In this
chapter Dawkins attempts to answer the question of why religion exists from a
Darwinian mindset. That is, why people
came to believe in god and how that belief might be beneficial from a survival
of the species standpoint. He then begins
by asserting Darwin’s viewpoint, “…natural
selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every
variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and
adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and
wherever opportunity offers, as the improvement of each organic being.”
He then
postulates that religion exists because we are genetically dispositioned to
believe what our elders tell us. That’s an interesting theory, but it does not explain several
important facts:
1) Adults can and do decide to
have faith (and that, both before and after having raised children).
2) A belief in Christ can and
does result in positive internal change for the individual believer. If it did not, people simply would not continue
to follow Him.
3) Each new generation makes up
their own mind about Jesus and the claims of Scripture. You might train a child to believe something,
but that does not automatically mean they obey that through adulthood. This is evident in everything from piano
lessons to food tastes, and certainly includes religious training.
Yet in
spite of the above facts, and in spite of his observation that, “Religion can
endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others.”, Christianity still spreads. That goes against everything natural
selection teaches. In fact, in places
where opposition is greatest (such as communist China) it seems to spread even
more and result in even greater degrees
of certitude. This flies in the
face of Dawkin’s suggestion that religion is
a byproduct of evolutionary practice.
Dawkins then
suggests that religion is akin to biological changes in our brains produced by being
in love. He says, “From a Darwinian
point of view it is, no doubt, important to choose a good partner, for all sorts
of reasons. But, once having made a
choice –
even a poor one – and conceived a
child, it is more important to stick with that one choice through thick and
thin, at least until the child is weaned.” Well that’s great from a Darwinian point
of view, but the Christian point of view says that marriage is for life. How would that help the Darwinian drive to
procreate as many children as possible by as many different mates as
possible? It doesn’t. The whole of
Christianity stands against the Darwinian viewpoint, and it is impossible to
argue that Christianity is the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process.
Faced
with such difficulty, Dawkins then says, “The
general theory of religion as an accidental by-product –
a misfiring of something useful – is the one I
wish to advocate.” In other words, religion
in general (which almost the whole world holds to) is a genetic error. That again seems counter to his argument that
natural selection is weeding out the ‘bad’. How is it then
that the genetically defective lot are the majority? He concludes that we are infected with the
virus of religion. Later he clarifies
that this virus has evolved totally randomly yet maintains some common
characteristics. Such is the logic of
memetics.
In a
brief aside, Dawkins can’t help himself but to take a
series of Martin Luther’s comments completely out of
context in his effort to prove that Christians think reason is our
enemy. Perhaps Richard didn’t bother to look up Martin Luther in Wikipedia (let alone
actually study the man and his writing).
If he had, he’d have learned that it was
Martin’s post-doctorate reasoning
that was the catalyst for the Great Reformation.
Getting
back to his chapter’s point, Dawkins asserts that
religion operates more along the rules of memetics (unwritten cultural ideas)
than the rules of genetics. He proceeds to say that just
as genes work together (for a carnivore must have meat digesting genes as well
as genes for canine teeth, etc), so also memes must work together. The environment of compatible ideas he coins ‘the memplex’. You should realize that Richard Dawkins is the
founder of the ‘science’ of memetics.
All of
this is quite complex and perhaps ironically interesting, but it misses the
point. A meme is just a human idea that
circulates for a while and then dies. A
gene is just a bit of matter that lives for a time and then dies. From a Christian point of view, an
understanding of God - who was, and is, and is to come - has more in common
with an understanding of the laws of physics than it does with understanding
the seemingly random propagation of a human idea. Likewise, his discussion of the cargo cult of
John Frum is an interesting side-study into cult development, but doesn’t prove or disprove anything as it relates to God Most
High. Comparing a cult to a religion is
like comparing feng shui to architecture.
I would counter that religion exists because people are dispositioned to
worship. Religion teaches us that God
was before mankind and created mankind to worship, so man must worship. The question of who we worship is the
central point of Christianity. I would
wish Dawkins would question why he is so opposed to worship (of God) or perhaps
even question what he does worship (because to say ‘nothing’ is really to say ‘myself and my own thinking’) instead of mocking others.
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