Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion – After the reaction by the religious!
It’s been a while now since ‘The God Delusion’ has come out and there are many varying reviews about Dawkins work, yet Dawkins remains the stable diet for those wishing to dismiss both the author and the ‘fundamental atheists’. Unlike Hitchens who will, with open willingness, have debates with religious people, Dawkins has never publicly done so still he does make his perspective on the place of intelligent design within the educational system clear and will assault the unintelligent evidence for the God done it approach. One of Alister McGrath’s arguments against the God Delusion is that it is a very long book, it could be seen as overkill but when faced with alterations of religious arguments I am surprised that the book is not actually longer. My own impression is that Dawkins is attempting to cover all the bases; if he had left anything out, and rest assured he did, then the argument could be easily dismissed or miss understood. The attitude of the religious persons is one that will allow them to take in what has been said and then somehow not apply it to their own beliefs. By far this is not limited to the religious person and thinking about it that should be put a person who is religious since belonging to a faith is not innate. Dawkins does recognise that religion has played four roles in our past, although this is mostly based on the Christian societies, being that of explanation of the things in the world. Exhortation through moral instruction, consolation, our need for God and inspiration, apart from inspiration this is what Sam Harris also argues. It is been suggested that inspiration should now come from science rather than in earlier centuries where faith did cause fantastic expressions of the human condition, heaven and other aspects of the nature & existence through art, music and word. The God Delusion or in fact science are not alternatives to religious faith it would simply be a poor unequalled replacement which would fail to deliver.
The God Delusion should be considered an inquisition, without the pessimistic features like those of Europe caused by Christianity throughout our past, it is beautifully put by Dawkins when he comments that people have written or spoken to him declaring one clear realization that they have had: they never even considered that non-belief was an option open to them. God is far from becoming unnecessary still when it comes under the protective status it irritates people like Dawkins and he has never declared that anyone should abandon their religious faith, rather the rest of us should not be subject to its rules and children should be made to understand they will also have a choice when they grow up. This is perhaps the most objectionable part of what Dawkins writes, that parents should not teach their children the religion that they follow, still rather than saying this he puts it like this: teach children all religions. I happen to belong to a generation that sees (for the most part) that racism is wrong, it would have been the right of my parents to teach me their racist ideology (if they had one) but I never lost anything through learning new ideas about equal rights. Why should religion receive special protection which racism does not? The protection that happens to surround religion in many societies does happen when one religion attempts to undermine another, still when criticism comes from the nonbeliever as the ever increasing demander of justification, that protection is formed in threats, offense and proclaimed hurt. We are subject to missing the point, as Dawkins implies. In the whole Danish cartoon matter it never really came to the rights of the newspapers to publish what they wanted to, the only focus is placed on lack of respect and offense it caused. There is no harm in a cartoon made of ink and paper produced by those that have never believed in Islamic teachings about an issue where they have every right to have an opinion, neither is it acceptable to shift the blame of the immoral actions performed by Muslims onto the cartoonists.
This is of course a very dated example but let’s take another one; from someone who has been knighted in the UK for interfaith relations you would expect, when asked publicly, to denounce any punishment for abandonment of their faith least of all the death sentence in Pakistan and would confirm that they would simply allow people to make their own minds up. Sir Iqbal Sacranie fits this description, so the question we should have to ask: why do we allow these people to have the right to offense our morality judgements. The reversal is what Dawkins is trying to achieve rather than looking at possible virtues of any religious belief we should look at the process of how we come to believe in the first place. Issues of our brains, through evolutionary processes, that allow us to think of the divine when they are not divinity just a shadow game played out by our powerful minds. In terms of evolution I don’t like Dawkins use of it in this book because I don’t think that it is necessary in order to discount God, it’s like saying you must know or have an idea of how we got here or you will not function. Still I do get the point he is trying to get across that because we appear to be designed it makes the account for God, – this is an argument that must be challenged. I do understand why it is there through the worship of the gaps but I don’t think that it is necessary when science is still misunderstood by many.
Intelligent Design and religion are all giving whereas science is partly given, that is to say it’s acceptable for science to not know something whereas religion gives everything in the same answer leaving only the outskirts to be discussed. Likewise Darwin died a hundred years before I was born and it should never be claimed that he had the final answer, it was always an imperfect explanation of the origin of species but it was never claimed to be the perfect answer. If at any point it did then it would no longer exist as science since that is the foundation of all science no matter what explanation is attempted. Saying we don’t know at the moment is more honest than having a guess based on personal feelings, just because you cannot explain something does not justify bringing in God. Dawkins himself and through a blogger’s comment comes up with this “we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance ‘God’”, it is interesting that in debates the issues normally come back to it must be or only God could have acted like that. This is not the underpinning argument of proof that is acceptable neither are unchecked personal feelings where there are many other explanations which do so much more than proliferate acceptance of our own ignorance. This is why Dawkins used evolution despite what appears to be a complete lack of understanding of it by many.
Theologians should bring more to the table than they do; they bring nothing about the debate of the universe, the questions which science hopes to answer or morality; if this is the case of what use is religion? Dawkins clearly answers why moderate religious people should never be left alone with unquestioned belief; the effect is the never ending support for those that would allow a non-moderate position to take place. Nonbelievers and the moderate religious are often seen has having the same level of morality within a certain society, although only mentioned in Christian societies, Hauser and Singer are used to demonstrate this conclusion. Dawkins uses this to propose the question why be good without god, sucking up to God rather than being moral, this goes to suggest that without God then you would turn to animal like behaviour, thus making you immoral for never being truly moral in the first place. Science books are corrected for their mistakes, still should it not be logical for all new versions of the bible to have such evil passages removed in the light of morality? There is often the dismissed argument that removal of such passages of religious text is unnecessary, after all it really is the unacceptable method of interpreting such text rather than the text itself which leads to ‘problems’ and division. It would be seen as rather like a censor if this was actually ever performed and alike with other revisions another form of religion would be born each claiming theirs as the true version. Dawkins as ever demonstrates clearly that there are alternative explanations to our morality, thou shall not lie is an unstable principle in itself and you don’t think about whether to lie or tell the truth, you just do it naturally, the point being no one is blackmailed into utterance of the truth only. This speaks of our evolution and the method which has allowed us to be here, we either choose to lie or not, the reason is much more complex than: threats and liars are simply just not immoral.
No one can prove that God is real, still just like with flying monsters, unicorns and gremlins why should anyone settle for having to disprove them before they are allowed to dismiss such ideas completely? At some point, pending germ theory, people believed that if you became ill it was the result of sin or lack of faith. This is what some of the religious debate still exists around, the very notion that just because there is currently no explanation of events therefore God is still a possibility which should never be dismissed. Dawkins puts this into the foundation of the deist argument although much of the time it is universal to all God discussions. The burden of proof is on those that do believe in God not those that don’t; after all to claim that unicorns are real you would need evidence to back up your assertion. Dawkins goes further than this by saying, at least indirectly, that it is not evidence which those nonbelievers require rather proof that God is probable. This automatically opens many questions, Dawkins uses the pattern making behaviour which is in all of us to describe a time when he was in bed and he thought he heard talking but got up to discover that it was the wind. If as children we are brought up in a strong religion what words would the child make out? This applies across the board and most favourable to those who seek ghosts. Our minds take in very little sensory information in situations of perceived ghosts, normally it is dark, quiet, late at night and often cold as well, it is always the assumption that these are the conditions which ghosts prefer but it also happens to be the same set of conditions where our brains will create shapes and voices that we are accustomed to. If our brains are accustomed to religious happenings would it not be also fair to take religious experiences as the brain doing what it needs to do, making patterns, rather than anything actually religious going on. The consideration that religious experiences are born from divinity is just one step too far when the logic of the religious person has not been examined.
Dawkins provides more than enough examples of the harm caused by religion; one which has stayed in my mind is a letter towards the end of the God Delusion where a woman describes her horror that her friend who sadly died and being a protestant would go to hell just because she was not catholic, the terror in her mind as a child was one that the people who she loved would end up in Hell, one would assume for the wrongness of her friends parents not belonging to the ‘right’ faith. I have no terror to compare to that sort of abuse still the whole array of ‘neo-atheists’ often work from the position that they want the truth and improvement to happen through education. There are really two problems which would remove such abuse taken indirectly from Dawkins words, the first is the teaching religion as true is always the wrong thing to do and the second is the part of such teaching placing faith as a virtue. Throughout my life I often went to church, sometimes summer school at my local church and also had forced onto me certain religious aspects at school, at no point did doubt ever get introduced into the discussion. I was told and as a child I believed certain things to actually be true rather than an interpretation of what could be true, there is a massive scope of difference to these two realities. In my adult life if it were not people like Dawkins religious speakers would still be making the unchallenged case that morality comes from religion where it clearly does not. Going back to this point, by taking the opportunity to teach all the main religions to children it allows them to understand for themselves that no one religion could ever be considered as being true. Also he does say ‘…it are the moderate that teach children that unquestioning faith is a virtue’, something which has an effect on them later on if they hold other beliefs in the same light.
Overall the God Delusion should provide great hope when it is understood not as just an attack on the religious rather a true exanimation of what religion is. Religion is explained not through the divine but through what makes us human, the position we find ourselves in due to the biology (in part) that allows us to be greater thinkers. The point of the book is that there is a different way of thinking, a way which if nothing else is interesting to read. Three years later the lack of understanding about The God Delusion is still present which I think is something that will sadly continue…
