests a happy concordat between science and faith.  (See here and here for Jason Rosenhouse’s analysis of what her data really show.)

In the guest post below, Sigmund analyzes Ecklund’s claim (made to Chris Mooney in a Point of Inquiry podcast) that the scientists she interviewed themselves brought up their “spirituality.” He shows that this claim is bogus—that Ecklund herself planted that word several times in the “guide questions” she asked her scientist-subjects.  Sigmund also points out that Ecklund’s description of her research on “spirituality”—that is, the disparity between her actual data and how she describes them—seems disingenuous.  I wonder if Templeton cares about that.

SPIRITUAL ATHEISTS EXPLAINED

by Sigmund

Between 2005 and 2007, sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, now an associate professor at Rice University in Houston, carried out a survey of the religious beliefs of a representative sample of 2,198 scientists from the top “twenty-one elite US research universities”. The survey, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, asked the responding scientists to complete a 15 minute internet based survey regarding their personal religious beliefs and practices. After answering the questionnaire,a selection of 275 of these scientists were subjected by Ecklund to either face-to-face or telephone interviews over the next three years. This survey and set of interviews have, thus far, resulted in one academic book, Science vs Religion, What Scientists Really Think  and, remarkably, four separate peer reviewed papers. The entire series of publications can probably best be described as Ecklund having one long losing argument with her data.

The initial dataset, published in 2007 in the journal ‘Social Problems’, provided a picture of scientists remarkably similar to that revealed by Edward Larson and Larry Witham in their famous 1997 Nature paper, with less than 8% of natural scientists in Ecklund’s survey stating that they had no doubt about the existence of God. Fully 75.2% of natural scientists questioned did not state a belief in God.

Despite this result Ecklund has continued to hammer on at her dataset, determined to prove that it is not quite the mortal blow to science-religion compatibility that her own figures suggest. One cannot, however, fault her for sheer determination, or indeed imagination, in how she tackled this dilemma.  After deciding that belief in God is not a critical point, nor indeed is adherence to traditional religious practice, Ecklund recently settled on the idea that it is the question of “spirituality” that proves the compatibility of science and religion.

Ecklund defined a new category of “spiritual atheism”—those who see themselves as spiritual yet do not believe in God—in a paper with co-author Elizabeth Long, “Scientists and Spirituality”, published earlier this year in the journal ‘Sociology of Religion’.

Describing this hypothesis in an interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast of May 2010 she states:

“About 65% of this population see themselves as being spiritual or interested in spiritual things and that perhaps was the most surprising thing to me, that people who do not consider themselves at all religious, and are scientists, see spirituality as very attractive.”

That a substantial proportion of atheist scientists would describe themselves as “spiritual” was surprising to many. Chris Mooney, the host of that Point of Inquiry episode, described it as the “blockbuster” finding of her entire project and asked her the obvious question.

Mooney: “Well, if I’m putting myself in a critical mindset towards this “spiritual scientists” I would say then why on earth are you using the word spiritual when you don’t believe in anything. Why don’t you use “awe and wonder” and things like that which are the words that Sagan used.”

Ecklund: “And you could have, right? So I tried very hard actually not to, the way that I set up my methodology for the interviews I got, I tried hard not to introduce these kinds of things, into their vocabulary and sort of let them talk about, you know, how they got a sense of meaning and purpose and they could have said “awe and wonder through science” but they used the label spirituality, which I found intriguing.”

Exactly how hard she tried was revealed this week in Ecklund’s most recent paper, “Scientists Negotiate Boundaries Between Religion and Science” which was co-authored with Jerry Z. Park and published in the ‘Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion’.  In it Ecklund reveals that, far from avoiding the introduction of the term “spirituality” into the conversation, the interview followed a script of nine “guide questions”, six of which explicitly used the terms “spirituality” or “spiritually”.

Indeed, from reading the guide questions it is patently obvious that it is Ecklund herself who introduces both the term “spirituality” and the notion of a difference between “spirituality” and “religion.”

“1. I’m going to use the words religion and spirituality interchangeably here, recognizing

there is a lot of public discussion about the differences between these terms. Could you

say a bit about how you understand the terms religion and spirituality?

2. How do religion and spirituality come up, if at all, in the course of your discipline?

3. How about in teaching, does religion or spirituality come up at all in interactions with

students or teaching and in what kinds of ways?

4. I’m also interested in the relationship between religion and your work as a scientist. How

does religion (or spirituality) influence the work you do as a scientist?“

With that amount of prodding it is more intriguing that so many scientists avoided the term completely in their answers.

Finally, those familiar with Ecklund’s previous work will realize the importance of examining the data in the results section rather than the claims highlighted in the abstract. In the abstract for this paper Ecklund states that “only a minority of scientists see religion and science as always in conflict”, echoing the claim on her website about one of her previous papers on the survey that “the findings show that in contrast to public opinion and scholarly publications most scientists do not perceive there to be a conflict between religion and science.“

In fact, her latest results show that 85% of scientists find science and religion to be in conflict, either occasionally, depending on the context (70%), or always in conflict (15%).

While it’s hard to dispute that the John Templeton Foundation is getting its money’s worth supporting Ecklund, a scientist who reads this series of papers can only despair at what passes for peer review in the field of sociology.

Do scientists have “faith” in science?

September 6, 2011 • 4:50 am

Faye Flam’s column/blog at The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Planet of the Apes“, occasionally deals with the intersection of science and religion. Her piece from yesterday, “Science, faith, and life’s origin,” addresses a misconception held by some of her readers: science is a faith like religion.  It’s a common way of dragging science down to the level of religion by implying that both are equally good—or equally deficient—at finding truth.

The reasons that people give for science being a faith are multifarious; they include, among others:

  • Our stance of philosophical materialism (i.e., the idea that the universe is composed only of matter and energy, with no supernatural forces at play) is an assumption based on faith.
  • Our assumption that there is an external reality that we can perceive through our senses is based on faith.
  • The idea that the Universe is comprehensible through empirical observation, and can often be described through mathematics, is based on faith.
  • The idea of “abiogenesis”— that life arose spontaneously from nonliving matter—is based on faith, since we weren’t there to see it and may never know how it happened.

I’ve already gone after the first three on this website and so won’t reiterate my responses (they involve our reliance not on “faith,” but on scientific experience of what actually works at helping us understand the universe, as well as the idea that natural selection favors our ability to perceive reality); but Faye’s column deals with the last misconception: abiogenesis rests on faith.  She interviews several scientists, including me, who knock down the idea.

If I can be a bit self-aggrandizing here, I do like this bit:

But how exactly this took place is still an open question. Does that mean scientists are exercising a religious type of faith to seek out a natural explanation?

Not if you define faith as the Bible does, said University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, author of the book Why Evolution Is True.

The definition is laid out in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Science is the opposite of faith – it relies on observation and evidence, Coyne said. “It’s the conviction of things seen.”

Let me rewrite, then, the whole Biblical quote to emphasize the distinction between science and faith:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  (Hebrews 11:1).

“Now science is the assurance of things that exist, hoped for or not—the conviction of things that are seen.”     (J. Coyne, Hebrew)

Or rewrite your own Biblical passage (another one to tinker with is “Doubting Thomas” from John 20:29: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou has seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”)

But have a look at what Faye’s readers—and the scientists—have to say.  And be sure you know how to counter the “science-is-a-faith” argument.

Why live? A comment.

September 6, 2011 • 4:08 am

I don’t often know which pieces will garner a lot of comments (except that the science ones don’t!), but I knew that when I put up yesterday’s post on “Death and atheism“, asking readers to describe how their unbelief had affected their attitude toward their mortality, people would want to weigh in.  After all, one of the things we must to come to terms with as atheists is that for everyone—including us—the end is really the end.  And few people of any sort don’t think, at least sporadically, of their end.

One of the many comments on that post, from Alexis Alvarez, stood out as being almost poetic in its poignancy. Let me put it up here as a reminder to take advantage of the time we do have. It reminds me of Dawkins’s famous quote that begins: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

I was raised Catholic. I don’t know when I stopped believing in God. But not believing has been truly liberating. I don’t fear death — it’s as someone stated above, something “emotion-neutral.” But I don’t want to die — not for a while anyway. I love being alive, not just joy, but also the pain, which has been almost overwhelming at times — and still I am besotted with life. The ephemerality of life does pain me, however, because I can’t conceive of anything more wonderful than being alive.

 

Free Kindle edition of evolution book

September 5, 2011 • 12:10 pm

Alert reader Bob has emailed me with the news that Eugene V. Koonin’s molecular evolution book, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, is being offered for free on Kindle (it’s normally over fifty-one bucks).  Now I haven’t read this book, but it looks legit, and if you’re into a book that covers the stuff described below, you have  not a penny to lose.  Bob also notes that these “free Kindle offers” usually last only 24 hours or so.

The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including  the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept;  the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.

If you’ve read this book, pray tell us in the comments how you liked it.

Death and atheism

September 5, 2011 • 7:05 am

“I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”  —Woody Allen

Humans are, I think, the only animals that really comprehend their own mortality, and much of religion involves trying to show that we live on in some form after death.  We atheists don’t believe that, and the natural reaction would be to think that atheism, and its attendant notion that when we’re gone, we’re totally gone, entails an increased fear of mortality.  Curiously, though, an atheist friend recently told me that the rejection of gods had freed her from the fear of death.  One can, as the New Atheists have often emphasized, see our finitude as liberating: we have but one life, and we should enjoy it while we’re here rather than wasting our time supplicating nonexistent sky-gods for a nonexistent future.

On the other hand, atheism could make our mortality even more depressing, or, as it did to the existentialists, make life seem like some sort of absurd and meaningless charade. I think this is what Camus meant when he said “There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.”

On the third hand, atheism could free us from the fear—one that drives Catholicism, for instance—that we’re all bound to be tortured in some form after death.

I’m interested in readers’ opinions on this issue.  Does your atheism make you feel better or worse about your mortality, and why?


Templeton gives a million bucks to show that evolutionary convergence proves God

September 5, 2011 • 5:19 am

People keep telling me that the John Templeton foundation is reforming: that it’s moving away from the science-and-religion-are-friends stance toward more funding of pure science.  I’d like to believe that, for it would be nice to know that that billion-dollar pot of cash would go towards understanding the universe instead of dealing with the unanswerable “big questions” that, of course, are the purview of faith.  But all I see is Templeton increasingly disguising their penchant for woo by putting the word “religion” in the sheep’s clothing of “spirituality,” and funding those forms of science that are supposed to bear on questions of meaning, purpose, and morals.

If you have any doubt about this, have a look at this mission statement, “Science and the Big Questions,” which appears on the “What We Fund” part of the Templeton website.  The bolding is mine:

Sir John Templeton stipulated that most of the Foundation’s resources would be devoted to research (and disseminating the results of research) about the “basic forces, concepts, and realities” governing the universe and humankind’s place in the universe. What did he mean by “basic forces, concepts, and realities”?

Sir John’s own eclectic list featured a range of fundamental scientific notions, including complexity, emergence, evolution, infinity, and time. In the moral and spiritual sphere, his interests extended to such basic phenomena as altruism, creativity, free will, generosity, gratitude, intellect, love, prayer, and purpose. These diverse, far-reaching topics define the boundaries of the ambitious agenda that we call the Big Questions. Sir John was confident that, over time, the serious investigation of these subjects would lead humankind ever closer to truths that transcend the particulars of nation, ethnicity, creed, and circumstance.

In posing the Big Questions, Sir John stressed the need for humility and openness, and he saw the possibility of important contributions from various modes of inquiry. He especially wished to encourage researchers in the natural and human sciences to bring their rigorous methods to bear on the sorts of subjects that he identified, but he was also enthusiastic about the insights that might come from new approaches in philosophy and theology. Whatever the field, he expected research supported by the Foundation to conform to the highest intellectual standards.

For Sir John, the overarching goal of asking the Big Questions was to discover what he called “new spiritual information.” This term, to his mind, encompassed progress not only in our conception of religious truths but also in our understanding of the deepest realities of human nature and the physical world. As he wrote in the Foundation’s charter, he wanted to encourage every sort of opinion leader—from scientists and journalists to clergy and theologians—to become more open-minded about the possible character of ultimate reality and the divine.

Sir John’s own theological views conformed to no orthodoxy. Though raised a Presbyterian and exposed in his youth to the Unity School of Christianity, he did not fully identify with any established religion and possessed an eager curiosity about all of the world’s faith traditions. In assessing proposals, he asked the Foundation to stand apart from any consideration of dogma or personal religious belief and to seek out grantees who, in their approach to the Big Questions, were “innovative, creative, enthusiastic, and open to competition and new ideas.”

The Foundation has honored Sir John’s vision of the Big Questions by supporting a wide range of research projects, as well as other activities of a more practical or educational purpose, in the following areas:

To see what Templeton’s been funding lately, you can download the pdf of their 2010 Capabilities Report.  I was particularly interested in Simon Conway Morris’s “convergence project,” in which he and his colleagues document many instances of evolutonary convergence: that is, cases in which unrelated organisms have evolved similar morphologies or behaviors (the similarities between New World cacti and Old World euphorbs, which I describe in WEIT, is an instance of this.)  Conway Morris is a Catholic, and it’s my contention (supported by evidence, see here and here) that, to Conway Morris, the existence of evolutionary convergence says something about the “inevitability” of evolution—that inevitability being, of course, the appearance of humans who are made in God’s image and designed to apprehend and worship Him.

Others have taken issue with my claim about this, but it’s supported by Templeton’s rationale for funding it in their Capabilities Report.  They donated nearly a million dollars ($983,253, to be exact) for this project. Here’s a screenshot of the rationale:

The last two sentences are the telling ones:  they show that Templeton is funding this because evolutionary convergence supposedly shows the existence of “purpose and meaning” (read “Jesus”) in evolutionary convergence.  (Of course there’s also a conventional Darwinian explanation for convergence, one that doesn’t involve God or any evolutionary teleology.)

I consider myself vindicated.

James Wood faults new atheism on specious literary grounds

September 4, 2011 • 6:18 am

James Wood is a professor of English at Harvard who writes on literature for the New Yorker.   I very much like his literary criticism, but for some reason he’s obsessed with attacking New Atheism (see here and here, with his response to my criticisms here).  His usual plaint is that the New Atheists provide only a cartoon characterization of faith, seeing it as a form of either Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, and ignore the nuances of other beliefs. (“Nuances” is another word that, when you see it, you should run, for faitheism or apologetics are in the offing.)  Although I’m not equipped to psychoanalyze Wood, I do note that while he admits he’s now an atheist, he grew up as a Biblical literalist.  I’ve often found that if you scratch an atheist who argues for the virtues of faith, you find someone who used to hold a faith.

Wood’s latest piece in the Guardian, “The New Atheism,” is a 3.5-page essay criticizing the New Atheists for their lack of nuance—nuance demonstrated in the works of great authors like Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf, who wrote about the complicated effects on the mind of religious belief. (For a sample of this kind of stuff, read the episode of “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karmazov, available free online).  Wood writes with erudition and sensitivity about great literature (his appreciation of the aesthetics of literature, and the way it moves us—rather than the masturbatory games of postmodernism—is one reason I like his criticism), but he completely misunderstands the goals of New Atheism.  Or, if he doesn’t misunderstand them, he nevertheless faults the New Atheists for being polemicists insensitive to the subtleties of faith.  He has several accusations, but they boil down to one theme:  “New Atheists should be sensitive literary critics like me.”  He has three beefs:

  • The New Atheists have a simplistic characterization of faith.  It’s really much more complicated than we think!:

I can’t be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them. For these writers, and many others, “religion” always seems to mean either fundamentalist Islam or American evangelical Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and the more relaxed or progressive versions of Christianity are not in their argumentative sights. . .

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities.

As I’ve said before, Wood doesn’t get out enough.  He runs in rarified academic circles, rife with well-fed and liberal believers, and doesn’t realize how deeply fundamentalist much of America really is.  As I’ve mentioned before, 81% of Americans believe in heaven, 78% in angels, 70% in Satan, and 70% in hell.   Why else would there be so much support in America for evangelical Christian politicians like Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, or Michele Bachmann? So yes, dispelling those ridiculous beliefs is a major goal of New Atheism.  A further goal is to point out how moderate religions enable those beliefs by giving succor to superstition in general. Neither Harris nor Dawkins nor Hitchens have neglected the non-fundamentalist forms of faith.

The overweening question of New Atheism is this: is there any evidential basis for believing in God? If not, why should we do it? That question is valid whether you’re talking about a Unitarian, a Catholic, or a Baptist.  Granted, some faiths are more pernicious than others. But if we’re to promote rationality and evidence as a basis for living our lives and building our world, then all faiths are pernicious in promoting irrationality and fuzzy thinking. As far as possible, any social movement should be based on palpable fact.  But Wood doesn’t seem much interested in the question of whether God exists. Rather, he claims this:

  • Many religious people don’t care whether there’s any truth behind their beliefs.  Wood says this:

Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious “belief” is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions (“I believe that Jesus is the son of God”, “I believe that I will go to heaven when I die”, and so on), but a matter of more unconscious, daily practice (“Now it is time to kneel down, face Mecca and pray”). This kind of defence of the deep embeddedness of religious practice has been influenced by Wittgenstein – for whom, say, kissing an icon was a bit like loving one’s mother; something that cannot be subjected to an outsider’s rational critique. Wittgenstein was obviously right, though this appeal to practice over proposition can also become a rather lazy way, for people like the Catholic Eagleton, of defending orthodox beliefs via the back door. . .

Yes, and for many more millions of people, belief is critically dependent on stable, creedal propositions. Really, how many Christians in America would remain religious were they to know, absolutely, that Jesus was not the son of God but simply an apocalyptic preacher in the Middle East? How many Muslims would remain Muslim were they to know, absolutely, that an angel didn’t dictate the Qur’an to Mohamed?

Yes, ’tis true that liberal religious people admit that they don’t much care about many religious claims, and go to church for the social benefits, the hymns, and the stained glass.  But how many of those would still go to church if they didn’t believe that there was still some kind of Supernatural Being out there? God is the ultimate creed, and I doubt that most Americans go to church to simply express awe at the cosmos.  And what about the afterlife?  Isn’t that a very important “propositional belief” of faiths like Islam and Catholicism?  How much Catholic practice, for example, would be abandoned were Catholics to realize that there isn’t any afterlife, either in Heaven or Hell?

It is a commonplace of faitheism to claim that many of the faithful don’t really believe what they say they believe.  That claim is not only wrong, but condescending.  Yes, there’s more to faith than belief in the truth of gods, afterlives, and sin, but absent those parts, most of religion—and certainly the most harmful parts—would vanish.  Wood doesn’t realize that the damage done by religion doesn’t come from its social aspects, but from its creedal beliefs, and it is the absolute certainty of those beliefs that drives things like oppression of women, opposition to abortion and condom use in AIDS-ridden Africa, and the instillation of guilt into Catholic children.  Catholicisism, after all, is not one of the “fundamentalist” faiths that, Wood argues, is how New Atheists see religion; yet it is one of the world’s most pernicious faiths.

  • The New Atheists don’t realize that people’s beliefs change or fluctuate, and that people sometimes have doubts.

But people’s beliefs are often fluctuating and changing – it is why people lose their faith, or convert to faith in God. If you spend any time asking people what they believe, how they believe, and why they believe the propositions they espouse in church or temple or mosque, you find that there is nothing very straightforward about propositional belief.

He gives two “proofs” for this vacillation; both involve educated people.  Here’s one:

Recently, I spent some time with two Christian believers, both ordained. One is an academic theologian and university chaplain, the other a religious affairs journalist. The academic theologian was walking with me in a university town, and began a sentence, “I believe.” And then he caught himself, and added: “I don’t know what I believe, at the moment.”

Well, professor Wood, I’ll see you one doubting theologian and raise you a million non-doubting Baptists. It’s beyond me how an academic can use anecdotes like this to show that belief is very unstable.  Yes, I’m sure that many believers occasionally have doubts—how could they not if they believe in such tripe?—but, by and large, the beliefs that New Atheists attack are stable, at least over the short term.

The bulk of Wood’s piece is then devoted to showing how various authors of fiction have portrayed the complications and doubts of not only faith, but of atheism.  One reads of Coetzee, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and of Jens Jacobsen, who, in his novel Niels Lynhe depicts an atheist who keeps wondering if there might be a God after all.  It’s all very enlightening, and a good summary of how fiction depicts the nuances of religion, but what is its relevance to New Atheism?  We’re not worried about fictional characters, but real ones: Muslims who throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, mitred despots who oppose vaccinating girls with HPV, garden-variety Catholics and Baptists who torture their children with thoughts of hell.

What is Wood’s big indictment of the New Atheists? It’s this: unlike novelists, New Athiests don’t “want to see both sides of a theological argument.”

Why don’t we? Because if there is no evidence for a God, then there are no theological arguments because there’s no theology.  It’s like seeing both sides of an argument about the behavior of leprechauns.

In the end, Wood describes a YouTube clip (below) in which Richard Dawkins discusses the truth of miracles with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Archbishop Williams waffles on what he believes.  It’s a wonderful vignette depicting the hypocrisy of liberal faith, but Wood argues that Williams, although he comes off the worst, should not be ignored:

The scene is amusing because both men are so obviously arguing past each other, and are so obviously arguing about language and the role of metaphor. Dawkins comes off as the victor, because he has the easier task, and holds the literalist high ground: either the resurrection happened or it didn’t; either these words mean something or they do not. Williams seems awkwardly trapped between a need to turn his words into metaphor and a desire to retain some element of literal content . . .

Dawkins is dead to metaphor, and tries to annul it by insisting on the literal occurrence, contained in actual words, of the virgin birth and the resurrection. And Williams insists that such literalism misses the target, and instead has recourse to the metaphor of “event”, of a “space” opening up in history, an indefinably miraculous aberration. One feels sympathy for both sides – and perhaps simultaneously a plague on both their houses – because Dawkins seems so bullishly literal, and Williams so softly evasive. Contra Dawkins, God should be allowed some metaphorical space; but contra Williams, God’s presence in the world, God’s intervention, should not surely be only metaphorical. God is not just a metaphor.

Of course Dawkins is dead to metaphor here, because he’s interested in the literal truth of things like the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus.  Are they real or not? If they are just metaphors, then key parts of Christianity are fairy stories, and that would drive away millions of believers.  Williams won’t commit because he knows this.  Whether Jesus is really is a metaphor here is like asking whether electrons, DNA, and the AIDS virus are metaphors.

Woods seems singularly uninterested in the vital question of whether there are empirical truths behind religious beliefs.  He claims that both Dawkins and Williams would benefit from reading Melville:

Both men could find themselves in Moby-Dick. For in that novel, Melville explores precisely the question that hovers over the Dawkins-Williams exchange. Can God be literally described, or are we condemned to hurl millions of metaphoric approximations at him, in an attempt to describe him?

Which of course leaves out the crucial question of whether “him” exists in the first place.

While Wood may be preoccupied with how Woolf and Dostoyevsky describe the complications of faith, he doesn’t notice that nobody has ever killed somebody else, mutilated their genitals, or tossed acid in their faces in the name of The Brothers Karamazov or To the Lighthouse. There are other books of fiction that inspire such acts.