Letter to Dawkins

I recently sent a letter to Richard Dawkin's website, critical of his views. If I get a response I will post it as a comment. Below is the letter.

Dear Professor Dawkins,

Forgive me that I am not terribly up to date, but I stumbled on the podcast of a debate you participated at Westminster in March in which the motion was “We’d be better off without religion.” I wondered if you would take a moment to reply to some questions and comments on what you said there.
Responding to the previous speaker Dr. Spivey, you say that religion is not part of your human nature or countless others that subscribe to atheistic beliefs. I don’t think the point was that each individual must necessarily be religious, rather that there is a collective disposition towards religion inherent in the social psychology of humans. It is perhaps not the most desirable quote to employ for the defender of religion, but James Madison once aptly pointed out that "passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." The gist here is that, whether for good or for ill, we act in ways qualitatively different in our mutual interaction than we might as purely isolated individuals. So I’m not certain how isolated enclaves of atheists, especially ones in academic positions, really show that religion isn’t an innate part of our collective human condition.
You next assert, in essence, that religion’s cultural contributions like King’s College Chapel or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are simply incidental to the historical circumstances of wealth and power being vested in religious bodies to which artists were beholden. You then muse about what types of cultural contributions a society culturally dominated by science would have produced. Is it so easy to treat religion and science as interchangeable ideologies? Perhaps the technocratic concerns of a science-dominated world would make it less predisposed to the aesthetic endeavors we see in a religious society. What unique circumstances would have brought about a scientific society that would have made its institutions fundamentally different from the institutions that religious society produced and in the context of which so much art, music, and literature was composed?
The contingencies of history seem too complex to make facile counterfactual claims about what might have been if this or that alternate condition had been in place. Exchanging science for religion in the cultural history of Western Civilization is not as simple a matter as exchanging a blue couch for a white one and leaving the rest of your living room intact. It just seems much more reasonable to just accept that, yes, as a matter of fact, religiosity was a contributing causal factor in some of Western Civilization’s greatest cultural achievements for whatever it’s worth.
Your comments then turn to religion’s consolatory, inspirational, and explanatory functions. In the midst of your discussion of the inspirational, you gush with awe at the achievements of modern science, the mysteries of “deep space,” “deep time,” and “deep complexity.” I must say, I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the achievements of modern science from my undergraduate education, and I still don’t see why it is or ought to be that inspirational. There is no doubt that modern physics, for example, is highly complex, both mathematically and conceptually speaking. But is venerating it in the way that you seem to an inevitable reaction? I personally find economics to be a fascinating field of study, yet it is popularly referred to as the “dismal science.” Is there any objective reason to imbue science with all of these feelings of awe and grandeur, or is this merely a whimsical expression of love and pride for your own chosen discipline?
Concerning consolation, you say that certainly a human being can be consoled by a lie. You’re missing the point here. Roger Scruton, I think, later hits the nail on the head when he compares religion to love. I would say that religious modes of thinking are also comparable to poetic modes of the thinking in some respects. The point of postulating an afterlife, for instance, isn’t that you just can’t accept that your grandfather has returned to the dust from whence he came and thus you invent a lie that he is in heaven to comfort the bereaved. It’s that in a very real way he does live on, and the wisdom of life experience that he carried with him lives on as well. The psychological disposition that the notion of an afterlife provides is the only fully satisfying way of expressing the way that he continues to live on for you and your loved ones. To attempt to stifle this essentially poetic experience of the world with a hoity-toity recitation of naturalistic technicalities completely wrongly dismisses the way that ordinary individuals integrate their emotive experience into a satisfying schema. And it evidences a profoundly distasteful condescension toward the mass of humanity. Scruton was correct to compare this to the imposition of the type of exclusionary reason we find in Plato’s Republic.
Concerning explanation, as a student of history myself, I find your attitude toward religion totally bereft of any real explanatory merit. One of the very first things an historian must do is adopt a sympathetic attitude to the subjects of his study. It does little for any balanced understanding of the ancient Israelites relationship with the God of their scriptures to hear Yahweh characterized as a “bully” like you did in another talk at Randolph-Macon Women’s College (I believe reading from The God Delusion, which I admit I have not read), as much as it may make for cleverly invective polemic. I am sympathetic to you insofar as your concern is the advancement of scientific education, but there comes a point where you cross a line and obstruct a level-headed approach to inquiry in the humanities by browbeating what doesn’t conform to scientific rationalism into silence. I am grateful that you are not a Religious Studies scholar, even a secular one.
At any rate, I thank you for taking the time to read my comments, and (hopefully) responding to them.

Sincerely,

John Headley