Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion

David Sloan Wilson, writing for the Skeptic, refutes Richard Dawkins stance on religion in The God Delusion. It's heartening to see the Skeptic grasp the evolutionary utility of religion, rather than dismiss it outright as do Dawkins and Sam Harris, among others. Religion is an evolutionary adaptation that has been crucial to the development of human cultures -- if it wasn't, it wouldn't be so widespread.

The article is long and well-reasoned, but there isn't single quote I can drop to entice you, so go read the article: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion.


2 comments:

~C4Chaos said...

blasphemy! this can't be! Richard Dawkins is Reader's Digest's Author of the Year awardee! he's on his way of being the next great Carl Sagan :)

seriously, i'll go ahead and check out that article now :)

~C

~C4Chaos said...

ok. just finished reading the very long critique. i almost fell asleep because of the scientific tone of the writing. but still, it's an excellent critique of Dawkins on a scientific playing field. here's a good quote:

"Religions are diverse, in the same way that species in ecosystems are diverse. Rather than issuing monolithic statements about religion, evolutionists need to explain religious diversity in the same way that they explain biological diversity.

These results raise as many questions as they answer. We did not evolve to feel good but rather to survive and reproduce. Perhaps religious believers are happily unaware of the problems that nonbelievers are anxiously trying to solve. As a more subtle point, people pass back and forth between the categories of “nonbeliever” and “believer” as they lose and regain faith. Perhaps some nonbelievers are psychologically impaired because they are the recent casualties of religious belief. Only more scientific legwork can resolve these issues, but one thing is sure: Dawkins’ armchair speculation about the guilt-inducing effects of religion doesn’t even get him to first base."

and thanks to this article, i followed the breadcrumbs and found this video: Evolution and Religion (lecture by David Sloan Wilson).

keep on (hyper)linking.
~C