The God Delusion

A couple of days ago, I listened to this interview on npr with my family, while we were driving. It's Richard Dawkins.

Now, I have to say I never gave Dawkins a fair shake, and I still haven't. Don't get me wrong, I buy the whole Selfish Gene thing, and the meme thing is interesting, too. But I have never listened seriously to Dawkins's views on God and religion.

Why should I? He is a scientist by profession and an athiest by confession. He is not an expert in religion, and he doesn't even practice it, so why should he have anything worth saying about it? His only qualification to speak about religion is that he's a really smart guy. And yet, he persists in talking about religion. He is so persistent, it makes me wonder if maybe he does have something to say.

Still, Dawkins tends to use really inflammatory language when talking about religion (e.g. The God Delusion), so that prejudices me against hearing him out.

Well, with all that preamble out of the way, let me tell you about the interview. He was much less inflammatory that I had expected. He even expressed respect for certain aspects of religion, such as the desire to do right or the desire to connect to one's people and heritage. OK, Dawkins, I'm listening. Well, the really interesting thing about Dawkins is that he really considers science to be his religion. He says that he does feel a sense of awe at the laws of physics and the infinite variation of biology, but he refuses to call those laws God or say that they were created by a God. He has no need of that hypothesis (to paraphrase).

That's because Dawkins has an implicit narrative (I believe) that says that the only things worth believing in are those that have explanatory force. God, as a hypothesis, is worthless to Dawkins because the existence of God does not explain anything in the realm of scientific fact.

Dawkins acknowledges this, and says that many people who believe in God also acknowledge that God is a feeble hypothesis. I happen to agree. So why do such people, who understand that theory of evolution by natural selection, believe in God? According to Dawkins, because they are afraid not to. They just can't bear to think there is nothing out there, they can't bear to think they are alone. This, for Dawkins, is not a good reason to believe in something.

I agree with much of the above. Yet, somehow, Dawkins emerges from this chain of reasoning as an athiest, and I emerge from it an agnostic. Where did we diverge? I think there is a difference in our implicit narratives.

Dawkins has an implicit value of humanism in there. He might say, "Why believe in mystical stuff when we have real scientific knowledge right here that is so much more wonderful, scientific knowledge that was discovered by people?" I think somewhere deep down, Dawkins is very attracted to the human empowerment that scientific progress represents. Scientific discovery is for him the pinnacle of human flourishing. And that belief attracts him to science. I imagine Dawkins has an implicit narrative somewhere back there with two panels: in one, people crouch in the dark in fear of the unknown God of their own imaginings; in the other, people walk confidently in the bright light of science.

I approach this whole thing with a somewhat different implicit narrative (which I am trying now to make explicit, I suppose). In my deep down value system, humility is good. Something in me is attracted to humility and repulsed by arrogance. I can't support that, it's just something that is in me. And to this value system, the idea of making science into a religion seems supremely arrogant. Science is just a knowledge system of recent, human invention...how can that substitute for a God? In the same vein, I recognize that religious dogmas and dialectics are also just knowledge systems of recent, human invention, and that they are not God either. But the idea of ever saying, "That's it, that's the Truth, that's all there is," just doesn't make sense to me.

So what is God? Maybe for me God is just a reminder that there is an infinite number of things I don't know.