I first came across Dawkins in the 1980’s when I first began reading books about the philosophy of science. The Selfish Gene is a brilliant book, popular science writing at its very best, explaining complex ideas with ease. It was the New York Times who classed it as ‘the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius.’

I have mixed feelings about Dawkins. He is clearly a top level scientist and a great writer. He is however a lousy philosopher and a lousy metaphysician. His anti religious rants are not derivable from his scientific evidence, rather they are merely piggybacked on his science and the impression is given that the one follows from the other. It does not. Since The Selfish Gene Dawkins has produced a number of other great books, but seemingly with each step has moved further away from the popular science genre and increasingly taken on the role of waging all out war against Religion. The great writer of popular science has become a savage anti-religious polemicist – preaching rather than arguing his case. In some senses he has become what he detests most.

Now I wouldn’t wish you to think that I am here to mount a knock down argument in the defence of religion. I am not. Much of what Dawkins argues – even at his worst – I can quite happily agree with. I probably agree with 99.9% of everything he writes. But at the core I am deeply unhappy with the fundamentals for which Dawkins argues. The case against God has not been proven. The case for scientific materialism has not been successful. Dawkins embraces everything he says with a materialist spin as if that is how evolution needs to be presented. It doesn’t. And the offensive part of Dawkins words is not the evolution but that materialist spin.

My second gripe with Dawkins is with his proposal for what we should do with the concept of God. He wishes to banish it from speech altogether so as not to give succour to those who he despises. He argues that scientists should cease giving acknowledgement to the God of Spinoza and of Einstein – The Rational God – because the ordinary reader confuses this Pantheist version with the Theist one. This is somewhat backward thinking. If scientists believe the concept is a valid one to have then they should not be browbeaten into naming it something else. Spinoza’s God is a clearly defined, internally consistent concept and can give us deep insights into the ultimate nature of existence.

In conclusion I would like to point out that Dawkins anti-religious views are not something which can be proven false by some scientific evidence. Yet neither are they self evident from the scientific facts as Dawkins generally assumes. The philosophical positions that Dawkins imports into his belief system are not the easiest to defend, and in the case of materialism are generally considered to be false by everyone. There are philosophical positions different to those of Richard Dawkins which can represent the scientific facts in an equally adequate way. For Dawkins to represent his philosophical viewpoint as scientific fact is disingenuous at best and anti scientific at worst.

We see two apparently different strands making efforts to explain the universe. There is the scientific and the religious. Mainstream opinion tends to hold the view that science is the serious approach whilst religion just offers us an outdated idea dreamed up by superstitious and ignorant ancients.

Whilst agreeing the best route to an understanding of the world is a scientific one I am not so ready to dismiss ideas of the ancients as superstition or ignorance. As long as we are discussing human beings then we can be sure that those who left us ancient writings had every capability that we have in terms of rational thought. Also, with less distraction than modern life and I suspect a lot more time on their hands it could be argued that the ancients had plenty of opportunity to engage in philosophical speculation.

We can see great intellectual achievement in ancient history, the pyramids in Egypt or the plays, architecture and academic works of the Greeks. All of this was from a pre-Christian world the world of the Pagans. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato were Pagans and great thinkers too, yet for two thousand years the term ‘pagan’ has been used as an insult.

The time when Paganism was eradicated coincides with the time Christianity rose. The early years of Christianity were a time of terror. In the 3rd century AD. Roman Emperor Constantin decreed that Europe was to be unified under one religion and that religion was to be Christianity. Those who failed to practice the new religion were persecuted and most likely killed.

There was also great division within the new church between those who considered the ancient texts to be literally true and those who considered them to be metaphorically true. More killing ensued as the literalists wiped out all opposition to their views.

Since then those same texts have been subject to re-writing, translation and reinterpreting. It should be no surprise that such influential documents have also been subject to being rewritten and re-interpreted with political objectives in mind.

The first original God was a pantheist one. God and the universe were considered to be the same thing. Human beings on that scheme are a part of God. It is not difficult to speak of this God in a metaphoric way and claim that he is all powerful. All things, all power is God. If God and the universe are the same thing then God is clearly everywhere and in all things. If human beings are a part of God then God is all knowing… at least in the sense that all things that are known are by default God’s knowledge.

This pantheist description of reality was never intended to be an excuse for inventing some super powerful being. Rather it was a metaphoric aid for truly understanding the nature of our universe. Using a pantheist model is a perfectly rational explanation of the world.

The political class in the days of early Christianity used the ancient beliefs for their own ends and objectives. They took the metaphorical aids and used them in a literal way creating a theist God who could be used as a political tool. If God was all powerful He could do as He wished. If God was everywhere, He could watch what you were doing at all times. If He was all knowing He could even know what you were thinking. The Theist God was used to watch over the population, to monitor their thoughts and to dish out cruel punishments for all eternity to those who failed to follow the government line.

Charlatans and fraudsters still use veiled threats and promises of eternal joy in the afterlife to persuade others to engage in actions and to give up money. The Theist God still has its uses for those seeking social and political control or who are trying to get rich on the donations of others.

But people tend to need some spiritual comfort. Science presents a world to us which is cold, random, here by chance and which in some interpretations is cruel. We are told that we are little more than a bag of chemicals which give off blips of thought and after three score and ten years we go back to nothingness from where we, by chance, appeared. This is a poor representation of the facts. The materialist doctrine has long been discarded and its replacement physicalism, is vacuous as a philosophy and says nothing at all about the world. See Materialism and Physicalism for more details

The Rational God then is a scientific and philosophical book. It is wholly rational and it is about the idea of God. Further, it is a book which describes reality and all of science in one easy to understand basic scheme, placing our scientific knowledge into context.

Materialism philosophy comes in too different brands. There is metaphysical materialism which is concerned with the nature of things that exist. There is also political materialism which is concerned with human behaviour and social organisation. This article is concerned only with the former type of philosophical materialism.

In recent decades there has been a massive growth in popular science books written by eminent scientists with the non-science specialist in mind. Some of the best known of these have been extremely careless in their philosophical presentations. Materialism is presented by some, as fact, when it is not fact. Indeed, it is false and has been discarded as a philosophical position by scientists approximately a hundred years ago.

The main proponent of a materialist philosophy in recent years has been Richard Dawkins. I can well understand him taking on the unscientific groups who seek to undermine rational understanding but to do so by presenting science wrapped in a materialist philosophy is to my mind a grave mistake. Quite simply materialism as a philosophy is dead and has been dead for a century.

I am all in favour of promoting science and the rational understanding of the world in which we live, but pretending that science and rationalism need to embrace materialist philosophy does not help. There are ways of viewing the world that do not entail a philosophical materialist interpretation and there are ways of understanding the world non-materially that do not contradict any known scientific facts.

Too frequently science is presented as materialist to counter some irrational position when materialism itself is equally objectionable. Dawkins speaks of evolutionary theory as an idea that refutes God. It does not. There may be arguments against the theist God but evolutionary theory is not one of them. Dawkins also presents life and human existence as a purely random and accidental occurrence. This may well be a true representation of the universe, but it is by no means clear that we are here by mere randomness. There is certainly no scientific evidence to believe such a proposition and it is equally valid to assume that the universe must be here in the way it is and could not exist in any other way. This is a philosophical question that science has been unable to answer. There are many scientists who would argue the point if were not for the fear of being grouped amongst the irrational.

Philosophical materialism is not a scientific fact and presenting it as such does not help. Materialism philosophy needs to be exposed for the redundant philosophy that it is. If we wish to argue for a rational and scientific understanding of reality then dropping the already discredited theories is important. Rant over.

From a purely rational perspective it seems that we are forced to accept that there is only one thing that exists in the universe. What it is we should consider that thing to be is a very difficult problem to present a conclusion to. Materialism and monism are presented together as the roots of all explanation, but can materialism and monism stand up to scrutiny? In short, monism can but materialism cannot.

About a hundred years ago materialism was discarded as a philosophical theory, not that many scientists or philosophers seem too keen to point that fact out. The
philosophical materialism of the nineteenth century was replaced by the new idea of physicalism. They seem very similar and are expected to perform the same task in understanding the world we inhabit, but physicalism does not play the same role that materialism once did. I shall make a post to explain this more clearly later. For now we shall look at the shortcomings of materialism of itself.

Remember that materialism states that all that exists is matter, extended in three dimensions and all that exists can be explained by a reduction to that three dimensional matter. I shall discuss two different objections. The first takes a little consideration but the second, in my opinion, is a fatal blow to materialist philosophy.

The first objection asks you to consider a world in which explanation has reached the end. We have discovered the means by which matter and ideas are related and there are scientists who are capable of looking at different molecular structures and telling us which idea they represent. So imagine now that you are watching a film. A scientist has access to your brain and is able to monitor the molecular changes occurring in your brain. He can see your brain states changing and because he is a highly skilled and knowledgeable scientist he can work out which film you are watching and even whether you are enjoying the film or not.

The gap between matter and mind states, even on this intimate level is still too broad for us to claim that the gap has been closed. Even a scientist seeing such molecular detail is only seeing an arrangement of atoms and molecules. You watching the film on the other hand are experiencing a range of emotions and feelings which are nothing like the molecules that the scientist is observing. The experience and the physical arrangement of molecules are two completely different things. No amount of knowledge of molecular arrangement is ever going to make experience reducible to matter.

The second objection to a theory of materialism as monism is to consider our knowledge and what knowledge is. Imagine that there are two people with two conflicting ideas. The two ideas contradict each other so only one person or one idea can be true, the other must be false.

In a materialist philosophy we can state that each of these two ideas is reducible to a physical system of matter. Each idea represents a specific arrangement of molecules, one idea is true and the other is false. But what can it possibly mean to claim that a physical arrangement of molecules is false? An arrangement of molecules is a factual arrangement of molecules; it is a fact and cannot be false.

On a materialist conception of the world all ideas become reducible to molecular arrangements. Any molecular arrangement is a real part of the world and to call it false seems rather odd.

When discussing materialism and monism it is taken for granted that the two go together and are true. Monism is probably true and materialism is not. Materialism, as I have stated, has long since been discarded. Materialism was dropped by scientists because it could not fit the scientific facts. I shall deal with the shortcomings of its replacement theory, physicalism, in a later post.

During my surfing hours the other day I came across what to me is a little known organisation called Christian Science which was founded by Mary Baker Eddy towards the end of the 19th century. She wrote an article called Christian Science and Pantheism which was aimed at damning pantheism and promoting Christian Science.

What is Christian Science? Well it has a sufficient following to warrant an entry in Webster’s. I am not fond of definitions from dictionaries. The definition of a word is always dependent on the context of the sentence in which it is used, and it is this context and usage which leads to the definition in a dictionary. Too many people run to the dictionary for the definition as if it is somehow the
dictionary compilers who have invented the words and thus is how any word must be used. Dictionary definitions change as the usage of a word changes, not the other way round. To understand the meaning of a word we need to know how it was intended to be used by the speaker or writer of that word. However, in this article, I shall use the Webster’s definition because it is the first entry on the Christian Science webpage. In this case the context is perfect.

Christian Science is ”a religion and a system of healing founded by Mary Baker Eddy c. 1866, based on an interpretation of the Scriptures asserting that disease, sin, and death may be overcome by understanding and applying the divine principles of Christian teachings.”

Now clearly, even on Mary Bakers own terms her religious beliefs have proved to be a failure. I may be wrong. Maybe Mary Baker is alive and well and has managed to overcome death by the application of Christian teaching. However, I am sure that I would be aware of her continued existence if it were the case that she is still alive. Having not heard to the contrary I can only assume that her teachings proved false.

The second point of interest in the quote concerning the Webster definition is the one which references “interpretation.” Mary’s beliefs were based on an “interpretation” of the scriptures. This admission is particularly fascinating to me because I am forever complaining about biblical literalists. They are the real problem in the theism atheism debate. The literalists are clearly a bunch of fruitcakes so eating them for breakfast or with afternoon tea never interferes with my hunger to consume more serious philosophical debate. Yet literalists are often held to be hardcore believers, the true upholders of scripture and the real defenders of faith. But someone like Mary, who “interprets” the scripture to suit her own beliefs is still accepted as “one of us.” She may be frowned upon a little by the staunch literalist, but she is accepted into the fold of the Christian church because she uses the scripture as the source of her beliefs.

Now I ask, what would have been Mary’s fate and standing in the community if she had promoted the same doctrine and belief system, yet proclaimed that her beliefs were based on something other than the bible. What if she had said that she had come to realise, from rational reflection that the universe was a self healing entity; if only we could learn how to harness the universal energy that is all around us? If she had promoted the same beliefs based on universal consciousness she would have faced life living as a heretic. If she had expressed those beliefs, and further added that she thought that scripture was a nonsense she would have been run out of town and maybe even lynched.

The point that I am getting to is that the belief system that you profess is not the arbiter of your goodness or badness according to the religious. Rather it is what you identify as the ultimate source of your professed belief. Try it. The next time you find yourself in conversation with a member of the devout, give them a long, made up fictional account of your “beliefs” and then identify your interpretation of scripture as your source for that belief. You will probably be invited for tea and may even end up being offered the daughters hand in marriage. On another occasion that you find yourself among the devout, tell the exact same story again, but at the end merely mention that your beliefs have come to you through the heart or through rational enquiry and that you reject all that is written in scripture as false. The response will be very different. The source of your belief system is far more important than the belief itself.

Now as you may have noticed I tend to favour a pantheist account of existence. This article is not the place to go too deeply into the nature of pantheism but there are a few points which are relevant to this piece. First of all, much of scripture can be interpreted in a pantheist way. It is very easy; pantheism can be substituted for all that is written in the bible claiming to be a reflection of theism. I do not think that this is a coincidence. Pantheism is older than theism. I would make the claim that much of what we know as scripture was written about a pantheist god. It was only later; with the advent of Christianity that the god of theism was invoked and then used as a tool of oppression. A pantheist god is benign and harmless. It is only the god of theism that can punish for all eternity and who can strike you down at any moment. The pantheist god has no such power. If you were a political power, charged with the task of rewriting and reinterpreting scripture, which god would you use to help maintain public discipline and hence your own power?

The bible has been written in many different styles and literary genres. The symbolic, legendary, confessional, mythic, poetic, devotional and the historic are all examples of biblical genre. None of it was ever intended to be taken literally and none of it was ever written as a scientific document. Yet all of it can be expressed as a pantheist doctrine. Science and pantheism make very good bedfellows. Pantheism can be developed quite readily from an ‘interpretation’ of scripture. Einstein was forever invoking the pantheist god; there are very good reasons to do so.

The overthrow of theism will not come about by opposing theists head on. The reduction of theism to the history of ideas will come about by replacing it with something that is compatible with peoples need for spiritual sustenance. Pantheism fills that need, both from a rational and scientific perspective and by an appeal to an interpretation of scripture.