Religion, good and bad and all that

John Wilkins has a good post on religion, I tend to agree with its general thrust though I might quibble with details. Not being gifted with much marginal time right now, a few quick thoughts:

1) I believe that institutional organized religion, e.g., Christianity, Islam, etc., can increase the magnitude of a social vector, but has little influence on its direction. For example in relation to slavery religion was a force for inflaming both abolitionist enthusiasm and justifying the holding of other humans in bondage. Religion doesn't do good or evil, humans do, religion is simply a 'virus of the mind' which hitch-hikes and surfs on cultural waves.

2) There is a distinction between basal religion, psychological propensities toward supernatural belief, and formalized systematic "higher religions" which exist on top of the basal layer and channel sociological dynamics and psychological biases toward the perpetuation of their particular "meme-complexes" (i.e., higher religions are constrained toward being cognitively optimal).

Second, Chad has two posts on The God Delusion. In reality Chad was commenting on this review in The New York Times. I was also pointed to this thrashing of Dawkins' book. A few points:

1) The reviewers miss the point of Dawkins work. For example, they seem rather confused about the nature of the cognitive work regarding religion since their understanding of religion as a natural phenomenon probably ends with William James.

2) There are serious problems with Dawkins work, but, I do not believe that dismissing the Ontological Argument is one of them. I do not think that theology is a science in the way that mathematics is a science, rather, it is a humanities in the way that literary criticism is a humanities. Theology is relevant to those who wish to know how humans think. I'm interested in the topic mostly because I am curious about how humans view the world around them, not because I think theology is talking genuine sense anymore than a good work of fiction is talking genuine sense about the world around us in anything but a figurative manner. It is also relevant to those who are intelligent and religious since it is a natural synthesis of their intellectual orientation and personal supernatural faith. Theology is what Scott Atran would term a "quasi-propositional" science, it exhibits the outward form of deductive analytic thought, but at the end of the day you very well know where the chain of propositions will end! My own belief (so to speak) is that theological consenses are purely social, the power of the Athanasian forumula was not due to its logical coherence vis-a-vis the Arian conception of God, it was due to the power of Athanasius and his allies, and likely contingent vicissitudes of history (Constantius' promotion of Arianism was a random event which resulted in the persistence of this theological stance for centuries because of the mission by the Goth Ulfilas during this emperor's reign, the Goths did not find Arianism more logically compelling than what became the "Orthodox" stance, it was just their first exposure and it "stuck").

3) Dawkins' work does have a serious flaw in that he brushes aside the literature he alludes to in the first half of the book before venturing on his anti-religious brief which is generally focused on the more fundamentalist forms of monotheism. But this is a different problem than the one that the reviewers allude to.

4) My own sense is that the positive reception of these reviews is a reflection of animus toward Dawkins' aggressive evangelism of his atheist stance, as well as his lack of diplomatic tact and civility in the face of what he perceives to be absurdity. Many of the individuals who praise critiques of Dawkins have not read his book. Myself, I would have likely assumed that the reviews were spot on before I read The God Delusion because I myself harbored some delusions about the state of Dawkins' knowledge of religion.

5) Dawkins plays a role in the world as a witness. My own criticism of Sir Richard is muted because 'tis a far far better thing that he devotes his time to this task so that I may enjoy my own life as the fundamentalists turn their fire toward him. We live in a pluralistic world and it takes all sorts.

Addendum: Just to be absolutely clear and beat a dead horse, my "issue," if I had any, with Richard Dawkins' variety of atheism was that I felt it was insufficiently informed by the latest in cognitive models. It seemd that Dawkins conceived of religion as a set of axioms which entailed some nasty chain of propositions, and that refuting the axioms would abolish the chain of propositions and usher in the golden age of utopia. I do not believe that anymore, the references to the literature in cognitive anthropology makes it clear to me that Dawkins is not now, if ever, ignorant of this domain. But, his argument still seems to presuppose the earlier model! Whereas before I has issues with what I perceived was Dawkins' ignorance, now I believe that his own argument seems strangely unintegrated insofar as the model of religiosity which he refutes is only a small subset of the phenomenon which he acknowledges. For someone who is famous for taking the axioms of Darwinian evolution to its logical conclusions this is rather disappointing. As for Dawkins' apologetic and evangelistic strain, my attitude is the same as it is toward apologetics and evangelists from the realm of religion, no one need read it and so no one need take offense.