Richard Dawkins

I had completely forgotten that there was a livechat scheduled with him today at 4pm. Luckily I checked my email when I got in and saw a reminder, so I caught the second half. It was held on the site faithless.org, which is a community of people who don't believe in any religion and believe that religion's hold on society needs to be shaken off by intelligent people. Dawkins, ps, is an evolutionary biologist who's written several really great books on evolution and genetics, including "The Selfish Gene" and my current read, "The Ancestor's Tale". He is most definitely an atheist. Ironically, as I'm watching this chat, I was doing my reading for Catholicism class, and it just became even more apparent, looking at the crap I was supposed to be reading about the "ecclesiology of the early Church", that I just have no faith in it whatsoever. Why have so many amazing minds bent their efforts to the study of such unconsequential matters?

I can't go so far as to say I don't believe in God, because I still do, even though I recognize that none of my arguments would withstand a vigorous debate. Some can even be used by both sides; creation obviously can be shown to have produced through natural selection, but what about the universe at large? The big bang didn't "select" to happen, something had to cause it.

And yet, even if creation occurred due to an intelligent designer, and then the laws of nature and evolution caused humans to become what we call human, why would that give us any special standing in God's eyes? we're just another species in the creation, 6 billion rats on a wheel.

I suppose I might almost count myself a kind of Deist--they believe in an intelligent creator who set everything up and then retired; Thomas Paine and other American founding fathers subscribed to this notion. This is where the Masons get their idea of the "Master Architect" of the universe. Of course this brings the question--how does this affect our understanding of the soul? If God does not act in the world and did not specifically intend for our race to develop, how are we any different than the animals?

I suppose there's still room in the Deist camp to suggest both a life after death and a general presence of God in the world. Of course, if we are no more special than animals, having been created by natural selection, then why do we deserve a life after death? Unless all creatures also go to this life after death? You could side with the pope and say that at some point, God acted and "inserted" a soul into the 'first' two humans. However, as evolutionary biologists will point out, there is no such thing as the first homo sapiens. The argument goes like this: for there to have been a "first" homo sapiens, there would have had to been a time when there were two parents of one species, and a child of a brand new species. That simply could not happen; every child of every generation will be biologically capable of breeding with its parent generation, and therefore cannot be of a different species. How then do we arrive at a different species? Because of transitional individuals, individuals with genetic changes that slowly bridged the gap between what we know as homo sapiens and the homo ergaster or homo erectus that came before. The child, though slightly different than the parent, is still enough of its species to mate with the parent (don't get too grossed out, happens in nature); however, the child of THAT child will not be able to mate with its grandparent, because the biological change will have been too great. When it has a child of its own, it can mate with that child, but the child will not be able to mate either with its grandparent or great grandparent, since the genetic differences are growing even greater. Thus eventually the descendants seem indistinguishable from the ancestors, cannot mate, and are obviously different species. So if that's how we came about, how would a soul occur? It could not happen by degrees as the transition to human-ness did, that's pretty ludicrous. And yet, I cannot shake my belief in a soul making us different from animals, and I cannot shake my belief in a benevolent being who exists in the world, even if he does not act in the world.

Dawkins would tell me that this reflects my inculcation in a religious society and that I'm not thinking for myself. He, like Marx, compared dependence on religion to dependence on narcotics. It seems true that simpler people tend to have very fervent belief in religion, a degree of belief that seems to wane the higher you progress along the educational spectrum. Dawkins pointed out how few scientists and doctors retain their faith, of any kind. Naturally, the egoistic side of me resented being lumped in with the intellectually stunted, simply for retaining a faith. I do think that religion is too often an opiate, and unquestioned by the people who subscribe to it. I also feel it is too controlling an influence in American society, and has been in the world for years. Yet, religion will never go away, because the masses will always need their opiates, no matter how hard you try to educate them. We can try to make it better (teaching evolution as a solid scientific theory instead of letting the wacko creationists run rampant, damned southerners!), but its influence will always be felt.

This is such just a tough subject to wrap the mind around. It's not experimentally verifiable and that's one reason to distrust the existence of god. You could argue that love is not verifiable either, (indeed, a cold evolutionary biologist could argue that the only reason to protect and raise your children is so that your genetic material can be passed on to further generations) yet no one denies it exists. It's just a tough nut to crack.

Someone asked "Why don't we worship philosophers like Socrates the way we worship Christ?" Dawkins replied "Let's not worship anyone. Except our lovers." I like that.