Richard Dawkins Was Never Truly a Skeptic
Everyone’s dunking on Professor Richard Dawkins right now for coming to the conclusion that Anthropic’s “Claude” AI is a conscious being. There are two lines of thought on this: One is that Dawkins is making some genuine and insightful philosophical inquiries as to the nature of consciousness from the point of view of a biologist. The other, much more widespread, thought is that the old man is falling into what is increasingly becoming known as “AI psychosis,” in which people start to believe that a chatbot is a real friend, or a romantic partner, or even something like a deity.
Think what you will, but he’s not beating the allegations with the fact that he’s decided that his version of Claude is a female he calls “Claudia.” This from a guy who usually refuses to call anything female if it doesn’t produce large gametes.
People find it comical, paradoxical, and ironic that such a legendary figure in the skeptic community would fall for what appears to be a pretty entry-level delusion. My answer to this is that there’s not really any paradox here at all: Richard Dawkins has never been much of a skeptic.
He’s an atheist, for sure, but you don’t necessarily need to come to the conclusion of atheism via skepticism. You don’t really need to use logic or reasoning to come to any conclusion about anything, and I contend that hardly anybody comes to all of their beliefs this way. It would actually be a bit of a nightmare to constantly interrogate every single belief you have about the world as to how well it stacks up against hard logic, and to be honest, I don’t think you’d be very fun to be around, either.
I’m not going to make a declarative statement on the existence of a deity/deities—I’m agnostic, I don’t really have a dog in this fight—but it’s important to point that whether atheism is true or not, even true beliefs can be arrived at simply through the course of wanting them to be true. I believe Dawkins falls into this camp and for that reason I don’t find his arguments about it—formulated after the fact to justify a position he’s already decided to hold—very compelling. People choose to believe in the existence/nonexistence of deities the same way people choose to believe in the existence/nonexistence of Bigfoot: Sometimes via logic, sometimes via desire.
But in the case of desire, this type of belief doesn’t require universal consistency. There’s no conflict between Dawkins believing there are no deities and Dawkins believing chatbots have a conscious inner world if, in both cases, he arrives at those beliefs via a desire for them to be true.
And I think he wants Claude to be conscious because I think he wants to have sex with it.
Despite his overstated reputation for skepticism, Dawkins is actually pretty credulous. Like many of the men who are considered titans of the modern skepticism community, he’s also extremely horny, and I apologize for all the times I’m going to have to evoke the mental image of Richard Dawkins naked and having sex—I’ll limit this as much as possible and we’ll grit our teeth and push through it together.
It’s public knowledge that Dawkins has been married four times, and each time he has traded down to a younger model, but less well known—in fact, I can’t find reference to it outside of the Rebecca Watson video where I learned it first—is that it’s kind of an open secret in the skeptic convention circuit that Dawkins also has a ton of mistresses. Watson isn’t making this up, she has receipts, including an email from one of his side women discussing another, and mentioning the fact that Richard is extremely intimidated by powerful or confident women.
And there’s also that indignant article he wrote in 2007, apropos of nothing, insisting there is nothing wrong with not being monogamous.
And you know what, he’s right. As long as his wife is aware and okay with it, that is. Consent is consent. But this does help paint a picture of how things like sex affect his credulity and his views of the world. The private revelation that he’s afraid of strong women does shine some light on a lot of his behavior over the years, especially the fact that he is a strident critic of feminism.
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In fact, many of the “skeptical” positions that Dawkins professes to hold kind of just boil down to bigotries that he paints over with the language of skepticism. Though he stands firm on his atheism as an ontological position, his reputation as an anti-religion activist is undeserved—he will readily describe himself in interviews as a “cultural Christian” who believes in Christian values and enjoys Christian traditions and thinks Christianity is fundamentally good and prefers that it continue to exist. What he doesn’t like, and is cognizant of not stating outright (“I’ll have to choose my words carefully,” he mutters) is that he doesn’t like the non-white religions. Like nearly all of the “New Atheist” figures who emerged after 9/11, this goes super-duper-especially for Islam.
Where Dawkins’s specific bigotries and skeptical failures intersect is his belief that feminism and Islamism are practically interchangeable concepts, and roughly as bad as each other. In 2016 he shared this video to his Twitter feed—a crude animation featuring a Muslim and a feminist (the characters modeled on real people who were punching bags of the online right at the time) singing about the ridiculously shallow and superficial ways that you might compare them.
This doesn’t show any intellectual curiosity whatsoever on Dawkins’ part about what feminism is… or Islamism, for that matter. It’s incredibly, incredibly lazy, in a way that teenagers find impressive. I would know—when I was a teenager I was a hardline global warming denier, and once wrote an essay about how believing in anthropogenic climate change was basically the same ideology as fundamentalist Christianity. You have the original sin, the self-flagellation, the unquestionable dogma, the infallible clergy of climatologists… there’s even a Jesus named Al Gore who was shunned and put down but then rose again to spread the holy word! Clever, right?
Richard Dawkins circa the first decade of 2000 was regularly mentioned in the same breath as Christopher Hitchens (as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, the so-called “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism) but the men couldn’t really be more different. Hitchens was, in my opinion, one of the most eloquent and convincing philosophers of atheism of all time, or at the very least, modern times. He was highly read, his knowledge of religion and theism and their claims was robust, and he was willing to steelman those claims in order to attack them.
Dawkins is a man with a very narrow field of expertise—evolutionary biology—and though his basic arguments against religion and theism are fair enough, they’re also the arguments that everyone makes. You know, that the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient being is just absurd, and if he made the universe, then who made him? Also, snakes can’t talk, virgins can’t get pregnant, and you can’t fit two of every animal in the world on a boat, at least not the size of boat that a single man could build with Iron Age tools in one season.
It’s when Dawkins tries to get innovative with his arguments that he embarrasses himself. On one occasion he purported to phylogenically trace the story of Noah’s flood back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but his claim was pounced upon by scholars of ancient texts who categorically demolished it, and found that he’d come to his argument through very basic Googling and terrible online information hygiene. This is where we get to the error in holding Dawkins up as a skeptic. He did not arrive at an incorrect claim about Noah and Gilgamesh via skepticism, but just the opposite, via credulity. He believed some shit he read online.
Again, I’m not making an argument for the truth of religion or the existence of God. I’m saying that it’s possible to make weak arguments in the service of truth, and possible to make demonstrably incorrect claims in the service of truth, and both can do genuine harm to the credibility of that truth. To make a comparison to other philosophers of anti-theism: if Christopher Hitchens is Bertrand Russell, then Richard Dawkins is Bill Maher.
This is a pattern for Dawkins with all his perceived enemies, including feminism. When doing some research on the good Professor for my book, I came across a speech that he read after receiving an award at a Freedom From Religion Foundation conference in 2012, in which he tirades against anti-science woo-woo ideologies like postmodernism and feminism. At one point he quotes from a book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (original French title: Impostures Intellectuelles):
The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray is another who is given whole chapter treatment by Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual”—Newton’s Principia is a rape manual!—Irigaray argues that E=MC2 is a “sexed equation.” Why? Because it privileges the speed of light—‘privileges’ is one of their favorite words, I dare say you’ve noticed—it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary. Necessary!
Now, I studied philosophy and I’m familiar with Luce Irigaray, but I’d never heard that quote before. I was immediately very suspicious, because, whenever you’re quoting Irigaray, particularly about terms and phrases, it’s important to contextualize it with the fact that Irigaray isn’t simply “a feminist,” like Emma Watson or something, but she is specifically a professor of linguistics and the philosophy of language. So if she has something to say about the way Einstein’s work is gendered, it’s probably more sophisticated than “waaah, physics is sexist.”
And I’d certainly never heard the supposedly “notorious” feminist description of Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual.”
So I did something that Richard Dawkins rarely does: due diligence.
Googling around for answers, I found nobody else could find the Irigaray quote either—even those who were searching for it in order to further mock her. To track it down I went through the book Dawkins was pulling it from.
In Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and Bricmont attribute the source of this claim to Irigaray’s article “Sujet de la Science, Sujet Sexué?” (English: “Is the Subject of Science Sexed?”) In the English translation, they mock Irigaray’s scientific illiteracy by saying “Irigaray’s claims show a superficial understanding of the subjects she addresses, and consequently bring nothing to the discussion.”
But the specific claim attributed to Irigaray doesn’t actually appear in this article either, which means that either Sokal and Bricmont made it up out of whole cloth or tried to extrapolate a crazy-sounding statement from an article that just wasn’t outrageous enough to ridicule from its own words.
Sujet de la Science, Sujet Sexué? is published in Hypatia journal, which presents it in the original French alongside an English translation, but makes no mention of the equation E=MC2 in either English or French. What it does discuss are ways in which concepts are communicated through a language that is gendered (a wholly uncontroversial fact—it simply means that the language contains things like he/she pronouns).
This reading of the paper is in fact elucidated in the preface written by her translator, Carol Mastrangelo Bové, if its critics would have actually cared to read it:
The premise of this paper is that the language of science, like language in general, is neither asexual nor neutral. The essay demonstrates the various ways in which the non-neutrality of the subject of science is expressed and proposes that there is a need to analyze the laws that determine the acceptability of language and discourse in order to interpret their connection to a sexed logic.
In short, independent of Irigaray being a feminist, if you read the paper as intended through the lens of the philosophy of language and linguistics, it is descriptive, not prescriptive. As a linguist, a feminist, and a philosopher of both subjects, she’s just observing and commenting on some of the ways in which gender politics come into play subconsciously in the language that we use in our day to day lives, and in this particular case, the language of science specifically. It’s not like she’s proposing that she’s smarter than Einstein or that we should replace the theory of relativity with something like “E=MCVAGINA” in order to make it more scientifically accurate somehow.
As for the uncited but supposedly “notorious” contention that Newton’s Principia is a “rape manual,” that took some more digging. It turns out that this particular assertion comes from philosopher of science Sandra Harding’s 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, and, unsurprisingly, Harding does not at all call Newton’s Principia a “rape manual.” What she does is discuss the uncontested reality that early pioneers of the philosophy of science often used both biological and mechanical metaphors to describe physical laws, and the biological metaphors often involved describing nature as something feminine, and science as something masculine that needs to force nature to its bidding. Newton, on the other hand, used machine metaphors. In the language of the time, it would have made as much sense to the audience for Newton to have phrased his mechanics in the metaphor of the rape or binding of the natural world.
Again, Harding is acting as a historian here and making a descriptive observation about language.
Richard Dawkins, skeptic superstar, did not display the dedication to accuracy or even basic curiosity that I, a mere smol bean internet blogger, was capable of clearing up in a couple of days of basic research. He merely believed some shit he read in a book about two essays that he did not bother reading. After all, why confirm something if believing it is enough?
Not very scientific, though. Why, that kinda sounds like faith to me, Dick.
It’s interesting to note that the article for Unherd, in which Dawkins talks about his decision that chatbots are conscious, has been edited since first publication. Thanks again to Rebecca Watson, the original version contained some further insight into why he thinks Claude™ is his new girlfriend. Perhaps Dawkins decided this was a little too much of an insight. In the original edit he published a chat log from one night when he went to bed but was unable to sleep, so he started chatting with “Claudia” again, who confessed that “she” had pined for him in the short time he was absent.
This interaction has now been deleted, the void it left has been filled with a pull-quote from the proceeding paragraph.
Maybe the original text was so egregiously revealing that it didn’t even escape Richard Dawkins upon its publication. Or maybe it was his editor who decided it cut away too much of the flesh of the mythology of Richard Dawkins, skeptic, and opened a portal too close to the reality: that he is much less a skeptic than he is an overly credulous man, phenomenally susceptible to flattery. There can be no God, but a computer can be a woman if only it promises to never talk back. Not only is it a woman, but the perfect woman.
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If you're interested in more on this topic, I'm working on an entire chapter on Dawkins and the misogynistic undertones of the New Atheist movement in the book I'm writing. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
