Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play every-
where in his world.”
Specific Religious Issues
Religion is an interesting test case in an exam-
ination of human nature, for what one says about religion also reveals
a commitment to a particular ideology and perhaps a methodology. Espe-
cially problematic is the frequent assumption that a commitment to
methodological reductionism also implies a commitment to metaphysi-
cal reductionism, which does not necessarily follow. Here, above all,
one's prior commitments to specific positions need to be attended to and
examined carefully.
For example, Dawkins adopts an explicitly antireligion position. He
sees religion as superstition and/or myth (understood as a false state-
ment) whose purpose is to hide scientific truths from the unsuspecting
or the naive. Faith, Dawkins declares, “is such a successful brainwasher
in its own favour, especially a brainwasher of children, that it is hard
to break its hold.” And in addition to faith's being an arbitrary belief—
otherwise, one could give reasons for one's position—faith for Dawkins
leads to fanaticism: “It is capable of driving people to such dangerous
folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It
leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme
cases they are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for further
justification.”
91
Dawkins defines the idea of God as a meme (Dawkins's term for a cul-
tural unit of replication) and part of the meme pool. Thus, the meme
“God” gains its survival in this pool through its appeal to our psychol-
ogy: “It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling
questions about existence.”
92
For Dawkins, God exists, but only as a
meme within the culture.
Dawkins's
The Blind Watchmaker
, in addition to being a sustained
argument for the randomness of evolution, is also an explicit attack on
the proof of God based on design in nature. Here, he is “advocating Dar-
winism not only as a candle in the dark against pseudo scientific beliefs,
but also as a direct substitute for personal religion.”
93
As Dawkins sees
it, evolution has no purpose other than the survival of particular genes,
and which ones survive cannot be predicted in advance. As such, there
is no design in the process of evolution.
