Milinda’s Questions

Gonna try to do better at this blogging thing during the month of February than I have in January. You know the only refrain: brief but regular.

Colleen Keating is keeping track of posts in the blogosphere that offer advice for aspiring professional philosophers. Should be worth keeping an eye on.

Nobel Prize winner (and fellow Austinite) Steven Weinberg offers his take on Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion here. I have a quibble with one passage:

I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton’s judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.

(emphasis added)

IMHO, the analogy fails.
Anyone, expert or not, is entitled to express her opinion about, or judge the validity of, religion or astrology or anything else. We’re talking about people here who’ve published book-length opinions on their chosen subjects. In the course of a book-length refutation of the claims of astrology, isn’t it likely that a critic would have to examine the actual claims that astrologers make (as opposed to those the critic imagines they make) in sufficient detail that said critic would end up knowing a fair amount about how to cast a horoscope?

In fact, I think Eagleton’s LRB review is a masterpiece. Here are a few snippets:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann.

But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.