On Debating Religion
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An article by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec 94)
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Richard Dawkins, well-known for his books on evolution, took part in a
debate with the Archbishop of York, Dr. John Habgood, on the existence of
God at the Edinburgh science festival last Easter. [Easter '92 ed.] The
science correspondent of The Observer reported that the "withering" Richard
Dawkins clearly believed the "God should be spoken of in the same way as
Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy". He [the correspondent] overheard a
gloomy cleric comment on the debate: "That was easy to sum up. Lions 10,
Christians nil".
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Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I
shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the
"no-contests". I suspect that Dr. John Habgood, the Archbishop of York,
probably belongs to the third of these groups, so I shall begin with them.
The "no-contests" are rightly reconciled to the fact that religion cannot
compete with science on its own ground. They think there is no contest
between science and religion, because they are simply about different
things. The biblical account of the origin of the universe (the origin of
life, the diversity of species, the origin of man) -- all those things are
now known to be untrue.
The "no-contests" have no trouble with this: they regard it as naive in the
extreme, almost bad taste to ask of a biblical story, is it true? True, they
say, true? Of course it isn't true in any crude literal sense. Science and
religion are not competing for the same territory. They are about different
things. They are equally true, but in their different ways.
A favourite and thoroughly meaningless phrase is "religious dimension". You
meet this in statements such as "science is all very well as far as it goes,
but it leaves out the religious dimension".
The "know-nothings", or fundamentalists, are in one way more honest. They
are true to history. They recognize that until recently one of religion's
main functions was scientific: the explanation of existence, of the
universe, of life. Historically, most religions have had or even been a
cosmology and a biology. I suspect that today if you asked people to justify
their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I
believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world,
and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education
system is such that many people don't know it.
They are also true to history because you can't escape the scientific
implications of religion. A universe with a God would like quite different
from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is
bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are
scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
I am sometimes accused of arrogant intolerance in my treatment of
creationists. Of course arrogance is an unpleasant characteristic, and I
should hate to be thought arrogant in a general way. But there are limits!
To get some idea of what it is like being a professional student of
evolution, asked to have a serious debate with creationists, the following
comparison is a fair one. Imagine yourself a classical scholar who has spent
a lifetime studying Roman history in all its rich detail. Now somebody comes
along, with a degree in marine engineering or mediaeval musicology, and
tries to argue that the Romans never existed. Wouldn't you find it hard to
suppress your impatience? And mightn't it look a bit like arrogance?
My third group, the "know-alls" (I unkindly name them that because I find
their position patronising), think religion is good for people, perhaps good
for society. Perhaps good because it consoles them in death or bereavement,
perhaps because it provides a moral code.
Whether or not the actual beliefs of the religion are true doesn't matter.
Maybe there isn't a God; we educated people know there is precious little
evidence for one, let alone for ideas such as the Virgin birth or the
Resurrection. But the uneducated masses need a God to keep them out of
mischief or to comfort them in bereavement. The little matter of God's
probably non-existence can be brushed to one side in the interest of greater
social good. I need say not more about the "know-alls" because they wouldn't
claim to have anything to contribute to scientific truth.
Is God a Superstring?
I shall now return to the "no-contests". The argument they mount is
certainly worth serious examination, but I think that we shall find it has
little more merit than those of the other groups.
God is not an old man with a white beard in the sky. Right then, what is
God? And now come the weasel words. These are very variable. "God is not out
there, he is in all of us." God is the ground of all being." "God is the
essence of life." "God is the universe." "Don't you believe in the
universe?" "Of course I believe in the universe." "Then you believe in God."
"God is love, don't you believe in love?" "Right, then you believe in God?"
Modern physicists sometimes wax a bit mystical when they contemplate
questions such as why the big bang happened when it did, why the laws of
physics are these laws and not those laws, why the universe exists at all,
and so on. Sometimes physicists may resort to saying that there is an inner
core of mystery that we don't understand, and perhaps never can; and they
may then say that perhaps this inner core of mystery is another name for
God. Or in Stephen Hawkings's words, if we understand these things, we shall
perhaps "know the mind of God."
The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no
resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist
says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we
should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature
of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It
has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving
sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not
the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of
arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a
death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after
he was born.
The Fabulous Bible
The same is true of attempts to identify the big bang of modern cosmology
with the myth of Genesis. There is only an utterly trivial resemblance
between the sophisticated conceptions of modern physics, and the creation
myths of the Babylonians and the Jews that we have inherited.
What do the "no-contests" say about those parts of scripture and religious
teaching that once-upon-a-time would have been unquestioned religious and
scientific truths; the creation of the world the creation of life, the
various miracles of the Old and New Testaments, survival after death, the
Virgin Birth? These stories have become, in the hands of the "no-contests",
little more than moral fables, the equivalent of Aesop of Hans Anderson.
There is nothing wrong with that, but it is irritating that they almost
never admit this is what they are doing.
For instance, I recently heard the previous Chief Rabbi, Sir Immanuel
Jacobovits, talking about the evils of racism. Racism is evil, and it
deserves a better argument against it that the one he gave. Adam and Eve, he
argued, were the ancestors of all human kind. Therefore, all human kind
belongs to one race, the human race.
What are we going to make of an argument like that? The Chief Rabbi is an
educated man, he obviously doesn't believe in Adam and Eve, so what exactly
did he think he was saying?
He must have been using Adam and Eve as a fable, just as one might use the
story of Jack the Giantkiller or Cinderella to illustrate some laudable
moral homily.
I have the impression that clergymen are so used to treating the biblical
stories as fables that they have forgotten the difference between fact and
fiction. It's like the people who, when somebody dies on The Archers, write
letters of condolence to the others.
Inheriting Religion
As a Darwinian, something strikes me when I look at religion. Religion shows
a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. The vast
majority of people have an allegiance to one particular religion. There are
hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal
to just one of those.
Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the
overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents
belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best
miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass,
the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available
religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to
the matter of heredity.
This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people
with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage
to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they
are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.
Truths about the cosmos are true all around the universe. They don't differ
in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Poland, or Norway. Yet, we are apparently prepared
to accept that the religion we adopt is a matter of an accident of
geography.
If you ask people why they are convinced of the truth of their religion,
they don't appeal to heredity. Put like that it sounds too obviously stupid.
Nor do they appeal to evidence. There isn't any, and nowadays the better
educated admit it. No, they appeal to faith. Faith is the great cop-out, the
great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is
belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. The worst
thing is that the rest of us are supposed to respect it: to treat it with
kid gloves.
If a slaughterman doesn't comply with the law in respect of cruelty to
animals, he is rightly prosecuted and punished. But if he complains that his
cruel practices are necessitated by religious faith, we back off
apologetically and allow him to get on with it. Any other position that
someone takes up can expect to be defended with reasoned argument. Faith is
allowed not to justify itself by argument. Faith must be respected; and if
you don't respect it, you are accused of violating human rights.
Even those with no faith have been brainwashed into respecting the faith of
others. When so-called Muslim community leaders go on the radio and advocate
the killing of Salman Rushdie, they are clearly committing incitement to
murder--a crime for which they would ordinarily be prosecuted and possibly
imprisoned. But are they arrested? They are not, because our secular society
"respects" their faith, and sympathises with the deep "hurt" and "insult" to
it.
Well I don't. I will respect your views if you can justify them. but if you
justify your views only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not
respect them.
Improbabilities
I want to end by returning to science. It is often said, mainly by the
"no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence
of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep
an open mind and be agnostic.
At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak
sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because
the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be
fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you
can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect
to fairies?
The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to
anything. There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold
which we can't positively disprove. On the whole, people don't believe in
most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so
on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God, together with
whatever particular baggage goes with the religion of their parents.
I suspect the reason is that most people, though not belonging to the
"know-nothing" party, nevertheless have a residue of feeling that Darwinian
evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can
say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you
read about and study what is known about life and evolution.
I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of
evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and
towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their
nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
The great beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution is that it explains how
complex, difficult to understand things could have arisen step by plausible
step, from simple, easy to understand beginnings. We start our explanation
from almost infinitely simple beginnings: pure hydrogen and a huge amount of
energy. Our scientific, Darwinian explanations carry us through a series of
well-understood gradual steps to all the spectacular beauty and complexity
of life.
The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural
creator, is not only superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls
foul of the very argument that was originally put forward in its favour.
This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of
colossal intelligence, a supermind, an entity of extremely low
probability--a very improbable being indeed.
Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything (and we don't
need it to), it still wouldn't help because it raises a bigger mystery than
it solves.
Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out
of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile
explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to
explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We
cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is
very, very improbable indeed.
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This was an article by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec
94)
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