Difference between revisions of "The God Delusion"

Revision as of 20:32, 31 January 2010

Comments on Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion"

(This page is still in the process of being written.)

On Dawkins's website, there's also a description [1] of this book of his with links to online book stores.

(from: "The God Delusion")

This recent book by Richard Dawkins is another milestone in the battle of enlightened minds against customary superstition in this world, a beacon for determined seekers for truth who are trying to find their way in a sea of ignorance and misconceptions.

Dawkins analyses the central role that religion plays in forming, maintaining and consolidating common belief systems, no matter how improbable, deluded and harmful these belief system seem to be from an intelligent point of view. With the eloquence of a professional writer and the thoroughness of a seasoned scientific researcher, he presents the phenomenon of religious beliefs in all its ramifications in and its disquieting effects on human society.

It is, as it always was, generally accepted knowledge, that "nowadays" we do live in an enlightened society and that superstition and organized ignorance are weird phenomena from the middle ages, from our immature past. As Dawkins eloquently shows, this is a grave misconception. Superstition and aggressively organized ignorance rule our present, just as they ruled our past, with all their disastrous consequences.

Dawkins suggests to utilize the word God with greater care, because the way many scientists use that word in a special, metaphorical pantheistic sense, is aeons away from the intervening, miracle performing, thought reading, sins punishing, prayers granting God of the bible, of the priests, mullahs and rabbis and from the customary usage of the word.

Dawkins points out that religion helps to keep our minds closed to the mechanisms behind many of the eternal plagues of mankind, like war, genocide, suppression, starvation and, nowadays, the worldwide destruction of our environment. In his introduction he describes how utterly difficult it is for intelligent people to insist on understanding instead of yielding to mindless superstition, how difficult it is to avoid being ostracised for just seeking truth. In particular in well known great leaders of mankind in science and in politics it is often well visible how seriously such people have been or still are struggling with the overwhelming aggressiveness of the superstitious belief systems they have to live and work in and in which they have to survive one way or the other.

As an example Einstein is quoted, saying: "I belief in Spinoza's God who reveals itself in the harmonious order of all that exists, not in a God that meddles with the fate and destiny of mortal beings." And Bertrand Russell is quoted, saying: "The overwhelming majority of prominent intellectuals doesn't belief in the christian faith, but they conceal that fact in public in order not to lose their income".

Such battered, intelligent souls find crucial and badly needed support in contacts with other intelligent persons who find themselves in the same minority position. Dawkins says that he took the effort to write this book, among other reasons, to encourage intelligent people to "come out of the closet" and stop hiding their real convictions, making it easier for other intelligent fellow sufferers to find the badly needed support and encouragement to resist the overwhelming and devastating pressure of organized stupidity.

He hopes that sooner or later a chain reaction in the right direction may occur, once a certain "critical mass" of intelligent people, insisting on the truth, has been reached. This is in line with what is described on this Wiki about the critical mass leading to Point Omega, the next major change in human evolution.

Climbing Mount Improbable

(from: "The God Delusion")

One of the recurring issues in discussions with theists is their argument that complex biological phenomena and complex physical functions never can have evolved gradually, because they consist of too many parts that only function together and not separately and that therefore a gradual growth towards such a multifaceted complexity cannot well be conceived.

Dawkins tackles this argument with what he labels as "the parable of Climbing Mount Improbable". Imagine a mountain with one very steep side, that is impossible to climb, whereas the other side of the mountain is a gradual slope giving an easy access to the top. (On) that top is a complex organ, for example an eye or the protozoan whip-rotor propulsion apparatus (flagella). Regarding the complexity of such organs as impossible to develop spontaneously, is like looking at the organ at the top from the steep side of the mountain. From that side, it is impossible to climb the mountain from the abyss and leap to the top in one big jump. Evolution however, follows the easy route around the mountain and reaches the top along the gradual slope: piece of cake! The combination lock of life is a mechanism that works through the principle of "cold, cold, warmer, hot". Real life always is looking for the gradual slopes at the other side of Mount Improbable, whereas creationists see nothing but the discouragingly steep side.

The principle of climbing the gradual slope instead of trying to jump along the steep abyss is so utterly simple, that one almost asks oneself why it took so awfully long before a Darwin appeared with that discovery, revealing the self-evident.

(comments on "The God Delusion")

However, we should ask here the right questions. We should note that it is not so much Darwin's insights that were so remarkable, but rather the striking and massive ignorance that he was challenging. How on earth could such massive stupidness exist for such a long time ?

Imagine an extraterrestrial intelligence discovering earth and mankind. Then it would be quite difficult to explain that a species (our own) that on the one hand is capable of setting up complex organizations, can produce aircrafts for hundreds of passengers, huge submarines, and vessels diving to the deepest ocean floors, and that has put nuclear power into operation, is on the other hand showing such a staggering ignorance, such a massive stupidness regarding anything about its own behaviour. At first sight such stupidness seems quite incompatible with the very apparent intelligence levels as are shown in the other walks of life. It would indeed seem quite difficult to explain this discrepancy to the extraterrestrials. Unless ............. they would have grasped the general evolutionary rules for intelligence whenever it would emerge anywhere in the universe. (And they probably would have by the time they would have acquired enough skills and knowledge to be able to contact other intelligences far away in the universe.)

In this Wiki it is explained why this utter delay in the discovery of the obvious, this incomprehensible level of collective stupidity and blindness, lasting until today, could occur, why it is that such striking examples of massive misconception and ignorance are so persistent and what is the evolutionary role and function of it. It is shown here, that this blindness phase in human evolutionary history, with its is logical and necessary and could never have been avoided. It is shown also how such blindnesses exert their evolutionary function and in which way they will eventually lose their function and be overcome and how they will disappear from human existence in the next phase of our evolution. This will happen very very slowly and gradually in terms of genetical predispositions, but rather sudden in terms of phenotypical expression.

Religion imposing non-understanding

(from "The God Delusion")

Dawkins points out that creationists have produced in the course of time a continuing stream of examples of complex organs that should presumably be impossible to be conceived of as the result of gradual evolution. However, until now never one of such proposed examples has stood up to scrutiny. Every single one of them proved to be explainable by the usual evolutionary mechanisms of gradual changes and development. Darwin already pointed out that if at any time only one such example could be found, which could not logically be explained with the usual evolutionary principles and rules, that such one example in one stroke would nullify his evolutionary theories. In fact, such an example would be world news and would attract the immediate attention of hordes of scientists. But, such a thing never happened. As a consequence, the evolutionary ideas of Darwin and his colleagues still prevail, in spite of the uneducated ravings of creationists and such.

Dawkins points out furthermore that in these cases it is in particular organized religion that feels threatened by evolutionary thinking and that organized religion emphatically teaches to be happy with non-understanding and with settling for the religion's own childishly simplistic pictures of the world.

(comments on "The God Delusion")

In this Wiki we show that organized religion does indeed induce non-understanding regarding many aspects of human life, and especially the more important and evolutionary aspects. In that way religion is one of the major tools with which human beings are kept unawares of the very basics of their very existence.

In fact, this unawareness is an expression of the evolutionary requirement for humans: to be large and by unable to think clearly about their own behavior. Organized religion very well helps to do just that. It thus keeps us religious humans procreating rather automatically, unhampered by too much insight in consequences, possibilities and alternatives. In turn, this is also conducive for a further expansion of the religion in question, which in reality and implicitly, is that meme set's evolutionary "goal".

Unbelievable evolution ?

(from "The God Delusion")

The evolutionary changes or transitions that have most strongly challenged scholars to find the evolutionary ways along which these transitions could came about are the following three events:

1) The emergence of Life itself from inanimate matter;

2) The emergence of the Eukaryotic cell;

3) The emergence of Awareness.

Creationists focus in particular on these transitions in evolution, propagating the notion that it is highly improbable that these transitions could result from gradual evolutionary changes, because they each represent a too large and complex change to be explicable through gradual and logical changes in inanimate and in animate matter resulting in a new level of organizational complexity. Dawkins mobilizes the idea of the "anthropic principle" to tackle these presumed evolutionary improbabilities. He brings forward that these transitions may be or may have been very improbable, but that they are nevertheless not completely impossible. By virtue of the law of large numbers it is then just a matter of sufficient time for such an improbable change to happen nevertheless. And because we happen to live on a planet where evidently these changes did happen, we may conclude that the transitions in question were not too improbable to happen sometime somewhere. And it is of course implicit that we are in exactly that place.

(comments on "The God Delusion")

We agree with the notion that the above mentioned three transitions in evolution must be very rare events and that much time must be involved before such events eventually will emerge. In that sense we can understand the use of the "anthropic principle" argument. On the other hand we feel that these transitions, given enough time, do have to occur sooner or later. Life can be regarded in its most original and primitive form as a configuration of inanimate matter that coincidentally finds itself in a form that enhances the same configuration to occur more often. Such a configuration in fact is then self-enhancing or catalyzing itself to be formed, making such a configuration just a little bit more probable than other, alternative configurations. Such a small difference in probabilities is already enough to start an evolution in inanimate molecules towards a gradual approach of something we would be able to recognize as "self-duplicating molecules" which can be regarded as the first step towards what we recognize as "life". Such a first configuration as a starting point may be rare to occur, but given enough time is is also inevitable that it will occur somewhere in time.

Jackes Monod wrote excellent books and articles on this same consideration in the early seventies, one of his famous titles being "Chance and Necessity". Bottom line is that no matter how improbable it may seem that life emerges from inanimate matter, it will most certainly and unavoidably happen if the physical circumstances are favorable enough and given enough time. So there is, logically speaking, absolutely no need for postulating the hand of some "God" in order to be able to explain the existence of live matter. So if people adhere to religious fairy tales and such it is apparently not because of a necessity to explain the existence of our world, but rather for other personal reasons, most of which are not very honorable and in fact often are quite destructive for the persons involved.

Similar considerations hold for the other two much debated transitions. "Awareness" is one of them. In a similar vein it can be argued that awareness is quite something different from the more basic forms of individual behavioral organization as can be found in larger numbers of more primitive species. At least, that is the argument of creationists, trying to find arguments for needing the hand of an external "creator" or God. However, similar to Monod's arguments, it can be shown that awareness automatically has to occur, once an internal information processing system, e.g., the animal's brain, has evolved far enough to make considerations and calculations on a "meta"-level possible. By then, "awareness" will result inevitably. And successively, so will "self-awareness" follow as soon as the next level of complexity and sophistication has been reached in evolution.

On this Wiki it is argued that these evolutionary transitions that at first sight seem to be difficult to explain in terms of gradual evolutionary adaptations, and that are embraced by creationists to defend the need for their God to be indispensable life as we find it, are in fact logical and inevitable phases in evolution that most certainly will occur in one form or the other, given enough time.

What is more, on this Wiki it is not only argued that the above mentioned transitions from inanimate matter to life and to complex cells and then to awareness, are necessarily occurring phases in the evolution of matter and of life, but also that the level of "self- awareness" sooner or later automatically leads to higher levels of intelligence. And arriving at a certain level of intelligence is another of such seemingly "impossible" evolutionary steps. This Wiki is dealing with the fact that evolution, moving from more general moderate levels of intelligence to the level of intelligence of Homo sapiens, needed to bridge an evolutionary threshold, that, for very good evolutionary reasons, normally puts a limit to the level of intelligence and awareness in any evolving species. This evolutionary block on intelligence has up till now not yet been pointed out in public among evolutionary scientists, but it is not difficult to explain (see here for an explanation).

The mechanism of this threshold is the reason why in a variety of phyla, whales, mollusks, parrots, corvidae, primates, etc., intelligent capacities have evolved, completely independent from one another, but that in all of the species involved the development of intelligence always stopped at more or less the same maximum level. That level is around where self-reflection is becoming possible and meta-decisions about the own behavioral strategies are coming within reach. Only Homo sapiens (apparently) escaped from this quite logical evolutionary block and developed a higher level of intelligence than anything in any of the other phyla containing intelligent species. On this Wiki it is explained what made this escape, from Homo to become Homo sapiens, possible. The trick lies in the development of a very specific block on human intelligence, namely on all aspects of the own psychological functioning, regarding the Self as well as personal and social relations. Such a specific block on the utilization of intelligence in certain fields of functioning, takes the sting out of the normal evolutionary block on the further development of intelligence, because this block prevents a higher intelligence to have its normal negative effect on procreational capacity. Elsewhere on this Wiki it is explained how such an evolutionary block on high intelligence normally works.

From an evolutionary point of view it is purely coincidental that the conquest of the intelligence barrier has been taken by Homo and not by some species of whales or octopuses or crows. In that sense Dawkins' Anthropic Principle" can be applied. We humans are the most intelligent species on earth, because, whereas both phyla were ready for it, coincidentally that trick occurred in a primate and not in some octopus species. Otherwise clever octopuses would now be studying the behavior of a variety of primates instead of us studying the behavior of mollusks.

This Wiki is dedicated to spreading awareness about the present day situation of Homo sapiens in that we are standing at the brink of a next transition, point Omega, in which humanity will collectively quite suddenly overcome the cultural programming that boosts and enhances the already genetically built in blocks of intelligence regarding the own behavior. What we will enter then is an evolutionary phase in which the average human individual will develop much better and further than what has been considered "normal" until today. That will result in an enormous leap forward in the expression of the already inborn and readily available human intelligence. This will in fact produce such a huge and sudden leap in actually realized intelligence, that it is phenotypically an obvious discontinuity in our evolution.

If creationists would have known about the difficulty of our evolution moving from the previous, more common, level of intelligence of say, 1 to 2 million years ago, towards our present and in particular our future level of intelligence, creationists would certainly have embraced this transition as "impossible to explain evolutionarily". As is shown elsewhere on this Wiki, that would have been completely wrong, because although showing a sudden strong leap in phenotypic intelligence, it is all based on very gradual processes of selection and mutation, as usual.

In fact, on this Wiki it is shown that this development of human intelligence is a good example of how in evolution some phenotypic achievements (may) occur in sudden leaps, simply because for a full deployment certain already built in design characteristics have to be overcome in order to make the novel characteristic express itself fully. For such transitions evolution does not show a smooth and gradual series of changes, but happens in sudden bursts and leaps. Fother for creationists it seems, but as this Wiki shows, the phenomenon of creationists and other deluded souls are themselves part of the cultural strengthening of the awareness blocks regarding the self, that have been built into the genetic basis of our behavior before the explosive development of human intelligence could begin.

Once we all understand the why and how of the existence of creationists and all other cultural tricks that keep our innate self-blindness in place, the typically human stupidity will finally understand itself and as a consequence a rather sudden explosion of higher intelligence will grab the whole of humanity. It will be a highly contagious process that nobody can escape from and that nobody would want to escape from anyway.