No doubt when I’ve re-watched all three episodes together of the ‘The Genius of Charles Darwin‘ I’ll write a ‘Whackos’ post about them as a whole but for this piece I’ll try to keep to The Final Installment of Dawkins propaganda… And make no mistake - that’s what it is. Either he doesn’t have enough time to give folk an open debate or he merely wishes to poke around to find teachers, or indeed preachers, who disagree with him and then narrate over any argument that they know is substantive to their basis. Of course those who do not rest on any scientific rational are allowed to be foolish on this programme targeted at the rationalists.
“Another inoculation against Deism, sir?” Is what this installment amounts to.
One of the main problems I have with this is Dawkins use of the word ‘fact‘ as opposed to ‘belief‘… If you want to read something dedicated to this issue then go here, dear reader. But as a brief jab at this - let’s take Napoleon: Dawkins uses Napoleon to demonstrate his grasp of the word ‘fact’ only to show those who know more about the divide between faith and fact that he does not know what he is saying. I am willing to accept that Napoleon walked the land and was eventually defeated by a coalition of various countries and one of those crucial leaders was Wellington… but I have not seen ‘the evidence’ I accept most of the story as if it were ‘fact’ because it’s a whole series of ‘truths of history’ - which makes it belief. This, more than anything else, is Dawkins blind spot and for those who see it it’s like a wide open maw. Napoleon’s story may well be made of a series of facts - but we also get historians views, the idea that Napoleon thought like this because he was short… and other such inferences some, or even most may be correct - which is which and what I believe is thus a tangled mess of historical facts [ie those bits of information that could be verified] and historians views of Napoleon. Why do I continue to use the word ‘believe’ when I refer to ‘facts’? It is because I have not checked them, personally.
Dawkins is famous for targeting those who are superstitious and the reason why so many believe in superstitions is that we seek patterns in the world around us and some of them are not true and can be argued to either be entirely random or have a logical rationale. Take mirrors - break a mirror and suffer seven years bad luck. Studies have been widely accepted that say that our appearance makes a crucial impact on how we are evaluated in the world at large and at one time it could take up to seven years to save the money to replace a broken mirror… Nowadays it could take a week, or less, and we in the west are likely to have more than one mirror so we can forget the whole reason but still the phrase survives…
At one point Dawkins announces that he will show us the ‘proof’ and then takes a stroll down a fossil lined corridor - what I was expecting was a demonstration of how the bones of the reptile jaw changed to the mammalian one piece jaw and the other bones migrating up to the ear. Or even a few skulls which show the ear migrate from around the jaw to the side of the skull… but alas we do not see this evidence - what we see is a series of jawbones that look similar to each other. As pattern seeking beings we will draw conclusions that could be right or wrong. Some take the line that this maw came before this maw and that the difference shows evolution others take a more skeptical view - do we know that the owners of both jaws did not walk the earth at the same time? Dating, when it goes so far back has huge +/- numbers ie the actual range of these ancient artifacts mean that instead of saying 25 million years ago we actually have the possibility of 25 million years with 5 million years before or after that date to play with… Ok, so I made the five million up at the top of my head. But when I was studying the archeology of the Old Testament this was a real problem and that was only thousands of years ago… and the further back we go the greater the problem.
One of my problems with Dawkins installment was the white washing. At one point we have a science teacher who was willing to argue, on a scientific basis, why he believed the Earth has only been around for ten thousand years (+/- a couple of thousand I’d presume) but instead of letting us hear this argument Dawkins narrates that we have six ways that agree with each other and say that we are on a really old planet… this is of course a free exchange of views… From my psychology studies I know that once you have a Standard other standards must be calibrated to agree with the first Standard - and that’s how a lot of these things do work… Let me hear the debate and I’ll be less sceptical, of course you run the risk that I might for my own strange and perverse views disagree with you but at least we’d know the parameters of the whole problem.
And as with the science teacher so with others including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams - he who’s mind is extraordinarily good but suffers from still believing in something (anything else bar science is enough for Dawkins to think you are a weirdo who needs saving).
At the end we are told that we should be proud that we have got to where we are - following on from generations of winners but as a still childless man in a land where success is measured by passing on my peculiar genetic variations, this gives me no consolation. In fact I am letting my genes down - I, by this measure, am a rank failure. They have gotten me this far but no further as of the time of writing this post.
Going back to another piece [which I posted about here] of Dawkins propaganda he argued that because you couldn’t verify some superstitions despite the fact that it brought some folk comfort it could not be ‘valid for the rest of us’ as it could not be independently verified- then he argued that it was alright, however grudgingly that some found comfort from their strange beliefs and that was ok… but problematic. Here at the end of his series on The Genius of Charles Darwin Dawkins asserts the comfort we can all have from the theory/fact of evolution and our place in the whole chain - but what if we don’t care about our ancestors and would rather find comfort in how we live now - how then can evolution as a comfort be ‘valid’ for us?
This, more than anything he has said before, shows how much of a belief system Dawkins has constructed on the back of the theory of evolution. What it doesn’t do is show any real moral values or a way to value different ways to live. At the end Dawkins becomes one of those figures from the conference of folk he so readily derides in his earlier programmes.