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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that you bring up Richard Dawkins, as he seems to be adamantly in agreement:

http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/119-why-i-won-39-t-de...

Unfortunately, by releasing the God Delusion, he engaged creationists as equals in an intellectual debate. He would have been better served by supporting research on the evolutionary psychology of religion, while staying very far away from debating creationists, which has sadly become a hobby of his.

That being said, I have yet to read a book which so elegantly describes evolution as The Selfish Gene. This includes Darwin's own works. It is an absolute masterpiece, and was the foundation of my lifelong passion for biology. I consider Dawkins the most influential man in my life. That is why it hurts me to see him behave in such a counter-productive manner.

I'm not very into the whole atheism/religion scene, but I think there are many people who basically don't care one way or the other about "the great questions", but when asked might have said that they're religious or spiritual in vague terms. I think it's these people that Dawkins has been helping, by essentially letting them know that 'unbelief' is a totally OK category for them to fall into.

I agree that formal debates over evolution are counterproductive - they give the impression that evolution and creationism should be taken equally seriously, and anyway they're more about who's a better presenter than who has the better evidence.

I appreciate Dawkins' writing, though. If nothing else, it contributed significantly to my shift away from evangelical fundamentalism. One of the benefits of Dawkins' choice of material is that it can communicate new ideas to the very religious (not "always does" but "has the capacity to"), whereas arguments about historical accuracy or studies of religious behaviour can't - because, from a fundamentalist perspective, that sort of evidence is necessarily secondary to communication directly from God.

For me, Dawkins first presented the idea that it might be possible for evidence to be more meaningful than faith, that everyone who wasn't a fundamentalist might not be lying or deceived. I consider that a justification for his work, though perhaps I'm wrong about its effectiveness (though I was a fairly strong believer when I read it). I don't know on what criteria you're basing your own judgement.

(Of course, I'm speaking here from my own experience and observation just of the community where I grew up. I'm glad that he existed at that time, but this is ultimately just an anecdote with a limited perspective.)

I'm surprised by your enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology. My admittedly limited experience of it seems like it's just a story telling contest with no actual science. The stories are often very interesting and plausible, but is there any sense in which they can be tested or have predictive power?

More to the point, evolutionary psychology fails the standard litmus tests for science:

1. Skepticism toward ideas not supported by empirical evidence, specifically the assumption that an idea not supported by evidence is assumed to be false (the "null hypothesis") -- the opposite of the normal attitude toward ideas shared by psychologists, who famously assume an idea to be true until it's been proven false.

2. A basis for falsification of theories based on empirical evidence. Not to say all ideas are false, but any of them must be falsifiable in principle by empirical evidence, by reality tests.

3. The idea that all theories are temporary and open to replacement by newer theories supported by better empirical evidence, in other words, nothing ever becomes true and beyond challenge.

Psychology in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular, certainly fails one or more of these tests.

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