The God Delusion Dawkins Richard

THE MOTHER OF ALL BURKAS

One of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is the image of a woman swathed in shapeless black from head to toe, peering out at the world through a tiny slit. The burka is not just an instrument of oppression of women and claustral repression of their liberty and their beauty; not just a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cowed female submission. I want to use the narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else.

Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is a chink of brightness in the vast dark spectrum, from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at the short end. Quite how narrow is hard to appreciate and a challenge to convey. Imagine a gigantic black burka, with a vision slit of approximately the standard width, say about one inch. If the length of black cloth above the slit represents the short-wave end of the invisible spectrum, and if the length of black cloth below the slit represents the long-wave portion of the invisible spectrum, how long would the burka have to be in order to accommodate a one-inch slit to the same scale? It is hard to represent it sensibly without invoking logarithmic scales, so huge are the lengths we are dealing with. The last chapter of a book like this is no place to start tossing logarithms around, but you can take it from me that it would be the mother of all burkas. The one-inch window of visible light is derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head. What science does for us is widen the window. It opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.

Optical telescopes use glass lenses and mirrors to scan the heavens, and what they see is stars that happen to be radiating in the narrow band of wavelengths that we call visible light. But other telescopes 'see' in the X-ray or radio wavelengths, and present to us a cornucopia of alternative night skies. On a smaller scale, cameras with appropriate filters can 'see' in the ultraviolet and take photographs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots that are visible to, and seemingly 'designed' for, insect eyes but which our unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral window of similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burka: they are blind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do -into the 'ultraviolet garden'.*

* 'The Ultraviolet Garden' was the title of one of my five Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, originally televised by the BBC under the general title 'Growing Up in the Universe'. The whole series of five lectures will be made available at www.richarddawlcins.net, the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

The metaphor of the narrow window of light, broadening out into a spectacularly wide spectrum, serves us in other areas of science. We 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. We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics - which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy. The range of sizes, distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band, set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian cosmology at the larger.

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.

At the end of a famous essay on 'Possible Worlds', the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, 'Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.' By the way, I am intrigued by the suggestion that the famous Hamlet speech invoked by Haldane is conventionally misspoken. The normal stress is on 'your':

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Indeed, the line is often plonkingly quoted with the implication that Horatio stands for shallow rationalists and sceptics everywhere. But some scholars place the stress on 'philosophy', with 'your' almost vanishing: '. . . than are dreamt of inya philosophy.' The difference doesn't really matter for present purposes, except that the second interpretation already takes care of Haldane's 'any' philosophy.

The dedicatee of this book made a living from the strangeness of science, pushing it to the point of comedy. The following is taken from the same extempore speech in Cambridge in 1998 from which I have already quoted: 'The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.' Where other science-fiction writers played on the odd-ness of science to arouse our sense of the mysterious, Douglas Adams used it to make us laugh (those who have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy might think of the 'infinite improbability drive', for instance). Laughter is arguably the best response to some of the stranger paradoxes of modern physics. The alternative, I sometimes think, is to cry.

Quantum mechanics, that rarefied pinnacle of twentieth-century scientific achievement, makes brilliantly successful predictions about the real world. Richard Feynman compared its precision to predicting a distance as great as the width of North America to an accuracy of one human hair's breadth. This predictive success seems to mean that quantum theory has got to be true in some sense; as true as anything we know, even including the most down-to-earth common-sense facts. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make, in order to deliver those predictions, are so mysterious that even the great Feynman himself was moved to remark (there are various versions of this quotation, of which the following seems to me the neatest): 'If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

* A similar remark is attributed to Niels Bohr: 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.'

Quantum theory is so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical 'interpretation' of it. Resort is the right word. David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory, perhaps because the worst that you can say of it is that it is preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes, existing in parallel and mutually undetectable except through the narrow porthole of quantum-mechanical experiments. In some of these universes I am already dead. In a small minority of them, you have a green moustache. And so on.

The alternative 'Copenhagen interpretation' is equally preposterous - not wasteful, just shatteringly paradoxical. Erwin Schrodinger satirized it with his parable of the cat. Schrodinger's cat is shut up in a box with a killing mechanism triggered by a quantum-mechanical event. Before we open the lid of the box, we don't know whether the cat is dead. Common sense tells us that, nevertheless, the cat must be either alive or dead inside the box. The Copenhagen interpretation contradicts common sense: all that exists before we open the box is a probability. As soon as we open the box, the wave function collapses and we are left with the single event: the cat is dead, or the cat is alive. Until we opened the box, it was neither dead nor alive.

The 'many worlds' interpretation of the same events is that in some universes the cat is dead; in other universes the cat is alive. Neither interpretation satisfies human common sense or intuition. The more macho physicists don't care. What matters is that the mathematics work, and the predictions are experimentally fulfilled. Most of us are too wimpish to follow them. We seem to need some sort of visualization of what is 'really' going on. I understand, by the way, that Schrodinger originally proposed his cat thought-experiment in order to expose what he saw as the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation.

The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just the tip of the iceberg. Science in general, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.156 Here's a favourite example: every time you drink a glass of water, the odds are good that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. It's just elementary probability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls in the world. So every time we have a full glass, we are looking at a rather high proportion of the molecules of water that exist in the world. There is, of course, nothing special about Cromwell, or bladders. Haven't you just breathed in a nitrogen atom that was once breathed out by the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree? Aren't you glad to be alive in a world where not only is such a conjecture possible but you are privileged to understand why? And publicly explain it to somebody else, not as your opinion or belief but as something that they, when they have understood your reasoning, will feel compelled to accept? Maybe this is an aspect of what Carl Sagan meant when he explained his motive in writing The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: 'Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science.'

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. There is an anthropic sense, then, in which our existence should not be surprising. I'd like to think that I speak for my fellow humans in insisting, nevertheless, that it is desperately surprising.

Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. We now understand essentially how the trick is done, but only since 1859. Before 1859 it would have seemed very very odd indeed. Now, thanks to Darwin, it is merely very odd. Darwin seized the window of the burka and wrenched it open, letting in a flood of understanding whose dazzling novelty, and power to uplift the human spirit, perhaps had no precedent - unless it was the Copernican realization that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

'Tell me,' the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, 'why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?' His friend replied, 'Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.' Wittgenstein responded, 'Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?' I sometimes quote this remark of Wittgenstein in lectures, expecting the audience to laugh. Instead, they seem stunned into silence.

In the limited world in which our brains evolved, small objects are more likely to move than large ones, which are seen as the background to movement. As the world rotates, objects that seem large because they are near - mountains, trees and buildings, the ground itself - all move in exact synchrony with each other and with the observer, relative to heavenly bodies such as the sun and stars. Our evolved brains project an illusion of movement onto them rather than the mountains and trees in the foreground.

I now want to pursue the point mentioned above, that the way we see the world, and the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world - I shall use the name Middle World - where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.

Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really composed almost entirely of empty space. The familiar illustration represents the nucleus of an atom as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The next atom is right outside the stadium. The hardest, solidest, densest rock, then, is 'really' almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so far apart that they shouldn't count. So why do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable?

I won't try to imagine how Wittgenstein might have answered that question. But, as an evolutionary biologist, I would answer it like this. Our brains have evolved to help our bodies find their way around the world on the scale at which those bodies operate. We never evolved to navigate the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands because our hands can't penetrate them. The reason they can't penetrate them is unconnected with the sizes and separations of the particles that constitute matter. Instead, it has to do with the force fields that are associated with those widely spaced particles in 'solid' matter. It is useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and impenetrability, because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through a world in which objects - which we call solid - cannot occupy the same space as each other.

A little comic relief at this point - from The Men who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson:

This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long and distinguished career. He is the United States Army's chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand soldiers under his command ... He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels he must do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has made it. He is going into the next office . . . He stands up, moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk. I mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of anyway? Space! He quickens his pace. What am I mostly made of? He thinks. Atoms! He is almost at a jog now. What is the wall mostly made up of? He thinks. Atoms! All I have to do is merge the spaces. . . . Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office. Damn, he thinks. General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. What's wrong with him that he can't do it? Maybe there is simply too much in his in-tray for him to give it the requisite level of concentration. There is no doubt in his mind that the ability to pass through objects will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal. And when that happens, well, is it too naive to believe it would herald the dawning of a world without war? Who would want to screw around with an army that could do that?

General Stubblebine is appropriately described as an 'out of the box thinker' on the website of the organization which, in retirement, he now runs with his wife.

Having evolved in Middle World, we find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like: 'When a major general moves, at the sort of medium velocity at which major generals and other Middle World objects do move, and hits another solid Middle World object like a wall, his progress is painfully arrested.' Our brains are not equipped to imagine what it would be like to be a neutrino passing through a wall, in the vast interstices of which that wall 'really' consists. Nor can our understanding cope with what happens when things move at close to the speed of light.

Unaided human intuition, evolved and schooled in Middle World, even finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us that a cannon ball and a feather, given no air friction, would hit the ground at the same instant when dropped from a leaning tower. That is because, in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we had evolved in a vacuum, we would expect a feather and a cannonball to hit the ground simultaneously. We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. The narrow window of our burka permits us, unless we are especially gifted or peculiarly well educated, to see only Middle World.

There is a sense in which we animals have to survive not just in Middle World but in the micro-world of atoms and electrons too. The very nerve impulses with which we do our thinking and our imagining depend upon activities in Micro World. But no action that our wild ancestors ever had to perform, no decision that they ever had to take, would have been assisted by an understanding of Micro World. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle Worlders are too cumbersomely massive to notice Brownian motion. Similarly, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the delicate force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse that priority and would find surface tension anything but delicate.

Steve Grand, in Creation: Life and How to Make It, is almost scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material 'things' are 'really' things at all. 'Waves' of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem 'unreal'. Victorians thought that waves had to be waves 'in' some material medium. No such medium was known, so they invented one and named it the luminiferous ether. But we find 'real' matter comfortable to our understanding only because our ancestors evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful construct.

On the other hand, even we Middle Worlders can see that a whirlpool is a 'thing' with something like the reality of a rock, even though the matter in the whirlpool is constantly changing. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of 01 Donyo Lengai, sacred volcano of the Masai, there is a large dune made of ash from an eruption in 1969. It is carved into shape by the wind. But the beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It is what is technically known as a barchan (pronounced bahkahn). The entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 metres per year. It retains its crescent shape and creeps along in the direction of the horns. The wind blows sand up the shallower slope. Then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down the steeper slope on the inside of the crescent.

Actually, even a barchan is more of a 'thing' than a wave. A wave seems to move horizontally across the open sea, but the molecules of water move vertically. Similarly, sound waves may travel from speaker to listener, but molecules of air don't: that would be a wind, not a sound. Steve Grand points out that you and I are more like waves than permanent 'things'. He invites his reader to think . . .

... of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place . . . Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.

'Really' isn't a word we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain which had evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks 'really' do consist mostly of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors, who couldn't walk through rocks, so our 'really' is a 'really' in which rocks are solid. 'Really', for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be, in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in such different worlds, there will be a troubling variety of 'reallys'.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data - a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal. Predators need a different kind of model from prey, even though their worlds necessarily overlap. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional maze of branches and trunks. A water boatman's brain doesn't need 3D software, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott Flatland. A mole's software for constructing models of the world will be customized for underground use. A naked mole rat probably has world-representing software similar to a mole's. But a squirrel, although it is a rodent like the mole rat, probably has world-rendering software much more like a monkey's.

I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in order to perform much the same task. The fact that the bat uses echoes to update the variables in its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I suggest, use perceived hues such as 'red' and 'blue' as internal labels for some useful aspect of echoes, perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces; just as swallows use the same perceived hues to label long and short wavelengths of light. The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used rather than by the sensory modality involved. The lesson of the bats is this. The general form of the mind model - as opposed to the variables that are constantly being inputted by sensory nerves - is an adaptation to the animal's way of life, no less than its wings, legs and tail are.

J. B. S. Haldane, in the article on 'possible worlds' that I quoted above, had something relevant to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. He noted that dogs can distinguish two very similar volatile fatty acids - caprylic acid and caproic acid - each diluted to one part in a million. The only difference is that caprylic acid's main molecular chain is two carbon atoms longer than the main chain of caproic acid. A dog, Haldane guesses, would probably be able to place the acids 'in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes'.

There is another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two except that it has yet two more carbon atoms in its main chain. A dog that had never met capric acid would perhaps have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet playing one note higher than we have heard a trumpet play before. It seems to me entirely reasonable to guess that a dog, or a rhinoceros, might treat mixtures of smells as harmonious chords. Perhaps there are discords. Probably not melodies, for melodies are built up of notes that start or stop abruptly with accurate timing, unlike smells. Or perhaps dogs and rhinos smell in colour. The argument would be the same as for the bats.

Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues - what philosophers call qualia - have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means light of different wavelengths. In a bat's case, I have speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dog's or a rhino's case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants us when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the wider range of what is out there for our delight.

The metaphor of Middle World - of the intermediate range of phenomena that the narrow slit in our burka permits us to see -applies to yet other scales or 'spectrums'. We can construct a scale of improbabilities, with a similarly narrow window through which our intuition and imagination are capable of going. At one extreme of the spectrum of improbabilities are those would-be events that we call impossible. Miracles are events that are extremely improbable. A statue of a madonna could wave its hand at us. The atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth. Because there are so many of them, and because there is no agreed preference in their direction of motion, the hand, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the jiggling atoms in the hand could all just happen to move in the same direction at the same time. And again. And again ... In this case the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us. It could happen, but the odds against are so great that, if you had set out writing the number at the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeroes to this day. The power to calculate such odds - the power to quantify the near-impossible rather than just throw up our hands in despair - is another example of the liberating benefactions of science to the human spirit.

Evolution in Middle World has ill equipped us to handle very improbable events. But in the vastness of astronomical space, or geological time, events that seem impossible in Middle World turn out to be inevitable. Science flings open the narrow window through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or inhabited by dragons. We have already made use of this widening of the window in Chapter 4, where we considered the improbability of the origin of life and how even a near-impossible chemical event must come to pass given enough planet years to play with; and where we considered the spectrum of possible universes, each with its own set of laws and constants, and the anthropic necessity of finding ourselves in one of the minority of friendly places.

How should we interpret Haldane's 'queerer than we can suppose'? Queerer than can, in principle, be supposed? Or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitation of our brains' evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

APPENDIX

A partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion

I intend to keep an updated version of this list on the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science: www.richarddawkins.net. I apologize for limiting the list below largely to the English-speaking world.

USA

American Atheists

PO Box 5733, Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733

Voicemail: 1-908-276-7300

Fax: 1-908-276-7402

Email: info@atheists.org

www.atheists.org

American Humanist Association

1777 T Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009-7125

Telephone: (202) 238-9088

Toll-free: 1-800-837-3792

Fax: (202) 238-9003

www.americanhumanist.org

Atheist Alliance International

PO Box 26867, Los Angeles, CA 90026

Toll-free: 1-866-HERETIC

Email: info@atheistalliance.org

www.atheistalliance.org

The Brights

PO Box 163418, Sacramento, CA 95816

Email: the-brights@the-brights.net

www.the-brights.net

Center for Inquiry Transnational Council for Secular Humanism Campus Freethought Alliance Center for Inquiry - On Campus

African Americans for Humanism

3965 Rensch Road, Amherst, NY 14228

Telephone: (716) 636-4869

Fax: (716) 636-1733

Email: info@secularhumanism.org

www.centerforinquiry.net

www.secularhumanism.org

www.campusfreethought.org

www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=aah&page=index

Freedom From Religion Foundation PO Box 750, Madison, WI 53701 Telephone: (608) 256-5800 Email: info@ffrf.org www.ffrf.org

Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia PO Box 242, Pocopson, PA 19366-0242 Telephone: (610) 793-2737 Fax: (610) 793-2569 Email: fsgp@freethought.org www.fsgp.org/

Institute for Humanist Studies 48 Howard St, Albany, NY 12207 Telephone: (518)432-7820 Fax: (518) 432-7821 www.humaniststudies. org

International Humanist and Ethical Union - USA

Appignani Bioethics Center

PO Box 4104, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10162

Telephone: (212) 687-3324

Fax: (212) 661-4188

Internet Infidels

PO Box 142, Colorado Springs, CO 80901-0142

Fax: (877) 501-5113

www. infidels. org

James Randi Educational Foundation

201 S.E. 12th St (E. Davie Blvd), Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316-1815

Telephone: (954) 467-1112

Fax: (954) 467-1660

Email: jref@randi.org www.randi.org

Secular Coalition for America

PO Box 53330, Washington, DC 20009-9997

Telephone: (202) 299-1091

www.secular.org

Secular Student Alliance PO Box 3246, Columbus, OH 43210 Toll-free Voicemail / Fax: 1-877-842-9474 Email: ssa@secularstudents.org www.secularstudents. org

The Skeptics Society

PO Box 338, Altadena, CA 91001

Telephone: (626) 794-3119

Fax: (626) 794-1301

Email: editorial@skeptic.com

www.skeptic.com

Society for Humanistic Judaism

28611 W. 12 Mile Rd, Farmington Hills, MI 48334

Telephone: (248) 478-7610

Fax: (248)478-3159

Email: info@shj.org

www.shj.org

Britain

British Humanist Association

1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD

Telephone: 020 7079 3580

Fax: 020 7079 3588

Email: info@humanism.org.uk

www.humanism.org.uk

International Humanist and Ethical Union - UK 1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD Telephone: 020 7631 3170 Fax: 020 7631 3171 www.iheu.org/

National Secular Society

25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

Tel: 020 7404 3126

Fax: 0870 762 8971

www.secularism.org.uk/

New Humanist

1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD

Telephone: 020 7436 1151

Fax: 020 7079 3588

Email: info@newhumanist.org.uk

www.newhumanist.org.uk

Rationalist Press Association

1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD

Telephone: 020 7436 1151

Fax: 020 7079 3588

Email: info@rationalist.org.uk

www.rationalist.org.uk/

South Place Ethical Society (UK)

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

Telephone: 020 7242 8037/4

Fax: 020 7242 8036

Email: library@ethicalsoc.org.uk

www.ethicalsoc.org.uk

Canada

Humanist Association of Canada

PO Box 8752, Station T, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 3J1

Telephone: 877-HUMANS-l

Fax: (613) 739-4801

Email: HAC@Humanists.ca

http://hac.humanists.net/

Australia

Australian Skeptics

PO Box 268, Roseville, NSW 2069

Telephone: 02 9417 2071

Email: skeptics@bdsn.com.au

www.skeptics.com.au

Council of Australian Humanist Societies GPO Box 1555, Melbourne, Victoria 3001. Telephone: 613 5974 4096 Email: AMcPhate@bigpond.net.au http://home.vicnet.net.au/~humanist/resources/cahs.html

New Zealand

New Zealand Skeptics

NZCSICOP Inc.

PO Box 29-492, Christchurch

Email: skeptics@spis.co.nz

http://skeptics.org.nz

Humanist Society of New Zealand PO Box 3372, Wellington Email: jeffhunt90@yahoo.co.nz www.humanist.org.nz/

India

Rationalist International

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NOTES

Preface

1 Wendy Kaminer, 'The last taboo: why America needs atheism', New Republic, 14 Oct. 1996; http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/kaminer.htm.

2 Dr Zoe Hawkins, Dr Beata Adams and Dr Paul St John Smith, personal communication.

Chapter 1: A deeply religious non-believer Deserved respect

3 The television documentary of which the interview was a part was accompanied by a book (Winston 2005).

4 Dennett (2006).

Undeserved respect

5 The full speech is transcribed in Adams (2003) as 'Is there an artificial God?'

6 Perica (2002). See also http://www.historycooperative.org/ journals/ahr/108.5/br_151.html.

7 'Dolly and the cloth heads', in Dawkins (2003).

8 http://scotus.ap.org/scotus/04-1084p.zo.pdf.

9 R. Dawkins, 'The irrationality of faith', New Statesman (London), 31 March 1989.

10 Columbus Dispatch, 19 Aug. 2005.

11 Los Angeles Times, 10 April 2006.

12 http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/02/islamic-society-of-denmark-used-fake.html.

13 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4686536.stm; http://www.neandernews.com/?cat=6.

14 Independent, 5 Feb. 2006.

15 Andrew Mueller, 'An argument with Sir IqbaP, Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2006, Sunday Review section, 12-16.

Chapter 2: The God Hypothesis

16 Mitford and Waugh (2001).

Polytheism

17 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06608b.htm.

18 http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/indexsnt.htm?NF=l.

Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America

19 Congressional Record, 16 Sept. 1981.

20 http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/buckner_tripoli.html.

21 Giles Fraser, 'Resurgent religion has done away with the country vicar', Guardian, 13 April 2006.

22 Robert I. Sherman, in Free Inquiry 8: 4, Fall 1988, 16.

23 N. Angier, 'Confessions of a lonely atheist', New York Times Magazine, 14 Jan. 2001: http://www.geocities.com/mindstuff/Angier.html.

24 http://www.fsgp.org/adsn.html.

25 An especially bizarre case of a man being murdered simply because he was an atheist is recounted in the newsletter of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia for March/April 2006. Go to http://www.fsgp.org/newsletters/newsletter_ 2006_0304.pdf and scroll down to 'The murder of Larry Hooper'.

26 http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2001/ll/18/ stories/2001111800070400.htm.

The poverty of agnosticism

27 Quentin de la Bedoyere, Catholic Herald, 3 Feb. 2006.

28 Carl Sagan, 'The burden of skepticism', Skeptical Inquirer 12, Fall 1987.

29 I discussed this case in Dawkins (1998).

30 T. H. Huxley, 'Agnosticism' (1889), repr. in Huxley (1931). The complete text of 'Agnosticism' is also available at http:// www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_huxley/ huxley_wace/part_02.html.

31 Russell, 'Is there a God?' (1952), repr. in Russell (1997b).

32 Andrew Mueller, 'An argument with Sir Iqbal', Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2006, Sunday Review section, 12-16.

33 New York Times, 29 Aug. 2005. See also Henderson (2006).

34 Henderson (2006).

35 http://www.lulu.com/content/267888.

The Great Prayer Experiment

36 H. Benson et al., 'Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients', American Heart Journal 151: 4, 2006, 934-42.

37 Richard Swinburne, in Science and Theology News, 7 April 2006, http://www.stnews.org/Commentary-2772.htm.

38 New York Times, 11 April 2006.

The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists

39 In court cases, and books such as Ruse (1982). His article in Playboy appeared in the April 2006 issue.

40 Jerry Coyne's reply to Ruse appeared in the August 2006 issue of Playboy.

41 Madeleine Bunting, Guardian, 27 March 2006.

42 Dan Dennett's reply appeared in the Guardian, 4 April 2006.

43 http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/03/the_ dawkinsdennett_boogeyman.php; http://scienceblogs.com/ pharyngula/2006/02/our_double_standard.php; http://scienceblogs. com/pharyngula/2006/02/the_rusedennett_feud.php.

Little green men

44 http://vo.obspm.fr/exoplanetes/encyclo/encycl.html.

45 Dennett (1995).

Chapter 3: Arguments for God's existence

The ontological argument and other a priori arguments

46 http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm. Gasking's 'proof is at http://www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/gasking.html.

The argument from personal 'experience'

47 The whole subject of illusions is discussed by Richard Gregory in a series of books including Gregory (1997).

48 My own attempt at spelling out the explanation is on pp. 268-9 of Dawkins (1998).

49 http://www.sofc.org/Spirituality/s-of-fatima.htm.

The argument from scripture

50 Tom Flynn, 'Matthew vs. Luke', Free Inquiry 25: 1, 2004, 34-45; Robert Gillooly, 'Shedding light on the light of the world', Free Inquiry 25: 1, 2004, 27-30.

51 Erhman (2006). See also Ehrman (2003a, b).

The argument from admired religious scientists

52 Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle (1997).

53 E. J. Larson and L. Witham, 'Leading scientists still reject God', Nature 394, 1998, 313.

54 http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9610/reeves.html gives a particularly interesting analysis of historical trends in American religious opinion by Thomas C. Reeves, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, based on Reeves (1996).

55 http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3506.asp.

56 R. Elisabeth Cornwell and Michael Stirrat, manuscript in preparation, 2006.

57 P. Bell, 'Would you believe it?', Mensa Magazine, Feb. 2002, 12-13.

Chapter 4: Why there almost certainly is no God The Ultimate Boeing 747

58 An exhaustive review of the provenance, usages and quotations of this analogy is given, from a creationist point of view, by Gert Korthof, at http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/kortho46a.htm.

Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser

59 Adams (2002), p. 99. My 'Lament for Douglas', written the day after his death, is reprinted as the Epilogue to The Salmon of Doubt, and also in A Devil's Chaplain, which also has my eulogy at his memorial meeting in the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

60 Interview in Der Spiegel, 26 Dec. 2005.

61 Susskind (2006: 17).

The worship of gaps

62 Behe (1996).

63 http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html.

64 This account of the Dover trial, including the quotations, is from A. Bottaro, M. A. Inlay and N. J. Matzke, 'Immunology in the spotlight at the Dover “Intelligent Design” trial', Nature Immunology 7, 2006, 433-5.

65 J. Coyne, 'God in the details: the biochemical challenge to evolution', Nature 383, 1996, 227-8. The article by Coyne and me, 'One side can be wrong', was published in the Guardian, 1 Sept. 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1559743,00.html. The quotation from the 'eloquent blogger' is at http://www.religionisbullshit.net/blog/2005_09_01_archive.php.

66 Dawkins (1995).

The anthropic principle: planetary version

61 Carter admitted later that a better name for the overall principle would be 'cognizability principle' rather than the already entrenched term 'anthropic principle': B. Carter, 'The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 310, 1983, 347-63. For a book-length discussion of the anthropic principle, see Barrow and Tipler (1988).

68 Comins (1993).

69 I spelled this argument out more fully in The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986).

The anthropic principle: cosmological version

70 Murray Gell-Mann, quoted by John Brockman on the 'Edge' website, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/smolin.html.

71 Ward (1996: 99); Polkinghorne (1994: 55).

An interlude at Cambridge

72 J. Horgan, 'The Templeton Foundation: a skeptic's take', Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April 2006. See also http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/horgan06/horgan06_index.html.

73 P. B. Medawar, review of The Phenomenon of Man, repr. in Medawar (1982: 242).

74 Dennett (1995: 155).

Chapter 5: The roots of religion The Darwinian imperative

75 Quoted in Dawkins (1982: 30).

76 K. Sterelny, 'The perverse primate', in Grafen and Ridley (2006: 213-23).

Group selection

77 N. A. Chagnon, 'Terminological kinship, genealogical relatedness and village fissioning among the Yanomamo Indians', in Alexander and Tinkle (1981: ch. 28).

78 C. Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Appleton, 1871), vol. 1, 156.

Religion as a by-product of something else

79 Quoted in Blaker (2003: 7).

Psychologically primed for religion

80 See e.g. Buss (2005).

81 Deborah Keleman, 'Are children “intuitive theists”?', Psychological Science 15: 5, 2004, 295-301.

82 Dennett (1987).

83 Guardian, 31 Jan. 2006.

84 Smythies (2006).

85 http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/14223.htm.

Chapter 6: The roots of morality: why are we good?

86 The movie itself, which is very good, can be obtained at http://www.thegodmovie.com/index.php.

A case study in the roots of morality

87 M. Hauser and P. Singer, 'Morality without religion', Free Inquiry 26: 1,2006, 18-19.

If there is no God, why be good?

88 Dostoevsky (1994: bk 2, ch. 6, p. 87).

89 Hinde (2002). See also Singer (1994), Grayling (2003), Glover (2006).

Chapter 7: The 'Good' Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist

90 Lane Fox (1992); Berlinerblau (2005).

91 Holloway (1999, 2005). Richard Holloway's 'recovering Christian' line is in a book review in the Guardian, 15 Feb. 2003: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/

0,6121,894941,00.html. The Scottish journalist Muriel Gray wrote a beautiful account of my Edinburgh dialogue with Bishop Holloway in the (Glasgow) Herald: http://www.sundayherald.com/44517.

The Old Testament

92 For a frightening collection of sermons by American clergymen, blaming hurricane Katrina on human 'sin', see http://universist.org/neworleans.htm.

93 Pat Robertson, reported by the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/americas/4427144.stm.

Is the New Testament any better?

94 R. Dawkins, 'Atheists for Jesus', Free Inquiry 25: 1, 2005, 9-10.

95 Julia Sweeney is also right on target when she briefly mentions Buddhism. Just as Christianity is sometimes thought to be a nicer, gentler religion than Islam, Buddhism is often cracked up to be the nicest of all. But the doctrine of demotion on the reincarnation ladder because of sins in a past life is pretty unpleasant. Julia Sweeney: 'I went to Thailand and happened to visit a woman who was taking care of a terribly deformed boy. I said to his caretaker, “It's so good of you to be taking care of this poor boy.” She said, “Don't say 'poor boy,' he must have done something terrible in a past life to be born this way.” '

96 For a thoughtful analysis of techniques used by cults, see Barker (1984). More journalistic accounts of modern cults are given by Lane (1996) and Kilduff and Javers (1978).

97 Paul Vallely and Andrew Buncombe, 'History of Christianity: Gospel according to Judas', Independent, 7 April 2006.

98 Vermes (2000).

Love thy neighbour

99 Hartung's paper was originally published in Skeptic 3: 4, 1995, but is now most readily available at http://www.lrainc.com/ swtaboo/taboos/ltnOl.html.

100 Smith (1995).

101 Guardian, 12 March 2002: http://books.guardian.co.uk/ departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,664342,00.html.

102 N. D. Glenn, 'Interreligious marriage in the United States: patterns and recent trends', Journal of Marriage and the Family 44: 3, 1982, 555-66.

The moral Zeitgeist

103 http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/newlOc.html.

104 Huxley (1871).

105 http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/american-authors/ 19th-century/abraham-lincoln/the-writings-of-abraham-lincoln-04/.

What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren't they atheists?

106 Bullock (1991).

107 Bullock (2005).

108 http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/1997/march97/holocaust.html. This article by Richard E. Smith, originally published in Freethougbt Today, March 1997, has a large number of relevant quotations from Hitler and other Nazis, giving their sources. Unless otherwise stated, my quotations are from Smith's article.

109 http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html.

110 Bullock (2005: 96).

111 Adolf Hitler, speech of 12 April 1922. In Baynes (1942: 19-20).

112 Bullock (2005: 43).

113 This quotation, and the following one, are from Anne Nicol Gaylor's article on Hitler's religion, http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/back/hitler.html.

114 http://www.contra-mundum.org/schirrmacher/NS_Religion.pdf.

Chapter 8: What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile? Fundamentalism and the subversion of science

115 From 'What is true?', ch. 1.2 of Dawkins (2003).

116 Both my quotations from Wise come from his contribution to the 1999 book In Six Days, an anthology of essays by young-Earth creationists (Ashton 1999).

The dark side of absolutism

117 Warraq (1995: 175).

118 John William Gott's imprisonment for calling Jesus a clown is mentioned in The Indypedia, published by the Independent, 29 April 2006. The attempted prosecution of the BBC for blasphemy is in BBC news, 10 Jan. 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/ entertainment/tv_and_radio/4161109.stm.

119 http://adultthought.ucsd.edu/Culture_War/The_American_ Taliban.html.

Faith and homosexuality

120 Hodges (1983).

121 This and the remaining quotations in this section are from the American Taliban site already listed:

http://adultthought.ucsd.edu/Culture_War/The_American_Taliban. html.

122 http://adultthought.ucsd.edu/Culture_War/The_American_ Taliban.html.

123 From Pastor Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church official website, godhatesfags.com:

http://www.godhatesfags.eom/fliers/j an2006/20060131_ coretta-scott-king-funeral.pdf.

Faith and the sanctity of human life

124 See Mooney (2005). Also Silver (2006), which arrived when this book was in final proof, too late to be discussed as fully as I would have liked.

125 For an interesting analysis of what makes Texas different in this respect, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ execution/readings/texas.html.

126 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karla_Faye_Tucker.

127 These Randall Terry quotes are from the same American Taliban site as before:

http://adultthought.ucsd. edu/Culture_War/The_American_Taliban. html.

128 Reported on Fox news: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96286,00.html.

129 M. Stamp Dawkins (1980).

The Great Beethoven Fallacy

130 http://www.warroom.com/ethical.htm.

131 Medawar and Medawar (1977).

How 'moderation' in faith fosters fanaticism

132 Johann Hari's article, originally published in the Independent, 15 July 2005, can be found at

http://www.j ohannhari.com/archive/article.php ?id=640.

133 Village Voice, 18 May 2004: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0420,perlstein,53582,l.html.

134 Harris (2004: 29).

135 Nasra Hassan, 'An arsenal of believers', New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2001. See also http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/011119_ hassan.html.

Chapter 9: Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion Physical and mental abuse

136 Reported by BBC news: http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/wales/901723.stm.

137 Loftus and Ketcham (1994).

138 See John Waters in the Irish Times: http://oneinfour.org/news/news2003/roots/.

139 Associated Press, 10 June 2005: http://www.rickross.com/ reference/clergy/clergy426.html.

140 http://www.avl611.org/hell.html.

In defence of children

141 N. Humphrey, 'What shall we tell the children?', in Williams (1998); repr. in Humphrey (2002).

142 http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/ yoder.html.

An educational scandal

143 Guardian, 15 Jan. 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1389500,00.html.

144 Times Educational Supplement, 15 July 2005.

145 http://www.telegraph.co.uli/opinioii/main.jhtmlPxmW opinion/2002/03/18/do 1801 .xml.

146 Guardian, 15 Jan. 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ weekend/story/0,,1389500,00.html.

147 The text of our letter, drafted by the Bishop of Oxford, was as follows:

Dear Prime Minister,

We write as a group of scientists and Bishops to express our concern about the teaching of science in the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead. Evolution is a scientific theory of great explanatory power, able to account for a wide range of phenomena in a number of disciplines. It can be refined, confirmed and even radically altered by attention to evidence. It is not, as spokesmen for the college maintain, a 'faith position' in the same category as the biblical account of creation which has a different function and purpose.

The issue goes wider than what is currently being taught in one college. There is a growing anxiety about what will be taught and how it will be taught in the new generation of proposed faith schools. We believe that the curricula in such schools, as well as that of Emmanuel City Technical College, need to be strictly monitored in order that the respective disciplines of science and religious studies are properly respected. Yours sincerely

148 British Humanist Association News, March-April 2006.

149 Observer, 22 July 2004: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ magazine/story/0,11913,125 8506,00.html.

Consciousness-raising again

150 The Oxford Dictionary takes 'gay' back to American prison slang in 1935. In 1955 Peter Wildeblood, in his famous book Against the Law, found it necessary to define 'gay' as 'an American euphemism for homosexual'.

151 http://uepengland.com/forum/index.php?showtopic= 184&mode=linear.

Religious education as a part of literary culture

152 Shaheen has written three books, anthologizing biblical references in the comedies, tragedies and histories separately. The summary count of 1,300 is mentioned in

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/ StritmatterShaheenRev.htm.

153 http://www.bibleliteracy.org/Secure/Documents/ BibleLiteracyReport2005 .pdf.

Chapter 10: A much needed gap? Consolation

154 From memory, I attribute this argument to the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfitt. I have not researched its origins thoroughly because I am using it only as a passing example of philosophical consolation.

155 Reported by BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/special_report/1999/06/99/cardinal_ hume_funeral/3 76263.stm.

The mother of all burkas

156 Wolpert (1992).