The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Mariner, 2006)One long hot summer when I was 10 or so, I went with a friend to an afternoon of Bible camp. Having not grown up a believer in any religion, the experience was fascinating and a bit terrifying. The organizers were ultra-conservative Evangelicals with a very literal, fire and brimstone sort of interpretation of scripture. Everything was "heaven" this, "hell" that. I was one of the younger kids, and I remember that, despite all the talk of being a good and righteous person, the older boys were little tyrants. Rather, I played the Canaanite to their Israelites.
We also sat for prolonged periods (at least to a 10 year-old) in silent prayer, silently communing with God. I remember that the rest of the kids closed their eyes, so I did too. I couldn't stop thinking about snack time, and opened my eyes a few times to see if anyone else was distracted. Sure enough, goodies were more popular than God; kids were shifting in their seats and looking around impatiently as the adult leaders looked on, gently chastising the hungry kids for being kids and not saints.
Since I was young, I've always been suspicious of organized religion. Now, nothing was ever clearly thought out, and my objections were never based on any sort of theological understanding; nevertheless, I couldn't shake the intuition that the whole thing was just a little silly. This early memory was one of many childhood experiences in my largely-Christian little Oregon hometown that gave me cause to doubt the truth of the faith. It just never seemed to make sense, as much as it would have behooved me socially to believe. There were a lot of cute Christian girls, after all (a topic I will return to shortly).
For all of us who have had lingering doubts about religion, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion is the long-awaited proof that justifies our suspicions with lucid argument, comprehensive research, and wry wit. As a writer, Dawkins is capable of articulating difficult concepts; as a scientist, he is capable of demonstrating that our understanding of reality no longer needs the old-fashioned superstitions of religion.
Dawkins's work comes as part of a three-prong assault on religion that was initiated a couple years ago along with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. It is also (admittedly) a text of conversion: it is his attempt to change people's thinking with the book, and to make atheists who have been in hiding come out of the closet and exclaim their pride in who they are (the parallels to the Gay Liberation movement do not go unnoticed by the perspicacious author). While this goal of transformation is perhaps a bit grandiose (a charge that has been leveled at Dawkins before), I must say that I can't imagine reading it and not being challenged, not having your ideas forced upon the grindstone and made sharper as a result. Simply put, it is impossible to ignore Dawkins's reasoned plea. The argument is too powerful and too urgent to ignore.
Trying to summarize all the key points in this 420-page book would be an arduous task and would probably begin to feel like homework for the tenacious reader. Instead of itemizing the major arguments of the book sequentially, then, I will bring up a few of the fascinating points that are made in no particular order.
- Religion has gotten a massive free-be over the years. To prove a case in court, the prosecution needs evidence; it can't simply base the argument on belief. In every aspect of modern society, we are governed by evidence, reason, and sound logic. Religion, on the other hand, is given a free pass on all of these hallmarks of modern thinking. It is not held to the same level of intellectual rigor as science, law, or scholarship. And this, Dawkins says, is a major problem. Religion should be held to the same standards as every other facet of our society. So with exacting reason, Dawkins approaches the idea of religion just like you would any other idea: as a theory.
- Debunk #1: The faithful often argue that scientists will never be able to prove that God doesn't exist. Dawkins turns this argument on its head and exposes it for the sophistry that it is. In a memorable turn, he suggests that we will never be able to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, or of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (proudly, Pastafarianism was created by a fellow Oregonian). Saying that something cannot be disproved is nonsensical to the extreme - there are plenty of imaginable things that can never be disproven.
- Agnosticism is a cop-out. There is no reason to even entertain a belief unless there is empirical evidence or blind faith - agnostics, lacking both, try to have it both ways.
- Many people argue that religion and science are two totally separate realms of experience and should be kept that way. This notion has been called "non-overlapping magisteria" (or NOMA) by Stephen Jay Gould, connoting that science cannot be brought to bear on religious issues and vice versa. Dawkins firmly rejects the idea of NOMA on the grounds that is is popular purely because there is no good evidence for the God Hypothesis. To keep the religious masses from rising up again scientists for their presumed arrogance, then, many scientists have taken this stance of non-involvement. To Dawkins, this is an act of intellectual cowardice.
- Debunk #2: Pascal's Wager states that, in the absence of evidence of God, it's best just to believe because the penalty if it is true (everlasting damnation) far outweights the penalty if it isn't (you die). I've heard this argument a lot from exasperated Christians. Unfortunately, if you don't believe something, you can't force yourself out of fear of a potential negative outcome. Wouldn't the omniscient God surely see through this sly stratagem?
- Debunk #3, The Boeing 747 Sophism: Creationists claim that the extreme complexity that we see around us could not possibly be the result of random genetic mutation and natural selection over billions of years. That, they say, is like a Boeing 747 being assembled out of a junk heap by a tornado - the probability is simply too remote to consider. This argument, however, suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution: indeed, evolution is a process and not a sudden random act. In addition, Dawkins points out, how come this same argument never applies to the ultimately complex being, God? If the probability of coming up with a 747 randomly is remote, what's the probability of coming up with a God?
- Debunk #4, The Anthropic Principle: There are, as Carl Sagan said, billion and billions of stars in the universe. Only a minute portion of these could sustain the development of life. This fact leads many to claim that, of course God exists because we're on one of these rare planets. Again, they phrase it as an issue of probability: the chances of us simply being here at all are too low for random processes to have generated. This claim is refuted by a simple twist of logic: if we were not one of the few species to have evolved on one of these rare planets, we couldn't make this observation to begin with.
- Debunk #5: "If you don't have a God telling you what is good and what is bad, how can you be a moral person?" This argument implies that the only reason people are good is because an angry father figure is watching over them and coercing them to act this way. There are plenty of real, biological reasons to exercise a degree of morality - we don't need scripture to tell us not to kill our neighbors.
- Getting back to my aside about cute Christian girls: we should never refer to children as "Christian children," "Muslim boys," or "Jewish little girls." To Dawkins, this is a form of child abuse, for children don't have the judgment to believe or disbelieve anything. It is pure indoctrination, and it saddles children with religious identities before they have they mental capacities to judge for themselves.
There are hundreds of other provocative arguments here, but I vowed to myself to keep this review short. Of course, there are reasons for maintaining faith that Dawkins does not get into, such as the strong community support that it often provides. It is never his intent, however, to debate the absolute value of religion: he easily recognizes that a little Biblical knowledge goes a long way when reading Western literature, for example. Although he views religion as a huge net negative for human happiness and civility, the book does not advocate throwing away our whole Judeo-Christian cultural lineage: rather, it simply encourages us to question the God Hypothesis a little more voraciously. For us natural questioners out there, it comes as a welcome suggestion.
6 comments:
Great post. I'll just add one more of his arguments that I found compelling. I haven't read the book, but Dawkins brought this up in an interview about the book. He mentioned that he began to lose faith when he realized that him being a Christian was a pure accident of geography. Had he been born in the Middle East or Asia, most likely he would have been of another religion, and been told that his God was the one true God. I found this very interesting.
To riff on his idea, if you believe there is one true God, and that your having been born at the right location makes you a believer in that one true God, then you are either a) special, or b) lucky. I can't speak for most believers, but I would bet that most think they are the former rather than the latter. In fact, believing that your God is the true God just because you believe in Him/Her/It seems to be a kind of solipsism. Your God-centric universe is more a You-centric universe, where God proves you are special, rather than the other way around. How many believers say to themselves "it sucks that I only have a 1 in 5 chance of actually believing in the one true God?"
To riff on this idea some more, I think that most religious concepts are tied to this idea of the self as center. Prayer, good deeds, sin, repentance, etc. are all premised on the idea that God is watching you. If you do good, you get rewarded. If you do bad, you get punished. You are special enough to warrant God's attention, either for good or ill. You can't avoid God's gaze. Hence the concept of an omnipotent God. You really can't have the type of mass organized religion in which individual participation is required without the idea of an omnipotent God.
Interesting thesis out there for someone who cared would be to track the concept of omnipotence through history. It seems to me that the way I've laid it out is a relatively recent concept. One of the oldest still existing Christian religion, Catholicism, has priests and the Vatican as intermediaries, tempering this idea of universal specialness. Certainly in Greek mythology people were always tricking the Gods, flying under the radar and such.
Very thought provoking post Zach! And I think the God issue is as important to consider today as it ever has been. I haven't read the book, but will definitely put it on the list of things to read.
Of course, like everyone, Richard Dawkins's arguments are selected based on his beliefs. I am no exception, so I'll say from the first that I am a wholeheartedly believing Christian—a radical Christian even. But hopefully not the "radical" Christian that first pops into everyone's mind: the fire and brimstone, televangelist, judgmental, or Joel Osteen varieties. I just believe that if Christianity is true and real, it radically changes everything—just like you said Dawkins's argument, you can't come across it and not be challenged, forced to decide.
The interesting thing is that I agree with most of the tenets of (your distillation) of Dawkins's observations. Religion should be subject to intellectual scrutiny (though more on the limitations of "logic" below), agnosticism is a cop-out, religion and science are not totally separate realms, etc. I come to quite different conclusions, however. All of these arguments just make it more plain, not to mention urgent, that the a decision has to be made one way or the other.
If I had the time, I might try to refute or offer contrary evidence to some of Dawkins's arguments, but in the end, even logic seems to come up short. You used the phrase "twist of logic" in your post, which I think is very appropriate. Sometimes it seems we could craft an argument to prove that anything is true: that pink is really purple, or the air is really filled with tiny little bits of cottage cheese (cf. your allusion to Sophistry). It comes down to each person's consideration of the claims of Christian truth, and whether or not one thinks they are true. C.S. Lewis called this "The Great Dilemma:" either Jesus was who he claimed he was (the son of God), or he was kind of a wacko. He can't just be a "good moral teacher."
In a nutshell, this is the state of the world as I understand it (a fuller explanation is at http://www.salemalliance.org/media/m214.mp3).
We all were created with three parts: Spirit, this is the part of us that relates to God. Soul, this is the mind/consciousness part of us. The third is Body, the physical life. When humans sinned against God, the Spirit part of us died. And here's the key...just as a dead person can't perform CPR on himself, we can't resuscitate our own spirit, even though humanity has been trying to do just this for ages. We need someone who has that Spirit to revive us: Jesus.
One final tangential thought about Dawkins's Debunk #5, saying that morality doesn't point toward God. To use his own logic against him (from Debunk #1): just because there are biological reasons for us to not kill our neighbors, does that mean that a deeply instilled sense of morality in God's image doesn't exist? I hardly think that cold biology can account for the deep sense of morality that I see in our generation, especially during this year's presidential race. Take for instance social justice. Wouldn't biology tell us to preserve our own life above everything else, and couldn't a "biological" response to overpopulation be to just start eliminating people to get the numbers down, stop global warming, etc.? But one of the main reasons so many are putting their hope in someone like Obama (and the Democratic party in general) is that their strong push for social justice. For instance, the desire to participate in relief efforts after Katrina cannot be completely explained by biological impulse. Spending of personal resources, putting oneself in bodily harm, etc. goes against preservation of life.
The inspiring moral urgency I see in you and many in our generation are, I think, misplaced. Government is not the place to fight for social justice, the Church is.
Wow, this comment got really long. But you all are putting up some quality posts, and they really get the juices flowing!
One thing I've always felt about the Christian model is how incredibly inefficient the whole thing is. I mean, God creates you, you sin, he puts you through the ringer, sends his son to die for you, and it's up to you to repent or not. Then you have to spend the entirety of your life filling some staunch stereotype of being the ideal zealot, where in the meantime you ignore anything on this planet that really matters. And how is the word spread? Critical mass proselytizing. Don't ask, but please tell. No questions, we have all the answers. No, I find a little rebellion is just as healthy for the Earth-bound as it is for teenagers. I agree, we need to challenge these thoughts and beliefs. We've inherited an incredibly flawed religious system that, over the ages, has been fabricated to benefit the social elite. When you hear some of the literal translations of the Bible from ancient Hebrew you begin to believe that, yeah, there is some pure wisdom there, but you have to really look to find it.
I've had my own belief struggles lately, resulting largely in my development into agnosticism. So yes, Mr. Dawkins, your assertion rubs me raw. I'm sorry, people may see it as a cop out, but there is something basic you have to understand. I've been lied to my entire life; by the religious as well as the atheists. It's not my refusal to "choose sides." That's the same bi-partisan crap that has polluted our political landscape. No, rather, it's the only truth I have, at this point, found. We have no basis for knowing. We have no facts concerning the afterlife, and therefore I choose to embrace not knowing, and through that path I am coming to an acceptance of my own mortality, which is healthy. Religion deals in facts about as well as science does (I mean, yeah, it was religiously influenced, but c'mon, the universe was geo-centric and the Earth was flat, so good were our observations). Agnosticism gives me room to be a skeptic and still give in to my gut feelings as well as embrace the truth: we just don't know.
Hot topic Zach, nice work. I hope the threads keep coming and we all learn a bit more about each other and ourselves.
Mark, great comment. I like your assertion of radical Christianity. Truly, this seems to be the proper approach. If everything Jesus taught and was is true, then going to church every now and again (maybe twice a year, for those "Chreasters"?) is just paying lip-service to a religion you don't really believe. If you did truly believe, the implications are so overwhelming as to practically compel action on your part, a reshaping of your life. Great comment, great idea, intellectually rigorous and consistent. Don't be a stranger to this blog.
Thanks for your comments, Chris. It looks like I won't be a stranger to this blog for long—Zach invited me to be a contributer, and I accepted! I look forward to pitching into the discussions and hearing from you all.
Wow, great discussion! I feel like the comment board has said a whole lot more than the original post. I'd like to follow up on a couple of points addressed here both from my own voice and from the arguments of Mr. Dawkins.
Mark, your comments come as a much needed corollary to the central thesis of the book. It is true that all too often the term "radical Christian" has come to mean exclusionary practices, bigotry, crass commercialism, and an unholy marriage to conservative politics, especially in America. Thank you for pointing out, and for serving as an example of a radical Christianity that is measured and critical. As you say, being a true believer carries radical connotations and forces you to see the world in a fundamentally different way. Interestingly, the moral universe that you occupy is similar to the one Dawkins has envisioned in his Godless paradigm, and I find this point fascinating. I wonder if there aren't just many paths all leading to the same goal of acceptance of others, moral righteousness, awareness of one's place in the universe, and a sense of meaning. Dawkins achieves his awareness through science; you achieve yours through faith. But perhaps it is the same awareness.
The morality argument is an interesting one. Dawkins really only addresses the "argument by scripture" and the "God is watching me so I better not be bad" models of religious morality. Your suggestion that we have a "deeply instilled sense of morality in God's image" is richer and more nuanced. On the surface of it, it would certainly seem that cold biology alone cannot account for the deep sense of morality that exists in many people. In terms of simple self-preservation, altruistic behavior isn't very evolutionarily accurate. On the species scale, however, it can be seriously beneficial to the group for individuals to act morally. And this principle goes for many social animals as well. Recent studies have examined the principles of fairness in monkeys and birds (as well as people) and found that these other animals have an innate sense of right and wrong-doing: if an individual monkey is always taking handouts from others but never giving handouts when he has extra food, he is ostracized by the group. While acquiring the extra food is of course beneficial for the individual, the social ostracization will make it more difficult for that individual to be protected by the group, and for him to find a mate.
This same principle holds with people as well. It seems (and research indicates) that we are hard-wired for morality. However, this fact can be explained be evolutionary development. It all comes down to a matter of believes, as you say, but what advantages does the God origin of morality have over a phenomenon that can be explained by available scientific methods? It strikes me that this is substituting an extremely complex answer for one that is simply and elegantly explained already.
Your comment about the Church being the ideal place to address social justice is well-taken, and in fact has been mentioned in these pages (an update to the "One Nation Under God" post). It used to be that the Evangelical Church was a marginal organization that stood up for the marginalized. And, of course, throughout European history the Church has often been the refuge for the poor and downtrodden. Many of the Christian saints (I'm thinking especially of Saint Francis) can serve as role models to everyone, Christian and non-Christian. The contemporary Evangelical movement in America, however, is a different beast entirely. To me, conservative Christian organizations in America have discredited themselves by insinuating themselves into politics in a way that is opportunistic, avaricious, and just plain morally rapacious. I agree with you - I do think that the Church can play a very unique role in the cultural awareness of social justice issues. However, they have tied their own feet with their money-laced alliance with conservative political figures, the same individuals who most vociferously deny that any social injustices are taking place. The Church cannot have it both ways: it cannot solve our problems of extreme social inequality while also scratching the backs of the political figures who make this injustice a reality.
Whoa, that turned into a pretty long response as well, and I haven't even gotten to Ruxton's comments on agnosticism! (another comment) Thank you all again for your thoughtful and constructive commentary on this post. Looking forward to more!
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