In Dawkins' Defence

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who has made it his remit to untangle the world of religion in his latest book 'The God Delusion'.

I have read the book and I have to say I've found it very enlightening. Type the author's name into YouTube and you will be met with a volley of clips from lectures and interviews, in fact YouTube is one of the best places to gather an immediate idea of the scale of debate and sheer outrage that Dawkins' ideas have generated. In a couple of interviews Dawkins has expressed his hopes for the book and how he would like to think that it will move some perpetual fence-sitters further toward the atheistic end of the religious spectrum.

In that sense I have also to report that the book is very effective. For many years I have sincerely doubted the existence of the traditional Christian God. Not being forced into any religion I was free to explore the various theologies and 'life stances' of the world. I think eventually I fabricated my own form of deism in which my own God was knocking around but generally not interested in human life. My doctrines were all based on a series of Ifs; If we have an immortal soul, heaven and hell, then I think an omniscient God will just be able to 'know' that I am a genuinely good person. Acting good just to please God seems a sad way to live.

Reading 'The God Delusion' as a rationalist agnostic in this sense has added a great deal of weight to my own suspicions of a Godless existence, however I would much rather use an adjective like 'Thinker' before 'Atheist' when describing my current self.

I think Atheism has been misunderstood recently after being so unfairly battered by mostly irrational religious argument. For me, finding atheism was like having the wool pulled away from my eyes. Religion has always seemed irrational, cold, hard (especially Church pews) and destructive. Atheism caters for my desire to understand universal truths and offers me a far more positive outlook for humanity than religion could.

For example, I can deduce logically that theism is incompatible with multiculturalism. Not only does monotheism require the belief in only one true God, but it also prescribes a morality that will often clash with the prescribed morality of a neighbouring faith. We are living in a global community. We depend on global trade, global communication, etc and to move forward as one planet it would seem that first we really need to get along with one another. I suppose that some religious people would say that they aren't interested in 'moving forward as a planet' and indeed many religious groups seem to want to go back in time but from my point of view it is wholly necessary to protect humanity from global problems such as global warming, fossil-fuel dependence and religious extremism.

Having said that I've just realised that multiculturalism would not exist if it weren't for theism and therefore there would be no need for any compatibility in my utopia because neither would exist.

Having said that perhaps multiculturalism would still exist in non-religious forms. Perhaps atheism is more an act of 'ironing out' the major causes of culturalism. Perhaps sentencing culturalism to death and advocating a singular, global culture would result in a catastrophic 'globalisation' of cultures. Perhaps this is already happening.

Any morally sound human believes their beliefs because they think they are best for the welfare of themselves and humanity. It does not benefit a man to endorse a religion that advocates his own destruction, neither does it benefit the religion itself. Of course if you are also a subscriber to the theory of memetics (i.e. the susceptibility of ideas and concepts to a process of natural selection and another of Dawkins' contributions) you will understand that religion is naturally selected to be good at replicating itself. This equally applies to atheism. In fact, writing this I find myself completely helpless to the merciless shoving of the atheism meme.

In any case I don't think it productive to think of atheism as a pseudo-religion. I think of atheism more as a haven for free thought, the abolishment of childhood indoctrination, a genuine search for universal truth (e.g. 1+1=2), and also perhaps most importantly a rational, utilitarian, consequentialist morality based on scientific truth (e.g. what is it to suffer, and can an embryo suffer).

I would also refute the idea that atheism is always a 100% refusal to believe in the existence of a God or Gods. (All dictionary definitions are subject to contextual influence). Any rational logical human would have to agree that nothing can be disproved. We can never say categorically that God does not exist in the same way that we can never categorically say that leprechauns do not exist. Atheism is rather a life in which God is 99.9 per-cent improbable. In fact the odds that God does not exist are infinitely long but certainly finite. In this sense atheism is merely a form of rational, thought-out agnosticism.

Whilst sat in the pub with, I have to admit, a much wiser and more intelligent group of adults than myself, I was explaining to a friend (an old English teacher no less, yes I go to the pub with my ex-teachers) how I had just read 'The God Delusion'. Knowing that I was in the company of one or two Christians I immediately braced myself for impact but surprisingly the volley of outrage and subsequent ejection and barring from the pub came in the form of a quiet and very respectable lady sat opposite who I recently learned is a philosophy teacher of some capacity.

Her arguments were brief but arranged thus:

1. Richard Dawkins is a bigot.
2. Richard Dawkins is an obsessive whose first wife you can never mention in conversation.

Not used to such a confrontation I hesitated, unarmed and returned to my pint.

I have since realised three things.

1. Richard Dawkins only appears as a bigot because he advocates that religion receives an unprecedented amount of respect and should be equally open to criticism as any other thing. He is in my opinion no more obstinate in his belief in the superiority of his own opinions than any preacher, and much more likely to be open to the possible fallibility of his opinions (also he has a lot more evidence to suggest that his opinions are factual).

2. My own father hates talking about his first wife. Attacking Dawkins' for being bigoted or obsessive are not arguments for the invalidity of his ideas.

3. Perhaps the outspoken Dawkins-basher in the pub wasn't aiming to criticise Dawkins' ideas. It does seem rather strange to bring his personal life up in the midst of a philosophical debate but then again who ever sat down and set out the laws of dialectics to state that going off on tangents should be punishable by blog-flogging?!

One excellent argument set out by Dawkins in the God Delusion states that at the end of the day, his 'insults' are only words. He could quite easily decide to carry out his beliefs by blowing himself up in a tube station, or hijacking a plane in the name of God and flying it into a skyscraper. Critically, he does not. This is true: an atheist will never act immorally because he is an atheist. A religious person will act immorally because he is religious, but he believes within his personal mikrokosm that his act is morally right.

The above develops into an issue of moral relativism; if a religious man murders a doctor who carries out abortions, he believes that it is the right thing to do and that he is essentially saving hundreds or thousands of human lives. An atheist would never consider murder as an acceptable act because science has told him that embryos do not have a properly developed nervous system and he would not only be taking away the life, hopes, love and happiness of a valuable doctor but also devastating his family and dependents. Who knows whether the doctor may have gone on to save the Pope from a rare disease? He would certainly have tried his best to help the Pope in this hypothetical situation.

The essential problem for atheists is that of creation. The suggestion that the entire universe appeared from nothingness is logically impossible. Theism fills this 'gap' of understanding by essentially blaming God for the whole thing. In this sense 'God' becomes a metaphor for everything that we can't explain or understand. Unfortunately blaming God is not a good enough answer, because it is too easy and opens up the floodgates where everything can be simply explained away with a small three-letter word. There is no meaning here. If this kind of thinking was applied to everything, we would be convincing ourselves that rainbows are unicorn's vapour trails, and simply because we can't find a better alternative.

I would be willing to suggest that perhaps the known universe is finite in three-dimensions but perhaps infinite in four, and perhaps 'God' is simply a symptom of our own human inability to comprehend infinity. I'm no astrophysicist but at least I'm generating alternatives.

As you can probably tell I am very interested in this subject and would openly invite any debate or comments that anybody might have, including 'Your grasp of multidimensionality is fundamentally flawed'.

Returning to the scrap of deism that I have left, I would have to say that if there is a heaven, my God will forgive me because he understands that searching for truth is truly virtuous, then he will most likely go back to the searching for truth he was doing before I disturbed him. If we possess no such thing as an immortal soul, which seems highly likely, then we will simply ebb back into the universe from whence we came and find our eternal existence in the matter and energy that once we were.