Roger Scruton replies to Dawkins
| January 12, 2006 | Posted by William Dembski under Religion, Science |
THE SPECTATOR
Thursday 12 January 2006
Dawkins is wrong about God
Roger Scrutonhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=7185
Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own  the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell. The meme exploits its host in order to reproduce itself, spreading from brain to brain like meningitis, and killing off the competing powers of rational argument. Like genes and species, memes are Darwinian individuals, whose success or failure depends upon their ability to find the ecological niche that enables reproduction. Such is the nature of ‘gerin oil’, as Dawkins contemptuously describes religion.
This analogical extension of the theory of biological reproduction has a startling quality. It seems to explain the extraordinary survival power of nonsense, and the constant ‘sleep of reason’ that, in Goya’s engraving, ‘calls forth monsters’. Faced with a page of Derrida and knowing that this drivel is being read and reproduced in a thousand American campuses, I have often found myself tempted by the theory of the meme. The page in my hand is clearly the product of a diseased brain, and the disease is massively infectious: Derrida admitted as much when he referred to the ‘deconstructive virus’.
All the same, I am not entirely persuaded by this extension by analogy of genetics. The theory that ideas have a disposition to propagate themselves by appropriating energy from the brains that harbour them recalls Molière’s medical expert (Le Malade imaginaire) who explained the fact that opium induces sleep by referring to its virtus dormitiva (the ability to cause sleep). It only begins to look like an explanation when we read back into the alleged cause the distinguishing features of the effect, by imagining ideas as entities whose existence depends, as genes and species do, on reproduction.
Nevertheless, let us grant Dawkins his stab at a theory. We should still remember that not every dependent organism destroys its host. In addition to parasites there are symbionts and mutualists  invaders that either do not impede or positively amplify their host’s reproductive chances. And which is religion? Why has religion survived, if it has conferred no benefit on its adepts? And what happens to societies that have been vaccinated against the infection  Soviet society, for instance, or Nazi Germany  do they experience a gain in reproductive potential? Clearly, a lot more research is needed if we are to come down firmly on the side of mass vaccination rather than (my preferred option) lending support to the religion that seems most suited to temper our belligerent instincts, and which, in doing so, asks us to forgive those who trespass against us and humbly atone for our faults.
So there are bad memes and good memes. Consider mathematics. This propagates itself through human brains because it is true; people entirely without maths  who cannot count, subtract or multiply  don’t have children, for the simple reason that they make fatal mistakes before they get there. Maths is a real mutualist. Of course the same is not true of bad maths; but bad maths doesn’t survive, precisely because it destroys the brains in which it takes up residence.
Maybe religion is to this extent like maths: that its survival has something to do with its truth. Of course it is not the literal truth, nor the whole truth. Indeed, the truth of a religion lies less in what is revealed in its doctrines than in what is concealed in its mysteries. Religions do not reveal their meaning directly because they cannot do so; their meaning has to be earned by worship and prayer, and by a life of quiet obedience. Nevertheless truths that are hidden are still truths; and maybe we can be guided by them only if they are hidden, just as we are guided by the sun only if we do not look at it. The direct encounter with religious truth would be like Semele’s encounter with Zeus, a sudden conflagration.
To Dawkins that idea of a purely religious truth is hogwash. The mysteries of religion, he will say, exist in order to forbid all questioning, so giving religion the edge over science in the struggle for survival. In any case, why are there so many competitors among religions, if they are competing for the truth? Shouldn’t the false ones have fallen by the wayside, like refuted theories in science? And how does religion improve the human spirit, when it seems to authorise the crimes now committed each day by Islamists, and which are in turn no more than a shadow of the crimes that were spread across Europe by the Thirty Years War?
Those are big questions, not to be solved by a TV programme, so here in outline are my answers. Religions survive and flourish because they are a call to membership  they provide customs, beliefs and rituals that unite the generations in a shared way of life, and implant the seeds of mutual respect. Like every form of social life, they are inflamed at the edges, where they compete for territory with other faiths. To blame religion for the wars conducted in its name, however, is like blaming love for the Trojan war. All human motives, even the most noble, will feed the flames of conflict when subsumed by the ‘territorial imperative’  this too Darwin teaches us, and Dawkins surely must have noticed it. Take religion away, as the Nazis and the communists did, and you do nothing to suppress the pursuit of Lebensraum. You simply remove the principal source of mercy in the ordinary human heart and so make war pitiless; atheism found its proof at Stalingrad.
There is a tendency, fed by the sensationalism of television, to judge all human institutions by their behaviour in times of conflict. Religion, like patriotism, gets a bad press among those for whom war is the one human reality, the one occasion when the Other in all of us is noticeable. But the real test of a human institution is in peacetime. Peace is boring, quotidian, and also rotten television. But you can learn about it from books. Those nurtured in the Christian faith know that Christianity’s ability to maintain peace in the world around us reflects its gift of peace to the world within. In a Christian society there is no need for Asbos, and in the world after religion those Asbos will do no good  they are a last desperate attempt to save us from the effects of godlessness, and the attempt is doomed.
Muslims say similar things, and so do Jews. So who possesses the truth, and how would you know? Well, we don’t know, nor do we need to know. All faith depends on revelation, and the proof of the revelation is in the peace that it brings. Rational argument can get us just so far, in raising the monotheistic faiths above the muddled world of superstition. It can help us to understand the real difference between a faith that commands us to forgive our enemies, and one that commands us to slaughter them. But the leap of faith itself  this placing of your life at God’s service  is a leap over reason’s edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational. On the contrary, it is the heart’s submission to an ideal, and a bid for the love, peace and forgiveness that Dawkins too is seeking, since he, like the rest of us, was made in just that way.
45 Responses to Roger Scruton replies to Dawkins
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Dave,
I’m not sure what your position is. I thought you were arguing earlier that even atheists can have moral knowledge, something I agree with. For instance, when you took care of the abandoned puppies you said you did it because:
“I do it because it’s the right thing to do, God or no God.”
This sounds like you are saying that taking care of abandoned puppies is the right thing to do in some absolute sense. I got the same sense when you wrote:
“People can be good and they can be evil. There are good and evil theists. There are good and evil atheists.”
This sounds like you are attributing the objective qualities of “good” and “evil” to people. Did I misunderstand these statements? If “good” and “evil” are merely arbitrary subjective preferences, what does it mean to say that people can be both good and evil?
Dave T.
Woctor,
I see the existence of moral disagreement as evidence that moral knowledge can transcend mere arbitrary subjective preference. Disagreement is only possible in the light of a more fundamental agreement and only if the disagreement is at least potentially resolvable in terms of common understanding. People don’t argue about whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream tastes better because taste is a mere subjective preference. There is nothing to argue about.
But every sane person understands certain moral fundamentals: It is better, in general, to know the truth rather than lies; it is, better, in general, to be courageous rather than cowardly; it is better to be wise than foolish, etc. Much of life contains gray areas where the truly right thing to do is obscure; but because we understand certain moral fundamentals, we can argue about them and perhaps make a moral advance. But this moral argument wouldn’t even happen if people did not already share knowledge of moral fundamentals.
Cheers,
Dave T.
taciturnus
Many of my notions of right and wrong are absolutes as far as I’m concerned. Not everyone will agree with me and I can point to no higher authority to back my notions than partial consensus of other people.
Like I said before, if God carved the ten commandments on the face of the moon where everyone could see them and know no man could have put them there then it would be a lot less open to skepticism than the legend of Moses on Mount Sinai.
The authors of the Declaration of Independence come as close to absolutes as I can agree with
My emphasis on the qualifier.
How is Dawkin’s idea different from demonic possession? And they call us superstitious!
taciturnus wrote:
“Disagreement is only possible in the light of a more fundamental agreement and only if the disagreement is at least potentially resolvable in terms of common understanding…”
The only “more fundamental agreement” necessary to make disagreement possible is shared language: You communicate your view to me, I compare it to my own and find that it differs, therefore we disagree. The disagreement stands whether or not it is potentially resolvable.
taciturnus continued:
“But every sane person understands certain moral fundamentals: It is better, in general, to know the truth rather than lies; it is, better, in general, to be courageous rather than cowardly; it is better to be wise than foolish, etc.
These things are better because they tend to promote our survival, and are therefore valuable in a Darwinian sense. Morality is one of the adaptations that gets our genes into future generations. You’d expect basic commonality between humans on “moral fundamentals” for this reason. You’d also expect people to take their morality very seriously, even considering it “absolute”, because, after all, it often *feels* absolute and instinctive to them.
Had we been a species which depended less on fighting or hunting, and more on hiding for survival, you can imagine that courage might have been considered a foolish vice rather than a virtue. In confronting enemies you risk injury or death, and you potentially reveal the location of others who are hiding with you.
On the deeply ingrained nature of morality, consider the research of Jonathan Haidt. He has coined the phrase “moral dumbfounding” to describe actions which many people instinctively consider to be morally wrong, though they cannot explain why. Wiping a toilet with the national flag is one example. Having sex with your sibling is another (assuming that you’ve both been sterilized, so there is no chance of an unwanted pregnancy).
Gay marriage is a prominent example these days.
Haidt puts it beautifully:
“So I think that with morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy, but that’s true about money; that’s true about music; that’s true about most of the things that we care about.”
Woctor,
Religious people are often accused of believing in fairy tales, but I’m afraid your account of the origin of morality is itself a fairy tale, what Stephen Jay Gould called a “just-so” story. There is no evidence that moral notions evolved for the reasons you state.
But more interesting in your response is that you’ve deployed what I call the “Intellectual Doomsday Machine.” You’ve tried to undermine what many of us think of as fundamental moral intuition by arguing that it was implanted in us by evolution and therefore without rational foundation. But this is true of EVERY fundamental intuition we have – moral, scientific, mathematical and otherwise. All rational thought is based on fundamental, self-evident insights that cannot themselves be justified, because they are the terms in which everything else is justified. They *feel* true to us.
And if the fundamental moral insights that form the foundation of ethics are undermined by evolution, why not the fundamental insights that form the foundation of math, science, and rational thought in general? It is just as easy for me to make up a “just-so” story about how evolution implanted mathematical notions in our head as it is for you to make up one about ethics. If evolution undermines thought, then it undermines all thought, not merely the thought of ethicists. The evolutionary “Doomsday Machine” blows up your thought as well as mine.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Dave,
I understand your view of morality as consensus. But I’m still puzzled about statements like this:
“I do it because it’s the right thing to do, God or no God. Right and wrong don’t flow from scriptures. Right flows from the hearts of good people and wrong flows from the hearts of bad people.”
If morality is merely consensus, then what does it mean to describe people as having good and bad hearts? This sounds like you are describing a moral quality of their being.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Morality, in humans, often defies survial and reproduction. Most people would agree it’s better to wait till your married to have sex, and to be with one person in marriage and stay with that person. That’s the moral thing to do. That’s hardly an effecient way to spread genes. Rampant sex parties, which are considered immoral would be a much better idea for survival, spreading more genes, etc. It’s considered immoral, yet people do it- people do things that are immoral all the time, and they often don’t care.
Running into a house to save a kitten when you’re allergic to kittens is an idiotic thing to do when it comes to your own survival- there are many examples like this that defy the logic of ‘this and this helped us survive.’ Giving your life for a stranger or a kitten would never be an adaptation for survival. It makes no sense.
As you quoted:
If morality has no objective foundation, nor does ANYTHING that we find imporant, we should live that way. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into imaginary ideas…so, with that in mind, we should remove all governments and all laws tomorrow and start living like the creatures we are- imaginary ethics and morals and all other sorts of disasters.
If nothing truly has any objective foundation- then there’s absolutely no reason for me to even listen to the quote above…because it’s ultimately based on nothing but an irrational opinion in a world without meaning. Without some objective foundations for thought- how could we do anything? Science itself would be a meaningless and pointless endeavor.
Also- I know of NO ONE who truly believes the above. I’ve never met anyone in my life who refuses to judge morality. If they truly believed morality was some adaptation, they’d never call another person a liar, they’d never complain about rudeness, they’d never get upset at someone who cuts in front of them in line, they’d never allow themselves to show any emotions, if all is based on meaningless adaptations built to fool us into thinking these things are genuine, objective, etc.
That’s the problem with this worldview- NO ONE could ever possibly follow it fully. They will make the claim like the quote above, then they’ll turn around and make an absolute objective statement about a moral or ethical issue.
Science is not a belief system, but a method and a body of knowledge. Dawkins’ materialistic belief system is nothing but a superstitious relation to science.
taciturnus,
There is a large and growing body of evidence for the thesis that morals have an evolutionary basis. Perhaps we can take up the topic later, but it is not essential for making my immediate points, so I’ll leave it for now.
The “Intellectual Doomsday Machine” you invoke is as much a problem for you as it is for me. We both come into this world depending on our minds to make sense of things. We don’t know for sure that we can depend on our basic reasoning machinery. Positing a soul or some other transcendent basis for cognition doesn’t help, because we have no reason a priori to assume that a soul is inherently reliable cognitively. And besides, we have no reason to posit a soul, because any reasoning we use to arrive at the necessity for a soul is itself suspect.
Rather than giving up or thrashing about randomly, we both assume that we can at least trust our basic perceptions, logic, and reasoning. As we accumulate knowledge and build up a model of the world we’re in, our confidence grows, because things make sense. The model we’ve built up helps us make accurate predictions about the world, so we come to trust our reasoning and the model itself. We become aware of our own cognitive limitations and learn to double-check ourselves against ourselves and others.
You wrote:
“It is just as easy for me to make up a “just-so†story about how evolution implanted mathematical notions in our head as it is for you to make up one about ethics.”
I would reply that it’s at least as reasonable to assert that natural selection would produce human reason that’s basically (but not perfectly) reliable as to assert that human reason is reliable because God created it and chose to make it reliable. In both cases, faulty reasoning in areas germane to survival and reproduction would be penalized by natural selection. Ironically, the only “world” in which faulty reasoning would persist over time would be one where God created it and intervened to protect it from the penalties imposed by natural selection.
You asked DaveScot:
“If morality is merely consensus, then what does it mean to describe people as having good and bad hearts? This sounds like you are describing a moral quality of their being.”
Dave can certainly answer for himself, but my answer to that question is that we hold people to be good or bad to the extent that they conform to our morality, which is usually quite consonant with the consensus morality.
jboze3131 wrote:
“Running into a house to save a kitten when you’re allergic to kittens is an idiotic thing to do when it comes to your own survival- there are many examples like this that defy the logic of ‘this and this helped us survive.’ Giving your life for a stranger or a kitten would never be an adaptation for survival.”
jboze,
An adaptation does not have be helpful 100% of the time to be preserved in the population. Witness the sickle-cell anemia gene.
You continued:
“If they truly believed morality was some adaptation, they’d never call another person a liar, they’d never complain about rudeness, they’d never get upset at someone who cuts in front of them in line, they’d never allow themselves to show any emotions, if all is based on meaningless adaptations built to fool us into thinking these things are genuine, objective, etc.”
If someone lies to me, is rude to me, or cuts in front of me, my life is worse. My wouldn’t I complain? “Truly believing” that morality is an adaptation does not mean that all of these behaviors suddenly become acceptable to me.
Woctor,
I haven’t argued for the existence of the soul or anything else. My argument is against anyone who thinks they can call the validity of reason into doubt (whether from religious or secular principles), then posit a theory that somehow overcomes that doubt is kidding himself. Once reason is called into doubt, that doubt can never be overcome because reason itself must be used to overcome it, the very thing in question.
JohnnyB did it from a religious perspective by casting the moral knowledge of atheists into doubt, then calling on God to overcome that doubt. You’ve done it from a secular perspective by using evolution to call into doubt fundamental moral intuitions, then calling on a “just-so” to explain moral intuition. I see you and JohnnyB as making the same mistake, which is to call into doubt our fundamental intuitions. Once you’ve done that there is no getting out.
You’ve stated my point exactly:
“Rather than giving up or thrashing about randomly, we both assume that we can at least trust our basic perceptions, logic, and reasoning.”
And basic moral knowledge is part of our basic perceptions. There are disputed cases and gray areas, of course, as there are in anything (even science), but there are fundamental moral axioms that every sane, healthy person knows. Every sane person knows that it is better to be a volunteer in a soup kitchen than an axe murderer, and they know it self-evidently. If we are going to doubt that intuition, and say that our preference for the volunteer over the axe murderer is merely a feeling implanted in us by evolution, then we need to ask ourselves the question: Do I feel more certain that 1+1=2 or that I shouldn’t be an axe murderer? If I can call into doubt the latter intuition, why not the former? In fact, it is silly to doubt either one. But if you are going to doubt one, then you need to explain why you don’t doubt both of them… I don’t doubt either one.
Cheers,
Dave T.
woctor,
you wrote:
“which is usually quite consonant with the consensus morality.”
Right. And, the consensus morality over the last 100 years or so (probably much less) has
now either totally validated, or permits at least on the discussion table, the following things:
-) euthanasia of older people and very young (based on “quality of life”(Peter I Singer; chair of ethics at Princeton) [and see practice in Netherlands, where it's gone past discussion to decriminalization]
-) bestiality (Peter Singer again)
-) loss of concept of “sanctity of life” within 35 years (based on economics and technology) (Peter Singer)
-) Homosexual marriage (even the Greeks who embraced such a culture never “validated” w/ a ceremony)
-) “love” relationships between adults and children (psych journals)
-) defence of “natural” disposition toward rape (psych journals)
-) defence of “natural” disposition toward infidelity (see article posted on this blog today)
(others can help me with this list if they like, these are just the things that have come into
my thoughts in 5 minutes)
so, what’s left? with the descision about “quality of life” being up to (who exactly?), which I’m sure will be eaten away at both ends of the spectrum,and in the middle as well (mental retardation, etc) it’s hard to come up with a list of things, including what used to be referred to as murder, that won’t soon be considered “the consensus morality”
I know this is just one of those falacious “slipery slope” arguments, but the majority of this stuff was not open to public discussion until quite recently, and much of it is currently coming to pass
So, those who subscribe to consensus morality, is this really what you’re “signing up to”?
It is interesting to note that many here seem to want to say that Hitler was atheist (therefore Dawkins is evil) or that Hitler was Christian (therefore Christians are evil) when actually the picture that emerges is that Hitler, although thinking it myth, wanted to maintain Christianity as an excellent way of maintaining social integrity (and control). This is surprisingly close to what Scruton is arguing (Scruton’s obvious playing with facts notwithstanding, e.g. Nazi Germany was unequivocally not atheist whatever its leaders may have thought, it is quite clear that Scruton if pushed would admit that God doesn’t really exist, well not really really).
Scruton likes to make things up that serve his organicist conservative agenda (c.f. The West and the Rest). The similarities between NeoCon, Scruton and Nazi ideology are considerable…