{"id":2766,"date":"2024-07-11T21:04:52","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T01:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/?p=2766"},"modified":"2024-06-27T21:06:12","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T01:06:12","slug":"the-surprising-spirituality-of-richard-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/2024\/07\/the-surprising-spirituality-of-richard-dawkins\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising Spirituality of Richard Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u00a0

by\u00a0

Eric Steinhart<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/head>

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If we naturalists ever want to escape from irrationality and superstition, especially as they appear in society and politics, then we need to build positive naturalistic cultures. \u00a0We need people who can help serve as pathfinders or cultural leaders.\u00a0 Cultural leaders are never perfect \u2013 and we can benefit by studying their flaws.\u00a0 At least because of the immense popularity of his writings, it\u2019s fair to say Richard Dawkins is a cultural leader.\u00a0 He has his flaws and imperfections.\u00a0 And the extreme clarity of his writing often makes his flaws extremely clear too.<\/p>\n

So let me say a bit about how Dawkins can help spiritual naturalists develop positive cultures.\u00a0I talk about these ideas in more detail in my new book\u00a0Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Of course, for anyone devoted to reason, believing also means criticizing.\u00a0 Science grows through self-criticism and error correction.\u00a0 So I\u2019m often highly critical of Dawkins too.\u00a0 Dawkins is neither prophet nor messiah, and we learn as much from his failures as from his successes.<\/p>\n

Dawkins often celebrates spirituality.\u00a0 He declares himself to be a highly spiritual person and he thinks science is a spiritual enterprise.\u00a0 He affirms naturalistic versions of the sacred and the holy.\u00a0 The marriage of atheism and spirituality turns out to be a happy one.\u00a0 Most people are shocked to hear that Dawkins affirms a kind of Einsteinian religion, or that he has a profound faith in the rationality of existence.\u00a0When he talks about mystical experiences with the scientist Alan Lightman, Dawkins says \u201cyou can\u2019t out-transcendence me\u201d.\u00a0 So Dawkins has a spiritual side.<\/p>\n

Dawkins tried Buddhist meditation<\/a> but didn\u2019t have much luck with it.\u00a0 Nevertheless, he endorses those atheists, like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, who advocate Westernized Buddhism.\u00a0 Harris and Blackmore celebrate the benefits provided by Buddhist breath meditation.\u00a0 Meditation improves your health (it lowers your blood pressure).\u00a0 It improves your mental health (it can help with depression and anxiety).\u00a0 And it has existential benefits: it enhances your well-being and makes you a better person.\u00a0 Here \u201cspirituality\u201d has nothing to do with supernatural spirits and everything to do with ethical self-transformation.<\/p>\n

Harris and Blackmore often move from the mechanics of meditation into a system of doctrines about consciousness and about the relative values of various states of consciousness.\u00a0 These doctrines are consistent with science.\u00a0 However, they are not scientific.\u00a0\u00a0 They are philosophical doctrines that go beyond science.\u00a0 Buddhism (even in its secular forms) describes ideal states of consciousness.\u00a0 Enlightenment is an ethical ideal.\u00a0 Buddhism defines an ideal way of living. \u00a0This ideality surpasses actuality.\u00a0 It is a kind of transcendence that is consistent with science.<\/p>\n

Dawkins often invokes Stoic themes in his writing.\u00a0 He talks about facing the troubles of life with Stoic serenity.\u00a0 When he writes about death, he writes about facing it with Stoic courage.\u00a0 When he talks about nature, he often portrays it in Stoic terms.\u00a0\u00a0He gets many of his ethical principles from Stoicism.\u00a0 And while Dawkins never develops his Stoicism in any systematic way, other New Atheists have become Stoics.\u00a0 The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci was a New Atheist who turned to Stoicism. \u00a0He began to modernize the spiritual techniques of the ancient Stoics.\u00a0 These are techniques for ethical self-improvement.\u00a0 The New Stoicism involves daily meditations.\u00a0It involves regular ascetic practices (such as fasting or other practices of voluntary self-deprivation designed to help you get mentally and morally tougher).<\/p>\n

Stoicism is a moral philosophy.\u00a0 It defines ways you ought to respond to events (virtuous ways) and ways you ought not to respond (vicious ways).\u00a0 Stoicism defines a moral way of life.\u00a0 The Stoics also define a moral ideal: the Stoic sage is an ideal human.\u00a0 And while you might fail to be a sage, you can aspire to it.\u00a0 It can define your hopes.\u00a0 As an ideal, the Stoic sage is unreal or non-actual.\u00a0 There are none in our universe.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not a scientific fact that the Sage is an ideal person.\u00a0 The ideality of the sage is defined by rational moral philosophy, not by empirical study of nature.\u00a0 Sages exist in ideal possible universes.\u00a0 Building cultures requires commitment to ideal possibilities.<\/p>\n

Dawkins appreciates the value of holidays.\u00a0 He has a great love of Christmas.\u00a0 He even loves singing the Christian songs and the practices of caroling and gifting.\u00a0 He loves setting up the Christmas tree and so on.\u00a0 The other Four Horsemen also confess to loving Christmas.\u00a0 Of course, they point out that Christmas has many pagan elements, and that it has long been highly secularized in the West.\u00a0 But this seems duplicitous.\u00a0 Why sing about baby Jesus coming to save humanity if you don\u2019t believe it? \u00a0\u00a0He even loves the Biblical Christmas stories.\u00a0 On these points, Dawkins was accused of hypocrisy.\u00a0But he says he only celebrates Christmas as a kind of fiction.\u00a0 He\u2019s doing larping: live-action role playing.\u00a0\u00a0 Still, this seems dishonest.\u00a0 When Dawkins declares himself to be a cultural Christian, I think this is one of his failures.<\/p>\n

Holidays are important because they involve shared social practices, practices which often invoke powerful positive and pro-social emotions.\u00a0 Although Christmas can be stressful, it aims to arouse positive emotions of joy and love.\u00a0 It is associated with practices of family gathering and positive social bonding.\u00a0 We send cards to our old friends, we give gifts.\u00a0 One way to build a naturalistic culture is to build new holidays.\u00a0 It shouldn\u2019t be too hard to transition from Christmas to the Winter Solstice \u2013 and then to the celebration of the other holidays on the Wheel of the Year.\u00a0 The problem is that Christmas involves ideals which transcend the merely astronomical facts of the solstice.\u00a0 But ideals point beyond the actual universe.\u00a0 To have successful holiday traditions, naturalists need ideals.\u00a0 The position of the sun and earth on the solstice need to be used to symbolize ideal values and meanings.\u00a0 Poetically speaking, the winter solstice symbolizes the rebirth of the sun.\u00a0 So it is a holiday of rebirth and life after death.<\/p>\n

Dawkins usually denies life after death.\u00a0 Most atheists and naturalists do the same.\u00a0 And, when they deny it, they\u2019re being illogical.\u00a0 Dawkins recognizes that the information in genes has a kind of immortality: although organisms die, the information in their genes survives by copying into their offspring.\u00a0 In principle, genetic information can persist eternally. \u00a0Life after death is just about copying information from some old body into some new body.\u00a0 Or from some old biological hardware to some new hardware of some new kind. \u00a0Writers like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have recognized that life after death is a topic in theoretical computer science.\u00a0 Dawkins knows that your entire genome could be copied into a clone.\u00a0 He recognizes that this is genetic life after death.<\/p>\n

Of course, cloning does not preserve the information in your brain and does not rescue the information encoded in your relationships with the world and other humans.\u00a0 Is full life after death impossible?\u00a0Dawkins has a robust theory of the ways that information propagates in the evolution of biological complexity. And he often describes an evolutionary cosmology in which information accumulates.\u00a0 Dawkins in fact has all the principles he needs to develop a full-bodied theory of life after death.\u00a0That he fails to do this testifies to a way that he was blinded by religion. \u00a0Nevertheless, many entirely naturalistic theories of life after death are entirely consistent with science.\u00a0\u00a0 And they are supported by the very same informational principles that support evolution.\u00a0 Naturalistic theories of life after death can support many ideals.<\/p>\n

Dawkins contrasts astronomy with astrology.\u00a0 He says that astrology is both false and ugly while astronomy is both true and beautiful.\u00a0 But here\u2019s the problem: astronomy has very little cultural value.\u00a0 Astronomers do gather to look at the stars (and planets).\u00a0But astrology is a practice of making the stars and planets relevant to our lives.\u00a0 Astronomy deals with things as they are.\u00a0 Astrology deals with your hopes and fears.\u00a0Of course, as a predictive tool, astrology is useless.\u00a0 However, as a tool for thinking about your possible futures, especially your possible future social relationships, astrology is extremely successful.\u00a0Astronomy does not create culture; astrology does.\u00a0 Rather than just condemn astrology as ugly and false, Dawkins should have thought hard about using astronomy to develop positive naturalistic ways of social meaning-making.<\/p>\n

Dawkins talks about how science has artistic value.\u00a0 Science reveals that nature is beautiful.\u00a0 It arouses the emotions of wonder and awe.\u00a0 These emotions reveal that nature is sublime.\u00a0 Of course, the beautiful and the sublime are aesthetic values.\u00a0 Dawkins says these are objective values in nature \u2013 he\u2019s an aesthetic realist.\u00a0 Astronomy reveals objectively existing beauty while astrology is objectively ugly.\u00a0 And so Dawkins advocates science-based art.\u00a0 Such art exists.\u00a0 To celebrate the glories of evolution, the classical composer Greg Brown wrote the\u00a0Missa Charles Darwin<\/em>, and the heavy metal band Nightwish created the album\u00a0Endless Forms Most Beautiful<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dawkins knows that evolution generates enormous suffering.\u00a0 It is red in tooth and claw, a war of all against all.\u00a0Nature is not utilitarian.\u00a0If you\u2019re a utilitarian, you have to say that evolution is evil.\u00a0 But why be a utilitarian?\u00a0 Nietzsche says that \u201cexistence is holy enough to justify a monstrous amount of suffering\u201d.\u00a0 And, while Dawkins agrees that the sublime aspects of nature point to a kind of natural holiness, he never develops those ideas.\u00a0 Actual human life is saturated with evils.\u00a0 How can we find the holiness that makes life worth living?\u00a0The Abrahamic religions turn against nature by positing their supernatural Gods.\u00a0 They say nature is fallen and evil.\u00a0 Against that anti-nature, a naturalist will want to affirm that nature is good.\u00a0 Here Dawkins should have turned to the work of Iris Murdoch, an atheistic philosopher who argued that atheism needs a kind of naturalized Platonism: we need the Platonic ideal of the Good.<\/p>\n

Dawkins talks about gratitude.\u00a0 He thinks we experience the desire to give thanks to something for the benefits we receive in our lives.\u00a0 But atheists can\u2019t give thanks to any non-existing deities.\u00a0 This is a problem for holidays like the American Thanks-Giving: what can atheists thank?\u00a0 One solution is that atheists can be grateful that they have benefits.\u00a0 But mere gratefulness emotionally weak.\u00a0 Dawkins should have thought about ways that atheists can really give thanks to natural things for natural benefits.\u00a0 On this point, he failed.\u00a0 For real gratitude, we need agents to thank.\u00a0Many naturalists have argued for the existence of impersonal agents who deserve our thanks.\u00a0 These agents include our earthly ecosystem, the sun, the finely-tuned universe, and existence itself.\u00a0\u00a0 Atheists can and do give thanks to the sun.\u00a0 Of course, you\u2019re not going to thank these agents like you thank persons.\u00a0\u00a0 You might thank these agents by performing rituals of reciprocation.\u00a0And there are atheopagans who do these rituals.\u00a0 You can even think of the Burning Man festival as an immense ritual of thanks-giving.<\/p>\n

Dawkins talks about mystical experiences.\u00a0 He does not deny their value and he often indicates that he has had mystical experiences.\u00a0 In fact, many atheists have had intense mystical experiences.\u00a0 Mystical experiences are not all in your head.\u00a0 They are about features of nature \u2013 they point to natural ideals.\u00a0 They reveal the ideal unity of nature or they reveal that the ultimate structure of nature is ideal.\u00a0 They reveal that nature itself is holy.\u00a0 Atheists can (and have) gone much further here to argue that all the beings in nature are grounded by the purely logical object of being-itself.\u00a0While being-itself is holy, it isn\u2019t personal and it certainly isn\u2019t any kind of god.\u00a0 An atheist can agree with Iris Murdoch that being-itself is the Good.\u00a0 That\u2019s entirely consistent with science.<\/p>\n

Dawkins talks about reason-based morality.\u00a0 Science doesn\u2019t define any system of moral values.\u00a0 Unfortunately, far too many naturalists and atheists are moral relativists.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to know why an atheist would be a moral relativist.\u00a0 The major theories of morality are virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology (the theory of moral duty).\u00a0 None of those theories involve gods.\u00a0 In fact, all those theories allow you to morally judge religions, which is something that atheists love to do.\u00a0Dawkins himself describes the Abrahamic religions as evil.\u00a0 To do that, he knows he needs some higher moral standard.\u00a0 Dawkins correctly rejects moral relativism.\u00a0He says that to learn about morality, we must turn to rational moral philosophy.\u00a0 He therefore affirms that morality comes from reason.\u00a0And Dawkins is consistent: he affirms the rationality of nature; so if morality comes from reason, then morality comes from nature.\u00a0 Dawkins is an ethical naturalist.<\/p>\n

Dawkins talks about a wide range of spiritual topics. \u00a0I try to critically develop Dawkinsian spirituality in my book,\u00a0Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0Besides the topics mentioned here, I discuss many others.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u00a0by\u00a0Eric Steinhart If we naturalists ever want to escape from irrationality and superstition, especially as they appear in society and politics, then we need to build positive naturalistic cultures. \u00a0We need people who can help serve as pathfinders or cultural leaders.\u00a0 Cultural leaders are never perfect \u2013 and we can benefit by studying their flaws.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1269,"featured_media":2769,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[957,463],"class_list":["post-2766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spiritual-naturalism","tag-dawkins","tag-evolution"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Surprising Spirituality of Richard Dawkins<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u00a0by\u00a0Eric Steinhart If we naturalists ever want to escape from irrationality and superstition, 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