Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press).
Earlier this year Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote a column called ‘Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins’, suggesting the eminent evolutionary biologist is too rude, too confrontational, and too simplistic in his argument against religion.
His TV series, aired around the same time, was provocatively entitled ‘The Root of All Evil?’ More damningly, in my view, at the time of the 2004 tsunami he smugly berated those who sought comfort in the face of catastrophe in religion. Fellow-scientist Michael Ruse has publicly criticised Dawkins along the same lines. He’s been called, in this context and others, a ‘fundamentalist’, as dogmatic about the truthfulness of science, and Darwinism in particular, as the creationists are about God.
The God Delusion is his long-awaited book-length polemic against, well, God – religion in most of its forms – and defence of his ‘passionate’, as he puts it, atheism. It details every conceivable argument for why there is ‘almost certainly’ no God (especially in the sense of a Being worth praying to, but also of a ‘prime mover’ who created the universe and then retired to more lofty endeavours than human affairs). But Dawkins’ targets also include the scientific advocates of ‘NOMA’, the non-overlapping magisteria associated with the late Stephen Jay Gould, according to which it is religion’s job to deal the ‘rocks of ages’, and science with the ‘ages of rocks’, an approach he dismisses as ‘supine’. Like it or not, the inescapable conclusion of modern science is atheism, and scientists who try to avoid this are doing science an injustice. ‘Moderate’ religion isn’t much more than the petrie dish, so to speak, for extremism.
I haven’t always been Dawkins’ biggest fan. (Some years ago I wrote for Workers Liberty a summary of the scientific debates in which he has been central, coming down against Dawkins; to my surprise, he responded, roasting me alive.) But The God Delusion is a splendid book.
It may be that tactically, Ruse and others are right, and Dawkins is too uncompromising. But everything he says here needs to be said by somebody. Dawkins is utterly scathing about arguments for God, about theology as a subject (he disputes it is one), and about the Bible in particular. He rejects the very notion that religious views are any more deserving of ‘respect’ than any others, and proceeds to attack, and mock, the Bible (and the Koran, but less so – because he knows less about it, not for any other reason).
I think it is a mark of something about the contemporary world that much of the tone of Dawkins’ critique of religion would have been commonplace thirty, or even a hundred and fifty years ago, yet now the forthrightness with which he denounces the Biblical God seems slightly shocking. Secularists have given too much ground to the God Squad.
“Do these people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest idea what is actually written in it?” Dawkins asks. “The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing your parents; committing adultery... homosexuality... You also get executed, of course, for working on the Sabbath...” (p248). He recounts a story from Numbers 15, in which a man is ordered by God to be stoned to death. “Did this harmless gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him? Did he whimper with fear as the stones first flew, and scream with pain as the fusillade crashed into his head? What shocks me about these stories is not that they happened. They probably didn’t. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh – and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster... on the rest of us.” He goes on to describe the massacres joyfully undertaken by the Israelites in the name of their God.
Dawkins addresses three main areas. First, that ‘God’ is a weak explanation for the mysteries of the universe, and an obstacle to actually thinking about them. This is part of the objection to so-called ‘intelligent design’ theory: it looks for God in the ‘gaps’ in our existing knowledge (in so far as the gaps it identifies are genuine). But even if you prove something else doesn’t account for a fact, it is lazy thinking to conclude that the explanation is therefore supernatural. Religion is the enemy of independent thought, because it looks instead to ‘sacred texts’.
He shows that it is absurd to conclude either that belief in God is a reliable guide for morality (as the quotation above demonstrates), or that without God there is no basis for morality. On the contrary, that modern believers in the Bible would reject, say, stoning someone to death for adultery, shows that their moral compass comes from somewhere else.
And he is greatly concerned to advocate secular education. Drawing on the success of feminism in making us uncomfortable with phrases like ‘Mankind’, and so on, Dawkins wants us all to wince at the notion of a ‘Catholic child’ or a ‘Muslim child’. There are only the ‘children of Catholic parents’: ‘Sikh child’ is as meaningless as ‘Republican child’, or ‘Marxist child’. It’s worked with me, anyway.
In this area, as in others (the Iraq war, for instance), Dawkins is a trenchant critic of the Blair government. He recounts in detail what he calls the ‘educational scandal’ of Emmanuel College in Gateshead – a city academy which teaches creationism. He quotes at length from a lecture by the school’s science teacher, Stephen Layfield (taken down from the internet after Dawkins himself exposed it). Layfield urges teachers to “note every occasion when an evolutionary/old earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor, and courteously point out the fallability of the statement. Wherever possible, we must give the (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data...” (quoted pp 335-6). As Dawkins concludes, the school’s students “were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds.” Emmanuel College received full backing from the government.
Dawkins does sometimes miss the point, and I will mention here just one. He challenges the argument that belief can have benefits even if the belief is wrong. But his challenge is too narrowly intellectual. He rejects what he calls the ‘argument from beauty’: that the existence of God is proven by the existence of great art, for example, because how else could there be such beauty in the universe. But the objection to Dawkins’ ‘passion’ is not only on does-God-exist grounds. It is to do with the actual, in-fact, positive role religion (as opposed to God) has played in the production of art. Indeed, in the book he pretty much puts this down to the needs of getting paid. Well, it could be that Bach just wrote church music to get paid, I suppose. But John Coltrane? All Gospel singers? I am not suggesting that religion is necessary for art; but Dawkins’ view of religion as a relentless source of evil is overstated. It is not that the need for consolation or inspiration prove the need for God, but that people’s religious motivations might - sometimes - be a source for good as well as bad in the world.
But he is right to be terrified by the growth of fundamentalist religion, not only in the ‘Muslim world’, but also in America. He quotes scary statistics about the fundamentalist Christian beliefs of many Americans, and outlines the influence of right wing Christian bigots (who think, for instance, that it is reasonable to kill a doctor to protect the life of an ‘unborn child’) – an influence which goes right up to the White House.
The God Delusion is immensely readable. I hope believers read it. If it’s too disrespectful and upsets them, well, good.
Clive Bradley
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
But,
Last year I started to go through the Bible and note all the inconsistencies, the contradictions, the repetitions of the same story in different settings where the authors had forgotten they'd already told it once, the examples of hypocrisy, of the kind of examples of cruelty etc. Dawkins mentions. I gave up after a while because there are just so many that you could spend most of your life on it.
Any intelligent person knows its all nonsense. The only sensible approach is to base your conclusions on a scientific, materialist method and religion undermines such an approach and is inconsistent with it. As Dawkins said recently being interviewed by Paxman about his book he cannot see how any scientist can genuinely hold religious beliefs.
But as we have discussed before those of us that base ourselves on science do have a problem. The latest scientific analysis leads us to the conclusion that the Universe was indeed designed, that the requirements for the cosmological constant are so improbable that it could not simply be a matter of chance. Indeed, other such requirements for our Universe to function such as the coefficents for the force of gravity etc. mean that the chances of all these things simply being by chance of the right order of magnitude are even less remote. The fact that the human brain is just big enough to be able to achieve self-consciousness, yet could not be bigger and achieve its curent optimal performance adds to that. Even in terms of the conditions for life, whilst the more we know means that life is capable of existing in more harsh condiions than we previously thought this is counterbalanced by other factors. For instance, were it not for the Earth's magnetism the atmosphere would be blown away by the solar wind as it has been on Mars and other planets. The same magnetism, together with the atmosphere give protection against cosmic radiation that would kill us all. Were it not for the effect of the Moon the Earth would wobble in its orbit, and our weather would vary so greatly that although life might exist the chances of it developing into intelligent life would be considerably reduced.
Now some of these can be got round by simply referring to the vast expanse of the Universe, the fact that a sufficiently large number of planets will inevitably mean the right conditions on some of them. The problem with the cosmological constant cannot be dealt with in that way. Yes, the solution to that has been suggested by Martin Reece, the Astronomer Royal, who puts forward the idea of a multiverse, but as you have said previously, Clive, to accept the idea of a Multiverse without any evidecne that such a multiverse exists is to make the same leap of faith to adopt the same unscientific method as a belief in God requires.
Arthur Bough
Multiverses
Dawkins has quite a good discussion of the 'anthropic principle' arguments, posing it, more or less, as: since this *is* the universe we live in, or we would not be having this discussion at all, it is a meaningless question. But then he goes on to the multiverse theory. I agree with you Arthur, it seems rather unconvincing - for our universe to be possible simply by chance, there must be an infinity of other universes, whose existence we are only postulating theoretically.
Dawkins' other way through this, which has more legs, is a bit narrower in focus. Okay, maybe the big bang and the cosmological constants and what have you imply some kind of design. But who designed the designer? As a *scientific* argument, 'there was a designer' is a non-starter, because it simply begs more questions (or rather, it begs the same question again).
In any case, the deist argument - God got the universe going and then who knows what happened to Him? - is not really what most people mean when they say they believe in God, including the advocates of 'intelligent design', who propose an argument, in effect, for a deist God in order to smuggle a theist one (the one you pray to) by the back door.
There is another possibility altogether, which seems to be outside the scope of Dawkins' scientific references, which is that the theory of the Big Bang is wrong. A couple of interesting accounts from this angle are 'The Big Bang Never Happened', by Eric Lerner, and 'Marxism and Science' or whatever it's called by Ted Grant and Alan Woods (?). They both draw on the theories of Johannes Alfven, a plasma physicist, who apparently argued that the laws of the universe are explainable by plasma physics without reference to singularities, etc.
I couldn't possibly comment. (Except to say that Lerner at least is for sure far too dismissive of orthodox cosmology, claiming that none of it is based on evidence at all, which - I read the book some years ago when I knew less about this - is just plain libellous).
I Agree
I agree you have to be careful with this stuff, because of the obvious link that would be made between well if the Universe was designed that must be God then. There seem to me to be several explanations all of which we cannot establish given our current state of knowledge - and maybe never will. None of them imply belief in a religion, and certainly not acceptance of the nonsense in any religious book.
The first obvious answer is that the current mathematical models of the Universe are simply wrong. Given the complexity of these models that is probably the most likely explanation. Secondly, they are not wrong, but simply incomplete, because we lack the empirical data required. For example, scientists postulate dark matter, dark energy etc. but really have no proof it exists or how much of it there is, and the idea of dark matter and energy are fairly recent concepts anyway, what other such concepts might develop?
Thirdly, a more "religious" or spiritual answer could be that the Universe is actually an organism for want of a better term that it is a "collective consciousness", and so the organisation etc. is not designed into it from something outside it. To link with Sean's post below there is an element of that within Yoga - not the little bloke of Star Wars. Yogic teaching sets out that everything is a part of the whole, and attempting to return to it on a conscious level, dissolving into it. Its described as follows:
"The dew is on the lotus!- rise Great Sun!
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave,
Om mani padme hom, the Sunrise comes!
The dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea."
Bahgavad Ghita Book VIII
Fourthly, Reece could be right about the multiverse, but we can't prove it, though recent theories also seem to suggest that Universes pop into existences like bubbles out of existing Universes, but that still seems to require at least one Universe to begin with. The idea of multiple Universes always seems to fit to me with the idea of Quantum theory which suggests to me that every time a probability occurs a new reality must arise for every variant.
Fifthly, the Universe might actually be one big computer simulation, and that simulation might have been created in a "Universe" where the rules are completely different where the restrictions of the cosmological constant etc. do not apply. The more I look at the nature of matter the more I am attracted to this idea. Matter appears to be continually having to be recreated. It doesn't exist in the past or future and the present does not exist because no sooner does it arise than it is the past - though it is possible that at some level time might not move in one direction, but moves backwards and forwards. This is very much like the way computer simulations work where the landscape etc. are continually being recreated by vector graphics. There is another link with Sean here and Yoga.
In Yoga the real self is considered to exist outside both the body and the mind. This is often thought to be like the idea of the soul, but in fact it is quite different. The student of Yoga when asked "What did you do today?" does not say "I walked down the street", but I watched myself walk down the street." Its like the idea of soemone playing a computer game watching their persona in the game undertake various actions.
I am interested in the ideas you mention about plasma physics, but the only thing that occurs to me is that even if that explains the shape of the universe, we know that singularities exist, we know that gravity exists - though some would offer alternative arguments to explain it - and the mathematics of that still require the cosmological constant. In other words the plasma physics themselves are governed by the same physical laws.
Arthur Bough
Plasma
Apparently - this is way outside my knowledge (I dropped physics before O level) - the point to plasma physics is that it answers some questions begged by Einsteinian cosmology without reference to anything which is not in fact observed in a lab. (For instance, the patterns of how galaxies are organised, the way they bunch together and what have you, are exactly replicated by plasma gasses in a lab). There's also something to do with the fact that gravity is a very weak force, the role of which in the Einsteinian universe is problematic (its the centrepiece of general relativity, and it seems odd that such a weak force could govern the laws of the universe). There. That's about as much as I can say.
Lerner has an interesting discussion, I seem to remember, about the fact that scientists from different disciplines hardly communicate with each other - their conferences, journals, etc are very, very separated. Consequently, all this stuff about plasma - which I think is more practical than a lot of cosmological discussion - is just simply not known in the astrophysics world.
There's also some interesting stuff about scientists' obsession with maths. (I do have maths O level. But only just). Lerner - I think following Alfven - describes it as basically Platonic: that is, many modern scientists think that if an equation is 'beautiful' it necessarily expresses something true - as if the material universe were, in the first place, a mathematical Ideal.
But one of the things which impresses me, as a mathematical illiterate, about people who really understand maths, is the way they talk about equations as actually describing something - like, they look at the equation and they can see something which people like me just can't see. I feel untold envy at this ability. (I've tried to teach myself maths as an adult, but I always quickly get lost after long division).
Philosophically, this area is fascinating. Does maths actually describe the material universe, or is that an illusion caused by our evolved ways of thinking? Maybe our minds aren't actually *capable* of grasping the laws of the universe, etc. Clearly, though, these questions are pretty unanswerable. You do the best you can. If you don't get the maths, you do the best you can, too.
Interesting
I was always interested in science, but we had something like 4 different science teachers in the two years before I took Physics 'O' level, and most of us didn't even recognise most of the questions because I think we'd been entered for the wrong paper.
I think I have seen something about the plasma theory reproducing galaxies etc., and I am pretty sure that plasma "contradicts" some physical laws in the way it behaves. The problem I have with it is that as an alternative to the Big Bang there is some pretty heavy duty evidence to back up the Big Bang. For example, we have now detected the background microwave radiation that was set off when it happened. Now whether you can combine the idea of the Big Bang then producing a load of plasma out of which the Universe forms I don't know. I posted a link to someone that has written a book questioning many of these basic postulates including the existence of gravity previously, and he does seem to raise some interesting questions - such as where does the power source for gravity come from? Why does it not as every other force does lose strength as the power source is drained?
I agree about maths. Orthodox economics is a good example. The marginalist model is a beautiful model of how martginal utility, marginal cost etc all come together, but of course its got nothing to do, or very little to do, with reality. I also had the same experience with equations. I had always studied Economics in terms of supply and demand graphs, Keynesian aggregate demand diagrams etc. so when I started University and was presented with all these formulae and calculus I wondered what the bloody hell was going on. They had to run some remedial maths classes for a load of us that had never even seen differential calculus before. I just managed to get 'O' level maths at school because I got 100% on the arithmetic paper, which made up for pretty abysmal scores on the Algebra and geometry papers. Algebra was weird because I went from doing presentations in front of the whole class to overnight just losing the ability to see it. My eldest son who is an autistic savant has always been able to see mathematical things in his head. Fortunately, his autism is not severe - he has Asperghers - and like a bloke I saw on the TV a while ago he is able to describe what goes on in his head. When he was about 5 or 6 he used to do things which most people didn't udnerstand, but I understood what he was doing straight away. He would say Tuesday plus Tuesday is Thursday, or Tuesday plus June is August. He was simply assigning numbers to the days or months adding them together and then reconverting them to days or motnhs. If you tell him your birthday and birth year he will tell you straight away without fail what day of the week you were born on.
He does a similar thing of picturing things with remembering stuff. At about the same age he could tell you any car just by the sound of the engine, and he knew everything in the Highway Code. I tested him once and asked him to tell me what such and such a word was on a particular page in a book, and he got it right every time. He knows every flag in the world, the Capital City, main religion, population etc. He knows every US President and Vice President, their wives and families, birth dates and so on.
I think probably that everyone has these kinds of abilities, but its a matter of if they are turned on or not.
Arthur Bough
Reason in Revolt
Below is a link to the book by Grant and Woods - "Reason in Revolt" setting out their arguments, which I found interesting if not altogether convincing.
Reason in Revolt
Arthur Bough
Another book
Another new book which covers similar ground to Dawkins, but is actually, I think, rather better, is "Living With Darwin" by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher is a philosopher of science, rather than a scientist (two of his earlier books, "Vaulting Ambition," about sociobiology, and "The Lives to Come," about genetics, are very good also). His argument is more subtle than Dawkins'. Pointing out that the scientific method is rarely just pure inductivism, he argues against Intelligent Design from a historical perspective: to reject evolution is also - working backwards, to reject geology, and - working forwards (this is my summary, not his) to reject molecular biology. Darwin's theory didn't pop out of nowhere, and the more you understand of the scientific background to it, the more convincing it is.
Kitcher 'gets' why people need religion in a way Dawkins really doesn't. So I recommend this, too.
Memes
Clive,
What is your take on memes, i.e. the genes that are suposed to result in humans engaging in group behaviour. Apparently, though it seems to be restricted to groups of around 250.
Arthur Bough
Memes
Memes aren't genes. They are supposed cultural units analagous to genes - ie, ideas. Hence, eg, Marxism was a meme which spread and then lost out through natural selection for other ideas. Seems like Hegelian pants to me.
See, eg, one of the chapters of 'Alas Poor Darwin' ed by Steven and Hilary Rose.
perhaps I have it confused
Clive, maybe I have it confused, perhaps its not memes, though I was sure that was it. There was a TV programme a while ago called I think "What Makes us Human". The presenter definitely argued that there was a gene that resulted in people conforming within groups, but that this only appeared to be true within groups of around 250, beyond that it began to break down. The argument was that this could be a cause of anti-social behaviour as groups and communities became to large. I will try to find the details of the programme.
Arthur Bough
EP
Sounds like Evolutionary Psychology. I'm sure nobody's found 'a gene' which makes us social. But there is a deduction, certainly common to EP, which says that we evolved to have the kind of social relationships our ancestors had in the savannah in the Upper Paleolithic.
Autism
Clive, I was looking up the programme "What Makes Us Human" which was on Channel 4, but the web info wasn't much help. It did remind me of the point that was being amde though.
The argument was put by looking at people suffering with Autism. One of the characteristics of Autism is an inability to put yourself in the place of someone else - I suppose empathy. So for example an autistic person would often not convey some information, because they would assume that because they knew this information the person they were relating to would also know it. They find it impossible to put themselves in that other person's shoes, to realise that they would not know this information. This is why often autistic people have problems with social relationships - people suffering with Asperghers for instance, that my son suffers with.
The fact that this part of the brain does not function in this way in people suffering with autism was if I udnerstand the argument correctly put forward to suggest that there must be some gene that turns htis function on in most people's brains, that is not conveyed in the people suffering from Autism, particularly as Autism is thought to be genetic rather than environmental.
But it is precisely this ability to put yourself in the place of others that allows co-operation to take place in a way that is way beyond what most other animals can achieve. Without the ability to realise that others need to recieve information that you have no co-operation can take place. And co-operation itself requires some commonality of goals.
Arthur Bough
Oh
Oh I see. That makes sense.
That something is genetic, though, doesn't necessarily mean a) that they know which gene it is which affects this behaviour; b) that there is only one such gene; c) that possession of this gene alone would be enough to determine the behaviour, or lack of it the opposite; d) that the gene is 'switched on' independently of environmental (by which I don't just mean social, but developmental-but-not-genetic) factors; e) that in fact the gene(s) is/aren't 'for' something else, so to speak, and a particular behaviour is a by-product.
But I agree with your last paragraph completely. It's not just the fact of human co-operation, but the nature of it. And it's not just about receiving info, right? - it's about empathy, the (consequent?) capacity for morality, and so on.
Yes I Think So
Clive, yes I think that what you say here is correct. The other day, I was reading something from the Libertarian website I post to sometimes along similar lines, though as you'd expect they have a different take on it.
"The answer comes to us from science...or at least scientific speculation. The human brain evolved over millions of years in circumstances very different from those today. People lived and worked in small groups,
probably no larger than a few dozen...maybe 50...maybe 150. They learned to communicate and to cooperate...in order to survive. Those who failed to master the techniques died out...eliminating the defective, uncooperative genes of the species from gene pool.
In times of famine, for example, a group would be much more likely to survive if it followed certain rules for the preservation of food. A certain amount of group planning and group thinking was necessary, too, to
organize group movements and projects, conservation of resources, rituals, taboos and so forth. In short, there were times and conditions when it probably helped for them all to come to believe the same thing at the same time. And these beliefs...were probably not only useful, but well founded in direct experience.
This is, of course, just guesswork...but we've heard worse. Groups of people needed to be able to co-operate in order to hunt effectively. Primitive hunters had no telescopic sights on their rifles. They had no rifles. They had to work together, often in relays, to run down, approach, surround and bring down large beasts. And when they were attacked - either by animals, other humans, or perhaps even other near-human species - they
had to work together to defend themselves. We can imagine that the threats were many and the comforts were few. We can also imagine where our high regard for military valor came from. A tribe whose men-folk did not rush to its defense - even at the price of their lives - was probably soon exterminated. It made sense, too - from an evolutionary biology point of view - for a man to fight to the death to defend his own tribe. The group was related by blood. Its children carried his genes.
But the attitudes and genetic conditioning that made him ready and able to work with a small group on a local scale turned him into a dunce when the
numbers grew larger and the distances increased. Today, he can still use tools...drive a car...organize a family vacation...do a decent job. He can still cooperate with others at work. And he is still a member of many smallish collective undertakings - his work team, his church, his clubs, his family.
But put a newspaper in his hands and he goes a little soft in the head. The skills that worked in a small group are worthless in a large one. He is too far from the facts to form a decent judgment. Nor can he really
tell if his leaders know what they are talking about; he's never been in the same room with them. He is ready to cooperate...even ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the group...but all his instincts and good intentions only mislead him and turn him into a chump."
Bill Bonner Daily Reckoning 15th December 2005
In other words collectivism is fine in small groups, but can't work for a modern society as a whoole, which of course is what you'd expect a Libertarian to say. At the same time I don't think we can just dismiss it like, that, because we certainly can witness that this type of mass behaviour does occur whether it is in Stock Market Manias and Bubbles like the South Sea Bubble or the Tech Bubble of 2000, and so on, or the various moral panics say over paedophilia that cause this kind of mass behaviour.
As I said the Channel 4 Programme spojke about experiments showing that the optimum group size was less than 150, and from memory I seem to recall seeing some research done by architects to the effect that small housing developments of that kind of size tend to be optimum for engendering co-operation and reducing anti-social behaviour. I suppose our argument back to the Libertarians is that we do not propose mass decision making, but decision making precisley by small groups, discussing those things they do know about directly.
Arthur Bough
Dunces
Yeah, I think like much stuff in this vein it has an interesting insight but extrapolates tendentiously.
Obviously it is true that we evolved as an animal to live in groups of a certain size, and our brains evolved accordingly. It may be there are certain things which we are bad at as a result. But nevertheless the human brain has been able to do innumerable things which were not available to it in the Upper Paleolithic, which suggests there is something about it which is pretty adaptable. Human beings have been forming social groups much bigger than that since at least 11,000 years ago. The globalised world in which we live, the technology, etc etc (and the newspapers) were made by *us*. To argue there is something inherently alien about the world we have made for ourselves seems to me to entail a fantastically primitive theory of the evolution of the brain/mind. For one thing.
It is true, all the same, that our brains can only cope with certain things: there seems to be a limit to how many people we get to know really well, for instance. (Our capacity to recognise faces on the other hands is remarkably enormous for the theory in question). We do seem to prefer small groups for certain types of activity. We often like to relax in relatively unpopulated places (though even that not always: look at nightclubs).
bagavad gita says that
bagavad gita says that religion and science ultimately lead to the same conclusion - maybe the Hindus have got it right
Where
Sean, where does the Bhagavad Ghita say that? I would be surprised because it was written thousands of years before the beginning of science.
Arthur Bough
not sure
as i recall (dimly) its near to the beginning where Krishna explains the benfits of bhakti yoga (duty) to his disciple and king, Arjuna. He says there are many routes to the god including meditation, renouncment, puja, mathematics and philosophy but bhakti yoga, performing ones duties as if it was actually for god, is the best and quickest because it would lead to the minimum number of reincarnations.
I'm sorry i can't quote chapter and verse but it is over seven years since i read it while backpacking in India. I got a copy for R100 from a Hari Krishna on a train. It was a very long version with endless explanations of the text from the top Hari Krishna guru.
Certain bits have stuck in my head but, like i say, quoting chapter and verse is beyond me. I don't really want to go into it and dig out the exact passage because uni is starting back now so I have enough of that sort of thing on my plate
I Don't Think Its Science
Sean,
I don't think the reference can have been to science, but I'll try to find out. The ancients certainly had mathematics and philosophy, but scienvce is really only something that emerges asa result of the Enlightenment, and rationalist thinking. In China for instance most of the discoveries such as gun poweder were based on Confucianism not science. But hey let's not knock it they came up with some pretty amazing stuff thousands of years before Western science rediscovered it. The Chinese knew thousands of years before Galileo that the Earth wasn't flat, they had detailed maps including one of Antarctica before it was frozen.
I started studying Yoga when I was 14. I bought a book Yoga, by Eernest Wood. Wood was born in 1883 - an auspices year if you beleive in reincarnation - in Manchester, and gained Firsts in Physics, Chemistry, and Geology. The book is interesting in that he relates some of the Yoga practice and belief to science, whether that science be Physics, Anatomy or Psychology. Some of the accounts of feats I find a bit hard to beleive, but Wood says he saw them.
And having studied Kung Fu for 17 years or so I have seen some pretty amazing things too that if I hadn't seen it I wouldn't have believed. I'm not suggesting anything supernatural, but emphasising Wood's point that our science has a long way to go just to actually properly explain many things that happen let alone explain the Universe.
Arthur Bough
My original post was
My original post was something of a paraphrase, a modern reading of ancient text. Mathematics and philosophy are forerunners of modern science, they were in effect the science of the day. Thinking back, I may have taken my interpretation from the Hare Krishna guru's explanation and if that is the case it may be that the interpretation is designed to persuade people to join the Hare Krishnas. However, I would still be quite surprised to be proved wrong on this because it is such a strong memory
I Wasn't Disagreeing
Sean, I don't think you are wrong. I was just being picky about the word science. The fact that they used Mathematics and Philosophy is one thing science is another.
Arthur Bough
???
Are not maths and philosophy apart of science? Philosopy gives us the questions and maths is what we partially measure the truth by.
Martina, I agree.
Martina, I agree. Certainly there could be no science without philosophy and maths.
Is modern 'enlightenment' science the be all and end all of science? For example, does yoga qualify as science? What about the 'science' the enabled ancient man to set up stone henge?
I think mankind used science prior to Bacon's 'New Atlantis'.
What is science?
What is science? Understanding, gathering knowledge, discovering the "truth". The druids found truth in the consistancey of the sun and moons orbits (not the sun but you know what I mean) and thier regular patterns. Stone henge is the evidence they understood that pretty well, yet although I know about equinox's and eclipses I know nothing of there gods, or advancements made attributed to thier existance. The event of the truth cannot be changed but the belief of why can. Over the years their religion changed dramatically (going by the fact most do and this was an old one) but the sun continued to rise at a constant. Yoga I imagine is the same, the fundementals which allow the amazing feets don't change just our perception of why
Not Really
At the expense of re-opening another debate about language, no I don't think that mathematics and philosophy are the same things as science. Philosophy certainly is not the same thing as science, as Engels makes clear in "The Philosophy of Nature". Marx certainly beleived science and philosophy were two different things. Perhaps the easiest refutation on that score is just to think of Idealist Philosophy which was the dominant strand prior to the revolution which science brought about which laid the foundations for the triumph of materialist philosophy. Science is based upon an analysis of the material world based on Reason. Idealist philosophy denies the existence of a material world to be analysed in the first place! A considerable amount of idealist philosophy was indistinguishable from theology, and therefore the very anithesis of science.
With mathematics its not so easy to make that argument. However, mathematics is based upon empiricism. We use a decimal base rather than an octal binary or hexadecimal base for no other reason than we have ten fingers on which to count. Most of the rest of mathematics at a fundamental level is based upon similar representation of the material world in which Man exists and the need to manipulate the date he is confronted with. To count it, add it together, subtract it etc. At this level Mathematics requires little in the way of rational thought merely ana cceptance of certain rules, just as religion requires only aceptance of its rules. You do not need to know why 2 plus 2 equals 4 just that whenever your hen lays 2 eggs, and your second hen also lays 2 eggs the total number of eggs equals 4. All of this can be derived empirically.
In order to derive higher level mathematics it is true that higher thought processes are required, including a much higher level of abstraction. Mathematics certainly provides the basis for rationalist thought, but it is restricted to just one small though important area of man's intellectual activity. It cannot, therefore be the same thing as science taken as being an analysis of all of man's environment, including the social environment on the basis of reasoned argument, and the testing of hypotheses. Mathematicians such as Descartes were, therefore, extremely important in being amongst the first to take their mathematical discipline and use it as the basis for rationalist thought, but for that very reason they are the creators of science,a nd science is the product of that rationalist approach.
Does Yoga qualify as science? Absolutely not. The fundamental philosophical basis of Yoga is obscurantist, just as many of the Chinese discoveries were obscurantist based upon Confucianism. Over thousands of years even non rational methods of thinking can come up with important discoveries. Gunpowder was actually discovered not as part of a scientific experiment to get a better bang if you' pardon the phrase, but as part of an attempt to create an elixir of life!!!! Now you can similarly point to the fact that penicillin was discovered by freak accident, post it notes were developed because the 3M scientist that developed them didn't get his actual task right, which was to develop a new super glue! But the fact that accidents continue to occur now has nothing to do with the fact that modern society uses science rather than obscurantist philosophy, or alchemy it just means that accidents continue to happen, and some accients have beneficial results.
Before science Man largely had to rely on the outcomes of such experiments being fortuitous because they really had little idea what the outcome would be because they didn't use scientific principles, nowadays that is reversed. Generally speaking we have a good idea what the outcome should be because we use science to predict what it should be, and instead have to worry about uninteded consequences that despite science we did not predict.
Arthur Bough
all very fair points Arthur
BUT.... In the context or my reading of the ghita, I'll stick with my interpretation. However, that doesn't mean that I think science and religion lead to the same thing i.e. god, just that i think the ghita effectively says that.
Also, Didn't Socrates teach that maths is basis of philosophy and wasn't Francis Bacon, who is said to be the father of modern science, a philosopher?
Fine
Sean, that's okay as I said I think that the spirit of what you said was correct, but not the letter. I am not sure that the Gita actually talks about God as westerners understand the term. The whole point of Yoga is that everything is an aspect of God i.e. God is not some separate entity. The whole point of Nirvana is the achievement of that state of oneness the conscious connection to everything else in the Universe. The whole point of Buddhists for instance in not harming other creatures is not that the locust could be your Grandfather reincranated, but that you are the locust because both you and the locust form part of the totality. Hurt the locust and you hurt yourself. This is the root of the teachings of Christianity about turning the other cheek etc. which almost certainly are derived from Buddhism - they certainly contradict all previous Judaism which speaks of an eye for an eye etc. - and gives support to the idea that Jesus Christ went to Kashmir for religious training as a child.
Science actually does lead to a similar conclusion - we are all stardust. And if string theory is correct then the Universe is one huge orchestra all playing in harmony.
Socratic thought is actually though quite recent. Systems of thought existed in China and other parts of Asia long before. These systems of thought were quite clearly philosophical, but not necessarily based on mathemetics. Often they were based on observation of nature. Chinese thought quite clearly develops in that way. Kung Fu and Confucius derive from the same root. Confucius was a "Wise man" whereas a Kung Fu master was someone that had wisdom. They had to udnerstand much more than fighting, they understood medicine etc., which is why many came from the Buddhist monasteries. Kung Fu itself developed as a result of an Indian Buddhist Monk Bhodadharma going to China. He found the monks so unfit that he had to put them through a series of exercises - probably based on Yoga - in order to raise them to the level of fitness required for the tasks they had to perform, and the requirements of meditation. A look at Yoga exercises shows the link with the natural world the different asanas are all developed from animal postures, or aspects of nature, and likewise much of Kung Fu has developed as different systems based on the movements of different types of animals.
Developing systems of thought based on a study of the natural world like that does not require mathematics.
Bacon was a philosopher. However, to put this in philosophical terms of syllogistic logic. All dogs are animals, but not all animals are dogs.
Arthur Bough
"Modern reading of ancient text"
That was the Pope's excuse, wasn't it, Sean?!
lol
fair point
I don't think there is a meaning
In life atleast. Say one day humanity does find a meaning, what a bitch for those people that died before its discovery not knowing what it was. With our "perfect" universe, who knows, infinite time can create infinite possibilities. It's right because it was right to create you to question whether its right at that moment in time. If it wasn't right you wouldn't be questioning whether it was right.
Personally I don't think you can ever overstate the evilness of religon, if any good does comes from it, then its not being a religon at that time.
I think the way in which
I think the way in which Dawkins dismisses religious people is pretty bigoted.
All of his opinions are received wisdom and capitalist idelogy - he isn't so clever or independant minded himself.
*All* of his opinions are
*All* of his opinions are 'received wisdom' and 'capitalist ideology'? The 'received wisdom' is mainstream modern science, and while I agree there are elements in some of this which are *shaped by* capitalist ideology, it - science - isn't simply a set of ideological fictions which serve the ruling class.
And I don't think it's fair to say Dawkins 'dismisses religious people'.