The Parable of the Astrodome
Let me offer another way of thinking about the religion question: gather a thousand of your closest friends. Crowd them together in the middle of a giant featureless round room. Give everybody a beeper and announce "when the beeper goes off, line up to face the same direction as your neighbor!" One of two things will happen:

A: If there really is nothing to orient by....
When the beepers go off, people will clump together facing the same direction, but there will be breaks - little errors in lining up will accumulate until some folks have to choose between facing one direction and facing another. The crowd will develop regions (called domains) where everybody is lined up, with sharp boundaries between the domains where people aren't able to locally reconcile their decisions.

B: If there is an external focus....
If there are field lines, or home plate, or a scoreboard still sitting on the wall of the stadium, some folks will get the idea to line up facing the external marker. This will dramatically cut down on the number of domains and make lining up easier.

What's my point? If there's an outside authority that helps each individual make a decision, the entire crowd can coordinate itself better. This is not random smacking on my part - it's exactly how iron atoms line themselves up in the presence or absence of a magnetic field. Nothing that I've said here is anything other than mathematics and physics of crowd behavior, but you can make the analogy to the value of religion easily enough.

Notice the question of the validity of the authority is left unanswered - its actually very easy to have this kind of discussion without insulting people. I can't imagine how Dawkins thinks it's fitter to constantly berate and aggravate religious folks. Such extravagant, baroque wastefulness on his part....


- posted by Scott @ 9:45 PM