Posted on 01/13/2006 10:06:18 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Dawkins is wrong about God
Roger Scruton
Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own — the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell. The meme exploits its host in order to reproduce itself, spreading from brain to brain like meningitis, and killing off the competing powers of rational argument. Like genes and species, memes are Darwinian individuals, whose success or failure depends upon their ability to find the ecological niche that enables reproduction. Such is the nature of ‘gerin oil’, as Dawkins contemptuously describes religion.
This analogical extension of the theory of biological reproduction has a startling quality. It seems to explain the extraordinary survival power of nonsense, and the constant ‘sleep of reason’ that, in Goya’s engraving, ‘calls forth monsters’. Faced with a page of Derrida and knowing that this drivel is being read and reproduced in a thousand American campuses, I have often found myself tempted by the theory of the meme. The page in my hand is clearly the product of a diseased brain, and the disease is massively infectious: Derrida admitted as much when he referred to the ‘deconstructive virus’.
All the same, I am not entirely persuaded by this extension by analogy of genetics. The theory that ideas have a disposition to propagate themselves by appropriating energy from the brains that harbour them recalls Molière’s medical expert (Le Malade imaginaire) who explained the fact that opium induces sleep by referring to its virtus dormitiva (the ability to cause sleep). It only begins to look like an explanation when we read back into the alleged cause the distinguishing features of the effect, by imagining ideas as entities whose existence depends, as genes and species do, on reproduction.
Nevertheless, let us grant Dawkins his stab at a theory. We should still remember that not every dependent organism destroys its host. In addition to parasites there are symbionts and mutualists — invaders that either do not impede or positively amplify their host’s reproductive chances. And which is religion? Why has religion survived, if it has conferred no benefit on its adepts? And what happens to societies that have been vaccinated against the infection — Soviet society, for instance, or Nazi Germany — do they experience a gain in reproductive potential? Clearly, a lot more research is needed if we are to come down firmly on the side of mass vaccination rather than (my preferred option) lending support to the religion that seems most suited to temper our belligerent instincts, and which, in doing so, asks us to forgive those who trespass against us and humbly atone for our faults.
So there are bad memes and good memes. Consider mathematics. This propagates itself through human brains because it is true; people entirely without maths — who cannot count, subtract or multiply — don’t have children, for the simple reason that they make fatal mistakes before they get there. Maths is a real mutualist. Of course the same is not true of bad maths; but bad maths doesn’t survive, precisely because it destroys the brains in which it takes up residence.
Maybe religion is to this extent like maths: that its survival has something to do with its truth. Of course it is not the literal truth, nor the whole truth. Indeed, the truth of a religion lies less in what is revealed in its doctrines than in what is concealed in its mysteries. Religions do not reveal their meaning directly because they cannot do so; their meaning has to be earned by worship and prayer, and by a life of quiet obedience. Nevertheless truths that are hidden are still truths; and maybe we can be guided by them only if they are hidden, just as we are guided by the sun only if we do not look at it. The direct encounter with religious truth would be like Semele’s encounter with Zeus, a sudden conflagration.
To Dawkins that idea of a purely religious truth is hogwash. The mysteries of religion, he will say, exist in order to forbid all questioning, so giving religion the edge over science in the struggle for survival. In any case, why are there so many competitors among religions, if they are competing for the truth? Shouldn’t the false ones have fallen by the wayside, like refuted theories in science? And how does religion improve the human spirit, when it seems to authorise the crimes now committed each day by Islamists, and which are in turn no more than a shadow of the crimes that were spread across Europe by the Thirty Years War?
Those are big questions, not to be solved by a TV programme, so here in outline are my answers. Religions survive and flourish because they are a call to membership — they provide customs, beliefs and rituals that unite the generations in a shared way of life, and implant the seeds of mutual respect. Like every form of social life, they are inflamed at the edges, where they compete for territory with other faiths. To blame religion for the wars conducted in its name, however, is like blaming love for the Trojan war. All human motives, even the most noble, will feed the flames of conflict when subsumed by the ‘territorial imperative’ — this too Darwin teaches us, and Dawkins surely must have noticed it. Take religion away, as the Nazis and the communists did, and you do nothing to suppress the pursuit of Lebensraum. You simply remove the principal source of mercy in the ordinary human heart and so make war pitiless; atheism found its proof at Stalingrad.
There is a tendency, fed by the sensationalism of television, to judge all human institutions by their behaviour in times of conflict. Religion, like patriotism, gets a bad press among those for whom war is the one human reality, the one occasion when the Other in all of us is noticeable. But the real test of a human institution is in peacetime. Peace is boring, quotidian, and also rotten television. But you can learn about it from books. Those nurtured in the Christian faith know that Christianity’s ability to maintain peace in the world around us reflects its gift of peace to the world within. In a Christian society there is no need for Asbos, and in the world after religion those Asbos will do no good — they are a last desperate attempt to save us from the effects of godlessness, and the attempt is doomed.
Muslims say similar things, and so do Jews. So who possesses the truth, and how would you know? Well, we don’t know, nor do we need to know. All faith depends on revelation, and the proof of the revelation is in the peace that it brings. Rational argument can get us just so far, in raising the monotheistic faiths above the muddled world of superstition. It can help us to understand the real difference between a faith that commands us to forgive our enemies, and one that commands us to slaughter them. But the leap of faith itself — this placing of your life at God’s service — is a leap over reason’s edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational. On the contrary, it is the heart’s submission to an ideal, and a bid for the love, peace and forgiveness that Dawkins too is seeking, since he, like the rest of us, was made in just that way.
Here's the heresy that none dare speak: Dawkins is selling his own religion. But he is not merely trying to persuade others to believe; rather, he wishes to force his religion on all, and destroy all who will not believe as he demands they do. His beliefs are so overbearing - all must believe as Dawkins does, or they will be damning the entire human race - is far more oppressive than Christianity has ever been.
At least in Christianity there is the hope that something better is attainable; in Dawkins religion, there is nothing, and none should dare to believe in anything...
Dawkins is a typhoid mary for a meme called Satan. Sad man with a sad (no) future.
It's just Dawkins' opinion. And, as we all know, opinions are like posterior exits to the human alimentary canal, everyone has one.
Dawkins apparently has a bigger opening than most...more excrement...
Dawkins is a typhoid mary for a meme called Satan. Sad man with a sad (no) future.
Yes, what a horrible life he leads. It must be absolutely awful to be one of the acknowledged leaders of your field with a well respected position. Not to mention the horror of a happy family life with a beautiful wife.
I feel for the man. I really do.
True, it's just his opinion, but after reading his proposals for the eradication of traditional religions, I'm inclined to believe that he wishes his opinion were fact.
Given the nature of facism and communism in the 20th century, that makes me take his opinion very seriously...
If by happiness you mean that he's comfortable with himself, and he has all the things that he wants, well, yes, he's probably happy. Many people who want to control other people are very, very happy. Many of the great intolerant minds of the age have been very satisfied with their personal lives - it was other people's lives that bothered them.
His intolerance for anything other than his own beliefs is disturbing, and his ambitions to eradicate MY belief systems and MY happiness are horrible. But if you are simply judging a man by whether or not he is happy in his own life and exulted by others, then I guess you would call him happy.
Hitler was happy too.
There is a Creator. However, I have my doubts that we will get a realistic picture of the Creator from the television evangelists.
The television evangelists insistence that evolution is contradictory to the concept of a Creator is wrong. The Creator created conditions for life to arise and endowed life with the ability to adapt to changing conditions.
There are a couple of concepts that are integral to the process:
1. Natural variability within a species.
2. Mutations that occur randomly (or perhaps, they are Deliberate). If the mutations are favorable to the survival of the organism, they tend to propagate).
What this means, is species will change over time to meet new conditions. Isolated gene pools may change enough to become a new species, given sufficient time.
If by happiness you mean that he's comfortable with himself, and he has all the things that he wants, well, yes, he's probably happy. Many people who want to control other people are very, very happy.
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Who exactly do you think Dawkins wants to control? He has expressed an opinion that the world would be better off without religion. Now, you may disagree or agree with that position. I happen to disagree, I think that all the evil things that people do in the name of religion would be done in the name of other things, and similarly with the good things they do in the name of religion. However, he has at no point expressed a desire to actually PREVENT people from being religious.
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Many of the great intolerant minds of the age have been very satisfied with their personal lives - it was other people's lives that bothered them.
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Well, yes, Dawkins is intolerant. But he is no more intolerant than some of the religious fundamentalists that he rails against. Indeed, he is no more intolerant than lots of the people on this forum.
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His intolerance for anything other than his own beliefs is disturbing, and his ambitions to eradicate MY belief systems and MY happiness are horrible.
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Again, he has never expressed a desire to actually eradicate any such thing. However, lots of the people he interviewed in his latest TV show DID express the desire to eradicate opposing belief systems.
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But if you are simply judging a man by whether or not he is happy in his own life and exulted by others, then I guess you would call him happy.
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Well, if we are changing the subject towards judging, then my judgement of Dawkins is pretty much as follows: I think he is one of the acknowledged experts in his particular academic field. However, he is also a man of very strong views on a particular subject and he tends to rant somewhat on that subject. However, as a citizen in a free (for now) country, he is perfectly entitled to rant against religion (for now). In my opinion, while he is sometimes able to draw out intruiging, and somewhat incriminating statements from religious fundamentalists, he himself is something of a fundamentalist himself, and is not particularly interested in actually listening to what people have to say on the matter.
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Hitler was happy too.
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You do realise how silly it makes you look when you compare people to Hitler dont you? After all, Hitler killed millions of innocent people and the most that Dawkins has done is go on TV and suggest that maybe the world would be better if people werent religious. Hardly a comparable action, is it?
This sentence very neatly describes why I became depressed during graduate school.
Eons ago, some heritable trait that enabled belief conferred certain advantages on those individuals that possessed this capability. Whether it was group dynamics (ie follow the leader or be thrown out of the cave), or surplus foodstuffs, etc accruing to the best storyteller ('medicine men'), the fact that billions of people today share this same tendency points to a clear bio-evolutionary trail.
I'd be interested in a study that finally identifies this protein/gene combination. Will people be willing to undergo gene therapy to increase their capacity to reason, or will they happily continue in their faith based belief systems?
It is important to read the words of Dawkins himself, and not just the words of those discussing him. Have you read Dawkins latest proposals for the mass eradication of religion from public and private life? His suggestions that parents should be charged with child abuse for teaching children their religious beliefs? Have you studied his demands that sectarian schools of all kinds - not just Christian, but ALL religions - should be shut down? Have you studied his own suggestions for how the world should be forced away from all religions but his own secular one? Are you aware that he is not merely expressing his opinion, but was commissioned to do so by a public entity for broadcast?
http://www.sundayherald.com/53499
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553982/posts
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/index.shtml
All are entitled to their opinions under the Constitution of the United States of America - and under the First Amendment, all are entitled to their religions as well. According to Dawkins, I do not have that right, and therefore I do have a right to be concerned about his opinion. I do not, however, have a right to suppress it, and that is the difference between Dawkins and me.
This wish to suppress all diverse beliefs should be called what it is - facism. The allusion to Hitler was not in reference to Dawkins, it was in reference to the idea that a man's own happiness in himself was the ultimate measure of his worth. If that statement fits Dawkins, it is only because they both share the desire to control the belief systems of others...
I've wondered if it wasn't an adaptation that came about in our ancestral evolutionary environment when those with the "gene" for religion proved more daring and more likely to take risks, therefore they gained more status (due to being better hunters,warriors, etc), mated more prolifically and soon became dominant.
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Or perhaps religion is a secondary result of some other factor that does provide a more obvious advantage. For example, religion could be related to a tendency to obey group hierarchies. The idea that everyone in the tribe/pack has someone that they defer to leads to a more coherent group, and could easily be "extrapolated". Or alternatively, it could be a result of our ability to pattern-spot. The abilty to see patterns is a great advantage. For example, spotting the pattern that whenever antelope start to run away, a lion is probably close, would enable humans to avoid lions. However, our pattern spotting is often a little too active. For example, people see the Virgin Mary in a teacup, or in a oil spill. Perhaps somehow, the false-pattern of sacrifice/reward would be born from the accidental leaving of some food in a particular spot, just before a huge mammoth was found that provided even more food.
But isn't true that evolution only cares about the individual? I'm certainly no expert, but from what I understand evolution, the coherentcy of the group plays no part in natural selection except in some cases of kin.
Your idea of sacrifice/reward is something I've never heard before and certainly would make sense
...religion could be related to a tendency to obey group hierarchies...
But isn't true that evolution only cares about the individual?
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No. Evolution only cares about the GENE. However, the gene's chance of replication is determined in part by the environment that the gene is in. One factor of that environment is the social nature of the group the gene's host individual finds itself in. A gene that enables the host to get along well in a group is less likely to find it's host killed before it is replicated.
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I'm certainly no expert, but from what I understand evolution, the coherentcy of the group plays no part in natural selection except in some cases of kin.
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Coherency of a group CERTAINLY plays a part in wether an individual is able to reproduce. Take an extreme example, a person who commits murder at the age of 10, would be deemed by society to have acted in a way contrary to group coherence, and would be locked away in jail, thus reducing the chances of reproductive success.
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Your idea of sacrifice/reward is something I've never heard before and certainly would make sense
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Thanks. I am mildly proud of that idea myself, but given the way my brain works, I could have read it somewhere else and forgotten reading about it.
But I wonder what the "evolutionary explanation" (or rather, the "Just-so story") is for atheism? Dawkins often seems stuck in a view from nowhere, sometimes pretending to a god's eye view of the universe and thus outside of his own theory, sometimes not. If meme-theory explains away religion, it also explains away irreligion.
Meme theory also easily segues into postmodernist irrationalism: "truth" is an outmoded concept, all ideas simply suceeded because of the power, reproductive and otherwise, of those who propagated them.
I can't think of Dawkins without remembering Stephen Barr's amusing description of his three roles:
One encounters in A Devil’s Chaplain at least three Dawkinses: there is Dawkins the Humanist, Dawkins the Reasoner, and Dawkins the Darwinist. Each sits on a different branch, sawing away at the branches on which the others sit. (source)
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