The God Delusion, Part 1 - A deeply religious non-believer

My intention with this short series of blog posts is to discuss Richard Dawkins latest book The God Delusion (see picture). I think that The God Delusion is a good book, and I think that it is a book that should be read, especially if you are interested in science and religion and the relation between the two. You can accuse Richard Dawkins of a lot of things, but I have never seen anyone claiming that he is a bad writer. Indeed his clear and lucid style is some of the best I have ever read. If that is not reason enough for you, then consider the impact that this book has already had. Go to YouTube and search for Dawkins and you will see that he has been invited to every imaginable talk show to discuss his latest work. Here, for example, you will find a heated discussion with the renowned Bill O'Reily (not a very pleasant man if you ask me).

I would not claim that The God Delusion is a very original book. Most of the arguments and discussions in the book have appeared elsewhere before. However, The God Delusion is a comprehensive book which I think covers most the relevant arguments and discussions concerning science and religion. One influential (fundamentalist?) blog that I read recently complained that atheists cannot decide whether to attack religion because they think it is false or because they think it lead to evil. My response is that, religion should be criticized because it is plausibly false and because it is a source of evil. It is not a good defense to point out that your stance can be criticized from several different perspectives.

In the first chapter of his book Dawkins defines what he means by God. After all, God is defined in very different ways depending on who you ask. For example, there are many people who see God, not as an omnipotent, omniscient man in the sky, but rather they claim that God is the natural laws, or God is in everything. Personally, I think that semantics (the meaning of words), in essence is a democratic endeavor. I think that a word means what most people think it means. If you are not happy with that then come up with a new word. In any case, Dawkins makes it clear that he writes about the God as he is defined in the religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam i.e. the God in the Old Testament (Yahweh).

Why should we respect a religious hypothesis more than any other hypothesis? That is the next issue brought up in The God Delusion. In my relatively short career I have only yet been part of one article submission. The way it works is that when you send in your article to a peer reviewed journal, the editors will read it and possibly send it right back with a "we won't publish this crap" note attached. If you are lucky the editor thinks that your article has a chance of being published in their journal. If so, the editor sends the article to two or three reviewers, typically your worst critics. The reviewers read the article and send their comments back to the editor. They also say whether they think the article is good enough to be published in the journal or not. After all these turns which usually takes two or three months (sometimes more), you get your article back along with all the criticism and ad hominim attacks (which occur every now and then) and more often than not with a negative response. Then, for a couple of weeks, you feel devastated and contemplate whether you should perhaps start working with garbage disposal or something else that suits your mental capacity better, and then you get back on the horse and send your article to a less prestigious journal.

Dawkins writes:

"A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other."

I could not agree more. To criticize religion in the same fashion that scientific discoveries are criticized is completely taboo. I think this is strange because as I see it believing in a God is no different from believing that a classically conditioned memory trace sits in the Purkinje cell in the Cerebellum. Of course there is one important difference. Religion is often much more a part of a person than is for instance a scientific hypothesis. It is probably easier to really hurt someone by criticizing their religion than by criticizing something else, and I think one should take this issue into account, though not to the extent that we do today.

To illustrate the reactions that can occur when religion is criticized, Richard Dawkins, writes about the Muslims reaction to the cartoons that were published in Jyllands Posten. Sure they were probably tasteless and all that, but compared to the way Richard Dawkins was depicted in South Park (season 10, episode 12), it is nothing (I am a big south park fan by the way). In response to the cartoons in Jyllands posten one (fundamentalist) Muslim responded in a tragicomic fashion:

"Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion'."

Trofim Lysenko - why we should not mix ideology and science

What happens when ideology becomes more important than scientifical critical thinking?

Trofim Lysenko (see picture), quickly became a very prominent "scientist" in the soviet union following an article printed in Pravda (aka "the truth") about this barefooted peasant who "solved problems". Even though he had little education and was barely literate Lysenko progressed rapidly in the soviet system and it did not take many years before he controlled much of the agricultural policy in the soviet union. Lysenko was a practical man who cared about practical issues rather than theoretical nonsense. When something appealed to Lysenko's intuition there was really no need for rigorous testing, consider for instance his citation "In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result you will obtain it". When he had achieved a powerful position in the soviet union Lysenko's intuition became so important that criticzing him was associated with grave dangers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian biologist who have made important contributions to genetics was one of Lysenko's many victims

Lysenko did not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution because organisms do not "compete", they co-operate. Based on this belief Lysenko ordered that trees should be planted in groups so that they would co-operate (perhaps he was a well-meaning man after all). The result: only 5% of the trees planted flourished, 15% survived, huge economical costs to the soviet union. Lysenko also believed that environment meant everything. Give a seed a good environment and it will flourish. The result of this: availability of meat and vegetables was no higher in 1953 than in 1900 when Tsar Nicholas II reigned the country, millions of Russians starved. In fact, Lysenko even believed that one could easily change one species into another species by manipulating the environment, and indeed "scientists" began reporting studies in which they changed bacteria into viruses and even a rabbit into a chicken!

This history shows the danger of letting ideals steer science. Though he may have been a well meaning man, Lysenko ignored what was known about agriculture and the Russian people suffered the consequences. As I have previously argues, I think it would be a mistake to ignore what we know about human nature when we design our society. Under what conditions do people tend to co-operate, and when do we not co-operate?, what differences between the sexes should we expect and accept rather than fight against (and which should we fight against)? I think that the most important lesson of the above is that whatever ideological motives we have we should not let these motives affect the way we do scientific research...