Dawkins on "steroids"...

Having just recently glowingly reviewed Hitchens' book on god not being Great, (whatsoever), it might appear that there is no room for a spiritual perspective in my world, but that is not the case actually. I find myself getting irritated with Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) and his wholesale chucking out the planetary window of anything REMOTELY mystical or mysterious. If it doesn't have concrete, verifiable, quanitifiable evidence, it doesn't exist, PERIOD! Here's today's column in Guardian Unlimited Observer Review by Neil Spencer entitled "The Dawkins Delusion: science good, the rest bad".
Spencer says it alot better than I can:

Neil Spencer
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

Thanks to Richard Dawkins I have just acquired a new title. It's official: I am an 'Enemy of Reason', a wily opponent of rationalism interviewed (in my capacity as The Observer magazine's astrologer) by Dawkins for a new two-part TV documentary. In the first programme, he attempts to debunk alternative medicine, in the other to rubbish the ideas of astrologers, channellers and other so-called 'New Age' types.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins' interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy - the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.

On we went through genes versus soul, dark matter, forecasting 'trivial' horse races, astrology's antiquity. Dawkins thinks anything pre-Enlightenment is 'primitive'. As primitive as a gothic cathedral or a Plato text then. Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.
I object, however, to being bracketed with such 'enemies of reason' as religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, whom I dislike quite as much as the professor. But The Dawk sees enemies everywhere: chanting hippies, doughty dowsers, internet surfers - all are helping 'undermine civilisation'.

Dawkins has always been easily offended but his tone has taken on a distinctly paranoid tinge. 'Superstition is gaining ground and science is under attack,' he warns grimly. 'Primitive darkness is coming back!' What can he mean? The slaughter in Darfur perhaps? The shadow of Lord Voldemort? Why no - he's fretting about newspaper lifestyle pages offering 'free advertising for alternative medicine'.

Few things arouse the indignation of science's hard hats like non-conventional approaches to healing. Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics. Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.

The placebo effect is real enough, as any GP knows, but common sense and a wealth of personal testimony attest that there are other processes at work in treatments like homeopathy. For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.

Indeed they do, but not all the time. The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent. It is precisely the people for whom the drugs haven't worked, or who can't face the side-effects, who turn to alternative remedies. If they find help there (many don't), it seems patronising to sneer at their 'delusion'. It particularly irks the sceptics that anyone should earn money from alternative remedies (Dawkins snipes at their 'healthy fee'; presumably his own goes to charity). The enemies of reason are clearly only in it for the money, while science is presented with a moral halo as snowy as the lab coat Dawkins wears as he strides through shining pharmaceutical laboratories. This, let's remind ourselves, is the same benevolent pharmaceutical industry exposed by a 2003 Observer inquiry as routinely hoodwinking doctors with ghost-written articles about their products, a practice the editor of the British Journal of Medicine called 'a very big problem'.

There are frauds, scamsters and incompetents in the mind/body/spirit arena, but the same is true of applied science. Its assumed halo turns downright grubby when one considers its graduates' willingness to put ethics aside for questionable industrial practices - dowsers or chanters don't devise ever deadlier land mines.

There are doctors and biologists keen to explore 'alternative' remedies, physicists who are comfortable talking about spirituality. For Dawkins, however, there can be no compromise, no collusion - the 'fault line' between faith and reason, logic and irrationality, is absolute. His view of science requires an acrobatic rewrite of its own history, and for the 'esoteric' interests of its heroes to be suppressed. Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

The borders of science, then, require constant patrol. The tricky domain of quantum theory, claimed by some as a bridge between mysticism and physics, calls for particular vigilance, hence Dawkins' previous warning of quantum's uncertainty principle having 'deplorable effects on popular culture'.

Scientism's greed to own abstract theory as well as physical matter extends even to feelings. Ever the thought policeman, Dawkins distinguishes his own 'real mystery' and 'real sense of wonder' from the bogus wonder the rest of us feel when contemplating nature or the night sky.

Feelings, alas, are not amenable to regulation or double-blind tests, for we are not creatures only of reason but of intuition and emotion. Nothing makes that point as clearly as the great human preoccupation with love and romance.

I had always wondered how Dawkins could square his zealotry for reason with his admiration for William Blake and WB Yeats, the former a mystic who talked with angels and created a despot called Urizen, the latter a fully initiated magician from the Order of the Golden Dawn. Enemies, in short.

'Oh, [Yeats] wrote a lot of pretty words,' Dawkins said to me with a dismissive wave, 'whether they mean anything is another matter.'

Pretty but meaningless words! Might as well close down the poetry faculty now and stop bothering with pesky hermeticists like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Yeats and Hughes.

Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of 'indifferent vastness' - the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being 'betrayed'. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt. The sweep of Romanticism, from Goethe and Beethoven down to Nash and Ginsberg is where modern humanity has articulated many of its quests for metaphysical and spiritual truth.

'In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism,' Richard Tarnas says in his remarkable book Cosmos & Psyche, an attempt to heal that schism, to 're-enchant' the cosmos and redeem what he calls the 'pathos' of the modern condition. By contrast, Dawkins' one-eyed view turns reason, as Blake warned, into the enemy of imagination and of art.

What do YOU think? Yes, YOU!