Richard Dawkins: A Strange Secular Icon

 

I’ve always found it strange that Richard Dawkins became the leading poster boy for atheism in popular culture. While there’s no question that his works on biology are tremendous contributions to science, and terrifically written – especially The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow – there is little to recommend about Dawkins on the subject of God, Biblical exegesis, philosophy or religious faith. His book The God Delusion is a very weak attempt to undermine religious faith, his arguments against Christianity are woeful, his attempts at philosophical engagement are sub-standard, he’s fairly rigid in his thinking and in his ability to explore ideas openly, and he’s not especially witty or charismatic. 

And my surprise doesn’t end there. Given his supposed love of reason, he employs surprisingly inadequate reasoning in his atheistic arguments. And given his dislike of religious fundamentalism, which is the main target of his diatribe, it has probably slipped his notice that he resembles those fundamentalist traits in his own atheistic stridency. Is it really the case that his excellent works in biology have justified his place as the most popular spokesperson in atheism? I highly doubt it. Given the kind of people who were so easily talked out of their professed faith by Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I suspect that, as Tolstoy observed in his Confession, it was often merely "the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight."

But perhaps the defining inadequacy is this. Like most atheists, Richard Dawkins states that he thinks God does not exist – but his strawman caricatures are so clumsy that most Christians do not believe in the god that Dawkins denies. This points to one of my long-standing rules of thumb; the God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas. 

And this leads to a point that I think reveals an incisive truth, but one that isn't necessarily obvious at first glance. To see what I mean, imagine that for Richard Dawkins’ next book, he decides to write a project called “The Flying Spaghetti Monster Delusion” – in which he explains in about 200 pages why there is no such thing as The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I am pretty certain there would be no demand for it. because nobody believes in The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Therefore, not only would the refutations be pointless, it would be a book replete with misrepresentations of what people actually believe. 

Yet the absurd truth is, Richard Dawkins has done more or less the same thing with his book The God Delusion. He has written a book replete with misrepresentations of a belief system, only this time it is not The Flying Spaghetti Monster, but Christianity, I know this because I know Christianity, and no Christian really believes in the things Dawkins spends 200 odd pages trying to refute.  At best, he may have counter-argued against a few ideas held by the most extremist religious fundamentalists, who are both unlearned and unworldly - but in doing so, he has written a diatribe against a set of ideas that most people don’t believe in and never have. That is the essence of this strange secular icon.