I will make no secrets about this: this post is Dawkins inspired.
One of the impediments standing between me and studying for common tests is the huge wealth of fun that the internet provides us. And I don’t just mean watching the entertainment available. I mean the articles, the thoughtful blog posts, the discussions, podcasts etc.
And one of the thing that held my attention for about an hour plus yesterday was this mp3 file of a lecture that Ricard Dawkins gave on his book The God Delusion. If you don’t want to spend the time or the money to read his book, then I suggest you spend the considerably short time to listen to that lecture closely even though it’s still no substitute for the book.
Actually, believe it or not, I can understand if you do not want to buy the book. Even I, with my fairly anti-religious leanings even before I read the book, hesitated a great deal before buying the book. I was afraid that I was buying something rude, hostile, destructive and ultimately a shrill piece of nonsense.
But I bought it anyway (on the second try. the first time I contemplated buying it in a bookstore I put it down and did not.) and it turned out to be a well-reasoned piece of work, its language is not loud nor shrill nor rude (the “fuck you, bitch” sense of the word) but calm and collected. Of course, it could easily be “offensive” to religious people, but that is more because of its content rather than tone or style, I feel.
Therefore, I have decided to do something that I might eventually regret and.. erm, stop doing. Here goes:
If you are my friend, and you are somewhat interested in the book but are not really willing to buy it for yourself, you can tell me and I will buy a copy and give it to you as a gift. This is, of course, on the promise that you would read it and would find someway to show me that you have (perhaps by condemning it to hell or something). If you do not read it in the end, I hope you would either return it to me or pass it to someone else who would.
To the more calculative people like me: This gift does not replace any other present you might be slated to receive for your birthday. Hahaha.
Of course, I sincerely sincerely hope that if you already intend to buy the book you would just go buy it.
And this offer is to friends only, and will be made to people who are not really my friends on a case by case basis.
Ah well, okay, that was fairly impulsive but I think it’s a good thing. Unless I really really go broke because of this. =/
Anyway, I mentioned the audio lecture because there was something that was particularly thought provoking to me. It was a question brought up during the Q&A session that was about whether Prof Dawkins thought that if religion could be shown to have positive effects, would those effects be more important than the fact that it is not true.
Richard Dawkins said no. To him, the truth generally is more important, though he did make some concessions about specific scenarios “Well, if a religious person was on his deathbed I wouldn’t seek to…” you get the idea.
Of course, previously, I made the case for why I think religion has bad effects, here and here.
And shortly after I posted the first post there, Michelle (Zhuang) called me and after a while, I finally understood why she seemed upset at my post. Her message was, “Daryl, you are missing the point. What is more important isn’t about whether religion is good or bad, but whether it is true or false.”
And I told her, well, that’s important definitely, but for that post I was deliberately focusing on the question “harmful or beneficial”. And I said, “Well, many people I know agree that religion is not true and they take the attitude that ‘well, it’s not true but some people need religion because it brings comfort and happiness.’”
“Hence, I was going straight for that notion and contending that religion, taken as a whole, is indeed more harmful than it is good.”
I think most of us are fairly pragmatic and utilitarian in the sense that religion’s happiness providing value is more important than its truth value. So while we may not believe in the religion, we may “believe in belief” as Dawkins calls it.
For me, I am still not sure whether I take happiness-providing or truth as a more important criterion, but I have a feeling that it is the first.
But nonetheless, the case for why religion is not true is an important one and has to be made.
And so, after 800+ words of introduction, let’s go to the meat of the matter.
Definitions first.
When I refer to religion here in this post, not my previous posts, I refer to all religions, past and present. In my previous posts about the harm of religion, I had to limit my discussions to the three Abrahamic faiths as I wasn’t sufficiently equipped to deal with other religions.
In this post, however, what I say would apply to all religions, as long as they posit the existence of a supernatural being who created the world and remains intimately involved in human affairs.
However, I am not referring to some pantheistic God, like the God Einstein referred to when he said things like “God does not play dice”. Incidentally, Einstein was not a religious man and he was merely using “God” as a metaphor for something else. So God here is not “the Universe”, or “laws of physics”. It is a supernatural being who does such things as listen to our prayers and grants us wishes and raises people from the dead.
I will first like to make a few points.
It is impossible to concretely disprove the existence of anything. If I say that there are secret fairies that are living in my garden but they cannot be detected by any way, there is nothing you can do to prove 100% said fairies do not exist.
However, just because one cannot prove 100% that God does not exist does not mean that the chances of him existing and him not existing are equal. In practical terms, we can be very certain that fairies do not exist to the extent that we live our lives as though they do not. Simply because there is no evidence for the existence of such fairies.
Therefore, I am saying that if there is no evidence to support the believing in the existence of God or Gods religious people have to put their belief on the same level as believing in the existence of fairies or unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So, let’s look at the ways religious people have attempted to “prove” that God exists.
Today, the strongest argument for the existence of God comes in the form of Creationism, or equivalently, Intelligent Design.
The argument usually goes something like this:
First, they will misconstrue that the only alternative to Intelligent Design is pure chance. They ask, “How likely is it that just by chance, all the ingredients of life just mix together and out pops out an eye, or a lion, or a Venus Fly Trap? Clearly chance cannot be the answer to the complexity and variety of life. Surely the improbability of it is like asking a monkey to bang on the keyboard and getting Shakespeare’s Hamlet?”
Of course, it couldn’t have been chance. It is not chance, or at least supremely unlikely that it is so. And indeed, any theory that seeks to explain how life has come about to become so varied and complex has to be better than pure chance.
Evolution is an excellent alternative to chance. Modern biology uses evolution to create amazing applications in medical science. For instance, germ theory is founded upon evolution, and germ theory is how we learn how to kill those stuff anyway. Evolution is not chance, but it is a step by step process that results in huge varieties of complex and simple lifeforms.
Intelligent Design also proposes itself as an alternative to chance. Fair enough. Let’s see how they attempt that.
Now, the simple ID theory says this: Wow, look at the eye. It is so complex. Have you ever seen anything that is complex and didn’t have a designer? Have you ever seen a watch that did not have a watchmaker? Have you ever seen a car that didn’t have a car maker? So a designer must have designed the eye, there is no other way it can be!
And such is the common Christian propaganda that takes place in several places, especially the USA. Now I hear several Muslim countries are adopting these “arguments” as well.
The ID which is slightly more sophisticated tries to explain what exactly it means by “so complex that it must have been designed”. This they call “Irreducible Complexity“.
Charles Darwin himself said, “If it can be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown.” Indeed, Creationist have embarked on their quest for this holy grail: the search for such an irreducibly complex organ.
The eye is often touted as an irreducibly complex organ. Creationists say, “What’s the use of half an eye? The eye must be an irreducibly complex organ.” But even Darwin himself had already shown how the eye could have evolved, step by step. Half-a-human-eye do exist in the natural world: faltworms have eyes that can detect light and shade but see no images. Nautilus “pinhole camera eye” makes a real image but it is blurred and dim compared to the images we see. Clearly, our eyes could easily have evolved step by step, by natural selection. Indeed, every single case touted as evidence of “irreducible complexity” have been rejected by science.
Of course, there remains a theoretical possibility that something will emerge that is irreducibly complex. That would certainly be a challenge to evolutionary science.
However, Intelligent Design is not even a scientific theory. While irreducible complexity could potentially be an argument against evolution, complexity is something that completely annihilates ID right from the outset.
The simple question is: If everything complex needed a designer, who designed the dude who designed life on earth?
Once this question is asked, Creationists often lapse into nonsense and their “scientific theory” is shown for what it is: theology. Some of them launch into discussions on how “God has neither a beginning or an end. Hence, it needs no designer.”
Of course, science’s answer to complexity is stunningly elegant: evolution. But clearly Creationists cannot employ this argument to explain the complexity of their designer. So the argument from improbability is actually an argument that devastates the Creationist argument. How likely is it that such a supernatural being emerged from chance?
And that, my friends, is why religion is not true: there has been no evidence whatsoever that God exists. Please feel free to comment if you think you have some.
I would also like to point out that any failings in evolution does not automatically score points for creationism. In other words, even if evolution is untrue, it does not equate to creationism being true. And hence, objections against evolution are not arguments for creationism. There is a very big difference here.
Of course, several religious people accept that we do not have any evidence for God’s existence. Some of them say that this is on purpose, as faith is the most important thing. Well, at least these people are being honest. Better by far than those who claim that God can be justified by reasoning and evidence. And for your information, I have seen Christian pamphlets which have tried just that before.
But then of course, the question is: If there can be no evidence for God, and equally, no evidence for fairies, why do you believe in one and not another? Is it not mere arbitrary accident that you believe in one and not another?
Also, would you believe in something that is not true, but which brings you comfort and confidence?
These are all questions we should ponder carefully about. Yet I hope that I have successfully shown that belief in God is not a justified belief and probably untrue.
Ah, and forgive me if I’ve not been clear in my writing. Feel free to criticize. It is a really long post, written within any sort of essay plan. Which reminds me… CTs… =/
