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RICHARD DAWKINS, the evolutionary biologist at Oxford
University, published late last year a provocative book on religion
titled The God Delusion.
He was not the only one.
Daniel Dennett who works in
neuroscience at Tufts University came out early in 2006 with
Breaking the Spell in which he ruminated on the possibility of a
science of religion.
Lewis Wolfert, a biologist at
University College, London, speculated in Six Impossible Things
Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief on whether
causal reasoning, an important survival skill, is not also the
expression of religious faith.
Joan Roughgarden, another
evolutionary biologist who teaches at Stanford University, attempts
in Evolution and Christian Faith to relate ideas in the Bible to
evolutionary theory. She’s not very convincing but that’s
another story.
Of these four, Dawkins was the
only one to grapple directly with the basic premises of religious
belief. The God Delusion, an absorbing read, is an extended polemic
against religion of the Christian variety.
The first thing to ask is why
these highly trained and gifted scientists took time off from their
normal work to engage the general public on matters that are not
only contentious but fraught with cultural and emotional baggage.
Perhaps Dennett’s answer in a
letter to the March 1 issue of The New York Review of Books might
serve as a common reply.
“Yes,” Dennett said, “of
course I’d much rather have been spending my time working on
consciousness and the brain, or on the evolution of cooperation, for
instance, or free will, but I felt a moral and political obligation
to drop everything for a few years and put my shoulder to the wheel
doing a dirty job that I thought somebody had to do.”
Moral and political—these words
now resonate again among scientists because of contemporary events
that in one way or another trace back to religion. Much of the grief
that people are suffering not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also
in some countries in Africa and Asia is due to differing
interpretations of the same Koranic texts. The attempts of the
evangelicals in the US to confuse young minds about evolutionary
biology have resulted in obscurantism. Stem cell research is held
back by politicians because of a religious definition of life. And
so on.
The sources of conflict between
religion and science have been delineated by Freeman Dyson, the
physicist, in Infinite in All Directions, a collection of lectures
that he delivered at Aberdeen, Scotland in 1985 under the
sponsorship of the Templeton Foundation that encourages the
examination of the relationship between science and religion.
The first is the origin of life.
“How do you reconcile a theory which makes life originate by a
process of chance with the doctrine that life is a part of God’s
plan for the universe?” Dyson asked.
The second is the problem of free
will. How is the human experience of free will reconciled with a
belief in scientific causality?
The third is the conflict between
the religious ideas of a divine purpose and the laws of nature as
discovered by science.
The fourth is the religious
belief in a Creator or Designer to account for the existence of
complex entities.
These are the problems that
Dawkins dealt with panache in a chapter entitled “Why There Almost
Certainly Is No God.” The laws of probability rules out the
existence of God.
“A designer God,” Dawkins
argued, “cannot be used to explain organized complexity because
any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex
enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.”
The God Delusion breaks very
roughly into two parts—philosophical and practical—although the
arguments and examples for either part make for a coherent whole.
How religion is practiced is
couched in political terms. Dawkins, an atheist, proposed a
faith-free Ten Commandments that include “Do not indoctrinate your
children,” “Enjoy your own sex life.” Teaching catechism to
children is child abuse, Dawkins avers. Making sex a moral issue
contradicts the natural urge to pass on one’s genes.
It will not be easy to refute
Dawkins’s views on exclusionary religious belief as the cause of
social violence and terrorism. H. Allen Orr, a professor of biology
at the University of Rochester, said in his review of The God
Delusion said that secularism is not the answer. The secularism of
the 20th century brought on secular evil. This can only mean that
people are inherently not moral beings. Neither religion nor its
absence prevent from “evil” acts.
For those who do not believe in a
God or belong to any confession Steven Weinberg’s apothegm (taken
slightly out of context) is an article of faith. “The more the
universe is comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
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