1 Beyond Biology
At the start of his career, Richard Dawkins was famous for being a biologist; by the end, he was famous for being an atheist. As a biologist, he attracted a lot of academic attention; but as an atheist, he attracted attention both academic and public. He was reviled by many popular religious writers. He was attacked by academic theologians and theistic philosophers. However, as far as I know, no atheistic thinkers have risen to his defense. I am an atheist and I will defend Dawkins here. Consequently, I will be dealing here with his views on religion and spirituality. I will not be writing about his biology. I will not be doing philosophy of biology or philosophy of science. From an entirely atheistic perspective, I will be doing philosophy of religion and spirituality.
To justify the thesis that there is more to Dawkins than just biology, it will be helpful to briefly list his books. His most biological books are The Ancestor’s Tale and The Greatest Show on Earth. They focus almost entirely on the details of evolutionary biology. Yet they also mention theological and philosophical issues. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype are still biological, but they are also more abstract. They both contain extensive discussions of ideas from computer science and information theory. They talk about philosophical topics closely associated with values and ethics. And they contain many thematic references to theological issues.
Then there are three books in which the abstract sciences play central roles: The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and River Out of Eden. In these books, more purely mathematical structures are frequently in play. They deal with multi-dimensional spaces of possible organisms, adaptive landscapes, dynamical systems, optimization strategies, and so on. They talk about computers and programs, making great use of digital simulations. They discuss philosophical and theological topics. And, in these three books, these discussions are far more detailed and serious. They contain serious reflections on the nature of value, meaning, purpose, and larger cosmic themes. They are filled with ideas taken from Stoicism and Platonism.
Next comes The God Delusion, which explicitly gets into philosophical and theological issues. Most of The God Delusion is devoted to topics that lie entirely outside of biology or any of the empirical sciences. It discusses issues in ethics, in cosmology, in metaphysics. His two collections of essays, A Devil’s Chaplain and Science in the Soul, also frequently address philosophical issues. Perhaps surprisingly, even his book The Magic of Reality, a book for children, gets into some interesting epistemology. All these books contain many Stoic and Platonic themes. After that comes I think his most philosophically interesting book: Unweaving the Rainbow. Unweaving the Rainbow is a fascinating meditation on the value and meaning of science. But Unweaving the Rainbow does far more than discuss these aspects of science. Unweaving the Rainbow is an intensely spiritual book. It develops a theory of the meaning and purpose of life. It discusses the metaphysical significance of beauty and truth. It pays deep homage to mathematics. Old Platonic themes are here on full display.
2 One Rational Magisterium
One great problem with Dawkins concerns his status as a celebrity atheist. This fame means that people often talk about his ideas without reading his writings. I have read all his books and many of his articles. And I will often refer to their pages. Very often. But since ending every sentence with a note makes for rough reading, I’ll often use just one note for all the references in each paragraph. I’ll put it after the first sentence. On the basis of his texts, I will argue that Dawkins uses science to do something beyond science. Consider his take on the relation between science and religion. Dawkins develops his own position on the science-religion relation by attacking the position of Stephen Jay Gould. Gould said science and religion are two non-overlapping magisteria. Dawkins refers to this as NOMA. NOMA means that science and religion deal with separate issues. Hence there are two sides to NOMA. On the one side, science but not religion deals with issues of fact; on the other side, religion but not science deals with issues of value and meaning. And, according to NOMA, neither side knows what the other is doing. The domain of fact does not intersect with that of value.
NOMA ties important concepts and values to God. It binds them to God by negative implications like these: if there is no God, then there is no objective morality; if there is no God, then there is no life after death; if there is no God, then there is no meaning. NOMA gives you this stark dichotomy: either God or else nihilism. Here’s NOMA at work: “On the one hand, we can delude ourselves, clinging to the infantile illusion that some One, some Thing, is looking over us, somehow orchestrating the universe with each of us personally in mind. Or we can face, squarely, the reality that life is meaningless.”1 Of course, a theist would believe that—but why would an atheist believe it? The NOMA dichotomy is false. Atheism does not imply nihilism.
Dawkins attacks NOMA on both sides.2 On the first side, he argues that religion and science overlap on many questions of fact. Religions make empirical claims: a great flood covered the entire earth; Jesus came back to life after he died; the Virgin Mary was raised bodily into the sky. Dawkins correctly says these are entirely scientific claims. On the second side, he agrees that science by itself has little to say about morality and meaning. But now Dawkins makes two important points. The first is that moral debates depend on facts. For example, facts about embryology are relevant to moral debates about abortion. The second is that religion has no moral authority. Moral authority comes from rational moral philosophy. Moreover, Dawkins recognizes that there may be deep questions which science cannot answer. Consider the rationality of the universe. Science reveals that the universe is orderly; but does it reveal that the universe is rational? You could argue either way. Yet Dawkins says he has a profound faith in the rationality of the universe. His profound faith is not scientific—to decide that the universe is rational is to make a philosophical decision.
As a scientist, Dawkins obviously values evidence.3 But Dawkins is no positivist. A positivist thinks that every meaningful statement is empirically decidable—it can be verified or falsified using evidence alone. Dawkins affirms that theistic design might be indistinguishable from evolution by natural selection. No empirical evidence can decide against a God who generates all the empirical evidence. Likewise empirical evidence cannot tell us whether or not we are living in some digital simulation. The arguments against a God who emulates evolution (like the arguments for or against simulation) will be rational philosophical arguments. On the one hand, there’s no evidence that some things exist outside of our observable universe. On the other hand, there’s no evidence against things existing outside of it. Evidence alone is not enough.
Dawkins uses both science and philosophy to build a single rational magisterium. His rational enterprise uses empirical science to answer factual questions about our universe. It uses philosophically extended science to answer questions about value and meaning. For the sake of completeness, it also uses philosophically extended science to answer questions about ultimacy—it covers metaphysics and ontology. Of course, to rationally extend science, it is not necessary to add any new types of entities to science. Scientific documents contain symbols that refer to many kinds of objects. They refer, of course, to material things. But they also refer to properties and relations, to abstract laws and patterns, and to purely mathematical objects. Theists (and atheists too) are fond of saying that scientific naturalism is just materialism. Anybody who says that has not studied much science. Science includes logic and pure mathematics.
This rational enterprise competes with the old theistic religions.4 It pushes their answers to every question out into the irrational abyss. Old religious concepts are given new rational yet irreligious meanings. Consequently, as the rational enterprise starts doing the old jobs of religion, it begins to resemble religion even though it is distinct from religion. It has become popular to refer to this distinctive likeness as spiritual but not religious. Dawkins says he is a spiritual person. He says science is a spiritual enterprise. He insists that “religion is not the only game in town when it comes to being spiritual.” Dawkins is building an irreligious spirituality.
Atheism can be as spiritual as any theism.5 The atheist Iris Murdoch wrote The Sovereignty of the Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville has written The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. The atheist Sam Harris has written Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.6 These excellent books show that there are at least three ways to build existentially rich spiritualities outside of theistic religions. Atheists have written about the sacred, the holy, and the numinous. The philosopher Dan Dennett talks about sacred values. He declares that “This world is sacred.” The atheist philosopher Quentin Smith has developed an atheistic conception of holiness. The writer Christopher Hitchens argues for developing irreligious conceptions of the numinous, ecstatic, and transcendent. I will argue that the Dawkinsian texts support a spiritual atheism of great existential power.
3 From the New Atheism to Spiritual Naturalism
Dawkins presents his atheism in many books and articles.7 He focuses on it in The God Delusion, where he argues that God does not exist. When he talks about God, Dawkins means the God worshipped in the Abrahamic religions. These are mainly Judaism, Christianity, an...