THE CITY

The City
It is my contention that memes are what they appear to be: an ad
hoc solution. When asked to give evidence for memes at the 2007
Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture,
Dennett responded that it was an accepted scientific belief and
offered his article in The Encyclopedia of Evolution as one line of
evidence supporting his position (it was not his sole point on the
matter). But what kind of evidence is this? If this is a legitimate
response, I see no reason why I should not be allowed to hold that
there is good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus because I wrote
the article on the resurrection of Jesus in the Cambridge Dictionary
of Christianity. 12 If an article with the imprint of a prestigious British
university press is all that is required to prove a hypothesis, then
the matter seems settled. Frankly, I am advocating no such thing; it
seems to be a category mistake. Simply put, literary evidence is not
sufficient evidence to confirm a scientific theory—and with good
reason.
One must remember that the concept of memes is based on an
analogy between genes (or viruses) and ideas. An analogy is a type
of supposal, a way of likening one thing to another. Analogies are
not evidence that something is so, but rather illustrations of how
something could be so. Analogies are tremendously useful things in
philosophy, science, and history; positing them often allows us to
make progress. Unfortunately analogies can also distort our view
of reality and lead us down many dead-end paths. Remember that
scientists in the late 19th century routinely posited the luminiferous
ether—the hypothetical substance that was rigid in relationship to
electromagnetic waves but completely permeable to matter—based
upon the supposed analogy between light and sound. The idea was
analogically plausible but mistaken. Worse, the idea of ether actually
held back scientific progress. Fortunately Einstein built upon the
work of Michelson and Morley and disproved it in his special theory
of relativity.
Those who appeal to memes to dismiss belief in God depend upon
a hypothetical, unobserved entity, which can be dispensed with in
order to make sense of what we observe. But is not that actually a
basic atheist critique of belief in God—an unobserved hypothesis
which can easily be dismissed?
12
Robert B. Stewart, “Resurrection (the) of Jesus,” in Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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