Kate Muir, writing in The Times (London) positively fawns over Richard Dawkins, as he is releasing his new three-part series Dawkins on Darwin on British TV. I fairly fell over when I read this—even though I was sitting down:
In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on.
[Link: Richard Dawkins slaps creationists into the primordial soup - Times Online]
Something substantial to chew on? Hardly. In The God Delusion he doesn’t address—doesn’t even demonstrate awareness of—genuine theistic scholarship. Instead he serves up for himself easy, empty arguments about a vaporous version of God that he himself invented. Then, having savored and swallowed them, he burps them back up, pronounces himself satisfied, and expects us all to feel the same. Challenged on his utter avoidance of opposing scholarship (here, for example), he takes up P.Z. Myers’s “Courtier’s Reply” and insists it would be silly to give genuine theistic thinking any more attention than he has.
Is this indeed a corrective for barren, thoughtless times? I think not. There are better assessments out there; this one, for example, from Not Even Modern:
I think I mentioned the [Courtier's Reply] argument before. I detest it, because it is basically a license to intellectual laziness….
The “Courtier’s reply” move is astonishingly poor, to the extent that it’s baffling that Dawkins is actually using it. As it is, it is equally open to rhetorical deployment by Creationists (why read anything about biological evolution, as it’s nonsense anyway?), Flat Earthers, and so on. I really think there’s a hubris thing going on here. To wade into an area which has more than two thousand years of extremely bright believers making cautious and complex arguments and extremely bright disbelievers making equally cautious and complex arguments, and to think all one has to do is to ignore all that and point out the emperor is naked, one needs a pretty high opinion of oneself.
In a similar vein, David Heddle says,
The Courtier’s Reply is license to wallow in ignorance–in fact it justifies, rationalizes, condones, encourages, celebrates, and rewards ignorance, simply by declaring the subject at hand (theology) is not worthy of study. I see that as laziness, not brilliance.
In a masterpiece of oblivious self-parody, Dawkins himself, in his interview with the Times, explains the problem with the Courtier’s Reply. The topic is different but the principle is the same:
“I don’t like giving [Darwin skeptics] the oxygen of respectability, the feeling that if they’re up on a platform debating with a scientist, there must be real disagreement. One side of the debate is wholly ignorant. It would be as though you knew nothing of physics and were passionately arguing against Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
Knowing nothing of real theology, yet being quite content in his ignorance, nevertheless he passionately argues against God.
Such intellectual laziness is apparently all too fitting for our day. Consider this from Karen Muir in the same Times article:
For final proof that Dawkins, rather than God, is everywhere, you need only to have seen the most recent series of Doctor Who, in which Dawkins played a cameo as himself.
Need I spell it out? Am I being ungracious, or does that not speak for itself of “these barren, thoughtless times”?
Now, I will grant her points for this nifty bit of verbiage: “slaps creationists into the primordial soup.” That’s a real nice piece of imagery. We writers congratulate ourselves when we come up with lines like that. It’s a fine example of her own graciousness, too….
Hat Tip: Barry Carey, Al Mohler
