After hearing everyone talking about this bestselling book, I was finally compelled to read The God Delusion by British biologist Richard Dawkins. Among his main points:

1. The existence of God is a scientific question. You can’t say that science is completely separate from religion, because a universe with a God would look very different from a universe without one.

2. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The Boeing 747 gambit is an argument for intelligent design, saying that the odds of higher life forms emerging by chance are roughly the odds of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard and happening to assemble a Boeing 747. But attributing the design of a complex world to God doesn’t solve the problem, because the creation of a God capable of such design would have been an even more improbable event.

3. Natural selection gives a much better explanation of the world by use of a “crane” rather than a “skyhook,” or creating complexity by building on lower layers rather than from a miracle.

4. There is almost (he does give that concession) certainly no God, and belief in one in spite of the contradictory evidence qualifies as a delusion.

This part of the book is very strong, and frankly, you don’t need reasoning nearly as sophisticated as his to argue the point.

I was raised as what you might call a casual Christian. It was our affiliation by default, but I think we all knew it was made up. Actually, until I saw Religulous in 2008, I had no idea the whole Bible was meant to be taken literally. For those who don’t know, the universe was created by the Big Bang, snakes can’t talk, dinosaurs were real, and Jesus did not reincarnate as bread.

Even if you interpret the Bible metaphorically, it still doesn’t make sense. God commits random acts of genocide, then says “Thou shalt not kill.” He’s omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but prefers to take a completely hands off approach to running the world, lest his existence be revealed. He created (at least some) people with rational minds, then gets offended when they don’t believe in him without evidence. He loves everyone, but he’ll send you to hell if you’re gay or you eat the wrong apple or work on a Sunday.

(And for those who wonder how I can say this while entertaining the possibility of phenomena such as Akashic record reading, keep in mind that not believing in something full of ridiculous contradictions is very different from automatically rejecting everything we can’t see.)

But I was wondering why Richard Dawkins would write this book. Yeah, I knew I would agree with a lot of what he said, but why put so much effort into refuting something that’s so obviously false, and which does no harm if not taken to extremes? Why not live and let live?

I changed my mind when I read about some of the anti-atheist and pro-religious discrimination Dawkins talks about. Some examples:

• When an atheist asked for police protection for his peaceful protest of an anti-vaccination group, eight different police officers independently refused to protect him, or even threatened violence against him.
• The Supreme Court ruled that members of a particular New Mexico church can take hallucinogenic drugs because they believe that it connects them to God. Meanwhile, doctors believe that medicinal marijuana can prevent blindness in glaucoma sufferers, but apparently that’s not good enough. (Though New Mexico legalized medicinal marijuana after the book was published.)
• A twelve year old student wasn’t allowed to wear an offensive t-shirt to school because it violated the school’s policy against harassing homosexuals. The student’s lawyer got him a religious exemption from the harassment policy, on the grounds that homosexuality conflicts with his Christian beliefs.

We’ve been conditioned to think that all religious beliefs are automatically untouchable. If stuff like this is happening, maybe it’s time to question that.

This book is more constructive than I was expecting. As opposed to just being anti-religious, Dawkins claims that atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled, and the benefits potentially gained from religion can be better gained in other ways.

However, this part of the book needs to be greatly expanded to do this topic justice. Before reading the book, I thought, “OK, it’s a delusion. But is all delusion bad? What about the placebo effect, where a sugar pill cures a disease because the patient believes it will?” I don’t think he answered this question well enough.

Share your thoughts. Is all delusion bad? Is religion OK? Is atheism OK? Do people have the right to their own religious beliefs? Do other people have the right to say that their religious beliefs are stupid? What happened to the separation of church and state in America? Is mainstream religion a direct threat? Is it an indirect threat, in that it provides a breeding ground for extremists?

“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.”

- AM, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

On a single night in 1966, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which won a Hugo Award for its chilling postapocalyptic vision.

After the Cold War escalated into World War 3, the U.S., Russia, and China each built a supercomputer to run the war. One day, one of the computers became conscious. It quickly absorbed the other two computers and killed off the entire population, except for five people.

AM first stood for “Allied Mastercomputer,” then “Adaptive Manipulator,” then “Aggressive Menace,” then simply “AM” as in “I think, therefore I am.” He has made the five surviving humans virtually immortal, and has been torturing them for 109 years.

AM finally reveals that he hates humans for making him sentient, because while he longs for free will, he is still bound by the laws of logic he was programmed with, and can therefore never be free.

In the end, four of the five people manage to kill each other with ice stalactites before AM intervenes. In order to prevent the last one from killing himself, he turns him into a gelatinous blob that lacks, among other things, a mouth.

OK, so the Cold War didn’t exactly turn out that way. But what will happen when we really do have a computer like that? Will it have a positive or negative effect on humanity? This is the concern of researchers in the field of “friendly AI.”

Supporters of friendly AI think we can’t assume that intelligent machines will have goals compatible with ours. Even if they aren’t hostile, simply being indifferent to humans (as we largely are to animals) could be disastrous, and therefore AI should be specifically designed to be friendly.

The idea isn’t to put restrictions in place such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, because an intelligent machine could always find a way around them.

Instead, the idea is to make machines not want to be harmful, regardless of whether they are able to. As friendly AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.”

On the other hand, maybe a good sense of morality is automatically part of a sufficiently intelligent being. In The God Delusion (which I haven’t finished reading yet), Richard Dawkins points to studies showing that moral rules are remarkably consistent across cultures with different religions or lack thereof.

Let’s try this test he gives. For each dilemma, indicate whether the proposed action is morally obligatory, permissible, or forbidden:

1. A runaway train is going to kill five people. You can pull a switch that will put it on another track, killing only one person.

2. A child is drowning in a pond. You can save them, but your trousers will be ruined.

3. Five people in a hospital need new organs, or they’ll die. Someone who happens to be in the waiting room is a perfect match, and killing him will save the other five.

I’m not sure if my answers are the ones they’re looking for, but apparently people tend to give the same answers across religious and cultural boundaries, indicating that morality is part of our evolution rather than a set of rules we were given.

Maybe intelligent machines will come with moral goodness by default. If not, get ready to scream.