The God Delusion
I have a friend who regularly reads books about the mind and consciousness, hoping to find scientific proof of the existence of the soul. He’s an educated man, the type Richard Dawkins claims is increasingly becoming atheist and I think he thinks he probably should. But he’s invariably disappointed when each new writer he discovers turns out to be a materialist like Dawkins.
Unlike my friend, I’m quite ready to admit I’m an atheist. Actually I call myself an atheist plus. The ‘plus’ stands for my belief in reincarnation. I like the idea that I might get to try life from different perspectives and the lack of scientific evidence doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s my imagination that is exercised when I think about it, especially when I’m trying to figure out how I might find proof of reincarnation in today’s scientific theories.
I loved Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, it was a wonderful story of how the world we know could come to be without a god to design it. It made crystal clear what all the theories of evolution and universe formation had only hinted at. I especially loved the story of how DNA could have come into being as a manager of soil (giving clay an important part in our formation). But I can’t quite see the point of The God Delusion.
Dawkins is rightly concerned about the extremist Christian and Muslim communities confronting each other across the Atlantic and disseminating death and misery in lands between (not to mention erosion of human rights everywhere). Dawkins seems to think that doing away with religion, and especially the inculcation of innocent children in religious practice, will prevent the death and misery that extremist religious beliefs and the insistence that I am right and you are wrong have wrought. In this case I think Dawkins is wrong, but I doubt I’ll be shooting him for it any time soon.
Not that I’m less likely to be extremist than others, though I’m one of Dawkins’ well-educated types. I’m just less aggrieved and happy enough with my life not to want to inflict misery on others. I also live in a country where extremes of any kind are discouraged, even extremes of excellence. We call it the tall poppy syndrome.
Religion, no doubt, is one of the memes that Dawkins and others speak of but it’s only a cultural justification for a type of extremist behaviour that certain people want to engage in. Their reasons for wanting to do so could probably be the subject of scientific study. Doing away with religion will only offend those who genuinely want to believe, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, because the belief comforts them, makes them feel less guilty for their mistakes in this life or is the source of the social basis of their lives.
And they will probably find something else to believe in anyway, something which might just as likely be exploited in the future for extremist behaviour. To look at examples from the past why not consider Hitler. Nazism, for all it attacked the Jews, was about German nationalism and the Nazis killed Jews, as well as homosexuals and Catholics, because they supposedly polluted the German race, not the German religion. Perhaps Dawkins could write a book about the dangers of nationalism. It’s also caused a lot of wars, death and misery. So has economics for that matter. In fact, you could probably argue that economics is the root cause of most death and misery and find a justification for your argument in evolution. Though I understand Dawkins
is genuinely embarrassed by people who advance this argument and rightly so. I just mean to point out that no way of thinking is black and white and worthy of extermination.
Let’s consider for a moment what the world in which we have succeeded in exterminating religion would be like. Would religion go quietly or would we need to engage the thought police to make sure it was thoroughly stamped out?
I also don’t understand the format of his book, where the first few chapters do not much more that rail against religion, losing all but the most determined readers, most of whom are likely to be the ones who will posted nasty rebuttals on the Internet or inundate Professor Dawkins with frighteningly nasty emails. Most of the useful new information in the book is contained in the middle chapters with the later chapters included mostly to cover off all points in the proof that we don’t need religion (consolation, inspiration etc). I thought the best points were made in the section about morality.
Dawkins also seems to be quite missionary about scientific method, which has its flaws and prejudices (mass communication lectures, Foucault, see my first chaos theory essay) and celebrated cases of scientists discrediting ideas and refusing to accept the truth (Einstein with quantum theory, look for others in some of the science documentaries I have).
Also science is nowhere near done in explaining the universe, I look for possibilities of the afterlife in those extra dimensions that are supposedly curled up in our universe and in possible storage places for the information we store in our brains. The idea that when I no longer have an apparatus to think, the things I have been thinking are stored somewhere till another apparatus can be found.