Richard Dawkins has a new book out, apparently mostly focused on debunking some of these myths we have about God. I’m sorry, but what a tragic waste of time and talent.
First of all, I should say that Dawkins is for me himself kind of a god. Can I say that?
His book, “The Selfish Gene” is on the short list of books I have read that have completely transformed my world view. Oh, I don’t know how short the list is, but I do know its kind of random, which in itself is probably revealing. Apropos nothing, a few other entries on it include an obscure set of reprints from Scientific American, called “Cosmology + 1”, Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols”, Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, Frazier’s “The Golden Bough”, Heinrich Zimmer’s “Philosophies of India”, an abridged version of the Mahabharata given to me by an old friend from Kashmir, and Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope.” And of course, old Number One, and in particular, The Psalms and The Book of Job. Yeah. That’s good stuff. Go off and read those, then get back to me, and we’ll talk.
What these books have in common is a kind of mind boggling disorientation. I mean they bring you to contemplate what might otherwise be commonplaces in a way that is so far from conventional wisdom that maybe even if you thought you understood their subjects before having read them, no matter what else you think afterward, you wind up with a new perspective in spite of yourself.
What really knocked me out when I read The Selfish Gene was the sense of the enormity of the time over which evolution has to work, and how fruitless it is to try to apply “common sense” to phenomena so far out of any context with which we have had any meaningful experience, that it sends the mind reeling.
In “The Blind Watchmaker” Dawkins addresses this point directly, in that one argument postulated against Darwinian evolution, even in its modern modified form, is that it defies reason to think that complex entities like ourselves “merely appeared” on the face of the earth, like a pocket watch spontaneously coming into existence on the Scottish moor.
It seems implausible to our tiny minds to imagine such a thing happening, yet our best evidence and most careful study lead us to believe something quite like that. Except there is nothing ‘spontaneous’ about it. Some of us now think we have evolved from blobs of complex molecules having certain properties of replication over the course of billions of years. It is so hard to fathom the length of time over which this evolution has occurred that scientists studying these phenomena, being human themselves, have to spend years training their minds in order to explain the facts before them in terms which they themselves can’t possibly comprehend. Think about it.
Another wonderful book: “Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems” by John Holland approaches adaptation from a computational point of view. Its a real mind bender, check it out. In it he shows how powerful evolutionary problem solving can be, whatever you want to believe.
What I mean is that this is complex stuff — that even our best minds are only beginning to understand. If we have given up on our priests to give us all the answers let us not merely point the fickle finger of fate at our scientists. There are no answers. At least that we are capable of comprehending. There are only hypotheses, undoubtedly vast oversimplifications that either predict events or fail to do so. That is all.
A similar or maybe even more fundamentally disorienting experience must occur in the realms of astronomy and astrophysics, or so-called high-energy physics wherein we contemplate distances so great, or so small, and observed peculiarities of space and time so bizarre and alien to our everyday experience that we are barely capable of grasping them, much less finding them consistent with “common sense,” whatever that means.
So, the first thing to grasp is that no one really understands any of this. Scientists study phenomena, postulate hypotheses explaining the phenomena and these theories succeed or fail more or less as they are applied to and remain consistent with additional observations. Scientists tell us what they think, and we either trust them or we don’t. That is it. We all have this desire for definiteness. We like things to be simple. Does God exist or not? Some say yes, some say no. But the truth is, no one knows. Why can’t we just leave it at that?
What strikes me as maybe ironic is that scientists, or what may more generally be called “rationalists,” otherwise so skeptical about everything, sometimes seem to lack the ability to be skeptical, or shall we say modest, with respect to themselves. Questions about the existence of God and other imponderables like, Do we have souls? Is there life after death? Which, first of all, are entirely different questions from one another, get all muddled up together in this garbage heap of “irrationality” and absent any evidence, meaning any instrumentation with which to measure such phenomena, they are outside the realm of science. Pending the discovery or invention of such mechanisms, why can’t we just be content with that, and remain silent on the subject, then?
I’m afraid the true answer is that we have such divergent world views competing in the realm of policy these days, that we dare not ignore these differences of opinion for fear that we might underestimate our ability to kill one another over some such arcana.
Maybe there is something out there, some consciousness, maybe even with some of the attributes we conceive of as applying to God, omnipresence with respect to our dimensionality, omniscience with respect to our puny intelligence, something which remains hidden, and we have so far been unable to detect, like the cosmic background radiation. We can hypothesize it based on nothing more than intuition. Is that such a crime? Don’t confuse faith with fact, but it would seem prudent to approach the universe with a profound humility, just on general principles.
I think of Job and others in the Bible, wise men, better than you and me, when they find themselves before God, they tremble in fear, cover their eyes, and fall to their knees.
We wouldn’t expect a modern man to do anything resembling that, would we? I imagine a modern man standing there saying something like, “Now see here, God, I have a couple of questions for you.” Does that sound like a sensible attitude one should have toward the master of the universe? I’m not talking about whatever dysfunctional relationship you had with your father, with authority in general, with the man in the pulpit, or the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m not saying ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’ What I am saying is look at the universe around you. Really look at it, and ask yourself, who are you to judge that which is beyond your comprehension? Where were you when its foundations were laid? Where were you when God said to the seas ‘thou shalt go thus far and no further’?
So often, that’s what I hear when people like this joker John Humphrys on BBC4 trying to be profound ask questions that sound to me like nothing more than “riddle me this, batman.” Wake up, dude. The universe doesn’t owe us shit. And in particular, it doesn’t owe us an explanation. There is pain and tragedy all around you. That’s right. And it doesn’t begin and end with the sick innocent child that you claim somehow disproves the existence of God, nor does it begin and end with the tragic sadness of grief, or the sins we commit on one another. Its positively childish to put that on one plane, and forget about your scrambled eggs for breakfast, or factory farms, or a million other things you may or may not be aware of. For one example, consider the ongoing struggle for life between yourself, which you barely understand, and the microbacteria and viruses you are literally fighting with for life every moment of every day, as you sleep and wake. Wake up, you dumbass!
What I mean is that on the one hand, its amazing that we creatures, crawling around in the mud on the surface of this rock spinning in space, are able even to contemplate the vast universe, or that part of it which we can observe, and consider the beginnings and maybe endings of time, but on the other hand, even with all that, we have the arrogance to think we have the capability to understand more of it than we proportionately should expect to be able to.
That is as our lifespan relates to all of time, and as our travels from birth to death relate to all of space, why should not our intellectual achievement thus relate to reality?
That is not to diminish the accomplishments of human minds greater than our own, quite on the contrary. But where’s the humility, I ask you?
Ponder with me, if you will, the life of a man, perhaps a great man in a distant land, perhaps centuries or even millennia ago. A man who achieved great and wonderful things, who was a hero to his people, and who was known through the generations. Consider such a man to have lived in a now lost civilization, even the name of which we do not know, for example the Indus civilization, or maybe some even more obscure society of which we have no record at all.
Now consider that time is so long, we all will share that man’s fate, no matter what we do. There will come a day when there is not a human being on the face of the earth, perhaps no life on earth at all, perhaps no humans anywhere. There will come a time when the sun will emit its matter into the void of space and finally go dark. Maybe the entire universe will collapse, and there will come an end to time and space.
In that context, don’t all your exertions for achievement, for love, wealth, or fame or whatever it is you may choose to be chasing, seem pointless?
How can they not?
And that is where God comes in. God, or rather our belief in Him makes us like Daffy Duck in my favorite cartoon, “Duck Amuck.” If you’ve never seen it, look it up.
At one point, Daffy finds himself out of the animated frame, right off the cellulose, or at least off of an image of the cellulose on which he was being drawn, and talks directly to the audience. Its at once very deep and very funny, which I think is a characteristic of many profound experiences. Its where we find ourselves, outside one box, inside another, whether we perceive it or not. Theology, philosophy and physics are all absurd, and at their best somehow approach comedy, when you think about it. But deep down we all know comedy and sex are supreme over thought. And if you have ever been lucky enough to be able to laugh with your lover after sex, I don’t have to tell you, that’s deep.
You may say its like a dream, “and in that sleep, … what dreams may come…?” And we all step out of the “real” world into our own dream worlds, and some of us return with true insight, and some return with disturbing nightmares, and some confuse the dream for the waking existence, or vice versa, and are capable of the most shocking barbarity. Or is it the so-called civilized, rational man who is laboring under an illusion? Having evolved over the course of millions of years, surviving in large part due to genetic mechanisms we share with fish, fowl, bugs and beasts — is not the lower creature the greater part of us than this thin veneer of civilization or of rationality?
When we look at our DNA we find we share 99% of it with the apes, perhaps nearly as much of it with dogs and so on. Are we really so different from them?
And look at us, even so called civilized beings, constantly at war with one another, we survive by literally ripping the flesh off of other beings, which from a statistical analysis of our genetic material are largely indistinguishable from us.
And even putting this aside, as Nietzsche says, “in times of peace, a warlike people sets upon itself.” So if we abstained from all flesh, we would still need to consume plants, which are no less alive, and even if we sat quietly, fasting, meditating, our minds yet would fill with thoughts of aggression, and even if we mastered our desire for importance and power, our jealousies and hurts, would we not yet be guilty of a form of aggression, one part of ourselves over another part?
God, or rather our faith in God, and in a sense, God within us, allows us to step outside of all this noise, to transcend and perceive something greater, beyond the mean struggle for existence, beyond categories and names for things, beyond our ability to express. Our faith ennobles us, and as Martin Luther King said, our forgiveness for the wrongs done to us ironically frees us from the chains that bind us to the enemy. That’s a really big idea.
Clearly, the universe produced us, as Alan Watts said, in exactly the same way that an apple tree produces an apple. Isn’t it wonderful? Or like Einstein said, to some people, nothing is a miracle. To others, everything is.
This is a deep and profound truth, that once you can grasp it you will find encompasses and does not contradict these other truths — that even if from an egotistical point of view in the end it may all be fruitless, like the vanity of the man from a lost civilization — we can achieve progress through skeptical and rational analysis, and meanwhile doing our daily work for its own sake, putting food on the table and love in the bed, has value and is a worthwhile exercise of our energies. And if we have any juice left over at the end of the day, would it be such a waste of time to put a message in a bottle, so to speak, and let a prayer pass our lips, just in case the master of the universe might hear us, even if all we have to say is ‘thanks’, or ‘please take care of this soul now lost to us’, or whatever.
After all, isn’t it just “pity that’s the heart of love”, as Joyce said, and similarly isn’t it just hope that’s the heart of prayer?
And so, when confronted by the great deep, is it really so foolish and futile for us to cling to hope, the more desperate we are, the more tightly? And like a man lost at sea holding on to a bit of flotsam, it may just turn out that this irrational faith of ours will in the end save us.