Knowledge

Recently an English reviewer of Richard Dawkins' book <em>The God Delusion</em> took Dawkins to task for writing outside his field, suggesting he stick to science. Is this a legitimate criticism? And are there any anti-religious theologians?

Comments

I'm guessing the review to which you refer is Terry Eagleton's in the London Review of Books. I sympathize with Eagleton's frustration, though I don't think he quite plays his cards right. Surely it is true that Dawkins would barbecue any theologian who decided to write a book on evolutionary biology without boning up on the subject, and rightly so. One does rather expect that an author will have some minimal knowledge about what he or she is writing about. But the point (my point, anyway) isn't that Dawkins isn't himself religious. The point is that there are lots of people who study religion, and they do so from many different points of view. Some of these people are my colleagues at Brown, and some of them are Dawkins's colleagues in Oxford. Many of them are religious, but some of them are not. And for Dawkins to write on this topic with, so far as I can tell, essentially no real knowledge of this work is intellectually dishonest, at best.

I don't think a knowledge of Duns Scotus and Anselm is essential here. What is essential is some reasonable understanding of what religion is, and Dawkins has none. As a result, he attacks not quite a straw-man, as there are plenty of people who hold the kinds of religious beliefs he criticizes, but rather a very extreme form of religious belief. The target of Dawkins's critique is the target of many such critiques: A pre-Enlightenment religion centered upon an interventionist deity who acts as the ultimate arbiter of human disputes and dispenses reward and punishment as He (always, He) sees fit. But that is not what religion is. It is simply one form of it, and to criticize religious belief by debunking that form of it is like criticizing science by debunking cold fusion. Not to understand this point is to fail to understand the profound shift in religion (as in many other things) that the Enlightenment brought about.

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Recently an English reviewer of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion

Recently an English reviewer of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion

Recently an English reviewer of Richard Dawkins' book <em>The God Delusion</em> took Dawkins to task for writing outside his field, suggesting he stick to science. Is this a legitimate criticism? And are there any anti-religious theologians?