Hang The Sophist
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion—a Review-Essay
By Theodore D. Hall, Ph.D.
In recent years, I have said certain unkind things about Richard Dawkins, such as
“Dawkins is an affable and bright neo-Darwinist who has seen so little of real scientific
value because he has stood on the shoulders of pygmies.” Also, I have called Dawkins a
“sophist,” a sophist being an intellectual who creates elaborate arguments in support of
propositions or theories that are simply not correct.
The God Delusion has opened my eyes to an aspect of Dawkins I hadn’t seen before:
He is a very decent man. I like that in him. I respect it greatly. Nevertheless … I have
had to conclude that the argument in the Delusion book is, alas, sophistical.
Richard Dawkins is, and has been since 1995, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Could a scientist so honored, so
prolific, so respected, so bedazzling, possibly be a sophist?
Yes. Years ago, I came to the rather startling conclusion that Professor Dawkins is a
sophist in the course of reading his well-known book The Selfish Gene. “Like successful
Chicago gangsters,” he writes, “our genes have survived, in some cases for millions
of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in the
genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is
ruthless selfishness….”
This is baseless conjecture, absurdity reminiscent of those marvelous “Beyond the
Fringe” monologues of years gone by. The genes are simply patterns for organismal
parts. The genome is definitely not an Al Capone-type bunker; it is merely the New Parts
Blueprints Department of the cell.
Dawkins’ comparison of the genes to gangsters is an extension to absurdity of a long-
revered doctrine in neo-Darwinism called the “Primacy of the DNA.” This doctrine
presumes that all organismal behavior, including consciousness, is a product of the DNA.
The doctrine is wrong.
In fact, the DNA is third, not first, in the creational assembly line. Primacy belongs to
the environment. The DNA is activated by environment signals (step 1), these signals are
mediated by the receptor/effector network embedded in the cellular membrane (step 2),
and the product of that mediation then activates the genes. The “brain” of the cell, as Dr.
Bruce H. Lipton has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, is in the cellular membrane. It is
not, as Darwinists suppose, in the genome.
It was very difficult for me to believe that a man as bright as Dawkins didn’t know
what I, a mere biology watcher, knew. I had to conclude that he was, quite intentionally,
a sophist. No other choice. The God Delusion suggests clearly the big why behind
Dawkins’ sophistical mission: Our affable Professor of the Public Understanding of
Science is out to fulfill the prophecy of Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin’s famous “bulldog,”
that Science would one day (the sooner the better) put its foot on the neck of Theology.
Dawkins & Hawkins
My favorite sentence in The God Delusion is that which starts the second chapter:
“The God the Old Testament is arguable the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak, a vindictive,
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent
bully….” Right on, Richard! Any who think that professor Dawkins is not correct in his
assessment of the god called Jehovah, should open the Holy Bible and read the book of
Joshua. In this book of horrors, Jehovah orders his “chosen people” (bad luck for them)
to murder every man, woman and child in ancient Palestine—and to kill all the livestock
as well. What the goats and sheep had done to offend the great Jehovah I can’t imagine.
The war thus engendered is still going on!--and now threatens to engulf the entire world
in World War III.
Clearly, at least clearly in my view, the mission of the Christ was to dethrone, in the
minds of men, the God of Terror and to coronate the God of Love as the true supreme
being.
Dawkins is to be congratulated for his clear-eyed assessment of the god (a negative
ET?) called Jehovah and for his grand multi-adjectival condemnation of the same.
Further, Dawkins is to be congratulated for knocking theology around a bit. However,
the scientist who really succeeded in stepping on its neck (orthodox Christian theology)
is the brilliant David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., master of kinesthesiology.
Kinesthesiology, as practiced by Hawkins, is the science of accessing the collective
consciousness. For complete information, consult Hawkins’ pioneering book Power Vs
Force.
“The level of truth originally espoused by Jesus Christ,” Hawkins writes, “calibrates
at 1,000—the highest level attainable on this plane. By the second century, the level of
truth of this practice of his teaching had dropped to 930, and by the sixth century, to 540.
By the time of the Crusades, at the beginning of the 11th century, it had fallen to its
P
P
current 498….”
Hawkins identifies the most precipitous decline in Christianity as having occurred in
325 AD, “apparently due to spread of misinterpretations of the [Christ] teachings
originating from the Council of Nicaea.”
“Christianity’s fall from a calibrated 930 to 498,” Hawkins writes, “must be
recognized as the greatest single catastrophe in the history of Western religion. Here we
can see the origin of the spiritual divorce from the actual teachings of Jesus Christ that
allowed the later atrocities of the Crusades and the Inquisition….”
The “God Hypothesis”
Alas, most Christians suffer the delusion that Jehovah is synonymous with the
supreme being. Dawkins goes far beyond attacking this delusion, however; he denounces
all conceptualizations of God.
One of the sophist’s standard tools-of-the-trade is the “straw man.” A straw man is an
unsubstantial representation of that which the sophist wishes to attack. Naturally, the
sophist has little difficulty, if any, in knocking down the straw man. In his chapter titled
“Arguments For God’s Existence,” Dawkins sets up a number of straw men, then wittily
knocks them down.
Among these straw men is “The Argument From Personal Experience.” A very few
examples of such experience are offered, all of which are dismissed as hallucinations—
products of the mind’s “simulation software.” Conspicuously absent from the discussion
are accounts of those who encountered God in near-death experience (NDE). One of the
best-documented NDE cases involving an encounter with the Creator is that of a scientist
by the name of Mellen-Thomas Benedict. In 1982, after suffering from a terminal illness,
Mellen-Thomas died for an hour and a half. Miraculously, he returned to his body with a
complete remission of the disease—after an encounter with the “Universal Intelligence.”
(See http://www.mellen-thomas.com)
HTU
UTH
Another scientist who experienced “God” is the above-cited David Hawkins. “As my
final moment [of life] approached,” Hawkins writes in Power Vs Force, “the thought
flashed through my mind, what if there is a God? So I called out in prayer, ‘If there is a
God, I ask Him to help me now.’ I surrendered to whatever God there might be, and
went unconscious. When I awoke, a transformation of such enormity had taken place
that I was struck dumb with awe…. The world was illumined by the clarity of an Infinite
Oneness, which expressed itself as all things revealed in their immeasurable beauty and
perfection.”
For a scientist sincerely interested in exploring the “God hypothesis,” accounts such as
those offered by Benedict and Hawkins would have to be taken into consideration. Alas,
Dawkins utterly ignores the testimonies of those who have undergone NDE.
Naughty Richard
Dawkins’ list of scientists who believe in God is very, very short. No mention is
made of Max Planck, the farther of quantum physics, who has said, “All matter originates
and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force is the existence of
a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Further, no mention is made of the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of
Richard’s favorite doctrine (natural selection), came in time to the belief that the universe
must be governed by a “great Mind.” Indeed, naughty Richard quotes, without
correction, the incorrect opinion of physicist Leonard Susskind, who states, “Modern
cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they
provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents….”
For the record: Readers of Darwin’s tomes will find the old guy sometimes invokes a
“sublime Creator.” This sublime Creator couldn’t possibly be a supernatural agent,
right? What’s more, Darwin celebrates, in his book on the voyage of the Beagle, the
spread of British-style Christianity throughout the South Pacific. A curious thing for a
non-believer to do.
Dawkins’ claim that the doctrine of natural selection replaces, quite satisfactorily,
traditional belief in supernatural governance, is nonsense. The first to make this claim
was the bulldog, Thomas Huxley. The Darwin-Wallace theory, as Darwinism was first
called, took a turn down Strictly Materialistic Street, and this was due to the fact that
Huxley was driving the movement.
The Most Curious Thing
The most curious thing that I found in The God Delusion is the author’s invocation of
Darwin’s original (1859) representation of natural selection. “’Unrelentingly and
unceasingly,’ as Darwin explained, ‘natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing,
throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad,
preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever
opportunity affords, at the improvement of each organic being.’…”
Mr. Huxley had a problem with Darwin’s conceptualization, which is, obviously, an
anthropomorphic substitute for the anthropomorphic divine presence (“His eye is on the
sparrow”); and in his own, widely read, accounts of Darwinism, he speaks of natural
selection as merely circumstantial selection (the same wind that blows one fledgling out
of the nest merely ruffles the feathers of another).
Darwin himself abandoned his original conceptualization of natural selection, saying
that “survival of the fittest” was a better term for what he meant. Dr. Ernst Mayr, the
great authority on Darwinism in the modern period, stated, flatly, “Darwin was wrong”
about natural selection. Natural selection, Mayr says, means merely “elimination of the
weakest.”
So why is Dawkins validating a conceptualization that is considered by all the other
Darwinists to be wrong? Is he saying something he does not actually believe in order to
win votes for his thesis that the doctrine of natural selection is the greatest consciousness-
raising crane ever invented? If so, Dawkins is not just a sophist, but the ultimate sophist!
Or has Dawkins experience a divine guidance moment that has allowed him to see that
the original conceptualization of natural selection was, in fact, correct? If so, then we
must welcome Richard to the post-Darwinism evolutionary science movement.
All Considered
All considered, The God Delusion is an extended polemical exercise well worth a
read. I especially like Dawkins’ discourse on the anti-religion sentiments of Thomas
Jefferson and other founders of our secular (thank God) American system of government.
As an argument against religion, the book succeeds to some extent; but as an argument
against the God hypothesis, the book fails—utterly.
Concerning that hypothesis, what I would like to say is this: The universality of belief
in a Creator indicates that the belief is archetypal. What are archetypes? Primary
template formulations existing at the interface between the etheric (implicate order) and
the physical (explicate order). Unlike Benedict or Hawkins, I have not experienced the
etheric Source of the God archetype. Nevertheless, as a result of study of NDE accounts
and of the pioneering research into the “afterlife” conducted by the late Robert Monroe
and his associates at the Monroe Institute, I am quite certain that the etheric Source is not
malignant. Quite the opposite.
Malignancies associated with the God archetype (e.g., the Inquisition) are, to invoke a
sentiment expressed in one of my favorite popular songs, “our own damned fault.” They
are the product of human negative thinking. Historically, human consciousness is, as one
of my mentors has said, “an embarrassment to the Supreme Being.”
Copyright 2007 TDHall
www.biofractalevolution.com
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