The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (61 page)

Rorty confessed that he wished he had spent more of his life with verse. “This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived life more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. [Remember Oscar Miłosz described poetry as “a companion of man since his beginnings.”] Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verse.”
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“Our Spiritual Goal Is the Enrichment of the Evolutionary Epic”

I
n the Preface to
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
(1998), Richard Dawkins, then Oxford’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, recounted two incidents that in part prompted him to write his new book. One concerned an unnamed foreign publisher who had told him that, after reading his first book
The Selfish Gene
(1976), he could not sleep for three nights, so troubled was he by its “cold, bleak message.” The other story concerned a teacher “from a distant country” who had written to him reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book “because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism.”

Dawkins then went on to quote from his colleague Peter Atkins’s book
The Second Law
(1984) [i.e., of thermodynamics]: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”
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Dawkins comments: “[S]uch very proper purging of saccharine false purpose; such laudable tough-mindedness in the debunking of cosmic sentimentality must not be confused with the loss of personal hope. Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but
do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.” On the contrary, he wanted to convey the sense of awed wonder that science can give us and which makes it “one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.”
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The title of Dawkins’s book comes from a poem by Keats, who believed that Isaac Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. Dawkins did not accept this argument. He insisted that scientists and scientifically literate people everywhere who can read Keats as well as Newton have two ways of experiencing and understanding rainbows, not one, and that must be an advance.

He then set about demonstrating his own wonder at the natural world and the cosmos, ranging from bacteria, insect ears, birdsong, the rings in the trunks of sequoias, cuckoos and their habits with eggs, to snail polymorphism and much else. Along the way he dismissed paranormal activities, astrology, all forms of superstition and gullibility. He peppered his text with poems—some good, some indifferent—in a fulsome attempt to show that an appreciation of science in no way compromises enjoyment of poetry, not least because “[s]cience allows mystery but not magic.”
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That, in fact, an awareness of scientific inaccuracies in literature was and is another form of poetic appreciation.

At the end, he made a claim for what he calls “poetic science”: the notion that a Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, “might hear the galaxies sing.” Thanks to language, which separates us from the other animals, “[w]e can get outside the universe . . . in the sense of putting a model of the universe inside our skulls. Not a superstitious, small-minded, parochial model filled with spirits and hobgoblins, astrology and magic, glittering with fake crocks of gold where the rainbow ends. A big model, worthy of the reality that regulates, updates and tempers it; a model of stars and great distances, where Einstein’s noble spacetime curve upstages the curve of Yahweh’s covenantal bow and cuts it down to size. . . . The spotlight
passes but, exhilaratingly, before it does so it gives us time to comprehend something of this place in which we fleetingly find ourselves and the reason that we do so. We are alone among the animals in foreseeing our end. We are also alone among animals in being able to say before we die: Yes, this is why it was worth coming to life in the first place.”
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In the past few decades, both evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and cosmologists—physicists and astronomers—have mounted a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion, in particular the main monotheisms, and in doing so have tried hard to reshape what—for the sake of a better phrase—we may call our spiritual predicament.

The collective achievements of these two sciences have been threefold. First, they have sought to show that religions are themselves entirely natural phenomena; they have evolved, like so much else, and from this it follows that our
moral
life is also a natural (evolved) phenomenon, not rooted in any divine realm or mind. In this sense, the details of evolution teach us how to live together without any reference to God. Nothing is put in his place, because nothing is needed. Second, science has discovered—or reconfigured—some new aspects of the human condition, which provide us with principles for arranging our affairs for the greater benefit of the greatest number. Again, there is no need of God. Third, evolutionary biology and cosmology have given us some radically new ideas about the organizing principle(s) underpinning the universe. Some have gone so far as to call these new principles divine in themselves, but many others see them as entirely natural features of the world.

Some of these innovations are controversial, some are fantastical (part of their point being to gain our attention) and some are contradictory. They bring us up to date.

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL HEALTH

Richard Dawkins is probably the most controversial figure in the current debate between science and religion. In
Unweaving the Rainbow
, he sought to show that a scientific approach to creation can be just as “awesome” and fulfilling as religious belief. In
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986),
he set himself two more objectives. First, to explain in the only way possible—as the result of thousands and thousands of incremental evolutionary advances—the great biological complexity we see around us. And second, to argue that, if complexity can arise only in this way, there is no need of a complex God in the first place—in fact, it is a contradiction in terms. He insists that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
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He returned to the attack in 2006 with
The God Delusion
. Here he repeated some of his arguments against God—for example, that God would have to be complex to create the evolutionary mechanism, so why would he need to create evolution to manufacture complexity all over again? He looked at the several projects that have subjected prayer to experimental verification—and found them severely wanting. He looked at the roots of morality and examined a number of religious stances, which he found suspect. For instance, he believed that hardly anyone any longer “looked forward” (if they ever did) to the afterlife. So religion for him was a sham.

Dawkins didn’t have much to say about how we should live without religion—he took it for granted that his own lifestyle as perceived via his writings was evidence enough—but in typically combative fashion he described several instances of individuals “escaping” (his word) from their faith, to show that it could and can be done, and he published as an appendix a list of “friendly addresses,” mainly of humanist associations around the world, where people escaping from their church could find refuge and intellectual support.
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In
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(2006), Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University and a colleague of Dawkins, argued that it was now time for religion “as a global phenomenon” to be subject to multidisciplinary research, “because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about.”
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Until now, he said, there has been a tacit agreement that scientists will leave religion alone, but with fundamentalist terrorism so widespread “we are paying a terrible price for our ignorance.”
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He pointed out that two or three religions come into existence
every day
and that their typical lifespan is less than a decade, with even the great monotheisms not being that long-lived by the standard of other human institutions—writing, say, which has been around for five
thousand years, or agriculture, ten thousand, or language, hundreds of thousands of years.
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By examining humans’ need for intensity, for ritual, for attributing agency to anything that puzzles them, for finding patterns almost everywhere, for some people to assume the role of steward and others to cede it, he showed how folk religions evolved seamlessly into organized religions.

It is “belief in belief” that really matters, Dennett asserted; many people don’t actually believe many of the tenets of their religion (a belief in hell, say, or in the golden calf), but they do believe in the
concept
of God. Belief in belief is an elusive matter, but it has played an important role in the development, in the twentieth century in particular, of the concept of God as “apophatic”—meaning that God is “ineffable, unknowable, something beyond all human ken.”
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He was particularly dismissive of this concept (made popular by Karl Barth in the 1920s).

He concluded by asking if people are right in thinking that the best way to live a good life is through religion; the world is “sick and tired,” he said, of the demonstrations of devotion by one fundamentalist terrorist or another.
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The political agendas of fundamentalists and fanatics often exploit the organizational infrastructure of the religions they profess to belong to and their traditions of unquestioning loyalty. Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorism are Islam’s responsibility.

In writing his book, he said, he had come across one widespread opinion, albeit expressed in a variety of ways: in essence, this was that “man” has a “deep need” for spirituality. “What fascinates me about this delightfully versatile craving for ‘spirituality’ is that people think they know what they are talking about, even though—or perhaps because—nobody bothers to explain what they mean.”

Dennett had three things to say about how we should live. The secret to spirituality had nothing to do with the soul, or anything supernatural—it was this: let your
self
go. “If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to
proper
size, not all that important in the great scheme of
things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay
centered
, and
engaged
, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person [italics in original].”
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It was a matter of urgency, he thought, that people understand and accept evolutionary theory. “I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No. . . . We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! . . . In our view there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. . . . I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion.”
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As indicative of another way forward, Dennett recommended the work of the British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who has pioneered, he said, the consideration of the ethical issues involved in deciding how to decide “when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible.” Humphrey advocates teaching them about
all
the world’s religions, “in a matter-of-fact, historically and biologically informed way,” just as we teach them about geography, history and mathematics. “Let’s get
more
education about religion in our schools, not less.” We should teach rituals and customs and the positive and negative aspects of religious history—the role of the churches in the civil rights movement
and
the Inquisition. No religion should be favored, and none ignored. And as we learn more about the psychological and biological basis of religion, this should be included too. “The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century.”

In fact, Dennett’s call for more research into religion overlooks the fact that this is already under way, most notably as recorded in David Sloan Wilson’s
Darwin’s Cathedral
(2002), which looks at a variety of religions—those of the Nuer, Dagara and Mbuti, of John Calvin’s Geneva and of the Christian Koreans in Texas. He concludes that religions are adaptive units
that form in order to access resources (often, material resources) that can be obtained only through coordinated group action. Catechisms and the concept of forgiveness can also be regarded as evolved phenomena, he claims.
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NEW RULES TO LIVE BY: TRUST, TRADE AND A TRAGIC VISION

Sam Harris, in
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(2004), mounted a coruscating attack on all religions, stating that both the Bible and the Koran contain “mountains” of life-destroying gibberish; that the “land” most terrorists are fighting over is not to be found in this world; and asking why God would make Shakespeare a better writer than himself. Science, he said, is gradually encompassing life’s deepest questions and we are beginning to understand why humans flourish. We are beginning to understand, for instance, the role of the hormone oxytocin in the brain and its link with human well-being.