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.

I’m here because of Ashley

For me the most memorable moment of Barack’s most moving speech of the campaign, given last week at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was when he talked about a roundtable discussion in S. Carolina:

There is a young, 23-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She’s been working to organize a mostly African American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope – but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

I thought of this speech twice this weekend. Yesterday, halfway through my shift for 100,000 Calls for Obama (getting a lot of wrong numbers and answering machines), a grad student walked in, holding in his hand the blue flyer that I had posted on Rains doors two days before. He doesn’t live there, but his girlfriend does, and so he came out to join the cause. For the record, his name is Kenny, and he’s an immunology grad student.

Then today, I was supposed to go on a bike ride/hike with Rachelle, but the weather forecast didn’t look good so she suggested planting trees up at the dish. So we did. I planted the first tree of my life (a Douglass oak hybrid), right by a big rock near the dish. If anyone had asked why I was there, I would have had to say, “I’m here because of Rachelle.” While we were digging berms for the trees, a lady with a Russian accent walked by and asked if there would be more tree planting opportunities in the future. She made note of the email address and said she would be back sometime.

Social movements are about connections between people. Great leaders inspire those kinds of positive connections to occur. I think that is what makes Barack so special—that he ignites an energy in us that we didn’t know was there before. One tree won’t save the planet. But it’s a start.

Do not believe

Damon Linker, writing in the TNR, says that the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) are themselves intolerant:

"Yet the fact remains that the atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is a brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith, out to rack up conversions."

Yes, the New Atheists are proselytizing—they are trying to argue their case. In the sense that they are out to convert people to their point of view, then yes they are out for conversions. And yes, they are intolerant of faith, that is, the willingness to believe things without evidence. If faith merely resulted in silly beliefs with no other effect on society, we might be more tolerant of it, but in fact faith plays a major role in terrible tragedies, like 9/11, violence in the Middle East, and deadly riots over Muhammad cartoons.

Of course many people of faith do not engage in such moral atrocities, so there is an important distinction to be made between virulent and benign faith. Dennett, in particular, does a good job of distinguishing between the two. Dennett and Harris are less kind to religious moderates. In my view, we may be tolerant of virulent faith legally, but we should not tolerate it morally. As for benign faith, though I see no reason to believe in its claims, I don’t think it is so very harmful to society. So I don’t see such an urgent need to crusade against them. But I do think we ought to remember that virulent faith and benign faith share some things in common (i.e., the willingness to accept propositions without evidence) and we religious moderates owe it to themselves to remember this fact.

More importantly, what I think we ought to crusade for is the inclusive treatment of atheists in society (they are the single group, besides criminals, who are most discriminated against in seeking public office). Linker says:

"The United States remains a very religious nation. While there are small communities of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics in every state, and substantial ones in a few--Washington state leads the country with 25 percent of its residents claiming to worship no God; North Dakota comes in last with 3 percent--there aren't nearly enough unbelievers to leave a significant mark on the nation's culture or politics as a whole."

He exposes how poorly organized atheists are. Atheists are the second-largest “denomination” in America (after Catholicism), but have no effective unity. And there is only one openly atheist member of Congress (Pete Stark, from CA)—though surely many members of Congress are closet atheists. Certainly atheism needs a better PR campaign, but you have to give the New Atheists credit for bringing attention to the discrimination against their people.

Numb to the World

Dawkins coins a great term for why we so often take our lives for granted: “the Anaesthetic of Familiarity.” With monotony and repetition in our lives, we so quickly forget how incredible it is that we are alive. How vastly rare we are: lumps of matter that are awake rather than lifeless, which is what the vast majority of the universe is.

And how vastly improbable it is that we are here, given how many different ways our DNA could have been arranged. It’s probably the strongest case for enjoying every moment of life, for appreciating how extraordinary it is to be awake, and for fighting against the sedative of the routine.

Zeitgeist the movie

Turns out there is a movie named after my blog. I guess they thought my blog was so cool that they just had to make a movie about it. Now I'm not going to endorse this film, but you can judge for yourself:

http://zeitgeistmovie.com/

Truth unveiled?

Kausar Khan, a junior at Northeaster Illinois University has an article, "Veiled Feminism" in the winter 2007 issue of Current magazine (unfortunately, I don't think they have a website--we get copies of it on campus here at Stanford). She defends her decision to weir a veil, which she calls "a mark of a woman's honor, not her inferiority."

This is certainly not feminism, and it's not a case where I can stomach moral relativism. The practice of women wearing veils is one of the most oppressive customs widely endorsed around the world today. The fact is that for normal human interactions, whether social or professional, we depend on seeing a person's face--their entire face, in order to read their emotions. Without the capacity for others to see a woman's face, her status is demoted to the level of a second-class citizen. There is simply no way she can earn the same level of trust. So I don't see how we should stand for such misogyny.

I think most people in mainstream society would agree that the practice of wearing veils is oppressive to women--even if they willingly agree to the practice. The question is what to do about it. I don't think there is any legal justification for putting a restriction into law--I certainly think that free adults have the right to wear whatever they please. But we can speak out against the practice as something that we do not thing a justice-seeking society ought to endorse. We should stand up especially for children being pressured to wear a veil. Khan's younger sister is 14 and has already begun to wear a veil. Imposing backward beliefs on children is one of the most morally repugnant practices, and we should all stand against such oppression.