Why is Dawkins so hated?

Many believers have a special place of hatred in their hearts for Richard Dawkins (Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens may get squeezed in there too). I think part of the reason is that in his attempt to dismantle the truth claims of religion, Dawkins fails to recognize the many positive social benefits that religion provides.

Referring to the previous post, here is an example of where Dawkins misses this critical idea. A questioner in the discussion asks:

...another thing that the religions do is give comfort to people if they lose people in car accidents or to cancer and so on, and as far as I've experienced it, the scientific view cannot give people this kind of comfort...

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge

In his response, Dawkins does not acknowledge the fact that religions are very good at consoling people. He also misses the fact that there are two ways to console someone: one is to tell them false things about what has happened to a deceased loved one (they have ascended into heaven...). The other is to make the grieving person feel loved by their community, in other words to surround them with people who show that they care about the grieving person.

I've never read anything by Dawkins that I don't agree with. I think the God Delusion is a pretty water-tight case against all the truth claims of religion.

Where Dawkins misses the boat is in the fact that there are lots of other things that religions do besides offer an explanation for the natural world. They bring hundreds of people together every week; they foster creativity, art, music; they provide time for reflection and ethical introspection; they provide economic support networks for the needy. I could go on. The point is that all of these social benefits of religion are very real and very valuable. The fact that the truth claims it makes about the universe are unsupported by evidence does not diminish from all the good social benefits it provides to a community.

By ignoring these social benefits, Dawkins is able to write of religion as a whole as mistaken and malicious. I think he would have made a much stronger, and more persuasive argument if he had instead said, "The claims that religion makes about how the world works are unsubstantiated. But many religions foster community spirit and moral reflection, which are certainly positive contributions to society. But there is no reason why religions need to hold on to their antiquated dogma in order to continue supporting their social good works."

Of course, anytime you tell someone that the thing they believe in doesn't exist, you're going to ruffle some feathers.

The purpose of qualia

I just read the following transcript of a discussion between Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins on the question, "Is Science Killing the Soul?"

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge

It raises two important points, which I will address in separate posts.

First, I'd like to address the issue of qualia. Here is Pinker's response to one of the questions:

The part that remains a mystery [about consciousness] is why the purely subjective aspect of experience should exist at all. Some philosophers, such as Dan Dennett, argue that that isn't a scientific problem and may not even be a coherent question -- since, by definition, pure subjective experience has no observable consequences, we're wasting our time talking about it. I think that goes too far, but it is possible that the existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science. When cognitive neuroscience completes the story of how the brain works and predicts every last itch, every last nuance of color and sound in terms of the activity of the brain, one can still wonder why it feels like something to see and touch and taste. My own hunch is that this unsatisfied curiosity may itself be an artifact of how our brains work.

Qualia refers to this subjective experience--the feeling of pain, or sensation of the color red. So the question is why do I feel these things subjectively, rather than just behave like a robotic automoton. And to me the answer is: the only way to get a complicated thing to reliably and successfully navigate a complicated environment is to make it have subjective feelings. An organism with more computational power in its brain needs to have deeper, more visceral feelings in order to adapt to more varied environments and solve more complicated problems over a longer period of time. By contrast, an organism with very little computational power can successfully replicate under a very simple set of rules, e.g., grow roots downward, grow branches upward, turn leaves toward sunlight, etc. Let's say you build an organism as smart as a dog. Its brain is capable of navigating the animal through varied terrain, using its jaws to attack other animals, use its paws to dig holes, etc. How do you ensure that this rather smart brain does the right things in order to spread its genes? There is no simple rule-book that you can write down for it, like "take ten paces forward, bend head downward, extend tongue to drink". Life is too complicated--this organism must figure things out on the fly. But in order to get the organism to behave in evolutionarily successful ways, it has to enjoy fresh water, and dislike salt water, and enjoy sex, and dislike physical wounds.

Let me borrow on Dennett's idea of the zombie, which is a person who does all of the things that a normal person would do but has no subjective experience. If I remember correctly, I think that Dennett's argument is that even if we were all zombies, we should still treat each other the same way. I guess I would say that zombies simply don't exist. That is, there is no way to make an evolutionarily successful organism as complex and intelligent as a person without giving that organism subjective feelings. Otherwise, they would forget to eat. They would forget to have sex. They would forget to take their hand out of the fire. Their genes would die off rather quickly.

I think this is an important lesson for artificial intelligence. To get an individual to adapt to complex surroundings, it needs to have desires. The way to create those desires is with neural nets.