Socrates
February 8th 2004, 10:22 PM
A Passion for Evolution
By H. Allen Orr
Richard Dawkins
(click for larger image)
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 263 pp., $24.00
New York Review of Books
www.nybooks.com/articles/16920
[Note: "I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." -- Just shows how leading popularizers of evolutionary "science" can get away with rank antitheistic bigotry -- :soc:]
....
Dawkins's passion for evolution is perhaps matched only by his hatred of religion. Indeed Dawkins has railed so often against religion that his reputation as a God-basher may now nearly rival his reputation as a science-booster. A Devil's Chaplain leaves little doubt that the reputation is well deserved. Arguing that those who have masked their contempt for religion must speak out, Dawkins lets loose. He announces that religion is a "dangerous collective delusion" and a "malignant infection." Acknowledging that this position may seem "contemptuous or even hostile," he insists that "it is both." Asked why he is so hostile to organized religion, he answers that he's not particularly fond of disorganized religion either. Indeed:
"I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."
I suspect most readers will remember A Devil's Chaplain more for its broadsides against religion than for its defenses of Darwinism. What readers may not realize is that Dawkins's position on religion reflects another of his long-running disagreements with Stephen Jay Gould. Gould believed that science—in its frequent excursions into ethics and its vague denunciations of religion—had overstepped its proper bounds. He also believed that religion—in its sporadic pronouncements on empirical matters— had overstepped its bounds. Gould's solution, which he championed at book length, was simple: we must distinguish the legitimate sphere of science (the physical universe) from the legitimate sphere of religion (meaning, value, and ethics) and we must ensure that neither intrudes on the other.
I must admit that I didn't find Gould's defense of religion entirely convincing. To my surprise, though, I find Dawkins's attacks on it even less so. The problem is not that Dawkins's conclusion is necessarily wrong; the problem is that the arguments that lead him there are surprisingly shaky.
His first argument is that religion is just plain false. The events spoken of in sacred texts—six days of Creation and three days to Resurrection—did not occur. So why then do so many people believe them? Dawkins thinks he knows the answer: religious beliefs are viruses. Religious ideas, like all ideas, are memes; but religious memes, unlike many, are useless "mind parasites." Religious beliefs exploit the fact that children's minds are machines that copy—and believe—anything they're told. So just as desktop computers can be infected by computer viruses, young human minds can be infected by religion viruses.
But if religious ideas are viruses, then why aren't scientific ideas? After all, we foist all manner of scientific ideas onto young minds and they soak them up with astonishing efficiency. But Dawkins insists that scientific ideas are not viruses. They are more like mental adaptations:
Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeat-ability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on.
I confess that I find this argument astonishing. Why in the world should conformity to scientific criteria decide what counts as a "good, useful" meme? Why aren't good, useful memes the ones that make you happy, or give you a sense of belonging, or increase the odds of having cooperative friends about? If anything, these criteria would seem more natural than Dawkins's. But the deeper point is that there are no natural criteria. The whole point of memes is that a good meme is one that increases in frequency, period. Now we, as armchair memeticists, are free to partition successful memes into those that are "useful" vs. those that aren't, but someone has to decide: useful for what? For describing nature? Science is a useful meme. For building community? Religion is a useful meme. In the end, Dawkins's religion-is-a-virus argument comes perilously close to tautology.
Dawkins's second problem with religion is that it's the root of much evil. A Devil's Chaplain is run through with the murder and mayhem that follows on the heels of religion, and the Crusades never seem far from his mind.[6] But Dawkins's history seems curiously Victorian. In his drive to show that religion is the source of so much evil, he must obviously confront the awkward fact that the twentieth century was largely a chronicle of secular evil. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were atheists and Hitler wasn't particularly pious. Dawkins deals with the problem in an especially simple way: he ignores it. Except for a mention of Hitler, he sidesteps what is arguably the key lesson of the twentieth century—that secular ideologies, including atheist ones, can inspire atrocity and genocide as readily as any religious creed. And Dawkins's treatment of Hitler is remarkable: arguing "please don't trot out Hitler as a counter-example," he notes that Hitler never renounced his Roman Catholicism and quotes from an obscure speech in which the future Führer emphasized that he was a good Christian boy. Dawkins's normally robust skepticism seems to fail him here and he's silent on the obvious interpretation—that Hitler knew how to manipulate a Catholic crowd.
The point is not that religious views don't sometimes lead, directly or indirectly, to evil. Of course they do. The point is that they have no monopoly: nationalist views (Italian fascism), economic views (child labor), and even scientific views (eugenics) have all had horrid consequences. Now in the last case Dawkins would surely argue that it was the abuse of science that led to acts of evil (forced sterilization, racist immigration policies). And I would agree. But if you allow this kind of move for science, it's a bit unclear why you don't allow it for religion too: Did Jesus really intend the Crusades?
Though he's less explicit about it, Dawkins's third problem with religion seems to be that it's been a thorn in the side of science; it has stood in the way of truth. He's fond, for instance, of pointing to the Galileo affair and he never tires of ridiculing Rome's late reconciliation with Darwin. But these jabs are potentially misleading. The popular impression of long warfare between Church and science—in which an ignorant institution fought to keep a fledgling science from escaping the Dark Ages—is nonsense, little more than Victorian propaganda. The truth, which emerged only from the last century of scholarship, is almost entirely unknown among scientists: the medieval Church was a leading patron of science; most theologians studied "natural philosophy"; and the medieval curriculum was perhaps the most scientific in Western history.[7] There were of course some skirmishes between Church and science (the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, the Galileo affair) and the Church made a number of stupid decisions, but it's not entirely clear that these were more egregious than those made by secular institutions (e.g., Lysenko's suppression of Mendelian genetics).
....
By H. Allen Orr
Richard Dawkins
(click for larger image)
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 263 pp., $24.00
New York Review of Books
www.nybooks.com/articles/16920
[Note: "I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." -- Just shows how leading popularizers of evolutionary "science" can get away with rank antitheistic bigotry -- :soc:]
....
Dawkins's passion for evolution is perhaps matched only by his hatred of religion. Indeed Dawkins has railed so often against religion that his reputation as a God-basher may now nearly rival his reputation as a science-booster. A Devil's Chaplain leaves little doubt that the reputation is well deserved. Arguing that those who have masked their contempt for religion must speak out, Dawkins lets loose. He announces that religion is a "dangerous collective delusion" and a "malignant infection." Acknowledging that this position may seem "contemptuous or even hostile," he insists that "it is both." Asked why he is so hostile to organized religion, he answers that he's not particularly fond of disorganized religion either. Indeed:
"I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."
I suspect most readers will remember A Devil's Chaplain more for its broadsides against religion than for its defenses of Darwinism. What readers may not realize is that Dawkins's position on religion reflects another of his long-running disagreements with Stephen Jay Gould. Gould believed that science—in its frequent excursions into ethics and its vague denunciations of religion—had overstepped its proper bounds. He also believed that religion—in its sporadic pronouncements on empirical matters— had overstepped its bounds. Gould's solution, which he championed at book length, was simple: we must distinguish the legitimate sphere of science (the physical universe) from the legitimate sphere of religion (meaning, value, and ethics) and we must ensure that neither intrudes on the other.
I must admit that I didn't find Gould's defense of religion entirely convincing. To my surprise, though, I find Dawkins's attacks on it even less so. The problem is not that Dawkins's conclusion is necessarily wrong; the problem is that the arguments that lead him there are surprisingly shaky.
His first argument is that religion is just plain false. The events spoken of in sacred texts—six days of Creation and three days to Resurrection—did not occur. So why then do so many people believe them? Dawkins thinks he knows the answer: religious beliefs are viruses. Religious ideas, like all ideas, are memes; but religious memes, unlike many, are useless "mind parasites." Religious beliefs exploit the fact that children's minds are machines that copy—and believe—anything they're told. So just as desktop computers can be infected by computer viruses, young human minds can be infected by religion viruses.
But if religious ideas are viruses, then why aren't scientific ideas? After all, we foist all manner of scientific ideas onto young minds and they soak them up with astonishing efficiency. But Dawkins insists that scientific ideas are not viruses. They are more like mental adaptations:
Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeat-ability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on.
I confess that I find this argument astonishing. Why in the world should conformity to scientific criteria decide what counts as a "good, useful" meme? Why aren't good, useful memes the ones that make you happy, or give you a sense of belonging, or increase the odds of having cooperative friends about? If anything, these criteria would seem more natural than Dawkins's. But the deeper point is that there are no natural criteria. The whole point of memes is that a good meme is one that increases in frequency, period. Now we, as armchair memeticists, are free to partition successful memes into those that are "useful" vs. those that aren't, but someone has to decide: useful for what? For describing nature? Science is a useful meme. For building community? Religion is a useful meme. In the end, Dawkins's religion-is-a-virus argument comes perilously close to tautology.
Dawkins's second problem with religion is that it's the root of much evil. A Devil's Chaplain is run through with the murder and mayhem that follows on the heels of religion, and the Crusades never seem far from his mind.[6] But Dawkins's history seems curiously Victorian. In his drive to show that religion is the source of so much evil, he must obviously confront the awkward fact that the twentieth century was largely a chronicle of secular evil. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were atheists and Hitler wasn't particularly pious. Dawkins deals with the problem in an especially simple way: he ignores it. Except for a mention of Hitler, he sidesteps what is arguably the key lesson of the twentieth century—that secular ideologies, including atheist ones, can inspire atrocity and genocide as readily as any religious creed. And Dawkins's treatment of Hitler is remarkable: arguing "please don't trot out Hitler as a counter-example," he notes that Hitler never renounced his Roman Catholicism and quotes from an obscure speech in which the future Führer emphasized that he was a good Christian boy. Dawkins's normally robust skepticism seems to fail him here and he's silent on the obvious interpretation—that Hitler knew how to manipulate a Catholic crowd.
The point is not that religious views don't sometimes lead, directly or indirectly, to evil. Of course they do. The point is that they have no monopoly: nationalist views (Italian fascism), economic views (child labor), and even scientific views (eugenics) have all had horrid consequences. Now in the last case Dawkins would surely argue that it was the abuse of science that led to acts of evil (forced sterilization, racist immigration policies). And I would agree. But if you allow this kind of move for science, it's a bit unclear why you don't allow it for religion too: Did Jesus really intend the Crusades?
Though he's less explicit about it, Dawkins's third problem with religion seems to be that it's been a thorn in the side of science; it has stood in the way of truth. He's fond, for instance, of pointing to the Galileo affair and he never tires of ridiculing Rome's late reconciliation with Darwin. But these jabs are potentially misleading. The popular impression of long warfare between Church and science—in which an ignorant institution fought to keep a fledgling science from escaping the Dark Ages—is nonsense, little more than Victorian propaganda. The truth, which emerged only from the last century of scholarship, is almost entirely unknown among scientists: the medieval Church was a leading patron of science; most theologians studied "natural philosophy"; and the medieval curriculum was perhaps the most scientific in Western history.[7] There were of course some skirmishes between Church and science (the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, the Galileo affair) and the Church made a number of stupid decisions, but it's not entirely clear that these were more egregious than those made by secular institutions (e.g., Lysenko's suppression of Mendelian genetics).
....