Chesterton and Dawkins

Re-reading Chesterton the other day, I was struck by how much his arguments seem to address Richard Dawkin's brand of materialism. Chesterton writes:

"Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, .., and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small."

That strikes me as so perfectly in focus. I am always struck how much like "a pokey medieval universe" (to use Dawkin's phrase), the materialist viewpoint seems to be; it seems to leave out a lot of important things that make life worth living, as if people were machines, without any real purpose (apart from survival).

It is like the auditor who believes his audit of a shop tells you everything, but it does not show the people in the shop, and how they greet customers, and how good a shop it is to work for. In one sense, the audit captures something important, but to believe it is the only thing leaves out so much. And there is also the way in which the world is not as cut and fixed as that. Chesterton again, on the snares that deceive the materialist approach:

"The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

This wildness comes out in Chesterton's musings on the strangeness of the world, of matters that cause some dogmatic materialists to hide their heads in the sand; it is a closed and fixed approach that prefers not to see that "there may be more things" as Shakespear put it. Chesterton again:

"Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism--the abstract impossibility of a miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. "

I try to keep an open mind on the unexplained, the "Twilight Zone", which is not to say I accept the explanation often given along with the phenomena, but I do think that there is a "grey area" in which it would be better to be cautious than to be dogmatic. In 1808, Thomas Jefferson, noted thinker and materialist, heard from Daniel Salmon the discovery of a strange stone that purposted to have fallen from the sky. At that time, the existence of meteors was a matter of doubt, but Jefferson notoriously came out with a quick dogmatic stance:

"I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie, than that stones would fall from heaven."

Not even a peasant's story, two professors, but Jefferson knew he was right! As Chesterton said "The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them."