GDC: Part I
In starting “The God Delusion Challenge” I figured that my first post would be over the first chapter, or section, but there was something in the preface that irked me. And as someone who can’t leave well enough alone, I won’t.
The preface of The God Delusion (hereafter “TGD”) is a laundry list of the chapter topics and the purposes which Dawkins says that they each serve. As the book was written to “raise consciousness” he hopes that each chapter will speak to different people, based on where they’re coming from, i.e. if they’re attached to religion because they never knew they could abandon that, he has a chapter on it; if they grew up “indoctrinated” into a certain religion, he has a chapter on it. I won’t deny that that’s a “noble pursuit”, as Dawkins says. He wants to get these ideas out there so people are made aware of them. More power to him.
Now the piece that irked me was his comment on the religious indoctrination of children. I was fully prepared to skip over it without comment and take up the issue once I got to the chapter dealing with it, but Dawkins was so passionate and unapologetically repetetive on this point that I decided to tackle it first. He says:
…if you hear anybody speak of a Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know whwere they stand on economics or politics…I shall not apologize for mentioning it here in the Preface as well as in Chapter 9. You can’t say it too often. I’ll say it again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child. [1]
Does anyone notice what was conspicuously absent from that (albeit incomplete) list? The Atheist child. Now I’m going to give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would accept that if it is improper to label a child under any certain religious heritage then it is equally improper to label them Atheist… but it makes you wonder: would he? Or does he hold atheism over and above other belief patterns as the only safe bet for indoctrination? I guess we’ll have to wait till Chapter 9 to find out.
This topic also brings up something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: is indoctrination ever OK? Let’s say that a proposition, P, is true, and you know, beyond all necessary certainty, that proposition P is true. Would it be right to “indoctrinate” your child with assent to and belief in the truth of P? All other things being equal, would it be better for your child to be taught that P is true though they may not have an adequate understanding of P? Or would it be better to allow for the possibility of propositions with less truth content to take the place of P? I think it’s abundantly clear to everyone that if P is true and you know P is true, then safeguarding early assent to P would be good for your child. And actually, I think that we do this. Things that we know are true, and would be beneficial to our child to have belief in, we indocrinate into them though they may not have a full understanding. Just take a moment and think of all the do’s and don’ts your parents told you as a child that were beneficial though you didn’t understand (and might not have agreed!). Was it wrong for them to tell you not to play in the street? Should they have let you find out for yourself? Or is it the case that there are some things which it is dangerous to not indoctrinate your children with? (Stay away from strangers. Mind your manners.)
Now, to make a jump, if there is a proposition of a religious belief B that is true, and all other religious beliefs are to some extent false or less true, then is it good to indoctrinate belief in this proposition into children? Well if it is the case that, given the truth of B, opposing religious belief propositions have an amount of inherent danger to them (reality of Hell, lack of nourishment of the soul, abandonment of prescribed moral values), then yes it is good to indoctrinate this belief. I’m going to take a guess here and say that Dawkins probably believes that indoctrination is wrong because the child grows up unquestioning of the belief and is thus ignorant and foolish. He obviously thinks this is true of religious believers. I would respond by saying that the indoctrination of religious belief and the indoctrination of an unquestioning attitude towards that belief are two very different things, though they are regrettably often taught at the same time.
But of course, this claim of mine only goes so far. The major rebuttals would be that 1) it is not abundantly clear that any given indoctrinatable proposition is true, and thus 2) we don’t have absolute certainty on this point. I would respond by saying that there ARE some indoctrinatable propositions we know are true, and valuable to teach to children, such as the ones I gave above. And though we might not have absolute certainty, we at the very least have a measure of certainty on the probability of some propositions. If we weigh the probability that a proposition is true against the danger of indoctrinating a child with a false belief, and against the danger of NOT indoctrinating a child with a true belief, what do we come up with? I guess that’s the question.
1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 3.
Brian | November 13, 2006
Interesting. I’m guessing he would agree that atheism is also an illegitimate indoctrinateable proposition. I’ve heard other atheists say similar things, that they would allow their children to decide for themselves what they would believe. But I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
Dawkins has said that raising children to believe in religion is child abuse. He’s quite serious about it.
Your comments about teaching P to children are well-thought-out. Even if P is not something we can know with absolute apodictic certainty, if we have good reason for confidence in its truth we ought to teach it to our children. Such is the case with Christian belief.
Wow, good call. Athiesim isn’t a “null” belief system–there is a belief there, albeit a belief in no deity. It is still a belief! If Dawkins’ argument is that Christians should not “pre-determine” their children’s beliefs, then isn’t that true for Athiests as well?