Dawkins' allied comparison of belief in God to a computer virus again suits his world-view because 'virus' conveys an unfavourable image. Growing up in the universe The use of an educational series on science as a vehicle for promoting the view that science forced one into atheism was improper and is a view with which many scientists disagree. No indication was given that an opposite view could rationally be held - which amounts to propaganda. Blame for children retaining 'superstitious' ideas about God was laid upon schools and parents:.
In Dawkins' writings there appear to be some discrepancies between the reasoning and assertions which are made in one place and those which appear in others:. Dawkins constantly assumes that, since material objects have beginnings, God would also have had to have had an origin and asks 'who designed the divine creator? Living objects But it's terribly, terribly tempting to use the word designed But I've told you that they are not designed and coined the special word 'designoid' But in an almost throw-away comment in the second of his Christmas Lectures he appears to undermine his position.
He refers to a German designer who 'designs windmills and he claims that he designs his windmills by a kind of natural selection'. Natural selection, It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.
If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. Natural selection is like artificial selection, except that, instead of humans doing the choosing, nature does the choosing Natural selection, nature , is constantly choosing which individuals shall live, which individuals shall breed [CL 2] [emphasis mine].
So am I really trying to persuade you that a blind, unconscious process, evolution, can build animal optics that rival human technology? But chance with natural selection, chance smeared out into innumerable tiny steps over aeons of time is powerful enough to manufacture miracles like dinosaurs and ourselves This is a misleading way to talk.
Dawkins' selfish gene is also misleading, as it seems to oscillate between being treated as a metaphor and not being so treated. In one place he refers to 'The metaphor of the intelligent gene' [EP, p15], but in another place he responds to criticism of the term 'selfish' by saying:. When biologists talk about 'selfishness' or 'altruism' we We define altruism and selfishness in purely behaviouristic ways But despite the disclaimer, the phrase 'selfish gene' is metaphorical since 'a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them'.
Dawkins depicts faith as simply reflecting the 'will to believe'. So he dismisses certain Creationists' claims that the Paluxy River 'footprints' show humans and dinosaurs were around at the same time, claiming they saw it because they wanted to see it. They believed it because it fitted with their world-view.
They were blind to the truth that was staring them in the face. But this a bad reason for rejecting anyone's views, as it tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of what they believe. One can both want to believe something and it can be true. The grounds for rejecting this particular claim since withdrawn are provided by geological and other evidence, not by whether anyone wished to believe it or not.
When I am moved to tears as I can be by the slow movement of a Schubert quartet, it is not in any sense to demean that experience, to say that there is nothing going on other than activity in my neurones. I don't really see how they could not interrelate. I am very suspicious - we keep coming back to this - of uses of words like 'spirit', which I'm happy to use as long as it doesn't suggest anything supernatural or ghostly.
To say that something is explicable in terms of the brain, in terms of interactions between neurons, it really is vitally important to understand that that is not to reduce it. It is actually a far more wonderful explanation than just to say 'Oh it's the human spirit'. And the human spirit explains nothing, you've said precisely nothing when you say it's the human spirit. We haven't begun to celebrate what goes on in our heads and what goes on in the world, in the universe.
These are so much grander, so much more wildly exciting than whatever you can convey by a really rather trite phrase like 'the human spirit', that I just find there's no comparison.
Well I have said that. I believe in the survival of the fittest as an explanation for the evolution of life, but there have been people who have advocated the survival of the fittest as a kind of political creed, where they will justify a form of right-wing politics or economics on the grounds that it conforms to the laws of nature.
And that I do object to, as indeed so does any other modern Darwinian. We don't want to see Darwinism being used to justify things like fascism, which it has been. Well, only in humans. Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.
But it's not over. Darwinism is still THE explanation for the existence of all life, including ourselves, even if just at this moment, we're not indulging in Darwinism or at least indulging it in a rather unusual way. Not sure. I mean if it were true, the way it would come to be true is that we don't die young any more, or it's rather difficult to. That means that most people who want to reproduce do.
Whereas in the past, the people who reproduced would be those who made it. And so natural selection was a winnowing process - some survived, some didn't. The ones that survived reproduced and passed on the genes that made them survive. If we live in a welfare state where everybody survives, then there's not the same sense in which genes that make you survive are the ones that get passed on. Any old genes can get passed on, if the welfare state keeps you alive.
That would be the point of view that somebody who said that Darwinism had come to an end in humans, somebody who said that - that's what they would say. I'm not sure that I'm going to say that, but that Well, I think there may be more subtle processes of selection going on.
Clearly not everybody does reproduce. Some people reproduce a lot more than others. If there is any genetic component to the variants in reproductive success - the word 'success' is a neutral word, a Darwinian word, it doesn't mean that I approve of it - if there is, if you divide those people who have lots of children from those people who have none and then you ask the question 'Is there any statistical tendency for this lot to have a different set of genes statistically from that lot?
Of course it may be that that particular selection pressure is so short lived in historical time, that it doesn't lead to any interesting evolution - that's what I believe. I mean there could be a selection going on for example, in favour of incompetence in using contraceptives. If there is a genetic component to incompetence in using contraceptives, then for sure there'll be a slight Darwinian selection pressure in favour of it.
I don't really believe that, but that gives you the idea of the kind of thing that might be going on. Yes, that's an interesting point. My prejudice is that those things are even worse than religion. As for whether you're right that they signify a vacuum that needs to be filled, I'm not sure about that. I suppose the human mind is complicated, it has all sorts of desires and things that satisfy it.
If there are people who seem to need either religion or astrology and crystal gazing to satisfy them, I would like to have a go at giving them an alternative, and just to see whether perhaps it might work better as a satisfying agent.
And that would be understanding of the real world, and understanding of why you exist, where you come from, what the world is, what it's all about.
I think that is such a satisfying thing to have in your head, that I find it very hard to believe that anybody would prefer astrology, crystal gazing, or religion. And so my suspicion is perhaps there is a vacuum that needs to be filled, and it may be that scientific rationalism just hasn't got its act together enough to fill that vacuum, and if it did, it would fill it.
I'm not sure. Humanism means different things to different people. What is proposed for the national curriculum is I think not just humanism but also atheism was mentioned, and people wondered about how you can teach a negative. I don't have a problem, and I think that a non-theistic understanding of the universe and of life, that's not a religion, but it could very well be taught alongside other religions - which I'm sure will go on being taught - as something deeply satisfying.
The exclusivity that he dimly senses lies not in the nature of "nature" but in the insistence that there is only one kind of truth, only one way to acquire reliable knowledge, and that is via evidence. The sections on agnosticism give a fuller picture of Dawkins's over-inflated brand of atheism. He notes that there is a spectrum between agnosticism and atheism, and is rightly dissatisfied with those who adopt "agnosticism in principle" as a permanent position that silences debate on the topic of God.
He senses that what matters is the strength of the evidence for and against the existence of God. The proper next step would be to tackle the question of what evidence would be needed to establish a conclusion.
Which claims are ordinary plausible in the absence of detailed evidence and which are extraordinary requiring strong evidence to support them? Dawkins comes close to these essential points in his discussion of "Russell's teapot", a classic example of a highly implausible claim that there is a teapot floating out in space between Earth and Mars which therefore would require clear evidence to justify believing in it, and of which it is reasonable to be skeptical in the absence of relevant evidence.
Unfortunately, Dawkins lurches off in less productive directions. Instead of following though with a demonstration that belief in God is an extraordinary empirical claim that would require extraordinary evidence to give it any plausibility, he characterizes the existence of God as a scientific claim p48 , to be answered in terms of probability.
This over-specificity raises another set of tangential questions. What is the difference between a scientific question and an ordinary empirical question? How exactly are numerical probabilities going to be derived from the evidence at hand? What Dawkins has overlooked is the true point of Russell's teapot. It is not science that makes us disbelieve in the existence of the teapot.
It is the inherent implausibility extraordinariness of the hypothesis combined with a lack of evidence scientific or otherwise. With a loud fanfare, Dawkins announces his knockout argument that there is "almost certainly no God". This is the title of Chapter 4. Unfortunately, what he actually presents is a set of refutations of the theist Argument from Design.
These refutations do indeed show that the appearance of design does not imply the existence of a designer. However on their own they certainly don't imply the absence of a designer. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. Their two dogs, small fluffy creatures called Cuba a havanese , and Tycho a coton de Tulear named after a 16th-century Danish astronomer , have the air of pets who run the joint.
As a child, he preferred to read books while his nature-loving parents John and Jean were out spotting birds and plants. Jean, aged 98, lives on the family farm in Chipping Norton, outside Oxford, where Dawkins visits her weekly. Even then, surrounded by nature at its most vivid, Dawkins remained uninspired.
He remembers, as a young child, being taken in a safari car to watch a pride of lions gnawing at a carcass. While the rest of the group stared in fascination, he stayed on the floor playing with his toy cars.
He does, however, know every class and order of the animal kingdom, a product of the classical zoological education he received as an undergraduate at Oxford. If he has trouble sleeping, he mentally scrolls through the alphabet and assigns mammals to letters.
As a postgraduate, Dawkins excelled at the early stages of the research process, mulling theoretical questions and coming up with hypotheses. But he lacked patience with the laborious hours of data collection or methodical lab work.
On a recent spring afternoon, sitting in his back garden, he explained the evolution of social insects by imitating an ant whose sole function was to guard the entrance hole to a giant bamboo stick in which the ant colony lived.
The ant had an elongated head that it used like a door to block the hole and prevent the entrance of intruders. Dawkins hunched in his chair and stuck his head forward, then jerked it back, blocking and unblocking the hole. The performance was strangely captivating, but the ant was simply a means to explain the social behaviour of insects. He would regularly stay up all night writing code on the sole computer in the zoology department, an Elliot — at the time a relatively compact machine, now the kind of elaborate object kept for historical interest by the Science Museum.
The language of technology was ubiquitous in The Selfish Gene. To its critics, the book was an assault on human values: it seemed to suggest, in that stark title alone, that we existed simply to pass on our individual genes and cared nothing for each other, the common good, community. To Dawkins, this was a basic misreading of his argument. In his next book, The Extended Phenotype , which he regards as his most significant contribution to science, Dawkins explained that he wrote The Selfish Gene while on sabbatical, after returning, high on ideas, from a conference on artificial intelligence.
Dawkins has never lost his affection for technology. He is an Apple devotee, and an early adopter; he owns the 47th Tesla electric car to be sold in Britain. In his spare time, he plays the EWI , an electronic musical instrument similar to a clarinet.
It had originally been written in Pascal, an obsolete programming language. A few years ago, Dawkins put a plea on his website for help updating it. Canon was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian household, shed his faith, and later became a dedicated Dawkins fan.
Sitting at the computer in his study, Dawkins gave a demonstration of Blind Watchmaker. First, he clicked on the monochrome image of a tree in the centre of his screen and a handful of slightly different trees appeared — its offspring.
He then clicked on one of these surrounding trees and the screen refreshed so that the chosen tree was now central and in turn encircled by a new generation. The first time Dawkins tested his creation back in the s he saw, after numerous selections, images of entirely new creatures emerge, apparently distant from the original tree and yet its logical descendants: spiders, fish, a fox. He was the breeder; the process, by artificial selection, was evolution.
Even now, playing a game he invented 30 years ago, Dawkins became excitable as he unleashed generation after generation, click after click. Most days he cycles in for lunch at New College, where he has been a fellow since He has no duties in college, and stopped teaching in when he became the first Charles Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science, but he likes to maintain the connection. In conversation, Dawkins is most comfortable in the mode of an Oxbridge tutorial — as a professor conducting an in-depth discussion with a student.
His own students still remember the experience very clearly. In all his books, logic has been both subject and mode of thought.
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