
«You have a particular definition of god which i think is not normative.»ârabiz
Richard Dawkins, a fundamentalist atheist and author, has a new book out called The God Delusion. It looks at religion as a social phenomenon and makes some predictions and admonishments about our attachment to what is patently irrational. Sadly, Dawkins was in town a few weeks ago and I missed him. I would have enjoyed going to his reading.
While this book is not on the top of my current reading list, even though Iâm a fan of Dawkinsâ work, I do enjoy reading the reviews of it. Itâs the lazy way to feel smart!
From one such review on Uncertain Principles comes this bit of insight:
«The modern versions of the âontological argumentâ for God may be awfully intricate, but theyâre not really any worse than the loopholes in experimental tests of Bellâs theorem (in fact, divine intervention is probably about as credible an explanation of the results as some of the proposed loopholes). Ridiculous and complicated as they may seem, those are the arguments that need to be addressed, in the same way that a new Bellâs theorem experiment would need to deal with the faintly absurd loopholes that remain in the existing experiments.»
Itâs a sad, sick world in which we, as a culture, still need to debunk
a priori arguments (i.e. the pure-reason logic constructs referred to
as âontological argumentsâ made by Olde Timey authors like Decartes).
Why do I have to waste my time explaning why the crap in your head is
irrelvant to the mechanical nature of the universe?
Just because you canât âimagine
a being greater than which no greater can be conceivedâ only proves your
cognative limitations and suggests limitations on all human thinking. And if
you accept the limits of human cognative ability, you might
find a priori arguments as a class of persuasion even less cogent.
Like Vegas, what happens in your head, stays in your head.
Looking at some of the âclassical onotological argumentsâ for God, I shudder at the utter remoteness of them. They explain nothing. They predict nothing. The do not expand our understanding of life, the universe and everything. They move civilization forward not one jot. Cavemen learning to beat each other about the head with giant sloth bones was, as an achievement for the species, more productive.
Interestingly, one of the comments on that review points to a more philosophical rebuke of Dawkins:
«Again, not to harp on the point, but Dawkinsâ citations suggest that if children arenât indoctrinated into their parentsâ religion they will amost certainly accept some other superstition. In this case Dawkins seems to be assuming a naive sense of free well, as well as a tabula rasa conception of human nature. Among atheists there is an old joke that all children are born godless, but eventually indoctrinated into believing in gods. But science is science, and the works that Dawkins references in the first half of his book produce a great deal of evidence that children are ânatural theists.â So a child is not turned into a Christian or Muslim from the state of non-theism, but rather inculcated in a specific set of beliefs slotted on top of their innate religious sensibilities.»
Whatâs fascinating to me (and points to my own general dullness), is the idea of studying religion as a natural and social property of humans. Stripped of its emotional baggage, religion is an enormously important social activity that merits full scientific investigation. The mythology of religion, of course, does not.
Iâll have to pick up Breaking the Spell one of these days.