Baggini is himself a religious skeptic and his first installment addresses the inadequacy of the claim sometimes made by those religious folk who, in the course of defending their beliefs, say that "You just don't understand my religion." Baggini finds this somewhat less than compelling, at least in many contexts, and discusses how religious apologists have to do better than that:
Terry Eagleton's quip that reading Richard Dawkins on theology is like listening to someone "holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The British Book of Birds" is a funny and memorable contribution to a debate that is rarely amusing and frequently forgettable. Whether you agree with the charge or not, the complaint is of a kind we have become very familiar with: disputants in the religion debate are talking past each other because they do not have a sufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand against.I might add here, parenthetically, that they also have an insufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand for. Baggini continues:
I'm very much in sympathy with this view, and this series is largely an attempt to try to find more constructive points of engagement that can only emerge if we ditch lazy and tired preconceptions about those with whom we disagree. At the same time, however, I'm all too aware that "you just don't understand" is a card that is often played far too swiftly and without justification.I agree with Baggini on this. Resorting to the dodge that the other guy is just too ignorant of one's religion to make a legitimate criticism of it is often a tacit admission of one's inability to defend his beliefs against the critic's animadversions.
It has become evident to me, however, that many people, especially the religious, suffer from a kind of conceptual claustrophobia. Their beliefs are of their essence somewhat vague and they are terrified of being pinned down.Baggini goes on about this, instructively, I'd say, for several paragraphs, but the assumption seems to be that the fuzziness to which he alludes is an affliction of those who defend traditional religious beliefs while skeptics are lucid, precise, and logical.
Anyone who has read the recent works of the atheistic despisers of religion will have found that not only their antireligious arguments, but also the naturalistic Darwinism that they propose as an alternative, suffer from precisely the malaise that Baggini describes. Over and over we are soothingly assured by these scribes that the scientific illuminati have proven beyond doubt that science has all the answers to any question worth asking and that there's no need to resort to anything like God.
If, however, one were to impertinently ask a skeptic to explain how blind, purposeless forces and laws could have plausibly produced life from non-life and to have generated biological information, or if one were to ask them to explain how the impersonal can give rise to consciousness, or how something like butterfly metamorphosis or sexual reproduction could have evolved by purely non-teleological processes, one often hears the same vague appeals to mystery that Baggini deplores when they come from the traditionally religious. The inquirer is frequently told that his lack of scientific understanding impedes his comprehension of the Truth.
I hope that in future columns in the series Baggini brings out the fact that "You just don't understand my religion" is not just a dodge of the traditionally religious but also of those whose religion is scientific materialism.