A Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion Part XIV

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In this part of my review of Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” I will continue my look at Dawkins’ speculations on the roots of morality.  Dawkins rejection of God and acceptance of evolution forces him to find an evolutionary basis of morality.  He admits that “On the face of it, the Darwinian idea that evolution is driven by natural selection seems ill-suited to explain such goodness as we possess, or our feelings of morality, decency, empathy, and pity… Isn’t goodness incompatible with the theory of the ‘selfish gene’?” (pg 214-5)

Dawkins’ goes on to argue that the idea that it is, is a misunderstanding and the evolution is not incompatible with goodness.  There are two main problems with Dawkins argument. The first is that it is really very selective and theoretical and amounts to little more than special pleading.  The second is that while Dawkins’ see evolution’s ability to account for goodness as a strength, and yet another reason we do not need religion, the special pleading nature of the argument is in reality an indication of a much deeper problem: that as put forward by those like Dawkins it is a tautology . 

In logic a tautology is an argument that is always valid. While this sounds like a good thing, the problem with tautologies can been seen in the following example; it will either rain or not rain tomorrow.  Now this statement will always be valid, regardless of location or weather.  But while always valid, it tells us nothing about whether or not we will need an umbrella. In short it really tells us nothing at all.

What Dawkins explanation really reveals is that evolution is a huge complex tautology.  It can explain anything the evolutionist needs it to explain.  Soon after Darwin, the theory began to be applied to societies to justify why some people were better off than others, in Social Darwinism.  It then became the basis of Eugenics, which effectively argued for selective breeding of people, to produce better people, much the way we selectively breed animals.  This culminated in Hitler’s belief in a master race, and the elimination of impure bloodlines. 

Following WWII, this was all rejected, and rightly so, as immoral. While we continued to selectively breed animals, people were off limits.  Yet Dawkins now argues that he can explain an almost opposite morality also based on evolution.  What this means is that evolution can explain either view. Just like the statement it will either rain or not rain tells us nothing about the weather, evolution tells us nothing about morality. It only tells us about the ability to speculate to a particular goal on the part of the scientist.

The problem with the particular answer Dawkins gives is that he cites a number of “good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous, or ‘moral’ towards each other.” (pg 219) Yet those pushing Social Darwinism, or Eugenics in the 1920s and 30s also had many good Darwinian reasons as well. So a clear question become why Dawkins’ Darwinian reasons should be preferred to these other Darwinian reasons. For most people this is pretty easy to determine as history has shown that the Darwinian reasons for Eugenics leads to some pretty immoral things.  But since Dawkins is arguing for the basis for morality, he cannot use morality to make such a choice without falling victim to circular reasoning.  Which leaves him with special pleading; his reasons are better than the reasons that led to eugenics because they give him the answer he is seeking.

Yet even if Dawkins were correct, and our sense of morality is what it is because of evolutionary pressures to survive, it still would not follow that this is what morality should be in the twenty-first century.  Dawkins acknowledges this when he says that “those rules still influence us today, even where circumstances make them inappropriate to their original function.” (p 222) In short, even if Dawkins’ is correct concerning his view of the evolutionary basis for morality, that says nothing about what morality should be today.  In fact the only thing Dawkins would have succeeded in doing it arguing that morality is at best a residue of the evolutionary process, and there is no reason it should hold any automatic power over our actions.

In fact the only principle left would really be “might makes right.”  Whoever has the power, would determine right and wrong.  Of course the problem here is that had Dawkins view been accepted earlier, for example before much of the progress in civil and human rights over the last couple of hundred years, there would have been no reason to make those changes, and they very likely would never have happened. 

The belief in human rights is grounded in the belief that we are all created in the image of God, and what God has given, no one can arbitrarily take away, not even the king.  The anti-slavery movement was not grounded in Darwinian reasons, but in religious belief, in particular in the belief that slaves were men with rights.  Luckily those views became well entrenched before Darwin put forth his theory, as I am not at all sure that had the ideas of evolution become entrenched first, whether an anti-slavery movement could have ever taken root.

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.  

Age of Emotion

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We live in an age of emotion. Society is always in flux, changing, moving, and it is the same with emotion, and its counterpart reason. The last few hundred years have been called the age of reason as until very recently, reason was the dominate of the two. But over the last several decades reason has retreated back, and emotion has come to the forefront.

 Where it use to be very common when seeking someone’s opinion to ask them what they think on a given subject, now it is far more common to ask how they feel.  Asking how we feel about something is not the same as asking what we think, as the two can be, and even at times should be, different.

 For example, consider for the moment that a favorite pet of many years is suddenly sick and suffering with no hope of a cure.  While our reason tells us that the humane thing to do is to have the pet put to sleep, our feelings will almost certainly be telling us the opposite.

 Parents also know this conflict. Their emotions simply want to make a child happy. But their thinking tells them that always giving a child what they want is not in the child’s best interest. One of the signs that we are in an age an age of emotion is the large number of mothers and fathers who interact with their children more as friends than as parents.

 The new dominance of emotion is everywhere. While the Spock of the 1960s TV show Star Trek was completely logical, the Spock of later movies was a more emotional Spock, a Spock more in touch with his feelings.  Whereas the hero of movies used to be the strong silent type, now they frequency struggle with family problem, death of a loved one or some other emotional issue.

 To be clear, this is not an attack on emotions. God created us with both a heart and a mind. With feelings and intellect, and both are important. As with so many things in life, the question is not one of either-or, but of finding the right balance.  While too strong an emphasis on the intellect can lead to cruel and heartless actions, so can too much emphasis on emotions. The right balance can be difficult if not impossible, to find. In fact if you think you have the right balance, it is probably a good indication that you don’t.

 One good indicator of where society is can be seen in the actions of politicians campaigning for office. Whatever you think or feel about politicians, in an election they have one overriding goal: to win; and to do this they have to appeal to people to vote for them. While those in safe districts where their election is assured don’t have to worry about this, those who might lose have to pay very close attention to what people are thinking or how they are feeling as the case may been. 

 While there are frequent complaints about all the negative campaigning and calls to stick to the issues, the simple fact is that for the most part politicians only do what works. If people really were turned off by negative ads, there would be very few negative ads.  If people really wanted discussions about the issues, that’s what politicians would do. In fact they do frequently give such issue oriented speeches when before groups that want them.

 Politicians long ago figured out the emotional age we are in, and have adapted their campaign accordingly.  Thus candidates make a point of not wearing suits all the time less people get the feeling that they are not one of us. Their appeals are laced with words and phrase that will bring about positive feelings about them and negative feeling about their opponent. 

 The Church is not immune for these cultural shifts.  The shift between reason and emotion can most clearly be seen in the struggle between the Praise and/or worship part of the service, and the sermon.  Not too long ago, the sermon dominated, preceded by a song or two.  In many churches the praise and worship now dominates, and even the sermon is, like the politician’s campaign pitch, aimed more at making you feel good.

 Josh McDowell has documented some of the results in his book, “The Last Christian Generation.” McDowell reports a marked increase in the percentage of young people who also leave the church when they leave home. (pg 13) In fact, many young people see church as just a series of events with little impact on their spiritual life. (pg 59 – 61)

 Even when they stay connected to a church, they may not be that much better off.  A Barna survey in 2005 found that only 8% of Protestants actually had a Biblical worldview, Evangelicals did better but still half did not have a biblical world view.

 Part of this is the emotional emphasis of many services, services aimed more at getting an emotional reaction rather than intellectual respond. Both are good and both are important. But an emotional reaction is temporary and disappears quickly once the source is gone.  In short it may not last much beyond the parking lot of the church.  An intellectual response however, is much more lasting, for it changes how a person thinks, and thus how they live.

 So how is your Church doing? Does it have the right balance? Think about it.

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.

The Grand Experiment

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One of the main ongoing debates between Christians and Atheists is over the foundation for morality. Christians believe that morality in inherently tied to God. To reject God, is to reject the foundation for morality. Atheist often distort this into a claim that atheist are immoral.  This however is not the case. It is not that an atheist must be immoral, but rather that they are free to choose whatever morality suits them.  

More importantly, a society that rejects the foundation will over time drift farther and farther from Christian morality.  While this drift does not happen quickly it does happen and this is exactly what we have seen over the last few decades.  Very early in the abortion debate opponents argued that an acceptance of abortion would lead to other things like an acceptance of euthanasia.  While supporter of abortion rights ridiculed such claims, now euthanasia is legal in one state and people are pushing for it to be legal in others. Similar parallels could be drawn for many other issues such as the push for homosexual rights leading to sex marriage, or the push for the ERA and the claims it would lead to same-sex bathrooms, bathrooms that are now beginning to appear, though under the more PC name of gender-neutral bathrooms.  

Opponents of the Judeo-Christian morally that once dominated in America are taking a piece-meal approach, challenging only specific issues at any given time. They are quick to point to the religious foundation for Christian morality as a way of rejecting it, yet they never provide any alternative foundation in its place.  

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the public schools, and the results are becoming increasingly clear. In the first edition of Christianity and Secularism written in the late 1980s I wrote about how in Los Angeles a wall was built around a school to keep bullets from hitting the students. Since then we have had a number of students bring guns into schools to kill.  

While such things would have been unthinkable a decade or two earlier, now unfortunately they are increasingly common. Secularists vigorously resist any attempt to link such shooting to their undermining of the Judeo-Christian value system. It is as if a person did not like a part of a building, so they undermined the foundation of the building believing that only the part they did not like would crumble.  

The secularists have sought to undermine traditional views of most forms of sexuality, the family structure, and life among other things. To do this they have pushed an attitude of non-judgment, with its catch-all denunciation; “who are you to judge?” This is hardly a rational position as they are judging any who dared disagree with them, without seeing a conflict. Still they have been very successful with the young, many of whom are now so non-judgment as to be amoral; so amoral that it is difficult for them to even think in terms of morality.  

Following the murders at the Mall in Omaha last month, an NBC TV reporter interviewed a friend of the murderer, (played by Dennis Prager on his show. Dec 6 2007 Third Hour)

Reporter: “What are you thinking about now, now that you know that [your friend] was involved in the shooting earlier today”  

Friend of Murderer: “I don’t think anything less of him, because I know that [he] would never have done anything like this just for fun it, it was he wanted to go out in style and that is what he did, he went out in style.” 

No judgment for the lives taken. No judgment for the family and friends whose lives will never be the same because of the loss of a loved one.  No judgment for the wounded or their pain and suffering.  Instead, “I don’t think anything less of him… it was he wanted to go out in style.”  To those who grew up with traditional Judeo-Christian values, the lack of any moral judgment in those words is very hard to comprehend. Yet it is what the secularists pushing non-judgment have created.  

As if it were some bad science fiction movie, the secularists have conducted a grand experiment on society, with our children as the guinea pigs. They have raised a generation whose main view of morality is to not pass moral judgments. They chipped away at the foundation for morality, thinking that only those part of the Judeo-Christian morality they disagreed with would fall away.  But whatever their intentions, they have raise generation for whom the questions of is it good or evil; is it right or wrong, play little if any part in their thinking, replace instead by “does it affect me personally?”  

What will be the result of this experiment?  Nobody knows for sure but the current trends don’t look good.  Not everyone raised with this view will want to ‘Go out in style’, killing as many as they can in the process, but we have already seen that an increasing number do.   More widespread is the marked increase in cheating, or the winning at any cost mentality that pervades sports, business, and politics.  

If you assume that thousands of years of human history are irrelevant, and that most if not all the bad things in history were the result of religion anyway, then perhaps this grand experiment of producing an amoral society will produce a better society.  I for one doubt it.

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.

A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion Part XII

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In this part of my review of Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” I come to the chapter where Dawkins discusses the roots of religion. These next two chapters, this on the origin of Religion and the next on the origin of Morality both suffer from a problem that is common not just to atheist, or even to science but to everyone: the freedom of speculation, in absence of evidence.

This is quite visible when Dawkins discusses the habit of some birds to bath in ant nests, which is called anting.  Dawkins says “Nobody is sure what the benefit of anting is… but uncertainty as to the details doesn’t – nor should it – stop Darwinians from presuming, with great confidence, that anting must be ‘for’ something.” (pg 164) 

While not an entirely unwarranted conclusion, it clearly does not derive from the evidence, for by Dawkins own admission, no one knows what it is for. Instead it derives from Dawkins’ faith in Darwinian evolution.  His faith in evolution, is part of his world view, and shapes and in some cases determines the conclusions he reaches, particularly in those areas where there are gaps in his knowledge.

Again there is nothing unusual about this.  We all do it. Christians have certain beliefs about the universe and God, and when we come to things that are unknown, we attempt to fill in the gaps the best we can based on how we see the world.  There is no problem for Christianity here as many Christians realize this, and acknowledge the role that faith plays.  The problem is that most atheists are very critical of Christians for relying on faith, not realizing that they are doing the same thing.

The reliance of faith is likewise behind Dawkins belief that there must be some evolutionary benefit to religion.  This claim is a natural outgrowth of his rejection of God and the supernatural; and his faith in evolution.  Dawkins is not reaching this as a conclusion of his study of religion; it is his starting point for understanding of religion. 

In short, he starts with a huge bias that will permit only certain types of answers.  Sure, anyone who likewise rejects religion and accepts evolution, might find his explain, that religion is a by-product of the evolution of memes; the cultural equivalents to biological genes, acceptable.  However, Dawkins is hardly driven to that conclusion by the evidence. 

This leads to yet another problem, for there is really very little evidence for Dawkins claims about the origin of religion, and most of what there is comes from other areas of science that also have an a priori rejection of the supernatural.  Now when dealing with physics and chemistry, an a priori rejection of the supernatural, is not much of an issue. But when dealing areas such a psychology, it does become a factor, and when dealing with the psychology of religious belief, becomes key.

In short, this chapter basically boils down to biased speculation.  It cannot be taken as an argument against religion, and to his credit Dawkins does not really try to do this.  If he did, he would immediately fall into the fallacy of circular reasoning, as the ending premise and starting premise would both be: religion is false.  Instead, Dawkins is trying to clear up some questions that follow from his main argument discussed early, that the God does not exist.

Still his arguments in this chapter seems to be more than just a dispassionate analysis of the possible origins of religion once it is accepted that God does not exist. Dawkins seems driven to defend his hostility to religion. He admits that this puts him in a quandary for if religion is so negative, how can it be the evolutionary benefit it must be to exist in the Darwinian worldview.

But it is not much of a quandary.  Freed from constrains of facts and evidence, for there is very little in this area, Dawkins is pretty much free to speculate anything he wants, limited only by his own imagination, and naturalistic bias.

Such speculation is routinely condemned by atheists when theist engage in it, but the label of science puts a veneer of respectability on Dawkins speculations, as if labeling them as science somehow magically gives them some sort of special standing above other more ordinary speculations.  Since they are ‘science,’ they are more readily accepted into the mental framework and then become the basis upon which other speculations will be judged.

While Christians realize that they have faith in the Biblical accounts and that they are speculating in some cases where we do not really know, most atheists do not realize that they do the same things.  Most of them really have no idea of how much speculation and faith underpins that which they believe.

Actually Dawkins summed up the situation pretty well in his first sentence of the chapter, when he said “Everyone has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all human cultures have it.” (pg 163)  If you exclude a belief in God and sin up front, then one theory for religion is as good as another. Dawkins should have just left it at that.

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.

Free Will

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Dec 14, 2007, Wausau, Wi —  Last time I looked at the issue of Free Inquiry and the skeptic’s false claim that they were free to go wherever the evidence leads, while Christians were limited by their religious beliefs.  But there is a deeper more subtle problem with the skeptic’s claim that they are free to go wherever the evidence leads them.  This problem concerns freedom itself.

Inherent in the skeptic’s belief to be free is the belief that they are free to make a decisions.  In fact much of the skeptic’s criticism of religion centers around the concept of freedom.  Skeptics believe that Christians surrender their freedom to false religious beliefs.  Christians choose certain behaviors, not because they want to, but because the Bible says so. The problem for the skeptic, however, is how they can account for this freedom in the first place. 

Now this problem can be difficult to see because the freedom to choose is something we all just take for granted.  Of course we have a freedom to choose.  Our entire view of our daily lives, our interactions with others and everything we do is dependent upon our freedom to choose.  In fact it is difficult to conceive of how we would view the world if we didn’t make the assumption that we have a freedom to choose.  For example, the entire legal system and its concept of punishment for crimes is based on the assumption that the criminal had a choice whether or not to commit the crime.

The problem for the skeptic is not so much that we have free will, but rather how can they explain that we have free will.  While the concept of free will is difficult for every one religious believers and skeptics alike, it is particularly difficult for the skeptic who has a naturalistic view of the world.  For the skeptic, the natural universe governed by natural laws is the only thing that exists.  Miracles are rejected because they would violate the laws of nature.  For the skeptic, everything is governed by the laws of nature.  There is no room for God.

What the skeptic often over looks is that free will, the freedom to choose, is inconsistent with their naturalistic view of a universe governed by natural law.  Now again, this can be difficult to see because the idea that we have free will, that we have the freedom to make some decisions, is something we just take for granted.  We don’t even think about it.  We certainly don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how it can happen.

For the skeptic, we’re simply animals, the result of a long evolutionary process.  Our origin and everything about us, just like everything else in the universe, can be explained by the laws of nature.  There is no soul.  There’s nothing beyond the material body.  Our actions are completely explained by the electrochemical interactions taking place in our brain and in the rest of our body, or at least will be once science can figure everything out.  But therein lies the problem.  If everything can be explained by the electrochemical interactions taking place in our brain and in our body, where is there room for freedom of choice?

Now skeptics often claim that what we call consciousness is the result of the electrochemical interactions in the brain, and it is our consciousness that makes our decisions.  But while this may be a nice explanation for the skeptic, again how does this happen.  Even if for sake of argument we assume that they are correct and consciousness is nothing more than the electrochemical interactions taking place in our brain, how do those electrochemical interactions actually make the choice?

The simple fact is that the concept of choice is incompatible with a universe governed by natural laws.  A rock falling down the side of a cliff, does not make a choice to bounce right or left when it hits the side of the cliff.  Every aspect of its fall is determined by the laws of nature.  A choice, on the other hand, transcends the laws of nature.  It is not determined by the laws of nature; it is determined by something else.  If it was determined by the laws of nature it would not be a choice. 

So if choice is nothing more than the result of consciousness which is itself the result of the electrochemical interactions taking place in our brain, then at some point these electrochemical interactions that are governed by the laws of nature must somehow transcend the laws of nature so as to make a choice.

But if skeptics are correct and somehow our consciousness does transcend the laws of nature so as to make a choice, than this would violate one of their fundamental starting premise is which is that everything is governed by the laws of nature.

So the skeptic is caught in a real quandary.  They must either deny freewill, which is virtually impossible for them to account for anyway, or they must accept that there are things that are not governed by the laws of nature.  If they deny freewill, they are denying something so obvious that we simply take it for granted. Yet if they accept that there are some things not governed by the laws of nature, they deny one of their fundamental premises. Either way they have major problems.

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact. 

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