Is Religion the Root of All Evil?

This is the title of an article by Richard Dawkins in the Belfast Telegraph. The Professor doesn’t specifically consider the title question until the end. Early on he addresses the idea of religion as child abuse.

We concede that children’s minds are too undeveloped to categorize them in terms of a philosophical or political category. It would be absurd to label a six year old as a Marxist, a Socialist or an Anarchist, yet we have no problem categorizing them, and indoctrinating them, in terms of a religion. Dawkins considers this a form of child abuse.

However, he concedes that if religion is true, and necessary to save the child’s soul, then it wouldn’t be child abuse. He then uses this concession to launch an attack upon religious belief itself. “Despite the smug presumptuousness of that, I can almost sympathise, if you sincerely believe your religion is the absolute truth. Let me, then, be ambitious if not presumptuous, and try to shake your belief.”

Dawkins then engages in a lovely logical exercise that is elegant in its simplicity.

“Why do you believe in your God? Because he talks to you inside your head? Alas, the Yorkshire Ripper’s murders were ordered by the perceived voice of Jesus inside his head. The human brain is a consummate hallucinator, and hallucinations are a poor basis for real world beliefs.”

This is the old problem that you can’t always rely on your senses. Some researchers believe that what have been called divine or religious experiences can be traced to Temporal Lobe Epilepsy or other Temporal Lobe phenomena.

“Or perhaps you believe in God because life would be intolerable without him. That’s an even weaker argument. Lots of things are intolerable and it doesn’t make them untrue.”

This is the “Appeal to Consequences” fallacy that so many people arguing on the side of religion fall into. In a USA Today article discussing the evolution vs. creationism debate the daughter of Billy Graham, evangelist Anne Graham Lotz was quoted as saying “If you believe you have evolved, you say your life is an accident, maybe even a mistake. You have come from nowhere. You are going nowhere, and your life has no eternal purpose. You don’t belong to anyone and you have no accounting to give to anyone.”

Ms. Lotz is engaging in the same logical fallacy being pointed out by Professor Dawkins, “The Appeal to Consequences.”The fact that you may find the consequences unpleasant has nothing to do with the truth of an idea or situation. I’m sure the passengers on the Titanic didn’t want to believe that the ship was doomed because of the consequences to themselves, but the ship sank anyway. The possibility that accepting the evidence for evolution might destroy one’s faith in God may be a reason for denying evolution, but it doesn’t make evolution any less true.

“By far the favourite reason for believing in God is the argument from improbability. Eyes and skeletons, hearts and nerve cells are too improbable to have come about by chance.”

Here’s our old friend Intelligent Design in its original form as described by William Paley when he talked about his watchmaker.

“Man-made machines are improbable too, and designed by engineers for a purpose. Surely any fool can see that eyes and kidneys, wings and blood corpuscles must also be designed for a purpose, by a master Engineer?”

I think I first began to wonder about the whole Genesis position that God created man after I became an Engineer and started to realize that if God did create man, he didn’t do a very good job for a supposedly all powerful and all knowing being. Let’s face it, the design ain’t that great and wears out way too soon.

“Well, maybe any fool can see it, but let’s stop playing the fool and grow up. It is 146 years since Charles Darwin gave us what is arguably the cleverest idea ever to occur to a human mind. He demonstrated a beautiful, working process whereby natural forces, by gradual degrees and with no deliberate purpose, forge an elegant illusion of design, to almost limitless levels of complexity.”

Yeah, but end up with what is known as a “good enough” end product. Evolution doesn’t aim for perfection. As a matter of fact it doesn't aim at all; it's happy with something that manages to survive slightly better than the previous model. Like I said before, I think God would have done a much better job.

“Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it is a serious contender. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. But they are undermined by science and reason.”

I think it is clear that Dawkins is in what I call the Militant Secularist camp. I find three categories of secularists. The Co-operative Secularists who believe that religion and science can co-operate and compliment each other. The Independent Secularists who believe that religion and science can co-exist but as separate and independent domains and the Militant Secularists who believe that religion and science are in a death struggle and one must inevitably destroy the other.

Personally I tend to sit on the border between the Independent Secularists and the Militant Secularists. I’m inconsistent but recently, more often than not, I find myself sharing a campfire with Professor Dawkins.

Theists are spread out amongst camps with similar attitudes. The Catholic Church is clearing pushing an independent domains concept; there are a number of foundations and organizations that cling to the myth that co-operation is possible and the Religious Right is always ready for a knock down drag out kind of confrontation.

I don’t think this will be resolved in the near term. It may take several hundred years, but I suspect that if the human race is to flourish it must abandon religion and perhaps the concept of God also.