The God Delusion

I am just about done reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". It is an entertaining read, and certainly informative in parts.

For those who don't know Richard Dawkins, he is an atheist crusader. I choose these words carefully. He has the same zeal in spreading atheism that some fundamentalist missionaries have for their religions.

The central theme of the book is that reason and rationality should take all people towards atheism. And it goes without saying that he believes reason and rationality to be superior to faith. I have no problem with this. Every belief of every person is superior to that of another person, or that belief would not have been chosen.

Dawkins picks up individual ideas from the arguments of people of faith and goes about demolishing them. He tackles topics such as evolution and intelligent design, morality etc.

His arguments for morality and why they don't need a religious framework are sound. I agree with him for the most part in that area. This is because he tackles this subject mainly within the framework of human society, but also compares similar behaviors across species. The central idea here is how what we take as "morals" are actually mechanisms to sustain and propagate our species and it works well.

Dawkins however falters in other arguments. His take on intelligent design is one such piece that exposes the inadequacy of his atheism. For a person who harps on reason, rationality and logic, Dawkins displays a surprising lack of all of them in those passages where he takes on intelligent design. He ends up taking a position as indefensible as the one of the Creationists.

Dawkins is harsh on those who support Intelligent Design, and it makes for entertaining reading when he rips apart the core "Irreducible Complexity" idea that sustains Intelligent Design. This idea goes as follows: As we trace the building blocks of life, you will at some point reach a component that cannot be traced to an origin. While you can trace the parts that make it up, you cannot understand how they came together. For the proponents of Intelligent Design, this is where God steps in.

It should be fairly obvious to a rational person (and one who understands probability and chance) that there is no such thing as irreducible complexity.

This is where Dawkins and I part ways however. Dawkins seeks to explain the irreducible complexity i.e. make it reducible. He argues that this is the great goal of science - the continuous digging away at the frontiers of knowledge so that irreducible complexities fall away and new ones appear. He makes two fatal flaws in logic here that makes suspect his foundation of his own atheism.

One, he assumes that the ability to explain the unknown is the cornerstone of atheism. The unstated assumption is that people of faith are unable or unwilling to explain, and hence their belief in God.

Two, he makes the same flaw in argument that people of religion make - that humans are somehow endowed with the mastery of their environment, that we have the ability to explain everything, and that we can speak for all of nature.

Some more exploration of the two flaws is warranted. The argument that atheism has to be founded on reason and science is somewhat bogus. While faith is a belief in a supernatural God (or an unexplainable power), atheism strictly speaking should be a belief in nothing! One can see where this is going. Richard Dawkins' brand of atheism is based on a belief in science. While it is an old position of people of faith that science cannot explain everything, my position is that belief in science itself (whether or not it can explain anything) is a belief! Ergo, there really isn't a true atheist for even science relies on a belief that there is stuff out there to be explained and that is what keeps it going.

The second one is more fundamental, and for me exposes Dawkins' claims as hollow that he is an atheist. He is in fact so deeply influenced by his Christian upbringing that he doesn't even realize it.

The main position of people of religion (mainly the Abrahamic faiths) is that humans are different from other animals and nature because we have an intellect and a God. We have used our intellect to create language, civilization, science, art etc. which the other lowly animals have been unable to. So that makes us special, and somehow superior to the dogs, cats, birds, trees, plants, rocks etc. It is therefore up to us to exploit, protect, nurture and explain this universe that we live in. This is the "White man's burden" at the level of species and just as arrogant. I call it the "Noah's Ark Syndrome". Dawkins says that we are able to explain everything, and that this ability to explain is something that is unique to humans, and therefore, we need not believe in God. The problem here is that if at some point we cannot explain something, his whole argument falls flat.

There is another way to look at this. Humans like all other things on this planet and in the universe are a product of a long process that continues to this day. Darwin called it natural selection. Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his "Fooled by Randomness" gives a wonderful analogy which is apt here. Let us assume there is a coin tossing competition (where you "win" by guessing right and you "lose" by guessing wrong). Many people participate in it. It follows a knockout pattern until the end where there is an eventual winner. Here are the questions. Did the winner have any special skill that led to the win? Can he explain his win?

It would be a fallacy to claim that the winner was somehow endowed with more skill than the others. It would be downright foolish for the winner to hold forth on what it took - the effort, the practice, the "technique" - to win. To the extent that the winner studies this probability, it is a useful exercise. But if he assumes that because he is the winner, he is "better" than the people who didn't win, he is - in Dawkins words - deluded.

Every animal, plant, tree, rock etc. that we see around us is the "winner" of such a coin tossing competition. Including us humans. As they say in aeronautics, a good airplane is one that flies well. Not one that flies fast, or flies high, or carries a lot of passengers, or has tremendous range. Applying the same philosophy to life, it is apparent that there is no superior life form. Humans are well suited to our environment. We needed language and art and science and sundry other things to succeed in life and propagate. The ant required six legs, a maniacal sense of duty and discipline to succeed in its life. Is it really possible to compare the two and judge which life form is superior? Dawkins seems to think so, and that is a very Christian view of life. The ants don't need art and literature, just as we don't need to spray formic acid from our behinds. If an ant were to judge us, it would deem us very useless indeed and think that it was "superior".

There is another analogy that I think is useful to know. I don't quite remember where I got this from, but it has stuck with me. There is a little worm in a potato, in a sack full of potatoes, which is lying among hundreds of such sacks. All these sacks are in a cargo hold of a ship which is tossing about in a stormy ocean. Would this little worm comprehend and visualize the ocean and the storm the same way the ship's Captain does? Does it need to? We are limited by our senses, and every sophisticated instrument that we make to look beyond ends up being a proxy for the self same senses. I had a lesson in English I think in primary school. A man stumbles into a remote valley where all the people have been blind for many generations. He tries to explain the concept of "seeing" to them, and they in turn think he is a madman. How exactly do you explain what it means to see? Or hear? Taste? How do we know that other animals don't have some other form of "sense" that connects them to the universe that hasn't explained to them this environment in ways that we cannot even imagine? Does it make us any inferior? Or superior?

I digress. The bottom line is that Dawkins atheism is strongly influenced by his Christian roots. He makes the same errors in logic that people of faith make. He too is bound by his "belief" in these fallacies. Dawkins therefore is not a true atheist.

There is however one sentence in the book that totally demolishes Dawkins' credibility. While making the case for the superiority of science and reason, he says that if people of science had never asked the fundamental questions, we would still be living in the dark ages. Fair enough. He then goes on to tackle the old distinction that people of faith make between science and religion. The distinction is that science can answer the question "How" whereas religion answers the question "Why". He says that this distinction is bogus. As to whether the questions "Why does the universe exist? Why does XYZ happen? etc." need to be answered, he offers a gem. He says that just because one can make a grammatically correct question does not mean it needs to be answered.

So I guess if our ancestors saw lightning happen and asked "Why does lightning occur?" and Dawkins' ancestor had offered up the same gem, we probably wouldn't have any of the answers we have now. For in that age, those questions must have been as fantastical as all the current "Why" questions. Rejecting a question as not worth answering would negate the need for science too!

A good read, but totally unconvincing. Richard Dawkins is a typical missionary.