"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try no hell below us: above us only sky imagine no possessions: it isn't hard to do nothing to kill or die for: and no religion too.. "
John Lennon
"The empty headed fool says in his heart, there is no God".
In the November 2006 edition of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf writes about "...the band of intellectual brothers mounting a crusade against belief in God". Wolf in his introduction explains that:
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there is no excuse for shirking.
And the battle rages.
In the article, Wolf set out to talk to three of the most socially prominent atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Wolf wanted to find out what it would mean to to enlist in the war against faith. In this entry I'll comment on the interview with Dawkins.
Dawkins has reached somewhat of a celebrity status among atheists. Wolf talks about how
"Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means."
I'm a simple man. I think those are mighty fine arguments for theism. Wolf goes on to explain that:
Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."
That is a fascinating statement to me. There seems to be an a priori mechanism working here, where Dawkins (who without doubt is a towering intellect) seemingly retreats into a defensive mode. If I believe in God, and he does not; why wouldn't he try to disprove it? Interestingly enough, Wolf states that science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero is vanishingly small. That also fascinates me, because for the reasons of the neurosurgeon and geneticist mentioned above I would flip it and say that the probability of evolution, while not zero is vanishingly small. So, we are using the same argument to defend our positions. I have to wonder again, why wouldn't he try to disprove it?
According to Dawkins, "highly intelligent people are mostly atheists". This statement has inherent weaknesses. Has Dawkins interviewed all of the highly intelligent people that have ever lived? Or are living now? Or will have ever lived? Of course not. This is the statistical fallacy known as "hasty generalizations". In hasty generalization fallacies a large enough sample is not taken. If the sample is not large enough, then we risk it not being representative of the class we are studying. What if there was just one highly intelligent person who believed in God? What if there were two? Or three or four or five or a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand, does that weaken his argument? How can he so easily dismiss religious intellectuals on an equal or perhaps even greater plane than he, for example Blaise Pascal?
But there's more beneath this statement. By ascribing a belief system (whether atheistic or religious) to a class or segment of people based on superiority or inferiority of a trait, moral or ethical questions arise. For example, if we restate his claim he could say with the same meaning that "stupid people are mostly religious". Do you see where I'm going with this? Yep, I'll go ahead and make the leap that this kind of reasoning leads to devaluing segments of humanity. Now, I'm not saying that Dawkins is a Nazi. But, if we are just the product of blind evolution, and smarter people like us know that there is no God, then let's degrade the value of those in our society who are not as smart as us. And maybe us smart people should only marry other smart people so that we create the "master race".
I will give Dawkins points for honesty though. Dawkins openly agrees with the most stubborn fundamentalists (sic) that evolution must lead to atheism.
And on that point, we are agreed.
