Richard Dawkins and E.O.Wilson Against the Possibility of the Truth of Religion
The proposal that Darwinism can eliminate
the need for theology has been advanced in particular in the writings of:
Richard Dawkins, the ‘selfish gene’ theorist
and first Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford
Edward O. Wilson, Professor of Entomology at
Harvard and one of the founders of sociobiology - the science of explaining the
behaviour of complex organisms in terms of their genetic make-up.
also by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the
structure of DNA, who has more recently worked in the field of neurophysiology.
These thinkers have in common a rejection
of the possibility that religious propositions about creation could have any
validity. They see ideas of God as no more than phenomena in the history of
human evolution (see also the science of
sociobiology critiques the truth-claims of religion and religion as
evolutionary phenomenon.)
Science is an aspect of Western culture
which has been very successful in giving certain groups of human beings power
over their environment. This gives credibility to attempts by scientific
thinkers to reduce religion itself to a phenomenon for examination
within the discipline of their science. (These attempts receive much more
attention than theological examinations of the bases of scientific
exploration.)
At the most polemical end is Dawkins,
developing his idea of a ‘meme’, a complex of ideas evolving within a human
culture:
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how
it arose in the meme pool. Probably it arose many times by independent
‘mutation’...Why does it have such a high survival value?...What is it about
the idea of a god that gives it stability and penetrance in the cultural
environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from
its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to
deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in
this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a
cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none
the less effective for being imaginary.
Any possibility that human ideas of God
might reflect in however partial a way the existence of such a being is
discounted. So also Wilson:
...we have come to the crucial stage in the
history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the
natural sciences...sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by
the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material
structure of the human brain.
If this interpretation is correct, the final
decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to
explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material
phenomenon.
Compare this with the much more measured and
less polemical approach of Willem B Drees:
Theologians ... have to take into account
that religious beliefs and interpretations arose in various historical and
pre-historical circumstances. That such beliefs arose in certain circumstances does
not imply that they must be wrong (emphasis ours), but their historical
contingency in relation to human history and human nature raises the question
of why we would consider particular beliefs of an earlier epoch as serious
candidates for truth or as existentially relevant insights, worth reformulating
in our time. Translating theological convictions into new terms by finding new
models and metaphors is, in my opinion, inadequate if questions concerning the
evolved, historical character of human religious traditions are passed by.
humans and their cultures, languages,
aesthetic and moral codes, and their religious practices can be seen as results
of a natural evolutionary process...The actual history of morality and
religions and their actual functioning in the web of genes, mind and culture
are very complex, and therefore not clear. The complexities of culture and mind
should not be glossed over in short-cuts from genes to human behaviour and
social institutions.
It is a good exercise to look at the three passages
quoted above, and to examine the presuppositions of the writers. How do they
compare with your own presuppositions about religious belief? Is humanity
‘alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe,’ or at home in it?
Dawkins and Wilson both types of genetic reductionism - they both see a wide range of
behaviour in humans and other higher organisms as directly attributable to the
functioning of genes, and hence a manifestation of Darwinian selection. (Though
Dawkins at least admits a higher level of selection, the unit of cultural
inheritance or ‘meme.’ Furthermore he admits the possibility that genes will
cease to be the important level of evolutionary selection in humans.)
Click here for an examination of
reductionism.
Click here to go straight to further
analysis of the approach of Dawkins and Wilson under the heading
cross-explanatory reductionism.
Email
link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr.
Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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