ideological criminal

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, popular science writer, and Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is a highly regarded and widely read scientist. His latest book, The God Delusion, lays down his case for Atheism and against religion.

This book is not the kind of book I would pick up and read on my own, but it was sent to me with overwhelming enthusiasm from my father who had recently read it. Normally, any discussion of religion, even one which repudiates it, I find boring and my brain immediately shuts down in response. But, I’m generally in search of common ground between my and my father’s ideological convictions, and atheism is one of them (gay rights, immigration rights, drug decriminalization, and widespread disgust with Democrats have proved to be other commonalities; beyond that, things diverge, rapidly). So I gave it a whirl. Despite its breezy and accessible style, I found the book hard to read at length. It ended up taking me a month or so to read, putting it down and reading other things during breaks. Part of the problem is that Dawkins says everything no less than three times, and part of it is that chunks of the book are silly to the point of indigestion.

Dawkins’s book first lays out the kind of religion that is the subject of his attack. It is a fairly restricted concept, but one embraced by a large group of people throughout the world. The concept is that of a personal, all powerful, supernatural being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and all phenomenon within. The three Abrahamic religions fall under this concept, but Dawkins casts his net wide: “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.” Having established a “God Hypothesis,” Dawkins turns to historical arguments and “proofs” for God’s existence and his own argument “Why there almost certainly is no God.” Both of these chapters are of the silliest kind. His argument against God’s existence is one from a complexity point of view: the complexity of the universe we observe could be explained by reference to a being that willed it, but anything complicated enough to design the universe would need, in turn, for its own complexity to be explained in some way. An infinite regress lies here. QED. On the other hand, Darwinism provides an explanation for the observed complexity that presupposes no such complex being arising from nothingness.

Part of Dawkins argument is that the God’s existence or non-existence should be subject to the same scientific scrutiny as any other phenomenon. His claim is that a universe in which God exists would be very different from one in which God does not exist. Thus experimentation can shed on light on which we find ourselves in. Again, this all seems silly to me. Deductive reasoning alone can provide no insights into the nature of the universe in general, and with regards to God’s existence in particular. Deduction is concerned only with meaningless symbols. To relate to the outside world, we must endow the symbols with meanings—assumptions we suppose to be true. Analytic proofs of God’s existence (non-existence) would either presuppose God’s existence (non-existence) axiomatically, or prove the existence (non-existence) of any concept that could be substituted for the God symbol in the proof, i.e. my dog, unicorns, the color blue, etc. This is true despite the efforts of the logical big hitters from Aquinas to Gödel (arguments due to the latter were not taken up by Dawkins, despite Gödel being the most important logician of the past century and a man who truly believed God’s existence to be provable through formalism alone). On the other hand, empiricism seems a hopeless avenue as well due to the special nature of the God concept Dawkins wishes to refute. What could count for evidence against God’s existence? What can stand up to the trump card that is “God works in mysterious ways”? Surely the kind of God that Dawkins wishes to disprove is one capable of creating a universe in which there is no evidence of its existence. In fact, I would imagine this is the universe believers would assume we live in and that it is the nature of faith to stand within a context devoid of evidence. I bring these points up not because I wish Dawkins had dealt with them more thoroughly, but because I wish he hadn’t addressed them at all. It gets us nowhere with regard to a discussion of what role, if any, religion should play in society. The rest of the book stands just as valid independent of these two chapters, and thus are stronger without these early claims that God most probably does not exist: arguments which are unlikely to hold sway over believers since I, an unflinching atheist, find them dubious.

Another contention of Dawkins, and one that I find much more agreeable, is that religion and its consequences should not be placed beyond the realm of reason and debate (wholly different from whether God exists or not, in my view). “A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts—the non-religious included—is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.” He goes on to quote an impromptu speech by Douglas Adams (to which Delusion is dedicated) in Cambridge, shortly before he died (transcribed in his posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt):

Religion … has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you’d like; everybody will have an argument but nobody is aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I musn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics verse that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe … no, that’s holy? … We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Dawkins makes an example of the undeserved respect of religion in the realm of conscientious objector status, an example I find compelling and personally feel the status quo to be abhorrent:

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

Dawkins strengthens his argument from a disavowal of the special status of religion to one of disavowal for religious institutions in general, however “moderate” they appear. His argument there is that moderate religious structures pave the way for superstition and tolerance in the face of violence when it is predicated on religious grounds. He recounts a number of crimes such as sexual mutilation, the murder of doctors who provide abortions, the current war in Iraq, the God given rights of Jews in Israel, executions for “thought crimes”, etc., all of which Dawkins argues are supported in part by moderate religious structures that pave the way for, and make palatable, the eventual fundamentalism they engender. This I find to be Dawkins most daring thesis and one which I support. It constitutes only one chapter, but an important one at that. Make no mistake, Dawkins is arguing not only for atheism, but against religion.

Following this chapter is another important chapter which lays down another thesis worthy of support. Dawkins, as he says in the preface, would like believers to walk away from the book as non-believers. I find that unlikely. But he would also like to see a change in consciousness about how society talks about the religion of children. He wants us all to collectively shudder when we hear the words “Christian child” or “Muslim child” or “Mormon child”, etc. We should find the language no more strange than “Marxist child” or “Republican child” or “Beatnik child”. A child may descend from Muslim or Christian or Marxist parents, but that doesn’t mean that they ascribe to that system; instead, they should be described as “children of Marxist parents”, etc., until they are of an age to decide their own affiliations to religious, political, and economic identities. This seems very reasonable and uncontroversial. But then Dawkins drops a bomb in second to last chapter: religious indoctrination of children is child abuse. The chapter places this kind of abuse of children far above and beyond the damage, on the whole, caused by priestly sexual abuse. He writes, “Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Mealy-mouthed, Dawkins is not. He quotes the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s 1997 Amnesty Lecture at Oxford, which argues for freedom of speech in all but the special case of educating children:

Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parent to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Dawkins cites testimony from a number of correspondents who suffer psychological damage from their religious upbringing and quotes interviews from his documentary Root of All Evil? in which he talks to Pastor Keenan Roberts whose

[…] particular brand of nutiness takes the form of what he calls Hell Houses. A Hell House is a place where children are brought, by their parents or their Christian schools, to be scared witless over what might happen to them after they die. Actors play out fearsome tableaux of particular ’sins’ like abortion and homosexuality, with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating attendance. These are a prelude to the pièce de résistance, Hell Itself, complete with realistic sulphurous smell of burning brimstone and the agonized screams of the forever damned.

When Roberts is asked by Dawkins about the possible psychological trauma, Roberts responded, “I would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they absolutely do no want to go. […] I think there’s a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares.” I was taken aback by some of the things attributed to religious figures throughout The God Delusion, Hell Houses being one of them. I told myself, if such things do exist, then the kind of religion Dawkins was critical of is an overly simplistic kind of faith and worship, a parody, far more base than what is actually practiced (in part because I share an office with a rather intelligent and reasonable young scientist who also has aspirations of becoming a rabbi); but it was a day or so after reading these passages that I got The Evangelical War on Science, a segment on the “Crooks and Liars” video podcast to which I subscribe. The segment is an excerpt of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God. After seeing just a few minutes, I knew that Dawkins was in fact characterizing the mainstream US evangelical community, and probably far from parodying them, he is being generous. (The dogma exhibited toward children in Friends of God also lends credence to Dawkins claim of abuse).

Taken together these last two chapters (the real final chapter is only a conclusion, allowing Dawkins to repeat himself again) constitute the most interesting and provocative substance in The God Delusion. The much milder midsection focuses on Darwinian explanations for the existence of religion in societies, the roots of morality (again with a Darwinian basis) with reasons for being good in a God-less universe, and the mutability of the moral zeitgeist as evinced by history. Although not nearly as silly as the early does-he-or-doesn’t-he-exist business, these three chapters are largely boring and unenlightening, to me, at least. Yes, of course, one can be good even if God doesn’t exist. So what? The stranger phenomenon for me is that some believers find this difficult to accept, whereas I’ve always felt a person with God on their side is far more capable of doing horrendous acts since the “Will of God” would seem to trump all worldly concerns (I’ve always found it disgusting that, at least in the Big 3, personal morals are subordinate to God’s Will—as if we should act in an immoral way if God desires it; when God asks you to sacrifice your son, the correct answer is ‘fuck you’, not ‘yes, masta’).

So I can’t share the same effusive praise my father had for it. There are two good chapters that are thought provoking and fairly bold. Moreover, I find them very close to being right. On the other hand, I wish that Dawkins had a little more of the philosopher in him. Constructing air tight logical structures is not his forte. The meandering give-and-take prose leads to an overall softness in his arguments. Better would have been to drop the does-he-doesn’t-he crap. The thesis of childhood indoctrination as child abuse stands just as solid even if we suppose God exists and the Bible is literally true. Likewise the thesis that moderate religion paves the way to extremism and violence is logically independent. What a leaner, stronger argument it would have been had he left the silly crap out.

Finally, at a few points in the book (admittedly not many, but more than once), Dawkins dabbles with analysis of current affairs. He does this once very early on in the book (page 1): “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres”, etc. etc. Certainly, religion plays a role in all of the things he mentions, some more than others. But to suppose that religion is the key element of these conflicts, or moreover that were there no religion, these conflicts would simply not arise, is not only fanciful, but dishonest. It strikes me as no better than the “because they hate our freedoms” rhetoric. There are serious geopolitical factors at play; they are ignored at great peril. It’s unfortunate that as highly regarded an intellectual as Richard Dawkins can fall into such ignorant tripe on his opening page, no less.