I’m a Richard Dawkins fan from way back. When I was a freshman biology major at Florida State, one of my professors recommended The Selfish Gene, which remains one of my favorite science books. (I was not convinced then, nor am I now, of the usefulness of Dawkins’s meme theory, but that’s a minor quibble.) I also read The Blind Watchmaker, which solidified my opinion of Dawkins as a both a great rationalist and a great poet of nature.
On a whim, I picked up Dawkins’s latest book, The God Delusion at a bookstore and I have enjoyed it tremendously. For one thing, I was reminded of what an extraordinary writer he is. His clarity and subtle humor make reading the book a pleasure, even when the subject matter can be a little uncomfortable. And I think it’s safe to say that there are very few people who will not be challenged by what he has to say.
The title of the books leaves little doubt of its main thesis, that god is a dangerous fiction. Atheism is hardly a new invention and I don’t think that many of Dawkin’s arguments are new either. The early chapters of the book (especially Chapter 4, “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”) serve more the purpose of Darwin’s Origin of Species: they beautifully organize and summarize the major existing arguments. Theistic apologists from Aquinas to Paley get their comuppance, and Pascal’s horribly cynical wager is duly pilloried.
Dawkins sums up his major argument for atheism in the metaphor of “The Ultimate Boeing 747.” It seems that astronomer and science fiction writer Fred Hoyle once asserted that the chance of life originating on Earth is no greater than that of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard assembling a Boeing 747. This analogy has been picked up by creationists (or “intelligent design-ists” as they like to be called nowadays) as a more modern sounding replacement for William Paley’s watch analogy. The idea is the same: extreme complexity seems to require an intelligent creator. Dawkins neatly turns the analogy to signify precisely the opposite. Following the watch/747 metaphor to its reasonable conclusion, most of us would say that the creator of the watch must be more complex than the watch itself. No one, after all, would think that the watch could create the watchmaker. So, if we assert the “irreducible complexity” of the watch, we must assert the same, to an even greater degree, for the watchmaker. So, who created the watchmaker? To Dawkins, god is the ultimate 747, a hypothesis so incredibly complex as to be incredibly improbable.
This argument reminded me of a discussion I once had with a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He could not understand the logical appeal of a creator god. After all, he said, that only raises the question of where the creator came from. Why not just simplify a bit and say that the creation has always been there? It makes no less sense that the same statement about the creator, and doesn’t require us to invent some all-powerful, invisible being.
Okay, so much for god. It’s a human invention and a singularly silly one. So why does this fiction persist, when by rights it should have perished a couple centuries ago during the Enlightment? Dawkins tackles this question in Chapter 5, “The Roots of Religion.” Here he advances some of the book’s most interesting arguments. Particularly compelling are his arguments for “religion as a by-product of something else.”
When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question. We need to rewrite the question in a more helpful way. Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does.
Dawkins illustrates the principle using the example of moths, whose tendency toward self-immolation can hardly be regarded as adaptive in its own right. He shows how this non-adaptive behavior is a side-effect of a navigational scheme that works perfectly well except in the relatively rare case of there being a harmful artificial light source in the area. A similar example is the persistence of the sickle-cell anemia allele in human populations due to its anti-malarial side-effect.
Dawkins posits a few possibilities for what the “something else” might be. Maybe religiosity is a side-effect of our pair-bonding instinct. After all, analogies between romantic/sexual love and the love of god abound throughout literature. Similarly, it has often been noted that some of god’s more psychotic moments in the Old Testament resemble the acts of a jealous lover (remember the golden calf?).
Another intriguing possibility (and one that Dawkins seems himself to favor, although he declines to throw his weight behind any particular hypothesis in this area), is that religion is a by-product of childhood gullibility.
More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you.
Technically, this doesn’t get at the origin of religion, but it seems like a plausible mechanism to account for its stubborn persistence in the face of conflicting evidence.
Most of what I have talked about so far will cause little consternation to the modern atheist. But Dawkins is not going to let the “choir” to which he is preaching get off so easily. He follows American philosopher Daniel Dennett in distinguishing between “belief” and “belief in belief.” He notes that even among atheists, the latter condition persists. Even if we hold no religious beliefs ourselves, we tend to believe unquestioningly in the special status of the religious beliefs of others. The reasons for this seem to vary. Dawkins quotes Peter Medawar as expressing a regret for his lack of religious faith, as if faith itself is somehow intrinsically valuable.
I suspect that in the early 21st century “belief in belief” is most often couched in terms of “diversity” and cultural relativism. Dawkins quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey regarding an American documentary on the Incas: “The message of the program was … that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention—another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism.” Somehow the fact that it was associated with a religion, no matter how barbarous, made the practice permissible, or even admirable. Had the young victim been murdered by the exact same method for political reasons, the documentary would have no doubt taken a different tone.
The Inca example is, of course, extreme, and involves ancient history. Time, after all, can render the horrific strangely picturesque. Few modern Americans, I like to think, would defend human sacrifice for religious reasons. Dawkins provides a more modern, and more thought provoking example: the Amish in America. Specifically, he discusses the 1972 Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which Amish parents asserted their right to withdraw their children from high school at age 16. The parents won the case, with the majority opinion stating that “compulsory school attendance to age 16 for Amish children carries with it a very real threat of undermining the Amish community and religious practices as they exist today.” In other words, the Amish religion was deemed inherently valuable, even if its survival demanded the systematic withholding of knowledge, education, and opportunities from the community’s children. Why? What does the Amish religion contribute to humanity that is worth imposing a crippling ignorance on children? Cute buggies on the roads? Good pies? Warm fuzzy feelings about our nation’s “diversity”?
It is no accident that Dawkins’s examples of the real or potential harm in our “belief in belief” turn on the well-being of children. Dawkins regards children as the most vulnerable of theism’s victims. Along with the Incan sacrifice victim, the undereducated Amish children, and the many victims of sexual abuse by Christian clergy, he counts all those who grow up with the needless fear that inevitably stems from theistic beliefs. He quotes a letter from an American Catholic woman, who at age 7 suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest and was also told that her Protestant friend who died would go to hell.
Being fondled by the priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a 7 year old) as “yucky” while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest—but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell.
While we conduct witch hunts against such rare threats as Internet predators and pedophiles, as a society we ignore the home-grown psychological abuse inflicted on the young in the name of god. Touching a child sexually is, quite rightly, punishable by jail time, but brainwashing that same child to believe that there is an invisible man monitoring all his thoughts and ready to punish him if they don’t pass muster is perfectly okay.
In short, Dawkins not only makes the case for god’s non-existence, but also argues convincingly that theism is overwhelmingly negative in its effects, especially towards children. The book is a powerful argument in favor of rationalism and one of the most challenging and thoughtful works of non-fiction that I have read in a long time.