The view from Middle World

One last excerpt from The God Delusion. Finishing this book turned out to be a chore, but the last chapter has some good stuff. One doesn't have to accept Richard Dawkins' agenda to be delighted by paragraphs like these.

We live near the centre of a cavernous museum of magnitudes, viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems that are equipped to perceive and understand only a small middle range of sizes, moving at a middle range of speeds. We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics — which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy. The range of sizes, distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band, set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian cosmology at the larger.

Our imaginations are forlornly under-equipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar. We try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball, in orbit around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons. That isn't what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls. They are not like anything we recognize. It isn't clear that 'like' even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality's further horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighborhood of the quantum. (p. 363)

Dawkins means to demonstrate in passages like this that we don't need God to inspire a sense of wonder. He wants his readers to be content with the power of science to "open the mind and satisfy the psyche." (p. 362) He quotes the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose . . . I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." (p. 364) I agree! Dawkins looks at this queerness and sees only impersonal processes with science as the ground and end of all things, I look at that same universe and see God. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." 1 Corinthians 2:9 (KJV)

All quotes from Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)