November 9th 2006

This article was written in response to a radio article that was broadcast on Australia's ABC Radio National, The Science Show, on 4th Nov 2006,.which you can hear or read at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1777528.htm#.
It featured interviews with Richard Dawkins, John Barrow and Paul Davies. This response deals with the section involving Richard Dawkins.

The religion equivalent, he proposes, was the tendency to obey the elders;

"I believe religion is like a computer virus. The child nervous system is programmed to believe what its parents tell it, and that means it cannot have any method of discriminating the good instructions, like don't go near the cliff edge, don't eat the red berries,  from bad instructions like do a rain dance in order to make the rains come or something of that sort."

Dawkins goes on to speculate about how ensuring the survival of your belief might lead to destroying others'; the only interesting part of this discussion is when the presenter Robyn Williams asks for his comments on the fact that religious behaviour so often leads to self-denial. Dawkins admits that he hadn't thought of that and will go away and do so.

And that's it. Well, I've ordered Daniel Denett's book to see if he has any more ot add, but I don't hold out much hope. What is it with these guys? Dawkins' patronizing dismissal of the whole of traditional belief as 'doing a harmless rain dance' just beggars belief. Basically his attitude seems to be 'I know it to be nonsense so I don't need to know anything about it before I dismiss it'. And down the drain goes a clue to how we came to be the way we are, dismissed as the evolutionary trait of 'doing what we're told'.

I'm sorry, Richard, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford you may be, but this just won't do, it just won't. Here's my attempt to show why.

There are two questions here. One is 'What's there about religious belief that maintains it?' The other is 'How did it come about in the first place?'

From what Dawkins says above, the answer to the first seems to be that we're programmed to do as we're told. The second isn't even worth asking. Now it seems to me that if you're not prepared to look at what religious belief is in its early days, then you're not qualfied to say anything about it today that's entitled to be taken seriously.

There are two routes towards understanding what religious belief was in its beginnings. One is to look at the most ancient records, both written and archaeological. The other is to look cautiously at those surviving traditions which seem most unadulterated by alien environments. There aren't many of the latter, but records exist that were made at a time when there were; records made by the Spanish in South America, or  by the British in Australia come to mind. Some of these records are thoughtful, expansive and inquisitive contributions (and some of course sound as if they were written by Dawkins' forefathers). From both these sets of records I would distill the following list of characteristics;

The world emerged out of Chaos, by a process either of consolidation or surveying; Either way, the result was something that could be measured, as opposed to the previous chaos, which could not. This chaos was just a mixed-up jumble of what Hesiod calld 'the roots of things'. creation was the process of imposing order on this mess. More often than not, this mess turns out to have been just the disordered remains of a previous existence.

The process of 'ordering' is sometimes started by a division (this is a kind of surveying; in the Old Testament Book of Job Yahweh claims to have 'stretched the measuring line' across the wastes.

Sometimes this 'primordial' division involves lifting sky and earth apart. In other traditions, this separation occurs to mark the end of a Golden Age, when sky and earth and been in harmony. Even when it appears to be primordial, it marks a beginning of something very different to what went before, and it is carried out as the result of the encroachment or intrusion of chaos. These two ideas may appear in one tradition, in apparent contradiction.

For the history of religious belief what is significant is that the division of earth and sky is the result of some kind of misdemeanour or transgression, though it is sometimes not easy to tell who or what is responsible. The results of the division however are pretty consistent and may include one or more of the folloing; the arrival of Time (this pretty nearly everywhere); the arrival of light to replace darkness; the arrival of death instead of timeless existence; the disruption of direct contact between heaven and earth, men and gods; the arrival of fire (as a 'boon' in exchange for this loss of contact).

A number of other features are present in the earliest descriptions:

1. The gods are stars (the Old Testament often calls them 'The Sons of Heaven' or the 'Hosts' and they later become 'Angels') and that these stars are the 'First People', who dwell in the land where the dead return to.
2. This world is not the Real World; that is somewhere else, and the souls of the dead go there, some say they must knowthe way.
3. .It was the 'First People' who had been generated from the first Being (the Universal Soul, we might best call it), and it was they who committed the first sin of not staying in their allotted places.

This last item is not universal, as far as I have investigated, but it does occur in Australia and in gnostic tradition, and I suspect that remnants of it will be found elsewhere. (Testing this hypotheiss is part of the subject of my current work.)

This is then, an outline of the elements of religious belief as they can be gleaned from ancient and recent traditions. Often records demonstrate that these ideas decay with time, rather than develop. Nevertheless the most unlikely images do survive (Historian of Science Giorgio de Santillana called them 'Stone-Age boulders carried along in the glacier of tradiotion).
It is therefore clear that explaining the origins of these ideas in evolutionary terms is going to take a good deal nmore attention than Dawkins seems prepared to give it. Dismissing it all as 'doing a rain dance' just is not good enough.