My holiday break read, that I'd like to review today was Richard Dawkins' new book The God Delusion (2006).
It's important for me to state upfront that I'm writing this as a person with one foot in the science camp and one in the religious camp,seeking a synthesis of the best of both. This piece is from the scientific perspective.
Dawkins is a scholar at the University of Oxford, in England, and an opinion-leader for the New Atheist movement. In his view, having seen recent world events that he attributes to "extreme religion" he takes the position that we'd be far better off without even "moderate"religion, as he perceives it to be a breeding ground for extremism.
In his view, religion as a whole has no obvious function or value or Darwinian "merit" and is most likely, in his mind, just some side-effect. Still, his book spends some time considering why religion is so wide-spread in every culture, from a Darwinian perspective.
On the plus side, I heartily endorse his plea for civilization - can't we all take a break and stop killing each other while we consider politely why reasonable and well-intentioned people in different camps appear to get such disparate readings on what's going on?
On the negative side, I think Dawkins, while well-intentioned and trying to be fair and balanced, is blind to his own blind spots regarding possible benefits of religion.
I'm not disputing his evidence that religion, in some cases,has tangible harm and leads to violence; but I do dispute his oversimplifying and poorly examined assertion that all religion is harmful and has no corresponding benefits on any scale.
First, he uses terms in a slippery fashion, variously attacking "God", "religion", "belief" and behavior. He admits he's not a sociologist.
Dawkins himself asserts what goes on in a person's home should be his own business, and we can assume his and Oxford's view of academic freedom support the principle that what goes on in his own mind should be his own business (no "thought crimes") and only when beliefs turn into antisocial behaviors are there issues.
In that vein, by his own arguments, his academic attack on the internal academic structure of religious beliefs of non-academics is largely irrelevant. Most of the world has neither the training nor inclination to build mental structures that are pleasing to academics.
So, it is not really the beliefs per se, but the "behaviors and practices" that Dawkins finds appalling, that he seeks to modify by heading upstream and applying a social engineering intervention of removing God and religious beliefs from everyone. In his mind, we should treat religion as if it were an public health epidemic of a virus that causes stupidity, violence,and large-spread death.
I suppose that conclusion would follow immediately if we accepted his premises that religion has no positive value and serves no purpose, but his case consists primarily of hand-waving and ignoring evidence. He seems to be speaking to his own choir.
So, OK, let's apply some public health methodology to this problem.
First exactly how did he determine that religion has no value? He didn't do a focus group or household survey to ask people for subjective opinions on the matter. (He wouldn't like the answer she'd get.) He didn't do a facility survey at local churches or mosques. And he certainly didn't do a controlled experiment by taking a group of people who "had religion", removing their faith somehow, and comparing the "before and after" states to show the effects.
Still, what magic did he use to diminish to zero even rock-solid effects of religion?
Take, for a simple illustration, the Latter Day Saints(Mormons) of Cache County, Utah, USA. This highly studied group, identified by their religion, has a life expectancy about 10 years longer than the average US citizen, possibly due to the fact that their religion prohibits smoking and drinking alcohol.
Now, theoretically, it may be true that a similar improvement in life-span would be observed if the whole New Atheist group similarly gave up smoking and drinking-- but atheist groups don't seem to show that kind of cohesion and norm-setting capacity for modifying their member's behavior. The group intervention from "Weight-Watchers" might come close, but the religious Alcoholics Anonymous would probably claim that religion is an important factor in their success.
Still, many people would say that the LDS group's religion"gave them the strength" to sustain healthy life styles, in the midst of a culture saturated with messages pushing them to smoke and drink. There is, incidentally, in this example, no need for "prayer"or "divine intervention", and no need for their belief system to be"correct" in some theological sense. That's not the question. The question is, whether "religion" ever has some "benefit" measured on a tangible, outcome scale such as morbidity and mortality.
Doesn't this single counter-example disprove Dawkin's argument that religion has no positive benefit? My reading is that, if asked, Dawkins would join many classical biomedical epidemiologists who dislike "distal causality" and say that the benefits are due to life-style changes, not due to "religion." On this type of grounds, I think, he manages to dismiss a huge number of examples that can be raised where "religion" has been beneficial to people.
Institutionalized religions, with large scale cultural norms, are very different animals that internal personal philosophies, and almost certainly have very significant impacts mediated by those cultural norm sand social pathways with multitudes of feedback loops across space, time, and scale. They are also, in a connectionist sense, large computing engines that digest perceptions and make sense of the world with some learning capacity over time. There are many pathways for benefits to occur besides miraculous alterations of the laws of physics. Even these he dismisses with his broad brush strokes of trying to eradicate mental models that don't work for him.
I can understand his interest in economy, and wishing that such benefits and "morale strengthening" would flow without all the infrastructure of religion. Curiously, that doesn't seem to happen easily. More power to him if he can disentangle the religion from the social norm and life-style components, and package and sell just the "good stuff" with none of what he calls "bad"stuff. I'm not going to hold my breath. Solitary individuals don't stand much chance going against social tides.
I would assert that Dawkins is urging a dangerous large-scale social intervention that would remove a behavior modifying factor of moderation. His proposed intervention seems far more expensive, less likely to succeed, and perilous in the downside, than an alternative of focusing effort on making the existing religions somewhat more flexible and self-policing and tolerant so that they can keep their own populations from becoming extreme.
Even from a martial arts or strategy point of view,deflecting a blow is far less trouble than stopping one in its tracks. Worse,from a "systems thinking" point of view, we have to worry about whether the violence we see is, in fact, being caused by the exact activity we are using because we think it will lessen the violence.
Dawkin's suggestions of an all out assault on even moderate religion certainly runs a risk of generating far more hostility than it dampens.
Dawkins sees that all those impacts are very distant from the level of his "selfish genes" and dismisses them as extraneous,but then even he has second thoughts around page 169 and starts to look against "Group Selection". He's unconvinced by the math, identifies himself as "Those of us who belittle group selection", but admits that at this point even Darwin had to pause.
As such, he's excluding not just single-level "group selection", but long-term multilevel hierarchical selection pressures from small group, neighborhood, large-group, species, ecosystem, and biosphere. He doesn't deal with the amplifying effects over a billion years of any feedback loops at all for what are locally small effects, neglecting the lessons from physics that "weak forces" such as gravity, over large space and time, can end up dominating "strong forces" such as electromagnetism for shaping outcomes.
Also, he only indirectly mentions the Santa Fe Institute, experiments in"artificial life", and mathematical experiments via computer simulations of what the impacts can be on evolution in electronic worlds from morphic shaping from "above" at even very small levels. In the "selfish gene" world, even"culture" doesn't seem to exist. I haven't read his book extended phenotype, but his description of it seems to open the door, which he doesn't go through, to such larger scale entrainment of local perception and behavior.
We seem on many biological and social levels to have archetypes that are as if many pixels form an image, and then the image gets a"life of it's own,", lifts up its skirts, and turns around and starts telling the pixels what they are allowed to do. We need to study that more.
And, I'll suggest that we need to avoid the Minsky catastrophe. Marvin Minksy set back the world of Artificial Intelligence andNeural Nets ("Perceptions") at least a decade by "proving"that neural nets couldn't solve certain problems. His mistake, that he ultimately realized and retracted, was that he had looked at one and two layer networks. It turns out that networks with three or more layers that included feed-forward, could,in fact, form a complete computing device and solve all such problems. He stopped too soon. In my mind, the same mathematics apply to looking at one and two layer "group selection" models - until we get to N-layer models with feedback and feed-forward, we're going to miss the prize. The fact that Dawkins sees no effect on a gene + group two-level model is not persuasive of anything except that he didn't look very hard.
I'd think one of the strongest arguments against the "intelligent design" movement he detests (interpreted as "fixed creation of the end product") is that the most intelligent programmers these days solve problems using "evolutionary programming." It can be much more economical and powerful and elegant to "grow" a solution than to"build" a solution.
In summary, Dawkins says "I don't see what you guys claim you see at all, you must be gullible." My reply is, "Your tools were designed for looking downwards. They're demonstrably blind to complex adaptive systems dominated by feedback and context effects. They can't detect distal causality from above in even simple cases. When you get better tools, come back and let's explore the "up" direction together."
In the meantime I remain concerned that the"respect" he suggests we should abandon for religion is precisely the moderating element that is preventing all out global warfare over religion.
It is certainly simpler to say "we're right and you're wrong", but it is probably not the way to calm the waters. Saying "We're right and your whole culture should be extinguished" is alarmingly close to exactly the thinking Dawkins sees so clearly in his enemy, and so poorly in his colleagues.
(Photo credit - Victor Nuno )
It's important for me to state upfront that I'm writing this as a person with one foot in the science camp and one in the religious camp,seeking a synthesis of the best of both. This piece is from the scientific perspective.
Dawkins is a scholar at the University of Oxford, in England, and an opinion-leader for the New Atheist movement. In his view, having seen recent world events that he attributes to "extreme religion" he takes the position that we'd be far better off without even "moderate"religion, as he perceives it to be a breeding ground for extremism.
In his view, religion as a whole has no obvious function or value or Darwinian "merit" and is most likely, in his mind, just some side-effect. Still, his book spends some time considering why religion is so wide-spread in every culture, from a Darwinian perspective.
On the plus side, I heartily endorse his plea for civilization - can't we all take a break and stop killing each other while we consider politely why reasonable and well-intentioned people in different camps appear to get such disparate readings on what's going on?
On the negative side, I think Dawkins, while well-intentioned and trying to be fair and balanced, is blind to his own blind spots regarding possible benefits of religion.
I'm not disputing his evidence that religion, in some cases,has tangible harm and leads to violence; but I do dispute his oversimplifying and poorly examined assertion that all religion is harmful and has no corresponding benefits on any scale.
First, he uses terms in a slippery fashion, variously attacking "God", "religion", "belief" and behavior. He admits he's not a sociologist.
Dawkins himself asserts what goes on in a person's home should be his own business, and we can assume his and Oxford's view of academic freedom support the principle that what goes on in his own mind should be his own business (no "thought crimes") and only when beliefs turn into antisocial behaviors are there issues.
In that vein, by his own arguments, his academic attack on the internal academic structure of religious beliefs of non-academics is largely irrelevant. Most of the world has neither the training nor inclination to build mental structures that are pleasing to academics.
So, it is not really the beliefs per se, but the "behaviors and practices" that Dawkins finds appalling, that he seeks to modify by heading upstream and applying a social engineering intervention of removing God and religious beliefs from everyone. In his mind, we should treat religion as if it were an public health epidemic of a virus that causes stupidity, violence,and large-spread death.
I suppose that conclusion would follow immediately if we accepted his premises that religion has no positive value and serves no purpose, but his case consists primarily of hand-waving and ignoring evidence. He seems to be speaking to his own choir.
So, OK, let's apply some public health methodology to this problem.
First exactly how did he determine that religion has no value? He didn't do a focus group or household survey to ask people for subjective opinions on the matter. (He wouldn't like the answer she'd get.) He didn't do a facility survey at local churches or mosques. And he certainly didn't do a controlled experiment by taking a group of people who "had religion", removing their faith somehow, and comparing the "before and after" states to show the effects.
Still, what magic did he use to diminish to zero even rock-solid effects of religion?
Take, for a simple illustration, the Latter Day Saints(Mormons) of Cache County, Utah, USA. This highly studied group, identified by their religion, has a life expectancy about 10 years longer than the average US citizen, possibly due to the fact that their religion prohibits smoking and drinking alcohol.
Now, theoretically, it may be true that a similar improvement in life-span would be observed if the whole New Atheist group similarly gave up smoking and drinking-- but atheist groups don't seem to show that kind of cohesion and norm-setting capacity for modifying their member's behavior. The group intervention from "Weight-Watchers" might come close, but the religious Alcoholics Anonymous would probably claim that religion is an important factor in their success.
Still, many people would say that the LDS group's religion"gave them the strength" to sustain healthy life styles, in the midst of a culture saturated with messages pushing them to smoke and drink. There is, incidentally, in this example, no need for "prayer"or "divine intervention", and no need for their belief system to be"correct" in some theological sense. That's not the question. The question is, whether "religion" ever has some "benefit" measured on a tangible, outcome scale such as morbidity and mortality.
Doesn't this single counter-example disprove Dawkin's argument that religion has no positive benefit? My reading is that, if asked, Dawkins would join many classical biomedical epidemiologists who dislike "distal causality" and say that the benefits are due to life-style changes, not due to "religion." On this type of grounds, I think, he manages to dismiss a huge number of examples that can be raised where "religion" has been beneficial to people.
Institutionalized religions, with large scale cultural norms, are very different animals that internal personal philosophies, and almost certainly have very significant impacts mediated by those cultural norm sand social pathways with multitudes of feedback loops across space, time, and scale. They are also, in a connectionist sense, large computing engines that digest perceptions and make sense of the world with some learning capacity over time. There are many pathways for benefits to occur besides miraculous alterations of the laws of physics. Even these he dismisses with his broad brush strokes of trying to eradicate mental models that don't work for him.
I can understand his interest in economy, and wishing that such benefits and "morale strengthening" would flow without all the infrastructure of religion. Curiously, that doesn't seem to happen easily. More power to him if he can disentangle the religion from the social norm and life-style components, and package and sell just the "good stuff" with none of what he calls "bad"stuff. I'm not going to hold my breath. Solitary individuals don't stand much chance going against social tides.
I would assert that Dawkins is urging a dangerous large-scale social intervention that would remove a behavior modifying factor of moderation. His proposed intervention seems far more expensive, less likely to succeed, and perilous in the downside, than an alternative of focusing effort on making the existing religions somewhat more flexible and self-policing and tolerant so that they can keep their own populations from becoming extreme.
Even from a martial arts or strategy point of view,deflecting a blow is far less trouble than stopping one in its tracks. Worse,from a "systems thinking" point of view, we have to worry about whether the violence we see is, in fact, being caused by the exact activity we are using because we think it will lessen the violence.
Dawkin's suggestions of an all out assault on even moderate religion certainly runs a risk of generating far more hostility than it dampens.
Dawkins sees that all those impacts are very distant from the level of his "selfish genes" and dismisses them as extraneous,but then even he has second thoughts around page 169 and starts to look against "Group Selection". He's unconvinced by the math, identifies himself as "Those of us who belittle group selection", but admits that at this point even Darwin had to pause.
As such, he's excluding not just single-level "group selection", but long-term multilevel hierarchical selection pressures from small group, neighborhood, large-group, species, ecosystem, and biosphere. He doesn't deal with the amplifying effects over a billion years of any feedback loops at all for what are locally small effects, neglecting the lessons from physics that "weak forces" such as gravity, over large space and time, can end up dominating "strong forces" such as electromagnetism for shaping outcomes.
Also, he only indirectly mentions the Santa Fe Institute, experiments in"artificial life", and mathematical experiments via computer simulations of what the impacts can be on evolution in electronic worlds from morphic shaping from "above" at even very small levels. In the "selfish gene" world, even"culture" doesn't seem to exist. I haven't read his book extended phenotype, but his description of it seems to open the door, which he doesn't go through, to such larger scale entrainment of local perception and behavior.
We seem on many biological and social levels to have archetypes that are as if many pixels form an image, and then the image gets a"life of it's own,", lifts up its skirts, and turns around and starts telling the pixels what they are allowed to do. We need to study that more.
And, I'll suggest that we need to avoid the Minsky catastrophe. Marvin Minksy set back the world of Artificial Intelligence andNeural Nets ("Perceptions") at least a decade by "proving"that neural nets couldn't solve certain problems. His mistake, that he ultimately realized and retracted, was that he had looked at one and two layer networks. It turns out that networks with three or more layers that included feed-forward, could,in fact, form a complete computing device and solve all such problems. He stopped too soon. In my mind, the same mathematics apply to looking at one and two layer "group selection" models - until we get to N-layer models with feedback and feed-forward, we're going to miss the prize. The fact that Dawkins sees no effect on a gene + group two-level model is not persuasive of anything except that he didn't look very hard.
I'd think one of the strongest arguments against the "intelligent design" movement he detests (interpreted as "fixed creation of the end product") is that the most intelligent programmers these days solve problems using "evolutionary programming." It can be much more economical and powerful and elegant to "grow" a solution than to"build" a solution.
In summary, Dawkins says "I don't see what you guys claim you see at all, you must be gullible." My reply is, "Your tools were designed for looking downwards. They're demonstrably blind to complex adaptive systems dominated by feedback and context effects. They can't detect distal causality from above in even simple cases. When you get better tools, come back and let's explore the "up" direction together."
In the meantime I remain concerned that the"respect" he suggests we should abandon for religion is precisely the moderating element that is preventing all out global warfare over religion.
It is certainly simpler to say "we're right and you're wrong", but it is probably not the way to calm the waters. Saying "We're right and your whole culture should be extinguished" is alarmingly close to exactly the thinking Dawkins sees so clearly in his enemy, and so poorly in his colleagues.
(Photo credit - Victor Nuno )
technorati tags:Dawkins, GodDelusion, God, religion, atheism, science, systems, feedback, multilevel, causality, simulation, SantaFe, Islam, Muslim, Christian, ID, warfare, peace, mediation, moderation
2 comments:
It's also a much stronger rule in organizational development to "build on strength" instead of "attack weakness". If Dawkin's goal is to transform religion, he might do better to seek a pathway that starts by emphasizing and encouraging what he thinks is RIGHT instead of one that focuses on what he thinks is wrong.
As any good piano teacher knows, there is always SOMETHING you can find to compliment sincerely, regardless how bad the student and how little they practiced.
Even neural nets can be trained better and more stably with convergent positive rewards than with negative radially-divergent punishments.
Any existing belief system has a rather large amount of "momentum in the flywheel" as it were, socially. To try to just open the circuit and stop the current flow (changing metaphors) will only tend to produce a 20,000 volt spark that crosses the gap and electrocutes the interloper.
If the advice isn't sensible coming straight towards Dawkins, maybe it makes more sense looking at the outcomes the US had so far in Iraq and Afghanistan - there were noble sentiments spoken, but elimination of the existing (admittedly terrible) order and replacement with effectively nothing produced a resulting chaos or civil war that was in many ways worse than before the intervention.
Dawkin's camp can't just say "we should get rid of religion", without specifying exactly HOW you intend to do it, and WHAT you intend to replace it with, and what the human and dollar price will be of the transition, and what happens if the effort fails part way, and get some serious peer review that the idea isn't a wonderful delusion that flies on the whiteboard but fails in practice.
The idea of an emergent whole turning around and partially determining its own parts seems to have a whole new literature, which showed up in a NYTimes piece on Free Will versus Determinism this morning.
"downward causality" conference:
www.ctnsstars.org/
conferences/
conferences_3.html
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