The God Delusion and The Human Being Delusion

Richard Dawkins's should be congratulated on his new book. I particularly relish the argument that if you need a God to create the universe, not only do you need a 'GodGod' to create God but creating God would be much more tricky than creating the universe, creating the GodGod would be even worse, and it does not stop there.

As I am sure Dawkins would admit, if there is a weakness in the challenge to religion made by science it is that science is still encumbered with almost as much believing as religion. At the coal face in immunology I often wonder whether my colleagues have forgotten to bring the incense to go with their intonations. And there is a scientific belief that perhaps even outdoes the God Delusion - the Sentient Human Being Delusion.

Almost all scientists, apparently including Dawkins, believe in something that could be called a 'sentient human being', despite the fact that William James pointed out 100 years ago that such a suggestion is incompatible with science, or even with rational thought. The reasons are given on the linked webpages. Very briefly, human beings are colonies of cells and everything we know about these cells is that they have separate inputs of information about the world. They cannot have combined sentience for information that is only available to one or other of them. They could only be sentient separately. And there is no published reason why this should not be the case (to my knowledge) however surprising this might at first appear. I would suggest that to get a full perspective on the God Delusion it may be handy to see the full absurdity of the Human Being Delusion; they may be closely linked.


Jonathan Edwards: jo.edwards@ucl.ac.uk