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September 19th, 2006, 10:04 AM
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Member
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 174
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Andrew Brown on Dawkins and Atheism
I enjoyed Andrew Brown's discussion of Dawkins from the Guardian and found some food for thought in it:
Quote:
What is it about the jeering, smug atheism so well represented on the internet, as well as in Dawkins' books, that makes me so very angry? Perhaps this is a rage at heresy, since in lots of ways I think he's right, and our disagreements ought to be quite trivial. But the more I think of them, the more serious they become.
I certainly agree with him that religion can represent a monstrous betrayal of the intellectual's commitment to the truth, and that it can be extremely dangerous, both to its participants and to the innocent bystanders. Think how much better a place the world would be without any concept of the sacred, which has made Jerusalem so valuable to all three monotheistic religions that some of their members are prepared to risk a quite literal Armageddon to get hold of it. Wouldn't we all be better off without such beliefs? Is there any rational reason to suppose that there exists a God who cares who owns Jerusalem?
The answer to these very Dawkinsian questions looks self-evident to me. Of course such a God does not exist. Of course we'd be better off without other people's crazed beliefs about Jerusalem. But I think these arguments, true though they may be, fit very badly into a Darwinian and atheist world view. In particular, they don't fit Dawkins' own bias against explanations of behaviour that invoke the good of the species rather than smaller groups or even genes within it. Why should we expect human beings to have evolved for the good of the whole human race?
If we believe that human behaviour is a special case of animal behaviour, there is nothing that requires explanation when we find humans acting to the advantage of in-groups over out-groups. This is the kind of behaviour that will have benefited their ancestors. There's no need to suggest that there is something uniquely poisonous about religion so that people behave worse when they are believers than otherwise. The morality of the Old Testament may be reprehensible - though no worse than the morality of the Iliad - but it worked: the descendants of the children of Israel are still here and the descendants of the previous male inhabitants of the Promised Land are not.
[... TIS - skipping to the very end ...]
But I think people who talk about God are trying often to communicate something about their own experience of the world, or about their place in it.
In that case, it is more useful to try to understand what they are saying, and why, rather than dismiss them as deluded fantasists. At the very least, the atheist is required to admit the existence of widespread patterns of experience which can reasonably and naturally be taken as the experience of supernatural beings. Gods undeniably exist in this world as they do in Terry Pratchett's: wherever people believe in them strongly enough, they're there.
So the question becomes, what do we do about them? This shouldn't be essentially different, to a thoroughgoing atheist, to the question of what we do about money. Money causes quite as much misery in the world as religion does. People will commit terrible crimes to make or save it and view with the utmost indifference the sufferings of strangers who stand in their way. Yet the way to diminish these sufferings is not to abolish money or to pretend that the needs it serves are unworthy of human beings.
That's been tried. It didn't work. We've learnt, instead, how to make the capitalist system work better: to arrange for self-interest to be, so far as possible, enlightened. Similarly, if we want to diminish the suffering caused by religion we need to make superstition, irrationality and social organisation benefit, so far as possible, the human race. This isn't easy, and it may not be possible. But there really is no practical alternative. Even if God is no more than a word for luck, we should say "There, but for the grace of luck, go I"; and not "I thank you, luck, that I am not as other men." If religion is human, then humanists must try to understand it, to sympathise and not to sneer.
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