Authors: Unknown
When
he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in November 1939, Hitler
credited Providence with intervening to save his life by causing him to
alter his schedule: 'Now I am completely content. The fact that I left
the Biirgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of
Providence's intention to let me reach my goal.'
113
After this failed assassination the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal
Michael Faulhaber, ordered that a
Te Deum
should
be said in his cathedral, 'To thank Divine Providence in the name of
the archdiocese for the Fiihrer's fortunate escape.' Some of Hitler's
followers, with the support of Goebbels, made no bones about building
Nazism into a religion in its own right. The following, by the chief of
the united trade unions, has the feel of a prayer, and even has the
cadences of the Christian Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') or the Creed:
Adolf
Hitler! We are united with you alone! We want to renew our vow in this
hour: On this earth we believe only in
Adolf Hitler. We believe that National Socialism is the sole saving
faith for our people. We believe that there is a Lord God in heaven,
who created us, who leads us, who directs us and who blesses us
visibly. And we believe that this Lord God sent Adolf Hitler to us, so
that Germany might become a foundation for all eternity.
114
Stalin
was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't; but even if he was, the
bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple.
Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in
the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in
the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an
insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian
ravings. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and
they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war
that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it? A war might
be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or
racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief
in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is
an unshakeable faith that one's own religion is the only true one,
reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and
followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises that the
soldiers of God will go straight to a martyrs' heaven. Sam Harris, as
so often, hits the bullseye, in
The End of Faith:
The
danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human
beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them
holy.
Because
each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions
need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is
still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now,
killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought
something so tragically absurd could be possible?
By
contrast, why would anyone go to war for the sake of an
absence
of belief?
8
WHAT'S
WRONG WITH
RELIGION? WHY
BE SO HOSTILE?
Religion
has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man - living in
the sky - who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And
the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you
to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place,
full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he
will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry
forever and ever 'til the end of time . . . But He loves you!
—
GEORGE CARLIN
I do
not, by nature, thrive on confrontation. I don't think the adversarial
format is well designed to get at the truth, and I regularly refuse
invitations to take part in formal debates. I was once invited to
debate with the then Archbishop of York, in Edinburgh. I felt honoured
by this, and accepted. After the debate, the religious physicist
Russell Stannard reproduced in his book
Doing Away with God?
a
letter that he wrote to the
Observer:
Sir,
Under the gleeful headline 'God comes a poor Second before the Majesty
of Science', your science correspondent reported (on Easter Sunday of
all days) how Richard Dawkins 'inflicted grievous intellectual harm' on
the Archbishop of York in a debate on science and religion. We were
told of 'smugly smiling atheists' and 'Lions 10; Christians nil'.
Stannard
went on to chide the
Observer
for failing to
report a subsequent encounter between him and me, together with the
Bishop of Birmingham and the distinguished cosmologist Sir Hermann
Bondi, at the Royal Society, which had
not
been
staged as an adversarial debate, and which had been a lot more
constructive as a result. I can only agree with his implied
condemnation of the adversarial debate format. In particular, for
reasons explained in
A Devil's Chaplain,
I never
take part in debates with creationists.*
*
I do not have the
chutzpah
to refuse on
the grounds offered by one of my most distinguished scientific
colleagues, whenever a creationist tries to stage a formal debate with
him (I shall not name him, but his words should be read in an
Australian accent): 'That would look great on your CV; not so good on
mine.'
Despite
my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired a
reputation for pugnacity towards religion. Colleagues who agree that
there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral,
and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in
non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement.
Why are you so hostile? What is actually wrong with religion? Does it
really do so much harm that we should actively fight against it? Why
not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal
energy and ley lines? Isn't it all just harmless nonsense?
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. But my interlocutor usually doesn't leave it at that. He
may go on to say something like this: 'Doesn't your hostility mark you
out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way
as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?' I need to dispose of this
accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common.
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 contrast, 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.
Philosophers,
especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning, and even more
especially those infected with 'cultural relativism', may raise a
tiresome red herring at this point: a scientist's belief in
evidence
is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. I have dealt with
this elsewhere, and will only briefly repeat myself here. All of us
believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our
amateur philosophical hats on. If I am accused of murder, and
prosecuting counsel sternly asks me whether
it is true that I was in Chicago on the night of the crime, I cannot
get away with a philosophical evasion: 'It depends what you mean by
"true".' Nor with an anthropological, relativist plea: 'It is only in
your Western scientific sense of "in" that I was in Chicago. The
Bongolese have a completely different concept of "in", according to
which you are only truly "in" a place if you are an anointed elder
entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.'
115
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.
It
is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well
appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist
creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my
own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong
and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can't see it - or,
more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy
book. My passion is increased when I think about how much the poor
fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are
missing.
The
truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so
engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having
missed out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could
it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not
faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would
gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.
It
does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder
statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an
undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that
the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells)
was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was
the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a
visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell
biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi
Apparatus was real. At the end of
the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the
American by the hand and said - with passion - 'My dear fellow, I wish
to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' We clapped our
hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all
scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal
- unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as
flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings
a lump to my throat.
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. The saddest example
I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the
Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. It is
no accident that Bryan College is named after William Jennings Bryan,
prosecutor of the science teacher John Scopes in the Dayton 'Monkey
Trial' of 1925. Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to
become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose
motto might have been 'Think critically' rather than the oxymoronic one
displayed on the Bryan website: 'Think critically and biblically'.
Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of
Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and paleontology at
Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less).
He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well
on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing
research at a proper university.
Then
tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind,
a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious
upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth - the subject of
his Chicago and Harvard geological education - was less than ten
thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on
collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his
mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could bear the strain no
more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a
bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that
would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of
this ruthlessly honest and labour-intensive
exercise, there was so little left of his bible that,
try
as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the
pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without
it being rent in two. 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.
I
find that terribly sad; but whereas the Golgi Apparatus story moved me
to tears of admiration and exultation, the Kurt Wise story is just
plain pathetic - pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career
and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy
to escape. All he had to do was toss out the bible. Or interpret it
symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did
the fundamentalist thing and tossed out science, evidence and reason,
along with all his dreams and hopes.