I’ve seen an email that cites that crappy Eagleton review of The God Delusion that seems to think this quote is somehow a significant rebuttal of the book, rather than an indictment of the reviewer’s ability to comprehend the book without inserting his own biases against atheism into it.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history—and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

If you actually open The God Delusion to pages 340-345 and read, you will find a substantial section in which Dawkins defends the Bible as a literary and historical source, deplores the lack of knowledge of the book by its most ardent defenders, and even argues that religious rituals like those for marriages and funerals are a good thing. It begins this way:

I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent decades than I was. Or maybe it isn’t a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically more religious than other parts of the developed world.

The King James Bible of 1611 — the Authorized Version — in English includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the Hebrew too). But the main reason the Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture.

I will speak for Dawkins when I say that the the real bigotry and the crime against history is when the religious take acts of human selflessness and credit them to a nonexistent phantasm rather than their true source…people. I think it’s particularly galling when those paragons of virtue, the Christians who claim their goodness devolves from their religion, in general have such a deficient knowledge of their purported source of morality. Perhaps the reason Christians are such bad examples is that they don’t know their religion as well as we atheists do?

Wired has the perfect article for you: it’s called the Battle of the New Atheism, and it’s message is that the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett) are, well, right, but they’re also obnoxious and unsettling and foolish, and gosh, but youth pastors are cool and nifty and caring.

Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I’ve decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me.

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

Ah, yes. The classic response of the comfortable: both sides are bad, both are threatening my cozy life, so I’ll just damn them both and ignore them, hoping they’ll go away…and heck, misrepresenting the upstarts is always good. Actually, what these New Atheists are saying is that sure, we could be wrong, but the other side is almost certainly wrong. What we have to offer is uncertainty and a demand for some degree of rigor; it’s the theists who are arrogant in their certainty, who are willing to believe in the ridiculous, who reject the author’s “bedrock faith” that there’s a chance they could be wrong. The real irony is that he doesn’t recognize that his last sentence is a good summary of the principles of this “New Atheism,” and that it is directly contrary to the philosophy of the New Religion he finds so unthreatening.

The article is a perfect example of the tepid atheism that closes its eyes to the world, that advocates the kind of bland semi-solipsism that reassures itself that everyone else thinks in the same happily reasonable way, so we don’t need to exert ourselves to confront the opposition. It’s an attitude that will be popular, unfortunately.

You should only read Terry Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion if you enjoy the spectacle of “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching.” That’s the title of the review, but I think it’s more a description of the contents. You can get the gist from just the first paragraph.

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. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Shorter Terry Eagleton: “How dare a mere scientist criticize theology?” The whole thing blusters on in that vein for far too long.

He really misses the point, though. What we have in Dawkins is a scientist who has a fairly good grasp of what the real world is and how it works, noting that the personal spiritual guardian of most religious beliefs doesn’t appear to be doing anything in that world, and that all the convoluted rationalizations of theology seem to be a desperate grasping at straws, trying to insert an a priori belief in a supernatural entity into a universe that doesn’t need it. Eagleton practically snarls that Dawkins is “theologically illiterate”…which I think is a good thing. I don’t need to know the arcana of drawing up a horoscope to know that astrology is bunk; similarly, no one needs to spend years poring over the scribblings of theologians to see that their god is a phantasm. It ain’t the geopolitics of South Asia; South Asia exists, and bears a body of hard data.

And good grief, how can anyone speak of theology as the “queen of the sciences” as if that were a good thing? You’ve got to laugh at the notion, but this fellow writes as though the addition of half a millennium of knowledge that has dethroned his gibbering, senile queen was a great mistake.

As some of you might have heard, the Raving Atheist has been getting increasingly wacky and wobbling towards some weirdly irrational beliefs. The latest turn in the saga is that his disaffected readers have jumped ship and have started a brand new site, Raving Atheists. It’s a shame, really: the Raving Atheist was one of the earlier blogs where godlessness was loudly and proudly expressed, and he had a strong community of atheist readers who congregated there, and who are now off on their own site. If nothing else, we can all thank RA for stimulating an interesting group of people.

Another thing I’ll thank him for is that he has a transcript of the radio exchange between David Quinn and Richard Dawkins (mp3 here). I listened to that a while back, and was appalled at the foolishness Quinn was spouting, yet apparently a number of people think Quinn mopped the floor with Dawkins. Shouting dogma does not a victory make, I don’t think, and that’s all Quinn did.

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You can get the audio for Dawkins’ talk at the University of Kansas now.

There was an annoying interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon yesterday, which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read until today because…

…I was getting the story straight from the horse’s mouth.

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By popular request, I’ve uploaded the slides I used in my talk at NDSU. I fear they won’t be very useful; you can see the structure of the talk, but what I was saying was the meat. For instance, there’s a slide that says “Francis Collins” and the title of his book, and what I did there was read an excerpt from his work, which isn’t anywhere in that document. Mac users, you can download the Keynote file, which has all the nice builds and transitions; everyone else will have to make do with a barebones
html version (there are a couple of slides where I dissolve in some photos that overlay the title…sorry, they won’t be readable here).

By the way, I’ve been using Keynote a lot lately—even when I’m going to do the presentation on a machine that only uses PowerPoint, I do all the creation and editing in Keynote and then export the whole thing to a ppt file. It’s beautiful. PowerPoint always gets in the way, doesn’t provide any help with what I actually want to do, and like everything Microsoft, is cumbersome, awkward, and ugly. Keynote is simple and clean and does the job, and then has those clever bits that make you appreciate how good Apple design is. Those alignment guides—brilliant! The dual-monitor setup so the presenter gets to see the next slide, with timers—I want it all the time! It’s also not that expensive for educators…heck, it’s not that expensive for non-educators.

Now if only it were available on every computer on which I have to do a presentation…

If it’s quiet on Pharyngula today, it’s because I’m off at NDSU giving a talk to the Science, Religion and Lunch seminar, in the Meadow Lark Room in the NDSU Memorial Union (any Fargo residents out there?). The title of the talk is “Accommodation isn’t enough: why scientists need to speak out against religion”, and yes, I’m expecting to stimulate people to argue with me.

My central argument is that religion and science are incompatible ways of knowing: that important decisions should be made on the basis of reason and evidence, and religion fosters the abandonment of those principles. You might wonder what I propose to do about it, because religion seems to be a fixed element of our culture, one that will be impossible to eradicate, and in a progressive society that encourages independent thought, it would not even be desirable to stamp it out.

My answer is to compare it to another unstoppable universal that is tightly keyed in to human nature.

Top Ten Reasons Religion is Like Pornography

10. It has been practiced for all of human history, in all cultures
9. It exploits perfectly natural, even commendable, impulses
8. Its virtues are debatable, its proponents fanatical
7. People love it, but can’t give a rational reason for it
6. Objectifies and degrades women even when it worships them
5. You want to wash up after shaking hands with any of its leaders
4. The costumes are outrageous, the performances silly, the plots unbelievable
3. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying it, but it’s nothing to be proud of, either
2. It is not a sound basis for public policy, government, or international relations
1. Its stars are totally fake

Basically, I’m saying we ought to regard religion like we do other human foibles: regulate it, curb it’s excesses, shame those who overindulge, and for jebus’ sake, stop treating it like some exalted, privileged, glorious endeavor. Any idiot can be religious, after all, and many are.