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—</