[1]
Just after finishing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I happened to watch Elmer Gantry again.
It’s Burt Lancaster’s film, and he plays the role he was born for, but I’ll forbear lyricising about Burt and mention just one scene. This is where Arthur Kennedy, playing once again his cynical, sceptical but decent reporter character, has written an article condemning the hysteria and charlatanism endemic in ‘revivalism’.
In order to get the newspaper to print a retraction and make space available for a rebuttal, Elmer Gantry cross-examines the journalist about his religious beliefs. Kennedy’s character wheedles and prevaricates. He talks about the Bible being ‘beautiful poetry’; he admits how much he would like to believe. To confess to atheism, at that time, in America, was almost unthinkable.
And even today, we are browbeaten into showing respect for religion. On a radio show recently I heard Robert Winston, who professes Judaism, criticising Dawkins for his insulting use of the word ‘delusion’ in the title of this book. As I listened to him, I thought of the line, ‘Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.’
How could this intelligent man, I thought, not just believe, effectively, that there are fairies at the bottom of his garden, but expect other intelligent people to respect that belief? That delusion. That dangerous, dehumanising delusion.
Why is it that we are so careful in this country to understand and placate Muslims? Is it just that we afraid of being murdered? Maybe. But then why are we so concerned with a possibly diseased bullock, considered ‘sacred’ by a bunch of Hindus, who howl with outrage at the sacrilege committed by officials entering a ‘holy shrine’ to cart the damned thing off for slaughter. The man in charge actually took his boots off before entering. Can you believe it?
Can you believe that the case actually got to the Court of Appeal? I doubt if my cat would get the same consideration.
[2]
Dawkins gets the respect thing out of the way early and moves on to ask what people mean when they talk about belief in ‘God’. It’s what I always ask when someone asks me whether I believe in God. Which God? Allah, Jehovah, Pan, Thor? Aphrodite? Maybe I’d get down on my knees for her.
What sort of ‘god’? The clockmaker, the personal interventionist, the omnipresent immanence?
He checks off all the so-called proofs of some sort of god’s existence and easily shows how spurious they all are, before attempting to make some sort of case for the non-existence of God. Proving a negative is not easy at the best of times. So why bother trying, especially when not only is there no evidence for the positive, but we don’t know the nature of that ‘positive’, and it’s of no practical relevance to us anyway?
The answer to that is that the power of theism and its attendant religion is at best a dilution of our greatest talent, namely our reason; and at worst it is a seedbed for fanaticism, obscurantism and murder.
[3]
Dawkins seems to share this view, because not content with making an intellectual case for rejecting theism and embracing atheism, he goes onto the offensive. And he’s quite right to do so. Theists and religionists have had it their own way far too long, with their demands for respect, their indoctrination of children and their all-round bullying.
It’s timely too, when you can’t open a newspaper without seeing the stranglehold of militant Protestants on US politics, murderously militant Islam and the pernicious influence of Catholicism in the Third World.
Dawkins tries to explain the existence of religion in evolutionary terms, as a by-product of some useful mutation, primarily the tendency of children to believe their parents, to whom they are attached for a substantial part of their life. Add to that our inclination to form groups and avoid isolation, and the necessity for some emotional basis for pair-bonding, and it’s not fanciful to see by-products in nationalism, tribalism, religious affiliation (and fanatical support for football teams).
Religion gives us answers, something the human animal yearns for. And it gives us power. Every parent likes to invoke an authority figure to reinforce their own attempts at discipline. For example, ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ or ‘Don’t let that policeman see you.’ God is the best bogeyman you think of.
An issue Dawkins doesn’t address is whether humans have come to a point where evolution is not working any longer, because we are able to interfere with it. Our social morality forbids us, for example, to let the weak die; it also prevents males from distributing their seed as widely as they are programmed to do. At least it tries to.
Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that evolution is a hit-and-miss operation. For every useful mutation or trait-elimination there must be millions of useless or threatening ones. Such as religiosity.
[4]
While Dawkins’ polemic against religion is timely and necessary, he is less than politic in singling out certain moral issues with which to attack it. Abortion, for example. An attack on religion because it often forbids abortion is unlikely to be effective with people like myself who are uneasy about the wholesale termination of pregnancies. My concern has nothing to do with religion. I could argue that we are not giving evolution a chance, when healthy intelligent parents destroy their own genes.
Religion’s frequent prejudice against homosexuality is another of Dawkins’ bêtes noires. While tolerant myself I can easily understand a dislike of the practice in purely non-religious terms. After all, are not homosexuals, like nuns and monks, an evolutionary dead-end?
[5]
I have to say that I found a lot of Dawkins’ scientific explanations difficult to follow. But his final chapter, where he tries to describe the wonder of a mysterious world and the joy of forever discovering more about it without benefit of easy ‘revealed’ explanations, is inspirational.
His book is dedicated to Douglas Adams, with this quotation:
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Just after finishing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I happened to watch Elmer Gantry again.
It’s Burt Lancaster’s film, and he plays the role he was born for, but I’ll forbear lyricising about Burt and mention just one scene. This is where Arthur Kennedy, playing once again his cynical, sceptical but decent reporter character, has written an article condemning the hysteria and charlatanism endemic in ‘revivalism’.
In order to get the newspaper to print a retraction and make space available for a rebuttal, Elmer Gantry cross-examines the journalist about his religious beliefs. Kennedy’s character wheedles and prevaricates. He talks about the Bible being ‘beautiful poetry’; he admits how much he would like to believe. To confess to atheism, at that time, in America, was almost unthinkable.
And even today, we are browbeaten into showing respect for religion. On a radio show recently I heard Robert Winston, who professes Judaism, criticising Dawkins for his insulting use of the word ‘delusion’ in the title of this book. As I listened to him, I thought of the line, ‘Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.’
How could this intelligent man, I thought, not just believe, effectively, that there are fairies at the bottom of his garden, but expect other intelligent people to respect that belief? That delusion. That dangerous, dehumanising delusion.
Why is it that we are so careful in this country to understand and placate Muslims? Is it just that we afraid of being murdered? Maybe. But then why are we so concerned with a possibly diseased bullock, considered ‘sacred’ by a bunch of Hindus, who howl with outrage at the sacrilege committed by officials entering a ‘holy shrine’ to cart the damned thing off for slaughter. The man in charge actually took his boots off before entering. Can you believe it?
Can you believe that the case actually got to the Court of Appeal? I doubt if my cat would get the same consideration.
[2]
Dawkins gets the respect thing out of the way early and moves on to ask what people mean when they talk about belief in ‘God’. It’s what I always ask when someone asks me whether I believe in God. Which God? Allah, Jehovah, Pan, Thor? Aphrodite? Maybe I’d get down on my knees for her.
What sort of ‘god’? The clockmaker, the personal interventionist, the omnipresent immanence?
He checks off all the so-called proofs of some sort of god’s existence and easily shows how spurious they all are, before attempting to make some sort of case for the non-existence of God. Proving a negative is not easy at the best of times. So why bother trying, especially when not only is there no evidence for the positive, but we don’t know the nature of that ‘positive’, and it’s of no practical relevance to us anyway?
The answer to that is that the power of theism and its attendant religion is at best a dilution of our greatest talent, namely our reason; and at worst it is a seedbed for fanaticism, obscurantism and murder.
[3]
Dawkins seems to share this view, because not content with making an intellectual case for rejecting theism and embracing atheism, he goes onto the offensive. And he’s quite right to do so. Theists and religionists have had it their own way far too long, with their demands for respect, their indoctrination of children and their all-round bullying.
It’s timely too, when you can’t open a newspaper without seeing the stranglehold of militant Protestants on US politics, murderously militant Islam and the pernicious influence of Catholicism in the Third World.
Dawkins tries to explain the existence of religion in evolutionary terms, as a by-product of some useful mutation, primarily the tendency of children to believe their parents, to whom they are attached for a substantial part of their life. Add to that our inclination to form groups and avoid isolation, and the necessity for some emotional basis for pair-bonding, and it’s not fanciful to see by-products in nationalism, tribalism, religious affiliation (and fanatical support for football teams).
Religion gives us answers, something the human animal yearns for. And it gives us power. Every parent likes to invoke an authority figure to reinforce their own attempts at discipline. For example, ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ or ‘Don’t let that policeman see you.’ God is the best bogeyman you think of.
An issue Dawkins doesn’t address is whether humans have come to a point where evolution is not working any longer, because we are able to interfere with it. Our social morality forbids us, for example, to let the weak die; it also prevents males from distributing their seed as widely as they are programmed to do. At least it tries to.
Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that evolution is a hit-and-miss operation. For every useful mutation or trait-elimination there must be millions of useless or threatening ones. Such as religiosity.
[4]
While Dawkins’ polemic against religion is timely and necessary, he is less than politic in singling out certain moral issues with which to attack it. Abortion, for example. An attack on religion because it often forbids abortion is unlikely to be effective with people like myself who are uneasy about the wholesale termination of pregnancies. My concern has nothing to do with religion. I could argue that we are not giving evolution a chance, when healthy intelligent parents destroy their own genes.
Religion’s frequent prejudice against homosexuality is another of Dawkins’ bêtes noires. While tolerant myself I can easily understand a dislike of the practice in purely non-religious terms. After all, are not homosexuals, like nuns and monks, an evolutionary dead-end?
[5]
I have to say that I found a lot of Dawkins’ scientific explanations difficult to follow. But his final chapter, where he tries to describe the wonder of a mysterious world and the joy of forever discovering more about it without benefit of easy ‘revealed’ explanations, is inspirational.
His book is dedicated to Douglas Adams, with this quotation:
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
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