William Blake vs Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion

In 2006 Richard Dawkins set out his intellectual position as a strident atheist in his book The God Delusion. He also set up a Foundation dedicated to Reason and Science. Some two hundred years earlier William Blake wrote a letter to his patron Thomas Butts saying, “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!” What did he mean? And does his critical analysis of Isaac Newton, arguably the first scientist, have any message for us living in 2024? Isaac Newton, although a Christian, was a nontrinitarian and his career could not progress at the University of Cambridge because, at that time, to do so he would have had to accept the Doctrine of the Trinity. The Doctrine of The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost were fundamental and had to be accepted. Newton could not subscribe to this view and left Cambridge for London and the Royal Mint. However, Blake clearly saw him a unitarian and thought he was philosophically mistaken. Blake too regarded himself a Christian, but he did not go to church and was certainly not orthodox in his views. However, he was critical not only of Newton but also of David Hume, the radical philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, and whose writings on causation were based on reason at the expense of human imagination and any form of metaphysics. Hume saw no logical reason for joining causes to their effects. Blake’s poem “Milton” builds upon the earlier poem Paradise Lost which claims, “To Justify the Ways of God to Man”. Blake recognised and saw first-hand some of the consequences of this Single vision where science and reason had become sovereign. And, in the preface to his poem Milton with its call to ”Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age!” and build a “Jerusalem… Among these dark Satanic Mills”, Blake advocates a Fourfold vision at the centre of which stands imagination. There is clearly a scientific lineage from Isaac Newton down to Richard Dawkins today, and in this article, I will explore the polarisation of knowledge between the arts and sciences and adapt Blake’s fourfold vision to propose a new model in the light of Dawkins’ atheism.