Dawkins and God ...

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Evolutionary Psychology by John Grohol, 3/19/97
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    • Dawkins and Gould Are Always Right, But ... by James Brody, 6/8/97
      
      

Thanks very much for your reply.

It was actually a series on BBC Radio last year, in which an eminent London mathematician set out to find - as far as I recall - what the concept of God or god might mean to late 20th cent. people. Each program approached from a different starting point - psychology, discussing Freud, Jung, behaviorism &c (interviewing the likes of Anthony Storr) - and so on. Dawkins, asked why he couldn't countenance the possibility that God, or god, might have had something to do with creation said that if god did have anything to do with it, he chose the one means - natural selection - to cover his traces. He was sure - Dawkins, not God (tho you might be hard pressed to tell the difference) - was sure that the antelope (I think) when chased by the cheetah suffered terribly. That natural selection was not specifically cruel, it was just indifferent to us and our fate.

To invoke "God" was "explanatory overkill". So this was not a long, or exclusively Dawkins, interview. There was a full length TV program not long ago of the great man lecturing in a variety of places to different people, including schoolchildren. And demonstrating his faith in Science - a wonderfully dramatic start to the program, this - by resting the back of his head against a block and letting go of a cannon ball held against his nose swinging from the ceiling right across the other side of the room and back again to within a few mm of said nose without his moving a muscle: Newton was right!

In one way Dawkins is just the right person to educate the public in the scientific approach and away from millenarian mumbo-jumbo; in another way, perhaps he is not. What is he - what are we - offering people in place of the beliefs that keep them going? I'm not saying it's necessarily easier if you're a brilliant and world-famous Oxford don with a gift for metaphor, but is there perhaps something arid in his mechanistic reductionism? Another scientist with similar expository gifts, Paul Davies in, I think, "The Mind of God" takes Dawkins to task for triumphalism. He doesn't let people down gently enough (I speak as a psychiatrist).

You can't bludgeon folk out of their delusions. They cling more desperately to the only thing they have - and it's not likely to be natural selection according to Father Dawkins!

You might be able to hire or buy the video from the BBC - in a version suitable for USA players.

He's got a nice voice, very English, very clear, authoritative, delivered often in a witty, ironic style.

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