3 What are the origins of religion?
What are the origins of religion?
The core, incontrovertible, foundational assumption of atheism is that there is no God. So why would anyone believe in God? For Dawkins, this is an utterly irrational belief – like believing in a teapot orbiting the sun.1 Sure, this is a flawed analogy. Nobody that I know believes such nonsense. But that’s what Dawkins wants his readers to think – that believing in God is on the same level as cosmic teapots. It’s yet another recycled analogy that is all part of his general strategy of systematically mocking, misrepresenting and demonizing competing world views, which are always presented in the most naïve light possible.
So what new insights does Dawkins have to offer? The best way of understanding Dawkins’ approach to the origins of religion is to see him as taking a traditional atheist proof for the non-existence of God, and developing it in a new way. It all goes back to Ludwig Feuerbach, a radical German philosopher who disliked religion. In 1841, Feuerbach argued that God was basically an invention, dreamed up by human beings to provide metaphysical and spiritual consolation.2 His argument runs like this.
There is no God.
But lots of people believe in God. Why?
Because they want consolation.
So they ‘project’ or ‘objectify’ their longings, and call this ‘God’.
So this non-existent ‘God’ is simply the projection of human longings.
It’s a fascinating argument, and has had a deep impact on Western culture. It has its problems, however. For a start, wanting something is no demonstration that it does not exist. Human thirst points to the need for water. This argument also suggests that all world views are a response to human needs and desires – including, of course, atheism, which can be seen as a response to the human desire for moral autonomy.
Let’s look at two variants, each profoundly relevant to our theme. One locates the origins of belief in God in sociological, the other in psychological, factors. Karl Marx argued that the reason why people needed the delusion of God was that they were socially and economically alienated. When the socialist revolution came, there would be no need for religion. It would just die out, naturally. Which was just as well, as it was a serious obstacle to human progress. Sigmund Freud argued that the origins of belief in God lay in the longing for a father-figure. Once it is appreciated that God is a ‘wish fulfilment’ conjured up as a result of human projection, we can move beyond this infantile illusion, and grow up.3
As we shall see, Dawkins also offers a naturalist explanation of religion – in this case, one that is highly contrived and unpersuasive. Belief in God might be a by-product of some other evolutionary mechanism. Now here, he moves into territory explored by fellow-atheist Daniel Dennett in his recent book Breaking the Spell.4 Yet both Dawkins and Dennett adopt a very cognitive view of religion, defining it virtually exclusively in terms of ‘belief in God’. Yet this is certainly not the sole aspect of religion; nor is it even necessarily the most fundamental. A more reliable description of religion would make reference to its many aspects, including knowledge, beliefs, experience, ritual practices, social affiliation, motivation and behavioural consequences.5
Despite offering a somewhat attenuated account of religion, Dennett argues that its defining characteristic of belief in God might have evolved for a number of reasons. For instance, we might have a ‘god centre’ in our brains. Such a centre might depend on a ‘mystical gene’ that was favoured by natural selection because people with it tend to survive better. Or religious ideas ‘could have spread from individual superstitions via shamanism and the early “wild” strains of religion’.
Dawkins adds to such speculations, suggesting that essentially natural tendencies may have become misdirected, ending up as something fundamentally religious. Religion is thus an ‘accidental by-product’ or a ‘misfiring of something useful’.6 Yet this seems more than a little inconsistent with his own ‘universal Darwinism’, which eschews any notion of purpose – a view famously summarized in his statement that the universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’.7 How can Dawkins speak of religion as something ‘accidental’, when his understanding of the evolutionary process precludes any theoretical framework that allows him to suggest that some outcomes are ‘intentional’ and others ‘accidental’? It is inconsistent with a Darwinian view of the world. For Darwinism, everything is accidental. Things may have the appearance of design – but this appearance of design or intentionality arises from random developments. That, after all, was the nub of Dawkins’ critique of Paley in The Blind Watchmaker.
Yet this is a minor point. The main criticism of this ‘accidental by-product’ theory is the lack of serious evidence offered on its behalf. Where’s the science? What’s the evidence for such a belief? We find speculation and supposition taking the place of the rigorous evidence-driven and evidence-based arguments that we have a right to expect. Dawkins’ theories of the biological origins of religion, though interesting, must be considered to be highly speculative. His arguments about the psychological origins of religion are littered with ‘maybes’ and ‘mights’, verbal signposts that there is no substantial evidence for the highly tenuous and speculative ideas he explores with his readers.
On reading this section, I felt that I was being bludgeoned into submission to his ideas by the sheer force of his assertions, rather than led along willingly on account of the weight of the evidence on the one hand, and Dawkins’ skill in presenting it on the other. The arguments begin with cautious ‘could be’ statements, advancing tentative hypotheses for consideration. Yet they rapidly become bold ‘is’ statements, making assertions without the firm evidence normally thought to be required for rigorous scientific argument.
I would place Dawkins (and Dennett) in the broad tradition of naturalist explanation of religion which includes Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. Whatever the benefits of religions might be, these writers believe that they arise entirely inside human minds. No spiritual realities exist outside us. Natural explanations may be given of the origins of belief in God. In the end, this is a circular argument, which presupposes its conclusions. It begins from the assumption that there is no God, and then proceeds to show that an explanation of God can be offered which is entirely consistent with this. In fact, it is basically an atheist reworking of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’, arguing that a consistent account of things may be offered without being obliged to propose the existence of God.
At an early stage in The God Delusion, Dawkins represents atheism as the last outcome of a final process of whittling down irrational beliefs about the supernatural.8 You begin with polytheism – believing in lots of gods. Then as time progresses, and your thinking becomes more sophisticated, you move on to monotheism – belief in only one God. Atheism just takes this one step further. As Dawkins playfully remarks, it just involves believing in one less god than before. It’s the obvious next step in the progress of religion. Yet the history of religion obliges us to speak about the ‘diversification’, not the ‘progression’ of religion. The evidence simply isn’t there to allow us to speak about any kind of ‘natural progression’ from polytheism to monotheism – and thence to atheism.9
Yet there is a much deeper question here, one that Dawkins does not even begin to address. What is the difference between a world view and a religion? The dividing line is notoriously imprecise and, many would say, is constructed by those with vested interests to defend. A ‘world view’ is a comprehensive way of viewing reality, which tries to make sense of its various elements within a single, overarching way of looking at things. Some, of course, are religious; many are not. Buddhism, existentialism, Islam, atheism and Marxism all fall into this category. Some world views claim to be universally true; others, more in tune with the postmodern ethos, view themselves as local. None of them can be ‘proved’ to be right. Precisely because they represent ‘big picture’ ways of engaging with the world, their fundamental beliefs ultimately lie beyond final proof.
And here is the point: world views can easily promote fanaticism. Dawkins treats this as the defining characteristic of religion, airbrushing out of his somewhat skimpy account of violence any suggestion that it might be the result of political fanaticism – or even atheism. He is adamant that he himself, as a good atheist, would never, ever fly airplanes into skyscrapers, or commit any other outrageous act of violence or oppression. Good for him. Neither would I. Yet there are those in both our constituencies who would. Dawkins and I may both disavow violence, and urge all within our groups to do so. But the harsh reality is that religious and anti-religious violence has happened, and is likely to continue to do so. So important is this point that we shall deal with it in greater detail later.
Dawkins stands in the naturalist tradition that aims to explain the origins of religion without invoking the existence or activity of a god. Like Freud before him, Dawkins sets out to demonstrate that all aspects of religion may be accounted for in terms of a single theory – in this case, ‘universal Darwinism’.10 In undertaking such an ambitious project, he has many intellectual hurdles to overcome. In this chapter, we shall consider whether his approach matches up to the rigorous evidential requirements that are demanded by the natural sciences.
Defining religion
A clear definition of precisely what is being studied is essential to the serious scientific study of any entity or phenomenon. The failure of past attempts to offer a reliable and warranted definition of ‘religion’ is widely conceded in the vast scholarly literature devoted to this subject. Of the myriad of definitions of religion offered over the last 150 years, each of which presented itself as being ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’, none has been sufficiently resilient or representative to command continuing support.11 Furthermore, definitions of religion are rarely neutral, but are often generated to favour beliefs and institutions with which one is in sympathy and penalize those to which one is hostile, often reflecting little more than the ‘particular purposes and prejudices of individual scholars’.12
Dawkins deals with this serious problem by evading it, choosing not to engage with the issues that have famously scuppered previous attempts to generalize about the roots of religion. His analysis rests on the ‘general principles’ of religion13 he finds in Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough – a highly impressionistic early work of anthropology, first published in 1890.14 It is a highly puzzling strategy. Why on earth should Dawkins’ theory of the roots of religion depend so heavily on the core assumptions of a work which is well over a century old, and now largely discredited?
The rise of modern anthropology can be seen as a direct reaction to the manifest failures of Frazer’s Golden Bough. What were those failings? First, it adopted what can only be described as an imperialist attitude to the cultural context of religion, in order to generate universal explanatory concepts. Second, it totally lacked any serious basis in systematic empirical study. Dawkins seems to repeat both these errors, drawing ambitious theories about the origins of faith without any serious attempt to engage representatively with the large body of scholarly literature which reports and assesses the empirical evidence since Frazer, instead making highly questionable generalized assertions about the nature of religion.
So why does Dawkins want to follow Frazer in reducing religion to some single universal trait, neglecting the mass of research that suggests it is much more complex and diverse, incapable of being forced into a simple set of universal beliefs or attitudes? The answer is clear: because by doing so, he believes it can be analysed within the ‘universal Darwinism’ that represents his core belief system. ‘Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.’15
But that’s precisely the problem: it is now known that religion does not exhibit the ‘universal features’ that Dawkins’ preferred approach demands, and which late-Victorian works of the anthropology of religion erroneously regarded as axiomatic. It is one of the many points at which The God Delusion depends on discarded nineteenth-century assumptions to make a twenty-first-century case against religion. Dawkins tends to evade this point by directing his criticisms against the three great monotheistic religions. But in the first place, these represent only three of many global religious paradigms; in the second, there are highly significant differences between the three (one obvious example: Christianity does not demand ritual food practices or customs, such as kosher or hallal); and in the third, there are huge differences within individual religions (compare traditional Roman Catholic Christianity with evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity).
Even more worryingly, Frazer’s strategic assumption of ‘the essential similarity of man’s chief wants everywhere and at all times’ leads Dawkins to offer an account of the origins of religion based on an alleged ‘universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire’. It is a theory that can be traced back to Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud. Neither these seminal thinkers nor their many critics are mentioned, let alone engaged in defence of such an ambitious proposal. Dawkins’ authority at this point? William Shakespeare.
Dawkins identifies ‘wish fulfilment’ as a global feature of religion. Now there is a grain of truth in his analysis. The way that human beings perceive the world is indeed coloured by our agendas and expectations. ‘Cognitive bias’ is a fundamental characteristic of human psychology.16 Yet in general this unconscious personal bias is manifested not so much in our believing what we would like to be true, as in maintaining the status quo of our beliefs. The driving force is not wishful thinking, but conservative thinking – that is, thinking that conserves an existing world view.
For example, many people have a positive view of themselves, a sense that the universe is benevolent, and that other people like them. They maintain this view by attending to data that fit this view, and minimizing that which does not. Others (such as depressed or traumatized people) see themselves as worthless, view the universe as malevolent, and think others are out to get them. Once more, they discount or minimize the significance of any data that do not fit in with this view.
We thus have a built-in resistance to change our position – a resistance which is underpinned by ‘cognitive biases’ which predispose us to fail to notice or to discount data that are inconsistent with our view. On the whole we do this because it is efficient – it is effortful and upsetting to have to change one’s mind – even if the change is in a positive direction. The God Delusion is a wonderful case study of exactly this kind of unconscious bias. Without full awareness that he is doing so, Dawkins foregrounds evidence that fits his own views, and discounts or distorts evidence that does not.
While cognitive bias helps us cope with a complex world there are some situations where it is very important to minimize its effects. Scientific investigation is one of these. The entire point of the scientific method is to reduce, and where possible eliminate, such bias, to strive to give as objective and fair an account as possible. Dawkins does not apply this method to his consideration of religion.
Do cognitive biases play a part in religious belief? The evidence is that they are as important here as in any other area of life. An understanding of this aspect of cognitive processing may well shed light on the conservatism of established religion – the factors that maintain it in the face of threat.17 But they are less important in understanding the origins of religion and new religious movements, which are characterized by opposition to the status quo rather than conservatism.
Belief in God and religion
How are belief in God and religion related? Dawkins fails to make this critical distinction, seeing ‘religion’ and ‘belief in God’ as little more than two sides of the same coin. This inadequate approach does not even begin to deal with the problem of non-theistic religion, an issue which is dismissed with little more than a curt, soon forgotten, acknowledgement.
The God Delusion tends to limit its engagement with religion to demonstrating that its ideas are ridiculous or pernicious, violating the integrity of the human mind or contaminating the purity of the human heart. Yet this emphasis on the ideas and rituals leads, as we have seen, to a somewhat restricted account of religion, which fails to do justice to its many levels of meaning. Any account or description of religion would also have to include at the very least knowledge, experience, group affiliation, motivation and ethical consequences.18
Dawkins wants to offer a Darwinian explanation of religion. So is he accounting for belief in God? Or for religiosity? Or both? There are many who believe passionately in God, but eschew ‘religious’ behaviour – evangelicals represent a case in point. Again, it is possible to have ‘religious’ attitudes, without any attending belief in God – Buddhism is a case in point. Many individuals have a reverential attitude towards nature which is not ultimately theistic, but could still reasonably be termed ‘religious’.
The fundamental argument here is that ‘religion’ is (though he does not use this term) an epiphenomenon – a random by-product of something else, that has selective advantage. But in order to pursue this line with any rigour it is vital to define what aspect of religion is being considered. Dawkins refers to ‘beliefs’, and by this he appears to mean something corresponding to creedal statements, such as ‘belief in the existence of the Trinity’. This is a simplistic approach to an area that is much more complex than might appear on superficial inspection.
The type of belief that might usefully be subjected to his sort of Darwinian explanation are what are sometimes referred to as ‘hot cognitions’, such as ‘God likes me’ or ‘I am a sinner’, which express felt ‘meaning’, rather than propositional statements such as ‘God is good’ or ‘Jesus’ mother was a virgin’. The psychological processing systems involved in these two different types of statements are quite different in their characteristics, and likely to fulfil distinct psychological functions.19 The compelling nature of religious faith almost certainly relates to processing by what psychologists John Teasdale and Philip Barnard refer to as the ‘implicational’ subsystem rather than the ‘propositional’ subsystem. This is an emerging field, which requires careful analysis, and does not seem to fit easily into Dawkins’ exclusively propositional account of religious belief that focuses on dogmas.
Dogmas are not only propositional; they arise in a social context, and fulfil a social function. For instance Christian dogmas define agreed community ‘belief statements’, which emerged after an extended period of reflection on the fundamental resources and experiences of the Christian community.20 They can be thought of as group identity markers, consensual social constructs that try to systematize religious experience and individual beliefs. They survive in part for reasons of affiliation and conservatism, and partly because they express indirectly something that may be of more fundamental importance.
Psychologists of religion are only just beginning to get to grips with this important distinction – trying to identify personal ‘hot cognitions’ rather than affiliative group statements that may be assented to, but may not be felt to be true.21 People may be prepared to assent to propositional contradictions (renaming them ‘paradoxes’) and counterfactual belief statements (renaming them ‘mysteries’) precisely because the cognitive processing associated with their personal religion is not taking place at this level at all, but at an intuitive level that is not easily amenable to description in propositional terms.
More work clearly needs to be done here on defining and describing the nature of religious belief. A failure to offer a defensible definition of religion ultimately negates Dawkins’ attempts to offer a Darwinian account of its origins. Nevertheless, one issue he raises in exploring the question should be noted.22 Dawkins argues that human beings are psychologically primed for religion because the psychological processes that predispose us to religion (however defined) confer selective advantage in other areas of life. Religion has no selective advantage in its own right. It is an epiphenomenon – and a socially and psychologically dysfunctional one at that.
So are we psychologically primed for religion? This is an important question, and it clearly requires a psychological answer. It soon becomes clear that Dawkins is not qualified to give one. Dawkins shows himself to be ill at ease with psychology and neuroscience, despite the critical importance they play at this juncture in his argument. For example, his breezy assertions that the brain is a ‘collection of organs (or “modules”)’ for doing various cognitive functions, and that religion ‘is a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules’23 are muddled – conflating the language of information processing and brain physiology.24 Elsewhere, he seems to confuse brain mechanisms with psychological constructs.25 This isn’t the brilliant popularization of difficult scientific ideas that we saw in The Selfish Gene; it’s just a confused and misleading account of someone else’s area of specialization.
In his discussion of brain activity as a possible cause of religion, Dawkins might have cared to recognize that this activity is actually the cause (in the sense of being a necessary condition) of all human experience and behaviour26 – including his own. There is nothing specific to religion here. More seriously, he draws attention to the hypothesis of Michael Persinger that religious experience is associated with pathological brain activity,27 subtly implying that religion is itself therefore pathological. Readers ought to be aware (for Dawkins does not mention it) that Persinger’s experiments have been severely criticized for their conceptual and design limitations, and that his theory is no longer regarded as plausible.28
The problem that Dawkins confronts in offering a psychological account of the origins of religion can be stated like this. It is certainly possible to argue that some aspects of human cognitive processes may help explain how religious ideas are generated or sustained. Yet as the psychologist Fraser Watts points out, it is necessary to recognize a multiplicity of causes in such areas. Some scientists have fallen into the habit of asking: ‘What caused A? Was it X or Y?’ But in the human sciences, multiple causes are the norm. For example, consider the question, ‘Is depression caused by physical or social factors?’ The answer is that it is caused by both. As Watts points out, the history of such research ‘ought to make us wary of asking whether an apparent revelation of God really is such, or whether it has some other natural explanation, in terms of people’s thought processes or brain processes’.29 To put it crudely, God, human brain processes and psychological processes may all be causal factors in human religious experience. Dawkins himself uses the example of romantic love.30 The experience of romantic love may be said to be caused by the words and actions of one’s lover, the sense one makes of them, and activity in those areas of the brain particularly concerned with emotional processing. The ultimate cause is the beloved, and it can be argued that, whatever the proximal causes, the ultimate cause of religious experience is God.
In considering the psychological origins of religion, it is far from clear why Dawkins neglects to engage with Freud. Freud’s own heroic but incoherent and ultimately abortive attempts to explain religion in terms of psychopathology illuminate some of the difficulties encountered, as the Belgian psychologist Antoine Vergote has pointed out. Freud rightly saw that religion was the ‘most complex phenomenon in civilization’, making it impossible to explain by any single factor. No individual psychological process could be said to generate the idea of God. Vergote’s analysis of Freud’s attempts, however, made it clear that ‘the validity of religious belief can neither be substantiated nor refuted by scientific reasoning’.31
And in the midst of this interesting and potentially important argument, Dawkins reintroduces two of the most unpersuasive, pseudoscientific ideas to have made their appearance in discussions of the roots of religion in recent years – the idea of God as a ‘virus of the mind’, and the ‘meme’. An already faltering argument is simply given the kiss of death by the recycling of these implausible notions, which fail to command assent within the mainline scientific community. In what follows, we shall look at both of these.
The virus of the mind
Every now and then, highly entrepreneurial individuals develop new ideas or concepts, which they believe offer better explanations of the observational evidence than those of their rivals. Some – such as the electron and gene – find acceptance within the scientific community, and become part of its received wisdom. Others wither and die, simply because they are found to be of little use, explanatorily redundant or inadequately grounded in experiment. ‘Phlogiston’ and ‘caloric’ are examples of these defunct concepts, now relegated to textbooks of the history of science as interesting mistakes.
The same must be said of the two notions that we are about to explore – the idea of the ‘virus of the mind’ and the ‘meme’. Neither has made it into the annals of scientific orthodoxy. Both hover on the fringes, defended chiefly on account of their anti-religious potential (which is easily overstated), rather than their evidential foundations.
Of these two, the more implausible is the notion of a ‘virus of the mind’. During the 1990s, Dawkins introduced the idea of God as some kind of mental virus that infected otherwise healthy minds. It was a powerful image, which appealed to a growing public awareness of the risk of physical infections from HIV, and software infections from computer viruses. Viruses were nasty and destructive – precisely the message that Dawkins wished to convey about belief in God.
Since belief in God is utterly irrational (one of Dawkins’ core beliefs), there has to be some way of explaining why so many people – in fact, by far the greater part of the world’s population – fall victim to such a delusion. Dawkins argues that it is like being infected with a contagious virus, which spreads throughout entire populations. Yet the analogy – belief in God is like a virus – seems to then assume ontological substance. Belief in God is a virus of the mind. Yet biological viruses are not merely hypothesized; they can be identified, observed, and their structure and mode of operation determined. This hypothetical ‘virus of the mind’, in contrast, is an essentially polemical construction, devised to discredit ideas that Dawkins does not like.
So are all ideas viruses of the mind? Dawkins draws an absolute distinction between rational, scientific and evidence-based ideas, and spurious, irrational notions – such as religious beliefs. The latter, not the former, count as mental viruses. But who decides what is ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’? Dawkins does not see this as a problem, believing that he can easily categorize such ideas, separating the sheep from the goats.
Except it all turns out to be horribly complicated, losing the simplicity and elegance that marks a great idea. For instance, every world view – religious or secular – ends up falling into the category of ‘belief systems’, precisely because it cannot be proved. That is simply the nature of world views, and everyone knows it. It prevents nobody from holding a world view in the first place, and doing so with complete intellectual integrity in the second. In the end, Dawkins’ idea simply implodes, falling victim to his own subjective judgement of what is rational and true. It’s not an idea that is taken seriously within the scientific community, and can safely be disregarded.
I was severely and quite properly critical of this pseudoscientific idea in Dawkins’ God, noting that it lacked any basis in evidence, and seemed to depend on Dawkins’ highly subjective personal judgement as to what was ‘rational’ or not.32 This discredited idea now seems to have a purely walk-on part in the narrative of The God Delusion, which alludes to a 1993 article in which Dawkins wrote about God as a ‘virus of the mind’.33 It’s clearly about to be written out of the plot altogether, and not before time. Its passing will not be mourned.
Long live the meme!
The meme is much the more interesting idea, and plays a significant role in Dawkins’ attempt to devise a plausible account of the roots of religion. His appeal to the ‘meme’ occurs late in his discussion of the roots of religion,34 by which time his argument had become so contrived and unpersuasive that it stood in need of redemption. Dawkins defends the idea with a proprietorial intensity, as well he might – after all, he invented it. Maybe that’s why he entitled the section, ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my memes’.
Dawkins first introduced the idea back in 1976, towards the end of his Selfish Gene. In my view, this is one of his best books: his scientific analysis is bold and original; his capacity to communicate is evident for all to see; and his emerging anti-religious bias is kept on a tight rein. It’s a million miles from the unscientific anti-religious ranting of The God Delusion. The argument is that there exists a fundamental analogy between biological and cultural evolution: both involve a replicator. In the case of biological evolution, this replicator is the gene; in the case of cultural evolution, it is a hypothe-sized entity, which Dawkins termed a ‘meme’. In an image-rich passage, he spoke of these memes ‘leaping from brain to brain’.
For Dawkins, the idea of God is perhaps the supreme example of such a meme. As we have already noted, Dawkins dogmatically insists that religious belief is ‘blind trust’, which refuses to take due account of evidence, or subject itself to examination. So why do people believe in God, when there is no God to believe in? The proposed answer lies in the ability of a ‘God-meme’ to replicate itself in the human mind. The ‘God-meme’ performs particularly well because it has ‘high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture’.35 People do not believe in God because they have given long and careful thought to the matter; they do so because they have been infected by a powerful meme, which has ‘leapt’ into their brains.36
Yet has anyone actually seen these things, whether leaping from brain to brain, or just hanging out? The issue, it must be noted, has nothing to do with religion. It is whether the meme can be considered to be a viable scientific hypothesis, when there is no clear operational definition of a meme, no testable model for how memes influence culture and why standard selection models are not adequate, a general tendency to ignore the sophisticated social science models of information transfer already in place, and a high degree of circularity in the explanation of the power of memes.37
The meme is essentially a biological notion, arising from Dawkins’ core belief in ‘universal Darwinism’, which leads him to discount economic, cultural or learning-theory accounts of religion. But why should biology be able to explain culture? Isn’t this actually the area of study of cultural and intellectual historians, not to mention social anthropologists? Maurice Bloch, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is representative of the ‘exasperated reaction of many anthropologists to the general idea of memes’. The meme is a biological answer to an anthropological problem, and simply disregards and discounts the major successes of the discipline of anthropology in the explanation of cultural development – which took place without needing to bother with the unsubstantiated idea of a ‘meme’.38 The meme is conceptually redundant. The alternative models of cultural evolution developed within the scientific discipline dedicated to precisely this area of investigation are conveniently overlooked by those evolutionary biologists wishing to extend the competency of their discipline from the biological to the cultural.39
In The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out the idea of memes as if it were established scientific orthodoxy, making no mention of the inconvenient fact that the mainstream scientific community views it as a decidedly flaky idea, best relegated to the margins. The ‘meme’ is presented as if it were an actually existing entity, with huge potential to explain the origins of religion. Dawkins is even able to develop an advanced vocabulary based on his own convictions – such as ‘memeplex’.
So why are the arguments of leading critics of memetics within the scientific community not identified, and their highly significant criticisms confronted, fairly and squarely, point by point? It would, of course, have made Dawkins’ bold assertions about the ‘memetic’ origins of religion seem rather misplaced. It is clear that, before we get round to talking about whether these alleged ‘memes’ have any relevance to explaining the origins of religion, they need to be demonstrated as scientifically necessary. And the science just isn’t there.
Take one of Dawkins’ characteristically bold statements: ‘Memes can sometimes display very high fidelity.’40 This is a creedal statement posing as a statement of scientific fact. Dawkins is virulently critical of Christians who say things like ‘God is faithful’. Yet in this statement, he makes precisely the error of which he accuses others. He is translating an observation into his own theoretical language, which is not spoken elsewhere within the scientific community. The observation is that ideas can be passed from one individual, group or generation to another; Dawkins’ theoretical interpretation of this observation – which is here presented simply as fact – involves attributing fidelity to what most regard as being a non-existent entity.
Dawkins, in my view, makes his critique of religion dependent on a hypothetical, unobserved entity, which can be dispensed with completely in order to make sense of what we observe. But isn’t that actually a core atheist critique of God – that God is an unobserved hypothesis which can be dispensed with easily? The scientific evidence for memes is actually much weaker than the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus – something that Dawkins revealingly regards as open to question,41 while doggedly defending his dream of the meme. And since the evidence for memes is so tenuous, do we have to propose a meme for believing in memes in the first place?42
But Dawkins might respond that the alleged failure of his quest to show that the origins of religion are purely natural is actually of little importance. Who cares about how the roots of religion are to be explained, when it is so manifestly evil in practice? We must therefore turn to consider whether religion is indeed, as Dawkins would have us believe, the axis of evil that threatens to plunge civilization into a new Dark Ages.