A false positive

After attacking Jehovah (yes, *that* Jehovah) in his "The Root of All Evil", atheist top dog takes on a far more difficult (and moving?) target in "Enemies of Reason". Yes, it's Dick vs. the New Age, old school version, in a two-episode showdown with the Absolute. Weekly horoscopes, homeopathic medicine and your friendly neighborhood dowser next door gets slammed by the Intellectual Muscle Movement. The indefatigable Darwin, er, Dawkins also interviews people (or selfish gene machines) who claim that chakras are mini-black holes, that the rockness of a rock is a spiritual quality, that quantum physics prove faith healing works, and that Dawkins doesn't have an angel gently hovering above him. He never wrestles with the serpent power, but then, Mr Dawkins have never met U.G. Krishnamurti! And yes, I love the man's colorful language, as when he calls Satish Kumar a representative of the "sandal-wearing end of the Green movement".

:D

OK, jokes aside, but this was weaker than I expected. But sure, my worldview is very different from that of Dawkins, a rather strict reductionist and materialist. For starters, I thought Deepak Chopra's statements actually made some kind of sense. So did the statements by Satish Kumar about "rockness" and "treeness". Often, Dawkins attacks the lower end of various alternative claims: weekly sun sign horoscopes rather than, say, Gauquelin or Jung, amateur dowsers trying to find a hidden bottle during a double-blind test, rather than people doing research on "ley lines", etc. While I understand Dawkins' anger at obviously frivolous claims (a bunch of colored lamps can supposedly re-energize your chakras), he never really tries to understand the spiritual worldviews he is attacking, most of the time simply assuming that they just *can't* be correct, since he doesn't immediately grasp their method or terminology. It's all "metaphor" or "poetry", and that's that. In his reductionist worldview, everything above B F Skinner and double-blind tests of vaccines is just subjective mumbo jumbo. He never ask why "placebo" would work at all, if our minds aren't somehow capable of influencing our bodies. As for "anecdotal evidence", why are experiences of spirits "anecdotal", while the observation of animal behavior in the wild isn't? (Well, very often it *is* seen as anecdotal, making the behavior of lab rats more scientifically significant than what's going on in the real world.)

Dawkins points out that the ancient world knew less about medical science than we do, but does that mean they didn't get anything right? The Ten Commandments come from "the Bronze Age document" known as the Bible (which also implies that the world is flat and standing still in the center of the universe), the idea of universal human rights is based on Stoicism and Christianity and was codified in 16th century Spain at a time when Copernicus was still seen as controversial, and abolitionism grew politically strong when evolutionary biologists like Haeckel claimed that certain races were inferior. Besides, the ancient world might have known more about that accursed "placebo effect" than we do, precisely because they didn't have access to modern medicine. I think Dawkins would admit that progress is uneven, but how can a materialist *really* believe that morality is progressing, if it lacks an objective basis?

Lurking in the background is Dawkins' philosophical supposition that the universe is meaningless, which would make Dawkins' own rationality meaningless too, except as a base survival strategy (but then, if placebo or belief in rockness helps your selfish genes survive, why not embrace them instead?). And where does the feeling of meaning even come from, if the universe is meaningless? Dawkins often uses the "poetry of reality" as an argument against (!) religion and spirituality, claiming that the real world is more wondrous than the metaphors of witch-doctors, but how is this even relevant if meaning, awe and poetry are purely subjective? Then we might as well team up with Deepak Chopra and get our kicks from metaphors about quantum leaps! The moral revulsion of Dawkins against quacks is also obvious, but where does this morality come from? It seems to go beyond the (admittedly important) issue of which remedies might save our precious genes and memes from polio or small pox!

Of course, not everything is wrong with "Enemies of Reason". As Patrick Moore once quipped: "It's impossible to always be wrong, unless you are a psychiatrist". The anti-vaxxers really are a bizarre example of what can happen when people turn away from scientific reason (or even anecdotal common sense). And yes, many of the people Dawkins interviews are hilarious (as usual). Yet, I've come to the conclusion that it's immensely reasonable to believe in something above and beyond matter, some of which might affect us, and some of it which cannot be grasped with Skinner's "robust" terminology, but only with "metaphors" and "poetry"...