Review: An angelic riposte to the God Delusion by John Cornwell
22 September 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.
(My comments to certain points are at the end)
Amanda Gefter
"IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY GOD
THE debate between science and religion has been brewing since the
birth of modern science but its infiltration of popular culture has
recently become too noisy to be ignored. With the rise of "new
atheism" on the one hand and intelligent design on the other, the
debate has been reduced to unseemly bickering back and forth that for
the bystander feels like watching a never-ending tennis match.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Darwin's Angel: An angelic
riposte to the God Delusion. This is the fourth book written in
response to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and in this one John
Cornwell, the Catholic philosopher of science, addresses Dawkins in
the guise of a guardian angel. One can only imagine the inevitable
riposte in which Dawkins will perhaps speak through the character of
an ape or a swatch of DNA. We can wait until Cornwell resorts to angry
devils - or take a step back and ask whether the nature of the debate
itself might be flawed.
"You think religion is 'a persistent false belief held in the face of
strong contradictory evidence'," Cornwell's angel says to Dawkins.
"And yet, for most of those who have studied religion down the ages,
it is as much a product of the imagination as art, poetry, and music."
He goes on to describe religious activities and rituals as
"principally symbolic, appealing to deep levels of folk memory". For
Dawkins to oppose this version of religion - a way of organising the
cold, hard facts of the world into a meaningful and symbolic internal
narrative - denies people the right to unfettered thought and
erroneously assumes that science in itself can satisfy our innate,
insatiable wonderment at existence.
It's an ace for Cornwell. But before celebrating a win he must
presumably concede that in this version of religion, no particular set
of religious beliefs can be taken as superior to any other. He must
allow that "belief" is probably not the right word, and consider using
"intuition" or "experience". And that if a sacred text like the Bible
is, as he says, not to be taken literally, then its metaphorical and
allegorical insights cannot be held in any higher esteem than those of
other great works of literature. Would the average "religious" person
concede so much?
In any case, it is clearly not this version of religion that Dawkins
is calling "delusional". In The God Delusion, he talks about the
supreme wonder some scientists experience at the inner workings of
nature - wonder that might be called religious. "I wish that
physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special
metaphorical sense," Dawkins writes. "The metaphorical or pantheistic
God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist,
miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God
of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary
language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of
intellectual high treason."
Cornwell appears guilty of such treason. His image of religion is
lovely - after all, it comes from an angel - but it's not the religion
that most people who claim to be religious subscribe to. They adhere
to a particular set of beliefs not only about what the world means but
about how it works - how it began, how it evolved (or didn't evolve)
and how it will end. Even Cornwell invokes physical and cosmological
arguments for the existence of God, for example, the values of various
physical constants that appear designed to ensure the universe is
hospitable to life.
This is where the problem lies. Once believers start to claim truths
about how the physical world works - those who want to include
intelligent design in biology textbooks, for example, or who believe
that Jesus walked on water or Moses parted the sea - then they must be
willing to debate with scientists based on evidence. Meanwhile, those
who take religion to be an art or ethos should refrain from using
facts about the world as evidence for their mythological intuitions,
or abandoning their artistic post to squabble with scientists.
In turn, scientists should acknowledge that there are many different
kinds of religion. **
A faith that purely seeks to find meaning in the world is presumably
just as important, and just as subjective, as art, music, literature
and mythology. It is also dangerous, and as Cornwell points out,
perhaps even mathematically untenable, for Dawkins and others to
assume that science is ultimately capable of explaining everything
about the universe. ***
Such an assumption is itself surely based on faith.
If the tennis match is to continue, can we at least settle on the
rules of the game?"
Related Articles
Feature: What good is God?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325931.800
1 September 2007
Review: The Dawkins Delusion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325931.800
3 March 2007
Review: The God Delusion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225721.600
7 October 2006
Weblinks
Darwin's Angel
http://www.profilebooks.co.uk/title.php?titleissue_id=455
The God Delusion
http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=twmain.txt&eqisbndata=0593055489
Responses to Cornwell on Dawkins' website
http://richarddawkins.net/article,761,The-Fourth-Flea,John-Cornwell
From issue 2622 of New Scientist magazine, 22 September 2007, page 53
....................
My footnotes:
** Dawkins has never denied this.
*** Dawkins has never said this.
Both are egregious "intellectual high treason" bordering on actionable
libel.
John Cornwell is your typical lying apologist for his chosen
superstition, dressing it up in pretty words, (and outrageous lies),
to hide the fact that Dawkins is absolutely correct, and Cornwell *IS*
wilfully delusional.
.
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