Neil Degrasse Tyson says “we’re prisoners of this genetic moulding” that leads human beings to find logical thinking difficult. Richard Dawkins concurs, suggesting that natural selection could have led to curiosity being maladaptive in a dangerous world. It is about the evolutionary origins of why people give priority to feeling over thinking, that survival and prudence produce risk aversion.

This leads to a discussion of how false religious beliefs should be assessed in the context of scientific knowledge. My concern is that Richard Dawkins has not adequately considered the extent to which religion is an adaptive response to evolutionary pressures.

Christianity arose as a way to bring different societies together in a context of mutual respect, by constructing myths, rituals and systems that enabled people from diverse backgrounds to cooperate. The context was that prior religion was specific to a national or tribal culture, whereas Christianity proposed a universal faith, able to move toward shared values of peace, love and truth.

The problem was that the rational intent within the construction of early Christianity was stripped away, because the irrational emotional drivers of human cooperation, relating to the instinctive drives discussed by Dawkins and Tyson, gained far stronger social traction. Popular response to Christian stories found literal miracles more interesting and accessible than the idea that miracle stories are allegory for natural processes. This relates directly to Dawkins’ lament that people prefer literature to logic. And literature can obtain cultural resonance when its message is illogical.

This means that the evolutionary process of canonisation of the New Testament systematically selected for ideas that would find popular support, as a primary selective pressure working on the construction of the texts. My view is that this resulted in the original authors deliberately cloaking rational ideas in an irrational story, with the hope that eventually the rational intent would be uncovered.

This hypothesis puts religion into an adaptive memetic evolutionary context, examining how ideas that are clearly false on the surface can conceal a deeper truth. If the New Testament authors were an elite enlightened group seeking to influence an ignorant mass culture, this process of embedding their intent in a stable, durable and fecund vehicle suitable for sustained social organisation could explain the evolution of the church. This is a way to see Christianity as ‘Platonism for the people’, as Nietzsche put it, by imagining Jesus Christ as a Platonic philosopher king as proposed in The Republic.

Harry Marks wrote:If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment...I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

--Viktor Frankl

You are pretty dark there sir. Drink some Pepsi. Just a Pepsi.

I've decided that I am not going to discuss this book in the context of religion vs science. This isn't a fiction discussion. It's sad to see some of that already present. This should have been a FACTS only Discussion IMO.

Anyway, I am not going along with hijacks. I want to discuss the main theme. Science writing and how enriching, entertaining, and inspiring it can be.

Who's with me?

Harry Marks wrote:If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment...I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

--Viktor Frankl

Frankl's comments here can be seen as an argument against scientism—an excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge. Fair enough. This was after all the era of eugenics. But the first paragraph is something of a strawman. And the fact that Frankl himself was a scientist and philosopher indicates to me that the Holocaust was a consequence of a multitude of factors, including nationalism, antisemetism, and economic hardships following WWI. I'd like to see the context in which this statement was made.

Mr. P wrote:I've decided that I am not going to discuss this book in the context of religion vs science. This isn't a fiction discussion. It's sad to see some of that already present. This should have been a FACTS only Discussion IMO.

Anyway, I am not going along with hijacks. I want to discuss the main theme. Science writing and how enriching, entertaining, and inspiring it can be.

Who's with me?

I see your point and we should try to steer clear of false dichotomies but I also think science and religion are sometimes incompatible. Certainly Dawkins thinks so! Likewise, some of Dawkins' ideas (and his tone) are often seen as controversial. But I think this is all good for a book discussion as long as we stay on topic as much as possible. I think this book will take us in many directions due to the diversity of its subject matter.

geo wrote:

Mr. P wrote:I've decided that I am not going to discuss this book in the context of religion vs science. This isn't a fiction discussion. It's sad to see some of that already present. This should have been a FACTS only Discussion IMO.

Anyway, I am not going along with hijacks. I want to discuss the main theme. Science writing and how enriching, entertaining, and inspiring it can be.

Who's with me?

I see your point and we should try to steer clear of false dichotomies but I also think science and religion are sometimes incompatible. Certainly Dawkins thinks so! Likewise, some of Dawkins' ideas (and his tone) are often seen as controversial. But I think this is all good for a book discussion as long as we stay on topic as much as possible. I think this book will take us in many directions due to the diversity of its subject matter.

I 100% agree that religion and science are not compatible. I also feel strongly that religion should be eradicated from our existence. But that's neither here nor there in my mind right now.

I just still find I am having the same exact discussions that I have had for decades. It's like I never left... Same folks same strokes. It's not constructive to me anymore to see the same old same old paragraph after paragraph with the same arguments that have been answered so many times.

It's irrelevant to me if someone does not get that not being religious does not equate with immorality, That a fact based approach to understanding the world is enriching and does not diminish a thing when it came to awe of and appreciation or existence. That just because so many believe in something does not make it right because it 'works' when it is based on myth. That's idiocy and ignorance, not revelation or knowledge.

I just prefer to discuss with like minded folks sometimes. I was hoping here to just discuss what we enjoy about this topic without having to defend or retort. I'm going to try that anyway. I will just add my thoughts. Not looking to derail any convo.

Mr. P wrote:I am not going to discuss this book in the context of religion vs science.

In that case you will need to ignore a lot of the book, since it is a major theme, at least in the Tyson interview, which is all I have read so far.

Mr. P wrote: This isn't a fiction discussion.

Not sure what you mean by that? Dawkins is trying to understand how human evolution made belief in fiction adaptive, so exploring that theme could be quite interesting.

Mr. P wrote: It's sad to see some of that already present.

The religion v science debate is actually central to Dawkins’ public profile, involving the problem of how popular compelling stories in religion can be fact free, and looking toward how scientific knowledge could be presented in an equally influential narrative form.

Mr. P wrote:This should have been a FACTS only Discussion IMO.

With Booktalk being a relatively small forum, having all comments in the public view is advantageous.

Mr. P wrote: Anyway, I am not going along with hijacks. I want to discuss the main theme. Science writing and how enriching, entertaining, and inspiring it can be. Who's with me?

It is laudable to see scientific literature as enriching, entertaining, and inspiring. Dawkins certainly achieves that goal to a limited audience (the scientifically literate) in his great books on evolutionary philosophy such as The Selfish Gene. Yet reaching broader popular audiences often requires that ideas be simplified and even distorted, in order to avoid prejudicial rejection. Considering how literature can teach scientific knowledge, achieving that balance between interest and elegance is a pretty tough challenge. It is important that where someone like Dawkins over-simplifies issues then this should be analysed and challenged.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Mr. P wrote:I am not going to discuss this book in the context of religion vs science.

In that case you will need to ignore a lot of the book, since it is a major theme, at least in the Tyson interview, which is all I have read so far.

So the whole book is about that, but you admittedly only read the first interview? Are we taking this on faith then?

Keats thought that Newton was destroying the poetry of the rainbow by explaining the spectrum. And the message of my book is that you don’t: that by destroying the mystery you increase the poetry, you don’t decrease it.

How could anyone feel that knowing how a rainbow manifests takes anything away from the beauty? I just cannot make myself comprehend that. It absolutely adds to it, unless you prefer answers that are not answers. That makes it better? More poetic? More... Real?

I have experienced wonder at what I have not known or understood, marveled at the mystery...but I have always then done my research. I have to know why and how. And after that learning, after gaining true understanding, or better understanding at the least, of the thing...I have mostly found myself truly AMAZED and more baffled and awed by the occurrence.

The Keats thing is a bit of a straw man anyway. What's so decisive about some stray remark this young poet made?

I haven't looked ahead in the book, but as Dawkins is a controversalist, I suspect we'll be commenting on controversial topics as we go through. An anthology of the best science writing would have a very different purpose, but that's not what RD wanted to do.