Tuesday, October 31, 2006

The God collision

Richard Dawkins's wildly polemical new book, "The God Delusion," has created a windstorm of argument in the significant journals of opinion and the more free-flowing, interactive world of blogs and email chains.

Dawkins sets out to argue that the entire foundation of religion is fatally misconstrued, that no gods can possibly exist, and that religion as a whole is a destructive force. As the eminent philosopher and generalist Thomas Nagel writes in a sturdily constructed review in The New Republic,

One of Dawkins's aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and practices.

Nagel, no true believer, finds Dawkins's reasoning deeply flawed, because it fails to recognize the limits of scientific rationalism that religion means to address: "Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed."

Terry Eagleton, writing in the London Review of Books, is more blunt in his criticism. His opening:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Both Nagel and Eagleton are worth reading, since they and Dawkins are, you might say, addressing nothing less than one of the foundational clashes between red states and blue, not to mention West and Middle East.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:50 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss