Dawkins and God.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Responses to my article on Dawkins and God (May 2007) have fallen into two classes: those that challenge my criticism of Dawkins' atheism, and those that challenge my criticism of the morality on display in some Bible stories. I will briefly respond to those in the first class, and then those in the second class.

P.J. Moss suggests I am attracted to "the Cartesian notion of mind-body dualism", and do not have regard to "the work of those philosophers of mind who ... see the task of the philosopher as posing the problem into a precise enough form so that it admits of scientific resolution"; and he commends the work of John Searle. I am indeed attracted to a kind of dualism. However, it is not the Cartesian dualism of "two distinct realms" rejected by Searle, but rather a dualism that accepts, as Searle does, that there are two categories of empirical reality, subjective and objective, which are mutually irreducible (The Rediscovery of the Mind), and that there are features of subjective reality that cannot be fully understood in terms of objective reality. In a major work published in 2001, Rationality in Action, Searle even leaves open as a reasonable possibility a view I support, namely that consciousness may be able to cause things that cannot be fully explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, and he also supports a non-Humean notion of the self, as an entity that can, as a whole, consciously try to do things: see my review in Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(2), 2002. In any event, my argument against Dawkins does not depend on acceptance of dualism, just on the undoubted fact that science does not yet have the first idea what objective features are necessary and sufficient to give rise to subjectivity.

Robert McLaughlin makes out a reasoned case against my three suggested errors in Dawkins. It would take a book to deal fully with points of the kind he raises (I tried with my 1991 book The Mind Matters, and I may try again), but I have to be brief here. To say that the basis of all human moral values is simply human judgment begs the questions, whose human judgment? and why should anyone else defer to that judgment? If morality is based only on evolution-selected attitudes, then there is nothing to say which attitudes are to be accepted. Reasoned arguments about morality must assume the contrary. On consciousness, it is true that there are highly respected philosophers who argue that consciousness is purely physical, but there are powerful arguments to the contrary from equally respected philosophers. In any event the short points I made about consciousness in my article, apart from my suggestion that consciousness itself may be beyond physical matters and laws, are I believe valid irrespective of what philosophical view of consciousness is accepted. In my point about language, I am not suggesting that we should stop trying to understand. On the contrary, I am suggesting that in trying to understand, we should not prematurely assume we already have the framework for a complete explanation of everything in terms of physical matter and physical laws, but rather should recognise that new concepts and frameworks will almost certainly be required, and should not be dismissive of the metaphors of religious belief. I entirely agree that we should keep plugging away!

Chris Poole suggests that religion is primitive and superfluous. But there are questions that science cannot answer, such as how should we live our lives; and these questions deserve rational consideration, and require a broader view than science can provide about what we are and what our place in the universe is.

Moving to criticisms of the second class, James Franklin suggests that celebration of the Passover does not mean celebrating everything to do with the original story, for the same reason that marking Anzac Day does not imply approving of military blunders. I think there are differences. The Gallipoli campaign may have been a blunder and may have resulted in huge casualties on both sides, but it was neither a war crime ...