Amen and Amen! @ REVIEWS: BOOKS JUDE BULLOCK relishes an uplifting account of the awe and wonder of modern science, but wonders how so brilliant a mind can be so clouded when it comes to understanding religion as art and poetry Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins (Allen Lane) £20.
Unweaving Professor Dawkins ichard Dawkins has popularised Ree to a heroic degree. Few cientists make the bestseller list and even fewer with works that the rest of us can actually understand. But he is not only a brilliant scientist; he is also a gifted writer. Very gifted. Beguiling, one might say.
Unweaving the Rainbow is his latest outpouring and, as with all his writings, a worthy read. He makes science and the work of scientists sound as wondrous as it really is. Quoting from Carl Sagan, he mentions that religion should be grateful to science. After all, the universe is now bigger, grander and infinitely more complex than even the most imaginative of prophets could have imagined.
Dawkins analyses religion’s historical hostility to science in terms of the former’s preference for worshipping unlimited gods inhabiting little universes, over and against the unimaginable wonder of the cosmos as unfolded by scientists.
When Dawkins fires his scuds at biblical literalists, fundamentalists and other superstitious folk he is on solid ground. He understands superstition and fundamentalism all too well. The trouble is that he, like them, confuses dogmatic superstition with religion and that, for me, is where the problems with Dawkins’ thesis lie. Interesting, is it not, that science developed exclusively in Christian Europe and that Darwin’s first defenders were not the scientists of the time but a group of Anglican clerics. One wonders where his particular discipline of zoology wouid be without the work and imagination of one Gregor Johann Mendel, the founding father of genetics, who worked as a monk and abbot in his spare time.
Dawkins praises poetry and good literature to the highest heavens and yet cannot see that religion performs a similar task. He firmly believes, against all the evidence, I might add (an act of faith - gotcha!), that religion is both about keeping mystery a mystery, and about offering rival explanations for the way things are. Several times whilst reading Unweaving the Rainbow it struck me how mutually profitable it would be NWEAVING “Dawkins praises poetry and good literature to the highest heavens and yet cannot see that religion performs a similar task.” for Dawkins to engage with religion at the level of art and poetry rather than with his 19th century preconception of religion as a pseudo science stuffed full of bogus facts.
He chastises the mystical poets such as Blake and Keats for their anguished cry against the “unweaving of the rainbow” by science in general and Newton in particular, and yet misses the very point they made, put so well by Wittgenstein: “What is mystical is not how the world is but that it is”. Dawkins forgets that the mystics were not trying to explain anything. This was not because they thought they already had a ready-made explanation, handed down from on high. It was simply because “how” type questions were not asked.
Empirical inductive reasoning is the province of science. The great mystics, particularly modern ones such as Simone Weil and Teilhard de Chardin, could hardly be accused of opposition to the work of science! There is no “explanation” in the experience of mysticism, any more than there is in the appreciation of art, the thrill of driving a fast car, or the experience of having sex or falling in love. In fact, when it comes to doctrine, mystics have traditionally been a lot less dogmatic in their beliefs than the average scientist.
For those of us who have been terminally affected by the language debate, his last chapter “The balloon of the mind” provides much grist to our respective realist/antirealist/nonrealist mills. It strikes me as slightly odd that, having raised the subject of the mind’s symbolic representation of the world through language, he does not explore the question that inevitably follows. That is, whether we know things to be independently the case, language becoming the mediator of such knowledge, or whether what we know of the world is solely linguistic.
He says, “We are in a position to construct a working modei of the universe and run it in our heads before we die. We can get outside of the universe. I mean in the sense of putting a model of the universe inside our skulls”.
Sadly, Professor Dawkins does not consider the possibility that such a model may be as culturally and linguistically defined as the very models he so expertly (and savagely) dispenses with earlier in the book.
Richard Dawkins deserves to be read, not least because he is an excellent writer and communicator. For those of us lacking scientific knowledge, Unweaving the Rainbow provides illumination, along with personal warmth and wit by the bucket load. And this is how the book should be read: as a good, up-to-date popularisation of the state of biological science - and no more. Do not look for well-honed philosophical argument or a genuine critique of religion (as we might understand the term) or even a well thought-out engagement with the postmodern thought he decries - you won't find them®@ Jude Bullock’s various incarnations include Catholic priest, teacher, librarian, writer, chain-smoker and SoF evangelist Dynamic... Sexy... but...but...but... GRAEME SMITH looks back down the road that led to Blair High moral To ny Sexy? Discuss ) Christian Socialism: Scott Holland to Tony Blair by Alan Wilkinson (SCM) £14.95 government was replaced by a man with a mission; a young, eager, dynamic figure with a distinctive grin and an almost evangelical faith. In a manner familiar to British politics, an iconic figure who engendered either devotion or loathing was set to dominate the landscape, except that this time the icon is New Labour instead of New Tory.