In Defence of Dawkins

I must say I don’t understand why some people choose to follow Richard Dawkins on Twitter.  He is an outstanding academic and a clearly brilliant man, who thinks hard and asks question designed to encourage more thinking, yet most of his followers simply half read his questions and reply with the first thing that enters their heads.  That’s not how it works!  You need to answer with the tenth thing that you think of, after the previous nine have been considered and dismissed as flawed.

Yesterday Professor Dawkins posted the factually accurate information, that Trinity College Cambridge has more Nobel laureates that the entire Muslim world.  This seems to have caused quite a storm, especially amongst the hard of thinking or those who just operate on their preconceptions.

It is of course possible to quote facts in a manner intended to support bigotry, to use them as an attack.  He has been accused of racism, even though as Professor Dawkins points out, Islam is not a race.  However, in defence of his critics, the history of the persecution of the Jews has often referred to the Jewish race, even though there is no such thing, so our language and our culture has previous when it comes to grouping a faith together and labelling it race.  A proxy race is you like?

He could, it has been suggested, have said that Trinity College has more Nobel’s than all the black laureates combined, which would also, they say, have been a true statement.  But we all know that fact is because of a deliberate historical exclusion, an exclusion we all hope has ended now.  Another scientist I follow on Twitter is Neil deGrasse Tyson, considered by many, myself included, as the new Carl Sagan.  Science complements probably don’t come higher, except possibly been called the new Richard Feynman, and we may be waiting some decades for that.  That Mr Tyson is black has never once been pertinent, he’s simply a brilliant and engaging astrophysicist.  I hope that our scientific institutes and the Nobel committee are as blind to race as I am.

I’ve read a number of Professor Dawkins’ books and while some of the points are rather laboured and his arguments can be quite convoluted, once you take the time to go through them with care they are very rigorous and compelling. I can certainly find no fault with his very detailed reasoning.  So I don’t believe he is a racist, as racism is an intellectual bust.  The most obvious, and from the racists view point most important difference between the regional populations of the earth is the expression of the pigment Melanin, controlled by a number of genes; MC1R, KITLG, SLC45A2, and a dozen others.  Do any of these genes affect the ability to do great work?  Do they affect intelligence, or imagination, or genuinely new and radical thinking?  No.  There are doubtless genes that do have an effect on those qualities but the list is likely to be vast and environment could well play the greater role.  Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, he understands all this, far far better than me anyway.

So if it is not racism, what is it?  Well about a quarter of the world’s population is Muslim, which means they should have a quarter of the world’s very clever people.  I doubt very much that Professor Dawkins is suggesting that they don’t; that somehow we are cleverer than they are, as that would be an indefensible position, and having worked through his arguments in the past I know he likes to hold well defended, well-reasoned ideas.

If we exclude the peace prize, then Nobels are awarded for genuinely new and original ideas.  Things that yesterday the human race had never considered.  That is why there is often such a gap between the idea been published and the award given, because it takes years of follow up research to show the idea is true.

In which case there must be something about the Muslim world that prevents these ideas from flourishing?

In his 2012 Dimblerby lecture, Sir Paul Nurse made the connection between freedom and scientific endeavour.  Moving the Earth from the centre of the universe, or showing animals weren’t created but evolved, were ideas that challenged the accepted orthodoxy.  It is only possible to do that in a society that allows it.

If, this evening, there was a knock on your door and the Prime Minister was there, you could, if so motivated, give him a piece of your mind; a proper dressing down.  And the only person who would suffer is the PM as it would be repeated on the news over and over for the next two days.  You, as a regular citizen can confront the national leader and suffer no reprisals of any kind.  Because we are free.

If you challenge the hierarchy in a dictatorship or theocracy, you tend not to be heard from again.

Science, is by and large funded by government, and government bodies that are religiously inspired do not tend to be keen on science, because every time science meets scripture, scripture loses.  None of the events in these books happened, there are no miracles, thermodynamics says so.  And don’t argue they are miraculous and beyond such rules.  No they are not.  The laws of physics apply at every point of time and space; that is what makes them beautiful.  If you are relying on an ancient book to give you political or social authority, then the last thing you want is a healthy science sector rendering the same book obsolete.  Besides all that free thinking and challenging accepted wisdom might give the general population ideas.

What I think Professor Dawkins was trying to say, in one hundred and forty characters, is can you think of an important factor at play in the Muslim world that leads it to be massively underrepresented in a list of awards that celebrate original, ground breaking ideas?

I’ve got one.  Have you?

Why all religion is wrong (I love science, part 3)

So far I have argued that rationality is the only way to judge fact from fiction; that something can only be considered correct if there is reason to believe it is correct.  There are lots things in the world that collide with this way of thinking; the vitamin tablet industry, herbs that cure cancer, any statement randomly selected from any random politician.  But the largest and most enduring collision must be religion.  Therefore I would say that all religion, irrelevant of brand, is wrong.  Not morally wrong; that would be a ridiculous assertion.  It’s not immoral to have faith, although the indoctrination of children is highly objectionable; I myself was christened without my consent.  Children do not yet realise that they can disregard what adults tell them.  If you fill them with tales of an afterlife and the many many ways they can earn punishment within it, they will literally believe in unending, infinite torture, which is in a real sense, abuse.

I, however mean wrong as in not correct, not accurate.

The universe can only contain whatever it contains.  That statement might seem very obvious, and not terribly productive, but let me elucidate.  All faiths rely on the supernatural, but the supernatural cannot exist.  The universe is what we call nature.  If the supernatural is real, then it’s not super because it then becomes part of the universe.  It’s just nature that we can’t explain; and if there is one thing we know for sure in science, it’s that we haven’t finished yet; there are lots of explanations still to be found.  Remember, we don’t invent science, we discover it.

This rather semantic argument is not my centre piece; it’s just my way of introducing an important point.  The method used to understand the universe is science, and science is different from every other philosophy or ideology that has ever existed because you can check to see if it is true.  Sciences main activity is checking itself by endlessly retesting ideas.  We return to the concept of doubt from part one.  If you doubt an idea is right you will examine it more closely, and test it to destruction.  If you believe it to be true, you will accept it and move on without a thought, and accepting anything without thought, I have already argued, is not a sensible act.

We learn about the universe by observing it and then finding an explanation for the observation.  The supernatural cannot be observed, and is therefore indistinguishable from the none existent. 

 

Everything we have ever learnt about the universe tells us it governed by rules, and that is not science imagining rules because it is reductionist and that’s all it does; of course science would say it’s all about rules.  Reductionism died nearly a century ago with the advent of quantum mechanics.  We now know that a system cannot be predicted precisely, and its function boiled down to a series of constants and absolutes.  Instead we deal with probabilities that a particular outcome is most likely.  A cup of coffee left on the side will cool down because the probability of it cooling down is vastly higher than it heating itself up.  The universe is far too small and young for that to have ever happened, but the probability is not zero.  These probabilities are not place holders for definitive knowledge; they are actually how the universe works.  Explaining that sentence is a book in itself.

And we know these rules apply everywhere.  Notice I say know, not believe.  There are ninety two naturally occurring elements and each one has a unique pattern of light emissions when energised; the spectral lines.  These lines aren’t just observed, they are predicted.  As an electron obits the proton in a hydrogen atom, it can only exist in specific energy states, and as it transits from one state to another it emits a photon to carry away the excess energy.  We can predict that there are four different quantities of energy that could be emitted by hydrogen, which relate to four different frequency of photon.  When we test hydrogen in a lab, we see the four predicted photons, and only those four.  When we look at the most distant object yet observed, a proto galaxy only five hundred millions years younger than the universe, we see the same spectrum.  The rules we have are neither temporary nor local, they are universal and permanent.

There are lots of different religions and over the millennia there have been countless others, each have their own theories about the nature of reality.  I doubt they are all correct.  In fact I doubt that any of them are correct, and cannot be without evidence.  So let’s consider the evidence.  There isn’t any.  Not a shred.  There is only subjective opinion from the personal experience of an individual and their faith.  That does not meet the exacting standards of the trinity; testable, measurable, repeatable.

But more than that, there can never be evidence, because evidence can be analysed, and dissected, and quantified, and so becomes science.  By declaring that it is mystical, and beyond human experience, and beyond human comprehension, when the formation of the universe, and the origin and evolution of life is not beyond human comprehension, religion shuts itself away in the dark; forever separated from mankind’s growing knowledge.

As someone who demands rationality, and someone who applies facts to his actions and decisions, I am mystified that self-contradicting fairy tales are given any credence by anybody.  I have not during this trilogy, mentioned Florence.  It is a safe bet to say that her knowledge of religion will be in the main, historical.  These old books give us a window in to the civilizations of North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East at the time they were written.  They don’t give us our moral systems, our political systems, our economic systems, or an explanation of the reality that we exist in.  Moses did not exist, Jesus probably didn’t exist, Mohammed probably did, but none of them were prophets.  There are no miracles.  There is no evidence.

I do like churches, wich may seem strange, but I do, as artefacts.  They carry an almost tangible weight of history with them.  Florence will experience that history, and she’ll learn how to behave in a church.  You are dignified, if there is praying you are silent, if there is singing you join in.  I would very much like us to visit some of the great temples in this world and experience them.  I am lucky enough to have some quality cathedrals near me; Salisbury is particularly good and was the Apollo program of its day.  I see them as an example of what humans can do when they put their minds to it, and they moves me as temples to human endeavour.

She will learn the creation story, the real one, the one we can check is true.  We are but temporary homes for the atoms that make us, that every part of you has been part of someone else before.  Everything you have ever seen on the surface of the Earth is made of atoms that were here before the Earth was.  We are actually star dust, endlessly recycled by living organisms.  This atheist view of reality is so much grander than any ancient fable could ever be; a grandeur enhanced by understanding the rules that create the order and beauty all around us.  The act of understanding is a great and glorious act.