Interlude VII. The God Delusion

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2

On The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

I don't recall reading anyone I've agreed with so much. Most of his positions on religion are things I've thought of myself, and his intolerance of mild forms of faith (that being a little bit religious is like being a little bit pregnant) is an interesting point of view I hadn't considered before.

That said, I started wondering when he was going to get into epistemology and metaphysics around page 125, so I was pretty excited when he finally did get around to it on the last four pages of the book. He made, in a very nice but different way, points similar to the ones Annie Dillard made about "the tree with the lights in it" and Muriel Barbery made with her passage about Husserl. He even, a few pages before that, went into Quantum physics. He laid out the basics of the relativity of our experience of reality -- that science, at best, can tell us about what we perceive but almost nothing definitive about the reality behind that perception. And yet he shows no inkling of comprehending that this is a problem for someone who wants to say that God doesn't exist. I am gobsmacked.

What I am left with is that some people are so focused on science that they are blind to the undermining of the foundation of that science in exactly the same way religious people are blind to how science undermines their positions.

Nietzsche. posits a synthesis of the artistic (Apollinian) with the mystical (Dionysian) to create Attic tragedy and the Greek peace with reality (with the human fate of individuation). Then he sees this synthesis destroyed by the Socratic preference for reason and science, which rests on the premise that there is an objective reality that can be known and reasoned about to unlock all its secrets. The new scientific view worked fine into the 19th century, but no longer.

Quantum theory was the death of a Socratic belief system based on reason and objective scientific observation of an independently existing universe. String theory posits that subatomic "particles" are just bundles of energy at varying pitches in a cosmic harmony. Which sounds pretty damn mystical.

That consciousness seems to play a key role in actualizing quantum states, also removes the foundation of "objective" reality. The universe seems to be fundamentally interactive. All this leaves the door open for a pantheistic interpretation of reality (my preference) but at the least it needs to be addressed by someone like Dr. Dawkins who is, in effect, as a scientist, standing on thin air.

This doesn't undermine most of what he wrote against the various popular cults of our time, but it concerns me that he either doesn't wish to address it or, even worse, doesn't see the problem.

Next: Interlude VIII. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 3.