3. What he believes?
• Dawkins is a materialist and this means that
he doesn’t believe in the existence of the soul.
Therefore there is no chance in a life after
death as there is nothing to exist after death,
the mind dies with the physical body. There
life after death could only be understood as?
4. Where is his idea expressed?
• Dawkins rejects any ideas proposed by Plato
and Descartes about the soul – he is against
the idea that we have an immortal soul. In The
River Out of Eden (Palgrave, 1995) Dawkins
says that we are just bytes of information,
with nothing supernatural about us.
5. Evidence
• Dawkins argues that scientific views can be
supported by reliable evidence whereas the
ideas proposed by Plato and Descartes
depend on myth and faith, for which there is
no empirical evidence.
6. • Dawkins sees the concept of the soul as an
illusion caused by ignorance, superstition and
irrational perception. He says that human
consciousness is a ‘mysterious aspect of brain
activity, which neither science or philosophy
can understand’, it is this consciousness that is
mistaken as a soul.
7. • Dawkins connects this false belief of a soul to
religion, stating that ‘the universe turns due to
genetic replication and has nothing to do with
a divine being’. Conversely if we are no more
than the selfish DNA robot that Dawkins.
8. So why do we have this belief
• Dawkins alleges that the reason we have
belief in the soul is because it results from the
human incapacity to accept the fact that evil
and suffering have no purpose. He says that
we are nothing more than DNA. He says that
each person is the product of evolution and
not an immortal soul
