Devotional Dawkins

I've added a new category to my blog: "Devotional Dawkins".

In this category I will be posting a series of articles examining the congruence between Richard Dawkins' empirical interpretation of the mundane world with the Vedic worldview that underpins Krishna Consciousness.

I personally think that while we have a number of congruences with Christian philosophers, on the matter of empiricism the Vedic worldview is more congruent with modern science than it is with Creationism as a scientific doctrine.

While it is tempting to join the Christian Crusade against Professor Dawkins, and many within ISKCON obviously think it a good idea, I personally will not be joining.

My observation is that many of the congruent points that we share with Professor Dawkins are points that Creationists would also wage war on us for - for example, the idea that there is a single common ancestor, and a limited set of common ancestors of all living beings, which I discussed in my previous post. This would be grounds for Crusade against our worldview by Creationists, whereas it is a point of agreement with Dawkins.

One of the major reasons why Dawkins' worldview is more congruent with the Vedic worldview than the Creationist one, is that Dawkins' area of authority is the phenomenological world of mundane experience. Just as Buddhist philosophy and psychology is compatible and very similar to Krishna Consciousness up to the point of nirvana, similarly Dawkins' worldview is compatible up to the limits of empiricism. His worldview does not contain the soul, and thus represents a subset of the total Vedic worldview.

Creationism, on the other hand, already has the soul within it. This is a point of congruence with the Vedic worldview. However, Creationism mixes the concept of the soul and the body, making it incompatible with both Dawkins and the Vedic worldviews.

The beginning of knowledge, by the Vedic standard, is understanding the difference between spirit and matter. Whereas Dawkins' biological worldview is devoid of the concept of spirit, and thus offers the potential for a synthesis, the Creationist worldview has the concept, but it is erroneous. Thus their world view offers neither empirical rigour, nor metaphysical rigour by the Vedic standard.

When I say empirical rigour, I am referring to what Dawkins calls "the explanatory power of Darwin's big idea.

Studying books such as Dawkin's watershed work "The Selfish Gene" reveals that Darwin's big idea explains the material world in terms that are congruent with the Vedic world view - the material bodies are machines manufactured by the material energy, and are vehicles for material desires which are a completely separate agenda for the higher-order beings (ourselves) who find themselves manifested within them for a limited span of time.

This is completely at odds with the worldview of Creationism - another powerful example of our affinity for Dawkins over the Crusade against him.

Professor Dawkins' statements about religion are outside the scope of his work on biology and empirical science, and fall more into the category of sociology and psychology. In many of those cases I also happen to agree with him. In the area of metaphysical statements he also exceeds the scope of empirical science, and these are again in another category. In that category I feel he speaks with more certainty than is warranted by the available empirical evidence, and also borrows from his authority in other areas to lend more credence to his ideas there, than they would otherwise merit in isolation.

Readers who made it this far in this article may also be interested in my category "Dawkins", where I posted two years ago a series of posts analysing Dawkins' debates with various religious representatives.