The Onion AV Club has a review of The God Delusion this week. "Big deal, " you say, "Who cares what a humor magazine thinks?"
I've found in recent years, though, that the AV Club is one of the most consistent sources of reviews of movies, music, and books out there. They're sharp, they get right to the point (reviews are seldom more than a few paragraphs), and they're a reliable predictor of my reaction to a book, record, or movie.
It's a three-paragraph review, so it would seem cheap to quote it at length, but here are the opening sentences:
Without a doubt, contributing to the public understanding of science is a noble pursuit. Confirming the public suspicion that scientists are arrogant, pedantic know-it-alls who want to root out every vestige of mystery and religious awe from society--well, that's collateral damage caused by the way Richard Dawkins goes about this noble pursuit.
Read the whole thing. You might also check out their list of classic movies it's ok to hate, while you're over there...
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Still haven't read it yourself, eh?
There's little doubt that Dawkins's approach is incendiary, but the first thing he's always keen to point out - when he doesn't have the luxury of hundreds of pages to fill with his oh-so-eclectic quotations - is that he's now in the business of 'Consciousness Raising'.
He considers the 'attack on science' so dangerous that he no doubt considers the martyrdom of his personality a worthwhile price to pay to get people to sit up and listen, or at least notice. Consider Dennett's far superior work on the subject, but also that far fewer people have heard what he's doing, or what his views are...
What's most frustrating about his wild thrashings about is his naivety in thinking that he can persuade anyone of anything without having even the most minuscule speck of charm to make that work. He's not dealing with computers here, where you can just force the program in. He's dealing with people. Social apes, remember Richard?
Despite doing terrible damage in some areas of public appreciation of scientists and atheism, I expect he's at least glad to be providing quite a lot of power to this anti-religious backlash. Just as their are believers and believers, there are atheists and atheists.
Is his approach good or bad, then? I don't think it'll be possible to tell until it's too late. But lots of far more gifted writers are now having a go, which can't be bad. And some of them are even managing to avoid using evangelical words like 'truth' and 'fact' and 'evil', which means that those unschooled in scientific thinking will be able to tell it apart from mere dogma.
In view of existing data, I think you're going to have a very tough time establishing that Dawkins is damaging the public appreciation of atheists.
One of the problems with a survey like that - apart from people not wanting to appear 'amoral' to strangers by saying that they're an atheist - is that there's an inherent sampling error with people's views of atheism.
The quiet, sensible, moderate ones don't shout their heads off about it and publicly deride the believers, like Dawkins does. If the only example that the faithful get to see is Dawkins, then results like those will only increase as people identify atheism with red-faced intolerance.
We need more calm, conciliatory atheists who are charismatic and witty and humble. They don't get as much airtime, obviously, which is what makes me think that Dawkins is 'playing the system' to get noticed (and sell a few books). I should think that everyone knows an atheist or two. They just don't know it because the atheists don't make a fuss about it - they know to keep quiet. I bet that if you could empirically test such a thing, a good 25% of regular churchgoers don't genuinely believe. They just want to belong.
It's hard to trust the interpretation of telephone surveys anyway. Far, far too much depends on the style of the question, interview, gender, perceived class, education, authority... not to mention a specific definition of what was meant by 'atheist' in the first place. There are too many variables for it to be of any value to anyone but old-school sociologists.
And it's slightly perverse to be defined by something that I don't do - believe things, in this case. I'm also an ayodeller and an agoatsacrificer...
This review sounds like so many other reviews of Dawkin's work, in which the authors attack his "tone" and "approach" after Dawkins attacks their middle ground of "We want to seem educated, but we also want to accept silly make-believe as true". Once the reviewers find their own beliefs under fire, they realize they don't like the book very much. How dare someone be so "arrogant" as to question our "educated" beliefs.
This review sounds like so many other reviews of Dawkin's work, in which the authors attack his "tone" and "approach" after Dawkins attacks their middle ground of "We want to seem educated, but we also want to accept silly make-believe as true". Once the reviewers find their own beliefs under fire, they realize they don't like the book very much. How dare someone be so "arrogant" as to question our "educated" beliefs.
The real problem here is that militant atheists can't seem to decide whether they want to be liked, or to write paragraphs like the above. If you all would just pick one (they're mutually exclusive), life would be so much easier for everyone...
Maybe I'm a defeatist, but I think it's extraordinarily difficult to convince people that the beliefs they've held since they were children are wrong without them resenting it. I think that sort of resentment makes a very disingenuous review.
Too many "(militant?) atheists who want to be liked" end up pandering to religion in order to be more palatable to the religious. To say that some unfounded beliefs (god) are unacceptable while others are acceptable ("spirituality") is contradictory. Unfortunately this creates a barrier which is difficult for people to cross (without tunneling), but I don't think anyone has found a non-contradictory middle ground.
David Baltimore has a mostly positive review appearing in American Scientist. Since it doesn't reinforce your pre-conceived and ill-informed notions, I expect you won't be posting about it.
The problem is that people who try to be reasonable (unfanatical, not insulting, respectful of differing views) tend to be boring, or at least they don't generate bestsellers.
Case in point: Biologist Ursula Goodenough wrote a book some years ago called The Sacred Depths of Nature which attempts to weave a non-theistic spirituality based on nature and science. This didn't make much of a splash, and in fact Dawkins attacked it because he said that if that was religion, then he was religious himself (and he didn't want to be).
You get a lot more attention by being simplistic, bombastic, and unreasonable.