I have an issue with the logic and goals of contemporary atheism despite not being a theist myself. I believe it can be stubbornly unproductive and anti-intellectual, though well-intentioned. This may seem oxymoronic, because the figures who advance the type of atheism to which I refer are mostly scientists and therefore intelligent. A recent debate between evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, Richard Dawkins and psychologist and right-wing internet personality Jordan Peterson demonstrated many of my thoughts. Upsettingly, I found myself frustrated by Dawkins and agreeing with Peterson. Don’t go spreading this around. The debate doesn’t redeem Peterson, nor is this article tacit approval of what he says and does. But in the context of this debate, Peterson’s perspective is more productive and Dawkins’ is quite myopic.
Peterson claims the “scientific enterprise is motivated by the axiomatic presumption that truth tends towards a unity… that it’s predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that’s intrinsic to the cosmos, that that fundamental order is good, that it’s intelligible to human beings and that discovering that order, and aligning ourself with it, makes for life more abundant.” That is, science has its origins in the Enlightenment and is contingent on an objectivity that isn’t quite possible. This, like theism, is a metaphysics rather than the absence of metaphysics. Science is successful despite this partly by being endlessly iterative rather than dogmatic: if new evidence disproves a scientific theory, the theory will be changed to account for it.
Dawkins claims moral questions are not in the domain of science but doesn’t say what they are in the domain of. Yet he insists religion is the wrong domain (by himself taking moral stances) and therefore implies a correct, self-evident domain exists and might follow from the scientific enterprise. His arbitrary use of moral concepts and highly specific terminology like “virtue” with seemingly no awareness of how deeply rooted in and derived from theology those concepts are, undermines that implication.
At one point in the conversation, there is a dead-end disagreement about dragons. Peterson talks about dragons as real, archetypal and representative of certain socio-psychological mechanisms. Dawkins says he deals with facts not symbols; predators are real, so why say dragon instead of predator? The problem is linguistic: predator doesn’t refer to a particular; it is a category, a collection of properties that can be applied to many things. Not everything we consider a predator will contain every property in the category of predator. The line is difficult to demarcate. Predator is ultimately no more factual than dragon. You can’t “find” a dragon but neither can you “find” the metacategory of predator itself. Dawkins agrees that for science to proceed, it must first accept a few preconditions. These preconditions are productive for science, but they are a detriment to theological conversation.
The vocal atheist links the value of religion to its truth where truth is understood to be the literal, historical, biological, empirical factuality of a text. Dawkins is obsessed with a conclusive answer to whether Cain and Abel “really existed,” which implies a specific type of truth and a value that depends on it. This is a false premise. Moderator Alex O’Connor points out there is fair cause to conclude that believing in something factually untrue may be useful in evolution: if I always run away believing every rustle in the bushes is a tiger, my life will be saved the one time it actually is.
It’s also a privileged position only possible to have in this moment of history. In the historical epoch of these stories, in the communities of the Ancient Near East for example, “belief” isn’t in the vocabulary, so factualness was irrelevant. It was about customs: to be an Israelite one need simply to live in the land and observe the customs; belief is incidental. Narrative structures human understanding and permits things like civil society. This is why fiction can feel truer than non-fiction. This is why para-social relationships with the characters on “Friends” activate the same parts of the brain as “real-life” social relationships. I say that atheism can be anti-intellectual because the preoccupation with this truth-value presents a closed system. Because Dawkins won’t accept Peterson’s answer (I don’t know, maybe, it doesn’t matter), and since no one possibly could answer the Cain question empirically, he is prevented from considering the more profound truthfulness of the archetype, meme or even the literary prowess itself.
Dawkins says Dostoevsky was a literary genius and the authors of “Genesis” were not. Putting aside the absurdity of this claim, “Crime and Punishment” was written in a time where the metacategory of fiction existed. When Peterson asserts that one could’ve observed Raskolnikov—his properties materially manifest in many people in Russia at that time—and is therefore no more or less “real” than Cain, Dawkins remains hung-up and I don’t get why. Suppose we could prove two brothers named Cain and Abel existed and inspired the author, or the story was wholly fictional, by one author, by many, or that an author was divinely inspired to write something no mortal otherwise could. What then? And how ridiculous! Can we explain from a materialist view where precisely Dostoevsky got his ideas? Even when an author writes a “purely invented” story, he doesn’t do so in a vacuum but draws on every single person, place or thing he has ever observed both consciously and unconsciously and so the “purely invented,” from this perspective, is always rooted in the empirical!
We should want to mitigate and prevent the harms that are made possible by the power hierarchies isolating control of the narratives that structures a culture, ethical framework and society. Asserting a kind of sterile objectivity proves to be neither reliable nor conducive to generating values and justifying their goodness. Dawkins nearly hits upon a more useful procedure when he mentions in passing that the foundational Christian concept of the virgin birth is likely due to a mistranslation of Isaiah and the Hebrew word, “almah.” A more helpful solution is to prioritize literacy, critical engagement with narrative-mythic-poetic texts and strong cultural, historic and linguistic education that would permit productive exploration of how and why religious narratives came to be, how they function, why they endured and have influence and what their place is going forward.