Above is an NPR podcast, which I am referencing in the following rant about Richy Rich Dawkins.
Oh Richard Dawkins oh Rick-tiki-tiki Dawkins, you typical anglo-asshole alpha-male wannabe...
It’s just that it’s such a mundane argument. It’s the upper-middle-class white boy’s argument. It’s all he knows. It’s the only way he feels any purpose insinuating himself into the world. Intellectualism! Science! His argument is bullying at core, which is my problem with him. And while I realize that any dissenting opinion, especially that of a notorious iconoclast, can be interpreted as bullying, this one is just so old, cliché and boring to me.
Religion is boring? No! Absolutely not! Look below, and see how it’s my life’s work. You could say I’m as passionate about exposing the counter-human quality of the anti-religion sentiments of alpha-male characters masking their words under the all-consuming title of “science,” as Mr. Dawkins is about stamping out the “medieval, parochial and impotent” mindset of those who want or need religion to feel that their lives are the most meaningful. It’s not even that I disagree with the statements he makes. I simply hear this argument over and over and see two fanged animals duking it out over an unclaimed piece of carrion or a mate. Science vs. Religion. How trite.
He’s asked why people don’t become more moral as a species, but in response, he asks “If you look at the selfish gene view, the question is, ‘why are we as moral as we are?’” He expresses wonder at the capacity of humans to be altruistic in the face of natural selection. (20:00) As I see it, people are indeed both animals and humans. Like Dawkins describes in his proposal that humans and all species down to the most basic micro-organism share bits of the same “machine code,” we descend from the smallest primordial bacterium. However, we also make meaning. Around 15:40 he states explicitly that people make their own meaning. And yet he scoffs at Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project “smuggling God back in” when we have a perfectly poetic explanation of the Universe without Him (or Her or It).
Again, this says to me, that Dawkins, just like Billy Graham or Bin Laden, is obsessed with being the man (or woman, sure, just to be fair) with the one “true” answer or the awe-inspiring offerings of the “real world,” as he puts it. The world of data collection and organization, the structures by which he is trained as a biologist, as a philosopher, as a person are all a world he has created and which has created him. His “real world” is as real and as rich as that of the religious zealot. To call God “superfluous” or “redundant” when “Science” provides a perfectly poetic and “factual” explanation of the universe, just reveals his personality. What is any less poetic about the abstract thinker’s reasoning that God and Evolution exist beside and of eachother, than Dawkin’s concrete reasoning that “redundancy” is not beautiful. He hates inefficiency. It’s part of his psychological human disposition to dislike inefficiency or neat boxes, just like it is the psychological human predisposition to feel a discomfort with no life after death.
He admits to being a product of his culture, giving credence to the music and art of the Anglican Church. He is also a product of the culture of the scientific community, a no-nonsense, inefficiency untolerated environment of charts and grids – more boxes. People love boxes. Give people their god box to store in it their Einsteinian beliefs alongside their stained-glass windows and choirs.
It all comes back to the Darwinian animal need to be the alpha. Dawkins was right. What he’s wrong about is assuming that the humanity which gives us the capacity to make meaning through religion, art, family, science or whatever else we do with our lives is what’s going to win his argument. If his genes were so well-evolved he wouldn’t need to argue. He could chill out about the fact that religion is as beautiful and as uncertain and as ever-changing as science, or rather that they’re really both the same thing. To take a camp and fight the opposite camp is as futile as the human who hides the animal within himself, or perhaps more evident the animal who represses the humanity within himself. We can never be balanced without respecting both in all people. One man’s universe is only as "true" or "real" as the words he can define it with or the feelings he can impart on another man. The “evidence” (29:48) is as much in the tomes of biology as the Bible, but also as much in the feeling of genuflecting to God in a vast architectural structure as in the awe of looking through the lens of a microscope.
