On Richard Dawkins’s irresponsible and irrational dogmatism.

This is an excerpt from an article by Carson Holloway in which he makes interesting and insightful comments about the preachings of the biologist Mr. Dawkins, a militant atheist.

Dawkins contends that the meaningfulness of life need not depend on any notions of the ultimate purpose of the cosmos. He would probably assert that those who seek such cosmic justifications for the things they love are suffering a form of false consciousness imposed by the cultural influence of Biblical religion. Whatever the origins of such transcendent aspirations, however, it is an undeniable fact that countless human beings really do experience the meaningfulness of their lives as somehow bound up with their conviction that the universe possesses ultimate meaning. Dawkins’s ruthless indifference to them makes a tangled web of many of his fellow human beings’ most cherished sentiments and beliefs.

Dawkins’s problems do not end here, however. The responsible public intellectual, as I suggested above, is concerned with both the truth and its consequences. While he does not let a heedless zeal for the truth automatically compel him to its reckless popularization, neither does let his concern for others blind him to the truth and its value. Yet, an important part of his respect for truth is his recognition of the limits of his own knowledge, a sober sense that not all of his convictions are truths properly so-called — that is, propositions capable of confirmation by reason.

Here, again, Dawkins fails, dogmatically asserting as truth things that his science cannot confirm, things that science properly understood does not even claim to address. “Presumably,” he opines, “there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the universe.” On the basis of what evidence does Dawkins ground this momentous presumption? As a result of what scientific reasoning does he make this grandiose claim about the nature of all things? He has no such basis, and there is none available to him. It is true that pre-modern science sought to explain the purposefulness of the cosmos, while modern science has abandoned that project in favor of what is perhaps easier and more immediately useful: figuring out how nature works and how it can be manipulated. Nevertheless, it is clear that science’s turning away from questions of ultimate meaning is not equivalent to a denial of their importance, nor to a denial that they can be answered, let alone a claim to have answered them. Sober scientists — those who respect the limits of their method and avoid amateur philosophic extrapolations from it — understand this.

If it is not science that leads Dawkins to deny the purposefulness of the universe, then what is it? The answer to this question will be obvious to anyone familiar with his usual public pronouncements. Dawkins’s denial of the meaningfulness of the cosmos arises not from any evidence that science reveals to him, but instead from a simple dogmatic hostility to those who see purpose in the universe itself, or, put more simply, an animus against religion. Consider, for example, a recent interview in which he claims never to have met an intelligent religious believer who came to belief apart from childhood indoctrination, and that he cannot think of a single good thing that religion has contributed to the world.

These are not the opinions of a moderate and reasonable man, and his doctrinaire disdain for religion is equally on display in his new introduction. Those tempted to despair by his soulless and godless account of the universe, Dawkins advises, should seek meaning in the good things of ordinary life. “Our lives are ruled,” he notes, not by the meaning of the universe itself but by “all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.” Do “any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos,” he asks. His answer: “Of course we don’t; not if we are sane.” There you have Dawkins’s perspective in a nutshell: on the one hand, his account of things; on the other hand, madness. He is undeterred in this judgment by the fact that the views he regards as insane are held by countless millions of his fellow beings and have shaped the human story for millennia. It would be difficult to invent a more perfect caricature of the intellectually intolerant ideologue.

There are many words one might choose to describe the competent and useful public intellectual. Unfortunately for Dawkins, irresponsible and irrational are not among them.

Richard Dawkins