The Dawkins Delusion

Straw Men Locked in Combat, Richard Dawkins Pulling the Strings

I took a longish look at his book 'The God Delusion' in a second-hand bookshop, and found it without merit. I did not waste money on it. It was full of special-pleading and poor logic. He sets up a straw man, God as the old-man-in-the-sky-with-a-beard, and snipes away relentlessly, ignoring the fact that no serious religious thinkers have thought of God in that way in the last few centuries, and it is not clear that they ever did. Nor are he and his followers willing to publicly debate a serious religious thinker. I suspect that they know that they would get slaughtered.

       I find it hard to believe that Richard Dawkins is an eminent scientist. I have seen him interviewed on TV and he came across as a man of average intelligence at most. His arguments are usually naive. His book is full of bullshit. As an example, he tries to make it seem that a higher proportion of scientists are atheists than is actually the case, using inaccurate methods. He quotes a survey at a scientific conference that showed that a high proportion of attendees did not believe in a personal God, and goes on to assume that means that they are atheists. How does he know that they aren't engaged in Buddhist meditation, or attending shamanic drumming workshops? Or even agnostic? Rigorous logic is missing from his writing.

       He tries to pretend that great scientists of the past who were self-proclaimed believers were insincere, using the slimiest trickery imaginable. Freeman Dyson and Gregor Mendel suffer particularly from his innuendos. He clearly knows nothing of their life-stories, yet is happy to traduce their integrity in a kind of sniggering way. Of course they are not around to defend themselves, which, I suspect, is the point.
       Many people are angry with those who seek to make a profession of religion. Some of these religious professionals have behaved in a quite obnoxious way, infuriating many. Dawkins exploits this rage. Those who want to see someone biffing the mullahs and priests read his book uncritically, and hence are blind to its flaws.

       The type of 'scientific' world-view that he puts forward belongs more in the 19th century than the 21st. His mechanistic world would have been familiar to Lord Kelvin, but is alien to modern science, which sees the scientific process quite differently, and has a more modest agenda. Sadly, not all working scientists seem to grasp this, even though they must have heard it explained many times.

       The modern scientific process consists of the construction of models, often of a mathematical nature, but not necessarily so, and the testing of the degree of agreement of the model with the results of observation. Models do not need to be perfectly accurate to be useful, and some sort of quest for absolute truth is alien to this way of thinking. Ever since the discovery of quantum theory, physicists have accepted that the world may be quite mysterious on a deep level. Richard Feynman went so far as to declare that any effort to understand the quantum theory non-mathematically was a hopeless endeavour. I am not sure I agree with him about that, but it gives some idea of how things have changed since Kelvin's (and Dawkins') day. Modern savants understand that it is impossible to prove a negative.

       Dawkins absurdly claims that the idea of God is a testable scientific proposition like any other, which suggests that he doesn't understand the ideas in the previous paragraph, or even the idea of God, in a general sense. He has an unsubtle mind, and much escapes him.

       It is perfectly obvious that if a sentient being created the cosmos, He isn't necessarily comprehensible by us, and He doesn't need to be accessible to measurement by instruments. It is obvious that an external agency creating the cosmos might remain external throughout time, and the only direct evidence for the existence of that agency accessible to us, bound as we are in space and time, would be the existence of the cosmos itself.
       Equally, if a Creator is active within the cosmos, it isn't necessarily through the manipulation of material objects, but He might only act through the base level of consciousness, as the Yogis have long thought, based on their many years of meditation.

       Dawkins points out that if God wanted to prove his existence to us he could do so very easily, by manifesting miracles etc. He doesn't discuss the desperately anthropomorphic assumptions about the creator of the cosmos which he is making, or explain why God would wish to disrupt his own natural laws in such a way, merely to impress a bunch of baldy part-smart apes. Perhaps he is thinking that since he is such a grandstanding type of person, God, if he existed, would have to be too. A kind of larger Dawkins. I find this idea unnecessary, and distasteful.
       For centuries, since the time of Galileo Galilei, wise people have tried to separate the realms of science and religion, pointing out that they occupy separate spheres of human awareness. Dawkins wants to reverse this progress, and pit them against each other in a conflict as impassioned as it is meaningless. Sadly, he has managed to lure many people into following him down this destructive path. His success is humanity's failure. All he can accomplish is to impoverish the experience of anyone who falls within his influence.