Richard Dawkins, Witch Doctor
Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 6:26 pm
This is dedicated to Mercury and Dartagnan.
It kind of seems that for some folks, rejecting the nonsense of religious charlatans requires accepting the nonsense of high-profile anti-religionists like Richard Dawkins. And in his case, nonsense is just what it is. No wonder, since Richard Dawkins's views on religion arise from his "meme" theory, which (where it is not merely superfluous), contains a good deal of nonsense.
Boiled down, Dawkins's meme theory amounts to a claim by Dawkins to have discovered that things like beliefs and opinions can be transmitted non-genetically. (Cue baseless "straw man" accusations).
Wow. Turns out, I could have made a huge name for myself at the age of eight, if only I'd been bold (egomaniacal) enough to claim the most obvious feature of human cultural experience as my own unique discovery - and given it a nifty name. (Maybe Susan Blackmore would be my groupie right now, instead of Dawkins's).
This would be embarrassing enough, but Dawkins goes further. Though he uses clinical language to do it, he describes memes much as primitive peoples describe ghosts or spirits, or science fiction writers describe parasitic viruses from outer space. They invade our minds. Once they do, they control us. And some of them are evil. These bad ones must be rooted out - exorcised.
Consider how Dawkins views memes (taken from his book "The Selfish Gene", 207). Memes are "living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say [Pythagoras's Theorem] is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure of the nervous system of individual men...". (Adjust a few words here and there, and we're approaching the basic idea of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers").
In "The God Delusion", Dawkins claims that religions are a conglomeration ("memeplex") of these memes, good and bad; but that overall, religion is a bad supermeme (evil spirit/alien parasitic virus) (I can't decide which metaphor I like best :P).
But no worry - The Exorcist knows just what to do to annihilate each and every type of subsidiary evil spirit/virus. Employ all his remedies, and you will be whole again. (The introduction to "The God Delusion" is disturbingly reminiscent of an Elizabethan "medical manual": "to remove mal humours producing fevered anxiety, on the night of a full moon, mix one turnip with cumen and garlic and fennel, boil until pasty, stir in hot ash, then apply to the bowels.").
Consider Dawkins's own almost endearingly earnest (naïve) words from "The God Delusion":
"If your thoughts run along (creationist) lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment from Chapter 4 on 'Why there almost certainly is no God'...
"Perhaps you think there must be a god or gods because anthropologists and historians report that believers dominate every human culture. If you find that convincing, please refer to to Chapter 5, on 'the roots of religion'...
"Or do you think that religious belief is necessary in order for us to have justifiable morals? Don't we need God to be good? Please read Chapters 6 and 7 to see why this is not so...".
On and on goes Dr. Dawkins, prescribing a surefire remedy for each and every component of the malady of religiosity ("bad-memitis"), until the patient is cured!: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down". (Dawkins himself explicitly favours the virus analogy - see, among other things, his reference to immunology on page 5).
And once we are all atheists, then - in the immortal words of Grace Slick - "nothing's gonna stop us now". Heaven on earth is right around the corner. (Topic for another post).
Richard Dawkins may be a very talented zoologist. But as a philosopher, historian, psychologist, and political scientist, he fares very poorly.
It kind of seems that for some folks, rejecting the nonsense of religious charlatans requires accepting the nonsense of high-profile anti-religionists like Richard Dawkins. And in his case, nonsense is just what it is. No wonder, since Richard Dawkins's views on religion arise from his "meme" theory, which (where it is not merely superfluous), contains a good deal of nonsense.
Boiled down, Dawkins's meme theory amounts to a claim by Dawkins to have discovered that things like beliefs and opinions can be transmitted non-genetically. (Cue baseless "straw man" accusations).
Wow. Turns out, I could have made a huge name for myself at the age of eight, if only I'd been bold (egomaniacal) enough to claim the most obvious feature of human cultural experience as my own unique discovery - and given it a nifty name. (Maybe Susan Blackmore would be my groupie right now, instead of Dawkins's).
This would be embarrassing enough, but Dawkins goes further. Though he uses clinical language to do it, he describes memes much as primitive peoples describe ghosts or spirits, or science fiction writers describe parasitic viruses from outer space. They invade our minds. Once they do, they control us. And some of them are evil. These bad ones must be rooted out - exorcised.
Consider how Dawkins views memes (taken from his book "The Selfish Gene", 207). Memes are "living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say [Pythagoras's Theorem] is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure of the nervous system of individual men...". (Adjust a few words here and there, and we're approaching the basic idea of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers").
In "The God Delusion", Dawkins claims that religions are a conglomeration ("memeplex") of these memes, good and bad; but that overall, religion is a bad supermeme (evil spirit/alien parasitic virus) (I can't decide which metaphor I like best :P).
But no worry - The Exorcist knows just what to do to annihilate each and every type of subsidiary evil spirit/virus. Employ all his remedies, and you will be whole again. (The introduction to "The God Delusion" is disturbingly reminiscent of an Elizabethan "medical manual": "to remove mal humours producing fevered anxiety, on the night of a full moon, mix one turnip with cumen and garlic and fennel, boil until pasty, stir in hot ash, then apply to the bowels.").
Consider Dawkins's own almost endearingly earnest (naïve) words from "The God Delusion":
"If your thoughts run along (creationist) lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment from Chapter 4 on 'Why there almost certainly is no God'...
"Perhaps you think there must be a god or gods because anthropologists and historians report that believers dominate every human culture. If you find that convincing, please refer to to Chapter 5, on 'the roots of religion'...
"Or do you think that religious belief is necessary in order for us to have justifiable morals? Don't we need God to be good? Please read Chapters 6 and 7 to see why this is not so...".
On and on goes Dr. Dawkins, prescribing a surefire remedy for each and every component of the malady of religiosity ("bad-memitis"), until the patient is cured!: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down". (Dawkins himself explicitly favours the virus analogy - see, among other things, his reference to immunology on page 5).
And once we are all atheists, then - in the immortal words of Grace Slick - "nothing's gonna stop us now". Heaven on earth is right around the corner. (Topic for another post).
Richard Dawkins may be a very talented zoologist. But as a philosopher, historian, psychologist, and political scientist, he fares very poorly.