{"id":8042,"date":"2019-10-30T17:06:39","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T00:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=8042"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:38:38","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:38:38","slug":"richard-dawkins-outgrowing-god-a-beginners-guide-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2019\/10\/30\/richard-dawkins-outgrowing-god-a-beginners-guide-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Dawkins: OUTGROWING GOD: A Beginner’s Guide (2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This book, clearly aimed at younger readers, repeats many of themes from his earlier 2006 book THE GOD DELUSION, boiled down and made even more pointed. The first part of the book is structured as a series of \u201cbut what about?\u201d questions; the author challenges belief in God, and then answers objections along the lines of, but if there\u2019s no God, what about this? What about that? The second part is a multi-part answer to the final \u201cwhat about\u201d question.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll try to boil down the books to a simple sequence of questions and answers. [[ Some asides of mine in brackets. ]]<\/p>\n

Part I<\/p>\n

Q1: Do you believe in God?<\/p>\n

A1: Which one? There\u2019s a long list of gods of past cultures that no one believes in anymore. Yahweh, the god of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, started out as the tribal god of ancient Israelites who, they believed, looked after them as his \u2018chosen people\u2019. Yet Christians and Muslims seem to believe in other assorted gods: the devil; the holy trinity; mother Mary; and all those Catholic saints, quite analogous to the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. [[ It\u2019s as if humans have never escaped the animist mindset that ascribes agency to every natural phenomenon. ]]<\/p>\n

Q2: But what about the Bible? Isn\u2019t it true?<\/p>\n

A2: How do we know any book is true? We do know that the books of the Bible were written in ancient languages, from word-of-mouth storytelling, and then translated many times. The game of \u2018Chinese Whispers\u2019 [telephone, in the US] shows how stories change each time they\u2019re told. Most likely the stories in the Old Testament are legends, like the stories of Homer. In the New Testament, the gospels were written decades after the events they portray, and after all those letters of St. Paul, who didn\u2019t seem to know much about Jesus\u2019 life. The Biblical canon wasn\u2019t established until 325 AD. Other gospels were left out on the numerological grounds that there could be only four. And the four we have are inconsistent, and prone to mistranslation. (e.g that Mary was a \u2018virgin\u2019). The idea of miracles has to be carefully considered given how frequently people are mistaken, or fooled by conjurers or con-men.<\/p>\n

Q3: What about the non-miraculous stories in the Old Testament?<\/p>\n

A3: Consider how myths start. There\u2019s no independent evidence that Abraham actually existed, or that the Jews escaped Egypt led by Moses; you\u2019d think the latter would have been noted in Egyptian history. Yet there is evidence of the Jewish captivity in Babylon\u2026about the time the books of the OT were first written down. Thus those stories are influenced by legends of other peoples, e.g. Gilgamesh and Greek mythology. No modern theologian thinks that Adam and Eve, or Noah\u2019s Ark, are history.<\/p>\n

Myths can begin as stories based in fact, and grow in the telling. We\u2019ve seen this in recent history: how isolated Pacific Islands during World War II came worship American cargo planes (cargo cults) and on one island a cult formed around a visit by John Frum \u2013 \u201cJohn from America.\u201d It\u2019s easy to see Mormonism as another modern cult, given the circumstances of Joseph Smith\u2019s claims. People indoctrinated into religion as a child have a hard time shaking it off. Every tribe has its origin myth. Myths have poetic beauty, but they\u2019re not history.<\/p>\n

Q4: But isn\u2019t it necessary to follow the Bible, the \u2018Good Book,\u2019 for its moral wisdom?<\/p>\n

A4: Whether or not God is real or a fictional character, we can judge whether he is good or bad. The stories of Job, of Abraham and Isaac (a story involving a different son in the Qu\u2019ran). God seems not only cruel, but insecure \u2013 he even calls himself a \u2018jealous\u2019 god. The early Hebrews were polytheistic in a sense: they didn\u2019t doubt the existence of rival gods, they just believed their own Yahweh was more powerful. The commandment about not killing only meant, don\u2019t kill members of your own tribe. God of the OT kills other tribes right and left, and loves the smell of burning meat. All those stories of Hebrews killing tribes in places they were told to settle would today be called ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

What about the NT? Jesus said some nice things, but St. Paul dwelled on the idea of babies being born in sin. The doctrine of atonement, of God needing to sacrifice his own \u2018son\u2019 Jesus, born just so he could be tortured and die in agony, is macabre and nasty and deserves to be ridiculed. (Why not just grant humans forgiveness and be done with it? [[ Because blood sacrifices were common in primitive tribal religions of the time, and so the idea was worked into the legend of Jesus. ]] ) And how does the condemnation of Judas make sense, if his betrayal of Jesus was God\u2019s plan?<\/p>\n

So the character of God does not seem especially nice.<\/p>\n

Q5: But don\u2019t we need God in order to be good?<\/p>\n

A5: Most people think someone of a different faith is preferable to an atheist, as if belief in a higher power is necessary to know right from wrong. Why would this be so? Because a holy book is a book of rules, without which we\u2019d have no idea what is right or wrong? Or perhaps because people act good if they believe some policeman in the sky is watching them. Thus \u2018god-fearing.\u2019 Yet there\u2019s little evidence that belief in God or Hell makes people nicer. Prisons are full of believers, and very few atheists. Of course, some people think *other* people need such beliefs to be good; this is the idea of belief in belief.<\/p>\n

The traditional 10 rules (there are two versions) aren\u2019t valuable as a guide to being good or bad; the first two are only about God being jealous. No one observes the fourth. The sixth applies only to one\u2019s own tribe. The tenth considers the wife to be the property of the man. In the NT Jesus endorsed the OT \u2018Law\u2019, repudiated his own family, and took petty revenge on a fig tree. His \u2018golden rule\u2019 is familiar from many cultures. Anyway, if we can pick and choose which rules to follow, then we must have some sense of good and bad outside those rules.<\/p>\n

Q6: So how do we decide what is good?<\/p>\n

A6: Our brains have evolved to include certain tastes and desires, including the desire to be nice to other people [[ more about this later ]]. Our sense of right and wrong has changed \u2013 about slavery, the inferiority of different races, of allowing women to vote \u2013 because society has evolved, from interaction with people different than ourselves, through social debates, and so on. There are two broad classes of moral philosophy: absolutionists, who think some things just are right or just are wrong, and consequentialists, who considers the consequences of an action, who suffers or does not. \u2013Here author imagines a long debate about abortion between two women, one on each side. Deontologists propose ideas like Kant\u2019s categorical imperative, or the idea of a \u2018veil of ignorance\u2019 is setting social standards [[ this is the idea that you design a society so that whatever role you might play in it you would not be unhappy ]].<\/p>\n

So even if God does exist, we don\u2019t need him to be good.<\/p>\n

This leads to the ultimate \u2018what about\u2019 question \u2013 doesn\u2019t the world look obviously designed? So we move the second part of the book, about evolution.<\/p>\n

Part II<\/p>\n

Q7, Surely there must be a designer?<\/p>\n

A7: Author imagines a cheetah and a gazelle and observes how each seems designed for its role. Also how a chameleon\u2019s tongue works. Considers the complexities of the eye. These are all problems that need to be explained. The solution is evolution by natural selection. The fact that there are often flaws in these supposed \u2018designs\u2019 is evidence of that evolution: the human eye\u2019s blind spot; the nerve that connects to the voicebox; goosebumps. History is written all over us.<\/p>\n

Ch8: Steps towards improbability.<\/p>\n

All of these designs seem high improbable; don\u2019t they need a designer? No, that\u2019s no solution at all, despite William Paley\u2019s hypothetical example of finding a watch found on the beach. The solution is to imagine, e.g., the cheetah being change a little bit, in some random direction. The change might help, or not. The change is random, but the result is not, it\u2019s determined by how well the animal survives in its environment. Darwin used the example of how the domestication of horses and dogs have led to vastly different breeds. Humans did that selection; in the natural world, nature itself does the selection. Thus an excellent eye can result from a change to a slightly less excellent eye, and so on, all the way to a very poor eye that\u2019s better than no eye at all. [[ And our eyes may be excellent but they\u2019re not perfect, which is why so many of us where eyeglasses; so much for intelligent design. ]] The problem with imagining a designer is that God himself is even more improbable than Paley\u2019s watch; complex things take time to evolve. [[ I.e, where did God come from? If eternal, why not just allow the universe to be eternal? This is another example of human nature’s propensity to attribute agency to the natural universe. ]]<\/p>\n

Ch9, Crystal and Jigsaw Puzzles<\/p>\n

An ordinary rock may not require a designer; what about a cubical crystal? But crystals form spontaneously, due to the arrangement of their molecules. We can understand snowflakes similarly, and viruses, and proteins.<\/p>\n

Ch10, Bottom up or top down?<\/p>\n

Of course creatures don\u2019t appear from scratch; they arise from previous generations of creatures. DNA isn\u2019t a \u2018blueprint,\u2019 it\u2019s more like a recipe. [[ Or like origami steps, fold here then fold here, without having any idea what the result will be. ]] Houses are build top-down, from a blueprint; organisms arise bottom-up by following relatively simple rules. An example is how birds flock. Computer programs illustrate this. DNA provides instructions for how cells divide and grow. And when those instructions change a bit \u2013 through mutation of individual genes \u2013 the child animal will be slightly different than the parent animals. And some will enable the child to live longer, or have more babies. That\u2019s natural selection. Everything about us thus evolved, including the tendency to like music and sex, and including religion.<\/p>\n

Ch11, Did we evolve to be religious? Did we evolve to be nice?<\/p>\n

Since almost everyone believes in some sort of god, should this have a Darwinin explanation? Probably so. It starts with the human tendency to believe in agency \u2013 that an effect must have a conscious cause. Thus animism; how the Greeks imagined a different for thunder, for rivers, for fire, for the sun, etc. Yahweh was originally the storm god of the Canaanite people from whom the Jews descended. Sacrifices might have grown out of coincidences repeated. We notice false positives; they become superstitions. We often don\u2019t notice false negatives, e.g. not realizing mosquitoes spread disease. Sorting these out is what experiments, and science, is all about. Skinner instilled superstitions into pigeons. Similarly, gamblers develop lucky shirts and habits. Superstitions evolved to rituals that were instructed to children \u2013 pray five times a day! Some intelligent children grow up and realize the evidence of the real world doesn\u2019t support such advice. Religion is a byproduct of how child brains are shaped by natural selection to believe parents, teachers, and other elders.<\/p>\n

Another explanation might be how beliefs of one tribe might prevail over beliefs of another tribe, e.g. by encouraging the sacrifice of warriors through belief in an afterlife or martyrs\u2019 heaven. Indeed, the spread of Islam, and Christianity, came through military conquest. Also, shared beliefs and rituals bond societies together, promoting solidarity, or perhaps promoting the dominance of kings and priests.<\/p>\n

Recall the idea that natural selection promotes niceness. But there\u2019s a basis for nastiness too. The result is a balance, and it\u2019s this balance that has shifted in recent centuries. So why would niceness evolve? Because natural selection favors individuals who take risks to help close relatives; even at risk to oneself, because doing so still passes on the individual\u2019s genes. In small tribes or villages, this would tend toward everyone, since everyone could be in the same extended family. The flip side is: be hostile to everyone not in your tribe. Another behavior is reciprocal altruism: be nice to someone if they are nice back to you. This exchange of favors is the basis for all trade, and thus our global civilization, with its complexity in which each person performs only a specific role, and goods are exchanged among all of them.<\/p>\n

12, Taking courage from science<\/p>\n

Darwin\u2019s explanation of natural selection was a prime example of how when we didn\u2019t understand something, we assumed God must have done it, until someone figured out a natural explanation. Some discoveries seem to controvert common sense. But this has happened over and over. There are some examples\u2026<\/p>\n