Dude, nice memes

I would consider myself an initiated novice as to the work of Richard Dawkins. I've read The Extended Phenotype once, The Blind Watchmaker a couple times, and The Selfish Gene no less than 4 times cover to cover. I have a tremendous admiration for his work as a scientist. I will never forget the first time I read The Selfish Gene; I still feel like I see the world with a new pair of glasses now, it was that life-changing. Still, it is a constant source of wonder to me that a man, so steeped in genius, can be so absolutely and unabashedly narrow-minded concerning the subject of religion, or even the existence of God.

Not only is Dawkins a dogmatic Evolutionist, but, as a natural extension, he is also a full-blown, in your face atheist. Now, as Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything. Dawkins, unfortunately, believes that religion, and Christianity in particular, is "The Root of All Evil." Such is the name of a two-part series he recently co-wrote and hosted on UK Channel 4, and is coincidentally the theme of his next book, The God Delusion.

Those of you familiar with his writings or ideas have probably come across the term "meme," one that he himself coined to mean "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." Think of it as the mental equivalent of a gene. Like a gene it is subject to mutation, crossover, and adaptation. Dawkins considers religion a meme, and a bad one at that. The message he wants to get across in the show? That "all religion represents a danger to our society and future."

Poor, poor man.

Although no response is ever adequate for changing a mind so firmly entrenched in its own ignorance, Roger Scruton, one of the great living conservative intellectuals, has formulated a pretty good one, nonetheless, which reaches a glorious climax:

Religions survive and flourish because they are a call to membership — they provide customs, beliefs and rituals that unite the generations in a shared way of life, and implant the seeds of mutual respect. Like every form of social life, they are inflamed at the edges, where they compete for territory with other faiths. To blame religion for the wars conducted in its name, however, is like blaming love for the Trojan war. All human motives, even the most noble, will feed the flames of conflict when subsumed by the ‘territorial imperative’ — this too Darwin teaches us, and Dawkins surely must have noticed it. Take religion away, as the Nazis and the communists did, and you do nothing to suppress the pursuit of Lebensraum. You simply remove the principal source of mercy in the ordinary human heart and so make war pitiless; atheism found its proof at Stalingrad.

The real irony of the situation is that the false dichotomy drawn between faith and reason is a meme in itself - a purely modern one, at that. I guess in the end, when religion and humble science trump/outlive intolerant secularism, Dawkins will still be justified after all, in that the structure of his theory (though not his interpretation of its implications) will still be holding a lot of water. Are you a fan of irony?