Viruses of the Mind
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"Viruses of the Mind" (1991) is a controversial essay by Richard Dawkins using memetics, epidemiology, and an analogy with biological and computer viruses to analyse the propagation of religious beliefs. In the essay, Dawkins defines the "symptoms" of being infected by the "virus of religion", providing examples for most of them, and tries to define a connection between the elements of religion and its survival value (invoking Zahavi's handicap principle of sexual selection, applied to believers of a religion). Dawkins also describes religious beliefs as "mind-parasites", and as "gangs [which] will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism ... or ... component parts to a single virus". In the essay Dawkins coined the term faith-sufferer.
The essay is included in the books Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind (ISBN 0-631-19678-1) and A Devil's Chaplain. The second part of Dawkins' television programme The Root of All Evil? explored similar ideas and took a similar name, The Virus of Faith.
The claims that "God" and "Faith" are viruses of the mind was analysed at length within a year of their original publication in John Bowker's 1992-3 Gresham College lectures[1]. Bowker suggests that Dawkins's "account of religious motivation...is...far removed from evidence and data." and that, even if the God-meme approach were valid, "it does not give rise to one set of consequences... Out of the many behaviours it produces, why are we required to isolate only those that might be regarded as diseased?".
Alister McGrath is also severely critical of Dawkins's analysis. He suggests that "memes have no place in serious scientific reflection"[2], that there is strong evidence that such ideas are not spread by random processes, but by deliberate intentional actions[3], that "evolution" of ideas is more Lamarkian than Darwinian[4] and that there is no evidence (and certainly none in the essay) that epidemiological models usefully explain the spread of religious ideas[5] McGrath also cites a metareview of 100 studies and argues that "If religion is reported as having a positive effect on human well-being by 79% of recent studies in the field, how can it conceivably be regarded as analagous to a virus?"[6]
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- ^ Written in collaboration with the psychiatrist Quinton Deeley and published as Is God a Virus? (SPCK, 1995, 274pp) He is severely critical of the claims, and of the quality of Dawkins argument, suggesting eg that "Logic never interferes with Dawkins's arguments where God is concerned" (p73). The other quotes come from p73 as well.
- ^ Dawkins's God:Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life p125 quoting Simon Conway Morris is support
- ^ op. cit. p 126
- ^ op cit p 127
- ^ op. cit. (p137-8)
- ^ op. cit. p.136 citing Koenig and Cohen The Link between Religion and Health OUP 2002
