I appeared Monday on the Riz Khan show on Al-Jazeera with Richard Dawkins, and guess what? We had a civilized three-way dialog. No one erupted into Hitler-type yells. The Gestapo didn't show up, nor the Inquisition police, to drag Richard Dawkins from the studio. Host Riz Khan interviewed me for the first half of the show on the compatibility of Darwinism and religion, and on the issue of how to teach evolution in the schools. Then Khan interviewed Dawkins for the second half, mainly on why he encounters resistance to evolution and also why he rejects arguments for God as the creator of the universe.
Unfortunately Al-Jazeera hasn't yet posted the show on the web, so I'll withhold comment on Dawkins's central argument until I can link to it. But I do think that there is something on which everyone who sees the show can agree. Dawkins's excuses for not debating me (Dinesh is a "creationist" or Dinesh uses Hitler-style "yells and shrieks") are utterly absurd. Why won't Dawkins simply admit he's afraid? I don't really mind a coward as long as he's an honest coward.
I'm not the only one befuddled by Dawkins. So is evolutionary biologist and atheist David Sloan Wilson. Several months ago Wilson wrote a savage review of Dawkins's The God Delusion for Michael Shermer's magazine Skeptic. Basically Wilson said that Dawkins is supposed to be an expert about evolution but his book fails to examine religion from an evolutionary perspective. Rather, Dawkins insists on faulting religion based on claims--theological, philosophical, historical--that lie entirely outside his area of knowledge. No wonder that Dawkins's one-paragraph "refutations" of the likes of Aquinas have an amateurish, even juvenile, quality.
Wilson argues that a true scientist would develop a hypothesis about religion and then test it to see how it holds up. For instance, against Dawkins's and view that religion is a kind of destructive virus, a culturally transmitted epidemic that may benefit its parasitic carriers (the preachers) but certainly not those who succumb to the infection, Wilson offers a rival hypothesis. Wilson's view is that "religious groups are products of cultural group selection....A given religion adapts its members to their local environment, enabling them to achieve by collective action what they cannot achieve alone or even together in the absence of religion. Even though elements of religion often appear bizarre, irrational, and downright dysfunctional to believers, when examined closely most of them will make sense."
In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson offers the case study of the Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva. At a time when factionalism and internecine conflict was rending the social fabric of the city, Calvin and his deputies introduced the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Wow, do they sound harsh! Fines for dancing and jail for gambling are only the beginning. Yet Wilson surveys a wide body of historical scholarship that concludes that "there is little doubt that Calvinism was instrumental in solving the problem of factionalism and helping the city of Geneva survive as a social entity."
How? Basically Wilson found that morals are the key to restoring social morale. (The two terms "moral" and "morale" are connected by more than the similarity of their sounds.) Wilson writes, "I was especially impressed by how the mechanisms for preventing cheating extended to the leaders in addition to the rank and file. The head of the church was not a single individual but a group of pastors who made decisions by consensus. Calvin shared all the duties of a pastor, despite his enormous additional workload as primary architect of the religion. Double accounting methods were used to prevent the inappropriate use of charitable funds. The egalitarian spirit of Calvinism is perhaps best illustrated by the duty of caring for dying plague victims. This life-threatening task was decided by lottery."
Wilson concludes, based upon this data, that at least in this one important case, the Dawkins view is wrong and his hypothesis is vindicated. The Calvinist leaders were not out to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is simply wrong to say that they got ahead while everyone else suffered. Rather, the opposite is true. Calvinism's dour doctirnes of original sin and predestination contributed to an unprecedented identification of leaders and followers and caused the introduction of checks and balances to curb the suspect tendencies in human nature. To put it in blunt evolutionary terms, Calvinism was socially adaptive.
So what does Dawkins have to say about all this? The short answer is: nothing. Dawkins wrote a lame response to Skeptic, noting that he didn't purport in his book to be using an evolutionary understanding of religion. This would be like a doctor saying, "Well, I wasn't claiming to be giving a medical opinion." I suppose Dawkins considers it normal for an evolutionist to ignore his own field and dispense folk prescriptions based on a cursory persusal of other disciplines. I hope that Wilson does not invite Dawkins to debate this issue. What excuse will inventive Richard come up with this time?
Reader Comments ( Page 3 of 20)
31. Shannie; I think all the bad stuff we do made sense for the survival of "animal Man". But when we figured out how to farm and build societies to support our farming, some of those ingrained aggressive tendencies had to be suppressed.
Those energies were productive when it came to defending the tribe from another tribe or bringing down a mastodon, but they don't work very well in the inner city.
Ryan Anderson at 10:12AM on Jul 23rd 2008
32. With whom was god interacting during the billions of years before humans became sapient enough to recognize his existence? Was he playing with tyrranosoraus rex? Was there a tricerotops virgin birth? Was jesus playing with the sauropods? God conveniently becomes active at about the same time as our brains developed the ability to determine our mortality in advance and the imagination to invent a way to cope with that knowledge to avoid being driven nuts. So religion was the evolutionary way sapient mortals dealt with the knowledge of their ultimate demise and now evolution is trying to find a way to deal with the reality that these myths we created aren't true because of the knowledge we have attained as to how the universe really works.
eric at 10:15AM on Jul 23rd 2008
33.
Shannie, this argument is self defeating. It was an APPEARANCE of checks and balances. Read post #24.
When someone challenged his doctrine, the law said he should be banished. But, they threw the law, and checks and balances out the window, and burned an opponent at the stake, with his book chained to his leg.
Dinesh just took an argument from a book review, and posted it as the beauty of religious evolution. He didn't bother to check whether or not it could backfire on him.
ex-christian at 10:24AM on Jul 23rd 2008
34. The only thing that Prof. Dawkins has admitted to is that he doesn't like you, Dinesh. Why debate with someone he has no real respect for? It is absurd to think that this man is "afraid" of you. You give yourself far too much credit.
TJ at 10:26AM on Jul 23rd 2008
35. Hi Ryan... I don't buy it. Hunting for dinner or defending yourself from being dinner is not self destructive. It shouldn't matter how you feed your family or defend them... I don't see any need for self destruction, and yet it exists. And it persists, from the inner city to the jungles of the Amazon. We have yet to become civilized... try as we might.
That's nice Mr. ex but that wasn't really my point.
Shannie at 10:35AM on Jul 23rd 2008
36. Religion is a kind of destructive virus, a culturally transmitted epidemic that may benefit its parasitic carriers (the preachers) but certainly not those who succumb to the infection, the "religious fanatics".
DD: You certainly fit the description of the "Preacher" in this context.
Ray
R Shanker at 10:43AM on Jul 23rd 2008
37. Typical dimwit opening 'I'
Geoff Barker at 10:45AM on Jul 23rd 2008
38. 35. "Hi Ryan... I don't buy it. Hunting for dinner or defending yourself from being dinner is not self destructive."
I didn't mean that hunting for dinner was self destructive, but since we don't hardly do that any more and when we do, it's with rifles, I think a lot of the aggression built into us over millennium is now being channeled into destructive endeavors.
"Being civilized" only represents a tiny span of time so far in the human experience.
Ryan Anderson at 10:45AM on Jul 23rd 2008
39. "Ultimately, if we end up killing each other off because of these myths it will turn out that this survival strategy wasn't so effective after all. We have only been around after all in our present form for about 100000 years; a proverbial drop in the bucket in the scheme of things." - eric
With or without myth, the killing will continue. The question is: which society/culture has less murderous behavior; the myth or the mythless.
Monty at 10:51AM on Jul 23rd 2008
40. "Ultimately, if we end up killing each other off because of these myths it will turn out that this survival strategy wasn't so effective after all. We have only been around after all in our present form for about 100000 years; a proverbial drop in the bucket in the scheme of things." - eric
The killing will continue, with or without myth. The question is: which society/culture will have less of it; the myth or the mythless?
Monty at 10:54AM on Jul 23rd 2008
41. AOLWTF?!?!?!
Ryan Anderson at 10:56AM on Jul 23rd 2008
42. Monty; "The killing will continue, with or without myth. The question is: which society/culture will have less of it; the myth or the mythless?"
Good questions. The Christians will say the mythless (the Commies) have killed more. We'll say the Commies weren't really mythless because they had their cult of the state.
I don't think it's truly been tested.
Ryan Anderson at 10:59AM on Jul 23rd 2008
43. I have not heard of an atheist blowing himself and others up because of a promise of virgins in the afterlife. Although cloaked in morality most of the mythology of religion is dangerously particularistic and justifies unspeakable acts of homicide and genocide in the guise of expiating any number of angry dieties. Religion is just plain bad.
eric at 11:00AM on Jul 23rd 2008
44. Jeez Dinesh, you can't debate the debate that didn't really take place - so you debate the meaning of a book that Prof. Dawkins wrote - but you don't even really debate that, but use another man's reasoning to describe why Dawkin's book falls short of the subject matter you think it should contain.
Subject matter only you and he find lacking. After all Dawkins wrote a book on what he has concluded about the topic he chose to write about.
You and Wilson have every right to write books on what ever subject matter you want, but to say that "The God Delusion": "fails to examine religion from an evolutionary perspective." -
Personally I don't think it failed in anything. If you want to read a book about this subject matter - then ask your friend Wilson to write one. But don't just harangue Prof. Dawkins because his book doesn't touch on this specific subject to your liking.
After all I haven't read your book and I have no intention of doing so - I know it doesn't hold any interest for me.
It isn't said anywhere that Dawkins has to write a book on what Dinesh D'Souza wants to read.
TJ at 11:00AM on Jul 23rd 2008
45. I don't buy that either... I think the evidence shows people were murdering each other even when they were occupied trying to find and kill food for their families, etc.. Our self destructive tendencies were there from the beginning.
Shannie at 11:07AM on Jul 23rd 2008