Is reality unreasonable?

THE ENEMIES of Reason, a TV series by Richard Dawkins, is being shown by Channel 4.

Its theme is a familiar Dawkins one; that superstition and irrational beliefs should be rooted out and banished from our psyches. A previous series targeted organised religion, Marx’s “opium to the people” and Freud’s universal neurosis, which, Dawkins believes, brings all manner of ills in its train.

Now astrologers, water-diviners and purveyors of alternative medicine are being hammered.

Dawkins, author of the 1976 classic the Selfish Gene, is an evolutionary biologist. For him, our bodies and minds evolved through natural selection as our ancestors, animal and human, struggled to survive in a hostile world.

The moral and emotional faculties, too, are an evolutionary legacy. But what survival advantage did a tendency towards magical beliefs confer on our remote ancestors? Surely irrationality would be a hindrance, rather than a help, in facing the trials of life.

Creatures constantly monitor their environments. That, after all, is what senses are for. Dorcha, my cat, has a model of the world in her head. It’s a realistic one; she has survived and produced kittens. One of them, Dopey, got it wrong and perished under the wheel of a car.

The person who confronts life’s difficulties should have better survival prospects than one who retreats into fantasy and make-believe. A general, taking to the field because he perceives a military advantage should, on balance, defeat the one who does battle because the entrails of a slaughtered chicken have a particular colour.

In the dog-eat-dog world of natural selection, there is no room for escapist delusions. Why, then, are horoscopes, tarot cards and fortune-tellers so popular? Why are “alternative” medical treatments which, Dawkins claims, net a staggering €2.4 billion a year, favoured over the tried and tested ones of science?

Theologians produce ingenious arguments to reconcile inconsistencies in sacred texts. Commentators such as Dawkins do the same for cosmology and biology.

Dean Hamer, a molecular biologist at the US National Institute of Health, measured “spiritual” dispositions in people. Even non-religious people, he claims, have such experiences. The awareness of self can disappear when a person becomes totally absorbed in some activity.

Dancing, music or sport may result in “spiritual” experiences of this sort. The crucial element in spirituality, according to Hamer, is self-forgetfulness and the merging of one’s awareness in a larger whole.

Hamer used questionnaires to determine the extent of such phenomena. He then examined the DNA of his subjects and found correlations between spirituality and a particular gene. “Vesicular Monoamine Transporter Number 2”, or VMAT2 is, he claims, the “god gene”. It governs the production of monoamines, brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine.

These mood-influencing substances, he thinks, are responsible for “spiritual” experiences. Hamer’s work is controversial but interesting; there is less argument nowadays about the existence of God than about a genetic propensity to believe in Him.

But if there is such a gene, how did we evolve it?

Predator and prey live in a world of camouflage and stealth. The ability to see through stratagems of deception is vital to survival and so we search for patterns in the flux of experience.

A “bigger picture” of the world, even one bordering on the irrational, may reveal underlying patterns, knowledge which could be helpful in the trials of life.

But surely a pattern-seeking tendency would have self-censoring mechanisms within it; a propensity to imagine patterns when, in fact, there are none, could be lethal.

Arthur Koestler offered an alternative explanation. Man, he claimed, is the only creature to have discovered the inevitability of his own death and ultimate extinction. This revelation is disheartening and depressing, not one which helps in the task of survival.

The realist is demoralised and defeated before he starts. Koestler himself had an acute sense of this; he committed suicide, persuading his last spouse to die with him.

Belief in a supernatural world which is sympathetic and whose help can be sought in times of strife gives the believer confidence. We are escapists who don’t like dwelling on the darker aspect of existence. As TS Eliot put it: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Perhaps the manifest reluctance of young Irish people to study science and mathematics has its roots in the same source.

But is an irrational vision of the world necessarily so misguided, as Dawkins maintains? After all, science itself is moving increasingly towards irrationality. A century ago, Bertrand Russell stumbled on a problem at the core of logic, the paradox which bears his name. In 1905, Einstein’s paper on special relativity shattered everyday notions of space and time.

With general relativity a decade later, the commonsense world view, which had held sway since Newton, was swept away.

Then came the spooky world of quantum mechanics, the science of the very small, the tenets of which violate many of the apparent certainties of everyday realism. More recently, it is alleged that “dark matter”, something undetectable and totally unknown, comprises 90% of our universe. Super-string theory proposes that there are 11 dimensions instead of our everyday four and cosmologists talk of multiple universes. Perhaps evolution got it right, after all. Is reality unreasonable?