Many ideas
floating around in the vegan movement are based on faith, rather than critical
evaluation and “well demonstrated reasons” – not religious faith, but faith in
things we convince ourselves are true, because we want them to be true.
What can we
learn from Dawkins? Answer: a scientific approach.
This means,
rather than choosing a position and then defending it no matter what – using
any possible argument we can find supporting it, while ignoring arguments or
information that might contradict our position – the scientific approach means
never pretending to know all the answers, not hiding information because “it
doesn’t look so good”, and using logic, evidence and reason to draw
conclusions, not wishful thinking and blind faith. The scientific approach
means looking at the evidence.
Watch Dawkins’ “The root of all evil?” to
hear his criticism of religion. Quotes by Dawkins below.
Richard
Dawkins, The God delusion, The root of all evil? Part 1, Channel 4, IWC Media
Limited, 2006
“There are
would-be murderers all around the world who want to kill you and me, and
themselves, because they are motivated by what they think is the highest
ideal.”
“Don’t let’s
forget the elephant in the room: an elephant called religion.”
“This isn’t
just a problem of Islam, […] that dangerous thing that is common to Judaism and
Christianity as well, the process of non-thinking called faith.”
“I believe
there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief. There
is no well demonstrated reason to believe in god.”
“The 21st
century should be an age of reason. Yet irrational militant faith is back on
the march.”
“The time
has come for people of reason to say: Enough is enough. Religious faith discourages
independent thought, it’s divisive, and it’s dangerous.”
“If you have
the delusion that you are Napoleon, it must be a fairly lonely feeling, because
nobody else agrees with you. Your faith that you’re Napoleon needs a lot of
suring up. But these people here [Catholic pilgrims in Lourdes], thousands of
people, all have exactly the same delusion. That must give wonderful
reinforcement to their faith.” “This is a benign herd. But it supports a
backward belief system that I believe reason must challenge.”
“It may seem
tough to question these poor, desperate people’s faith. But isn’t embracing
truth better than false hope?” [Actually in terms of religion, I’m not sure
what the answer to this question is.]
“[…] I want
to look at how the suspension of disbelief inherent in faith can lead to far
more dangerous ideas beyond.”
“People like
to say that faith and science can live together side by side. But I don’t think
they can. They’re deeply opposed. Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive
doubt questing with logic, evidence and reason to draw conclusions. Faith by
stark contrast demands a positive suspension of critical faculties.
Science
proceeds by setting up hypotheses, ideas or models, and then attempts to
disprove them. So a scientist is constantly asking questions, being skeptical.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the
power of institutions and the passage of time.”
“There was
an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a
particular theory for, oh, a number of years. And one day an American visiting
researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man’s
hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said: ‘My dear
fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’
And we all
clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of someone who had a lot
invested, a lifetime almost invested into theory. And he was rejoicing that he
had been shown wrong, and that scientific truth had been advanced.”
“If you
believe the surveys 45% of Americans [US citizens], that’s about 135 million
people, believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old.”
“To understand the likes of Osama
bin Laden you have to realize that the religious terrorism they inspire is the
logical outcome of deeply held faith. Even so-called moderate believers
are part of the same religious fabric. They encourage unreason as a positive
virtue.”
“What’s
really scary is that religious warriors think of what they are doing as the
ultimate good.”
“But as far
as I’m concerned the war between good and evil is really just the war between
two evils.”
“I don’t see
what future the world has, as long as people think like that, and people are
going to go on thinking like that, as long as they’re brought up from
childhood, from the cradle, to think that there’s something good about faith,
to think that there’s something good about believing because you’ve been told
to believe rather than believing because you’ve looked at the evidence.”
“Unlike
religion, science doesn’t pretend to know everything.”
“We are all
atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of
us just go one god further.”
Richard
Dawkins, The God delusion, The root of all evil? Part 2 – The Virus of Faith,
Channel 4, IWC Media Limited, 2006
“The god of
the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an
ethnic cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide.”
Quoting
Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg: “[…] for
good people to do evil things it takes religion.”
Dawkins
himself doesn’t seem to be looking at the evidence here. If there is any such
thing as “good and bad people” is questionable. A monstrous example of atheists
doing “evil things” is the Communist Party of China, one of the most criminal,
murderous and “evil” regimes at present and probably in the history of
humanity.
Also
recommended:
Richard
Dawkins, Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science, TED, Oxford,
England, July 2005
“The
biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just
an extreme example. Science as opposed to technology does violence to common
sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that
you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver
Cromwell.”
“The history
of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive
generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the
universe. We’re now so used to the idea that the earth spins, rather than the
sun moves across the sky, it’s hard for us to realize what a shattering mental
revolution that must have been. After all it seems obvious that the earth is
large and motionless, the sun small and mobile. But it’s worth recalling Wittgenstein’s
remark on the subject:
‘Tell me’,
he asked a friend. ‘Why do people always say it was natural for man to assume
that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?’ And
his friend replied: ‘Well obviously, because it just looks as though the sun is
going round the earth.’ And Wittgenstein replied: ‘Well, what would it have
looked like, if it had looked as though the earth was rotating?’”
RE: Steve
Grand in his book “Creation: Life and how to make it”
“Steve Grand
points out that you and I are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent
thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your
childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe
even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at
the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the
bombshell: You weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was
there when that event took place.
Matter flows
from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are
therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.”
[As far as I
know, and I might be wrong, there are some proteins in our bodies (our eyes)
that are as old as we are, i.e. they are never replaced during our lifetimes.
But whether this means the atoms that make up these proteins aren’t replaced,
I’m not sure.]
Also
recommended:
Richard
Dawkins, BBC Horizon, Nice guys finish first, 1986
Here Dawkins
explains the so-called “Prisoners’ dilemma” and “the tragedy of the commons”
and talks about bearing grudges from an evolutionary perspective and
cooperation as the most successful long-term strategy.