The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins
The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins This is the third page looking at Richard Dawkins's Protestant atheism in his recent TV programme, The Virus of Faith. Here we look at various contradictions, discrepancies etc of his argument. On this page: Curry's Microsoft Analogy | Empathy | 1 Curry's Microsoft AnalogyDawkins's contributor, Oliver Curry, claims that, as far as First of all, it's difficult to understand in what sense the difference between MS-DOS and Windows 2000 can be regarded as But in any case there certainly is a CultureSecond, Curry perhaps has at the back of his mind an analogy between the way a computer works and the way the human brain works. At some basic level, there may be some kind of genuine analogy to be made. And when there is a deliberate effort to make computers simulate the operations of the brain, then there is obviously a built in analogy. But Curry's analogy is a different matter entirely. If we accept Darwin, and here we do, then as Curry and Dawkins suggest, human However, we must bear in mind a fundamental difference between ourselves and our primate ancestors. With the help of our massive brain power, we enjoy an extremely large amount of discretion as to how we follow our Who can say how much of the massively increased sophistication of our morality, our guidelines for social behaviour, have been built into us genetically since humans became humans, probably extremely little if anything at all. Certainly it seems absolutely impossible that the genetic basis of our But the massively more sophisticated social guidelines we have needed must be stored somewhere and that somewhere must be what we call culture. So it is misleading in the extreme for Curry to suggest that there is Proximal and DistalThird, Curry's analogy seems even more problematic if we understand Proximal relationships are based on permanent proximity and require minimal mediation. Chimpanzee relationships, the expression of chimpanzee Today's human relationships are becoming increasingly distalised, involving mediations that necessitate third party providers who make it possible for the friends to get together and whose motive is profit. Thus in Britain today, male friendships, and increasingly female ones, involve expensive sports and visits to bars. This distalisation is even invading the family lives of ordinary people, with the massive increase in recent years of third party commercial child care. The current push in Britain for people to stay in work longer must strengthen the trend, with fewer grandmothers being available to care for their grandchildren while the mothers work. For more on distal childcare, see The perils of distal childcare ScientismFourth, we can see Curry's unwarranted analogy as feeding into the general scientism of Dawkins's two TV programmes, with scientism meaning here the use of scientific sounding chatter to give an impression of science where none is present. As we point out elsewhere, ever since the c18th there has been science to religion crossover, with new religions using ideas inspired by contemporary science. In these TV programmes Dawkins carries on a parallel tradition, that of replacing God with Reason or Science. He uses a mystical notion of Science as a deus ex machina to explain what for him would be otherwise inexplicable: the yawning gap between the Curry's cyberbabble helps create the illusion that real science is being talked in these programmes. [Back to Summary] 2 EmpathyAt the very end of the programme, Dawkins's contributor and fellow vice-president of the British Humanist Association, the novelist Ian McEwan, rhapsodises in an access of atheist spirituality over what he calls the this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own. McEwan declares that it is Dawkins comments that he agrees At a personal level, [1] Dawkins has demonstrated a little empathy in the course of the programme: possibly. He has labelled the Protestant schoolteacher, Adrian Hawkes, as a But then, this was Dawkins in remarks made after the particular interviews. Maybe he was not showing empathy at all, but rather judging his interviewees with patronising condescension, as if they were contestants in a talent show. Whatever empathy Dawkins might display in the programme for the individuals he interviews does not extend to religious believers more generally. He speaks of them as having minds locked in We may recall that in the first programme, Dawkins smeared American fundamentalists as Scientific ObjectivityBut far more important than that, we have to see any claims Dawkins may have to scientific objectivity are quite bogus in so far as they relate to religion. In the second programme, as in the first, Dawkins introduces himself as Clearly, we have to recognise that total objectivity is unrealisable in any sort of study. Nevertheless, a large measure is possible, even when it is human beings that are under the microscope. This is where empathy comes in: in the study of humans as humans, objectivity involves as much empathy as the scientifically intentioned observer can muster. Thus in seeking to understand religious behaviour, you need to bear in mind that religious believers are people too and, in McEwan's words, have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own. Regarding them the way Dawkins does in the programme, as infantile, diseased, uncivilised, crazy, is not science at all. [Back to Summary] NOTES1 No Marxism hereOctober 2007: At the time of writing, the text from here to the end of the page has been pasted into a posting on an Australian website preceded by the following: For amarxistanalysis of the televised version of the God Delusion (i.e. the Root of all evil) follow the link below On another of the Dawkins pages, discussing his scientism, I say: We may bear in mind at this point that science-talk has been used in all sorts of new belief systems since the c18th to claim that they were not belief systems at all, but scientific truth. Such a one was Marxism, aka scientific socialism, another form of historicism. I'd hardly be making remarks like that if I was a marxist. Indeed, the term historicism as I use it - belief that there is some kind of inevitability about history - derives from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, a work of anti-marxist intent. Of course, the Marxist idea of the inevitable advent of some kind of communist utopia has been totally discredited by events. The Early Christians got round the same problem, the failure of their predicted utopia to arise, by moving it out of the natural world into the supernatural. That leaves liberal beliefs in the inevitability of human progress, such as in the pseudo-scientific version of Dawkins. This has not been discredited so far by events, but it's early days. It is not merely that we cannot predict what particular path human progress is going to take. Despite the claims of people like Dawkins that they have access to a higher rationality, we have no rational basis for assuming that further progress of any kind is somehow inevitable. It is entirely possible that we are in for some kind Mad Max distopia: to give an Australian example. [Back to Article] [Continuing] (c) John C Durham, 2006
The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins |