Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss

It is not that common in the scientific community to find scholars that dedicate their precious time to the advertisement of science to the general public. Perhaps the most famous examples are Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman (definitely one must read his books :) and Stephen Hawking. Dawkins and Krauss are two, say, more recent examples of this sort of scientists. I've already written a bit about Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor of evolution. Lawrence Krauss is a physicist at Stanford University, who seems to be very active in the US.

Today I saw a very enlightening and interesting debate among them. The format of the debate was also very different since there was no moderator, so they discussed freely about anything they wanted. They discussed from the beauty of science to social impacts of scientific education. One comment that I found very interesting is that, when discussing about morality, people tend to put science in a lower level with respect to religion. However, when there is a serious problem, such as an epidemic, people forget about what they previously said and resort to scientific methods. For instance, when there was the risk of an bird flue epidemic, the same government that allowed creationism to be taught in schools, discusses about the possibility of the virus to mutate, what would allow for it to contaminate humans, but does not discuss the possibility that the virus was created to destroy us.

Religion

In the past months, I have been reading Richard Dawkins' recent book, The God Delusion, and it really made me think about how people are so deeply brainwashed by religion, usually with the most ridiculous ideas, that they become blind to common sense and, in some extreme cases, intolerant to other beliefs.

One good example of how religious beliefs can instigate, not only a person but an entire society, to ignore reason is the battle between the conflicting theories of Creation and Evolution. Creationism states that all living beings exist as they are because of an inherent "intelligent design" that is present in the DNA. While Evolution explains the existence of living beings by the process of Natural Selection, where beings more adaptable to its environment are selected from the beings less adaptable. Though there is a enormous amount of evidence supporting evolution and no evidence supporting Creationism, some states in the US have adopted Creationism in the educational curricula because of the pressure of religious groups that can't accept the Evolution theory, since it contradicts directly with Christian beliefs of how the world was created, but accept Creationism that supports these religious beliefs.

But why do people still believe in some Religious dogmas, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence against it? This is one question that Dawkins tries to answer in his book, for which I try to summarize. One problem with the Abrahamic Religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, is that all of them preach that faith is the greatest virtue. This is why a religious person still believes in dogmas that are proved wrong because it would require of him more faith to believe on it, and hence he would be regarded as more virtuous.

Dawkins uses the examples of Abrahamic Religions because both the autor and to the target western readers are more familiar with them. But one can't generalize this explanation to other religions, such as Hinduism, since they don't have a set of dogmas, and therefore, faith is not a cornerstone for the existence of Religion. And yet, Hindus often disregard evidence, for example, in India there is a generalized belief in astrology.

Dawkins, as an evolutionary biologist, gives a more satisfying explanation to another question, why are there so many religious people in the first place. His answer has to do with a misfiring of the following Darwinian characteristic: Children that believe and obey blindly to there parents have a higher probability to survive and hence, to give continuity to the species. This is simply because children do not have the time to verify the things said by parents; if for instance, a parent tells a child not to jump a cliff and this child does not obey, the result would be disastrous. Even though there is no Darwinian advantage for believing in Religion, a misfiring of this characteristic happens that results in children adopting the religious beliefs of their parents.

There are many other interesting issues discussed by Dawkins; for instance, he tries to argue why there is not a God; why religion can be bad, for which some reasons I commented here; where do our morals come from (perhaps I will discuss more about this topic later); and the conscious raising to not label a child with the religion of his/her parents.