The Delusion Of Dawkins' Dangerous Religion

I Just watched the first part of Richard Dawkins' Age of Reason series. The title is a brilliant steal from Thomas Paine, and as usual very entertaining to watch. It has struck me for some time now that Dawkins himself, in his style if not his conclusions, is a parallel not only with Paine, for his brilliant polemic style in energising his own side, but also with Socrates. This might seem like too high a praise, I'm sure he would reject the characterisation, but watching his methods you cannot fail to see the parallels. Socrates never wrote, what we have from him are dialogues recorded by Plato, and although of course Dawkins does he also has also has something of a penchant for documentaries including discursive interviews. It's two things mainly.

First they are/were both exquisite at humiliating people with well placed questions. This is not only very amusing, a subtler point in philosophy but actually very important, but reflects a radical rejection of the idea that deeply held beliefs on any subject should be respected. What this does in both cases is switch the focus of the debate to the bare propositions, if what you say is stupid and ludicrous then no amount of justification by what that belief means to you can command respect for it. As Nietzche was fond of saying, 'A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.' and I always find it profitable to remember this point. Secondly the occasional unacknowledged quotes. On this particular occasion using the same Socratic argument about conflicts between figures of authority to justify their method. In Socrates it is disagreement between the gods on the nature of the good. Dawkins makes do with the rather more mundane example of adults disagreeing about things, but then he is talking to 6 year olds, the principle is the same. 

In general however I have gone rather cooler on Dawkins than in the past. At the time I first read The God Delusion I shared the good professor's alarm about, as well as views on, religion. It felt like a pressing danger, a threat to the scientific ideals of the enlightenment and everything I believed in. A while back though I started to notice something about the way these great adversaries of reason talked about themselves and their beliefs, something that made them seem a lot less dangerous. In essence the kind of religion that exists today frames itself purely in the terms of a positivist world view and standards of proof and evidence that in never did before. It also treats the individual in a completely different way, seeing people as noble, rational and flawed but not fundamentally so. Finally it confines itself in a way that it could never have accepted before, compartmentalising itself to the sphere of ethics and morality, saying only what should be and ceasing to try to explain what is. We underestimate the extent to which modern religion, in the west at the very least, has been totally hamstrung by the prevailing discourse. This is only natural, when all of the things that make life so liveable for us, from Tesco to the IPhone, are explained to us scientifically we are bound to find that more compelling than religious discourse that we only hear when we are being told about the things that make life worse.