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Dawkins, delusion and the search for a shared ethics

by Margaret Somerville


Sarah Fisher photo (hon. mention). See winners here.

A FEW YEARS AGO Richard Dawkins and I had an exchange of views at a meeting in Oxford. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA and Nobel Prize winner, was also there. At the coffee break just after this exchange, Watson – who agrees with Dawkins about religion – said to me, “You know Margo, the problem with you is that you’re full of mystical nonsense.” Mystical nonsense is indeed a real danger, but I think that he and Dawkins are mystically tone deaf, which is a much more serious danger.

Dawkins is on a highly publicized campaign to convince the world that “religion is the root of all evil.” At the centre of his argument is the proposition that faith and reason are incompatible. But they are not in fact incompatible. In positing this incompatibility, Dawkins, whom I consider a fundamentalist atheist, and religious fundamentalists are similar. They all take an either/or approach to everything. Dawkins casts the current societal-ethical values debate as consisting of a series of choices: either them or us, atheism or religion, science or faith, reason or emotion and mysticism. I believe we must accommodate all of these realities and, to help us do that, I propose we need to search for a shared ethics. . . .

Human ways of knowing
Richard Dawkins and I part company most dramatically when it comes to what I call “human ways of knowing.” An overwhelming focus on reason is at the heart of Dawkins’ views, but I believe our valid and necessary ways of knowing are multiple and diverse, encompassing the mind, body, heart and spirit. John Ralston Saul, in his book The Unconscious Civilization, includes among our ways of knowing: common sense, human memory (history), imagination, creativity, intuition (I’d emphasize moral intuition), ethics and reason.

I would expressly add experiential knowledge and underline its importance to ethics, because experiential knowledge cuts across all of the other ways of knowing used in “doing ethics.” . . .

Let me be clear.
We are secular societies and there is rightly a separation of church and state. The question is: What does respecting that separation require? People who are adamantly atheistic believe it means religion must have no voice in the public square. I disagree. I believe religion is one voice among many, including secular and atheistic voices, that have a right to participate and be heard in societal debates.

The above article is an excerpt of an adaption of a speech delivered at The Sydney Institute, June 4, 2007. See Geez magazine issue 10, Summer 2008, pages 58-61; subscription info here.

Margaret Somerville is founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She received the 2004 UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science, and is author of The Ethical Imagination (Anansi, 2006).

Comment

  1. Dawkins has specifically stated that he doesn’t believe religion is the root of all evil, just some.

    Either God exists or he doesn’t. Either religion is true or it isn’t. Yeah- insisting on truth is really fundamentalist.

    — Samuel Skinner · Jun 6, 09:23 PM · #

  2. I agree with Dawkins (God doesn’t exist) but I don’t agree with his approach (villainizing Christianity of every form). Dawkins primarily engages fundamentalist Christianity. The further one moves away from fundamentalist and creationist thinking, the less relevant Dawkins arguments become.

    — Karl · Jun 22, 11:55 PM · #

  3. Insisting on “truth” isn’t necessarily fundamentalist. But insisting that you as a human being have a fully realized comprehensive grasp on truth might at the very least border on fundamentalist thinking.

    — Alen · Jul 9, 11:04 PM · #

  4. I don’t think there is some bearded white dude sitting on a cloud micromanaging every detail of our lives.

    And quite frankly, I don’t think the authors of our ancient holy writings thought that either.

    It’s a symptom of the literalism of our modern era that believers and disbelievers alike base their arguments on this false premise.

    One time my wife asked me to grab a specific shirt in my son’s drawer.

    She described it with a few details, one of which was that it was green. She misspoke and should have said it was blue and so I couldn’t find that shirt for the life of me.

    Based on some of the other details she gave me, I should have figured out the shirt was right there in front of my eyes, but I was so focused on the “green” part that I didn’t see it.

    But that doesn’t mean the shirt didn’t exist, I just didn’t recognize it because of my mistaken expectations.

    A lot of the Bible says it indirectly, but 1 John spells it out for anyone who misses it, “God is love.”

    And I believe in love. So I believe in God.

    Until someone comes up with a mathematical formula to quantify love (or God) I guess we’ll have to stick to the imperfect tools of allegory and metaphor to describe our experiences with it…

    ...sort of like they do in the Bible.

    — Chris · Jul 10, 06:16 PM · #

  5. I believe in the existence of absolute truth…That’s why I walk with God. Jesus said that we must worship God in spirit and in truth. What “fundie” athiests like Dawkins do is simply ignore the truth of God’s existence that can be clearly seen in nature.

    What these guys like to do is the same thing that cult leaders do: you either follow them, and worship them as gods, or you’re the “devil” and you shouldn’t even exist, much less have any rights in society. I have seen this Dawkins guy on YouTube and his speeches aren’t that much different from the hatefulness of the ones of Fred Phelps. Instead of trying to win their audience over, they simply belittle and insult those that don’t believe like they do.

    As for trying to “win” some kind of argument with these people, there’s no use in trying to do so. They have already made up their hearts and minds: I will not believe in God because I don’t want to submit myself to Him. When one college student asked Dawkins “But what if you’re wrong?”, he just shamed the student until the other athiests in the lecture cheered and applauded.

    ...and he never did answer that student’s question.

    — Jeffrey Williams · Aug 25, 06:27 PM · #

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