Thoughts on The God Delusion

I can honestly say that The God Delusion is a wonderful book; well-written, and full of clear, logical thinking. Since I am myself an atheist, it is not surprising that I should make such a positive statement. However, there is something about Dawkins's book that I feel somewhat dissatisfied with. Dawkins is an anti-postmodernist. He dismisses relativist thinking and what I might call liberal culturalism.

Firstly, let me make clear what I mean by 'relativist thinking', since this is the most important part of my argument. I am a sort of amateurist Nietzschean. That is to say, I find Nietzsche's writings amazingly powerful, but could not say that I really understand them in any depth. Frankly, I do not have the time to study them in detail (unfortunately). What I have got from the Nietzsche I have read is a sense that meaning (and morality) is not fixed. We gain our ideas of morality from our culture, our upbringing, and that cultural heritage lends us a moral compass. In that sense, Christianity is seen as a cultural phenomenon rather than a Truth (note the capital 'T', it is very important). Nietzsche sees mathematics and science in the same light. Even logic. There is a difference, of course: Nietzsche, I am sure, would not argue that scientific discovery is the same as religious faith; what I think Nietzsche is saying is that the value we place on logic is not fixed. In that sense, although the observations of science cannot be counter-argued, the value we place on those observations can go up as well as down.

This is, unfortunately, something that we witness every day. Dawkins's own book has many accounts of people who fly in the face of logic and observed phenomena. For example, many (if not all) religious Christian fundamentalists believe that dinosaur bones were placed in the earth by god to test our faith. Now, to my mind, this is an observed phenomenon. We know that many people do not value science highly, even though its methods have yielded wonderful truths about ourselves, the planet we live on and the universe at large. What relativism explains is this observed phenomenon. One might say that relativism is a fact rather than a political bias (although I don't like the word 'fact').

Dawkins, however, sees relativism as a problem. He seems to think (and many 'relativists' may agree with him) that relativism means that there is no way to value competing viewpoints: that world-from-god has equal value to world-from-existential-fact. Nietzsche would disagree with him. To value is human. We cannot help but value. The key is to state your prejudices - your "sine qua non" - the premises on which your judgements stand (belief in logic being one of your prejudices). For Nietzsche, 'saying yes' - being positive - being 'healthy' was his stated underlying principle for judgements - and being honest!

My argument here stems from the fundamental reason that atheism struck me as the only option as a teenager. The argument was put to me that being a Christian depends on being told about Christianity. For people who existed before Christ and for people geographically remote from the Christian world or for people with different, competing cultural identities, Christianity is not an option. To put it another way, had I been born in a remote Borneo village, I would not be a Christian: I would believe with equal force something else. The 'truth' I had been told about for most of my childhood seemed to have little value. It was dependent on chance.

Cultural relativism, then, led me to atheism. It seems to me a great shame that Dawkins does not see the value of it to support his arguments rather than weaken them. It does not seem absurd to me to state that the value of truth-through-scientific-methodology is greater than the value of truth-through-revelation and that this is not incompatible with notions of cultural relativism.

Indeed, embracing cultural relativism would strengthen Dawkins's arguments considerably.