Not sure that the logic works there, milord.  Belief is a human concept and is not necessarily governed by the laws of nature as Darwin expressed them.

However, how do I know what I believe is the same as what you believe?  It is impossible for me to experience what it is like to be Lord Byron, so I cannot be sure what it is like to believe what you believe.  We have to rely on words and conversation to convey something of our belief.  And for something like belief that is probably not a very accurate thing.

So I suspect we all have different beliefs, but we cannot know that.

Anyway, back to McMillan.  Of course he can express his belief.  Just don't ram it down my throat, please.  One of the things I have a trouble with Religious belief is that 'belief' or 'faith' is axiomatic.

For religion, you have to believe in order to understand, and also you have to believe in order to experience (You cannot really understand or experience God until you believe in him).  Whereas my position is that I can only reach belief after experiencing things and possibly after understanding how things are.  (e.g. I believe the apple will fall because I have seen apples fall hundreds of times - not because God says so, and not because Newton and Einstein have theories of Gravity or Space Time.  However, I can understand how Newton and Einstein can be consistent with my belief.)

What is difficult about trying to find common ground on these two is when a religious person says 'You just have to actively believe'.  Belief is not something I can do, it is something that happens a a result of experiences.  Sure, I can tell myself something 1000 times until the mantra sticks, but that's not the same as truly believing, surely.  So, it is difficult for me to understand the position of someone where belief is an active thing.

And then it is difficult for someone with 'faith' to understand where I come from.  Belief is a changing thing, dependent very much on experiences.  Sure there are things that are unlikely to change - like my belief of what Yellow is, or that apples fall from trees - but there are things that change - like my belief about what 'I' is, or indeed what belief is.  So it must be hard for someone where 'Belief' is a fundamental, and almost unquestionable, to accept my position.

I know it is not as clear cut as this, but I hope you get the idea.

Tommo

My, very small, two cents worth - being 'religious' and being 'spiritual' ain't necessarily the same thing.

That's all.

Tommo, you believe that newton existed, but how do you know, really, are you not taking a 'leap of faith' ?

Well, I don't 'know', and perhaps there is an element of "leap of faith" in my belief that N existed.  You are quite right that he could have been a fabrication of someone passed down the centuries.... Or indeed that people only talk about Newton when I am in earshot, telly programmes are made especially just for me, and that Newton's ideas and methods do seem to fit nicely into the chain of scientific thought and history.

I think the point is that there are very many experiences (in the form of concepts I have been introduced to) that are consistent enough and sufficiently close to each other (i.e. not leaps) for me to understand them and hold them together in a belief system.  Again it is a belief born from experience.  If you told me tomorrow that actually it was proved that Liebnitz did beat Newton to calculus, and that you had proof, I would gradually change my belief system.

That's a bit different from an unbending, axiomatic belief.

Tommo

I'm sure I read that Dawkins regrets using that title; and he has let himself in for some completely avoidable taunts.  But nobody who has actually read the book and understood it even on a superficial level could come away with the idea that Dawkins meant 'selfish' in the limited way that Lord B implies.  One of the principle arguments of the book (unless I misunderstood it) is that a tendency towards cooperation and even altruism is compatible with the survival and proliferation of genes with that tendency.

Here's an excerpt from Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind" (Heinemann, 2000), a book which has greatly influenced my thinking about human behaviour. In this book the author argues that much behaviour can be explained by Darwin's theory of sexual selection, often operating at an unconscious level. I commend this book to all.

"Imagine some young hominids huddling around a Pleistocene campfire, enjoying their newly evolved language ability. Two males get into an argument about the nature of the world, and start holding forth, displaying their ideologies.

The hominid named Carl proposes: `We are mortal, fallible primates who survive on this fickle savannah only because we cluster in these jealousy-ridden groups. Everywhere we have ever traveled is just a tiny, random corner of a vast continent on an unimaginably huge sphere spinning in a vacuum. The sphere has travelled billions and billions of times around a flaming ball of gas, which will eventually blow up to incinerate our empty, fossilized skulls. I have discovered several compelling lines of evidence in support of these hypotheses . . .'

The hominid named Candide interrupts: `No, I believe we are immortal spirits gifted with these beautiful bodies because the great god Wug chose us as his favorite creatures. Wug blessed us with this fertile paradise that provides just enough challenges to keep things interesting. Behind the moon, mystic nightingales sing our praises, some of us more than others. Above the azure dome of the sky the smiling sun warms our hearts. After we grow old and enjoy the babbling of our grandchildren, Wug will lift us from these bodies to join our friends to eat roasted gazelle and dance eternally. I know these things because Wug picked me to receive this special wisdom in a dream last night.'

Which ideology do you suppose would prove more sexually attractive? Will Carl's truth-seeking genes - which may discover some rather ugly truths - out-compete Candide's wonderful-story genes? The evidence of human history suggests that our ancestors were more like Candide than Carl. Most modern humans are naturally Candides. It usually takes years of watching BBC or PBS science documentaries to become as objective as Carl."

Miller, of course, has a lot more to say  on the subject than this, but what he is arguing is that much religious myth-making (including Heaven, Hell, the after-life) is a kind of artistic activity. Karen Armstrong (an ex-nun) has, I believe, taken the same view.

I don't object to imaginative creation myths: the problems begin when one, and only one, is taken as true and then rammed down peoples' throats.

This paragraph out of Nietzsche's 'The Joyful Science' could make a nice complement to this text.  I lost what rested of my faith being read this:

Believers and their need to believe.— How much one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is "firm" and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one's strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one's weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today; therefore it still finds believers. For this is how man is: An article of faith could be refuted before him a thousand times—if he needed it, he would consider it "true" again and again, in accordance with that famous "proof of strength" of which the Bible speaks.
Metaphysics is still needed by some; but so is that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm (while on account of the ardor of this demand one is easier and more negligent about the demonstration of this certainty)—this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop, in short, that instinct of weakness which, to be sure, does not create religious, metaphysical systems, and convictions of all kinds but—conserves them.
Actually, what is steaming around all of these positivistic systems is the vapor of a certain pessimistic gloom, something that smells of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, and fear of anew disappointments—or else ostentatious wrath, a bad mood, the anarchism of indignation, and whatever other symptoms and masquerades of the feeling of weakness there may be. Even the vehemence with which our most intelligent contemporaries lose themselves in wretched nooks and crannies, for example, into patriotism (I mean what the French call chauvinisme and the Germans "German") or into petty aesthetic creeds after the manner of French naturalisme (which drags up and bares only that part of nature which inspires nausea and simultaneous amazement—today people like to call this part la vérité vraie) or into nihilism à la Petersburg (meaning the belief in unbelief even to the point of martyrdom) always manifests above all the need for a faith, a support, backbone, something to fall back on.
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant—which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

Would you care to elaborate on that comment?

Dawkins doesn't of course argue that only tendencies directly aimed at reproduction survive, but rather that over time non-survival-oriented genetic tendencies will inevitably be weeded out. Even then, homosexuality arguably aids survival of species in certain (admittedly non-genetic) ways by encouraging certain forms of sociality and co-operation within competition.