Though she is remembered for her detective stories. Dorothy L. Sayers was also a theologian, and some years ago, "a book of hers":http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826476783/andrewbrownssite on the Trinity was reissued. I got a free copy, so I suppose this must have been at least ten years ago; but I have only now got round to reading it.
It has dated remarkably little, and as I read the opening chapters, I realised that it was all, in one sense, an argument with Pharyngular atheism, of the sort that maintains that religion must by its nature be irrational, and religious beliefs must by their nature be held without evidence.
She starts with a glorious denunciation of modern media and the sloppiness of modern thought, with which I am sure that Professor Myers would agree:
the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling. Some time ago, the present writer, pardonably irritated by a very prevalent ignorance concerning the essentials of Christian doctrine, published a brief article in which those essentials were plainly set down in words that a child could understand. Every clause was preceded by some such phrase as: "the Church maintains", "the Church teaches", "if the Church is right", and so forth. The only personal opinion expressed was that, though the doctrine might be false, it could not very well be called dull.
Every newspaper that reviewed this article accepted it without question as a profession of faith—some (Heaven knows why) called it "a courageous profession of faith", as though professing Christians in this country were liable to instant persecution. One review, syndicated throughout the Empire, called it "a personal confession of faith by a woman who feels sure she is right".
Now, what the writer believes or does not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to read.
Testify, sister! Her brusque and angry dismissals aren’t just worth quoting in themselves.
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense—that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print —nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. … a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination …
She’s writing, as it happens, about Christian doctrine, but nothing she says could not be applied to the difficulties of communicating science. But it will take a couple more posts to get that far. And you’re not going to get them tonight.
vs. me?
She died before I was born, so the match seems a little unfair. I’m also not sure how a series of assertions about church dogma exactly contests the opinion that religion is irrational — is disciplined adherence to a strict set of arbitrary rules rational?
I wonder what Miss Sayers would have said to a student who, in a class on Augustine’s political thought in the City of God, said ‘that’s his opinion’ of a central point of Christian doctrine — original sin. Said student, it must be noted, being very vocally Christian.
But the rules don’t look arbitrary from that side of the fence, whereas the laws of physics et al do. I can just about get flashes of what it must look like when I talk to intellectual, cultured and thoughtful Christians. And more often, when I read about people such as the YEC professional cosmologist who saw astrophysics as a great and wonderful puzzle to be sorted out like an enormous, sparkling jigsaw — but with no ultimate significance, and the literal seven day Genesis account as the real, revealed truth.
I can even see, more or less dimly, the consolations of being on the other side of that fence, and how they might permanently intoxicate the organs of reason, and there are times when I’ve been overwhelmed with powerful emotion in religious contexts. It’s part of being human, like love and a fondness for cardamon. It’s precious and I wouldn’t deny anyone that.
The god business, though, is bollocks.
R
I shall be interested to see how you support this. By my reading, Sayers is not at all interested in debating theism vs atheism – at least, not in this book. Rather, she starts from the stance of a believer and strives to use her personal familiarity with literary creation to illuminate the creative aspects of God. The argument is interesting, even if you are only looking from the artistic perspective.
I have posted on this recently myself here.
By the way, I strongly recommend her translation and analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which used to be available as a Penguin Classic.
I very much liked Sayers as a child. There is something to that era’s style of writing that just sounds cultured and well thought. Generally, I find reading these theists, including Lewis, less stressful than reading modern apologetics, with its dishonesty and lack of grace.
I like your term Pharyngular atheism, although Paul’s atheism is no more original than Dorothy’s theism and apologetics. But while Paul is clearly an unapologetic atheist, I find it very unclear that he thinks that theism is irrational. At worst he thinks it is unscientific, and that one ought not believe things that are unscientific (although I can’t recall him ever saying that in public or private).
I think it’s fair to say, Mr. Wilkins, that theistic thought only survives when it does not contest the working of the natural world, and one ought not pit the one against the other, as theistic thought has not faired well at all when it has tried. One ought not to believe that unscientific reasoning has naturalistic consequences.
Why shouldn’t one believe this? Is there no other route to naturalism than science? There was naturalistic reasoning long before there was science.