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I keep coming across Dawkins, who annoys the socks off me and who's clearly in a social darwinist camp which has a massive influence over how the world and society are seen. (See 2 January 2008)
This page also makes as good a home as any for one or two bits of amateur theology which don't fit on the 'Religion & Politics' page.
My Own Beliefs.
I'm being rather inconsistent on this page - perhaps playing at being Devil's Advocate. Sometimes I need to test myself and my own beliefs by adopting opposing viewpoints. That's my excuse, anyway.
I've added to the item on Dawkins a couple of times: most recently 26 Feb.
Come back Diocletian - all is forgiven!
19 February 2008 .
I like to believe of myself that I am liberal and tolerant. However... there's a side of me, normally hidden behind the veneer of civilisation, which I feel like letting out for once.
The End Of The World Bus Tour, on BBC1 this evening, is a film about a 10-day coach tour of Israel. Although the American passengers are from all over that country - they aren't members of any sort of club or group - they're all Christians, sharing a belief in the imminent apocalypse and their own forthcoming rapture. For all I know, they're Godly people; but that's not how they come across: rather, they seem as smug and narrow-minded bunch as you could ever meet, pouring out trite nonsense with evangelical fervour.
Particularly sad is a 16-year-old girl who shows no concept whatever of love for the human race - but who is certain of her own goodness.
I don't know if these people have any understanding of how unpleasant their blissful self-satisfaction can be... if anyone comes close to telling them, they have a passage from scripture to explain that the chosen of God will always be mocked - but of course that isn't what it's about at all.
Between these people and the imams who teach children to be bombs, I really can't see much of a gap.
PS: I wrote this item in a spirit of exasperation, and not really with the intent to publish it. When I read through it, I realised just how offensive it is. I was about to zap it... when it came to me that what I have written here is no more offensive than the opinion widely held by a certain type of Christian - represented by those on the bus - that there are those of us who haven't been 'saved', or who are Palestinians, and that we're going to rot for all eternity in their Hell. So I decided instead to save what I've written. My friends will just have to realise that I'm not as kindly as they think I am.
Please note: there has been no disrespect addressed to God here, and none is intended. Unless of course either the tourists or the preachers of death are correct about the His nature, in which case He (he) isn't worth respecting anyway. Give me the inclusive, invitational God of Dr. Rowan Williams or the Sufis, any day.
The True Glory Of Creation.
03 January 2008 .
Bishop Ussher and the creationists have it that God created the world in October, 4004 BC.
-/-
Years ago, I came across the idea of condensing the geological history of our planet - the history posited by the scientists - into a single year, so that the formation of the planet nearly five billion years ago started at one second after midnight on the first of January, and we are now in the last second of midnight on the 31st December.
The universe is about three years old, then, and - on current scientific understanding - is good for a couple of decades, yet.
If I remember rightly, life on Earth was starting quite early - March or even February; the conquest of the land would have been about September/October, and the era of the dinosaurs started early in December. One day equals something less than 15 million years, so the dinosaurs were at their peak on Boxing day before disappearing soon after.
One hour represents, very approximately, 600 000 years, one minute about 10 000. On this scale, Jesus lived about twelve seconds before midnight - i.e. twelve seconds ago, Mohammed about eight seconds ago.
So: this planet, which has known life for ten months on a scale which has the dinosaurs here within the last week, may be largely bereft of life through our doing within the next second or two.
-/-
Back to the creationists. If they are right, then on our scale the planet - and, in effect, the universe - has existed for just 36 seconds, not long enough to brush your teeth.
How can 36 seconds sing to the glory of God, compared to the years which the scientists allow?
Dawkins.
02 January 2008 .
I knew that 'The God Delusion' (On the Nature of God's Self-Awareness, 31 December 2007, below) would get under my skin, and so it has. Since I have just essayed a self-assessment of this site in which I rather concluded that I'm not sticking to my own aims for it, I should not really be writing this item which has no bearing at all on them. But I am. So there.
For those of you who have not come across Dawkins, he is an evangelical atheist - sharing more than a few characteristics with other evangelicals.
First reactions:
Then:
Incidentally, his argument against the idea of 'moving cause' (in effect that if everything has a moving cause then something previous to God would have to have created God) don't hold water: it is perfectly conceivable that God could have created himself. I actually wouldn't suggest time travel too seriously, but it would certainly be an explanation easy to understand
I've forgotten most of the comments I was going to make, which demonstrates immediately that I am less with it than Dawkins is; but I'm going to break my own rule and add to this item on future days, if ideas occur to me, under today's date.
That was Wednesday. Now it's Friday.
I thought at first that the battalions which Dawkins had mustered were rather weak. I can see now that he did muster them better than I could. (Mind you, he is a professional atheist, and therefore presumably has the necessary time...) But, frankly, they still don't seem very strong.
Some thoughts as I read the book, as they spring to mind now.
I referred to joke Aunt Sallys which he set up. I have the impression that behind the joke, it is what he really is doing - setting arguments for God so that they present as Aunt Sallys; no doubt he would claim that that's simply what they are. E.g:
In this connection: my understanding is that the Old Testament is a record, not a history, of our growing understanding of and with God. The inconsistencies not only fail to say anything about the non-existence of God; they fail even to demonstrate that the Bible is not the work of God. As one matures, one might recognise that the inconsistencies (which, after all, are pretty glaring) are God's way of telling us to look for something deeper than a simple story.
My take on the Bible is that God actually tells us this. He does not go in for asking 'Why?', and when He does it seems to be rhetorical; but in Genesis Ch III He certainly asks Adam questions such as "Where art thou?" and "What is this thing that thou hast done?". Might we not learn from this that God doesn't always know, but that He does understand.
I think I have to admit at this point what may well be all too obvious: I am not a theologian and I am not educated in the subject. So, my arguments may, for all I know, be very simplistic or childish: but, and here's the point, however ill-informed these arguments are, they go some way to demolishing Dawkins. If even I can do it, it suggests that an awful lot of Dawkins' book is wasted.
Enough for now, so these as parting thoughts: Dawkins (so far) goes most of the way to demonstrating that God may not be necessary to the running of the universe - but I can't see that he goes from there to proving that that means there is therefore no god; and,
Intellectual challenges against how people perceive God, no matter how successful, are not the same thing as challenges to the existence of God himself.
Saturday:
I seem to have gone through a shift of perception. From the title of the book, I at first assumed that Dawkins was attempting to prove that there is no God. I've had to adjust to the view that he is trying to prove that it is organised religion, religion and our personal beliefs which are delusional. In fact, not a shift: right now I seem to be hung in a loop between those two perceptions.
I'm not clear, right now, whether Dawkins would accept that if there is a God, then any beliefs we have may be mistaken, but they are not delusional.
So, two thoughts:
I claim to be reasonably intelligent when I work at it; I say that to show that I mean no false modesty when I admit that I'm not, however, very clever. But the more I read his book, the less I'm certain that Dawkins is either as clever or as intelligent as he thinks he is. It's a pity that I'm not a clearer thinker; but while I'm a plodder, I think I'll get there eventually.
This has led me to another problem. Dawkins is an Oxford University professor: of itself, that doesn't deny me the right to argue with him and, in any case, part of our cultural belief is that we ought not to let ourselves be over-intimidated by someone's eminence... but I certainly wouldn't argue with a surgeon in the operating theatre, and I'm not arrogant enough to imagine myself at Oxford's level of debate. So, I have to consider the possibility that I'm just missing the point.
On another matter: I posited that God might be omnisapient rather than omniscient. This suggestion left me rather uneasy and, upon reflection, I wonder if the better understanding might be that God, having the power of omniscience, might rather be choosing to be omnisapient, possibly in order to allow His creation (intelligent life) to have free will unfettered by His foreknowledge.
As argument rather than theology: Dawkins says that God cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient, since He would be unable to make a decision which He already knew that He won't be making (or, as it were, vice versa). My suggestion that God could choose not to be omniscient, despite having the power, would neutralise that argument, too. Perhaps He chooses to allow Himself free will.
Please excuse the rather clumsy way I am expressing these ideas. [I realise that whether they are good ideas or not, they are so obvious that they cannot be new. However, they are original to me - the result of my own unassisted thinking - and I'm moderately proud of them.]
Wednesday (assorted thoughts of no great import!):
1) I've been trying to remember who wrote this, and in what context: The world was created by God three days ago, together with all the evidence to prove that it has existed for millions of years and, of course, our memories. (I think it was G. K. Chesterton, who thought deeply about creation, but who would of course have been joking here.) Such an argument, while (presumably!) nonsensical, could never be proved wrong. Which simply goes to show (in the most facile way) that trying to prove the non-existence of God is a waste of time anyway.
2) I was tempted at times to write notes in the margin of Dawkins' book prior to preparing a good argument: if it were ever likely that I'd meet him I might do so; but it really isn't worth it, because (pace Oxford) I think it's not a scholarly book and there's no meat to argue against. That's not to say that what he says isn't sometimes interesting and/or rational or even true. It is to say that he isn't clear what he's arguing about (God, religion or both) and, while he may make some people reconsider some aspects of their beliefs, I doubt that he is going to sway many people who were not swaying already. (Sorry, I'm being a bit repetitive, I know: but the major point of writing this is to help myself focus on the arguments.)
3) Dawkins repeatedly affirms that he isn't a fundamentalist, on the grounds that, being scientific, he would switch sides if presented with convincing evidence. He knows perfectly well that he won't be given such evidence in his lifetime (unless he is trying rather unsubtly to tempt God...) So, whatever he may claim, he is a de facto fundamentalist - and he comes across like one..
4) Sometimes Dawkins not only confuses God and religion (deliberately or otherwise); even while distinguishing between religion and morality, I think he manages to mix those two up, too. He explains his pro-choice view on abortion, with great rational explanation about how a foetus has no central nervous system (and therefore cannot be realistically be murdered). He tries to place the pro-life lobby in the religion camp, and is quite ill-mannered (but not successfully scathing) about pro-lifers. In fact, one's position on abortion may be founded, I believe, on purely (rational) morality: my own position is that I am appalled by abortion, not only because of the killing of the child but because of the damage done to the mother. I'm obviously not pure pro-life, since I might accept abortion to save the life of the mother, but morally I am against abortion. [However, there is another morality, which says that whatever I may feel about another person's opinion on some subjects, it is not for me (or the government, or the religious) to interfere; so I don't.] I would imagine that Dawkins would find the parenthesis perfectly acceptable; but my point is that it is an opinion on the 'morality' of abortion which disagrees with his but which has made no mention of God.
5) Off in another direction: Dawkins is appalled by the sacrifice which Abraham was willing to make of Isaac, his son: he can find no positive message in God's demand, nor in the imminent act, nor much in God's last-minute revocation. [I admit that my problem, when I was a child, was to wonder how Abraham knew that it was God demanding the sacrifice (rather than, say, the devil deceiving him).] Let me offer one possibility which demonstrates that, even in lay terms, there is possibly a positive message to the story:
6) Dawkins claims that only religion demands unqualified respect and deference from everyone. It would, however, be more accurate to say that in today's world, religion is simply the most successful mind-set to make such a demand. In the 20th. century, communism made precisely the same demand with, in a large part of the world, just as much success as any religion. But then, I would be amongst those who suggest that communism was in effect a religion anyway - think of the Russians who admit that they would linger over their pictures of Stalin with worship and adoration. So how about Diana-worship? There are plenty of families and communities in the UK where to profess disbelief in Diana's sanctity will earn you exactly the same reaction as atheism will in the US bible-belt: then again, maybe that's virtually a religion as well.
7) Dawkins isn't factually wrong in much of what he says - in fact a great deal of it is unarguable; I have simply been reacting to areas where I think he's weak, and I think he's weakest of all in his ambitions for the book.
Early on, he says in almost so many words that he hopes that the book might convert some readers to atheism, and clearly he'd feel that he'd be doing a favour to anyone who did so convert - in the opposite direction but otherwise very like those nineteenth century priests in Rome whom he hates so vividly. So the question is, whom does the book help and how?
Let's be realistic: Belief is belief. Many of those who read the book will be firm atheists already; the book may provide them with arguments to bolster their belief - like a theological work for a Christian; but I don't think that is Dawkins' aim.
Others will believe equally firmly in their religious faith; I suggest that if any such should waver in their faith because of this book, then their faith was already pretty shaky. If Dawkins has helped them to think things through, and they find an understanding of the universe thereby, then, yes, he's done them a favour...except that, because I think he hasn't proved anything beyond that some of us may be mistaken in our specific beliefs, I think that conversions to atheism will - on the basis of this book at least - be weak. It all comes down to this: he has not proved the non-existence of God and he therefore can't prove that religious faith is a delusion (and vice versa, I suppose).
It's those in the middle, the agnostics, the don't-knows and the don't-cares, who are really the field for Dawkins' battle. Of them, I would have thought that two types would be most likely to read the book, intellectuals and searchers (Certainly not the don't-cares!). I just don't believe the book will sway the intellectuals, for the reasons I've been going on about and more; so that's them out. Searchers, on the whole, will be searching for a faith of the heart, not of the mind: I suspect that cold science won't meet their needs at all.
I guess that may leave those who think they might be, or want to be, atheists, looking to Dawkins' book for a rationale to support their direction. The book will, I hope, help that small number: but, their atheism, if it happens, won't be because of the book, but because that is what they will believe - because that is what they are on the way to believing already.
More to come...
(28 Jan:) I've just been looking at an article by Oliver James (The Lack Of 'God-Given Talents'. 28 January 2008 - Classified - Social Darwinism). I don't know if I've read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or just heard so much about it that I think I have; but Mr. James' article has brought home to me just how much Dawkins influences and justifies some of the nastier aspects of social darwinism in our society - enough that I realise that my instinct to write about Dawkins here may have been right after all.
Mr. James seems to have as much respect for Dawkins 'science' as I do. It's so pleasant to read thoughts which concur with one's own!
(1 Feb:) Dawkins will have it that those of us who are rational will be 'scientific' in our outlook, because science provides us with a demonstrable framework of evidence, etc.
But... If I, as a lay person, believe that the world started with Adam and Eve, I do so because 'authority' tells me so. If I, as a lay person, believe that it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, I still have to do so because 'authority' tells me so. In neither case is there a realistic possibility of my being able to prove or disprove the thesis, because I simply don't have the skills - at some point I simply have to have faith in either case. Dawkins may say that there is the possibility, by study, that eventually I could come to understand the science behind any thesis (Big Bang, or evolution, for example). But no matter how informed I may be, eventually I have to accept the vast mass of scientific knowledge on faith - by the reports of others - just as I would with religion, because life simply isn't long enough for anything else.
And it isn't as if the scientists get their facts right all the time, let alone their morality: they have too often fudged their own science, or misunderstood it, or even gone every step of the way punctiliously and still got it wrong. Medicine, and the drug companies, are where we sometimes see these difficulties at closest hand. The scientists might claim that these are human failings, or that we haven't yet reached a certain point of understanding in such and such a field; sounding just like the theologians, really.
I should make it clear that I am a scientist by nature: I studied physics and chemistry up to university level, and I have a perfectly good grasp of scientific method - and of the philosophy behind it. It is precisely my familiarity with the concept of scientific method which allows me to begin to understand, too, some of its limitations. I'm happy to accept those limitations and live within them; I try to use 'science' as a guide, as I do logic, without believing that they are the only guides in my life.
The one respect in which science is spiritually satisfying in an area where religion often is not is, as Dawkins says, its willingness to abandon ideas that have failed the tests - it willingness to acknowledge changes in thinking. Even here, however, I believe this has a lot to do with human nature: the Koran may seem to be a set text, and to demand a certain morality; 'The Origin of Species' may not be so, or not seem to be. One might suppose, therefore, that a particular type of person would be more attracted to the one than to the other. However, the best of the religious philosophers, accepting that God Himself may be unchanging, nevertheless develop our understanding and relationship with Him almost day by day. (Just as scientists may accept that the laws of the universe are unchanging, although they expect their understanding to change all the time.) And Darwin has led to a rigidity of thinking as ossified as that of any cleric: if you don't believe it, look at the growing harshness of Thatch/Blairism and the social evolutionary philosophy that underlies that.
More to come - this is a bone I can't leave alone - but I'll leave a reading homework for you. Unexpectedly, I've come back to Olaf Stapledon's 'Last and First Men'. (I don't think I'd thought about that book in years before I started this site, but it's obviously had more philosophical effect on me than I realised. Or something.) In the early part of the story, he posits the development of a scientific elite, the Sacred Order of Scientists, who, in the face of war and general stupidity, finally take over the reins of world power (it is a book very much of its time, but none the less valid for it). The SOS exercise their control through the possession of a great secret, never quite specified but the source of all the (energy) power the world might need, which they will release when the human race is ready for it and needs it. The development of the SOS as a priesthood and how they come to face their ultimate test is, if you like, the homework. What I really mean, of course, is that understanding and knowledge, whether spiritual, scientific or whatever, are what we make of them. And I do not believe that Dawkins and his mob have grasped that.
Added Feb 9: Did Dawkins, once again challenging the strength of people's faith in God (or, in this case, in the after-life), suggest that people were in no hurry to die in order to get to Heaven? Surely he didn't! Another thing I'm going to have to go back to check... because the histories are full of people who died rather than deny their faith, or who died in faith for the sake of others - and it's regrettably full now with those who actively want to take others with them in an explosion of faith. Whether people are willing to die or not proves nothing either way about God, or about whether religion is delusional, anyway: at most, it tells us one little thing about the strength of faith of this or that individual.
I avoided the net for a time to avoid being influenced while I was starting this whole site; so I've only just started looking at the reactions of other people to Dawkins - and there certainly are a vast number. It's pleasant to find that we all seem to follow different routes. Whatever one may think of Dawkins, he's clearly not a chap people find easy to ignore.
Added Feb 23: I'm (re)reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. By comparison with The God Delusion, it's taut and focused - clearly his guild masterpiece. Even so, I suspect that there are a couple of places where he doesn't follow his own logic to the end of the line; perhaps he can't quite handle what it tells him: for example, although he demonstrates (by way of game theory) that the selfish gene can flourish by being 'nice', he still takes time to hope that we can overcome our own genes' 'selfishness'... he gives the impression that he is trying to escape from a corner into which he's backed himself, and I'm not sure that that has a place in this book's argument.
More to the point: you can see why he eventually had to write the Delusion, or something like it. In the Gene, he almost defines his protagonist out of existence - down to hardly more than a molecule, doing what molecules do - and, in doing so, reduces its significance in the grand scale of things (in moral or any other terms) to no more than that of salt crystallising in a drying sea. A gene is a simply a chemical replicator, he says, 'success' being the appearance of replications, and presumably lack of success arising when there are no further replications*: it's as meaningful to say that sugar crystals in a bottle of Millefiore are struggling to spread themselves, or that pre-Devonian rock is in some sense 'successful' because of its longevity; it is meaningful, but only as a fascinating attempt at mechanical explanation. There are two obvious ways rationally to internalise what Dawkins is saying; either that the whole thing is awesomely bleak (the corner he's in) or that the mechanism might be an extraordinarily neat way by which the Creator does His work - and Dawkins clearly doesn't want us following the latter road.
*There are no dinosaur genes for size around: are (were) they a failure? But they lasted tens of millions of year: are (were) they a success? The questions are surely wholly meaningless within Dawkins' thesis - there were merely some chemical reactions which no longer happen.
Still, all in all, the Gene isn't an infuriating muddle in the manner of the Delusion. Except that Dawkins does bang on a bit - both books would benefit by good editing of half their length.
In passing, while discussing game theory, Dawkins mentions the adversarial nature of our legal system and of Parliament. Now that does have a bearing on what I'm trying to do on this site.
What I don't understand is how people can see the Gene as underpinning their political philosophies. It lays out an explanation of nothing more than a glorified chemical reaction which offers no moral message whatsoever. But then, plenty of Thatcher's mob claimed that their philosophy was underpinned by competition theory - which is another purely intellectual model with no moral message that's misunderstood by too many folk who take it to be more than it could ever be.
Added Feb 26 : The universe of the Gene really is a cold place. As a lay, mechanical explanation of a chemical reaction which happens, along the way, to employ the vehicle we call 'life', the book's very compelling; but 'compelling' doesn't mean 'true' in the sense of being a full and correct explanation. Of course, neither does the fact that we don't like it mean that it's 'false'.
It's an atheistical text, in that Dawkins' account doesn't take account of God - whom, of course, he doesn't believe to exist; but one can equally well explain a hurricane without reference to God - it doesn't mean He's not there, either.
The ultimate challenge for Dawkins is the development of self-awareness. His theory can certainly account for what appear to be thinking beings, but it has to falter when it comes to (my own) Cartesian self - the jump from the appearance of thinking to actual thinking. Although, even if he never manages to answer that challenge, it still wouldn't prove him wrong.
-/-
There is a feeling that social darwinists internalise a message from Dawkins that, because of the cut-throat nature of the genetic battle which underlies our existence, they owe a (genetic?) loyalty to 'their own' - so that, far from allying with the great unwashed, they would be betraying their own genetic line by doing so.
Never minding that the social darwinists come dangerously close to the Nazis, philosophically; and never minding that there is the danger that they abandon the concept that Humanity has the intelligence to become better than nature made us: the message of Dawkins is actually a great deal bleaker.
It can be read like this: My children are merely part of a continuing chemical reaction; my instinct to beget children or to love and protect them once I've done so is no more than part of the same chemical reaction; once I'm dead, those children will still merely be part of the ongoing reaction (in which the 'I', who lives and thinks now, will have no more part than any other element of the chemical soup - such as, say, Joseph Stalin). Your child - or a fruit fly's - and mine have the same intellectual 'meaning' to me, not because I value them all equally highly but because none of them have any more meaning than salt crystallising by the drying sea.
Added 1 June (in response to feedback):
I suggest above that understanding all things, God may choose not to know all things.
'the meaning of omnisapient'
On the Nature of God's Self-Awareness.
31 December 2007 .
I came by a copy of 'The God Delusion' (R. Dawkins) this evening. It must be not fate, of course.
I'm not sure if I've read him before (have I read 'The Selfish Gene', or just endlessly heard about it?) but I've seen him on television and on that basis I don't think he's half as clever - or as rational - as he thinks he is. He seemed to me just as pig-headed, tunnel-visioned and ill-mannered as some of the fundamentalists he was pitting himself against (not that I claim to be any better). Perhaps I'll know more when I've read a bit more than his first 10 pages, but I'm growling already - he is unfairly dismissive of the deists who, in more religious times, were quite courageous in their attempts to move away from theism.
This item appears because I just know that the book is going to get me huffing and puffing, and some of my spleen is inevitably going to end up in these pages. But, our attitudes to religion, like those to life and death, are part of what define our society, so here is where that spleen will appear.
I'm not into theology, so please excuse the following if it's not very clever; however, it's fundamental to my own thinking and I want to put it on record, for my own benefit, so that when I've finished the book I may come back and look at this earlier moment.
My problem with a concept of God has to do with His nature.
I have been told that it is more pointless for us to try to understand God's nature than for an ant to try to understand that of a human. But: ants have been around for a very long time (about 100 million years?) and are remarkably successful. (On present form, it looks like there may be ants around long after we're gone - unless we kill them as well as ourselves.) So: seen from any perspective other than that of humans, there's nothing necessarily to say that there is any less value in a colony of ants than in a colony of humans; any yardstick we may use, including rationality or self-awareness, may be purely human constructs. [Objectively, the standards we must be judged by are the same as those by which ants must be judged.] Ants seem to do perfectly well in a world with humans, assessing us in what whatever pragmatic way ants do: we must assess God in whatever pragmatic way we do.
1. If God has self-awareness, as the biblical religions hold, then that "I" (which is to say, God) is that "I" as much by chance as this "I" (which is to say, me) is this "I". (Or indeed, an ant with whatever consciousness it has is by chance that ant). Whatever He did, God did not create his own fundamental "I-ness".* He is who He is by chance, just as I am. Therefore he is no more inherently different, or worthy, compared to me than I am compared to the ant. He is, in fact, just another being, able to do some things which I can't. Why, then, should I worship him?
* I admit the possibility that, by a circularity, God might have created himself. If that were true, it wouldn't change my argument one jot.
2. If God does not have self-awareness, then what is he but a name we give to our sense of awe at the universe around us? Why, then, should I worship him?
a51.