A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion from an evolutionary point of view.

by eloi

Odd book for an evolutionary biologist to write. For in rejecting the adaptive function of religious belief, Dawkins also rejects the significance of adaptation, which consists in the selection of any behavior, however irrational it may seem, that enhances either individual or group survival.

The God Delusion is not remarkable for its arguments, but for the fact that these arguments are made by the man who wrote, 30 years ago, the much more entertaining The Selfish Gene. In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to perform the remarkable feat of distancing himself from all the implications of his earlier work, while still trying to hold on to his credentials as an evolutionist.

Dawkins does state in his chapter entitled The Roots of Religion that “[u]niversal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.” But then he goes on to say that “It is hard to believe...that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence.”

As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins should be aware that guilt is an emotion that serves an adaptive purpose. As with other unpleasant emotions, such as shame and fear, it enables individuals to survive and prosper. It is an emotion that can be experienced equally intensely by a Roman Catholic as by an Oxford don. Why does Dawkins ignore such a fundamental truth about the evolutionary importance of unpleasant emotions?

Dawkins also mentions in passing the idea of group selection, referring to David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin’s Cathedral, as “the American group-selection apostle.” Dawkins states that he is not a supporter of group selection, adding: “Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution.” He gives no reason for his rejection of the evolutionary significance of group selection, but his reason is easy enough to deduce: acceptance of group selection would give credibility to D. S. Wilson’s arguments for religion as a group evolutionary strategy, and so would invalidate the thesis of The God Delusion from an evolutionary point of view.

But in any case, Dawkins cannot dismiss religion altogether, if he wants to keep any shred of his credentials as an evolutionary biologist, so he attempts to explain religion as “a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.” Dawkins’ theory concerns children, and their need to believe what grown-ups tell them in order to survive. He implies that this belief is transferred onto a belief in a supernatural God. Unfortunately for Dawkins, this kind of theory is more appropriate to the social sciences in general and to the Frankfurt School’s The Authoritarian Personality in particular than to evolutionary biology.

Dawkins is especially upset by the Bible, and argues that it encourages “a system of morals which any civilized modern person...would find...obnoxious.” One of the Biblical horror stories he relates is that of Joshua:

“The ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody fruition in the book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so....Good old Joshua didn’t rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old...with the edge of the sword.’”

Yet Dawkins wrote in TheSelfish Gene, in the chapter titled “Aggression,” that “members of the same species, being very similar to each other, being machines for preserving genes in the same kind of place, with the same kind of way of life, are particularly direct competitors for all the resources necessary for life.”

That’s an elegantly simple theory, and indeed is accepted by Darwinists: conflict between individuals and groups is normally a conflict over access to resources.

But we have a problem here. James Burnham, in his Suicide of the West, points out that liberalism, the ideology of the Secular State, “holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve the goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define ‘the good society.’...[W]hat liberalism notices as the evils of society—crime, delinquency, war... —are the results of ignorance and faulty social institutions or arrangements.”

The faulty social institution, for Dawkins, is religion, especially Christianity. But we can assume that in what evolutionary psychologists call the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness), and what the rest of us know as the Stone Age, there weren’t any copies of the Old Testament handy. Did their ignorance of the Old Testament make cave men especially peaceful? The archeological evidence suggests otherwise. Many Neanderthal skeletons show signs of stab wounds and blows to the head.

Dawkins does admit that “humanity’s powerful tendencies towards in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion.” But this statement undercuts his entire anti-religion argument, and is as good an example as any of Dawkins’ confusion and ultimate inability to reconcile Darwinism with the ideology of the Secular State.

In the section titled Faithand the Sanctity of Human life, Dawkins bemoans the anti-abortion sentiment that is the basis of opposition to embryonic stem cell experimentation. But let us return here to the selfish gene. No matter how selfish the gene is, and no matter how intent it is on replicating itself, it doesn’t have much of a chance to do so if women are destroying their unborn children.

Any society that encourages abortion while disparaging motherhood is on thin evolutionary ice. Dawkins, the promoter of the selfish gene, isn’t being very considerate of his star attraction. He even goes so far as to put the humanness of the selfish human gene into question. “The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet... [T]here are no natural borderlines in evolution.”

Dawkins concludes this section with the extraordinary statement (given the arguments in his book), that “it is surely very odd to think that a truth about the real world can be reversed by considerations of what would be morally desirable”! Very odd indeed.

Dawkins’ “group-selection apostle,” D. S. Wilson, in his Darwin’s Cathedral, does a very good job of explaining the adaptive value of religion. In his book, he makes the case for religion’s causing human groups to function as adaptive units. While admitting that some religious beliefs seem irrational to the modern mind,“[r]ationality,” he points out, “is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged.” I doubt that any bona-fide evolutionary biologist would take issue with this affirmation. Indeed, as Wilson notes, “factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors.”

Taking Calvinism as an example, Wilson writes that its “seemingly irrational features...seem gratifyingly functional from an evolutionary perspective. For all its otherworldliness, Calvinism caused its community of believers to behave adaptively in the real world, which is all that evolution can be expected to accomplish.”

And in a passage that Dawkins might take to heart, Wilson writes that “[t]hose who regard themselves as nonreligious often scorn otherworldliness as a form of mental weakness....This stance itself can be criticized for misconstruing and cheapening a set of issues that deserves our most serious attention as scientists and intellectuals.”

Ironically, Dawkins himself seems to confirm Wilson’s view that seemingly rational, non-adaptive behavior leads to extinction. “[E]ven if it were conclusively demonstrated,” writes Dawkins, “that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst—none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true.”

The implication here is that even if a belief system that seems rational to you leads you to despair and suicide, it is still to be preferred over a belief system that might seem irrational but faith in which enables you to go on living. Scientific truth—or what passes for scientific truth in the age you live in—overrides all other concerns, even that of survival! Hardly a likely strategy for a bearer ofselfish genes.

The ironic thing about Dawkins’ preaching is that in the end, the society that values non-adaptive rationality over adaptiveness will succumb to others that value adaptiveness over rationality. And so the atheistic society that holds as sacred what it considers to be scientific truth will eventually disappear, replaced by a society made up of those “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads” whom Dawkins finds so repugnant.

No one can be a true Darwinian and politically correct at the same time. And readers of The God Delusion cannot be faulted for wondering why they should be expected to believe in evolution and all its implications if such high-profile evolutionists like Dawkins don’t even seem to believe in it themselves.