Transcript Unit Standard 1136 Plan the management of a forest estate

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins
An impassioned rebuttal of religion of all
types
(published 2006)
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Richard Dawkins
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Professor for the public understanding of science at
Oxford university
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Fellow of New College
Fellow of the Royal Society
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
2005 Shakespeare Prize
2001 Kistler Prize
1997 international Cosmos Prize for achievement in human
science
– 1990 Michael Faraday award of the Royal Society
– 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award
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Richard Dawkins
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He is best known as an ethologist, evolutionary
biologist and science writer
He is also an atheist, a secular humanist, a sceptic,
and an outspoken critic of creationism
His early books include:
– The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982),
The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995),
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow
(1998), and The Ancestor’s Tale (2004).

His latest publication and the most controversial is
“The God Delusion”
– The English language version has sold over 1.5 million
copies and been translated into 31 different languages
– It has become his most popular book
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The God Delusion
Ten Chapters
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1. A deeply religious non-believer
2. The God Hypothesis
3. Arguments for God’s existence
4. Why there almost certainly is no God
5. The roots of religion
6. The roots of morality: why are we good?
7. The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist
8. What’s wrong with religion? Why be so hostile?
9. Childhood, Abuse and the escape from religion
10. A much needed gap?
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H. Allen Orr
New York Review of Books
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“The God Delusion seems to me badly
flawed. Though I once labelled
Dawkins as a professional atheist, I’m
forced, after reading his new book, to
conclude he’s actually more an
amateur.”
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Some quotable quotes
– All religions are the same: religion is
basically guilt with different holidays
(Anon)
– Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the
opinion that has survived (Oscar Wilde)
– When enough people share a delusion, it
loses its status as a psychosis and gets a
religious tax exemption instead (Richard
de Sousa)
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Three themes to be covered
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Is God amenable to scientific inquiry? (Don)
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The origins of religion (Lindsay)
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Chapters 1,2 and 4
Chapter 5
Does ethics depend on religion? (Don)
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Chapters 6 and 7
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Einsteinian religion
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Dawkins claims:
– “By ‘religion’, Einstein meant something
entirely different from what is
conventionally meant.” (p.15)
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Some Einsteinian quotes
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“I do not believe in a personal God and
I have never denied this but have
expressed it clearly. If something is in
me which can be called religious, then it
is the unbounded admiration for the
structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it”
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Some more….
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“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to
me and seems even naive.”
“I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is
a somewhat new kind of religion.”
I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals
himself in the orderly harmony of what exists,
not in a God who concerns himself with fates
and actions of human beings.” “
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….and finally
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“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or
a goal, or anything that could be understood
as anthropomorphic. What I see in nature is
a magnificent structure that we can
comprehend only very imperfectly, and that
must fill a thinking person with a feeling of
humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling
that has nothing to do with mysticism.”
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Dawkins sums up…
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“Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely
metaphorical, poetic sense. So is
Stephen Hawking (‘for then we should
know the mind of God’), and so are
most of those physicists who
occasionally slip into the language of
religious metaphor.”
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Dawkins’ plea
(+ a sample of his angry mood)
– “I wish that physicists would refrain from
using the word God in their special
metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or
pantheistic God of the physicists is light
years away from the interventionist,
miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sinpunishing, prayer-answering God of the
Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of
ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse
the two is, in my opinion, an act of
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intellectual high treason.”
The God Hypothesis
 “There
exists a super-human,
supernatural intelligence who
deliberately designed and
created the universe and
everything in it, including us.”
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Agnosticism – two types
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Permanent Agnosticism in Principle (“PAP”)
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Temporary Agnosticism in Practice (“TAP”)
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PAP… example
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“In 1835, the celebrated French philosopher Auguste
Comte wrote, of the stars: ‘We shall never be able to
study, by any method, their chemical composition or
their mineralogical structure.’ Yet even before Comte
had set down these words, Fraunhofer had begun
using his spectroscope to analyse the chemical
composition of the sun. Now spectroscopists daily
confound Comte’s agnosticism with their long
distance analysis of the precise composition of even
distant stars.”
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TAP… examples
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What caused the massive extinction of life at
the end of the Permian period?
– We don’t know, but one day we might find out at least a
possible answer, just as we have with the Cretaceous
extinction.
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Does life occur elsewhere in the universe?
– Again we don’t know, but now we do know there are several
hundred planets circling other stars. This was not known a
few years ago.
– Dawkins comments. “We must still be agnostic about life on
other worlds – but a little bit less agnostic. Science can chip
away at agnosticism …..”
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God’s existence
“God’s existence or non-existence is a
scientific fact about the universe,
discoverable in principle if not in
practice.” (p.50)
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NOMA
“Non-Overlapping Magisteria”
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Stephen Jay Gould:
“The net, or magisterium , of science covers
the empirical realm: what is the universe
made of (fact) and why does it work this way
(theory). The magisterium of religion
extends over questions of ultimate meaning
and moral value. These two magisteria do
not overlap, nor do they encompass all
inquiry (consider, for example, the
magisterium of art and the meaning of
beauty).”
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Dawkins’ Bottom Line
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“A universe in which we are alone except for
other slowly evolved intelligences is a very
different universe from one with an original
guiding agent whose intelligent design is
responsible for its very existence.”
“The presence or absence of a creative superintelligence is unequivocally a scientific
question, even if it is not in practice – or not
yet – a decided one.”
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Rephrasing
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If God interacts in any way with the
natural world (or the universe), even if
it is only at its creation, the world will
be affected in some way; there will be
a change, some sort of result, and
therefore, in principle, God’s action is
amenable to scientific inquiry.
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Dawkins’ Alternative to
The God Hypothesis
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“Any creative intelligence, of sufficient
complexity to design anything, comes into
existence only as the end product of an
extended process of gradual evolution”
Or, in other words
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“Creative intelligences, being evolved,
necessarily arrive late in the universe, and
therefore cannot be responsible for designing
it.”
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Discuss
Can Dawkins sideline the Einsteinian
God?
 Is his formulation of The God
Hypothesis valid?
 Do you think God is amenable to
scientific inquiry?
 How about Dawkins’ extension of
Darwinism to eliminate God?
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Chapter 5
The origins of religion
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Where does religion come from?
Why do virtually all cultures have it?
To answer these questions, Dawkins argues
that religion is a by-product of something else
Benefits of religion may include:
– > Providing consolation and comfort
– > Fostering togetherness
– > Satisfying our yearning for knowledge of
existence
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A Darwinian approach
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The Darwinian question is
– What is the advantage generated by
having a religion? Religion is wasteful of
scarce resources
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Large quantities of time and energy used in the
construction of temples and cathedrals
Death of many who have died in religious wars
– Darwinian selection ruthlessly eliminates
waste
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A Darwinian approach
– How has religion benefited the survival of
an individual’s genes?
– My suggestions
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Large families with the woman’s primary role
being child bearing (traditional Roman
Catholicism, Exclusive Brethren)
Polygamy (traditional Mormons, Islam)
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Religion as a by-product
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Consider religion as a by-product
– Example - moths flying into lighted candles
because their eyes use light from distant
objects (moon) for navigation, not because
they want to commit suicide
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Apply this to religious groups that utilise
beliefs that are contradicted by science
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Some widely-held religious
beliefs
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Examples are
– The virgin birth
– The raising of Lazarus
– The resurrection of Jesus
– God hearing everybody’s thoughts
– The day of judgement
– Bread & wine becoming the body of Christ
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Are humans psychologically
primed for religion?
– Human tendency to dualism
– Deep-seated human belief that the mind
and the body inhabit different worlds
– Mental illness being seen as possession by
demons
– Striking similarities between the intense
love that a worshipper feels for God and
the love an admirer feels for his/her dearly
beloved
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A Darwinian view of religion
– Religious groups use a lot of resources in
pursuit of their religious activities
– Children initially trust those in authority
who provide them with advice on how to
live in this world
– Many attributes of religion are designed to
help its survival
– This has probably occurred by a mixture of
design and natural selection.
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Belief and reason
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Martin Luther repeatedly warned Christians of
the danger of reason
– “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it
never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but
struggles against the Divine Word, treating with
contempt all that emanates from God.”
– “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear out
the eyes of his reason.”
– “Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.”
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A Darwinian approach to ideas
Natural selection as it applies to ideas
(memes) rather than to genetic material
 Gene pools for carnivores would contain
a different groupings of genes
compared with those for herbivores
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– great sense of smell, sharp claws, meateating teeth, meat-digesting enzymes
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A Darwinian approach to ideas
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A meme pool of religious ideas :
– You will survive your own death
– If you die a martyr, you will go to paradise and
there will be 72 virgins waiting for you
– Heretics, blasphemers and apostates will be
punished (by death, mutilation or ostracism)
– Belief in God is a supreme virtue. If you find your
belief wavering, work hard at restoring it and beg
God to help your unbelief.
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A Darwinian approach to ideas
– Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The
more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more
virtuous you are.
– Religious beliefs must be accorded a higher level
of respect than other beliefs.
– Do not try to understand mysterious things such
as the trinity, transubstantiation or reincarnation.
Become fulfilled by calling it a mystery.
– Beautiful music, art and scriptures are selfreplicating tokens of religious ideas.
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A Darwinian view
– Some of these memes have absolute
survival value and would flourish in any
meme pool.
– Others would only survive with the right
mix of memes.
– Consider Islam and Buddhism as two
meme pools, with Islam analogous to a
carnivorous gene complex and Buddhism
analogous to a herbivorous one.
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An example of a meme Cargo cults
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Evolution of ideas
– Cargo cults evolved at an astonishing speed
– They arose in both New Guinea and Pacific
Melanesia; the earliest ones from the 19th Century,
the more recent ones from after WW2.
– The wondrous possessions that the immigrants
brought.
– Broken ones were sent away and new ones kept
arriving.
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Cargo cults
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No white man was ever seen to do anything that
could be recognised as being useful.
Sitting behind a desk shuffling paper was obviously a
form of religious devotion
Cargo was obviously of supernatural origin.
The locals eventually figure out that these rituals are
important to encourage the gods to send more cargo.
More than 17 outbreaks in New Caledonia, the
Solomons, Fiji and the Hebrides
Over 50 in New Guinea.
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Discuss
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What do you believe are the likely
origins of religion?
What have been the common roles for
religion?
Are these roles changing?
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Does Ethics depend on Religion?
 Chapter
6
 The roots of morality: why are we
good?
 Chapter
7
 The ‘Good’ Book and the changing
moral Zeitgeist
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Chapters 6 and 7, Contents
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Two Chapters … 64 pages … on Ethics?
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In fact, Chapters 6 and 7 are composed of:
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30 pages on the horrors of sacred scriptures
or the behaviour of religious people,
12 pages on the evolution of altruism,
10 pages on the Moral Zeitgeist,
7 pages on Hitler and Stalin, and
5 pages on ethics
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On the Origin of the Moral Sense
A Darwinian perspective
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Altruism – kinship, reciprocation and
symbiosis, reputation, conspicuous generosity
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Misfiring or the “by-product” theory
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Moral dilemmas across cultural and religious
boundaries – thought experiments
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Moral Philosophers – two types
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Absolutists – Absolutists believe there are
absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives
whose rightness makes no reference to the
consequences.
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Consequentialists – Consequentialists hold
that the morality of an action should be
judged by its consequences.
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The Moral Zeitgeist
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“Zeitgeist” – spirit of the times
“A broad liberal consensus of ethical
principles … A mysterious consensus
which changes over the decades… and
…moves in parallel, on a broad front,
throughout the educated world.”
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Conclusion on the Zeitgeist
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“Where, then, have these concerted
and steady changes in social
consciousness come from?... For my
purposes, it is sufficient that they
certainly have not come from religion.”
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Discuss
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Are there any absolutes?
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Has religion played a part in the
development of the moral Zeitgeist?
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Will it continue to play a part in the
future?
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