The God Delusion and the Human Being Delusion

I enjoyed Richard Dawkins's book, even if he is attacking a soft target. 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 wondered whether my colleagues had 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'. 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. The idea that calling multicellular colonies like people and lobsters 'single organisms' is anything more than an arbitrary convenience for biologists and for social discourse is debunked by the existence of the cnidarians (such as the Portuguese Man O' War). Life comes in units called cells, which gather together and separate in all sorts of ways. 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. It seems likely that they are closely linked. It may have been useful to the survival of cellular colonies for them to develop a narrative about being a single being. Once such a narrative caught hold it would be a small step to apply it further to the universe.