Root Of All Evil
I recently watched a programme on Channel 4 (UK) fronted by the evolutionist Richard Dawkins and entitled The Root Of All Evil.
As might be expected, it is a platform for Dawkins to rant against what he sees as the ‘superstition’ of religion. Unfortunately in doing so, he merely exposes his own shallowness of thought. For example, in a Sunday Herald article he states the following:
I pretty much knew what I was going to find when I started making the films, which didn’t make it any more palatable or acceptable, of course.
Which is hardly an objective rational viewpoint and of course, as most balanced people realise, one often finds what one looks for if even only on a subconscious level. But this is my main criticism of Dawkins - he seems utterly unaware that there is a subconscious level, to him (as to the fundamentalists he decries) everything is black and white. With him being the one who knows which one is the absolute truth.
But some background would be useful as I really don’t want to just rant about Dawkins - it is more what he represents (and what he represents is a form of reductionist thought which is closely allied to fundamentalism and extremism) that I want to highlight. So: I have always respected Dawkins - he has a unique ability to cut through the nonsense in his evolutionary writings and make the subject accessible.
Personally I do not fully agree with his viewpoint although clearly natural selection is undeniable. There are numerous problematic issues with evolutionary theory imo though and Dawkins never addresses these and where he touches on them he merely demolishes the position of the ‘creationists’ which is, as he never tires of pointing out, a ridiculous viewpoint, so much so actually that one wonders why he pays it so much attention. most sensible people have far more sophisticated concepts even if they are religiously minded.
Anyway, this is not the place for a discussion of evolution, suffice to say that rationally, acceptance of the theory does not by definition imply a denial of God or even His role as a creator - but somehow to Dawkins it does. And this is wooly thinking. Why should the two - God and evolution - be linked at all?
I will back up my claim that Dawkins is in fact what he likes to call a fundamentalist. If one visits certain newsgroups that deal with politics or news (any such newsgroup in fact) one will soon hear the view expressed (more or less in these terms) that Islam equals terrorism. Or encourages terrorism. Or is somehow inherently predisposed to extremism. Or whatever.
The evidence cited for this is the maniacs running around at the moment blowing people up in the name of some Islamist cause. But logically, these characters do not necessarily represent Islam because they claim to. That is simple logic. They may do of course and the claim that Islam is somehow ‘extreme’ may be correct - in order to ascertain this one must look at the big picture; historic, Scriptural, cultural etc. Fortunately if one does this then one finds the contention is not correct but that is not my point here - the point is that an extremist or fundamentalist never looks at the big picture. This is almost a definition of their state - they are not objective.
What a fundamentalist or literalist does is to focus on one small aspect of something which may (or may not) be true in microcosm and extrapolate it to the point where it is no longer true. This is perhaps understandable in religious terms which are by nature amorphous but in a scientific sense it is a betrayal of logic.
Worse, it is actual a tacit acceptance of the fundamentalist world view (which is not surprising since it is a view he shares albeit framed in a scientific sense rather than a religious one) because it actually accepts that the view is universal - it has to in order to oppose it. That is to say, Dawkins could quite easily have shown any number of Christians in his film who were not conservative right-wing Creationists. He could have shown Muslims that were not extremists - but he didn’t. He didn’t because he believed and wanted to show that those people he showed represented Christianity and Islam.
That is what they want and believe too.
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