The Devil's Chaplain
Saint No. 4: Richard Dawkins
"My last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."
-- Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain (2004)
Richard Dawkins has no problem admitting that there might be ways in which your religion might be good for you. He agrees with what Jared Diamond explained beautifully in his wonderful Guns, Germs, and Steel: religion can forge a society into a much more effective conquering force by convincing people to act against their own best self-interest; they fight with much more discipline and commitment and less sense of self-preservation, and though the soldiers die, the religion meme flourishes and expands as its society conquers. And of course the genes shared among the soldiers' society also go forth and multiply.
He laid out the fundamental ideas in that paragraph in The Selfish Gene, his first book, written in 1976. The idea of the gene as the basic unit of natural selection. The idea that "selfish" genes whose purpose is to drive the creature they code for to try to maximize copies of themselves, can actually drive that creature to act in altruistic ways and benefit other creatures at its own expense. The idea of a "unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," which he named meme. The idea that religions are among the ideas which flourish, not because they are true, not even primarily because they provide consolation, inspiration, or help to the individual, but because they are diabolically effective at spreading themselves by every possible means.
His other books - including my favorite, The Blind Watchmaker - also use clear logic, compelling analogies, and the advances in scientific understanding of the world since Darwin's day to fill in many of the gaps in Darwin's theory, to explain evolutionary biology to people not in the field, to talk about why scientific curiosity is not only a more verifiably true and more useful way to look at the world than blind faith and deliberate mysticism, but also more inspiring and emotionally satisfying, and to convince his readers that there is simply no future in trying to believe in a "God of the gaps".
And though in a coldly Darwinian sense religion can be beneficial to its carriers, that's not a good enough reason to support it for this soft-hearted atheist. In fact, Dawkins spends a lot of time talking about how "the attributes that you need to survive in a Darwinian sense are the attributes that I don't want to see in the world. I can easily see myself fighting against the success of Darwinism prevailing in the world." Only humans, he writes, are aware of the blindly self-interested goals of our genes, and only humans can choose to ignore them in favor of our own goals. Only humans could abandon the bloody struggle of natural selection and come up with a morality that, if we could live by it, would make the kind of world that we'd like to live in.
Incidentally, given how long it's taken me to put this page up, and how long it'll take for the next one, it seems appropriate to repeat a favorite quote from a good friend of Dawkins: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
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