The Dawkins Disillusionment

It is a painful experience to have a hero disappoint you. I have admired Richard Dawkins from the time I read The selfish gene, at the age of twenty. It was one of the most important reading experiences of my life. Since then, I have read all his books with great interest. Until this one: The God delusion.

I should have known. Each time the evolutionary biologist, in his past books, briefly touched the subject of religion, he lost his attitude of eloquence and well-manneredness. Now that religion is his main subject, he constantly loses his temper.

The very low probability of God

Dawkins sets himself the task of debunking a large number of ancient arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from Design, the ‘Unmoved Mover’ and the argument from Scripture. Because he is hardly the first one to do so, his zeal strikes me as beating the dead horse. One wishes that he would just move on and address the really interesting questions. Such as: why is religion still a factor despite the fact that these arguments for the existence of God are not valid?

Chapter four has the corny title Why there almost certainly is no God. Dawkins feels obliged – a real gentleman – to leave open the possibility that God exists. How high does he estimate this possibility? ‘Very low probability, but short of zero.’ At this point it dawned on me that Dawkins is really off on the wrong foot. In a book about religion I don’t expect statements like: the odds that God does not exist are six hundred to one.

However, Dawkins definitely is right to criticize creationism - the pathetic pseudoscientific theory currently also known as 'intelligent design'. He accurately diagnoses the creationists' parasitic way of planting their flag of God just one step ahead of the latest frontier of scientific knowledge. Dawkins:

The origin of religion

An interesting chapter is The roots of religion. Dawkins examines the function of religion from a Darwinian perspective. What survival value is in it for believers, who invest so much energy in seemingly useless rituals? Dawkins's global answer is that religion has no use and that our susceptibility to it is merely an unfortunate by-product of mental abilities that were evolved for other purposes.

It is indeed conceivable that a number of originally unrelated instincts/abilities cooperate to produce religious experience. As candidate modules Dawkins proposes our overeager tendency to 'detect agency' in the world around us. Like tiger cubs who treat every moving object as if it were prey, we humans do the same on a mental level. This habit, which is useful most of the time, is misfiring on some occasions.  Another necessary ingredient for the emergence of a religious experience is the ability to fall in love with a person – hence the abstraction of that feeling to a devine person.

Dawkins comes up with a few candidate mental modules which together, as a side effect, could make religious experience possible. These are promising attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation, but they are limited to the ‘replicating devices’, so to speak: the reproductive organs for the religious memes – and not the content, the religious doctrine itself. Dawkins realizes this: 

And he immediately gives the answer. Or rather, he dismisses the very relevance of answering this question.

So Dawkins completely sidesteps the issue of the possible benefits of religious beliefs. Instead, he wishes to concentrate solely on the 'viral' technology of religious belief systems. He explains how religious ideas prevent themselves from extinction: by teaming up in memeplexes.

In other words, a religious idea cannot survive in the meme pool in isolation. It has to be supported by a sort of immune system to ward off competing ideas. This immune system consists, for example, of the ideas that heretics should be killed and that rational doubt is the devil. Agreed, it is hardly surprising that a belief system which has been around for thousands of years, should consist of some cunning tricks.

However true Dawkins's point me be, his analysis completely ignores the possibility that some religious ideas might actually have some benefit for human minds. As Dawkins has pointed out in his previous books, the interests of genes and body are largely overlapping. It is in the interest of genes to build a body that functions properly. Why couldn't the same be true for the relation between memes and minds?

Root of all evil?

In chapter seven, The good book and the moral zeitgeist, we finally learn about the content of religious faith itself. Which is, according to Dawkins ‘barking mad’ and ‘viciously unpleasant’

Richard Dawkins in the South Park episode Go God Go

Indeed ‘unpleasant’, but maybe Dawkins confuses cause and effect here, or messenger and message. He seems to agree with the often heard opinion that religion is the cause of unnecessary feelings of shame and guilt. According to this type of explanation we are ashamed of our nudity because this shame was installed in us by reading the Bible story of the Fall. The causality of this kind of explanation is simplistic. Couldn’t almost the reverse be the case, namely that Bible stories just provide an explanation of all our in-born and ill-understood feelings of shame? One way or another, our multitude of instincts has to be channeled, preferrably in an orderly fashion. The rituals and stories of religions provide a formal means of achieving this. I wouldn’t call this a condemnation, I would call it an outlet.

Considering that long ago there was no knowledge of human psychology, the story of original sin might not be such a bad explanation for the ethical problem of guilt. Early mankind had to tell himself stories on an allegoric/symbolic level. Speaking of allegory and symbol: Dawkins obviously struggels with these ways of using language.

Symbol blindness

Is Richard Dawkins symbol blind? He appears to be. He admits that we should not take Bible stories literally, but then refuses to discuss their symbolic meanings. Sarcastically, he scoffs at the mystery of the Trinity, calling it ‘a masterpiece of theological close reasoning’ (p.33). (Dawkins has cleverly noticed that it is inconsistent for an entity to be united and divided at the same time. Firmly he concludes: : ‘It is the mere Abracadabra of the moutebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.’)

Another example of symbol blindness:

Did I just really read this? Sure, we may want to examine, for example, if a novel is based on true events. But this is a different matter than to assess the quality of the story itself. Whether or not the Shroud of Turin stems from Biblical times, is indeed a straightforward scientific question. The meaning of the story of the resurrection of Christ, on a symbolic level, is an entirely different question. (I wonder why I even bother explaining this, since it is so obvious).

The fact that many people, and also many religious people, take the Bible literally, is a wrong but understandable attitude. The Dutch writer Gerard Reve observed the following:

'The Church carries out its teaching literally, and it depends on the intellectual level of the souls whether they prefer to understand it literally, allegorically, or as an inscrutable mystery. […] One cannot retail something from door to door with the message I have to tell you something that is not really true, yet on a certain level very very true. Because what will be the response of the person who opens the door? It will be: ‘Man get lost and get a haircut’.

What are symbols anyway? Dawkins never even considers this question. Again, Reve has an interesting view on the function of symbols in a religion: ‘It [religion] reveals, yet conceals at the same time. It channels an intercourse with the Mystery, yet at the last instance it uses its symbols as heat shields, which prevent us from facing the Mystery itself […]’  A stimulating perspective. These are the kind of considerations I had hoped to read in a book about religion.

Dawkins hates mysteries, which in principle is not a bad attitude for a scientist. But may I assume that he is capable of being moved by a good novel or another work of art? He surely would agree that a good story contains some things that ‘cannot happen in reality’, or wouldn't he? He surely knows the difference between being enchanted and being gullible? Does he know that the majority of religious believers undergo their ceremonies in a state of awe and don’t harm anybody? However, Dawkins does not pay much attention to the psychology of religious experience.

Conclusion

Because of his ambivalence of attitude, Dawkins has written a curiously deformed book. On the one hand, he tries to examine the origin of religion objectively. On the other hand he denounces it as nonsense.  I felt as if I was attending a lecture about the habits of an animal, where the biologist is constantly making asides about how pathetic the creature is: this animal is a disgrace to the entire class of mammals!.

I find it strange that I haven’t read anything about pretty straightforward aspects of religion. Not a thing about the nature of ritual. Nothing about the phenomenon of people’s lives being saved from an addiction by religion. Nothing about the relation between religion and the emotions conveyed by ‘secular art’. What I read about praying, to illustrate once more Dawkins’s approach, was a discussion of a scientific and double-blind study after its statistical effect. Conclusion: the independent variable of prayer does not have an effect on the dependent variable under research. Deep sigh..

The God Delusion is a bestseller. Dawkins was even 'honoured' with two appearances (as a cartoon character) in episodes of South Park (illustration). The book was received by critics with reserved reviews, to say the least. Daniel Dennett, friend and ally on most matters, wrote in his mild review: ‘Now if only he could get on Oprah’s program!’ I could not help but sensing a mild irony here. It got me thinking of other talkshows in which Dawkins could spill his guts. How about Dr. Phil, for some counseling in anger management, and some career advice?

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March 2007