The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion left me with mixed feelings. He makes some great points, but he can be awfully smug at times and his reasoning is sloppy in places. That said though, it's a worthwhile read.

The first thing to realize is that, when Dawkins' espouses atheism, he is not denying that there is a spiritual dimension to life. That's an important point, and one that believers often overlook or refuse to accept. In the beginning of The God Delusion, Dawkins makes this clear and, when he denies the existence of a God, he's referring to the personal God that intervenes in the world, the sort of God envisioned in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. He doesn't even believe that Buddhism is a religion. He thinks that it is a code of behavior. To his mind, pantheism is "sex-up" atheism, and deism is atheism for those who are not willing to take that last step and abandon God. I have no quarrel with any of this. It makes eminent good sense to me.

I also have to agree with Dawkins when he wonders about why we tend to give religious beliefs such respect. People are perfectly willing to argue and debate the most sensitive of political topics, but a person's religious beliefs are considered out of bounds, even when they are utterly ridiculous. Come on, why are Christians given a pass when they claim that Jesus rose after three days in the grave? That is such utter nonsense, and there is no evidence for it whatsoever. Not only that, the whole notion of accepting things on faith is ridiculous. Here's an example inllustrating the point. Suppose I believed that we are living in an elaborate simulation being run on some supercomputer. The big bang was the moment that the program was started. Evolution is just a reflection of the genetic algorithms that underlie the computer's program. Let's say that I even agree that Christ rose after three days in the grave, but I claim that the reason for that was that the programmers didn't like the way the simulation was going so they intervened. Now suppose I clung to this belief with great fervency, and suppose that I was positively evangelical about spreading my opinions. The fact is that most people would consider me deluded and in need of psychiatric treatment. However, if I held Christian beliefs with equal fervency, there would be no problem, even though there is no more evidence for those beliefs.

One of the most important points that Dawkins makes is that religion is not necessary for morality. Nietzsche said that God is dead so all things are permitted. That's true in a strictly logical sense, and it drives some to hysteria. If people didn't have religion they would rob, rape and kill. The result would be total chaos. Dawkins makes a couple of good points here. In the first place, the evidence is that atheists are no more or less moral than believers. The human race evolved to live in small groupings of a hundred or so. A person who was born into such a community could expect to know and live with those same people for the rest of his life. He couldn't afford to get into their bad graces. A golden-rule ethic naturally evolved. Those who did not live by it would be shunned or even killed.

Nietzsche's comment still needs to be addressed though. When he said that all things are permitted, he didn't mean that they were permitted in fact, but only in the strictly logical sense. The deeper meaning of that statement is that there is no God who can put his imprimatur on our code of behavior. We, as a human community, have to accept full and complete responsibility for our behavior. God, or the Devil, or the Bible told me to do it is not acceptable.

Dawkins makes many other good points that I won't go into. However, there's one thing I'd never thought of. At one point, he wonders why monotheism is preferable to polytheism. In Western cultures, it's simply accepted as fact. The more advanced societies believe in the existence of only one God. The question becomes, why? Polytheism certainly seems to come to us more naturally. Catholicism, which is perhaps the most dominant Christian sect, embraces a de facto polytheism with its devotions to the Virgin Mary and various saints. So why the monotheism? The answer isn't simple and I won't go into it here, but it's something to think about.

One of the big weaknesses of Dawkins' book is his failure to understand the historical, political and sociological dimensions of belief systems. It is his contention that religions have been responsible for most of the great cruelties of the past. There were the Crusades, the Inquisition, Joshua's slaughter of the native inhabitants of Israel, and Islam's depredations during the Middle Ages. Absent religion, Dawkins doesn't believe that these things would have happened. I think that's naive. Political leaders often exploit religion to garner popular support for bloodthirsty projects, and religion should be held culpable for that, but it's naive to think that these projects would disappear if there were no religion. Ambitious political leaders would simply encourage other secular belief systems as Hitler did in Germany and Stalin in Russia. Those two examples pose a problem for Dawkins and he attempts to explain it away by claiming that Hitler and Stalin were actually believers. His arguments don't wash.

Dawkins can also be sloppy when it comes to the philosophical. In my opinion, he bungles his explanations of the flaws in the arguments for the existence of God. Take the ontological argument. In essence, it says that if God is the perfect being, then he must exist because it is more perfect to exist than not to exist. Dawkins says that the flaw in the argument is that there's no reason to believe that it's more perfect to exist, than not to exist. That's off the mark and, if you accept Dawkins' argument, you'll just get caught up in all kinds of word play. The flaw lies in the very conception of existence. As the logicians would say, existence isn't a predicate. In less technical terms, existence isn't a description. You can say that according to your understanding of God, he is all-knowing and all-powerful. Those are descriptions of your God. Existence isn't such a description. It's an assertion and it neither adds to nor subtracts from the concept.

Dawkins can also be smug, and it is irritating. For example, he makes a lot of use of his notion of the meme, and when someone holds a belief that he disagrees with, he often refers to them as infected with the meme. However, he never uses such pejorative terms when referring to beliefs with which he agrees. It is only those who disagree with him who are infected. This smugness doesn't just extend to his criticism of religion. He is also dismissive of those who don't accept his opinion on other scientific matters, like the multiverse and anthropic priniciple of physics. Those two concepts are not universally accepted among physicists and many regard them as nonsense, but Dawkins seems to be of the opinion that only the benighted could disagree.

There is one very controversial statement that Dawkins makes that I wholeheartedly agree with. He says that it is tantamount to abuse to raise a child in a religion. I was brought up as a strict Catholic and, after that experience, I couldn't agree more. I'm not talking about bringing up children with an awareness of religion. Parents could tell their children something like the following. This is what we believe, and here's why. They could go on to explain, but tell the child that he should use his own mind and decide for himself. That's not what Dawkins means about bringing up a child in religion. He is referring to something more like what I went through, where you were required to adopt the religion of your parents, required to participate in services, and required to receive indoctrination into the religion. When it comes to that, I endorse Dawkins' position. It is tantamount to abuse.

Dawkins has come under a lot of criticism, from the expected sources, of course, but also from publications like The New York Review of Books. In the January 11 issue, H. Allen Orr slams the book. Some of the criticisms are deserved, but what really irks Orr is that Dawkins refuses to take religion seriously. Here are a few of his comments. "The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way....You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book...no attempt to follow the philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions..." My response to that is, so what? If one is denying the existence of God, what else is there to discuss? All of those sophisticated theological arguments and speculations are only so much nonsense. Orr seems to believe that there are rational reasons to believe. Bullshit. Faith is a variety of superstition and I challenge anyone to show me any significant difference between the two.

Dawkins' book may not be the best one on the subject of atheism versus theism. I've read that Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism is better, and I intend to check it out, but I do think that Dawkins' book is worth the read.