Today brings to an end my recent run of atheist book reviews. Wipe away those tears though, since I've saved the best for last. Richard Dawkins'
The God Delusion, a masterpiece of nonfiction and one of the most interesting books I've ever read. And I can say that even having viewed (well, listened to while cooking) many dozens of hours of Dawkins' speeches and interviews.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist, a lecturer and debater, and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science of Oxford University. I have no idea what that means, but it's always in his bio, and it sounds impressive. He's published several of the most influential and important science books of the past twenty five years, including
The Selfish Gene, in which he introduced the concept of "memes," an idea at once so simple and obvious, and complicated and explanatory, that it's created foundational changes in how scientists view society and psychology, even as it's trickled down into the cultural consciousness. Dawkins also has a
very busy eponymous website that functions as an online clearing house of atheist news and content, and there you can find links to numerous excerpts from this book. He
reads large chunks of it in appearances from his book tour that are all over Google Video.
This book may or may not be his magnum opus, but it's an amazing piece of work. Entertaining, thought-provoking, massively-researched and informative, and logically persuasive on many levels, if a book of this magnitude were arguing anything other than religion, it would change the mind of anyone who read it without prejudice. Since it is about religion, that obviously won't happen on a massive level, but I think the work can still do some good in helping people overcome the lingering effects of the faith that was drummed into them as they learned their ABCs and 123s.
To the scores:
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, 2006
Concept: 7
Presentation: 9
Writing Quality: 8
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 9
Entertainment Value: 7
Rereadability: 8
Overall: 9
If I have any criticism of this work, it's that it's too sprawling. Dawkins takes on religion and faith from so many different angles that some of them are necessarily abbreviated, and the sheer amount of content can produce fatigue in the reader. Almost every chapter features several ideas that would take the average reader some time to think over and process, especially if they were trying to figure a way to deal with Dawkins' insights and arguments while retaining their faith. The fact that so many of these come in rapid sequence might do something to diminish their impact.
Dawkins' specialty is in the areas of science and biology, and he's at his best explaining Darwin's theory of natural selection, clarifying how genetic mutations function, how populations change over time, why Creationism/Intelligent Design is a crock, and so forth. He's written entire books on those subjects in the past (
The Blind Watchmaker is an excellent example, though it's a bit technical and advanced for a general audience, as I remember from struggling through it some fifteen years ago.) so he doesn't belabor it too extensively in
The God Delusion.
What he does quite a bit is engage in mind-expanding theorizing. His professional skill is in understanding how evolution functions on a micro and macro level, and some of his discussion about topics such as the biological origin of our shared human morality and the group selection advantages and disadvantages of religious belief, are legitimately fascinating. Whether you believe in God or not, it's fun to study how such beliefs (memes) spread in populations, and to examine what the benefits and drawbacks are, for individual believers and for societies on a whole.
Check the
table of contents if you want more specifics about what he gets into; he there provides quite a thorough listing. Rather than go over it in order, I'm going to do what I've done with other recent nonfiction book reviews/discussions, and touch on some things I found most interesting. When I'm using a library book I don’t want to write in, I fold back the corner of the page when I want to note something interesting on that page. As a measure of how interesting this book is, I must have folded back 35 or 40 pages in this book; I did that with about half a dozen pages each in
God is not Great and
The End of Faith. I enjoyed and found value in both of those titles, but they didn't hit nearly as many noteworthy points as Dawkins' did. There's something really worth thinking over in every chapter, which is not something I can say about any other book I've ever read. I'm only going to take the time and space here to touch on a few of them.
One of the concepts well worth considering is NOMA. This term was coined by famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, who though an atheist (like most top scientists) is quite the opposite of Dawkins in his interest in confronting religious belief. NOMA acronyms "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," by which Gould means science and religion. From his apologetic point of view, science is the study of empirical fact and measurement, while religion is about ultimate meanings and moral values. Gould says that both can be studied and analyzed to their fullest extent, and that to do so people should simply ignore the areas in which they overlap or contradict. Dawkins has none of this, and in a chapter on the issue, he makes a point I found compelling. It's one Hitchens hit upon in
God is not Great, too. Here's what Dawkins says on page 59.
Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods. To dramatize the point, imagine, by some remarkable set of circumstances, that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? "Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium. We're concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other."
The very idea is a joke. You can bet your boots that the scientific evidence, if any were to turn up, would be seized upon and trumpeted to the skies. NOMA is popular only because there is no evidence to favour the God Hypotheses.
Seems a pretty valid point to me, and of course humans seize upon evidence to back up their theories when such evidence exists. It's just that we've come so far in understanding the events of the world that explanations that once fit, and that make up the core of ancient religious (and non-religious) texts, are now almost entirely rejected on empirical grounds. Virtually no one still believes illness comes from demonic possession, or that the earth is flat, or that famines or plagues or volcanoes or hurricanes are punishments for our wickedness, since we've got scientific answers for all those things, and countless others.
As part of an extended discussion/exploration of the biological origins of religiosity, Dawkins considers and rejects a number of possible theories. One he touches on is the consoling nature of belief. This functions on numerous levels, with the idea of prayer, potential divine or semi-divine intervention in the form of guardian angels, and of course the biggie that all religions provide; the consolation that death isn't really the end. There's a problem, though:
As Steven Pinker pointedly said of the consolation theory, in How the Mind Works: "It only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plain see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing that he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit."
This problem is left unresolved by Dawkins, but I think the answer is fairly simple. He's simply giving people too much credit. Sure, most religious ideas are plainly false if you are of average (or greater) intelligence and if you examine them with a critical eye. But plenty of people are not that smart, and plenty of others don't apply the same rules of logic to their faith that they apply to everything else in the world.
The examples of being cold or eaten by a tiger aren't useful, since they posit an absolute situation with clearly observable outcomes. Furthermore, they're probably fatal for the individuals. If the false beliefs of religion
usually led to death for their believers, then the religion wouldn't survive simply because no one would live to spread it. Believing that a guy born of a virgin died and came back to life isn't exactly on top of the reasonable conclusions to draw from history, but it's not that critical to the lives of most believers, and it's not fatal to very many of them at all.
This isn't to say that there aren't religious beliefs so toxic that they burn themselves out. The once small but thriving sect of
Heaven's Gate came to a pretty abrupt end, as did
the People's Temple, and many others throughout human history. Larger religions lead to the deaths of plenty of their followers too, but the body count from warfare, suicide bombings, or disease (AIDS for Catholics who don't use condoms, preventable disease for Christian Scientists who refuse medicine, etc) isn't great enough to imperil the survival of the religion as a whole. And in all of those cases, religion can, and usually does, function as a consoling belief for the people dying and those left behind after their deaths.
Later in the book, around pages 195-200, Dawkins gets into a topic that fascinates me. He talks about memes and how they self perpetuate, and then gets into something he calls a "memeplex." This is cluster of memes that would have little survivability on their own, but that perpetuate in conjunction with other supporting memes. For instance: the idea that you will survive your own death and go on to play a harp in a magical cloud-filled city with streets of gold, or that faith in something logically unbelievable is a virtue, or that a cracker becomes the literal flesh of a minor Jewish prophet who died 2000 years ago when a priest mumbles some Latin over it, are all ludicrous on their face, and taken singularly, they wouldn't last a minute. Imagine any of these ideas, or something similar, tacked onto a scientific theory or philosophical argument? "I think therefore I am, because winged people in a cloud city play harps." "I think therefore I am and therefore I will achieve eternal life." "I think therefore I am because when I think part of my brain literally becomes the brain of a guy who died 2000 years ago, and this is a good thing." Absurd, right? But no more so, and in fact quite a bit less so, than some of the chief tenants of all major religions that believers take to be literally true. Self evidently true, in many cases. Thus is the power of a memeplex demonstrated. Individual ideas that would be rejected persist if they are inextricably tied to other equally-improbable ideas, that all work together to form a more cohesive, if not necessarily coherent, meme.
There's a section beginning on page 202 about
cargo cults that's also a must read. During WW2, US forces hop-scotched across the Pacific, pushing the Japanese back. On the various islands the US forces occupied, they immediately cut runways out of the forest and set up huts with radio equipment, and soon afterwards planes would begin landing or ships arriving with useful goods of every kind. The islanders observed this, and emulated them in amazing fashion, inventing new religions almost on the spot. After the Americans moved on, or on islands they did not build on, the islanders took to clearing out runways, building control towers complete with bamboo radios and antennas, constructing decoy planes from plants and wood in an attempt to lure down the desired cargo shipments, and so forth.
That's amazing enough, but they even evolved a cosmology of sorts. One much-studied cargo cult, which still exists on the New Hebrides (now known as Vanatu), has deified a man named John Frum. Even as recently as the religion formed, it's already unclear if any such man ever existed back in the 1940s, but that's no more important to the persistence of the cult than the historical reality (or not) of Jesus, or Buddha, or Confucius. The people believe John Frum was on the island during the heyday of the cargo, and they believe he will one day return. They've got canonical descriptions of him (that have shifted over time; John Frum he got taller since the earliest descriptions -- compare this to the way Jesus developed Aryan features and white skin in European Christianity), a holy date for his return (February 15th), and more.
So far he has not returned, but they are not downhearted. David Attenborough said to one cult devotee, called Sam:"But Sam, it is nineteen years since John say that the cargo will come. He promise and he promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn't nineteen years a long time to wait?"
Sam lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at me. "If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years for John."
I enjoy the story of the cargo cults, (which I've only very briefly summarized here) since they're such perfect lab example of how religions are created and then how quickly their memes take on a life of their own, evolving to fit new events or the changing state of mind of their believers. It's also interesting to realize, as Dawkins notes, that the genesis of these cults seems to prove Clarke's Third Law; which that states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I liked the story enough to spend a few minutes in Photoshop throwing together the following masterpiece.
It's LOLGod, I guess?
In Chapter Seven Dawkins discusses the "changing moral zeitgeist," as part of his (largely successful) efforts to demonstrate that 1) religion is not moral, and 2) that morality does not come from religion. It's a massive argument, one that I'm not going to try and recap here. Read the book if you want it. I did like the following quote enough to transcribe it, though.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved" by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors, and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.
Another brief but interesting quote falls on page 321, as part of Dawkins' reply to a woman who says that she's come embrace science and Darwinism, but that she's still haunted by the horrible visions of hell that were (literally) beaten into her by nuns in her primary school days. Dawkins replies:
...I suggested that the extreme horribleness of hell, as portrayed by priests and nuns, is inflated to compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter.
I'm not sure I agree, but it's a fascinating insight I'd never before considered. It's eminently logical, of course. People always overstate threats to make them scarier, and while this seldom makes the threat more believable, it makes the potential so awful that even the faintest chance it might be true is motivating. I.e., hell. Or "Saddam Hussein's going to build a nuke and give it to Al Queda." Improbable and unlikely in every way, but such a horrible possibility that it galvanized a nation (if not the world) into war.
I also like the idea of a mildly-unpleasant hell. He's got a point; that it lasts forever and is not the perfect bliss that is heaven should be enough. However, what's Heaven, when you get right down to it? I think it says something about human nature that it's so much easier to craft a convincing, emotionally-moving hell than heaven. This is something that Christopher Hitchens, atheist and widely-read literary critic, often mentions in his lectures and debates. Where are the enticing visions of heaven? Countless books have created fully-formed hells, Dante chief amongst them, but what's heaven? Is anyone really all that interested in the popular conception, featuring clouds, golden streets, harps, white robes, vestigial wings, and so forth?
Okay, but that's just the modern version, which lacks any real literal validity from the scriptures. What does the actual Book say about it? I don't have a quote but I've heard that it's a much purer concept; a sort of "existing in a perpetual bliss from the presence of God." Okay, but what does that mean? It's like asking the finite mind to conceive of infinity. It can't be done. What's it like to bask in the presence of God? How is that blissful? Is it like an orgasm? Like scratching a really bad itch? Do you ever get hungry or thirsty still? Is there a physical sensation? Wouldn't that get boring after a while, like a hot bath that's paradise for half an hour, before turning tepid and wrinkle-fingered?
On the other hand, we can all imagine (to some extent) what it would feel like to be dipped in a boiling pit of tar, or stabbed by a be-horned, pointy-tailed imp with a rusty trident. Hence visions of hell are far more detailed and believable, in their own way, than the intangible purity that is heaven.
Speaking of heaven and hell, on page 356 Dawkins makes a nice point about those beliefs.
Polls suggest that approximately 95% of the population of the US believe they will survive their own death. I can't help wondering how many people who claim such belief really, in their heart of hearts, hold it. If they were sincere, shouldn't they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him. "Congratulations! That's brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you."
...Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday? ...Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside shower her with messages for those that have gone before? "Do give my love to Uncle Robert when you see him."
Why don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying? Could it be that they don't really believe all that stuff they pretend to believe?
Another nice short bit. On page 360, Dawkins returns briefly to the argument from consolation.
There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty? Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless? To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren, and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that someone else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.
This goes to the heart of the philosophy of atheism, and is, I think, a major reason many people retain some theology in their hearts, even after their minds have long since rejected the rest of it on scientific grounds. People want to believe there's something more, something above and beyond our tawdry, inconsequential, brief years of scratching out an existence on this pitiless rock. It's telling of many religious apologists that they argue against atheism in this fashion, saying what Dawkins' so aptly summarizes in the above quote. "There must be a God, or else life is meaningless." Left unexamined is how meaningful life would be even with the God of which they conceive?
Take Christianity. To say that God gives live meaning and purpose is kind of a stretch. After all, in that cosmology, isn't human existence essentially just a rat maze? Humans are created, gifted with a soul that sets them above all other animals on earth... and then what? Nothing. Humans are merely meant to live out their lives running blindly through the twists and turns of a vast maze, doing a little good but more importantly avoiding the ever-present temptations of evil, and if all that goes well at the end they're rewarded with a yummy food pellet. For all eternity. That's meaningful? And atheism, with its complete concentration on the importance of events accomplished in this life, regarding other humans and the world at large, is barren and pointless and empty? I can't really see the logic of that one, but then again, that's why they call it "faith."
There are a ton of other excellent bits throughout Dawkins' book, both long and short, but like life itself, this book review must end at some point. Collect your heavenly food pellet on the way out, thanks.
Labels: atheism, book review, richard dawkins
