To hear a mocking bird

To hear a mocking bird

To Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto last night to hear Richard Dawkins speak about his new book The God Delusion. Dawkins’ thesis is that religious beliefs are not merely false but also harmful. He makes a strong case against the Old Testament and has harmless fun ridiculing it as a source of morality. He draws on his authority and reputation as a scientist to encourage atheists to stand up against claims that religious beliefs and sensibilities should be exempt from challenge. This is fine as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and it less than we deserve from Dawkins.

I believe that men and nations can live in peace and harmony—when they’ve tried everything else.

Religious tolerance is part of what constitutes the liberal democracies. It presumes that religion is a matter of individual belief and practice: the celebrated separation of church and state. This is not a dispensation of secularism. Rather, secularism emerged in the space provided by this settlement, itself the product of countries harrowed by religious war. It took much blood to produce societies in which we agree to differ.

Dawkins' line jeopardises this settlement without offering the means to replace it. Secularism does not remove the impulse to worship. Substitute religions have flourished in secular societies and still do. John Gray argues that Communism, Fascism, and the widespread belief in Modernity and Progress are but secular versions of Judæo-Christian millenarianism. The latter has spawned the lesser cults of wealth and celebrity, and the American veneration of their own constitution. This has long since transcended the status of an eighteenth-century political settlement and now occupies a hallowed realm as a universal dispensation for mankind, its own mechanisms for change by now rusted into disuse.

Humans are pack animals, disposed to follow leaders. When we invented language and began to understand the world through the stories we tell about it, we became susceptible to what Dawkins calls ‘the God delusion’. No leader is so strong or charismatic that he would not prefer to be seen as the the humble instrument of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural leader who always wins and who will settle all scores in an afterlife opaque to human scrutiny. This is the paradigmatic meme.

If God did not exist, we should have had to invent him.
Voltaire

Voltaire didn’t go far enough. We didn’t have to invent this meme; it invents itself.

And so Dawkins doesn’t go far enough, at least not on the strength of his talk last night. A biologist should have a lot to say about our vulnerability to religious thinking and how it permeates our life. (This is why ordinary people fear religious cults. You might think sensible, educated people immune to absurd and extravagant belief. In our hearts we know we are not.) We need more from Dawkins and his colleagues not just on the pernicious effect of religious belief, but on how to come to terms with our vulnerability to it. We all need to see ourselves as recovering believers; most of us have not even taken the first step of recognising the problem we have.

The new issue of Prospect carries an article about how much western secularism has been the product of demographics. After the Industrial Revolution, secular and ‘progressive’ beliefs correlated with better health and hygiene; over generations, secularists outbred believers. That trend is now in reverse and secularism may already be in decline. This is not going to go away.

The man who introduced Dawkins last night spoke movingly of his own strongly religious upbringing and a university education that eventually allowed him to “diagnose his own condition”. This is one aspect of what it takes to free oneself from what we Buddhists call maya, the ‘world of illusion’. Mocking others worse afflicted is not a helpful start.

Thanks for tackling the question of religious belief, Prof., but 2/10 for addressing only part of it. ‘Could do better.’ A lot better.

Posted by SJT at October 30, 2006 09:31 PM