Dawkins is a Good Read. And Wrong

Richard Dawkins is undoubtedly a very smart man, much smarter than me. However, his recent entry on the Huffington Post I found to be quite lacking.

First, he starts off with the misstatement that America was “founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment,” which I think romanticizes the founding of America a great deal. Not to mention that the country may have been “founded” by those fleeing religious persecution, but they didn’t waste much time persecuting those who held different beliefs. Dawkins paints this picture of a rosy secular republic with the Founding Fathers welcoming and tolerant to all differing religious views. Bollocks. The reason the founding fathers were so adamant to separate church and state wasn’t as much to keep church out of government as it was to keep government out of church. If Dawkins can say, with a straight face, that the founding fathers would have been open to all sects of Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, Islam, Mormonism, etc. then I’ll stand up and call him a bald faced liar. To say that our modern political system would “horrify” the Founding Fathers presumes that the Founding Fathers would not also have been “horrified” by things like abortion and gay marriage. I am fairly certain that would have been equally horrified by both.

Dawkins is correct, however, that there is a rising element of what I consider a specific brand of American Christian Fundamentalism that is definitely a cause for concern–among true Christians and non-Christians alike. These people, often in the guise of Christianity, pervert the very Bible they purport to worship for the sake of advancing their own political agenda and often engage in a form of worship that I can’t really fathom, which seems to include ignoring the poor and worshiping the dollar. But that’s not really the focus of Dawkins post.

Instead, Dawkins purports to engage reason and the scientific mind to conclude that, in all probability, there is no god. But he proceeds to offer evidence that is, frankly, irrelevant.

Turning to British leadership analogies as only a Brit could, Dawkins outlines the Chamberlain and Churchill schools of dealing with the ‘threat’ of religion to science (again, as if this threat were something new and endemic to America. Galileo might differ with Dawkins on this.)

Dawkins then goes on to criticize rational scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould, who understood that science cannot affirm or deny the existence of the supernatural, nor need they bother. That’s because Dawkins and the Fundamentalist Atheist movement are as zealous and mis-guided as the Fundamentalist Christian’s they oppose. Both of them have abandoned the core of the belief system they purport to adhere to and make gigantic leaps from reason.

Dawkins starts off in the right direction: that the existence of a deity (or deities, if you rather) can be viewed as a scientific hypothesis. I agree. In fact, to me, it’s very much like the quest for a unified theory in physics. But that’s where Dawkins makes a huge mistake: he concludes that “a universe with a god would be a completely different universe from one without”. Really? Why is that so? I say that a universe with a god could be exactly like one without one. It really depends on the nature of the god you believe in, doesn’t it?
Dawkins seems to think that if there is a god, it must be an interventionist god. That god would be evidenced by a righteous display of his powers, healing the sick, blowing shit up or something. I don’t really know. As an example, he offers that if there were some kind of DNA evidence that Jesus did, in fact, not have a father and had a virgin mother, that the religious community (which he’s lumped now with anyone who agrees with Gould’s NOMA) would rush to embrace the science. Right off the bat, Dawkins is trying to attack *Fundamentalism* but failing to properly define the scope of his inquiry. You can’t disprove one religion’s god based on the fundamental assumptions of another religion’s belief. Not all religions are incompatible with scientific inquiry or evolution. It’s too bad, in attempting to prove or disprove his hypothesis, Dawkins never actually bothers to define the “god” he’s attempting to disprove.

He makes an attempt. He mentions that if your view of “god” is one of “love, nature, goodness, the universe and the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity” then his previous diatribe doesn’t apply. What he misses is that to many Christians, god is both personified and the embodiment of those things. Now, personally, I don’t believe in a personified, interventionist god. But Dawkins really makes a critical error, one I see atheists making all the time, by distinguishing the two.

At heart of the debate between the religious and the non-religious is something that Dawkins does touch on: “we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem.” Which is precisely the basis of the theory he’s supposed to be addressing. He goes on to point out, rightly so, “Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.” That’s where he slips up. He’s assuming that “god” is a “complex and statistically improbable thing” and that since these things are the product of evolution, they “cannot be responsible for designing it.”

That may be true, but now, he’s attacking Intelligent Design. He’s assuming, and he makes a lot of assumptions–most of which are based in Fundamentalism, that if there were a god who created the universe, that it must have been designed. Because when physicists smash atoms into each other in a supercollider, the sub-atomic particles that result are always exactly what they expected.

But, in fact, most of the Christians I know don’t believe in intelligent design. They believe in evolution and they’ve read Darwin (many even read Dawkins). Certainly Dawkins hangs with a different crowd than I do, but something tells me neither one of us is down with the Creflo Dollar crew. That’s the problem. Dawkins says it’s improbable that there’s a god because all of the complexities of life are numerous and unlikely to have been designed. Therefore, no god could have been complex enough to create all this, so no god exists. Q.E.D. Very nice. But very wrong. He’s looking in the wrong place for his evidence.

He hits on the kernel of what should be the starting point of scientific investigation when he says “Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem.” That’s where the answer lies, if there is an answer. Looking to evolution for the proof of existence or non-existence of god is looking in the wrong place. Evolution doesn’t have to be incompatible with god. Dawkins isn’t even asking the right questions, let alone looking at proper evidence.

If you want to believe that the universe was created by a god/gods and that it has since evolved into what it is, that’s fine with me. If you want to believe that the universe is pure random happenstance, that is also fine with me. If you want to believe that we ride on the back of a great tortoise I also am okay with that. But what really, really irritates me is zealotry. And I see Dawkins and his ilk engaging in the exact same kind of religious zealotry as Fundamentalist Christians, but they call their religion “Science”. What’s shameful about that is it’s a perverted science, as sure as “Fundamentalism” is a perverted Christianity. It’s zealotry, pure and simple. It’s low-down, dirty partisan politics. It’s intellectually dishonest.

The honest answer is: we can’t prove god exists and we can’t prove that god does not exist. Both the existence and non-existence of God are competing scientific hypotheses which are, at least in the foreseeable future, unlikely to be proved or disproved. Not that it can’t be valid scientific inquiry, I think it can. But before Dawkins can spout off evidence supporting his theory, it would be more productive to actually define which theory of god he’s actually attacking.

If you ask me, though, it’s a tremendous waste of his time and energy, not to mention his intellect. Instead of worrying about whether or not there is a god, the right thing to do is to stop wasting time and effort attempting to convert the religious to atheism and to focus on stopping the rise of Fundamentalism that perverts science, humanity and religion.