Author
|
Topic: The Economist reviews The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Read 3687 times) |
|
David Lucifer
Archon
Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.79
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
  
|
 |
The Economist reviews The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
« on: 2006-10-04 16:44:00 » |
 |
source: The Economist
MISBEGOTTEN SONS
Sep 21st 2006
Richard Dawkins has long trumpeted the rationale of science. Now, at
65, he has finally marshalled a lifetime's arguments against believing
in God
"THE GOD DELUSION" is an irreverent book. The author, Richard Dawkins,
accuses Jesus of having "dodgy family values". And don't get him
started on the God of the Old Testament, "a misogynistic, homophobic,
racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully".
Mr Dawkins is an atheist, an evolutionary biologist and an eloquent
communicator about science, three passions that have allowed him to
construct a particularly comprehensive case against religion. Everyone
should read it. Atheists will love Mr Dawkins's incisive logic and
rapier wit and theists will find few better tests of the robustness of
their faith. Even agnostics, who claim to have no opinion on God, may
be persuaded that their position is an untenable waffle.
Like several other anti-religious volumes of recent years ("The End of
Faith", "Breaking the Spell"), Mr Dawkins's book is partly a reaction
to the September 11th attacks. These have been portrayed as essentially
religious acts. Whatever the hijackers' political or social
motivations, it was religious faith that ultimately turned them into
killing machines. They believed they were doing God's work and would be
justly rewarded in the afterlife.
It is easy to denounce such deluded zealots, but what relation do they
have to ordinary, "sensible" religious people? The problem, as Mr
Dawkins sees it, is that religious moderates make the world safe for
fundamentalists, by promoting faith as a virtue and by enforcing an
overly pious respect for religion. (Why is it easier for a Quaker to
avoid combat duty as a conscientious objector than someone who simply
deplores violence?) Furthermore, the argument goes, any positive
aspects of religion can be replaced by equally beneficial non-religious
substitutes.
As a prelude to these contestable claims, Mr Dawkins examines the
interesting question of why religion is so widespread. Worshipping
deities would seem to be an irrational and wasteful habit, yet it has
been found in all cultures. Wouldn't natural selection have got rid of
religious tendencies if religion were clearly bad for humans after all?
Not necessarily. Mr Dawkins advocates the idea that religion is a
by-product of mental abilities that evolved for other purposes. One
form of this theory is that children are "programmed" to believe
anything their parents tell them, which is quite sensible in light of
all the useful information parents can share. But this system is
vulnerable to becoming a conduit for worthless information that is
passed on for no other reason than tradition.
However, this does not explain the special appeal of religious ideas as
opposed to any bizarre ideas. Religious thoughts must be especially
compatible with human psychology. "Religion has at one time or another
been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation,
exhortation, consolation and inspiration," writes Mr Dawkins,
enumerating the four targets of his logical firepower.
He shows that religion does not provide a satisfactory explanation for
anything. Here his arguments are well-rehearsed and finely honed from
decades of combating American fundamentalists. This section will appeal
to anyone who ever wondered, if God created the universe, who created
God?
As for exhortation, he argues that in practice, religion is not a
legitimate source of morality. If it were, Jews would still be
executing those who work on the Sabbath. Where morality actually does
come from is less clear. Mr Dawkins suggests the source is a
combination of genetic instincts, which evolved because morals allowed
humans to benefit more efficiently from co-operation, and a cultural
ZEITGEIST.
For some people consolation and inspiration are genuine benefits of
religion, as even Mr Dawkins will allow. But these functions can and
should be fulfilled by other means, he says. This is the most
problematic part of his thesis. In his case contemplation of the
natural world does the job; his final chapter is an ode to the
perspective-altering discoveries of modern physics. But only a minority
will find as much consolation in quantum physics as in the prospect of
reuniting with their dearly departed in heaven.
Even if it is granted that religion should be expunged, how does Mr
Dawkins suggest this could be done? Buy his book as a Christmas gift
for one's religious friends? Obviously, many people will never be
persuaded; that is precisely the nature of faith. The actual plan is
twofold.
First, Mr Dawkins wants to subvert the mode of transmission between
parent and child. He calls a religious upbringing a form of
indoctrination and equates it to child abuse. He wants to encourage a
change in the ZEITGEIST, so that when people hear the words "a Catholic
child", or "a Muslim child", they will wince, and ask how a child could
already have formed independent opinions on transubstantiation or JIHAD.
His second and related plan is to energise atheists, whom he regards as
being in the same situation as homosexuals were 50 years ago:
stigmatised and unelectable to public office (in America, at least). Mr
Dawkins dreams of a day when atheists are as well organised and
influential as Christian conservatives have become. If nothing else,
his book should help bring the atheists out of the closet.
The God Delusion. By Richard Dawkins. Bantam; 372 pages; GBP20.
To be published in America by Houghton Mifflin on October 18th
See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SJPJGNJ
Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.
- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -
Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.
|
|
|
|
|
David Lucifer
Archon
Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.79
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
|
|
Richard Dawkins Explains His Latest Book
« Reply #1 on: 2006-10-22 11:38:52 » |
|
source: Atheists For Human Rights
Richard Dawkins Explains His Latest Book,
"The God Delusion."
By Richard Dawkins
I wanted to write The God Delusion six years ago. American friends counselled against, and my New York literary agent was horrified. Perhaps in Britain you could sell a book that criticized religion, he said. But in the US, don't even think about it. He hated to admit it, for he was an atheist like most American intellectuals, but religion was off limits to ridicule. You had to respect religion even if you didn't subscribe to it. Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall. Concentrate on science, my American friends advised. Hands off religion. Let the grandeur of science speak for itself, and religion will die a natural death by ignominious comparison. I gave way and wrote The Ancestor's Tale instead.
I don't regret that decision, for The Ancestor's Tale is the nearest approach to a proud magnum opus that I am likely to achieve, and I could not wish it undone. But how different the cultural landscape looks today. After four years of Bush, my literary agent changed his tune. He started begging me to write The God Delusion. And publishers around America are now falling over themselves to bring out atheistic books from which they would have run a mile only a few years ago. Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell (thoughtful and persuasive as we have come to expect of that scientifically savvy philosopher) is selling very nicely, as are Sam Harris's scintillating and more militant The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation (books whose almost every sentence makes you want to phone somebody up and read it out to them). Another that I am looking forward to is God: the Failed Hypothesis - How science shows that God does not exist, by that lucid and knowledgeable physicist Victor Stenger, due out early next year.
On the other side, of course there have always been huge numbers of religious books. You can't get away from them. But works like Francis Collins's The Language of God, and Alister McGrath's Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life are a significant departure. They amount to an anxious backlash against the newly emergent scientific atheism. The same could be said of Ann Coulter's barbarically ignorant Godless: the Church of Liberalism. As an outsider, I observe American culture polarizing fast, and religion is at the center of the action.
America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over real people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming. Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull's-eye as usual:
Quote:| It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ . . . Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency. |
Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?
My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the "breathtaking inanity" (Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of "intelligent design" continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban. The God Delusion is my goodwill contribution from across the Atlantic to that awakening.
Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain "appeasement" school, as I have called it in my book, focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease "moderate" or "sensible" religion (not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do). Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased.
The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote:
Quote:| We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering -creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist. |
A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and atheism, "Dr Dawkins 'probably single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists'." This is not the first, not the second, not even the third time this plonkingly witless point has been made (and more than one reply has aptly cited Uncle Remus: "Oh please please Brer Fox, don't throw me in that awful briar patch").
Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould's "NOMA" - "non-overlapping magisteria". Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.
This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis - by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.
To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.
Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.
The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to "sensible" religion, in order to present a united front against ("intelligent design") creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with "moderate" religion on one side, and I find myself on the other.
Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Lord Krishna. If, by "God", you mean nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me. "Sure," he replied. "He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is religion!" Well, if that's what you choose to mean by religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins, wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal." But don't expect congregations to flock to your church.
When Einstein said "Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?" he meant "Could the universe have begun in more than one way?" "God does not play dice" was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. "Religious" physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason.
Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and I spend a couple of chapters of The God Delusion explaining why.
Most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:
Quote:| Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. |
That's an argument? As I point out in The God Delusion, you might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology.
The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although - since the name begs the question of its validity - it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar "watchmaker" argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.
In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To naïve observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed - things like eyes and hearts - are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too - fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.
Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.
Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic "crane" (to use Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain - a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.
Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication - DNA, or something that works like DNA.
The origin of life on this planet - which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule - is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable - in the sense of unpredictable - event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion - that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible - would follow from the premise that life is extremely rare in the universe. And to be sure, we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio - the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"
A billion billion is a conservative estimate for the number of planets in the universe. Suppose life's origin on a planet demands a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, if there are a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.
The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good - as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, the matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.
Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe - everything we can see - is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. It must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.
The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are dramatic limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.
Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species - plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is - to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck.
We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.
The non-existence of God is the main conclusion of the first half of my book. The second half is devoted to questions that arise from it.
* Why, if religion is false, do so many people believe in it? (I am one of those who see it as an unfortunate by-product of otherwise useful psychological predispositions).
* Where, if not from religion, does our morality come from? Don't we need religion, in order to be good? (I cannot believe that those who advocate a morality based on the Bible have actually read it. We not only shouldn't get our morals from religion, we don't. Believers and unbelievers alike participate in a slowly shifting moral Zeitgeist rooted in Darwinian rules of thumb).
* Even if religion is false, doesn't it do some good? (Yes, but only by accident). And weren't Hitler and Stalin atheists? (The answer is: No for Hitler, yes for Stalin, and your point is . . . ?)
* Religion may be nonsense, but isn't it harmless nonsense, like astrology and crystal balls? Why be so hostile? (Scientists have a particular reason to be hostile to any systematically organized effort to teach children to reject evidence in favour of faith, revelation, authority and tradition. Religion teaches people to be satisfied with petty, small-minded non-explanations or mysteries, and this is a tragedy, given that the true explanations are so enthralling. Moreover, such hostility as I have is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement).
A recurring theme of my book is consciousness-raising. Just as Darwinian biology raised our consciousness to the power of science to explain things outside biology, and just as feminists taught us to flinch when we hear "One man one vote", I want us to flinch when we hear of a "Christian child" or a "Muslim child". Small children are too young to know their views on life, ethics and the cosmos. We should no more speak of a Christian child than of a Keynesian child, a monetarist child or a Marxist child. Automatic labelling of children with the religion of their parents is not just presumptuous. It is a form of mental child abuse.
Academic studies of Nobel Prize-winners, and other intellectual elites such as the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, all report an overwhelming preponderance of atheists. One would presume that a fair proportion of our elected rulers would also be drawn from the intellectual elite. Given that 93% of the National Academy does not believe in any kind of personal god, a statistician would expect that at least some members of Congress, if not a majority, would also be atheists. Yet, as far as I can discover, the number of avowed atheists among the 535 members of Congress is not 93%, not even 10%. It seems to be zero. What is going on here? I think we all know.
In 2001, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) based in the City University of New York, reported some surprising figures. The great majority of the US adult population call themselves Christian: 160 million adults. But what group takes second place? Jews? No. For all their formidable electoral clout, the 2.8 million Jews are massively outnumbered by the nearly 30 million non-religious or secular Americans. Organizing atheists is like herding cats. But if the unbelievers of America could only get their act together a tenth as effectively as the legendarily powerful Jewish lobby, what might they not achieve? Maybe at least some candidates for high office would gain the courage to tell us what they truly believe. And still get elected.
|
|
|
|
|
David Lucifer
Archon
Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.79
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
|
|
Re:The Economist reviews The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
« Reply #2 on: 2006-11-10 11:35:58 » |
|
Richard Dawkins and God
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6.11.10
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i12/12b00401.htm
CRITICAL MASS
Imagine, Richard Dawkins suggests, a world with no religion:
"Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no
witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no
Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no
persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers,' no Northern Ireland
'troubles,' no 'honor killings.'" In his new book, The God
Delusion, the British biologist, perhaps the world's most famous
atheist, makes a passionate case for the evil religions do and for
why believing in God is irrational. A sampling of the responses to
Dawkins's latest:
Thomas Nagel, New York University: Dawkins seems to believe that if
people could be persuaded to give up the God Hypothesis on
scientific grounds, the world would be a better place -- not just
intellectually, but also morally and politically. He is
horrified -- as who cannot be? -- by the dreadful things that
continue to be done in the name of religion, and he argues that the
sort of religious conviction that includes a built-in resistance to
reason is the true motive behind many of them. But there is no
connection between the fascinating philosophical and scientific
questions posed by the argument from design and the attacks of
September 11. Blind faith and the authority of dogma are dangerous;
the view that we can make ultimate sense of the world only by
understanding it as the expression of mind or purpose is not. It is
unreasonable to think that one must refute the second in order to
resist the first. (The New Republic)
Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester: Imagine someone holding
forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of
British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to
read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like
Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have
had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't
believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least
anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up
with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a
first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion,
the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they
were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of
South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any
shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the
queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word
than in its medieval heyday. (London Review of Books)
Jim Holt, science writer: Despite the many flashes of brilliance in
this book, Dawkins's failure to appreciate just how hard
philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an
intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no
decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain
number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart
people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no
knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective
values, or the existence of other minds. Dawkins asserts that "the
presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is
unequivocally a scientific question." But what possible evidence
could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we
are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and
elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can
come into collision with it. Nor is it obvious what sort of event
might unsettle an atheist's conviction to the contrary. (The New
York Times Book Review)
Sean Carroll, California Institute of Technology: To be fair, much
of Dawkins's book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated
form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly
implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God
means. That's not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does
annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all,
that kind of naïve theology is a guiding force among a very large
and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The
reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its
adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn't save
God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going
to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations
of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through
compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves. (Cosmic
Variance)
Kenan Malik, writer: Part of the problem is Dawkins's view that
religion is not so much a set of beliefs as a mental illness. And
moreover, a mental illness to which evolution has made the human
mind particularly susceptible -- an argument that has become
fashionable in recent years. It may be true that humans possess
certain psychological dispositions that open them to religious
ideas. But uncovering such traits is not the same as explaining the
origins, let alone the contemporary attractions, of religion. What
people seek in religion is not always obvious, and is often shaped
by historical and social context. (The Daily Telegraph)
PZ Myers, University of Minnesota at Morris: [Dawkins] is not
proposing the abolition of religion, but rather that we acquire a
proper perspective on it. Religion is a cultural heritage that
should be appreciated for its contributions to history, literature,
and art, and Dawkins actually advocates more education in the
subject. At the same time, its promotion as a guide to absolute
truth, as a dogmatic and authoritarian prescription for behavior,
and as a substitute for scientific thinking, leads to catastrophic
excesses and false conclusions, which he documents at length. We
can respect poetry as a window on the human mind and an outlet for
the expression of beauty, but we'd laugh at someone who claimed
that poetry explained cosmology, was grounds for declaring war, or
could cure cancer. But religion makes these kinds of claims, and a
dangerous majority accepts them. Dawkins asks that we recognize
religion as a legitimate expression of human feeling -- but that we
avoid overendowing it with powers it does not possess. (Seed)
|
|
|
|
|
David Lucifer
Archon
Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.79
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
|
|
How dare you call me a fundamentalist
« Reply #3 on: 2007-05-14 02:39:34 » |
|
source: Times Online
The hardback God Delusion was hailed as the surprise bestseller of 2006. While it was warmly received by most of the 1,000-plus individuals who volunteered personal reviews to Amazon, paid print reviewers gave less uniform approval. Cynics might invoke unimaginative literary editors: it has “God” in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several critics began with the ominous phrase, “I’m an atheist, BUT . . .” So here is my brief rebuttal to criticisms originating from this “belief in belief” school.
I’m an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language.
Objectively judged, the language of The God Delusion is less shrill than we regularly hear from political commentators or from theatre, art, book or restaurant critics. The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack. In a criticism of religion, even clarity ceases to be a virtue and begins to sound like aggressive hostility.
A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would, in other contexts, sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a shrill rant. My nearest approach to stridency was my account of God as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but my intention was closer to humorous broadside than shrill polemic. Restaurant critics are notoriously scathing, but are seldom dismissed as shrill or intolerant. A restaurant might seem a trivial target compared to God. But restaurateurs and chefs have feelings to hurt and livelihoods to lose, whereas “blasphemy is a victimless crime”.
You can’t criticise religion without detailed study of learned books on theology.
If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist? But I need engage only those few theologians who at least acknowledge the question, rather than blithely assuming God as a premise. For the rest, I cannot better the “Courtier’s Reply” on P. Z. Myers’s splendid Pharyngula website, where he takes me to task for outing the Emperor’s nudity while ignoring learned tomes on ruffled pantaloons and silken underwear. Most Christians happily disavow Baal and the Flying Spaghetti Monster without reference to monographs of Baalian exegesis or Pastafarian theology.
You ignore the best of religion and instead . . . “you attack crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than facing up to sophisticated theologians like Bonhoeffer or the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible. Most believers echo Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.
You’re preaching to the choir. What’s the point?
The nonbelieving choir is much bigger than people think, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks that showered my North American book tour, my articulation of hitherto closeted thoughts is heard as a kind of liberation. The atheist choir, moreover, is too ready to observe society’s convention of according special respect to faith, and it goes along with society’s lamentable habit of labelling small children with the religion of their parents. You’d never speak of a “Marxist child” or a “monetarist child”. So why give religion a free pass to indoctrinate helpless children? There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
You’re as much a fundamentalist as those you criticise.
No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.
I’m an atheist, but people need religion.
“What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to fill the need, or comfort the bereaved?”
What patronising condescension! “You and I are too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, Orwellian proles, Huxleian Deltas and Epsilons need religion.” In any case, the universe doesn’t owe us comfort, and the fact that a belief is comforting doesn’t make it true. The God Delusion doesn’t set out to be comforting, but at least it is not a placebo. I am pleased that the opening lines of my own Unweaving the Rainbow have been used to give solace at funerals.
When asked whether she believed in God, Golda Meir said: “I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” I recently heard a prize specimen of I’m-an-atheist-buttery quote this and then substitute his own version: “I believe in people, and people believe in God.” I too believe in people. I believe that, given proper encouragement to think, and given the best information available, people will courageously cast aside celestial comfort blankets and lead intellectually fulfilled, emotionally liberated lives.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
