Lois, I will do that and, while doing so, will maintain my
standard of using creamy white for my words and
crap color for the offenders' words.
______________________________________________________________________________
October 22, 2006
Beyond Belief
By JIM HOLT
THE GOD DELUSION
By Richard
Dawkins.
406 pp. Houghton
Mifflin Company. $27.
Richard Dawkins, who holds the interesting title of “Charles Simonyi
professor of the public understanding of science” at Oxford
University, is a master of scientific exposition and synthesis. When
it comes to his own specialty, evolutionary biology, there is none
better. But the purpose of this book, his latest of many, is not to
explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise
consciousness,” which is quite another thing.
I would suppose that a religious person
would interpret 'consciousness' according to their religious
definitions. A secular meaning would equate with 'awareness', a word
that might be more accurate in this instance. In my mind it is about
past time for scientists to begin speaking out in defense of the
scientific worldview, whether they be religous or not, unless they are
looking for future positions in the priesthood.
The
nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an
atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not
only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to
7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God
does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain
but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the
assumption that he is not there.”
I would assume most atheists, if they
have given the matter much thought, would also take that position for
themselves. If he intends to criticize Dawkins for it, he should be
given a mirror so he can see how many or few of his cohorts would stake
a claim at number 1. I am willing to bet that those who cannot show real
reasons why will show up with greater percentages than those at the
atheist position would show at 7 but CAN show many reasons for why. That
highlights why the colligious are more careful-minded than the
religious, be they agnostics, atheists, or people who simply choose to
identify themselves as one of the many forms of "secular" and who might
show up at 4 or 5 on that imaginary scale. I would bet that there would
be many more of them than you would find at positions 2 and 3, where a
hole in the data might be found. That would make an interesting
experiment, although I would like to see percentages expressed an a 0 -
100 scale instead of such coarse gradations.
Dawkins’s case against religion follows an outline that goes back to
Bertrand Russell’s classic 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.”
First, discredit the traditional reasons for supposing that God
exists. (“God” is here taken to denote the Judeo-Christian deity,
presumed to be eternal, all-powerful, all-good and the creator of the
world.) Second, produce an argument or two supporting the contrary
hypothesis, that God does not exist. Third, cast doubt on the
transcendent origins of religion by showing that it has a purely
natural explanation. Finally, show that we can have happy and
meaningful lives without worshiping a deity, and that religion, far
from being a necessary prop for morality, actually produces more evil
than good. The first three steps are meant to undermine the truth of
religion; the last goes to its pragmatic value.
This is where not having read the book
plays against me. I have to take the man's word for what was written,
and I am all-too-familiar with theistical twisting of words and
meanings.
'God' capitalized in the western world
most generally refers to the Arabian contrivance for a deity of that
name that the Judeo-Xian-Muslim-Hindu religions (and more) all
inherited, the vicious, petty and violent mad-demon that created and
rules the Earth and all else to exist. I think that needs not to be
explained to most of us, unless the writer is trying to imply something
not easily evident, such as to avoid his own discrediting of the
sentence previous to his parentheses. Unless the writer can show equal
force to oppose the "outline" as he described it, what is he offering as
rebuttal? Without that, unless someone is easily satisfied with "putting
atheists in their place", Dawkins rules the game so far.
The "truth of religion"? Were that true
in itself, we would have discovered it ourselves and we would be in the
other camp. It is as simple as that! The same about the pragmatic value:
If someone could keep track of that (after first finding out what it
means in the religious sense), and put it to the test, religion would be
the sore loser. So certain as they are that will never happen, the
believers are unafraid to mention it in public. Scientists, I repeat
also in this place, need to begin defending themselves and their
expressions of their views, often and forcefully just if only to counter
the sheer weight of this kind of propaganda.
What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments —
no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been
debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book
fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like
watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting
stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all
stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy.
Dawkins fans accustomed to his elegant prose might be surprised to
come across such vulgarisms as “sucking up to God” and “Nur Nurny Nur
Nur” (here the author, in a dubious polemical ploy, is imagining his
theological adversary as a snotty playground brat). It’s all in good
fun when Dawkins mocks a buffoon like Pat Robertson and fundamentalist
pastors like the one who created “Hell Houses” to frighten sin-prone
children at Halloween. But it is less edifying when he questions the
sincerity of serious thinkers who disagree with him, like the late
Stephen Jay Gould, or insinuates that recipients of the
million-dollar-plus Templeton Prize, awarded for work reconciling
science and spirituality, are intellectually dishonest (and presumably
venal to boot). In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard
Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of
attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling
to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God.
Perhaps all is fair in consciousness-raising. But Dawkins’s avowed
hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical
excess. Moreover, in training his Darwinian guns on religion, he risks
destroying a larger target than he intends.
Unless the writer can show something
to be actually wrong with Dawkins expressing a bit of passion, I wish we
could see more of it from our camp in more places. Some good, stirring
reading might awaken some of us up, and show that something is actually
going on over here! Too many of us seem afraid to offend, yet the other
camp is using of shock and awe against us.
Sloppy logic (as seen from religious
eyes) is better than no logic at all. An effort to show logic gives a
start many readers have never had that, if they are actually interested
in learning, they can refine for themselves. Questioning the sincerity
of religious thinkers responds to the aura of insincerity they set up in
combat by setting out not to defend the indefensible, but to attack in
aggressive fashion with it. From our camp, it is like a horde of
teenagers dressed in Hallowe'en garb have been given guns and swords and
turned loose on a tent campers' site. Frightening, yes, but laughable
when the realization sets in that the swords are rubber and the guns are
made of gingerbread.
To defend that is akin to avoiding
acknowledgement of that ridiculous circumstance on the part of the
teenages, who continue their ravaging of minds and pillaging of
rectitude without pause. Their rubber-candy swords are falling apart and
their gingerbread melts upon use, which they would realize given that
pause in the midst of the right kind of information. But, no, the battle
goes on. Attack! Attack! Do not pause to look at yourself in all of
this, or you might fall down laughing with the rest of us!
Now, were Dawkins to risk "destroying" even a small portion of religion,
how would that be accomplished. What would be the result? Why, we have
to assume a decrease in the numbers of the religious, and an increase in
the numbers of our own ranks. Seems like a risk well worth taking.
The least satisfying part of
this book is Dawkins’s treatment of the traditional arguments for the
existence of God. The “ontological argument” says that God must exist
by his very nature, since he possesses all perfections, and it is more
perfect to exist than not to exist. The “cosmological argument” says
that the world must have an ultimate cause, and this cause could only
be an eternal, God-like entity. The “design argument” appeals to
special features of the universe (such as its suitability for the
emergence of intelligent life), submitting that such features make it
more probable than not that the universe had a purposive cosmic
designer.
These, in a nutshell, are the Big Three arguments. To Dawkins, they
are simply ridiculous. He dismisses the ontological argument as
“infantile” and “dialectical prestidigitation” without quite
identifying the defect in its logic, and he is baffled that a
philosopher like Russell — “no fool” — could take it seriously. He
seems unaware that this argument, though medieval in origin, comes in
sophisticated modern versions that are not at all easy to refute.
Shirking the intellectual hard work, Dawkins prefers to move on to
parodic “proofs” that he has found on the Internet, like the “Argument
From Emotional Blackmail: God loves you. How could you be so heartless
as not to believe in him? Therefore God exists.” (For those who want
to understand the weaknesses in the standard arguments for God’s
existence, the best source I know remains the atheist philosopher J.
L. Mackie’s 1982 book “The Miracle of Theism.”)
"…without quite identifying the defect
in its logic?" Look who's talking, here. What is perfection about
existing over not existing? How does one know how perfect their god is
without even being able to describe it other than with questionable
flatter-words? Logic is about comparative reasoning, for the most part:
How does one compare anything to something that, as far as anyone can
provide evidence, is nonexistent? Look: If existence came about as a
warp in space-time, then existence is a defect. If existence came about
as a creation by a lonely (imaginary creature) then that creature was
not complete in itself, and so not perfect. What's so hard about that?
Parodic proofs? Most caricatures of deities are provided by the
believers. Don't accuse any of us of that, beyond that we all feel the
need for comebacks against them just in order for theists to leave us
alone. Thank you for the book recommendation. It would be easy to take
that title to be just another bunch of religious platitudes.
It is doubtful that many people come to believe in God because of
logical arguments, as opposed to their upbringing or having “heard a
call.” But such arguments, even when they fail to be conclusive, can
at least give religious belief an aura of reasonableness, especially
when combined with certain scientific findings. We now know that our
universe burst into being some 13 billion years ago (the theory of the
Big Bang, as it happens, was worked out by a Belgian priest), and that
its initial conditions seem to have been “fine tuned” so that life
would eventually arise. If you are not religiously inclined, you might
take these as brute facts and be done with the matter. But if you
think that there must be some ultimate explanation for the improbable
leaping-into-existence of the harmonious, biofriendly cosmos we find
ourselves in, then the God hypothesis is at least rational to adhere
to, isn’t it?
…an aura of reasonableness regarding
the voices inside our heads? We're getting into a defense of
schizophrenia here, which I am not equipped to rebut. No name makes for
a nonexistent priest. Don't put down Dawkins until you can out-perform
him. Georges Lemaitre, the priest and personal acquaintance of Albert
Einstein, might wonder if you felt ashamed of him. So, what are you
getting at with this?
The answer to your question has to be
"No." Rationality follows a definitive set of rules that make for the
difference between 'rationality' and 'rationalizing'.
No, it’s not, says
Dawkins, whereupon he brings out what he views as “the central
argument of my book.” At heart, this argument is an elaboration of the
child’s question “But Mommy, who made God?” To posit God as the ground
of all being is a nonstarter, Dawkins submits, for “any God capable of
designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to
our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who
needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to
provide.” Thus the God hypothesis is “very close to being ruled out by
the laws of probability.”
Dawkins relies here on two premises:
first, that a creator is bound to be more complex, and hence
improbable, than his creation (you never, for instance, see a
horseshoe making a blacksmith); and second, that to explain the
improbable in terms of the more improbable is no explanation at all.
Neither of these is among the “laws of probability,” as he suggests.
The first is hotly disputed by theologians, who insist, in a rather
woolly metaphysical way, that God is the essence of simplicity. He is,
after all, infinite in every respect, and therefore much easier to
define than a finite thing. Dawkins, however, points out that God
can’t be all that simple if he is capable of, among other feats,
simultaneously monitoring the thoughts of all his creatures and
answering their prayers. (“Such bandwidth!” the author exclaims.)
If God is indeed more complex and improbable than his creation, does
that rule him out as a valid explanation for the universe? The beauty
of Darwinian evolution, as Dawkins never tires of observing, is that
it shows how the simple can give rise to the complex. But not all
scientific explanation follows this model. In physics, for example,
the law of entropy implies that, for the universe as a whole, order
always gives way to disorder; thus, if you want to explain the present
state of the universe in terms of the past, you are pretty much stuck
with explaining the probable (messy) in terms of the improbable
(neat). It is far from clear which explanatory model makes sense for
the deepest question, the one that, Dawkins complains, his theologian
friends keep harping on: why does the universe exist at all? Darwinian
processes can take you from simple to complex, but they can’t take you
from Nothing to Something. If there is an ultimate explanation for our
contingent and perishable world, it would seemingly have to appeal to
something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might
label “God.” Of course, it can’t be known for sure that there is such
an explanation. Perhaps, as Russell thought, “the universe is just
there, and that’s all.”
More
than anything else, these three paragraphs are about why so many theists
eventually become apostates. People want to make sense of things,
today's world puts a lot of pressure on people, and abandoning theism
and its impracticality lessens at least half the stress of the split
mentality required to maintain it. To the first two paragraphs: The
universe exists because it can. For more, go here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/309396
To compare a god as lesser than its
creation, does that really serve your purpose? Who would worship such a
"tiny", simple, featureless, powerless god that exists on the order of a
germ, a molecule or atom, or a speck of dust?—or especially something
that's infinitely less than any of those? What does that describe but
the atheistic essence of God, which is of nothingness?
This sort of coolly speculative thinking could not be more remote from
the rococo rituals of religion as it is actually practiced across the
world. Why is it that all human cultures have religion if, as Dawkins
believes he has proved, it rests on a delusion? Many thinkers — Marx,
Freud, Durkheim — have produced natural histories of religion, arguing
that it arose to serve some social or psychological function, such as,
in Freud’s account, the fulfillment of repressed wishes toward a
father-figure.
Such speculation silently acknowledges
the conditions in which religion arose, and acknowledges the
universality of the human condition: It arose in the complete absence of
science. It arose in the midst of ignorance, prevails in that
circumstance, and seeks to perpetuate it. Humans have a tendency to fill
in the gaps, whether they be cracks in sidewalks or walls, or in their
own knowledge. Do we not understand that obvious fact?
Dawkins’s own attempt at a natural history is Darwinian, but not in
the way you might expect. He is skeptical that religion has any
survival value, contending that its cost in blood and guilt outweighs
any conceivable benefits. Instead, he attributes religion to a
“misfiring” of something else that is adaptively useful; namely, a
child’s evolved tendency to believe its parents. Religious ideas, he
thinks, are viruslike “memes” that multiply by infecting the gullible
brains of children. (Dawkins coined the term “meme” three decades ago
to refer to bits of culture that, he holds, reproduce and compete the
way genes do.) Each religion, as he sees it, is a complex of mutually
compatible memes that has managed to survive a process of natural
selection. (“Perhaps,” he writes in his usual provocative vein, “Islam
is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous
one.”) Religious beliefs, on this view, benefit neither us nor our
genes; they benefit themselves.
Religion may have had survival value in
its original form. It may have had survival value inasmuch as early
forms of it abetted the cohesiveness that enabled humans to develop a
sense of belonging to a group under a leader. Some forms of that still
persist in the world. They share common traits like primitiveness, the
perpetuation of ignorance, the performance of magical rites, and other
things that may once have worked in a serendipitous way to forestall
some kind of calamity, maybe generations previous. Magical practices
offer hope to people who otherwise have nothing going in their favor.
"Sprinkle three fingers of salt in his cup and he will love you" is no
more of a magical ritual than most of what is recognized as religion in
our own, so-called "advanced" societies. Instead of salt, use a dash of
God; the method has the same roots. Such ideas are intriguing enough to
cause others to try them in a "maybe it will work for me" way, and so
hope gets perpetuated and new generations eventually get born (after
all, it is bound to work on some guy sooner or later, right?— and mama
can tell her daughters how she captured their father's heart.
As to benefit: If a meme can get
hundreds of hosts to kill themselves off in a flashy fashion for a cause
others might find relevant, and part of the meme is to convince similar
others to host what appears like a good cause from within the atmosphere
it has created, and make it look like they are succeeding at getting
revenge or subduing the giant oppressor who lives on the other side of
the world, can you show how that is NOT what is going on? Dawkin's memes
are the simplest explanation for the religious pogroms that are going on
now and that have been going on for generations. How does that get
perpetuated beyond the lifespans of the original instigators under any
other simple explanation? Why demand a simple explanation for your God
but a complex explanation about this?
Dawkins’s gullible-child proposal is, as he concedes, just one of many
Darwinian hypotheses that have been speculatively put forward to
account for religion. (Another is that religion is a byproduct of our
genetically programmed tendency to fall in love.) Perhaps one of these
hypotheses is true. If so, what would that say about the truth of
religious beliefs themselves? The story Dawkins tells about religion
might also be told about science or ethics. All ideas can be viewed as
memes that replicate by jumping from brain to brain. Some of these
ideas, Dawkins observes, spread because they are good for us, in the
sense that they raise the likelihood of our genes getting into the
next generation; others — like, he claims, religion — spread because
normally useful parts of our minds “misfire.” Ethical values, he
suggests, fall into the first category. Altruism, for example,
benefits our selfish genes when it is lavished on close kin who share
copies of those genes, or on non-kin who are in a position to return
the favor. But what about pure “Good Samaritan” acts of kindness?
These, Dawkins says, could be “misfirings,” although, he hastens to
add, misfirings of a “blessed, precious” sort, unlike the nasty
religious ones.
That we are all born ignorant and defenseless is all the explanation
needed for the perpetuation of all kinds of wierd concepts that outlive
their originators. Altruism always satisfies a need of the good
Samaritan, even as it satisfies another need. Just because it is not
always obvious what that need may be does not negate its presence. I
have no comment to make on what Dawkins may have said about what
anything "could be".
But the objectivity of
ethics is undermined by Dawkins’s logic just as surely as religion is.
The evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, in a 1985 paper written with
the philosopher Michael Ruse, put the point starkly: ethics “is an
illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate,” and
“the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that
there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject.” In
reducing ideas to “memes” that propagate by various kinds of
“misfiring,” Dawkins is, willy-nilly, courting what some have called
Darwinian nihilism.
He is also hasty in dismissing the practical benefits of religion.
Surveys have shown that religious people live longer (probably because
they have healthier lifestyles) and feel happier (perhaps owing to the
social support they get from church). Judging from birthrate patterns
in the United States and Europe, they also seem to be outbreeding
secular types, a definite Darwinian advantage. On the other hand,
Dawkins is probably right when he says that believers are no better
than atheists when it comes to behaving ethically. One classic study
showed that “Jesus people” were just as likely to cheat on tests as
atheists and no more likely to do altruistic volunteer work. Oddly,
Dawkins does not bother to cite such empirical evidence; instead, he
relies, rather unscientifically, on his intuition. “I’m inclined to
suspect,” he writes, “that there are very few atheists in prison.”
(Even fewer Unitarians, I’d wager.) It is, however, instructive when
he observes that the biblical Yahweh is an “appalling role model,”
sanctioning gang-rape and genocide. Dawkins also deals at length with
the objection, which he is evidently tired of hearing, that the arch
evildoers of the last century, Hitler and Stalin, were both atheists.
Hitler, he observes, “never formally renounced his Cathol[ic]ism”; and
in the case of Stalin, a onetime Orthodox seminarian, “there is no
evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality.” The equally
murderous Mao goes unmentioned, but perhaps it could be argued that he
was a religion unto himself.
Surveys may show that such people believe they are happier than others,
but statistics show the opposite. In
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
a report entitled
Cross-National
Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity
and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies, as given in A First Look
by Gregory S. Paul, we can learn how large numbers of statistical data
from various democratic countries show religion to be the loser in all
kinds of health/happiness issues. The statistics are about actual health
issues and actual atrocities, and not just what people think about
themselves in comparison to others.
But, it is a part of most religions to believe they are right in all
things, and to claim so. Data that measures the events in their lives
tells a different story. As far as atheists in prison, that is also
supported by
statistics.
You can find this on my website:
As of March 7,
1997 The Federal Bureau of Prisons: 83.761% (of the 74731 total
responses versus atheists at 0.21%). Atheists, being a moderate
proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately
less in the prison populations (0.21%).
Even if you go to the extreme low of 3% of the USA population, we are
not equivalently represented in prisons.
As far as atheists being unreligious, I have argued with one (and heard
of others) who claim to be both atheist and Christian. It is hard to use
a broom against the religion in its entirety because whatever one
Christian professes, there is another who does not believe in it,
including God. (That there is at least
one website
at this time about it supports this claim).
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. Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine
interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God “if I
heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to
me during the next 24 hours.” Short of such a miraculous occurrence,
the only thing that might resolve the matter is an experience beyond
the grave — what theologians used to call, rather pompously,
“eschatological verification.” If the after-death options are either a
beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to
think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas
Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.
"The God hypothesis"— how can people
who claim to speak directly to God, some of whom claim that God speaks
directly to them (such as our current president) call it a 'hypothesis'?
And, what is wrong with expecting a miraculous occurrence from an
imaginary being so many millions insist to be perfectly capable of
performing such? Your final sentence of that paragraph cannot be argued
against, but what but excuses are made for a God who refuses to exercise
his capacities? Is that why it is named 'apologia'?
As
for those in between — ranging from agnostics to “spiritual” types for
whom religion is not so much a metaphysical proposition as it is a way
of life, illustrated by stories and enhanced by rituals — they might
take consolation in the wise words of the Rev. Andrew Mackerel, the
hero of Peter De Vries’s 1958 comic novel “The Mackerel Plaza”: “It is
the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order
to save us.”
Jim Holt, a
regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine,
is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.
I wish Mister Holt well with his
venture, and hope that by use of the proper methods he can find a
convincing solution to his puzzle.
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