John Stackhouse wrote a post a couple weeks ago responding to the following quote, attributed to Richard Dawkins:
What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?
His response, “What Good Are Theologians?” is, if I understand him properly, an appeal to scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi’s concept of “personal knowledge,” and to the lesson of Basil Mitchell’s parable of the freedom fighter. (He doesn’t explicitly reference either, but he does quote Polanyi in one of his comments on the thread.) I say “if I understand him properly” because if I’m right about that, then a number of his respondents don’t understand him properly—my read appears to be a minority opinion.
The post is well worth reading; but it’s worth reading, in part, to set up the discussion in the comments, which I think is better than the original post. I particularly liked this contribution from one Ian:
As Stan Grenz and Roger Olson assert in their invitation to the study of God, Who Needs Theology, “Everyone is a theologian.” (IVP 1996) The only question remains are you a good theologian or a bad theologian. Of course Dawkins is referring to those of us who are or are becoming professional theologians.
Yet, one also has to wonder about his claims concerning the type of world we have. For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark suggests that we would not have many of the technological advances that Dawkins claims for science without Christian theology. Descartes himself found theological ideas significant for his method and science is indeed indebted to him for good or ill.
Finally, Dawkins has made a career out of theology by pitting himself against a theological worldview and its promoters. One wonders what we he would do without us? Who would read his books?
(At first I thought that was Iain Provan, but then I realized that the name was spelled differently.) Other commenters take on the ridiculously (and arrogantly) reductionistic position staked out by Dr. Dawkins, but I think Ian has hit the key point on the head: everyone is a theologian, in that everyone forms and articulates beliefs about the nature and existence or non-existence of God. The role of the theologian is to inform and critique those beliefs, and the reason for the violence of Dr. Dawkins’ response is not rational, but personal and visceral: he is categorically unwilling to have his beliefs (which are the foundation and justification for that reductionism) either critiqued or informed.
This is characteristic of Dr. Dawkins, as it is of his fellow “New Atheists”; I’ve laid out my views of them before, and I remain convinced that they are the mirror image of whom they imagine their opponents to be: dogmatic fundamentalists who have made their chosen god in their own image and will brook no contradiction of their dogma because it would threaten their chosen self-understanding and way of life. Though they make a great parade of their insistence on reason, their rationalism appears to be of the kind best captured by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography:
So convenient a thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.
Or, one might add, “believe.” When Dr. Dawkins asks, “What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?” he’s defining “use” on his terms—terms which have already, by their narrowness, predetermined the answer, to ensure that he need not feel obliged to grapple with the answer.