Evolutionary biologist: God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and
America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.
The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion,
religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/print.html
By Gordy Slack
April 28, 2005 |
Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous
out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most
controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The
Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome,
irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked
everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked
its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals.
Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.
Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded
his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker,"
"Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent
work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time,
stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.
Given his outspoken defense of
Darwin, and
natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role:
the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from
controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister
who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the
minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said,
"You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."
Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Oxford University, a
position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft
millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British
television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion
in modern history, tentatively titled "The Root of All Evil."
I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist
Alliance International annual conference in
Los Angeles, where he
presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to
magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room,
Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white
shirt and soft blazer.
Once again, evolution is under attack.
Are there any questions at all about its validity?
It's often said that because evolution
happened in the past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct
evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's rather like a
detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has
been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at
the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a
billionfold.
There are clues from the distribution of
DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein
sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great
detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple
branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents
throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a
fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what
you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts
all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong
direction.
British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when
asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said,
"Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing
like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such
facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place.
Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing
wrong with that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at
all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to
disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.
Still, so many people resist believing
in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?
It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion.
And from bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the idea of
evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an
exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately
is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United
States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
My American friends tell me that you are
slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for
the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people
in America. Unfortunately, at
present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people
who voted Bush in.
But the broad direction of history is
toward enlightenment, and so I think that what
America is going through at the moment will prove to be a
temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice
would be, Don't despair, these things pass.
You delve into agnosticism in "The
Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?
It's said that the only rational stance is
agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of
the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that
you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it.
There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns,
werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed
to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do
exist.
Believing in God is like believing in a
teapot orbiting Mars?
Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to
just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to
be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David
Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument.
It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain
improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have
been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who
must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant
thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can
only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a
designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is
explained by natural selection.
Those who embrace "intelligent design"
-- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by
nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of
God.
There is just no evidence for the
existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works
up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain.
The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it
is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of
evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us
the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent
design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.
So why do we insist on believing in
God?
From a biological point of view, there are
lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary
predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that
the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to
infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer
has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That
automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are
programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral
program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
Similarly, the child brain is
preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and
other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains
should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by
adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas,
useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious
customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is
very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways
by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new
minds that were previously uninfected.
You've said that raising children in a
religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.
What I think may be abuse is labeling
children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I
find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of
a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4,
when these children are much too young to know what they think about the
cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian
child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged
exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse
to talk about an atheist child.
You are working on a new book
tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?
A delusion is something that people
believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely
distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and
the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses
adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word
"delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty
of those.
What are its negative connotations?
A delusion that encourages belief where
there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between
incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because
reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the
cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in
extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among
themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue
about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of
philosophers, historians and literary critics.
But you don't do that if you just know
your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his
incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and
private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their
minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to
torture and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy wars and purges
and pogroms, to the Inquisition and the burning of witches.
What are the dark sides of religion
today?
Terrorism in the Middle East, militant
Zionism, 9/11, the Northern Ireland "troubles," genocide, which turns
out to be "credicide" in Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science
education, oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the
Roman Catholic Church, which thinks you can't be a valid priest without
testicles.
Fifty years ago, philosophers like
Bertrand Russell felt that the religious worldview would fade as science
and reason emerged. Why hasn't it?
That trend toward enlightenment has indeed
continued in Europe and Britain. It just
has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We're
seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the
U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are
fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other.
The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who
don't subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle.
Actually, holy alliance would be a better
phrase. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of
faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have
implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each
believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if
he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be
even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them.
This world would be a much better place without either of them.
Does religion contribute to the
violence of Islamic extremists? Christian extremists?
Of course it does. From the cradle, they
are brought up to revere martyrs and to believe they have a fast track
to heaven. With their mother's milk they imbibe hatred of heretics,
apostates and followers of rival faiths.
I don't wish to suggest it is doctrinal
disputes that are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing the
killing. What I do suggest is that in places like
Northern Ireland, religion was the only available label
by which people could indulge in the human weakness for us-or-them wars.
When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant,
they're not playing out doctrinal disagreements about
transubstantiation.
What is going on is more like a vendetta.
It was one of their lot's grandfathers who killed one of our lot's
grandfathers, and so we're getting our revenge. The "their lot" and "our
lot" is only defined by religion. In other parts of the world it might
be defined by color, or by language, but in so many parts of the world
it isn't, it's defined by religion. That's true of the conflicts among
Croats and the Serbs and Bosnians -- that's all about religion as
labels.
The grotesque massacres in
India at the time of partition were between Hindus and
Muslims. There was nothing else to distinguish them, they were racially
the same. They only identified themselves as "us" and the others as
"them" by the fact that some of them were Hindus and some of them were
Muslims. That's what the Kashmir dispute is all about. So, yes, I would
defend the view that religion is an extremely potent label for
hostility. That has always been true and it continues to be true to this
day.
How would we be better off without
religion?
We'd all be freed to concentrate on the
only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the
privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys
through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority
of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny
minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and
forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world
would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It
would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to
others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid
obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.
Are there environmental costs of a
religious worldview?
There are many religious points of view
where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to
scientists. But there are certain religious points of view where it is
not. In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that
because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the
world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that
say, "We don't need to bother about conserving forests or anything else
because the end of the world is coming anyway." A few decades ago one
would simply have laughed at that. Today you can't laugh. These people
are in power.
Unlike other accounts of the evolution
of life, "The Ancestor's Tale" starts at the present and works back. Why
did you decide to tell the story in reverse?
The most important reason is that if you
tell the evolution story forwards and end up with humans, as it's
humanly normal to do so because people are interested in themselves, it
makes it look as though the whole of evolution were somehow aimed at
humanity, which of course it wasn't. One could aim anywhere, like at
kangaroos, butterflies or frogs. We're all contemporary culmination
points, for the moment, in evolution.
If you go backward, however, no matter
where you start in this huge tree of life, you always converge at the
same point, which is the origin of life. So that was the main reason for
structuring the book the way I did. It gave me a natural goal to head
toward -- the origin of life -- no matter where I started from. Then I
could legitimately start with humans, which people are interested in.
People like to trace their ancestry. One
of the most common types of Web sites, after ones about sex, is one's
family history. When people trace the ancestry of that name, they
normally stop at a few hundred years. I wanted to go back 4,000 million
years.
The idea of going back towards a
particular goal called to my mind the notion of pilgrimage as a kind of
literary device. So I very vaguely modeled the book on Chaucer's
"Canterbury Tales," where the pilgrims start off as a band of human
pilgrims walking backward to discover our ancestors. We are successively
joined by other pilgrims -- the chimpanzee pilgrims at 5 million years,
then the gorilla pilgrims, then the orangutan pilgrims. Starting with
humans, there are only about 39 such rendezvous points as you go back in
time. It's a rather surprising fact. Rendezvous 39 is where we meet the
bacteria pilgrims.
The idea that evolution could be
"random" seems to frighten people. Is it random?
This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If
it was random, then of course it couldn't possibly have given rise to
the fantastically complicated and elegant forms that we see. Natural
selection is the important force that drives evolution. Natural
selection is about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine.
It can't work unless there is some sort of variation upon which to work.
And the source of variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the
sense that it is not directed specifically toward improvement. It is
natural selection that directs evolution toward improvement. Mutation is
random in that it's not directed toward improvement.
The idea that evolution itself is a random
process is a most extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it's deliberately
put about maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a
preposterous absurdity. Of course evolution isn't random. It is driven
by natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.
Is there an emotional side to the
intellectual enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?
Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a
scientist who calls himself or herself religious, you'll often find that
that's what they mean. You often find that by "religious" they do not
mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional
response to the natural world that you've described. Einstein had it
very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word "God" to describe it,
which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that
feeling, I have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of many
scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those
who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a
scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, "No, you believe in this
transcendental feeling, you can't be an atheist." That's a confusion of
language.
Some scientists say that removing
religion or God from their life would leave it meaningless, that it's
God that gives meaning to life.
"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically
attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview
makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific
worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental
worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be
granted a few decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can
understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate
enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier
times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific
exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of
knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by
what any schoolchild could tell him today. That's the kind of privileged
century in which we live. That's what gives my life meaning. And the
fact that my life is finite, and that it's the only life I've got, makes
me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business
of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to
have been born.
Humans may not be products of an
intelligent designer but given genetic technologies, our descendants
will be. What does this mean about the future of evolution?
It's an interesting thought that in some
remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st
centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped
being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the
past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a
sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and
chickens. That's increasing and we're getting more technologically
clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution
but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the
great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no
foresight.
In general, evolution is a blind process.
That's why I called my book "The Blind Watchmaker." Evolution never
looks to the future. It never governs what happens now on the basis on
what will happen in the future in the way that human design undoubtedly
does. But now it is possible to breed a new kind of pig, or chicken,
which has such and such qualities. We may even have to pass that pig
through a stage where it is actually less good at whatever we want to
produce -- making long bacon racks or something -- but we can persist
because we know it'll be worth it in the long run. That never happened
in natural evolution; there was never a "let's temporarily get worse in
order to get better, let's go down into the valley in order to get over
to the other side and up onto the opposite mountain." So yes, I think it
well may be that we're living in a time when evolution is suddenly
starting to become intelligently designed.
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About
the writer
Gordy Slack is a freelance science writer based in Berkeley, Calif.
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