Returning the Question

An initial and important concession: When he gets rolling on the follies of religions, Dawkins's politeness is sometimes lacking. I have no trouble seeing that there's a definite and large component of mockery in his response in that clip.

That said, it's not pure mockery. The guy in the video (James White, I assume?) is right in saying there's mockery there, but anyone saying it's nothing more than mockery is clearly missing some important points.

For this to make sense, imagine that you've just read a book that someone loaned to you, and when you give the book back, they ask "Well?" Nothing more, that's their entire question.

Chances are, you know (or at least think) that they've got some particular question in mind, such as "Well, did you enjoy the book?" or "Well, has your opinion about the wood-construction issue changed?" or "Well, how did that make you feel?" or "Well, did you find the plot well developed and the characters believable?" Indeed, most people would, given the question "Well?", answer one of the expanded questions instead. "I really liked the book" or "That made me think differently about wood-construction" or "Wow, what a sad book!" or "That author sure can write!"

Then again, perhaps you're not confident in what the person's "Well?" is asking. You could try to get clarification by asking them to kindly expand their question but that often just confuses people, because they know what they were asking and it's not clear how you couldn't know, so your question doesn't make sense. Alternately, you can figure out what question they were asking by requesting that they give you their answer to their own question. If they say "I thought it was sad", then their question was probably "How'd it make you feel", for example.

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them can be useful to figure out what they're asking.

Don't leap to conclusions yet.

Sometimes, however, it may be the case that you know that I know all your opinions about the book. There's nothing I could ask you to answer about the book (including your own question) that I don't already know, so it would be rather awkward to turn the question directly back on you.

I still may want to know which question you were asking, though, so if I knew we'd both read some book (say "The Logger") but hadn't discussed it, I might shift the perspective a bit and say "Hmm... imagine I'd just lent you The Logger, and you were handing it back, and I asked 'Well?' What would you say?" Your response from that should illuminate which variety of "Well?" you had in mind, and then I can ask the question you meant to ask, rather than one of the many many questions you didn't.

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them, with the perspective appropriately shifted, can be useful to figure out what they're asking.

Please continue to avoid jumping to conclusions.

Suppose you like chocolate ice cream far more than any other flavor, and I feel the same way about strawberry. We're hanging out on a hot sunny day, talking about stuff, and in the course of things you ask me "Is there anything that wouldn't be worth doing to get some chocolate ice cream?"

Being more than a little smart, I probably realize that, if you were to answer your own question, the answer would be 'no' (keeping in mind we're just hanging out, and not having a semantically nuanced debate). But, not being that great a lover of chocolate, my answer is... well... just the same as your answer would be if I'd asked the question about strawberry instead of chocolate. So, I could say "yes, plenty of things wouldn't be worth it", or I could say "not for you, perhaps" or I could give you the answer that most accurately answers your questions for all perspectives at once: I could ask you "Well, is there anything that wouldn't be worth doing to get some strawberry ice cream?"

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them, with the perspective appropriately shifted, can be useful to answer the question in the clearest way possible.

Please remember that I'm not claiming Dawkins was the epitome of politeness in his response before jumping to conclusions, but at this point you may be able to jump safely.

"What if you're wrong?" is a hugely open-ended question. It's not so much a question as a giant swath of questions and, without the question being any more specific, the only appropriate answer would be "In that case, I'm wrong." End of story, that's all there is to say. And it's very unlikely that the question whose answer is "In that case, I'm wrong" was what the girl in the audience meant to ask.

So, what did she mean to ask? Given the setting, probably something like "How would your behavior, morality, and means of pursuing truth change if you were wrong about the non-existence of Yahweh, and what manner of apologies would you need to make?" I can imagine other questions, but hopefully everyone will consider that a fair approximation of what she probably had in mind (if not, I'd love to hear what else people think she was asking!)

Well, perhaps that's what she meant, perhaps it wasn't... perhaps she didn't even know what she was trying to ask. However, for Dawkins and many others, the answer to what she probably meant to ask would be... well, it's rather complicated and hard to explain in a sound bite. It's quick to say that it's the same answer to "How would your behavior etcetc change if you were wrong about the non-existence of the Hindu pantheon", and (whether you can imagine it or not) it would be the same answer to the question "How would etc etc wrong about the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster". Answering any of those questions is complicated and hard to explain quickly, but they all fundamentally have the same answer.

And that's useful, because chances are that the girl who asked the question probably has essentially the same answer to the Hindu version of the question, and the [insert Central African religion] version of the question and, if she could bring herself to not feel mocked, probably even the Flying Spaghetti Monster version of the question. (That's an if that I think Dawkins guessed badly about. I think he should have stuck with nonsynthetic religions like Hinduism or the Greek Pantheon. Bad call on his part, it raised the mockery level at the expense of making the point harder for theists to see. Net loss.)

The point is, if the girl has the same answer to the Hindu question as Dawkins does, and Dawkins has the same answer to the Hindu question as to the Yahweh question that the girl probably meant to ask, and all of those questions are pretty darn hard to answer concisely... well, it makes sense to answer by asking the question back with an appropriate shift in perspective. Once the girl answers Dawkins' question, she has found the answer to her own question.

He's still a dink for digging up undersea Ju-ju's rather than sticking with something straightforward, less prone to bad reactions, and classically buff like Zeus, though.