A HOLLOW MAN
WHY RICHARD DAWKINS IS WRONG ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
B
ritish atheist Richard Dawkins has told sellout crowds across New Zealand and Australia that life exists purely because of “an astonishing stroke of luck”. That message became the keynote theme of his speeches, his best argument for batting away claims that life is intelligently designed. Hailed as New Atheism’s “rock star”, Dawkins makes a lot of money telling non-believers what they want to hear, but as I argued in The Divinity Code there’s actually very good evidence that Dawkins is utterly and completely wrong. Let’s look at some of his assertions. Firstly, he’s telling his audiences religious belief is an evolution of “gratitude”. “When you feel just plain grateful, then who are you being grateful to? You have to invent a God of pixies or something to be grateful to.” Dawkins fails to explain why gratitude would be an evolutionary trait worth keeping – after all, there are millions of animal, plant and insect species that have flourished in far greater numbers than humans without being grateful in the slightest. At one point in his speech he suggests perhaps natural selection favoured the survival of those who believed what their parents believed – a Dawkinsian appeal to one of Kipling’s “Just so” stories, perhaps. Here’s how I tackled it in Divinity Code: A recent poll showed 77% of New Zealanders believed in some kind of higher power. But the question is ‘Why?’. Why do we believe in God? Time magazine put it another way: “Which came first, God or the need for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above, or did evolution instil in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather into the communities essential to keeping the species going?” Examine the last part of that statement for a moment. It’s the idea that evolution created the idea of God in our heads. Yet evolution is supposed to be purposeless and randomly-caused. How could a single-celled organism know in advance that in order to succeed it needed to believe in an imaginary friend called God’? The idea seems more farcical and fraught with contradictions than simply believing in God himself, but it has led to what some scientists are calling their theory of “the God Gene” – the idea that humans are programmed to believe in God. “Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus, there is a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it,” says Time. “It’s hard enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and cheating pay such rich dividends. It’s harder still when there’s no moral cop walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best and, not incidentally, give us a sense that there’s someone awake in the cosmic house when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we’re here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine. And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods – and millenniums of holy wars prove that we do – the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely outweigh the bloodshed.” Again, from Time, no explanation as to why this is an evolutionary advantage. If natural selection measures success by the number of members of your species alive at any one moment, it’s worth remembering New Zealand has more possums than people (30 million at last estimate). Intelligence and self-awareness may have helped us in our own ecological niche, but to argue that humans are the most successful species on the planet in the unbiased eyes of Nature would be a mistake. 52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM April 2010