Outgrowing God –– Richard Dawkins

Author: [[Richard Dawkins]]

Date Started: [[June 1st, 2021]]

Date Finished: [[June 15th, 2021]]

Type: Kindle

I think I wasn't the intended audience for the book, however I still got a few good pointers from the book. It would have been nice to have a longer list of arguments against the existence of god –– I was expecting more of that, rather than a detailed science class about evolution. Nevertheless, it was a nice and quick read.

Part 1: On the history of religion

Most of us are confident enough to say that we are atheists with respect to the gods that we don't believe in.

• If only one of them is right, why should it be the belief that you happen to have inherited in the country where you were born?
• If you believe the myths of your own faith, why are those myths more likely to be true than the myths of other faiths, believed equally fervently by other people?

Christianity verges on polytheism, and polytheistic religions often borrow concepts from monotheistic religions too. "Father, Son and Holy Spirit" are described as 'three in one and one in three', which according to Dawkins, just sounds like a formula for squeezing polytheism into monotheism.

Most sensible agnostics say that they don't know for sure, but think it's pretty unlikely any sort of god exists. Other agnostics may say it's not unlikely but we just don't know.

• There are people who don't believe in named gods, but still hanker after some 'higher power', 'pure sprit', or 'creative intelligence' about which we know nothing.
• Strictly speaking, we should all be agnostic about all those billions of things we can imagine and nobody can disprove. But we don't believe in them, and until somebody offers us a reason to believe, we're wasting our time.

As each generation of storytellers gives way to the next, the story becomes more and more garbled. Eventually, history –– what actually happened –– becomes lost in myth and legend. The Chinese Whispers Effect

• There is nothing wrong with myths, the are beautiful and sometimes even interesting - but they aren't history.
• It's a shame that people don't realize which books got included in the "canon" and which books were left behind. Everything depends on the people writing it, the translations and the way it's interpreted. People conveniently pick and choose what aligns with their values and beliefs, even if it's not true. [[cognitive dissonance]]
• How do believers decide which far-fetched tales to believe and which to ignore? Jesus could walk on water, but didn't kill the boy who bumped into him?

[[David Hume]] on miracles

• possibility 1: it really happened
• possibility 2: the witness is mistaken or is lying, was hallucinating, has been misreported, or something to that extent.
• When you have a choice between two possibilities, always choose the less miraculous.

Monty Python's film: Life of Brian #towatch

The power of childhood indoctrination: people brought up with religion have a hard time shaking it off, even if it is not logically sound. And then they pass it on to the next generation and so on.

Maybe there are patterns deeply buried in the human unconscious mind that pop out in the form of myths. [[Carl Jung]] called these unconscious patterns archetypes.

In both the stories - God testing Abraham and God testing Job, the God character is not only cruel but insecure. In fact, he refers to himself as jealous. Is this a "character" you want to worship?

• He had no problem killing foreigners and immigrants.
• Whether or not he is a fictional character, we are entitled to choose whether he's the kind of being we'd like to love and follow, like Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders tell us we should.

When it comes to politics, any kind of belief in a 'higher power' will do, even if it's a different one from their own. People would much rather vote for some one from faith, regardless of which, than an atheist.

• Are your morals higher only because you believe in a higher power watching your every action?
• Some threats are plausible - like if you are found guilty of stealing you might go to prison. Other threats are very implausible - like if you don't believe in God, you will spend eternity in a lake of fire. What do you think of people who threaten children with eternal fire after they are dead?
• If we have some independent criterion for deciding which biblical verses are good and which are bad, why bother with the Bible at all?

A lot of money gathered by churches goes to fund missionaries. They call it charitable giving. But is it charitable in the same sense as famine relief of helping people made homeless by earthquakes?

• Giving money to education seems like a good thing to do - but what if it's education that consists entirely of learning the Quran by heart?
  • Poorly educated people are more likely to end up in prison. And poorly educated people are less likely to be atheist.

[[Daniel Dennett]] - "belief in belief": not believing in God, but believing that belief in God is a good thing.

A typical type of theological reasoning is by 'analogy' –– reasoning symbolically. It happened this way once upon a time, so that's enough reason for it to happen the same way now.

• Another favourite dodge of theologians is to say it's only "symbolic". If you don't like something in the Bible, say it's only symbolic, it never really happened, it's a metaphor to convey a message. Of course they also get to choose which verses are metaphors and which are to be taken literally.

The Bible was written when men owned their wives and had slaves. Of course, we've moved on since those bad old days. But isn't that the whole point. Yes, we have moved on. And that's precisely why we shouldn't be getting our morals and do's and dont's from a Bible.

Many of the awful things done in the name of islam can be justified using later 'Medina verses' in the Quran, which contradict –– and supersede, according to the official doctrine –– earlier, nicer, 'Mecca verses'.

Judging people of an earlier time by the standards of your own time is one of the things good historians just don't do. But Jesus was supposed to be no ordinary man. He was supposed to be God.

Absolutists think some things just are right and wrong, no argument. Rightness and wrongness is just a fact, plain truth - like the statement that parallel lines never meet. Consequentialists judge right and wrong from the consequences of the action.

• Absolutists are often religious, though not a hard and fast rule.
• Various schools of moral philosophers, deontologists, believe you can justify rules on grounds other than simply looking up statements in a holy book.

[[Categorical Imperative]], [[Immanuel Kant]] - Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that is should become a universal law.

Part 2: On evolution

It is obvious that plants and animals don't come about by random chance. Most people think that the only alternative to luck is a 'designer'.

Every living being contains the genes that helped an unbroken line of ancestors to survive and the desire to pass those genes on.

It is obvious that God himself is more improbable than Paley's watch. Anything clever enough, complicated enough, to design things has to arrive late in the universe. Anything as complicated as a watchmaker must be the end product of a long, slow climb from earlier simplicity.

Paley thought that his watchmaker argument established the existence of God. But when properly understood, the very same argument goes in exactly the opposite direction: disproving God's existence.

DNA supervises the development of bodies, and DNA is in-turn 'supervised' over many generations by natural selection. So, indirectly, natural selection 'supervises' the development of bodies.

Each one following bottom-up rules, together produce an effect which looks top-down.

The tendency to be religious is a property of human brains, just like the tendency to like music and sex. It's therefore reasonable to guess that the tendency towards religious belief has an evolutionary explanation, like everything else about us. And the same foes for our tendencies, such they are, to be nice or moral.

• Did religious belief, belief in some kind of god or gods help our ancestors to survive and pass on genes for religious belief?
• Even if it's not always a lion, a general policy of believing that mysterious movements or sounds spell danger may save your life.
• Humans have a tendency to believe in agency.
  • We are likely to mistake a shadow for a burglar, we are unlikely to mistake a burglar for a shadow. We have a bias towards seeing agents, even when there aren't any. And religion is all about seeing agency around us.
  • The human brain is a pattern-seeker. 'What follows what' turns out to mean not 'what always follows what' but 'what sometimes follows what'.
    • Human pattern-seekers had to strike a balance between two risks: the risk of noticing a pattern when there isn't one (superstitious false positive) and the risk of failing to notice a pattern when there is one (false negative). A tendency to notice patterns was favored by natural selection. Superstition and religious belief were a byproduct of that tendency.
    • Natural selection would have favoured parents who warned their children. And natural selection would have favoured the genes that built into child brains a tendency to believe their parents.
• The spread of religious beliefs was through military conquests, or the fact that they are usually missionary religions. And this shared religion even helped societies bond together/cooperate through rituals and traditions.
  • 'Be hostile to anyone you've never met before' could have been equivalent to 'be hostile to anyone who is not a relative'. Or 'be hostile to anyone who looks different from you and people you know'. This is because ancient tribes lived together in small bands or villages, and everyone knew everyone else.
    • Such brain rules could provide the biological origins of racial prejudice. Or of hostility to anyone perceived as 'other', like recent immigrants.
• [[Reciprocal Altruism]] doesn't need conscious awareness. Natural selection can favour genes that reciprocate even though they don't realize it. So there is some Darwinian pressure to be nice, which could serve as the original basis for our sense of right and wrong.

Wherever there is a gap in our understanding, people try to plug in that gap with God.

Even solid ground behaves like liquid, given enough time.

"My best judgement tells me that it's much more likely that we invented God than that God invented us."

We humans exist. We know we exist because here we are, thinking about our existence. So, the universe we inhabit has to be the kind of universe that is capable of giving rise to us. That doesn't mean that God has to be the one that gave us our existence.