Review of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
By Jeffrey Stueber, copyright 2007, all rights reserved
My essay seeks reviewers, see how
Review other pillars of unbelief if you like - Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Chester Dolan, S. T. Joshi, B.C. Johnson, Ruth Hurmence Green, and Steve Allen
One thing that has become abundantly clear in
this book is that Dawkins has progressed from science advocate to biased
anti-creationist propagandist and this is displayed in his frequent allusions
to evolution and Darwinism as “consciousness raising.” If I suggested that the
theory - extraterrestrials helped Egyptians build the pyramids - raised our
consciousness, you might suspect I was biased
toward it. So should be our opinion toward Dawkins and
his devotion toward evolution.
Dawkins attributes the idea of consciousness
raising to feminism and this power is so overwhelming that it led author
Douglas Adams to “radical” atheism. (The term “radical” is how
Dawkins is so upset with religious belief
and explanations that he will accept no compromise with them. The now deceased Stephen Gould has originated
an idea called NOMA (short for non-overlapping magisterium) - an idea whereby
science can retain the domain of empirical science while religion can have
dominion over questions of meaning and moral value - a way to, as Gould puts
it, have religion retain the rock of ages while science retains the age of the
rocks.[1] Gould doesn’t succeed when, for example,
calling the idea of a soul “a sop for our fears,” but we can at least credit
Gould with an attempt at compromise.
Dawkins will have none of this, saying Gould has “carried the art of
bending over backwards to positively supine lengths.” If there are issues that science cannot
address, you can bet that religion is unable to address them as well, he says. Dawkins recounts the words of a warden of his
That’s certainly an extreme view. Certainly Christians have provided a
framework within which to view first century Jewish events by supposing the
resurrection of Jesus was a historical event and their arguments suggest this
is the best way to make sense of what happened back then. Outside of Christianity, New Agers suggest a
framework in which to view evidence for past life recall which suggests
reincarnation is true and that belief best fits the evidence available. (I disagree reincarnation is true, but need
not discuss that here.) The point is
that there is a host of areas in which the religious suppose what they believe
is true and this is where scientific explanations must yield to religious ones
to provide coherence.
Dawkins deals with the argument to design by
first mentioning Fred Hoyle’s musing that the odds of life originating on earth
are no greater than the odds a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard would
assemble a Boeing 747 jet. Repeating an
idea he has articulated elsewhere, Dawkins says that if life is very improbable,
the originator (God) would be even more improbable and hence God is the
ultimate Boeing 747. The chief
assumption here seems to be that if one cannot believe in item a which is improbable one cannot believe in item b which is more improbable. One
cannot postulate things that are more improbable than item a until one believes item
a can originate by chance.
I’m not sure I can succumb to Dawkins
logic. Is it really true that there is a
top-down (or perhaps bottom-up) line of probability drawn here? One of the chief problems plaguing this
argument is the measuring of different items to assess the probability of
each. An arrangement of coins spelling
the words “
Neither can I submit to Dawkins’ suggestion
that we must be able to explain the existence of a designer before we can
believe that something is designed over and above what natural causes can
create. Is it really true that we must
be able to explain who built the pyramids and how they did it before we
attribute them to design? If we cannot,
do we then insist the pyramids had natural causes? How about any number of other items such as a
stack of playing cards set on their ends so they sit upright vertically instead
of laying on top of a table? I could
come up with any number of items, but the point should be clear that if science
is to be the search for the most plausible explanation and not the best
naturalistic explanation, we can’t approach scientific inquiries like this.
Continuing in that same vein of thought, we
find Dawkins ruminating on origin-of-life experiments.
The
origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research. The expertise required for it is chemistry
and it is not mine. I watch from the
sidelines with engaged curiosity, and I shall not be surprised if, within the
next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new
origin of life in the laboratory.
Nevertheless it hasn’t happened yet, and it is still possible to
maintain that the probability of its happening is, and always was, exceedingly
low – although it did happen once.
What merits Dawkins’ confident assessment
that life originated at least once given the odds against even the origin of a
bacterium? Obviously science hasn’t
demonstrated this is true and so Dawkins’ confidence can only be attributed to
faith. Robert Shapiro writes that a
reasonable estimate for the formation of a bacterium with the proper order of
amino acids as 1 in 10100,000,000,000. and “given such odds, the time until the black
holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no
difference at all. If we were to wait,
we would truly be waiting for a miracle.”
[2] Even
efforts at humans creating polypeptides fail. Alex Williams and John Hartnett
cite an experiment using mineral surfaces as enzyme substitutes. Enzymes, polypeptides which speed up chemical
reactions and overcome hydrolysis, are difficult to produce during via random
processes. An experiment using pyrite as
an enzyme substitute got a small proportion of amino acids to join up, but all
were rapidly hydrolyzed. Ferris and his
colleagues did better and produced chains of 55 amino acids by adhering them to
clay mineral surfaces, but this required 50 operator interventions to make this
work. [3] John Horgan, in his book The End of Science, even includes a description of the poor efforts
at discovering how life originated when noting in almost 40 years (which would
be 50 years now) after Stanley Miller’s experiments producing a mixture of
amino acids, solving the riddle of the origin of life has become more difficult
than anyone imagined. The situation has
become so desperate that Miller’s area
of expertise has gathered a reputation of being a fringe discipline. Lynn Margulis, more a Gaia advocate than
creationist, has noted that a bacterium is more like people than Stanley
Miller’s mixtures of chemicals. To go
from a bacterium to man is less of a step than to go from a mixture of
chemicals to a bacterium. [4]
Given the scientific research alone, it would seem we shouldn’t assume life can
originate by chance ever without
intelligent intervention.
Dawkins repeats his earlier confidence in
cumulative selection, but here the difficulties arise from the fact life has
sprung quickly without any hint of gradual accumulation of minor changes. Take, for instance, the origin of trilobites
which led Richard Forty to muse
Fossils of
trilobites appeared suddenly in the geological record during the early part,
but not quite at the base of the Cambrian period, perhaps 540 million years
ago. If you are tempted by the word
“dramatic” then this is one occasion where you could be forgiven for
weakening. These are trilobites with
lots of segments and big eyes: striking things, not little squitty
objects. It is an appearance as drastic
as that of the sorcerer in
What one sees viewing the chapters that deal
with scientific arguments against improbabilities and the argument-to-design is
the over-confident attempt to defend evolution by dismissing any hegemony
creationists might grab even at the expense of damage to evolution as a
theory. Dawkins quotes a blogger on an
article he and Jerry Coyne contributed to the Guardian as asking why God should be considered an explanation for
anything. “It’s not – it’s a failure to
explain, a shrug of the shoulders . . . dressed up in spirituality and ritual,”
this person says. Dawkins would agree,
but then falls into attributing human ailments like a bad back to mistakes
drawn from an evolution from walking on all fours to two-legged mobility. Natural selection is also cruel and wasteful
given the relationship between predators and prey. How then might we attribute the clever
“design” in DNA to a wasteful process not to mention the beauty in a peacock’s
feathers, the complicated wing motions necessary to keep a hummingbird afloat,
or the complicated process involved in blood clotting? Are all these, and many more, the creations
of a cruel and wasteful process? I
actually wish here that evolutionists like Dawkins would be more empiricist
rather than papering over all life with their materialistic theories because
they don’t particularly like God intruding on their domain.
Dawkins attempts to explain the origin of
religion by offering numerous theories, shuffling between them as if pulling
them each successively out of a hat and tossing them aside in search of
another, and each one can be discarded by us as well. Perhaps, he thinks, religion originates as a
by-product of a misfiring in the brain of a useful impulse to believe without
question what one is told to do much as children obey their parents
unquestioningly. How then does this
explain the fact the majority of people (much to the disappointment of Dawkins)
have this impulse – unbelievers also?
Are we really to believe the majority has a misfiring in the brain? Also, why would we attribute the origin to a
misfiring when people generally consider religious belief consoling? Finally, how could we attribute converts to
religious belief to misfirings in the brain, converts like
Josh Mcdowell (author of
the Evidence that Demands a Verdict
series, a convert from at least, bare minimum, agnosticism)
Ignace Lepp (convert from
Communism)
Alister McGrath (convert
from atheism)
Patrick Glynn (convert from
atheism and whose book, God: The Evidence,
details the findings that led to his conversion)
Antony Flew (convert from
atheism whose book There is a God
details his reasons for this)
Dawkins later suggests belief in religion
is a by-product of romantic love.
Certainly love for a god compares somewhat with love for a wife or
child, but just because two things share common facets does not mean one is a
by-product of the need for the other.
(The love for a friend is close to the love of a spouse, but nobody
would thus imagine love for a friend was an unfortunate misfiring brain
by-product of spousal love.) Taken too
far we could attribute the love of anything (much less any emotion) to this
“by-product” theory. Is the affection toward a pet a by-product of romantic
love? How about the desire for a computer? Is the desire for a car a by-product of the
desire for a home? The lengths to which
this logic can go stretches the possibility of a meaningful theory to the
limits where the falsifiability of science is breached and blind religion
begins.
Perhaps religious ideas are nothing but
memes (ideas in the brain) that have survived.
However, as I have noted in my book Refuting
Atheism, religious ideas like heaven would not survive given their lack of
referents. Why, for instance, would a
desire for survival after death survive when one knows it wouldn’t happen and
this knowledge would produce stress even in the presence of what he calls a
“memeplex”? How about other ideas such
as a virgin birth, triune god, angelic figures, and hell (an idea that is sure
to be undesirable and hence eliminated by any mematic natural selection)?
Taken too far, and perhaps logically enough,
Dawkins’ theories could undermine the justification for atheism. Imagine if I tried this type of Dawkins’esque
mematic analysis of atheism: Does
atheism have any survival value?
Apparently it doesn’t because the religious are actually happier and
healthier being religious. Does it
benefit the spread of genetic material to offspring? Obviously it does not since few people are
atheists and the human race has reproduced fine without it. Perhaps the only use of atheism is atheism
itself, a meme that has seemed to be able to copy itself among a select group
of the population. [6]
What one notices while reading this chapter
is the musings of a man who is vividly upset at the fact the data does not fit
the theory of which he is so impressed.
It’s almost like a man, who claims men salespeople sell the most cars
and then finds women are outselling them at every turn, grovels about looking
for an explanation for this and cannot tolerate his inability to find one. It
simply doesn’t, and can’t, occur to Dawkins that evolutionist theory cannot
explain the origin of the religious impulse and desire much less religious
tenets.
Dawkins takes us through an explanation for
our moral instinct also and at one juncture talks as if he were offering an
explanation for it that jives with creationist theory. He is speaking of Harvard biologist Marc
Hauser’s book Moral Minds detailing
studies done about how people respond to moral dilemmas using questionnaires on
the internet when we join Dawkins’ thoughts in progress.
From
the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to
the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the
decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their
reasons. This is what we would expect if
we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct
or our fear of heights or . . . our capacity for language . . . As we shall
see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to
articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs
or lack of them. The message of
Hauser’s book . . . is this: ‘Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral
grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over million of years to include a
set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up
our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.’
What better description of a moral awareness
that is “written in the heart” (to use a Biblical phrase) can we get?
Dawkins does find a Darwinian explanation for
the moral impulse when noting that genes are selfish and therefore would work
to enhance the survivability of the individual, not the group. But our human moral intuition has us working
toward the good of the group, not necessarily the individual. This is where the
group selection and reciprocal altruism he speaks of come into play. While natural selection and selfish genes
favor the individual, evolution has fostered cooperation that favors the group.
I guess the first question is this: where along the evolutionary line of descent
did we suddenly switch from a selfish nature to a cooperative one and why would
we if selfish behavior favored the individual?
Altruism would be filtered out of the Darwinian process because only the
fittest survive and it is those that do not practice altruism that can do this.
I rather like the commentary on this by
critic of Darwinism, but not creationist, David Stove who says, quite
succinctly, “If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every
species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which
only a few in any generation can be winners.”
The human, race, however, is not like that and this fact he dubs “
That’s Dawkins’ book. Is it critical of religion? Hell yeah it
is. Is it unbiased. No. Is it full of baloney? You bet. Is it Dawkins’ intellectual attempt
to get religion out of our lives so he can worship at