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The God Delusion II. Dawkins's Book I began to think seriously about this question, “What does it mean to understand something?” as a result of reading Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion. Dawkin's makes a number of valid points about the pretensions and inconsistencies of organized religions in the course of his critique, and he also has some interesting things to say about recent discoveries in several scientific fields, yet I finished reading the book with the idea that he simply doesn't understand things very well. This is made evident by the pseudo-scientific way he has set up his analysis. He proposes to examine the hypothesis that There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. He comes to the conclusion that the evidence cannot support such a hypothesis. I believe he is right. He goes on to suggest, following this line of reasoning, that anyone who finds the concept “God” useful in fleshing out a worldview must be delusional. Hence the title of his book. But it seems to me that Dawkins has not given us a very sophisticated definition of who or what God is. There are other ways of defining “God” than the one he proposes, and this fact deflates his final conclusion. He himself must be dimly aware of how narrowly he has set his sights, for he dismisses both Confucianism and Buddhism as perhaps not religions at all, but “ethical systems or philosophies of life.” Clearly, to a man whose guiding purpose is to dismiss the “designer God” that lies at the root of much religion, those religions and philosophies that do not have a “designer God” will be of little interest. More than that, they will ruin his case. Dawkins is a well-known atheist, and he has met up with more than his share of Bible-thumping crackpots in his day. This may explain why his understanding of religious belief is so superficial. (Many adults who have liberated themselves from the rigors or orthodoxy find themselves in the same boat.} And there is both entertainment and illumination galore in his analysis of the theological arguments for God's existence as set out by Aquinas, Anselm, and other famous clerics of the Middle Ages. Among other fascinating asides with which the book is laced, he reminds us that recent experimental studies on the efficacy of prayer have failed to expose the slightest benefit to be gotten from it, and offers a humorous suggestion of how comedian Bob Newhart might have discussed this prayer-research with his maker. He seems to be unaware that this well-known study actually illustrates, among other things, how difficult it is to apply the methods of science to these realms. Occasionally his desire to come up with zingers carries him too far, and at one point, after highlighting the numerous character defects of the Hebrew God in shopping-list fashion, he refers to him as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” At one point Dawkins defines his own belief, rather unimpressively, in the following terms: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” To which the believer might reply, “Perhaps he is not there. Perhaps he is here.” Though Dawkins himself is obsessed with causes and effects, his own thought is heavily laden with spiritual import of a different kind. Let me give you a few examples. His “political” argument may be summarized in a single principle: in mature societies, respect for persons, whatever their beliefs (or lack of belief), must stand above the respect we grant to religious doctrines themselves. This is a sound and admirable principle, but it happens to rests on the doctrine of the sanctity of the individual soul. This is a religious principle. You won't find many references to it in The Origin of Species.
In an attempt to explain how the mind, and even religious sentiment itself, has contributed to our evolution, he writes, “Each of us builds, inside our head, a model of the world in which we find ourselves.” He goes on to acknowledge that this Model may well contain some means of addressing and coping with our sense of beauty and fellow-feeling. The “software” we use to create this model “was constructed and debugged by Natural Selection...” he asserts. Yet lo and behold, he adds, “As an added bonus, our brains turn out to be powerful enough to accommodate a much richer world model than the mediocre utilitarian one that our ancestors needed in order to survive. Art and science are runaway manifestations of this bonus.” This “added bonus”—the vast disparities between the utilitarian faculties we need to survive and the bountiful energies and imagination we have at our disposal—is rather difficult to account for by reference to successive adaptations to the environment. Am I suggesting that God “gave us” these gifts? Not in so many words—although many people find that it's the only way to adequately describe how lucky they feel to be exuberantly alive. For the present, I am making the more modest suggestion that biological theories can take us only so far in our inquiry into life's mysteries, because, and Dawkins own analysis makes plain, they are incapable of accounting for the most unusual and important pieces of evidence. Call it The Natural Selection Delusion. It might even be argued that Dawkins himself is suggesting that these gifts were give to us by a God—the God called Natural Selection. This phrase—Natural Selection— refers to a process by which a God (the one we're referring to as Nature) selects organisms that have the best design features, and grants to them greater reproductive success than their less sophisticated fellows. But does this God called Nature exist? I don't think so. It seems to me, in fact, that the idea that Nature differentiates between creatures on an individual level, with the goal in mind of preserving only the best of the bunch, is more absurd that anything you'll find in the Old Testament. Exasperated readers may exclaim, “It's just a manner of speaking!” Of course. Yet in many cases God-talk is also just a manner of speaking. We need to be precise in our choice of expressions. The concept of Natural Selection, by placing the organism in a passive role with regard to evolution, misrepresents what actually takes place. The God of Natural Selection crops up repeatedly in The God Delusion. In the passage quoted above Dawkins refers to the human software that “was constructed and debugged by Natural Selection.” At another point he refers to “the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection...” Those are Dawkins's words, not mine. But selection doesn't build things into the brain, any more than God tinkers at his workbench crafting frogs and leeches. In short, biologists know a good deal less than they would care to admit about how life develops. This shortcoming doesn't necessitate a return to the Biblical God of our ancestors. Ever since Plato's time a good portion of philosophical speculation has been focused on the issue of limning the commonly-felt indwelling surge of energy—call it love, emotion, idealism, a vital spark. Indeed, this zone of experience can be felt throughout the exuberant pages of The God Delusion, though Dawkins has never really come to grips with it. Never really understood it. Never understood himself. One further case in point will have to do. In addressing the issue of aesthetic perception, the crux of Dawkins reasoning is as follows: Obviously Beethoven's late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare's sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and sublime if he isn't. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare. Yet Dawkins never addresses the issue of what the experience of the sublime entails. When we use that word, we're referring to a sense of over-reaching awe, perhaps tinged with terror. Of course, beauty also shows itself in other, less dramatic guises. We experience such things not only when we're in the presence of a work by Beethoven or Shakespeare, but also when we're watching a sunrise or attending a wedding. Many artists and scientists experience a sense of the sublime in the act of simply using their creative faculties, and they often describe such experiences in religious terms. If you've ever watched a Country Music Awards ceremony, you'll know just what I mean. And after all, Beethoven's favorite book was Betrachtungen uber die Werke Gottes in der Natur (Observations Concerning God's Works in Nature).
Am I saying that the experience of beauty, or the exercise of creativity, “proves” that God exists. I guess I am, though at this point it might be more fitting simply to assert that the experience of beauty is inexplicable without recourse to value-laden expressions that carry a spiritual dimension. Dawkins argues that the logic behind such arguments is “never spelled out.” In fact many, many books have been written spelling it out at length. Glancing over at the shelf I spot Real Presences by the polymath George Steiner, and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry by the Thomist Jacques Maritain; there we have A God Within by the biologist Rene Dubos, and over there I spy the poet Czeslaw Milosz's Visions from San Francisco Bay, which contains some trenchant thoughts about religion and aesthetic experience. The science of aesthetics has a long and glorious history, and Dawkins might do well to begin his education with that eighteenth-century landmark, Kant's Critique of Judgment. Perhaps Dawkins should have given closer attention to the theory espoused by the eminent biologist Steven Jay Gould, for whom he obviously has a good deal of respect, of “non-overlapping magisteria.” Gould's theory, in brief, is that scientists study particular things and derive suitable explanations for how or why they behave the way they do. Theologians and philosophers probe such issues as why anything exists at all, rather than nothing. The two fields of inquiry, in Gould's view, are categorically distinct. Faced with this straightforward distinction, we might expect Dawkins to demonstrate, with characteristic scientific brio, that the two spheres are not, in fact, mutually exclusive, or that the difference between the two types of question is in fact illusory. He does no such thing. It he had done, he would have been exercising a command of metaphysics that it's pretty clear he doesn't posses. Instead, he merely tells a few anecdotes about his undergraduate years at Oxford, muses on whether philosophers would be comfortable being grouped into the same category as theologians, asks a rhetorical question, “What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?” and asks himself why a chaplain would be better able to deal with such questions than a gardener or a chef. Several times in the course of a page or two he baldly questions whether theology can be considered a subject for inquiry at all. Dawkins own book of a short-course in the via negativa of theological thinking, but he lacks the background to pull it off. Not only the background in metaphysics, but also, it would seem, the background in those life experiences upon which we build our notions of what life, at its best, both demands and promises. III A friend of mine who's going through a troubled patch asked me the other day if I believed in God—not in the sneering or peevish tone, but as if she were actually grappling with these questions and perhaps hoping that I would say Yes. I said Yes. She asked me what kind of God. It was not the moment to enter into an extended disquisition on the niceties of theology, so I simply told her I was a Deist. Perhaps she went home and looked it up in the dictionary. That's what I did.
To call oneself a Deist is not to say much. My understanding is that there are several kinds. Am I a Shaftesbury Deist? Yes. A d'Holbach Deist? No. I believe in a benevolent God whose spirit moves the benevolence in all of us, though a sort of participatory energy that I suspect the neo-Platonists have explored more fully than I ever will, or currently feel the need to. I also believe in the Navaho Gods that inspired the magnificent prayer that begins “Walk in beauty.” Even that little phrase says a lot, I think. When you're on the verge of browbeating your local librarian because you've received a ten-cent fine for a book you seem to recall having returned, ask yourself if you're walking in beauty. (Probably not.) On the other hand, I do not believe in that Deist Watchmaker who designed the universe and then sauntered off to the parlor to play whist. No, the universe is a sublime work of art in the making, and there are still plenty of lumps in it. Nor do I believe in a God that watches over us attentively, making sure that we never come to harm—there is far too much evidence to the contrary—though I do find myself addressing such a God occasionally, usually when a friend is in real trouble or I'm dangling from the end of a rope. I believe that there is quite a bit to be learned on these subjects in the Zen koans of the Old and New Testaments, though I see no reason that we should limit ourselves to such texts. As far as science is concerned, I find it easy to see the validity of the positions so admirably established by David Hume in the eighteenth century, that the law of cause and effect is impossible to demonstrate scientifically, and that our knowledge of both ourselves and the world at large is based entirely on faith. This serves to explain why the understanding arrived at by means of scientific hypotheses are often useful, but seldom really illuminating. I do not believe, as some folks do, that there is a reason for everything. If there were, then it would follow that personal freedom is a delusion. I believe that some events have more value than others, some are mere accidents—and some have a negative value. They destroy things. Good things. It is our mission to differentiate between these various types of events and try to emulate the best of them, so that we involve ourselves and everyone around us in fewer unfortunate accidents and more nourishing, delightful, and mind-expanding events.
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