"Viruses of the Mind" (1993) is an article by Richard Dawkins using memetics and analogies with biological and computer viruses, and with disease and epidemiology, to analyse the propagation of ideas and behaviours. Its particular focus is on religious beliefs and activities. The article is included in the books Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind (ISBN 0-631-19678-1) and A Devil's Chaplain. In this article, Dawkins coined the term faith-sufferer.
The second episode of Dawkins' two-part television programme The Root of All Evil? explored similar ideas and took a similar name, "The Virus of Faith".
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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 [that] 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".
Dawkins suggests that religious belief in the "faith-sufferer" typically shows the following elements:
Dawkins stresses his claim that religious beliefs do not spread as a result of evidence in their support, but typically by cultural transmission, in most cases from parents or from charismatic individuals. He refers to this as involving "epidemiology, not evidence". Further Dawkins distinguishes this process from the spread of scientific ideas, which, he suggests, is constrained by the requirement to conform with certain virtues of standard methodology: "testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on". He points out that faith "spreads despite a total lack of every single one of these virtues".
The idea that "God" and "Faith" are viruses of the mind has provoked some hostile criticism, including John Bowker's 1992–1993 Gresham College lectures,[1] in which he suggests that Dawkins' "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, a Christian theologian, has also commented critically on Dawkins' analysis, suggesting 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 Lamarckian than Darwinian,[4] and that there is no evidence (and certainly none in the article) 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 analogous to a virus?"[6]
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