mcgrath lectures notes

Alister McGrath Lecture Notes on some of Dawkins' ideas

Some of Dawkins' criticisms of religion:
1. if youre a real scientist that immediately impels you towards atheism
2. religion makes assertions that are grounded in faith, the sciences, on the other hand, are all about proving things to be so - so there is a tension between religion (i.e. about believing things that cannot be proven ) and the sciences (i.e. about rigorous, evidence based belief)
3. belief in God is not actually rational - it is produced by several possible mechanisms (i.e. the meme/virus of the mind) i.e. in some way another wise healthy mind is 'infected' by this idea of God & that leads to all kinds of complications - in the late 1990's this was certainly a very common thing to say
4. religion offers an impoverished view of the world i.e. believing in God leads you to view the world in a way that is less intellectually and aesthetically satisfying than if you do not believe in God
5. religion leads to evil

mcgrath wants to answer all of these points

before that a disclaimer..
a perpetuatual historical myth in particular that Dawkins holds to:
1. science & religion are locked into mortal kombat and only one of them will survive (which will inevitably be science, beating its superstitious alternatives) [someone like historian of science Ron Numbers will question this stereotype and will say there has never been a time when science & religion have been thus pitted against each other - they occasionally have their tensions & convergences - but it is always a nuanced & complex relationship, so to describe it as a consistent battle is simply misguided]

mcgrath's answers to the above points:
1. does science lead to atheism? dawkins thinks so, and he criticizes such scientists as physicist Freeman Dyson who, at some points, are positive about religion.. but why should science lead to atheism? surveys say about 40 percent of scientists believe in God, 20 percent are agnostics and 40 percent are atheists.. so Dawkins' conclusions do not fit the actual empirical data - if it is some kind of superhighway to atheism to be a scientist then why are so many scientists religious believers? for dawkins either these people are mad, bad, deluded or being deceitful for all kinds of significant purposes..
for McGrath an obvious point is that there appears to be no obvious reason why science leads to atheism, if it leads to anything at all - McGrath thinks it leads, if anything, to agnosticism: ie the evidence is not good enough to allow us to reach a secure decision one way or the other.

a basic problem with Dawkins here really has to do with the scientific method itself. nature is open to multiple interpretations - it can be interpreted atheistically, agnostically, theistically etc. but nature itself comples/constrains you to adopt none of those - it is maleable, its consistent with all but leads to none.. Huxley in the 1880's said that science was agnostic in that it puts aside theological claims, as well as anti-theological claims.. more recently Stephen Jay Gould, an atheist biologist-popularizer, did not derive his atheism from science and was completely adamant that science did not impel anyone towards atheism at all.. in a 1992 article he said: 'to say it for all my colleagues and for the umpeenth millionth time, science simply cannot by its legitimate methods ajudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm it nor deny it, we simply cannot comment on it as scientists.' he then named every evolutionary biologist he could think of from the nineteenth century and onwards and put them both into two piles, both of which were about the same size. the conclusion he drew was that either half my colleagues are stupid or Darwinism is compatible with religious beliefs and equally compatible with atheism. so hes saying it can be interpreted both ways but in itself and of itself it does not require either.

so McGrath's question to Dawkins in why this insistence that science leads to atheism? they do for some people, yes, but that they should do for all is a rather dogmatic judgement.

2. relationship between faith & evidence. Dawkins argues that faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. McGrath, however, stopped being an atheist cos he felt it simply could not be reconciled with the evidence he saw around him in the world - does that mean he had not been thinking very hard? Dawkins says faith is not allowed to justify itself by arguments, but has Dawkins read Plantinga, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Swinburne etc.? it seems like he could not have to make such a statement. he is right, however, that unthinking faith is an embarrasment, but he seems to be saying that if you believe in God you've never used your brain at all - but surely that is a presumptious conclusion that needs to be challenged.

can God's existence be proved? McGrath would say no, if by proof you mean shown with absolute certainty as for example i could prove Godel's theorem. but equally can God's existence be disporved? if you read the reviews for The God Delusion you can say alot of people dont think it is one of his best books. so the answer really is no, it cannot be disproved either - believing or disbelieving in God is a judgement of faith, it goes beyond the available evidence and we all do this all the time with many other things: its not a real problem. Dawkins seems to think everything needs to be absolutely proved and, as a result, ends up in some difficult situations. so whether or not God's existence can be proved is a stalemate.

are there limits to what science can prove? Dawkins argues science proves things with certainty and anything worth knowing can be proved by science and anything else i.e. belief in God is just delusion. we can find this view also in Russell: 'whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot discover, mankind can never know'. but in contrast Peter Medawar, nobel prize winner, in his book The Limits of Science says the inability of science to answer child-like questions like 'how did everything begin, what are we here for, what is the point of life?' etc. show its limits. hes not criticizing the sciences at all, just saying they are superb in their sphere of operation, the problems only begin when scientists start extrapolating to other areas, answering questions which really science cannot answer at all.

3. is God a virus or a meme?
Dawkins greatest impact upon popular culture has been through this concept of the meme - the meme is a cultural replicator paralleling the gene in genetics. he asks us to imagine here memes 'leaping from brain to brain', a powerful visual image of a process called 'immitation'. his basic argument is that people believe in God not because there is a God & not because theyve given it long & careful rational thought but because something has leapt into their minds, this meme. it has a very high survival value, is very adaptive/successful and simply takes people over. the argument goes that this 'God meme' is what sustains belief in God in an age when science has made belief in that God simply untenable. an interesting idea that has been discussed alot. but the judgement of most is that the meme is not a particuarly helpful idea at all.

Dawkins has done an enormous amount to popularize the concept. we find the idea back in The Selfish Gene and is applied immediately to a religious concept back in 1976 where he talks of the 'God meme' and he develops this in subsequent writings.

four problems for memes:
i. theres a serious question about whether cultural evolution be though of as even Darwinian at all. or does evolutionary biology have any particular value in relation to the history of ideas?
ii. there is no direct experimental evidence for the existence of memes itself.
iii. the case for the existence of the meme, from 1976 up until now, rests upon an analogy.with the gene. but the analogy proves incapable of bearing the weight dawkins wishes to put upon it.
iv. gene has to be proposed to explain what we observe, with the meme the observational data can be explained perfectly well without the need for invoking the meme at all.

each point in more depth.
i. is cultural development/evolution Darwinian? back in 1978 McGrath found Dawkins' idea of meme immensely intriguing and far more satisfactory and scientifically rigorous that any of the models in the humanities about the history of ideas. some difficulties emerged in looking at cultural history i.e. one in the Italian Reneissance. here is a classic case of cultural evolution - a reappropriation of the past, a redirection/remoulding - taking old ideas/values & giving them a new lease of life. but that reappropriation of the past was deliberate, intentional & planned - those who were concerned to advance the Renaissance were quite clear that they were doing it deliberately and the difficulty here is that this points to Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian, conception of evolution if it points to anything at all. but more likely it simply means evolutionary biology has not much relevance to cultural development at all.

ii. do means actually exist? Dawkins talks about this is his preface to Susan Blackmore's book The Meme Machine (1999), here he very honestly lays out some problems for the hypothesis i.e. what are memes made of? where do they reside? memes havent found a Watson or a Crick. genes are to be found in precise locations of chromosomes, memes presumably exist in brains & we have even less chance of seeing one than we have of seeing the gene - though there have been neurobiological conjections of what they might look like. the real point here is there is no compelling evidence to believe in these things at all.
genes can be seen, their transmission patterns can be studied under rigorous empirical conditions, what may have started off as hypothetical constructs inferred from systematic ovservation ended up by being observed themselves. the problem is memes are hypothetical constructs inferred from observation and it turns out they are unobservable and, in McGrath's view, serve little explanatory purpose.

iii. biological evolution requries a replicator we now know exists called the gene, so by analogy cultural evolution also requires a replicator which is hypothesized to be the meme. analogy is always somewhat lose in terms of its thinking. but these arguments are dangerous - think of 19th century physics, sound was known to have to move through a medium and wasnt light analogous to sound & so didnt light need a medium to travel through also? this lead to the long & abortive search for the luminous aether began and ended very quickly. an analogy may seem to exist but it does require to be verified.
Simon Conway Morris states in Life's Solution, p.324: 'memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. in any wider context they are hopelessly if not hilariously simplistic. to conjure up memes not only reveals a strange indecision of thought but, as O'Hair has remarked, if memes really existed they would ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought.
the real difficulty as Martin Gardner is that a meme is so broadly defined by its proponents that it is a fairly useless concept - whatever can be explained by memes can be explained in other, perhaps more economical ways. this point leads to the fourth criticism:

iv. there are other models available from economics and anthropology which offer explanations of cultural evolution much more successfully than memes.

Dawkins then goes onto saying that God is a virus of the mind.
Virus used also in an analogical sense - belief in God is like a virus being spread from one individual to another. Virus here is obviously a word with highly negative connotations. BUT, again, real viruses can be seen and Dawkins' hypothetical virus of the mind has never been seen - an obvious problem. in the real world virus' are not known simply by symptoms or patterns of diffusion, but by being detectable/subjected to rigorous empirical investigation and their genetic structure being characterized. In contrast God, or anything, as a virus of the mind, again, is hypothetical - posited by a questionable analogical argument rather than direct observation.

it appears here with both that Dawkins leaves himself open to the suggestion that there is an atheism virus or an atheism meme as much as there is a God meme or God virus.

4. does religion impoversih our view of the universe? does the theist look at the world in a less exciting way than if we look at it without God?
in Unweaving the Rainbow he writes:
'the universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe-inspiring but the kinds of view of the universe that religious people have embraced have been puny, pathetic & measely in comparison. the universe presented by organized religions is a poky, medieval universe & extremely limited.'
this idea also recurrs in The God Delusion.

in response Dawkins simply asserts this & doesnt argue the point. a Christian has at least a good a reading of nature as Dawkins does. first point we see something beautiful (ie a scene of natural beauty) and your heart misses a leap - before you understand what it is you know that experience - we all have it: Dawkins, McGrath & everyone - but what does believing/not believing in God have to do with it? secondly there is a sense of wonder at the theoretical representation of nature, in other words the theories/equations/mathematics that describes nature so well - but again why does believing in God stop you having this sense of wonder at theory? surely atheist & theist alike can have it. thirdly if youre a Christian you see nature not simply as nature but as God's creation that in someway reflects the beauty/glory of God (see Psalm 19) - so an added motivation to study nature is that by engaging in God's works you are learning more about God Himself and this has been a driving force for many scientists/scientific studies throughout history of science.

5. religion is a bad thing. McGrath thinks Dawkins is right to say religion has caused a huge number of problems. think of 9/11 - religious element involved in that. 9/11 for Dawkins was a catalyst for writing The God Delusion. Robert Pape (whose conclusion here we could argue with - which, as an aside, personally i probably would) has looked at suicide bombing and said that religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for suicide bombing - he says its oppressed people groups who feel they have to large army to fight against a greater power that may be occupying their land/territory. but there is a debate about this and McGrath thinks Dawkins takes a complex debate and simplifies it into one issue only - it is more complicated than that though.
religion has done bad things but McGrath says so has atheism in the 20th century - but in God Delusion Dawkins denies this. but how can we deny this? in 1919-1941 95% of soviet churches were dynamited or bulldozed, the same number of soviet priests were liquidated. religion on its own or atheism on its own dont cause us to do bad things but perhaps theres just something about human nature itself that causes us to do both great and dreadful things..
an example McGrath studied chemistry at Oxford, there he read a book by man & wife Feser & Feser - Feser the man did alot of work to help haemopheliacs - and his work shows that science has the capacity to transform man for the better - but its not quite that simple.. in 1942 he also invented napalm, which killed hundreds of thousands of people in World War II.. do we conclude science is evil from that? maybe, but maybe its just there is a shadow side to all of us and we need to recognize that and work to eliminate it..

one of the things that troubles McGrath about Dawkins' book The God Delusion is that, in a 400 page book, refuses to acknowledge religion has done anything positive - even one thing at all Michael Shermer, president of the American Skeptics Society, on the other hand has admitted that though he may not like religion overall it has done a huge amount of good in peoples lives. so Dawkins doesnt seem to want to confront the evidence honestly, despite his rhetoric about considering evidence.
the real issue for McGrath is extremism and the issue is how to minimize extremism in our society.

also Dawkins is clear science has no methods for deciding what is ethical - most scientists would agree.. but if it cant tell us what is right & wrong what does? an acknowledgment to the limits of science maybe.. but a question arising from this is how do we tell religion is bad empirically? this has become object of intense study in last 15 years - what objective measures can we use to show this? maybe something like general levels of wellbeings & longevity - studies which have been done.. it is an ongoing field of research still happening, but looking at the evidence - in 100 peer-reviewed researchers looking at this question, the pattern emerged that 79 of those studies reported at least one positive correlation between religious involvement & well being.. 20 showed a mixed pattern (or no pattern) and only 1 found a negative association between religion & wellbeing.. this doesnt prove God exists - but surely if Dawkins is right about religion being a bad thing these figures should be the other way around.. Dawkins is aware of this &, in The God Delusion, he has an inadequate discussion of this - he says religion may not necessarily be bad for you but that doesnt prove its right..

Dawkins argues that if religion would be eliminated then the world would be liberated from all the conflicts we have had recently.. but what about the French Revolution? 1792 a french woman is being beheaded on guillotine, she sees the statue of liberty in the distance, points to it and says 'liberty, what crimes are committed in your name'.. the point she was making was that basically the French had elevated liberty to the place of God and if you kick God out you put something else in His place - its all about transcendentalization.. we take something and make it as if it were God & sacred i.e. citizenship, race, tribe, liberty etc. can all take this role.. humanity has been very good at taking divisions and making theoretical justifications for them - that wont change even if religion were to be eradicated.