Outgrowing Dawkins: God for grown-ups, by Rupert Shortt

Author: Rupert Shortt. Review by Jonathan Wooding.

I have a feeling that neither atheists nor the irreligious (nor the indifferent) will really feel the need to read this book. They’ve made up their minds, as Rupert Shortt indicates in a chapter entitled ‘A dialogue of the deaf’. But it’s important for the religiously inclined to be able to defend themselves, isn’t it, when we’re subject to so much scorn and such (to us, surprising) indifference?

Rupert Shortt’s book sets out to give ‘people of faith’ (who are, generally, ‘adamant that belief in God does not and cannot come at the end of an equation’) the confidence ‘that their convictions need not be in conflict with science’. Here he succeeds remarkably well, drawing for instance on the writings of other scientists, like the physiologist Denis Noble who maintains that Dawkins’s position is ‘a contentious philosophical postulate, not an empirical discovery’. It’s not that Shortt isn’t interested in atheism. He has high praise for the philosopher John Gray, for instance, suggesting that there is ‘more insight into the subject of faith in the opening few pages’ of Gray’s ‘excellent’ Seven Types of Atheism than in ‘Dawkins’s screeds… in their entirety’ (meaning The God Delusion and Outgrowing God: A beginner’s guide).

Both Shortt and Dawkins, it turns out, went to Oundle School, though at different times. Shortt seems to suggest that Dawkins’s thinking on ‘religion’ got stuck back in the fourth form, and Shortt is furthermore in the rather invidious position of having to admonish his esteemed forebear for skimping on his homework. What are all these ‘adolescent certainties’, he writes? The ‘lack of intellectual curiosity’? ‘Whence all the anger, combined with tunnel vision?’ Isn’t it time for Richard Dawkins to revisit some of this stuff?

Let’s not be satisfied with what is ‘one-dimensional’. After all, we have it on the authority of the late Jonathan Sacks, once chief rabbi to British Jews, that ‘Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science.’ Shortt is quick to point out, like any good tutor, that he is not necessarily attacking Dawkins’s conclusions, but certainly his methods and manner. ‘It is not unbelief as such which this book seeks to contest: only the dogmatic scorning of religious belief in principle.’

We are, after all, entering upon tragic territory, if not holy ground. Where dogmatic certainty is concerned, non-creedal, peace-seeking Friends will be the first to tell you, one needs to be wary of division, dualism, intolerance and exclusion. Dawkins himself contends, of course, that it is the religious who are guilty of unwarranted certainties, but Shortt takes issue with this: ‘Dawkins is right about the dangers of certainty: but the greatest bloodbaths in history have been caused not by the dogmas of religion, but those of pseudo-science. Think of Nazism and Communism, ideologies both claiming scientific certainty rooted in race and historical sociology respectively.”

Beware pseudo-science masquerading as theology, one might say. Theology: understanding(s) of the divine, the infinite, the absolute? When the atheist says, ah, but these things don’t exist, Shortt (who previously published the wonderful God Is No Thing: Coherent Christianity) might encourage us to reply: non-existence isn’t such a bad thing when it comes to God. Promoting a mind-set of cynical reductionism and scientism is not the same as elucidating the mysteries of existence, it turns out.

It occurs to me, however, that Dawkins, the pioneering scientist, does know a thing or two about paying attention, and that this is something Friends have in common with scientists. Attention is not all observation and measurement, I feel bound to point out. What are we, disciples of Charles Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, the man with the facts, facts, facts, the man for whom all is but utility, in the novel Hard Times? We might all agree that looking at the facts is a virtue, but the scientists must allow Friends and other religious and philosophical folk to explain what we, in fact, mean by virtue. It may be, too, that Dawkins will agree that ‘looking’ is a very real, cognitive appraisal, which robotic measurement doesn’t cover. Attention to the facts brings knowledge, but what about comprehension, what about wisdom? These are ‘facts’ which are not scientifically verifiable, quantifiable or knowable. Let’s remember, once again, the cri de coeur of many a Quaker (though written by a French metaphysician, Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715)): ‘Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.’ There’s more to this paying attention, clearly, than meets the scientific eye.

Rupert Shortt helpfully offers that Outgrowing God would be more sensibly understood as an exercise in ‘Outgrowing false gods’. Dawkins’s Christianophobia (the title of another timely book from Shortt) may then yet prove to be a friend, though appearing in the guise of an enemy for now. The professor, according to Shortt, savages a depiction of religious consciousness which offends his own materialist preferences (as well as, presumably, challenging his self-esteem not a little). But it’s unclear whether Dawkins has really looked into just how the faith, let’s say, of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an Iris Murdoch, or a George Fox (Ludwig Wittgenstein prized Fox’s Journals), might enhance the wellbeing and (in fact) freedom from delusion of, well, anyone who cares to look.

Forgive me, professor, for the acidity with which I (alongside others) deliver my verdict on your theological endeavours. Rupert Shortt, your fellow Old Oundelian, is certainly more measured. What may be upsetting me – and you wouldn’t deny that you like to upset religious people – is that throughout history the pioneers of faith – my heroes, as it happens – have generally been written off (often painfully) as, yes, atheists and blasphemers and heretics, and here we are proclaiming you, professor, as an atheist, on the basis of theological hearsay? May I say, that if it is true that you remain ‘culturally Anglican’, attending choral evensong and so on, then there is plenty of divine presence in your life! Perhaps, like me, you mistake the transcendence and beauty of choral evensong for the flattering reassurance of secular eminence that choral evensong may confer. And is your failure to engage with theological and devotional writings – as Rupert Shortt demonstrates – an agnostic’s fear that divinity tends to bring down the mighty from their seats, and fill only the hungry with good things? Religion comforts the losers, I say, and is counted as but loss by the bestselling authors.

Shortt’s practical guide to refuting scientism certainly comforts me. He may acknowledge, with the journalist Bryan Appleyard that religion seems to have been ‘embarrassed out of existence’, but he is not embarrassed at all to say, with a proper understanding of the distinction between ‘ministry’ and mathematics: ‘The impact of Jesus’s ministry was so momentous that the resulting reorganization of religious language was a centuries-long process culminating with the Nicene Creed.’ And the final word must go to Shortt in a debate, which surely Dawkins will now concede he is ill-equipped to continue: ‘What faith offers is not a demonstrative or even probabilistic solution to the amount of suffering in the world, but a resolve never to abandon the path of love.’

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