Belief

There's been a lot of hubbub about Richard Dawkins recently, and it's got me thinking, so this post is loooong, self-indulgent, potentially boring, and definitely opinionated.  I'm really only typing it up as an aide to clarify my own thoughts.  I'm no philosopher - the arguments and observations here are probably incredibly naive and easily knocked down.  If so, please feel free to comment with a rebuttal.  Otherwise, feel free to skip it or read on as you please.

Back to Dawkins: a lot of people enjoyed watching him club the baby seal that is Steve Fielding when the two of them were on QandA recently on the ABC here in Australia.  It was sickeningly brutal but I couldn't look away.  I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Dawkins that Fielding is "dumber than an earthworm" but I do think that he's way out of his depth in Parliament and is doing himself and our country an injustice by being there.

While I love to see Fielding taking the hurt, I find Richard Dawkins an incredibly difficult person to watch.  He makes very strong arguments but does so in a way that I find personally objectionable.  On QandA I think he got carried away.  He became more and more smug, more and more mocking, and more and more contemptuous of his fellow panelists as the evening went on.  It's kind of unfair for a person who makes a profession out of attacking religion to get stuck into people who are not in the business of defending religion.  I think he made Tony Burke look uninformed and unprepared, but in return Tony Burke made him look like an arsehole.  When Burke called Dawkins out on his smugness, Dawkins attempted to deny any such thing, and I don't think the incident reflected well on him.  Tony Burke 1 - Richard Dawkins 0.

To be honest, I don't understand why (some) scientists seem to get so much pleasure out of attacking religion.  I do understand the frustration and desire to retaliate when ill-informed religious leaders seek to inject religion into science. But to retaliate by denigrating all religion ends up (in my humble opinion) not only missing the point of the argument but actually bolstering the credibility of the opposition by accepting the role of antagonist.

What I have difficulty sympathizing with is Dawkins' position, which seems to be that because science works, all religion is thus stupid and only a fool would subscribe to the religious viewpoint. Science and religion beating up on each other seems to make as much sense as mechanics and ballet dancers beating up on each other.  And while beating up ballet dancers may be fun and make you feel like a big man, I don't think it's either necessary or excuseable, despite that fact that in the real world, until quite recently, the ballet dancers have been beating up the mechanics for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Let's be clear about where I stand - I'm agnostic.  And proud of it.  Hmmm, maybe "proud" is not the word - I'm not "proud" of being blue-eyed either - it's more that I refused to be ashamed of it because it's an honest description of me. Many people seem to shrink from the label as if it reveals some kind of moral weakness, like how the term "liberal" in the USA is often used sneeringly.  But I'm agnostic because I have no idea whether there is any kind of God or not.  I think that's a rational position.  There's no evidence that I'm aware of that God exists, in whatever form you care to conceptualize him. Absence of evidence, however, is not evidence of absence. Recognising that, atheism seems to me to be just as much of a leap of faith as religion.  I can't put my hand on my hand and say that I think there is no God.  But why am I this way?

One thing I have come to believe over time is that we don't choose our beliefs.  I think I'm agnostic in the same way that I'm introverted, modest and devastatingly handsome.  It's the way I'm put together.  Sure, if I'd been raised in a deeply religious family I'd be different.  But I wasn't so I'm not.  I used to have (mostly) friendly arguments with a colleague at work when he would urge me to reconsider my lack of faith and would present all sorts of well-informed theological arguments to try to persuade me to Believe.  To my mind the best theological argument is Pascal's: if I believe and I'm right, I get an infinite reward.  If I disbelieve and I'm wrong, I get an infinite punishment.  Anything else and meh.  Given that equation, you'd be a fool not to believe.  I find this argument immensely compelling, and it genuinely makes me frightened and makes me wish that I believed.  But my stumbling block is this: I do not believe.  And I don't know how to choose to believe something.

Sure, I could act as if I believed, and hope that over time I just kind of came to Believe, in the same way as you might drink only sarsaparilla cordial for a month during summer to try to train yourself to like it (which is how I taught myself to like sarsaparilla, just to see if it would work).  But that seems incredibly insincere and phony to me.  I'm about to say something ridiculous here: if I was God, I'd prefer people to stick to their honest beliefs and try to live good, productive, fulfilling, generous lives, rather than force themselves to pretend to be something they aren't.  I'm aware that that is an absurdly presumptuous thing to say so I'll pre-empt Godwin's law myself - just because Adolf Hitler, if he was God, would have done some seriously bad stuff to a lot more people than he was able to anyway, doesn't mean that the real God agrees with him - thank God.  Nevertheless, I think the underlying point is a valid one: regulating actions is more reasonable than regulating beliefs, because people have more control over their actions than over their beliefs.  (Even if free will doesn't exist I think this is still true - perhaps that's a future post...)

But back to Richard Dawkins, again.  He likes to talk about rationality.  Science is rational, religion is irrational, etc etc.  I think he overestimates the rationality of science.  Sure, the idealized process of science is rational, even if the practise of it isn't.  And science works: 747's can indeed fly and VX gas does indeed kill you very quickly. Obviously, one of the great things about science is that it seems to work regardless of whether you believe in it or not.  But very few people obtain scientific knowledge by the scientific method. I know heaps and heaps of "sciencey stuff" that I use to make decisions all the time about my own life and indeed the lives of others that I've encountered in a medical context.  Ultimately though, I have almost zero scientific basis for that knowledge because I have simply accepted it carte blanche.  I subscribe to a whole slew of beliefs about scientific knowledge because they come pre-approved by the Powers That Be.  My actual direct exercise of rationality though is pretty much limited to seeing people put bananas into a box and then take some out again, and being able to deduce how many are left.  (Yes, I like to hang around fruit shops.  And zoos.)

I'm not denying that there are people out there who have direct experience of certain areas of science because of their work.  But it's probably quite rare.  Several hundred years ago, the work that scientists did was so grounded in their direct sensory experience that to even consider that there was some kind faith involved would probably have been borderline psychotic.  But now it's a different matter.  I listen to patients describe symptoms to me, which I interpret in terms of explanations of physiology (although I have never seen 99% of it with my own eyes) and I recommend treatment to them in terms of pharmacology (of which I have never seen 100%) and I fully expect that it will work.  I take all this information out of books and just assume that it's right.  Why?  Partly because most of the time it is self-consistent and seems to work, but mostly because That's Just How You Do Things.

So when Richard Dawkins sneers at religious people, it gets my hackles up.  His arrogance diminishes him, it diminished his arguments and it diminishes me as a believer in science and as an agnostic as well.  I think his hostility is unnecessarily because religion and science aren't playing for the same cup, and science is almost as much of a religion as religion is.

Right - so that's science v. religion resolved.  Next up: MP3 v. vinyl.  Then mechanics v. ballet dancers.