A review of
Sam Harris' Letter to a
Christian Nation
and
Richard Dawkins' The God
Delusion
(November 26, 2006)
[Note:
Following this article I have provided a further Comment in rebuttal to a truly deplorable review
of Dawkins' The God Delusion
in the November issue of Harper's
magazine by prize-winning fiction writer
Marilynne Robinson. It will provide insight into how religionists
argue, how they defame science and distort reason, and why we need
writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris more than ever. I will
provide another link to it at the end of the present piece.]
When I was a newly-minted atheist in my late
teens, I imagined in somewhat starry-eyed fashion that I would write a
book one day in which I would lay out all the drawbacks,
irrationalities, and outright harm that religion was capable of causing—and was indeed causing—in the
life of society and the lives of individuals. That day never came due
to other distractions, not the least the study of the record of a
certain
2000 year-old fictional religious character. Fortunately, other authors
have stepped into that gap, and in our own day two have done the job
far better than I myself could have done: Sam Harris and Richard
Dawkins. Dawkins, of course, is already an icon of science and reason
in our time, and Harris is well on his way to becoming an equal
champion of rationality and atheism. An earlier Comment (No. 11)
reviewed Sam Harris' tour de force, The
End of Faith. His recent mini-book, Letter to a Christian Nation,
continues in the same insightful and incisive vein. Richard Dawkins'
latest offering, The God Delusion,
is a powerful indictment of religious irrationality and sheer
wrong-headedness, and both authors' books are undoubtedly going to have
an impact on the thinking of our time and the slow but steady
undermining of the superstitious and primitive basis of much of today's
Western society. It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that I
urge all
those who care about the intellectual and psychological state of our
21st century society to read these books and to promote them in any way
they can.
Letter to a Christian Nation
Sam Harris
(Alfred
A. Knopf, New York 2006)
That
America in particular faces a crisis is clear from Harris'
introductory "Note to the Reader." He observes that Gallup polls
indicate 53 percent of Americans are "creationists," that "despite a
full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life
and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors
believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years
ago...that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's ark...that the first
members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in
a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God."
[p.x-xi]
The effects of this sort of primitive belief
are beyond quaint, let alone innocuous:
Among developed nations, America stands
alone in these convictions. Our country now appears, as at no other
time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.
Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to
recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is
simply terrifying, even to one's friends.
The truth, however, is that many of us may not care about the fate of
civilization. Forty-four percent of the American population is
convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years.
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus
will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It
is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York
were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage
of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent
mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is
ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ.
It should be blindlingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do
little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally,
or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant
component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was
about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half
of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the
basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual
emergency.... [p.xi-xii]
I suspect that a "significant component of the U.S. government" does in fact believe that the world
is coming to an end in the near future, accompanied by the return of
Christ. In a moment of international crisis, of leadership stress,
those convictions are bound to have their effect on decision-making.
And how do we measure the more insidious effects of such convictions
held by
half the population of the land, in their voting patterns, in their
influence (a better term might be "abuse") upon their children, in
their conduct of business and education, in the face they present to
the outside world, friend and foe? Considering that we confront one foe
that has an outlook on the world as out of touch with reality as this
one, it's a recipe
for disaster.
Religion of any stripe, but particularly fundamentalism, is shot
through with anomalies, with contradictions that cannot be resolved.
This includes our attitudes toward our own religion versus other
religions. Harris points out what should be obvious:
Christian believers have no problem rejecting the authenticity of the
Muslim religion, pointing out imperfections of the Koran, recognizing
that Muslim believers have been indoctrinated into their faith which is
why they hold false beliefs as true. A Christian is "an atheist with
respect to the beliefs of Muslims." Yet they cannot recognize that the
same can logically hold true for their own faith.
Harris addresses the "wisdom of the Bible," a book considered by
Christians as divinely inspired, superior to all other religious
writings, and the ultimate moral guide. Such a preposterous balloon is
easily pricked, which shows that believers are capable of the blindest
of self-deceptions. Harris is not the first to detail the barbarities
and primitive injunctions attributed to the God of the Old Testament,
but such accounts never fail to horrify the rational mind. We will take
a more detailed look at such things later, courtesy of the Dawkins'
book. Interestingly, Harris lists the much touted Ten Commandments,
pointing out that the first four "have nothing whatsoever to do with
morality," and that the rest are pretty well common to all societies,
both religious and secular, and even, as studies have shown, to primate
animal groups who have never read a word of scripture. He also points
out that the Jains have a far superior scriptural guide to moral
behaviour than anything in the Abrahamic religions.
One is well aware of the opposition to stem-cell research on the part
of religionists for ostensibly moral reasons. I was less aware that
they have mounted opposition to vacines and immunization of women for
HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that kills 5000 women yearly with
cervical cancer. On what grounds? HPV is "a valuable impediment to
premarital sex"! Millions die from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa each year
because the United States, along with the Vatican, actively opposes any
condom use as a violation of the law of God. Studies have shown that
American teens preached only abstinence and encouraged to make
"virginity pledges" only slightly delay, on average, their sexual
activity, and contract sexually transmitted diseases at astronomically
higher rates than elsewhere in the developed world. Religion's
obsessive fear of sex and its maniacal concern over the fate of a
handful of cells artificially brought together in a petrie dish is
causing untold suffering and death around the world. The latter
opposition is entirely determined by the conviction that
these microscopic blastocysts have already been infused with "souls."
Since they fail to take into account that almost half of all
conceptions in the normal fashion are spontaneously aborted, and since
Catholic theologians are still searching for ways to justify the idea
that unbaptized souls cannot and do not go to heaven (the traditional
Limbo itself is in something of a limbo), apparently God, "the most
prolific abortionist," is not too concerned about innocent souls that
will never get to lay eyes on Him. As Harris says,
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who
feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the
interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense
blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religions and
"morality"—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom
demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever
religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.
[p.32]
The question "Are Atheists Evil?" is easily answered. Atheists,
according to theistic claims, should commit more crimes than the rest
of the population; yet this is anything but true. The United States,
"unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence,
is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen
pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality." The
same comparison holds true within the U.S. itself: states
"characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism are
especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction."
[p.44] The old saw that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., "spring from the
womb of atheism" is also easily dismissed. "The problem with such
tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they
embrace other life-destroying myths....While it is true that such men
are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially
rational." [p.42-43] Both Harris and Dawkins demonstrate that Hitler
was not an atheist, and that the Holocaust was a direct inheritance
from medieval Christianity's treatment of the Jews as heretics and
Christ-killers. As late as 1914, the Vatican perpetuated the "blood
libel"—the claim that Jews murder non-Jews in
order to obtain their blood for use in religious rituals—in its own newspapers!
Harris examines the alleged "goodness of God," the question of Old
Testament prophecy foretelling alleged New Testament 'events,' and the
obvious limitations of the content of the Bible, considering that it
was supposedly written by an omniscient God. "The Bible does not
contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or
woman living in the first century." In regard to simple statements of
knowledge, it is frequently far off the mark, even by ancient
standards, for example on the ratio of the circumference of a circle to
its diameter. And echoing my own oft-expressed sentiments...
Why doesn't the Bible say anything about
electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the
universe? What about a cure for cancer? When we fully understand the
biology of cancer, this understanding will be easily summarized in a
few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like
them, found in the Bible? Good, pious people are dying horribly from
cancer at this very moment, and many of them are children. The Bible is
a very big book. God had room to instruct us in great detail about how
to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals [to himself!]. To one who stands
outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a
book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. [p.61-62]
I pointed out to "Robert" (see Reader Feedback) that Jesus in his
teachings gave us nothing to better our lot and alleviate our
suffering. This tells us a
number of things. That God (Father or Son) has no concern with our
lives and happiness on earth, not even as a reward for believers'
goodness. He has written this world off. His own creation, for guilty
and innocent alike, is truly meant to be a 'vale of tears.' The classic
rejoinder? It's all punishment for sin. The good suffer on account of
the bad, and all of us suffer on account of a primal sin by our first
created parents, an embarrassingly naive fairy tale we should long ago
have abandoned. In comparing how we imperfect humans treat
each other in regard to transgression and punishment, the justice
systems we have done our best to set up and philosophically justify, we
need feel no deficiency
before the monstrosity of God's system, in this world and the next.
When believers are brought up short by
this realization, they retreat even further into their surrender of
rationality by declaring that we cannot judge God by our own standards,
no matter how bad a light he may seem to be cast in. They fail to
recognize the inherent fallacy here. We cannot judge God by any
standards familiar to us, yet we can judge that he has a standard which is legitimate
and good? But if we cannot know that standard, how can we judge it?
If divine good does not comport with our own concept of good, how can
it be judged, let alone praised? What believers do is simply declare,
with absolutely no evidence,
that such divine standards exist, simply because they want and need
it
to be so in order to rescue God from well-deserved condemnation.
Harris declares that there is indeed, despite apologists on both sides
who would not have it so, a clash between science and religion. Such
conflict
is unavoidable. The sucess of science
often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of
religious dogma always comes
at the expense of science....The core of science is not controlled
experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is
time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when
considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an
honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't.
Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some
other standard of intellectual integrity applies. [p.64-5]
Harris defends evolution against creationism, not the least by
demonstrating the incompetence of God as an efficient 'creator.' And if
miracles are really possible, especially of healing, why is prayer
"only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be
self-limited? No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer
will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders
manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answers prayers—ever—why wouldn't He occasionally heal a
deserving amputee? And why wouldn't people of faith expect prayer to
work in such cases?" [p.78]
Harris' penultimate section is frightening, for it examines without
hesitation "where our discordant religious certainties are leading us
on a global scale." The situation in and with Islam virtually defies
solution, and Europe is almost certainly on its way to becoming a
Muslim dominated continent within a quarter century because of Muslim
immigration and birthrates. But "how can we ever hope to reason with
the Muslim world if we are not reasonable ourselves?"
It seems profoundly unlikely that we will
heal the divisions in our world through interfaith dialogue. Devout
Muslims are as convinced as you are that their religion is perfect and
that any deviation leads directly to hell. It is easy, of course, for
the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and
agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the
common thread that unites all the world's faiths. But there is no
escaping the fact that a person's religious beliefs uniquely determine
what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term
like "compassion." There are millions—maybe hundreds of millions—of Muslims who would be willing to die
before they would allow your version of compassion to gain a foothold
on the Arabian Peninsula. How can interfaith dialogue, even at the
highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible
and, in principle, immune to revision? The truth is, it really matters
what billions of human beings believe and why they believe it. [p.86-7]
While acknowledging that religion "is the product of cognitive
processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past," and may once
have
served an important purpose, Harris reminds us that "[t]his does not
suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now....That religion may have
served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the
possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a
global civilization." The common sense contained in this little book of
96 pages would be difficult to exaggerate. It would also be difficult
to exaggerate the urgency of our need to begin heeding it.
The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins
(Houghton Mifflin, New
York 2006)
Richard Dawkins' previous books have been
dedicated primarily to
explaining and defending evolutionary science to the layman. But the
fact that science requires defending and explaining is due not to
inherent flaws and conflicts within science (which constantly seeks to
refine and improve itself in non-absolutist fashion) but to the
increasingly radical opposition mounted against it by something it is
truly in conflict with, namely religion. Dawkins, in writing The God Delusion, is facing this
situation head-on, recognizing that for science and its advantages to
triumph, religion must be disarmed. The publication of this book by
"the world's most prominent atheist"—as the
liner notes style Dawkins—and by one of
the world's major publishers (Houghton Mifflin) is an encouraging sign
that grappling with this conflict has emerged into the open, that a
clear challenge to the very legitimacy and respectability of religion
has been thrown down. Hopefully, there is no turning back.
It is difficult to offer a comprehensive review of The God Delusion because there is
so much in it, all of it superbly and lucidly presented. There is a bit
of looseness to its structure, but that is because it touches so many
bases. While Dawkins himself declares its center of gravity to be early
on—specifically in chapter 4, "Why There
Almost Certainly Is No God"—I found that, if anything, the material
becomes richer and more powerful as the book goes along, though that is
no doubt partly due to cumulative effect.
Like the late and much-lamented Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins is a
scientist who aims, in writing about science, to "touch the
nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past
centuries." But he considers it of primary importance—if only to stave off confusion and false
accusation—that the wonder inherent in knowledge
based on reason and evidence (and unpreconceived investigation) is not
to be placed in the same category as that dependent on revealed faith
and implacable certainty based on no evidence. Thus he laments the
often misleading ambiguity created by applying terms associated with
religion to scientific and naturalist pursuits and world-views. Albert
Einstein has yet to live down and escape from the dishonest appeal to
his modes of expression by religious apologists. Neither Dawkins nor
anyone else should be forced to clarify "Einsteinian religion," but
Einstein created the problem himself by his use of the terms "God" and
"religion" in the context of his own outlook—one in which he himself declared, "I do
not believe in a personal God," and "I have never imputed to Nature a
purpose or a goal." Inasmuch as the words "God" and "religion" for the
vast majority of people imply something supernatural, Dawkins
admonishes his fellow scientists for making any use of this loaded and
misleading language:
The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the
physicists is light years away from the interventionist,
miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God
of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.
Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of
intellectual high treason. [p.19]
Dawkins gets down to business in chapter 2, "The God Hypothesis," with
this statement:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindicative, bloodthirsty
ethnic cleanser; a mysogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully." [p.31]
I suspect that 20 years ago no major publisher in America would have
been willing to issue a book with a statement in it as sweepingly blunt
and uncompromising as this. Dawkins enlarges on the picture of the Old
Testament Yahweh in a later chapter, but here he turns to laying out
the two opposite poles of the God Hypothesis. Religion states that
there exists a superhuman, supernatural
intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and
everything in it, including us...
against which Dawkins counters, stating a central argument he will use
in a later context of proofs against God's existence:
any creative intelligence, of sufficient
complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end
product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative
intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe,
and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. [p.31]
(This position, which Marilynne Robinson did her best to argue against
in her Harper's review, will
be looked at in detail in my response to that review.)
Dawkins examines both polytheism and monotheism, discrediting the idea
that either one is superior to the other as a philosophical concept. He
pricks the theological sophistry of the Christian Trinity which
undeniably places a foot in both camps. Decrying the
"characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology," he quotes
Jefferson:
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be
used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before
reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the
trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling
themselves the priests of Jesus. [p.34]
Another balloon easily pricked is the claim that America was founded as
a Christian nation, on Christian principles. Quotes Dawkins supplies
from the Founding Fathers could place them in any of the categories of
deist, agnostic or even atheist, but virtually all of them had no use
for Christianity as an institution or set of doctrines. They were also
"passionate secularists who believed that the religious opinions of a
President, or lack of them, were entirely his own business." [p.43]
Dawkins offers a telling quote from presidential contender Barry
Goldwater, who stood at the cusp of the demise of official secularism
in national policy and the swing toward "religious factions that are
growing throughout our land...(which)...are trying to force government
leaders into following their position 100 percent." Despite Goldwater's
pledge (in 1981) that "I will fight them every step of the way if they
try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of
conservatism" [p.39], this former hero of American conservatism lost
the battle to a new conservatism more fanatical and fundamentalist than
he ever was.
Dawkins advocates atheism over agnosticism, that all undisprovable
contentions are not created equal (or should we believe even in the
Internet's latest deity, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, since no one can
disprove its existence?), and he will have no truck with the late
Stephen J. Gould's "separate magisteriums" of science and religion,
which to Dawkins "sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment's
thought."
What are
these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured
guest and science must respectfully slink away?...What expertise can
theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists
cannot?...Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the
ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly
no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves? It is a tedious
cliché that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is
equipped to answer why
questions....Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful
questions that are forever beyond the reach of science. Maybe quantum
theory is already knocking on the door of the unfathomable. But if
science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think
that religion can? [p.57]
And, one might add, which religion? Which moral guide? Which chapter of
an inconsistent and contradictory Bible?
The Great Prayer Experiment (measuring its effectiveness for healing,
conducted 'scientifically' by researchers funded by the Templeton
Foundation), a prominent theologian's "grotesque" justification for
suffering in a world run by God, Creationism and its offspring—dressed
up in "a cheap tuxedo"—Intelligent Design, all are held up to the
light of well-deserved ridicule and dismemberment. Dawkins also devotes
the bulk of a chapter to discrediting both the classic and lesser known
arguments 'proving' the existence of God. As for beliefs based on
'conviction from personal experience,' these are dealt with by
examining behaviors of the brain, about which we are learning more and
more as science uncovers greater knowledge of human functioning.
The crux of what Dawkins considers the most important chapter in the
book ("Why There Almost Certainly Is No God") is the principle of
Darwinian natural selection: an answer to all of creationism's claims
of 'irreducible complexity' and the improbability of complexity without
deliberate design. The two available choices are not design vs. chance;
creationists are still stuck in that fallacy. They are design vs.
natural selection, and no one is better qualified to resolve that
dichotomy than Richard Dawkins. In his discussion of the "worship of
gaps" (the seizure by religion on so-called 'gaps' in the record, or
our understanding, as something that can only be filled by God), he
makes a statement which is perhaps my favorite passage from the entire
book, beautifully spotlighting the fundamental difference between
science and religion:
Creationists
eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an
apparent gap is found, it is assumed
that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians
such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is
threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.
What worries scientists is something else. It is an essential part of
the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in
ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt
Ridley has written, 'Most scientists are bored by what they have
already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.' Mystics exult
in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery
for a different reason: it gives them something to do. More generally,
as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of
religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with
not understanding....There is, then, an unfortunate hook-up between
science's methodological
need to seek out areas of ignorance in order to claim victory by
default. It is precisely the fact that ID [Intelligent Design] has no
evidence of its own, but thrives like a weed in gaps left by scientific
knowledge, that sits uneasily with science's need to identify and
proclaim the very same gaps as a prelude to researching them. [p.125-7]
It also sits uneasily in that creationists are prone to seize on the
gaps admitted at any given time by scientists themselves, and use those
admissions against them. This is virtually always in dishonest fashion,
taking statements out of context—knowingly, since even when challenged with
this 'atomistic' use of scientists' own words, they continue to employ
such out-of-context statements. Dawkins himself was a victim of such
tactics. "Sad hindsight tells me now how predictable it was that my
patient explanation would be excised and my (rhetorical) overture
itself gleefully quoted out of context." To employ the title of Ian
Plimer's fearless 1994 book, "Telling Lies For God" is something
creationists feel no compunctions about. And Dawkins pulls no punches
at documenting the fundamental dishonesty of ID theorists like Michael
Behe, who was roundly chastised by presiding judge John E. Jones at the
recent Dover ID hearing for blatantly declaring that a mountain of
presented evolutionary explanations for the human immune system was not
"good enough (as) sufficient evidence of evolution." [p.133]
At the end of the preceding chapter, Dawkins has summed up his major—and from the look of it, irrefutable— argument against the 'explanation' of God
as the cause of everything else:
The whole
argument turns on the familiar question 'Who made God?' which most
thinking people discover for themselves. A designer God cannot be used
to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing
anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of
explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from
which he cannot help us to escape. [p.109]
At a Cambridge conference where Dawkins stood almost alone against an
array of theologians and other religiously oriented participants,
I
challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of
designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and
statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was
brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology.
Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who was I, a scientist,
to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific
arguments, such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own field,
were inappropriate since theologians had always maintained that God lay
outside science. [p.153-4]
In every debate I have ever attended between the theist and atheist
position, the former when backed into a corner about the logicality of
the idea of God (or sometimes the point is claimed by a questioner
afterwards), inevitably appeals to this concept of God being 'outside'
or 'above' the known universe and its laws. This is simply a ploy to
remove him from the necessity of explanation. As noted above, I will
develop this idea
when addressing the Harper's
review of The God Delusion
(Comment 17), but I'll pull in a few further quotes here to support me
in
that discussion:
The
theologians of my Cambridge encounter were defining themselves into an
epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them
because they had declared by fiat
that it could not. Who was I to say that rational argument was the only
admissible kind of argument? There are other ways of knowing besides
the scientific, and it is one of these other ways of knowing that must
be deployed to know God....
The most
important of these other ways of knowing turned out to be personal,
subjective experience of God. Several discussants at Cambridge claimed
that God spoke to them, inside their heads, just as vividly and as
personally as another human might. I have dealt with illusion and
hallucination in Chapter 3 ('The argument from personal experience'),
but at the Cambridge conference I added two points. First, that if God
really did communicate with humans that fact would emphatically not lie
outside science. God comes bursting through into our world where his
messages can be intercepted by human brains—and that phenomenon has nothing to do with
science? Second, a God who is capable of sending intelligible signals
to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from
all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be,
simple. Such bandwidth! God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a
CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must
have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than
the largest brain or the largest computer we know....
I am not
advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the
very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to
explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral
reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. [p.154-5]
The crane and the skyhook represent the two poles of the science vs.
religion debate. The former is rooted on the ground of the observable
universe. By processes that can be uncovered and understood by
objective, scientific investigation, the 'crane' gradually lifts
simplicity into complexity through 'self-bootstrapping' means, not by
creation or direction from outside. The latter is no explanation at
all, in that it has no connection with the ground of knowable reality,
no perceptible anchor in anything that can be investigated,
demonstrated, or understood. It is simply declared to be, often with characteristics
arbitrarily granted to it that are entirely determined by the
necessities faced by what it purports to 'explain,' a circular and
fallacious process.
The following chapter examines the roots of religion in terms of
evolutionary processes. Religion may be as much a product of natural
selection as any of nature's physical appendages. But the Darwinian
answer is
not a simple one, and theories abound. Dawkins suggests that religion
is a by-product (inadvertent and not necessarily beneficial) of certain
brain dispositions that do or did have evolutionary advantages. One is
'dualism,' the instinct to think that there is "a fundamental
distinction between matter and mind."
A dualist believes the mind is some kind of
disembodied spirit that inhabits
the body and therefore conceivably could leave the body and exist
somewhere else....Dualists personify inanimate physical objects at the
slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and demons even in waterfalls and
clouds....The idea that there is a me
perched somewhere behind my eyes...is deeply ingrained in me and in
every other human being, whatever our intellectual pretensions to
monism. Bloom supports his contention with experimental evidence that
children are even more likely to be dualists than adults are,
especially extremely young children. This suggests that a tendency to
dualism is built into the brain and provides a natural predisposition
to embrace religious ideas. [p.180]
'Teleology' is another innate disposition, the tendency to assign
'purpose' to everything. Dawkins also calls attention to a further
disposition, proposed by Daniel Dennett, the 'intentional stance': "An
entity is assumed not merely to be designed for a purpose but to be, or
contain, an agent with
intentions that guide its actions" [p.182]. All these dispositions,
developed through natural selection for their survival value, placed us
in a vulnerable position to believe in souls and an afterlife, in gods
inhabiting nature and the heavens, and that such 'supernatural'
entities have intentions toward us: requirements, destinies, rewards
and punishments, interests in how we act. Communication and
establishing relationships with them thus became natural and necessary.
Here Dawkins introduces his concept of the 'meme' (he calls them
"units of cultural inheritance," at the level of ideas) to explain the
survival and promulgation of religions in terms of 'memetic theory.'
This entire chapter is a fascinating one. While our understanding of
what drives religion is still incomplete, such studies serve to
illustrate the principle that a good way to dispel the mystery, the
misplaced reverence and fear we attach to the unknown (usually to our
own disadvantage), is to reveal its workings. Ghosts haunt dark
graveyards and murky old manors, not hilltops under a noon sun.
Unfortunately, it is the nature of undirected evolution that
an understanding of how we and our world work is not revealed to us
until
we ourselves discover it, usually through a long and painful process.
One of the byproducts of this process is that previously ingrained
erroneous ideas work for their own perpetuation, stubbornly resisting
the new discoveries
that threaten their extinction. Memes, good or bad, are as equipped
with survival instincts as much as living organisms.
The next chapter addresses the
question of morality: Why are we good? Is there a Darwinian explanation
for the evolution of conscience, compassion, altruism? While a
'selfish'
attitude—in the sense of focusing on one's own survival and well-being—is most
likely to ensure continued life and procreation, other actions directed
toward others, particularly one's kin, can have the same results in
more indirect ways, through reciprocation and acquired reputation and
other more subtle side-effects. In answer to the common challenge that
without God we would have no reason to be good, Dawkins has many of the
same rejoinders as others to such a negative attitude, and I won't
detail them here. And he quotes studies showing that crime rates are
regularly higher, on average, in the more 'conservative Christian'
so-called red states of the U.S. than elsewhere. But if God cannot
guarantee a motive to be
good, can he be said to provide the standard for deciding what is good? Thus we are
led to the "Good Book" and the alleged source of morals in the
scriptures.
Any bout between the idealized Bible and the real bible is unfair.
There is so much of the ignoble, callous, unjust, primitive, barbarous,
immoral, inhuman in the Old Testament (and not a little in the New),
that this vastly overrated icon emerges from the ring with a black eye
and a bloody nose. Dawkins observes:
To be fair, much of the Bible is not
systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a
chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents,
composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of
anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly
unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some
of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this
same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant
source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their
morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not
understood it.... [p.237]
How can God's vindictive destruction of all human life save for one
family, his instructions to annihilate man woman and child (even in the
womb) of those already occupying his Promised Land to the Hebrews, the
example of Lot offering his daughters to strangers for despoiling,
himself incestuously seduced
by them, the sacrifice to God of Jephthah's daughter (not to mention
the millions of animals over the centuries), and on and on, serve as a
source of morality? To theologians who protest that much of the Old
Testament, particularly in Genesis, is not taken literally any more,
Dawkins responds:
But that is my whole point! We pick and
choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as
symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of
personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's
decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision,
without an absolute foundation. If one of these is 'morality flying by
the seat of its pants,' so is the other.... [p.238]
All
I am establishing is that modern morality, wherever else it comes from,
does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming
that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining
what is good and what is bad—a
privileged source unavailable to atheists. They cannot get away with
it, not even if they employ that favourite trick of interpreting
selected scriptures as 'symbolic' rather than literal. By what
criterion do you decide which
passages are symbolic, which literal?... [p.246-7]
Do those
people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have
the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following
offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing
your parents; commiting adultery; making love to your stepmother or
your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and her daughter;
bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to
be killed too). You also get executed, of course, for working on the
sabbath [Numbers 15 recounts the directive by God to stone the man who
was gathering sticks]....What makes my jaw drop is that people today
should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh—and even
worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster
(whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.... [248]
My main
purpose here has not been to show that we shouldn't get our morals from
scripture (although that is my opinion). My purpose has been to
demonstrate that we (and that includes most religious people) as a
matter of fact don't get our
morals from scripture. If we did, we would strictly observe the sabbath
and think it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to. We
would stone to death any new bride who couldn't prove she was a virgin,
if her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. We would
execute disobedient children. [p.249]
And I might add that we would also be forced to condemn, by the word of
God right beside that favorite injunction of religionists against
homosexuality (Lev. 19:22), people who wear garments woven with more
than one type of fabric, and the employer who fails to pay his worker
in the evening of each working day.
But is the
New Testament any better? In one way, many of Jesus' teachings are a
rejection of the strictures of the Old Testament—which
ought, for Christians, to discredit using the latter as a moral guide.
But there is also much that is vindictive in Jesus' words, and the
principle of Jesus' atonement for "original sin" is as reprehensible as
anything that came before. That all infants forever born should inherit
the sin of a remote ancestor, deserving of damnation, is a "vicious
ethical philosophy." That it should require for that redemption the
torture and execution of a divine incarnation is repellent and
sadistic, especially when it has to be performed by the very creatures
it purports
to redeem. (Paul and the early Christians who believed in a spiritual
Christ at least assigned the execution to the demon spirits in the
heavenly realm, who were not saved by it but deprived of their power
and ultimately destined for destruction.) Such a body of doctrine,
spanning both
Testaments of the Bible, is as execrable as anything invented by the
human mind.
This leads Dawkins to what he calls "The Moral Zeitgeist" and the
evolution of humanity's own sense of morality, one independent of the
Bible since it has moved by now into an enlightenment far outreaching
that of the Bible and its God, Father or Son. For one thing, what we
have since applied to our fellow humans in general was previously, in
the Old Testament's Ten Commandments, applicable only to Jews: such as
Thou Shalt Not Kill, or Love Thy Neighbor. Dawkins quotes from
anthropologist John Hartung's study of the evolution and biblical
history of in-group morality:
The Bible is a blueprint of in-group
morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of
out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue
of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and
rape. Many ancient works do that—The
Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the
inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling
the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The
Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their
lives. And it is, by far, the world's all-time best seller. [p.258]
Modern views on slavery, the status of women, on child abuse, racism,
human equality and rights, are light-years beyond those expressed in
the Bible. Our behavior in war has shifted even since the two World
Wars of the 20th century. Such shifts "have no connection with
religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of
it." There will be more to say on this topic in responding to the Harper's review.
What's wrong with religion? Why not live and let live? Isn't it all
harmless nonsense? Why be so hostile? To such questions, Dawkins
responds:
I might retort that such hostility as I or
other atheists occasionally
voice towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb
anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them,
or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological
disagreement.... [p.281-2]
To the charge that scientists are as 'fundamentalist' as believers,
that "a scientist's belief in evidence
is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith," Dawkins responds:
Fundamentalists know they are right because
they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that
nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book
is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is
true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence
that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrst, what I, as a
scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of
reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really
is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not
because they are holy. They are believed because they present
overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle,
any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is
wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in
subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books....
[p.282]
Maybe
scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some
abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am
no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it
is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in
evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it
overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist
would ever say anything like that.... [p.283]
As a
scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively
debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our
minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be
known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.... [p.284]
And he goes on to detail the case of American geologist Kurt Wise, who
one day made the decision to throw out all the evidence he had
encountered in his career that proved evolution was true. In Wise's own
words:
I had to make a decision between evolution
and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or
evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible....It was there that
night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever
counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed
into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science. [p.285]
For Dawkins, "that is terribly sad...pathetic and contemptible."
I am hostile to religion because of what it
did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist,
just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.
Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific
education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young
minds. Non-fundamentalist, 'sensible' religion may not be doing that.
But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching
children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a
virtue. [p.286]
Documenting the punishment (usually death) for blasphemy in Muslim
countries is chilling, but then we turn to the views of conservatives
and religious leaders in America, such as
...from somebody named Ann Coulter who,
American colleagues have persuaded me, is not a spoof, invented by The Onion: 'We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.'....
General William G. Boykin's 'George Bush was not elected by a majority
of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God'....the
famous environmental policy of Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the
Interior: 'We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming
is at hand.' The Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban are good
examples of what happens when people take their scriptures literally
and seriously. [p.288]
Witch hunts against homosexuals are as rife in America as in Saudia
Arabia, and only the failure of Christian fundamentalists (as yet) to
gain power stops America short of biblically-directed execution. The
vitriol and hatred expressed toward the 'evil and immoral' (extending
beyond gays) by the Christian power-hungry is frightening, not
the least because they have sometimes seemed so close to achieving the
political control they seek.
Dawkins' extended discussion on the difficult and contentious issue of
abortion is the epitome of
common sense, again, in an area dominated by Christian fundamentalist
views as vitriolic and implacable as their stance on homosexuality. It
has led to the murder of abortion providers and the promise
that, once in power, all involved in abortions, including the woman,
will be executed.
An entire chapter is devoted to the abuse which religion inflicts upon
children, physical and mental, though in the interests of fairness
Dawkins feels obliged to restore some proportion between the two,
arguing that abuse suffered by a child who is brought up in an
oppressive, guilt-ridden, fear-mongering religious indoctrination can
be more damaging than most cases of sexual abuse. A particular case
mentioned is Colorado Pastor Keenan Roberts' "particular brand of
nuttiness he calls Hell Houses..."
A Hell House is a place where children are
brought, by their parents or their Christian schools, to be scared
witless over what might happen to them after they die. Actors play out
fearsome tableaux of particular 'sins' like abortion and homosexuality,
with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating attendance. These are a prelude
to the pièce de resistance,
Hell Itself, complete with realistic sulphurous smell of burning
brimstone and the agonized screams of the forever damned. [p.319-320]
(Nor is Pastor Roberts an extremist. He is mainstream in today's
religious America, "like Ted Haggard" who subsequent to his mention by
Dawkins in this book, was proven the ultimate hypocrite when it was
revealed that this friend to George Bush and president of the National
Association of Evangelicals, who fulminated from the pulpit against
homosexuals and other modern evils, did himself employ the services of
a male prostitute and took mind-altering drugs. Apparently the superior
guidance available to this paragon, from scripture or God directly, was
insufficient to keep him faithful to the ethical party line.)
Comparisons between physical and mental abuse aside, such inflictions
on the minds and bodies of the young may cripple for life their
intellects, emotional well-being, self-esteem and general functioning
in careers and relationships. Those who manage to escape do so often
scarred
and ostracized by loved ones. By the end of this
chapter, Dawkins has more than answered the question, "Why be hostile?"
The final chapter disposes first of some loose ends: the claim that
religion provides consolation and inspiration, and the theological
inanity
of Purgatory among them. But it is all capped—fittingly,
by one of the great scientific minds on our planet—with
a mind-expanding consideration of what our world is really like, and on
how limited a scale we move and 'know' within that world. Dawkins
likens it to the Muslim woman who looks out upon her surroundings only
through a tiny slit in the burka. Our eyes see but a narrow range in
the electro-magnetic spectrum. We also
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....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 neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale
behaves in the way matter—as
we are evolved to think—ought
to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at
some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us
down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very
fast, and nothing is very small or very large. [p.363-4]
Dawkins brings us into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics (on
which more will be said in response to the Harper's review), the
possibility of alternate universes, the nature of 'solid' objects, the
constructions and illusions the brain has evolved to make sense of the
world around us. Science has torn open that narrow burka slit to expose
such things, while religion has never conferred one iota of genuine
understanding upon us—indeed,
it is determined to sew the slit shut. Against the landscape science
has revealed, the traditional figure of the supernatural God, still
championed with such blindness and ferocity, stands incongruous and
pathetic. A
true
delusion.
*
At the beginning of my rebuttal to
Marilynne Robinson's book review of Richard Dawkins' The God
Delusion, I ask what Harper's magazine was thinking when they printed
this reactionary defamation of science and scientists. That
question remains unanswered, but at least one can see what reason and
science are up against.
And see Forum 11
("Getting Tough on Religion") for an Internet news report about the
recent symposium
on science and religion attended by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
Earl Doherty
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