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How Richard Dawkins Catches Atheists and Skeptics in His Confirmation Bias Trap [1]
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Date: 2023-03-08
Richard Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist, who wrote The God Delusion, a treatise on the foolishness of religious belief in a god or gods as well as religion in general. He has become the de facto spokesman representing so-called New Atheism—intolerance towards religion and its dogmas.
Dawkins has amassed a considerable following for his writings and ideas among the secularist and freethought movements. These DDs (Dawkins disciples) assiduously defend him against the frequent attacks and criticisms by religious, mostly Christian, adversaries.
Nevertheless, he has a sense of humor and occasionally pranks his own fan base. Let me set up an example from God Delusion. There he has the chapter, The Roots of Religion in which he promotes religion as a non-functional byproduct. A byproduct in biological parlance is a trait that was not specifically selected for. Rather, religion is an accident that piggybacks on or side effect of other traits that are adaptive and selected for.
Early in the Roots of Religion chapter Dawkins says,
Darwinian evolution habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.
Sounds good to me. Natural selection is going to eliminate, on average, organisms whose phenotype (features and traits) aren't as efficient as others of their species. Something that is non-functional, like religion as Dawkins claims, should not be tolerated (non-anthropomorphically) by evolution, which punishes the smallest extravagance.
Literally two pages later he says,
Religious behavior is time-consuming, energy-consuming, often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a bird of paradise.
Anyone see a problem here? In each quote he's proclaiming a completely opposite position. In both quotes he uses a time metaphor—watching the clock versus time-consuming. In both he uses extravagance/extravagantly but with contradictory intention. Neither quote addresses or presumably supports religion being a byproduct.
In fact, this suggests that religion isn't a byproduct. If evolution punishes the smallest extravagance, and religion is extravagantly ornate, then it can't be a non-functional byproduct. It has to have, at least in part, a beneficial function.
Towards the end of the chapter Dawkins says,
The details [of religion as byproduct] are various, complicated, and disputable.
He's intentionally laying out a puzzle to see if anybody is paying attention.
Dawkins could not come closer to disavowing his own religion-as-byproduct proposition without actually disavowing it. Skeptics, the breadcrumbs couldn't be more obvious. If you read this chapter of God Delusion without the usual worship and adulation Dawkins gets from his followers, you’ll see he’s messing with you. If you look critically, it's clear that he's equivocating throughout this chapter while pretending to be convincing.
His overall message in God Delusion is spot on, but Dawkins is not convinced by his own explanation for the origin of religion.
The bigger issue is that we all are susceptible to cognitive biases. They are difficult to perceive, let alone overcome. Of course, it applies to all aspects of our lives including political. Dawkins provides a service by showing us how easily we can be fooled or misled.
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