Richard Dawkins

From Philosopedia

Dawkins, Clinton Richard (26 March 1941— )

Dawkins’s father, who worked in the British colonial service in Nyasaland, now Malawi, moved to Kenya at the outbreak of the Second World War. Richard, his son the zoologist, was born in Nairobi. While an undergraduate, he was taught at Oxford University by Niko Tinbergen, the Dutch-born animal behaviorist (and, later, Nobel Prize winner). His doctorate developed a mathematical model of decision-making in animals. Often described as being "Darwin's rottweiler," Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Contents 1 The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker 2 Viruses of the Mind 3 The Vision Thing 4 River Out of Time 5 The God Delusion 6 Works 7 Dawkins's Impact 8 The New Atheists

The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker

His works include The Selfish Gene (1976), in which he described his theory of the self-replicating “meme,” as a way of understanding the transmission of human culture and ideas. His The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986) became a best-selling study of Darwinian design. Ian Parker has appropriately called Dawkins “Britain’s village atheist,” as is illustrated by his “case against God” which is entitled, “Lions 10, Christians Nil” (New Humanist, June 1992) and which concludes,

• Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude that He is very, very improbable indeed.

Viruses of the Mind

A leading evolutionary theorist, Dawkins is author of Viruses of the Mind, The 1992 Voltaire Lecture (British Humanist Association), which in user-friendly fashion describes how computer viruses wreak havoc and how, analogously, children’s minds have long been “shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people,” leading to beliefs in the absurdities of religion. He describes in a “medical textbook” a viral infection:

• 1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as “faith. . . .”

Matt Cherry, reviewing the Dawkins book, wrote in New Humanist (March, 1993):

• Viruses are distinguished from other self-replicators, because they are harmful to their hosts (one reason why some consider the human species to be a virus on the planet Earth). Therefore, Dawkins’s charge that religion is a virus of the mind rests on the argument that religion would not be accepted if judged by the criteria best adapted to selecting true beliefs and beneficial behaviour. The arguments that religion is false and harmful are familiar and accepted by most rationalists, and rejected by religionists. Viruses of the Mind is therefore unlikely to change the mind of any religious believers familiar with rationalist arguments.

In 1993, Dawkins wrote for Free Inquiry (Summer, 1993) about computer viruses as being a model for an informational epidemiology: “It is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, scientologists, and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.” He is not pessimistic about the future, however, adding, “Many children emerge unscathed from the worst that nuns and mullahs can throw at them. Anthony Kenny’s [who was exalted by the “laying on of hands” to celebrate Mass when he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest] own story has a happy ending. He eventually renounced his orders because he could no longer tolerate the obvious contradictions within Catholic belief, and he is now a highly respected scholar. But one cannot help remarking that it must be a powerful infection indeed that took a man of his wisdom and intelligence - now president of the British Academy, no less - three decades to fight off. Am I unduly alarmist to fear for the soul of my six-year-old innocent?” The article, an abridged version of Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind (1993), is included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994).

The Vision Thing

In 1994 in “The Vision Thing” on English Channel Four, Dawkins made powerful arguments for a philosophy devoid of supernaturalism and for an enthusiastic celebration of life without the baggage which religion embraces. “If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow,” Dawkins has said, “there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than a horse, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?”

River Out of Time

In 1995, Dawkins wrote a book that offered a novel answer to the basic philosophic question, What is the purpose of life? In River Out of Time: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), he paints a new picture of Samuel Butler’s response, that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.

The God Delusion

In 2006, his The God Delusion is caustic about Muhammad, Jesus, and the God of Abraham:

• The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction [and is] proud of it: A petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

In the event he is not clear, he adds, "I am not in favor of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. . . . What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?" He concludes,

• If the demise of God will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world.

Reviewing the book, Jeremy Gerard, an editor for Bloomberg News, observed,

• There is no room for weak-kneed agnostics in Dawkins's universe, except insofar as they are willing to acknowledge their uncertainty as a temporary state on the way to atheism. Unsurprisingly, he has no use for fundamentalists of any stripe, right-wing TV personalities, or George W. Bush's personal relationship with God. That dismissiveness is both the charm and the weakness of The God Delusion. A sneering tone creeps occasionally into the prose, and Dawkins is capable of his own rhetorical rigidity. By the end, however, you may well share the author's outrage over humankind's continuing subjugation to the fossilized construct of bygone civilizations.

John Silber, President Emeritus of Boston University, wrote in The New York Times Magazine (12 November 2006),

• Congratulations to Jim Holt for his penetrating review of Richard Dawkins's God Delusion (Oct. 22). He has clearly exposed the shallowness of Dawkins's position and left room for mystery - for the important questions we all ask but for which no definitive answers are possible. No serious thinker should treat either scientific or religious issues with the cavalier superficiality and downright ignorance revealed in Dawkins's discussion of religion. (Silber, who has taught philosophy at Yale and the University of Texas at Austin, is author of The Ethical Significance of Kant's Religion. At Boston University, he lambasted the schools dean of religion for suggesting that the Bible doesn't condemn homosexuality, demanding that a support group for gay students could only encourage them: ""We're not running a program in sex education," he said. If students want that, they can go to public school, where they will "learn how to put a condom over a banana." In 1995, Silber's son died of AIDS.)

Works

Dawkins, arguably the most articulate atheist so far in the 21st century, is author of the following:

The Selfish Gene (1976 - 1989) - genes are selfish, even when seemingly altruistic.

The Extended Phenotype (1982) - The book's thesis is that the organism is a survival machine constructed by its genes to maximise their chances of replicating. It concludes with the view that life is gene-centered.

The Blind Watchmaker (1986) - natural selection and the illusion of design

River Out of Eden (1995) - a river of DNA flows through time and through ourselves

Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) - The work debunks creationists' claims about the probability of naturalistic mechanisms like natural selection producing complex organisms.

Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) - Science, Dawkins explains, does not destroy but, rather, discovers poetry in the patterns and laws of nature. He tells the relationship between science and the arts from a scientist's viewpoint

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2004) - a tracing not of family trees but of the ancestry of life

A Devil's Chaplain (2003) - In 32 essays, he writes about pseudoscience, genetic determinism, memetics, terrorism, religion, and creation.

The God Delusion (2006) - a study of beliefs in deities

Dawkins's Impact

Dawkins, from his viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, posits that the central purpose of evolution is the survival of DNA, not of the beings that are the DNA’s temporary expression. Life perhaps began when the first molecule of RNA, DNA’s elder cousin, got itself more or less accurately replicated in some natural stew of chemicals on the primitive earth. The first living cells, the first plants and animals, emerged merely because they were better mechanisms for repeating that first ancient accident of replication.” In short, the purpose of life is for DNA to endure, not for humans to bow to one of the various supernatural divinities. According to Dawkins, DNA is not just a human’s way of making another human: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Jan Parker has said that Dawkins is considered by man both arrogant and aggressive, a person who scraps eloquently and energetically with bishops, charlatans, and astrologers (declaring that all the latter should be jailed). “I’m a friendly enough sort of chap,” Dawkins told Parker. “I’m not a hostile person to meet. But I think it’s important to realize that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”

In 1989, Dawkins was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. Also, he is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism as well as an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. In 1996, Dawkins was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Dawkins signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. For Free Inquiry (Spring 1998), he wrote about “The Emptiness of Theology” that

• Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunize against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin. . . . What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? . . . The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?

Upon receiving the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award" in 2001, Dawkins said,

• My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th. The last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the 'Day of Prayer' in Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

His Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), according to Roy Silson,

• minimises technical language while providing clear and critical explanations of the concepts, subtle mechanisms, and interactions now associated with natural selection. . . . Apart from its subject, which ought to be part of the education of all caring humans, it exemplifies a model of careful rational thought which others would do well to copy.

"There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have,” Dawkins wrote in “The Improbability of God.” In the same article, he wrote that the Argument from Design “has been destroyed as a reason for believing in a God.” Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (1998) reveals Dawkins’s dismay that most people have muddle-headed views about reality, that they are therefore attracted to superstition, fantasies, and all kinds of pseudoscience. However, organisms have always been indifferent to any putative greater good, he again states, and “natural selection is never aware of the long-term future. It is not aware of anything. Improvements come about not through foresight but by genes coming to outnumber their rivals in gene pools. . . . There is no foresight.”

As for immortality, Dawkins in a Guardian interview (10 January 2006), said,

• The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me. But to maintain such a belief in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is truly bewildering.

The New Atheists

A cover story in Wired (November 2006), "The Church of the Non-Believers," named what Gary Wolf described as "the new atheists": Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Greg Graffin, Penn and Teller, and Warren Allen Smith. Interviewing Dawkins in England at Oxford University, Wolf wrote:

Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion.

Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?

Dawkins has been talking this way for years, and his best comebacks are decades old. For instance, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a variant of the tiny orbiting teapot used by Bertrand Russell for similar rhetorical duty back in 1952. Dawkins is perfectly aware that atheism is an ancient doctrine and that little of what he has to say is likely to change the terms of this stereotyped debate. But he continues to go at it. His true interlocutors are not the Christians he confronts directly but the wavering nonbelievers or quasi believers among his listeners – people like me, potential New Atheists who might be inspired by his example.

"I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism," Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. "The number of nonreligious people in the US is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million," he says. "That's more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we're in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes."

Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. "Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists," he says. "Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn't add up. Either they're stupid, or they're lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they've got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can't get elected."

When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Here is where Dawkins' analogy breaks down. Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"

Dawkins is the inventor of the concept of the meme, that is, a cultural replicator that spreads from brain to brain, like a virus. Dawkins is also a believer in democracy. He understands perfectly well that there are practical constraints on controlling the spread of bad memes. If the solution to the spread of wrong ideas and contagious superstitions is a totalitarian commissariat that would silence believers, then the cure is worse than the disease. But such constraints are no excuse for the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign. Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them.

It is exactly this trip down Logic Lane, this conscientious deduction of conclusions from premises, that makes Dawkins' proclamations a torment to his moderate allies. While frontline warriors against creationism are busy reassuring parents and legislators that teaching Darwin's theory does not undermine the possibility of religious devotion, Dawkins is openly agreeing with the most stubborn fundamentalists that evolution must lead to atheism. I tell Dawkins what he already knows: He is making life harder for his friends.

He barely shrugs. "Well, it's a cogent point, and I have to face that. My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible" – and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes – "the 'sensible' religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side."

Three years ago, Dawkins adopted a new word to demarcate the types of things he couldn't believe in. The word is bright, a noun. Coined by Sacramento, California, educators Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell to designate a person with a naturalistic worldview, bright was designed to be broader than the atheist movement; it is not merely God that is untenable, but superstition, credulity, and magical thinking in general. Dawkins happened to be present in the spring of 2003 when Geisert and Futrell unveiled their proposal at an atheist conference in Florida, and he subsequently issued a public call in The Guardian and in Wired urging its use. The monthly Brights meetup in London is among the largest. The main organizer, Glen Slade, is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and management at Insead, Europe's leading business school. Slade points out that political developments in Europe and the US have created new opportunities for consciousness-raising. "The war on terror wakes people up to the fact that there is more than one religion in the world," Slade says. "I think we're at a crucial point, when we admit that certain types of religion are incompatible with certain rights. At what point does society say, 'Hey, that's insane'?"

Like Dawkins, Slade rejects those who might once have been his allies: agnostics and liberal believers, the type of people who may go to church but who are skeptical of doctrine. "Moderates give a power base to extremists," Slade says. "A lot of Catholics use condoms, a lot of Catholics are divorced, and a lot don't have a particular opinion about whether you are homosexual. But when the Pope stands up and says, 'This is what Catholics believe,' he still gets credit for speaking for more than a billion people."

Now that people are more worried about the fatwas of Muslim clerics, Slade says, this concern could spread, become more general, and wake people up to damage caused by the Pope.

For the New Atheists, the problem is not any specific doctrine, but religion in general. Or, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers."

Dawkins estimates the number of nonreligious people in the United States as "something nearer to 30 million than 20 million," adding that's "more than all of the Jews in the world put together."

On 25 February 2010, in one of her over 1,000 articles Ruth Gledhill of the London Times wrote about Dawkins's being offended by . . . atheists!. In one of her blogs Gledhill quoted what Dawkins wrote, which she and others found distasteful:

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.” 'What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that? Eat a baby? Gas a trainload of harmless and defenceless people? Rape an altar boy? Tip an old lady out of her wheel chair and kick her in the teeth before running off with her handbag?....Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?

(See the website about Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Also see why Ruth Gledhill of the London Times found one item in one of his blogs distasteful.)

{CA; E; FFRF; Free Inquiry, Winter 1993 and Winter 1996-1997; HNS2; ”The Improbability of God,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1998; New Humanist, November 1994; Nicholas Wade, “Double Helixes, Chickens and Eggs,” The New York Times Magazine, 29 January 1995; Jan Parker, “Richard Dawkins’s Evolution,” The New Yorker, 9 September 1996}