Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (56 page)

Atheists, to be sure, may well believe that the killing of a little girl is evidence against the existence of God. The proposition is true but trivial. Atheists, who have also killed tens of millions of people, among them millions of little girls, can equally take the murdersthey themselves have committed as evidence against God’s power to intervene.
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In the
Encyclopedia of Wars,
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Charles Phillips and Alexander Axelrod survey 1,763 violent conflicts throughout history, of which only 123 (7 percent) were religious. Nearly all major conflicts in recent times, which have been far more murderous than in the past, have been decidedly nonreligious (the two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the Cambodian and Rwanda genocides, among others).

As to the call for science and scientists to do battle against religion in order to reduce violence and increase happiness in the world, I see no evidence that with religion banished, science will reduce violence and increase happiness. Nor do I see evidence that religion necessarily contributes more to unhappiness than to happiness. Religions throughout history have tended to lessen social distance within a group as they have increased distance and occasions for misunderstanding and conflict with other groups. But so do other determinants of cultural identity, such as language, ethnicity, and nationalism.

There is also a historically robust correlation between war and religious rituals, including costly ceremonial labors to build and maintain monumental works, and various forms of bodily deprivation and mutilation.
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But costly ritual commitment, even in a religious group convinced of its own singular rightness and truth, does not necessarily translate into intolerance or bellicosity. On the contrary, analysis of data from the U.S. National Election Study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame indicates that for Pentecostals who are most strongly engaged in religious activity, and who most strongly profess faith in divine guidance for their daily lives, there is greater trust of fellow citizens even outside the group than exhibited by less committed Pentecostals, atheists, or mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
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Recent surveys across the world
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show that the less educated and poorer a society is, the more religious it tends to be. (TheUnited States is a glaring exception to the tendency.) For atheists, this confirms that religion is an immature form of human understanding born of ignorance that will disappear with the elevation of human life by science. For theists, this confirms that materialism is a monumental barrier to spirituality and that greed and moral relativity lead to a decadent self-indulgence and social alienation that religion disallows.

The actual causal relations between religion, war, poverty, and lack of knowledge about the outside world are not well studied or understood. Jamaica, for example, is a poor nation with one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, and also the highest per capita membership in religious institutions and cults. Yet religious groups there are much more involved in trying to reduce violence between rival street gangs and political factions than in inciting violence.

At particular times in history, religions are strongly associated with intellectual creativity and the expansion of human freedoms and opportunities. At other times, the opposite is true. There’s no evidence I’m aware of to suggest today that belief in Islam or any other religion necessarily or probably leads to violence or that belief in science and devotion to atheism leads to tolerance and peace. To illustrate, consider a few examples.

Islam also stops violence. The only organizations I’ve found that have actually enticed significant numbers of voluntary defections from the ranks of would-be martyrs and jihadis—in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and elsewhere—are Muslim religious organizations. Recall, also, that during the massacres in Rwanda, many Muslims saw it as their religious duty to save, at their own peril, thousands of non-Muslims, both Tutsi and Hutu, when churches, governments (including the United States and France), and secular NGOs turned away.
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According to the Four Horsemen—Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett—science education is a natural antidote to sacredterror. But there’s no evidence that science education stops terrorism. Indeed, independent studies by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta,
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forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman,
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and journalist and political scientist Peter Bergen
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indicate that a majority of Al Qaeda members and associates went to college, that the college education was mostly science oriented, and that engineer and medical doctor are the professions most represented in Al Qaeda. Much the same has been true for Hamas.

Atheism doesn’t stop intolerance: Analyzing British Broadcasting Corporation interviews of 10,069 people in ten nations on four continents, (atheist) psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Ian Hansen find that atheists are just as likely as religious believers to be intolerant of other people’s beliefs and to scapegoat others for the world’s troubles.
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Harris has taken me to task for doubting his assertions. In 2006, he wrote on his Web site:

Scott Atran rebukes Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg and me for the various ways we each criticized religion at a recent conference at the Salk Institute…. Atran makes insupportable claims about religion as though they were self-evident: like “religious beliefs are not false in the usual sense of failing to meet truth conditions”; they are, rather, like “poetic metaphors” which are “literally senseless.” How many devout Christians or Muslims would recognize their own faith in this neutered creed?
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Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a humanist I admire, said that “religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” This is a classic argument made in bad faith. For, as any social worker, judge, or law-enforcement officer in a violent neighborhood or prison also can tell you, “With or withoutreligion, you’d have bad people doing bad things and good people doing good things. But for evil people to do good things, it takes religion.”

As for Harris’s contention that I make insupportable claims about how people actually process religious concepts (as opposed to what Harris and even religious believers say they think), there is substantial evidence that people do not cognitively process religious beliefs as they do facts; indeed, the findings of a small industry of experiments on the issue have been published in some of the world’s most reputable scientific journals.

Well, damn the facts; world salvation is on the march here.

DAWKINS’S DELUSION: THE SLAVISH MIND

In their haste to redeem humanity by saving it from religion, many of the new atheist scientists whom Dan Dennett dubs the Brights (as opposed to the Dims?) often studiously avoid science in their apparently willful ignorance of the facts. In one of the world’s best-selling works of so-called nonfiction,
The God Delusion,
Richard Dawkins, who is justly famous for his pioneering work in evolutionary biology, writes as fact his fantasy of the slavish gullibility of jihadis, which he also finds in children and Bible believers, though not in exceptional scientists:

Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools; that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise. And they were taught that lesson not necessarily by extremist fanatics but by decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors, who lined them up in their madrasahs, sitting in rows, rhythmically nodding their innocent little heads up and down while they learned every word of the holy book like demented parrots.

In fact, none of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers or thirty-odd Madrid train-bomb conspirators attended a madrassah, and the one July 2005 London Underground suicide bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, who did attend a madrassah in Pakistan, did so very briefly. Only a relatively small minority even had a boyhood religious education, including the 9/11 plotters. “Decent, gentle” mainstream religious instructors generally do not teach the duty to suicide bomb, and even the overwhelming majority of Salafi (Muslim “fundamentalist”) instructors vehemently oppose it, as do most Wahabis, who generally profess loyalty to the state.

Certainly madrassahs exist that do shun secular education and encourage rote learning of the sort that Dawkins describes. But terrorist groups rarely draw from their students because these lack the needed social, linguistic, and technical skills to successfully carry out operations in hostile territory. In Pakistan and Indonesia, the two countries with the greatest number of madras-sahs as well as jihadi groups, we’ve seen that less than 1 percent of the madrassahs can be associated with jihadis. Even those that are associated with important terrorist organizations, like Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayibah and Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, not only encourage science, or at least technical education, but usually offer only to the top of the class the opportunities for advanced education and training in activities useful for terrorism. As people who have gone through these schools have made clear to me, just parroting the Koran is not the kind of linguistic skill that gets you a top role in the jihad.

Dawkins cites and even praises a number of serious scientific works on the cognitive and evolutionary origins of religious belief, but simply chucks their main findings when he claims, for reasons only Freud would know, that grown people seek religion because they miss their fathers. Earlier in life, children allegedly believe because “natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal leaderstell them.” Children, like “computers, do what they are told: they slavishly obey any instructions given in their own programming language.”
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What’s the scientific evidence presented for Dawkins’s own science fiction that children or jihadis are robotic learners? None. Now, it’s almost the sworn duty of any scientist to cite any serious counterevidence to one’s own claims. In this case, counterevidence is overwhelming.
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Not content to banish all religion, and what he calls its bedfellows, “myth” and “falsehood,” Dawkins also doubts whether any “anti-scientific fiction” is healthy for children, such as
Harry Potter
(which he hasn’t read), if it involves “bringing up children to believe in spells and wizards.” But here at least he is willing to let science decide what fantasy should be nixed or get the nod: “Whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.” (Though the fact of his own earlier readings about frogs turning into princes appears not to have had the effect in the predicted direction.)
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Now, I’m all for research, but the aim of it here seems ridiculous and dull.

“About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale,” wrote C. S. Lewis (who was wrong about a lot of things but not this). Why? “It is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think that no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me; the school stories did.”
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Not to mention that, as almost every parent and psychologist knows, fairy tales, myths, religious lore and the like grab attention and teach consequences in quite compelling ways.

RELIGION ISN’T CHILDISH SCIENCE

The scientific revolution began in earnest when a Polish cleric, Nicolaus Copernicus, bucked his faith and theorized that the earth orbited the sun. The Church did not pay much mind as long as the theory remained in the realm of speculation. But when Italian philosopher Galileo Galilei empirically confirmed the theory with a telescope, the Church banned Copernicus’s teachings as “false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture.” In 1633, Galileo himself was brought to trial by the Holy Inquisition and compelled to recant.

Given the supposed risk of society’s moral degradation in the face of the free choice to make up one’s own mind (“I think, therefore I am”), the Church violently insisted that faith in absolute authority (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) always trumps the more tentative teaching that goes with clear reasoning and experimental observation. When the Enlightenment unshackled scientific thinking from lingering religious control, religion opted for a separate realm where science would not operate. Science, for the sake of its peace and independence, generally accepted this division into separate
magisteria.