For a variety of reasons, over the winter I let my copies of unread New York Review of Books pile up on my bedside table. Having reached a point now where I can relax and enjoy them, I am only sorry I have not been keeping up as they are a wonderful source for material for this web log. I just finished, in fact, an essay in one of the recently passed volumes, reviewing Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. For those not in the know, Dawkins is an excellent biological scientist, author of a ground-breaking work in the popularization of genetics, The Selfish Gene, and a professor at Cambridge University, intellectual home of Isaac Newton. In Dawkins' view, religion is not just a holdover from our ancient past best discarded as we rid ourselves of our immature mythical fantasies, but a festering sore on the bottom of humanity, to be stamped out actively in the name of the survival of the human race. Religious moderates (I do not know if Dawkins can imagine a religious progressive such as myself; that was one of the failures of Dawkins' work, according to the NYRB article, a failure of imagination) are actually worse than fundamentalists, because they attempt to give respectable cover to those horrid fundamentalist types whom we all know will be the death of western civilization as we know it if we aren't careful.
According to the review essay, Dawkins spends quite a bit of time on the traditional proofs for the existence of God, and shows them to be, to say the least, inadequate to the task. While not having read Dawkins (and I shall be honest enough to say that, while I may at one time have considered it, after reading the review, I think I shall find better things to do with my time), my supposition is that the reference here is to what has come to be known as "the five ways", the five different philosophical movements that follow various causal and other links from known and visible phenomena to God. It might surprise Dawkins to learn - and I mean that quite literally - that St. Thomas, the perfecter of those five ways as an intellectual structure - was not only refuted at the time, but significantly so. Indeed, far more important is the so called "ontological argument" presented a century earlier by British monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, which is best summed up in the dictum, "God is that than which nothing greater can be thought," and which holds as its supposition that, containing all perfection within the divine existence, God must necessarily exist because existence is a perfection in itself.
Be that as it may, it highlights a failure of Dawkins to seriously engage religious thought across the broad spectrum of his its depth, its breadth, and through the veaious changes in its history. Keeping that in mind, I wish to offer a counter-example to all those who believe as Dawkins does. I want it clear that I am not anti-atheist or anything like that; I am not even against those like Dawkins, or the shallow torture apologist Sam Harris, who wish to be atheistic evangelists. Let them have their say, and try to make converts. My objection is the utter dismissal of Christian theological thought as a human enterprise that should inspire, if nothing else, awe at the sheer variety and capacity of human thought. Such rank intellectual snobbery is unbecoming, and counter-productive to a serious engagement of many of the issues that Dawkins attempts to address. He wishes to be taken seriously, yet refuses to grant seriousness to those he criticizes; why should I, therefore treat him with any amount of respect?
Anyway, my proposal. As a Christian, I want to prove that science is not only a base influence upon morals and conduct, but actively engaged in the destruction of society through its fruits in technology such as global climate change, the threat of bio-technology, and thermo-nuclear weapons. In order to do so, I turn to . . . the writings of Albertus Magnus, teacher of St. Thomas, and a vast publisher on matters in physics, optics, meteorology, animal husbandry and so on. Indeed, to his credit, St. Albert the Great, while not developing the idea fully, pointed in the right direction in his examination of rainbows, saying that "it is in the water that we must look for answers." I would spend much of the book showing how wrong St. Albert was on just about everything (except rainbows, at least obliquely). Furthermore, I would dismiss those who argue that science today is vastly different from science in the twelfth century as so much rhetorical nonsense - I would point out that the goal of understanding the world in terms of cause and effect has not changed, only the methods, quantitative rather than qualitative, have. I would refuse to even mention Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Huygens, Benjamin Franklin, Laplace, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, or Charles Darwin, considering them as having added nothing of substance to the sins of science, only confusing the central fact that science is a pernicious horror, a plpague upon humanity that must be stopped before it kills again.
One would hope that such nonsense would be laughed away, dismissed as rank nonsense, anti-intellectualism of the highest order. When the tables are turned, and it is Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Huldrich Zwingli, Count von Zinzendorf, Friederich Schleiermacher, David Strauss, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jurgen Moltmann that are ignored, treated as intellectual pariahs in such a shallow, cavalier manner - he is taken seriously. There are good arguments for atheism, as the review author notes. It is just that Dawkins' book isn't one of them.
Virtual Tin Cup
