While Dawkins quantifies Teilhard’s insights on evolution, where is he on the concept of God?
Today’s Post
For the past three weeks, we have been looking at how such a brilliant scientist, who prides himself on his secular grasp of the unquestionable processes in both human and material evolution, ends up providing insights which validate Teilhard’s insights into evolution.
What it doesn’t show is how Dawkins is unable or unwilling to follow his own insights into resonance with Teilhard’s understanding of God.
This week we will look into the other side of Dawkins’ thoughts on God as the name for the ultimate principle of this evolution.
Dawkins, Teilhard and God
We have seen how Dawkins reflects several aspects of Teilhard’s thinking when he says
“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “
We can parse this statement in three ways. First, he agrees with both Physics and Teilhard with the concept of a ‘first cause”. Secondly, he implicitly agrees with the efforts of Teilhard (and Blondel before him) that the language of traditional religion needs to be ‘divested of its baggage’ and therefore ‘reinterpreted’ if it is to have relevance in this age of scientific discovery. Third, he further resonates with Teilhard’s concept of an energy which evolves the universe in the direction of increasing complexity. From this perspective, Dawkins reveals himself less as an ‘a-theist’ and more of an ‘a-religionist’.
However, he makes little effort to address how these three simple insights can be carried forward to perform the ‘divestment of baggage’ that he says is necessary to correctly ‘conceptualize’ God. His quote from Carl Sagan offers an example:
“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”
The flaw in this argument lies in his assumption that all the ‘laws’ of the universe can be found in those currently understood in Physics. In the first quote above, he obviously acknowledges that these ‘laws’, by his definition, must include those which underly the rise of complexity if our ‘present complex existence’ is to be scientifically understood. And further that these laws, so far, lie outside those addressed by Physics. He seems unaware of his contradiction that when we follow his suggestion that these other laws be considered, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ can be explored to reveal a God whose ‘emotional satisfaction’ increases the intensity of traditional religion.
Dawkins makes the vague pronouncement that
“Natural science …explains how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.”
He, astute student of natural science, provides no examples of such explanation, nor does he offer any explanation himself. He focusses on debating the common religious assertion that evolution is ‘deliberately guided’, even though he seems comfortable with ‘a crane’ that ‘raises’ complexity over time.
Looking a little more closely at this ‘crane’ we can see further contradictions.
“The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation, it comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.” (Italics mine)
This would seem to contradict his statement that the action of the ‘complexification’ that he acknowledges is different between the causality seen in natural selection and that seen in the rise complexity of the universe.
“The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered. Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwins biological one”.
After first claiming that natural selection is the “only process ..capable of generating complexity”. He now asserts that “it doesn’t have to be natural selection”.
Contradictions become even more pronounced in assertions such as these. The ‘drive to increased complexity’ in evolution is seen as merely an aspect of natural selection, even though he admits elsewhere that NS cannot cause it during the ‘pre life’ phase of the universe or in the non-biological phase of cultural evolution. Nor does he even attempt to explain how the ‘replication’ of living things can result in ‘complexification’.
He nonetheless goes on to implicitly agree with Teilhard’s concept of a universe in the process of increasing its complexity, as at least as it occurs on Earth.
“On one planet ..molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. “
Dawkins eschews the idea that the religious idea of God can be reconciled with his valid insights on evolution because he conflates his reasonable concept of God (as the underlying ‘cause’ of complexification) with the Christian fundamentalist and anthropological understanding of God as a supernatural person who creates, judges, rewards and punishes. He seems incapable of understanding how his suggestion to “divest the idea of God of its baggage” can lead, as Teilhard asserts, to “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.
Next Week
This week we looked at the thinking of the brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins whose detailed understanding of the progression of evolution in the ‘pre-life’ and the ‘conscious-life’ eras of the unfolding of the universe give substance to Teilhard’s insights. We also saw how Dawkins’ anti-religion bias colors and therefore inhibits his ability to recognize how such insights, as recognized by Teilhard, have given new life to what has often been a dogmatic and increasingly irrelevant Christianity.
Next week, we will move on to yet another contemporary secular thinker, Johan Norberg, so see how his flood of data also can be seen t substantiate Teilhard’s insights.