by Sam Fryman
Likewise, in the present, we do not hear physicist Stephen Hawking savaging religion, but only a biologist, Richard Dawkins.
According to all reports the higher conscious or mystical state is a sudden unplanned and unexpected plugging into the hidden intelligence behind the universe, the realisation that the universe is not random, but the product of a living intelligence, and that the universe is a meaningful, blissful place in its fundamental nature, rather than a random, meaningless one.
So Dawkins denies the validity of this experience, which countless saints, prophets and mystics and higher developed people have had to a greater or lesser extent, and says it is all “a delusion in the brain.”
But is he only saying that because due to the fact it apparently hasn’t happened to him, he thinks that it never happened to anybody else either?
This is the position of the arrogant modern scientist, of which Dawkins is the high priest in terms of his arrogance. What they have not experienced themselves they say does not exist.
This is once again, the same distorted logic which refuses to tolerate the possibility of being true, anything outside their own personal experience.
Likewise therefore Dawkins attacks “alternative medicine.” Presumably he includes things like acupuncture in this.
But has he ever been for an acupuncture session we would ask?
Your author knows people who have, and he has seen dramatic practically instant changes in their physical condition, so acupuncture is definitely doing something physical to the human body, though just how reliable it is in the hands of any particular practitioner in the modern age we cannot say.
And let’s ask what “alternative medicine” is.
Does Dawkins mean, anything not approved or created by the gigantic fabulously rich multi-national drug companies?
Our so called “ad hominem” attack on Dawkins was merely to point out that whatever the truth or not of his scientific views, his words whether intentionally so or not had the effect of supporting the status quo in numerous ways.
Firstly, he is the most staunch supporter imaginable of the view that religion is the enemy of the people.
This is what the “scientifically educated” Westerner is being encouraged to believe.
The propaganda goes something like:
“Look, it’s obvious. Look at these Muslims flogging women for no good reason, and all these Muslim terrorists who want to kill us all.” Or on the other hand “Look at those Christian zealots like Bush, all war hungry” and so on.
Now firstly, if George Bush Junior is a true Christian, then I am Mahatma Gandhi. Christ said “treat your neighbour as yourself” he didn’t say go and bomb him and torture and sexually humiliate his people.
Secondly, and much more importantly, let us look at the three great Western familiar spiritual figures – Moses, Christ and Buddha.
Moses set his people free, he led them from the tyranny of the then Egyptian enslavers. Christ preached justice and equality for all men. Buddha rejected his status as a royal prince, when he saw the inequality in his country, and preached universal tolerance and non-violence.
It is a state sponsored lie that religion has ever had any purpose other than to set the people free.
Of course throughout the ages the message of Christ was corrupted, lost, so that for example, Christ’s words of “anyone who lets any one of these children be harmed, it would be better they were cast into the river with a millstone round their neck” (i.e. the ultimate warning against child abuse) had somehow been recast as, it’s alright to beat the living daylights out of you to cast out your “sins.”
But this is the big lie that seeks to mock not only the obviously out of hand fundamentalist religions, but any kind of mystical or spiritual path whatsoever.
It says – be content with your bread and circuses, bury yourself in sex, drugs and rock and roll, bow down and worship the capitalist system. For there is nothing else.
But then there is a logical flaw in this situation also.
It denies the problem of death.
Dawkins is apparently content that he be extinguished at any moment never to return. That is the only possibility in his atheistic philosophy. He says like some kind of drunken maniac swinging from a high building “Don’t worry about that little thing, death, just enjoy the view!”
That neither Dawkins nor his fans apparently have any concern for the issue of their own immanent non-existence only confirms what Gopi Krishna has long been saying – “There is a fatal flaw in the modern scientific mind and human intellect”, in that it has become unconcerned with its own survival. Due to this same flaw, the world is under the threat of extinction from nuclear weapons.
Dawkins’ fans think he is logical, and this is the delusion that above all we ought to smash.
Let us give an example.
Suppose we were discussing sport. Suppose someone said the chances of British soccer club Chelsea winning the Championship in any particular year were like the chances of a snowball freezing in hell.
Would we think that person was being rational, assessing matters based on some information, such as players’ performance, the previous season’s results and so on?
No, of course we would think that person was a fanatic. We would think that they had conjured up such an illegitimate and non-comparable analogy out of some emotionally biased mindset, such as them having an emotional attachment to another club such as Manchester United or whoever.
But we have Richard Dawkins saying that the question of God existing or not is comparable to the question of whether there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, or he goes on to use other analogies such as whether there is a teapot orbiting Mars, or whether there is such a thing as a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So we are asking: is this a legitimate instrument of logic, of science, of rationality to make such comparisons?
These comparisons are not founded on logic, on science, they are founded upon mockery, contempt.
He is just saying, when précised, the idea that there might be a God is ridiculous, it’s laughable.
So he is fully entitled as a private citizen to hold such an opinion, but he cannot claim this position is either rational or scientific, because that requires evidence, which he doesn’t have.
On the contrary, what we have is a universe, but no explanation for its existence.
What we have are life forms, human beings, but once again, no explanation for their existence.
He tries to tell us natural selection accounts for human existence, but it certainly does not explain how life began.
Science fans in general do not like to be reminded of the fact that no scientist has ever been able to create life out of the 92 naturally occurring elements in a laboratory.
All they can do is fiddle with what’s there already, and there is as yet no proof that any of the genetic engineering they have done is either safe for the environment or in any way an improvement on what Nature had already achieved.
But science fans like to overlook all these hard facts, these realities, and pretend an omniscience of knowledge that they don’t possess.
So we have no fundamental explanations for any of the mysteries of the universe, but science rejects the concept of a God without any evidence.
Why is it not logical or scientific to compare God’s existence to that of fairies down the bottom of the garden?
The difference is that thousands or more people throughout history claim to have in some way seen or experienced a God, and they tend to report their vision in more or less the same way. This consistency tends to support the view that this is a common genuine experience, and not any kind of bogus claim. Of course, they could all be experiencing some kind of delusion, but if we want to apply that argument, which quite frankly is all that Dawkins has to offer against those who claim proof by experience, then we can say that we are all experiencing delusion all the time, and Dawkins himself could simply be experiencing a delusion in not se
eing or accepting this God.
But the broader point we are making, is that few or no people have ever reported seeing fairies, whereas countless people like our Dr R M Bucke have reported some kind of vision of God or a “cosmic consciousness”, so the two matters are not analogous.
That is, logically Dawkins could compare God’s existence to that of the genuineness of UFOs, at least on the basis that in the case of UFOs, there have also been so many reported sightings.
But the fact that he draws only analogies such as flying spaghetti monsters, orbiting teapots and fairies, just shows he is thinking from a mocking, insolent, contemptuous emotional mentality, rather than a scientific, unemotive, rational one.
The biggest logical, scientific mistake that Dawkins makes however, and this is really a mistake of epic proportions, is to start talking about probabilities.
This is according to Chapter Four of his work, Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist, the basis for his claim.
Mr Dawkins should have studied probability and statistics at University, as did your author, before he so glibly started tossing concepts of probability and statistics around.
But such university study is not even essential to see that Dawkins’ position has got more holes in it than a sieve. Any averagely school educated reader should be able to see what an ass this man is making of himself, by attempting to use probability theory in such a way.
Some have criticised our works in the past for their brevity, but the reason for that is you author is a trained mathematician. He deals in elegant solutions, he doesn’t say in fifty pages like Dawkins does what can be said without any pomp or circumstance in one.
There is so little genuine substance in what Dawkins says, any real scientist or rational thinker is appalled at his extravagant verbosity.
This of course we feel to be a deliberate strategy, just as governments such as the British, when some gross injustice or official blunder occurs, commission an inquiry which takes about six months or even more than a year, by which time everybody has almost forgotten what the point of it was, and they produce five hundred or more pages of waffle, and come to some naïve and typically disbelieved conclusion such as “the government is innocent of all blame in this matter.”
The other reason we try our best to be brief is because we respect the reader. We realise how precious is their time, and thus do not insult them by demanding one more second of it than we have to without just cause.
So let us look further at Dawkins’ report which tells us God is only a delusion.
Dawkins tells us that the reason he can make such a claim with justification is that he thinks he has “proofs” that God is improbable.
One of these “proofs” he claims is that the very fact that some life form is complex makes it improbable. So a God as the hypothetical creator of every life form, would have to be the most improbable creature of all.
Yes, that is precisely the way the terminal anthropomorphist interpreters of God see him, i.e. as some glorified “bloke”, and thus that ridiculous theory makes sense to them.
He ties this up with the other tired old argument that “If there is a God who made everything, who made him?”
Well, as we have said, who made the laws of Nature? Nobody, they just are. They don’t require an explanation, say Dawkins and his kind.
And then we (as agnostics or spiritual speculators) say “Well, likewise could be God. Perhaps He just is, he doesn’t require any further explanation, he is just a fundamental fact of existence like the atom.”
And then Dawkins and the rest stamp their foot in rage and say “Hold on now! We can’t have a God that requires no further explanation! That’s not rational!”
And then we reply “Well, then we can’t have laws of Nature existing without explanation, that’s not rational either, is it?”
But they reply “Hey, that’s different. We are talking about God here, which by definition (i.e. their definition) isn’t rational, whereas laws of Nature are.”
So once again we see, this is not a rational position. As soon as the subject of God gets mentioned, so called rational scientists fly into fits of hysteria and irrationality as if they were babies whose feeding bottles had been torn from their mouths.
So what does Dawkins do to support his irrationality?
He finds “religious believers” who are easily seen to be more irrational than he is, and ridicules them, such an easy exercise any bullying teenager could pull off.
He says, if scientists don’t have an answer for any particular problem, then the Creationists immediately jump on it and say “therefore God.”
But as usual, he ignores the agnostic rationalists who say only “Maybe God”, because he doesn’t want to accept or have the reader accept that anyone who expressed any uncertainty on the subject could exist, and also be rational, and as scientifically well informed or even more so than himself.
Which of course pleases his fans no end. They can just say “Look at these pathetic lunatics, trying to make such irrational claims.”
But as we have pointed out, the greatest proof, and arguably only possible proof of God existing is the one he hardly mentions at all, and discounts as “a malfunction in the brain”, it is not intelligent design, which is practically all he focuses on, as that is too inconclusive either way.
Does he think the vision that produced spiritual works such as the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the discourses of Buddha and so on was the equivalent of seeing a fairy at the bottom of the garden?
Many of these works of spiritual literature were phenomenal works of philosophy, from brilliant thinkers like Buddha, Shankara and so on.
This awareness is what prompted Dawkins’ fellow biologist Stephen Rose to say “Richard’s view about belief is too simplistic…” and so on.
But this is what Dawkins wishes to convince his reader are the only two explanations of reality and life. It’s a strict either/or situation. It is either Natural Selection or it’s Creationism, Intelligent Design.
So he says that the problem of complex life forms, which look like they were created or designed is solved by Natural Selection.
And the amazing thing here, so he says, is that this has nothing to do with chance.
This is yet another staggering piece of double-think he lays on his readers.
i.e. there is no planned design, but it also didn’t happen by chance.
And as logic, this is of course pure garbage, absolute nonsense.
But let us see how he accomplishes this mental “sleight of hand.”
He says, the incredible complexity of life forms, which he admits is “very, very improbable” is accomplished by an enormous number of “baby steps”, which individually are only “slightly improbable.”
Let’s quote him verbatim here, to make sure everybody is agreed that what we are saying above is exactly what Dawkins is:
What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.
Well, can anyone spot the logical flaw in this paragraph, which indeed as far as we can see is the only significant paragraph in the whole book which expressed Dawkins’ actual scientific viewpoint, amidst all the celebrity waffle about Douglas Adams, and childish attacks upon outdated theologian
s and American creationists, desperate to try to keep some kind of morality going in their own country and community, which they quite rightly assume is unlikely without some kind of religious or spiritual belief – another point we shall come to shortly?
Incidentally, anyone who is a student of writing rather than merely science can see that this mutual admiration club that Dawkins and Douglas Adams had apparently formed some time before Adams’ death has extended into Dawkins’ writing style. When Dawkins says as above “the end product is very, very improbable indeed”, it’s OK for Douglas Adams to talk that way, he’s a science fiction writer, but it’s definitely not OK for a serious rational scientist to talk in such terms.
Science must talk in exact terms, and if it can’t, how can it be regarded as serious science at all?
Newton does not say “Action and Reaction are probably equal and opposite forces.” They are either equal or not. There is no issue of probability involved.
So let us be specific. Dawkins’ entire philosophy is based on this assumption, this belief we might even say – since he is using it to deny any God is required – that “big improbabilities” can be split up into a large number of “little improbabilities.”
This is the question that needs to be explored in the greatest detail.
That is, let us ask how acts of “creation” in general are effected. How does for example Beethoven create a symphony? How does Picasso create a painting like Guernica? How does some artist like Paul McCartney or whoever create a hit song?
Even Paul McCartney cannot create a hit song every day, he may now never have another, who knows?
And as we have seen, these rare few beings out of millions or even billions alone have the power to effect these acts of “creation”, which somehow register as meaningful in the lives of millions or billions of others, who themselves could not have created them.
This is obviously a power of the brain. It is a power of intelligence. It is a holistic vision, it takes a lot of diverse elements (you know, like the 92 naturally occurring elements of the periodic table) and synthesizes them into something meaningful.