Letter to Richard Dawkins

So, for a while now I’ve been trying to contact Professor Dawkins. So far unsuccessful, but one can always hope. Here’s my letter for him.

Dear Professor Dawkins,

I am an avid reader of yours from the Czech Republic. I write to you with a question in mind which pertains to the public advocacy for non-belief. I have been a strident atheist for the most of my life. I live in a prominently agnostic country—the Czech Republic (where some 80 % are non-declared or non-religious). Currently I am attempting to understand just how broader the struggle for secularism is, than only tackling the problem of organised religion. The post-communistic mentality of disbelief did not eradicate what I choose to call faith-based thinking. It should be noted here I am not addressing religious fundamentalism, but rather a general leniency toward general superstition and disregard for empirical reasoning.

Once I heard you mention moral relativism in a documentary, much in accord with what I happen to believe, but the core struggle which I identify in the fight for real secularism is another kind of relativism. It is the relativisation of truth, the philosophical stance that truth is relative and two contradictory truths can coexist. Should this principle be challenged aggressively by secularists?

However rational one is in everyday life, a majority of European populations, I suspect, are perfectly comfortable with the idea of plurality of truths. It seems this is why the religious mindset persists.It is why people fall for charlatanish alternative medicine practices.This is why stridently anti-religious Czechs believe in New Age therapies.Last but not least, it might be why we are overly tolerant toward extreme religious fundamentalists in Europe.

The last of these points is especially alarming, with the majority of the Czech people whom I know dismissing opposition to the threat of Muslim militancy as interfering with the credos of multiculturalism.So many argue that the ‘reality’ of Islam, of jihad and of Sharia is as good as our secular reality. In other words, our ‘truths’—which really seems to be a wrong term for ‘opinions’—are equal and deserve respect.

I would love to ask you about the idea of relativism and its, from my point of view, dangers when classical religious faiths are challenged.Is the seeming acceptance of ‘multiple truths’ a semantic problem, or is it more than that? Is there not a danger that a newly convinced agnostic-atheist, previously under the moderating influence of a major organised religion, becomes vulnerable to other covert ideologies requiring, as Bill Maher likes to say so eloquently, the purposeful suspension of critical thinking? Is it not the core of the problem that there is actually an accord between being an empirically-minded atheist and a die-hard religious fundamentalist: that at some point it is necessary to affirm that truth is absolute?

I shall be delighted if you find an opportunity to respond. Many thanks for what you do.

Sincerely,

David Novak

Natural Sciences: Why You Should Be Interested

I think you should try being interested in natural sciences. I’ll get over it if you turn out indifferent to the details, but it’s your duty to at least look around for a bit and check things out. My path from indifference concerns entirely the fact of evolution and its, to me, unceasing beauty.

Biological evolution (lest you got all the wrong ideas) is a scientific fact—quite distinctly from the theories describing the process. The details of how evolution occurs we are inherently less sure of, but we’re extremely certain that Darwin got the gist of natural selection. And some fascinatingly intelligent people are working on devising fitting theories for the most complicated mechanisms in evolution. The most often you might tend to hear about evolution, though, is when flat-out denial is confronted.

Indeed, some people deny parts or the entirety of our collective knowledge concerning evolution. As an uninterested high-school freshman, I could have only sneered at the stereotypical redneck Americans—clutching to an age-old myth of a supernatural space-god modelling a plasticine Earth-sphere in seven days (prior to establishing the meaning of day as a unit of time). This never stopped being peculiar—just about every statement in the Bible has been negated and replaced with ‘it’s the metaphor that counts’—but the seven-day nonsense stuck to Westboro Baptist (et al.) doctrine like superglue. And so evolution became a social issue—a stigmatised ‘world view’, no good, no healthy. And it’s not just the Westboro Baptist types—it’s elected politicians in some parts of the world who believe creationist nonsense. But for me, in a Central European post-communistic republic, we sure knew better. We take evolution for granted.

But the secular people have a problem here. We have become accustomed to accept things without recognising what they mean. Taking shit for granted is not a kosher stance for an educated society. An average Joe, me ranking among these on things evolutionary some eight years ago, has no idea what we’re collectively subscribing to.

If you’ve never read of evolution or seen a BBC documentary about it, let me tell you you’re prone to misunderstand it. My concept of evolution, for years, has been just short of Lamarckistic—the idea that living things accumulate features during their lifetime. This way, change would happen over generations and we’d have a bunch of different species in no time, derived from one original. The erroneous idea of evolution from before the discovery of natural selection, really.

But oh, how beautiful it was to dive past the ‘I recognise evolution because I’m not as stupid as those who don’t’ façade. Go, I encourage you, and watch a documentary, do a Google search, or read Richard Dawkins on evolution. Your eyes will be opened to the true beauty of the natural world.

All living things, from an amoeba through a pine tree through a stomach bacterium to modern humans, have a three-and-a-half-billion-year-old ancestor. A humongous carbon-based family of Earthlings: from you through the guy over there to a fucking dandelion. It’s all interconnected. More importantly, life is designed by omission. There is no creator intervening in evolution, it’s just the vast amounts of time for the reproductively weak individuals to be left out of the gene pool, with no foresight whatsoever. (Actually, it’s not that simple, but the principle stands in general.)

So, that’s how I found I didn’t want to be a lawyer, a banker, an economist, a journalist. At least not primarily. Because in the secular pursuit of scientific truths, I think you’re bound to find beauty in something. A principle. A system. The selfish gene theory of evolution in biology, the potential to harness power chemically, the vastness of fractals in mathematics. That’s my case for the natural sciences. And with that vague endorsement and lack of structure, I’m kicking off this blog.

Enjoy.