The GOD Delusion (45 page)

*
Sir Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, 1960.

'About
the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was
syphilitic, the mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the
first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the
fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?' 

'I would have
terminated the pregnancy.' 

'Then you would have
murdered Beethoven.'

The
Internet is riddled with so-called pro-life web sites that repeat this
ridiculous story, and incidentally change factual premises with wanton
abandon. Here's another version. 'If you knew a woman who was pregnant,
who had 8 kids already, three of whom were deaf, two who were blind,
one mentally retarded (all because
she had syphilis), would you recommend that she have an abortion? Then
you would have killed Beethoven.'
¹³⁰
This
rendering of the legend demotes the great composer from fifth to ninth
in the birth order, raises the number born deaf to three and the number
born blind to two, and gives syphilis to the mother instead of the
father. Most of the forty-three websites I found when searching for
versions of the story attribute it not to Maurice Baring but to a
certain Professor L. R. Agnew at UCLA Medical School, who is said to
have put the dilemma to his students and to have told them,
'Congratulations, you have just murdered Beethoven.' We might
charitably give L. R. Agnew the benefit of doubting his existence - it
is amazing how these urban legends sprout. I cannot discover whether it
was Baring who originated the legend, or whether it was invented
earlier.

For
invented it certainly was. It is completely false. The truth is that
Ludwig van Beethoven was neither the ninth child nor the fifth child of
his parents. He was the eldest - strictly the number two, but his elder
sibling died in infancy, as was common in those days, and was not, so
far as is known, blind or deaf or dumb or mentally retarded. There is
no evidence that either of his parents had syphilis, although it is
true that his mother eventually died of tuberculosis. There was a lot
of it about at the time.

This
is, in fact, a fully fledged urban legend, a fabrication, deliberately
disseminated by people with a vested interest in spreading it. But the
fact that it is a lie is, in any case, completely beside the point.
Even if it were not a lie, the argument derived from it is a very bad
argument indeed. Peter and Jean Medawar had no need to doubt the truth
of the story in order to point out the fallacy of the argument: 'The
reasoning behind this odious little argument is breathtakingly
fallacious, for unless it is being suggested that there is some causal
connection between having a tubercular mother and a syphilitic father
and giving birth to a musical genius the world is no more likely to be
deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste abstinence from
intercourse.'
¹³¹
The Medawars' laconically
scornful dismissal is unanswerable (to borrow the plot of one of Roald
Dahl's dark short stories, an equally fortuitous decision
not
to have an abortion in 1888 gave us Adolf Hitler). But you do
need a modicum of intelligence - or perhaps freedom from a certain kind
of
religious upbringing - to get the point. Of the forty-three 'pro-life'
websites quoting a version of the Beethoven legend which my Google
search turned up on the day of writing, not a single one spotted the
illogic in the argument. Every one of them (they were all religious
sites, by the way) fell for the fallacy, hook, line and sinker. One of
them even acknowledged Medawar (spelled Medavvar) as the source. So
eager were these people to believe a fallacy congenial to their faith,
they didn't even notice that the Medawars had quoted the argument
solely in order to blow it out of the water.

As
the Medawars were entirely right to point out, the logical conclusion
to the 'human potential' argument is that we potentially deprive a
human soul of the gift of existence every time we fail to seize any
opportunity for sexual intercourse. Every refusal of any offer of
copulation by a fertile individual is, by this dopey 'pro-life' logic,
tantamount to the murder of a potential child! Even resisting rape
could be represented as murdering a potential baby (and, by the way,
there are plenty of 'pro-life' campaigners who would deny abortion even
to women who have been brutally raped). The Beethoven argument is, we
can clearly see, very bad logic indeed. Its surreal idiocy is best
summed up in that splendid song 'Every sperm is sacred' sung by Michael
Palin, with a chorus of hundreds of children, in the Monty Python film
The
Meaning of Life
(if you haven't seen it, please do). The
Great Beethoven Fallacy is a typical example of the kind of logical
mess we get into when our minds are befuddled by religiously inspired
absolutism.

Notice
now that 'pro-life' doesn't exactly mean
pro-life
at
all. It means
pro-human-\ite.
The granting of
uniquely special rights to cells of the species
Homo sapiens
is
hard to reconcile with the fact of evolution. Admittedly, this will not
worry those many anti-abortionists who don't understand that evolution
is
a fact! But let me briefly spell out the argument for the
benefit of anti-abortion activists who may be less ignorant of science.

The
evolutionary point is very simple. The
humanness
of
an embryo's cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous
moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with
chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet. To
see this, imagine that an intermediate species, say
Australopithecus
afarensis,
had chanced to survive and was discovered in a
remote part of Africa. Would these creatures 'count as human' or not?
To a consequentialist like me, the question doesn't deserve an answer,
for nothing turns on it. It is enough that we would be fascinated and
honoured to meet a new 'Lucy'. The absolutist, on the other hand, must
answer the question, in order to apply the moral principle of granting
humans unique and special status
because they are human. It
it
came to the crunch, they would presumably need to set up courts, like
those of apartheid South Africa, to decide whether a particular
individual should 'pass for human'.

Even
if a clear answer might be attempted for
Australopithecus,
the
gradual continuity that is an inescapable feature of biological
evolution tells us that there must be
some
intermediate
who would lie sufficiently close to the 'borderline' to blur the moral
principle and destroy its absoluteness. A better way to say this is
that there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a
borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates
happen to be extinct. Of course, it could be argued that humans are
more capable of, for example, suffering than other species. This could
well be true, and we might legitimately give humans special status by
virtue of it. But evolutionary continuity shows that there is no
absolute
distinction. Absolutist moral discrimination is
devastat-ingly undermined by the fact of evolution. An uneasy awareness
of this fact might, indeed, underlie one of the main motives
creationists have for opposing evolution: they fear what they believe
to be its moral consequences. They are wrong to do so but, in any case,
it is surely very odd to think that a truth about the real world can be
reversed by considerations of what would be morally desirable.

In
illustration of the dark side of absolutism, I mentioned the Christians
in America who blow up abortion clinics, and the Taliban
of Afghanistan, whose list of cruelties, especially to women, I find
too painful to recount. I could have expanded upon Iran under the
ayatollahs, or Saudi Arabia under the Saud princes, where women cannot
drive, and are in trouble if they even leave their homes without a male
relative (who may, as a generous concession, be a small male child).
See Jan Goodwin's
Price of Honour
for a
devastating expose of the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and other
present-day theocracies. Johann Hari, one of the (London)
Independent's
liveliest columnists, wrote an article whose title speaks for
itself: 'The best way to undermine the jihadists is to trigger a
rebellion of Muslim women.'
¹³²

Or,
switching to Christianity, I could have cited those American 'rapture'
Christians whose powerful influence on American Middle Eastern policy
is governed by their biblical belief that Israel has a God-given right
to all the lands of Palestine.
¹³³
Some rapture
Christians go further and actually yearn for nuclear war because they
interpret it as the 'Armageddon' which, according to their bizarre but
disturbingly popular interpretation of the book of Revelation, will
hasten the Second Coming. I cannot improve on Sam Harris's chilling
comment, in his
Letter to a Christian Nation:

It
is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York
were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage
of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent
mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is
ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It
should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little
to help us create a durable future for ourselves - socially,
economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the
consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government
actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending
would be
glorious.
The fact that nearly half of
the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis
of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual
emergency.

There
are, then, people whose religious faith takes them right outside the
enlightened consensus of my 'moral
Zeitgeist'.
They
represent what I have called the dark side of religious absolutism, and
they are often called extremists. But my point in this section is that
even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith
in which extremism naturally flourishes.

In
July 2005, London was the victim of a concerted suicide bomb attack:
three bombs in the subway and one in a bus. Not as bad as the 2001
attack on the World Trade Center, and certainly not as unexpected
(indeed, London had been braced for just such an event ever since Blair
volunteered us as unwilling side-kicks in Bush's invasion of Iraq),
nevertheless the London explosions horrified Britain. The newspapers
were filled with agonized appraisals of what drove four young men to
blow themselves up and take a lot of innocent people with them. The
murderers were British citizens, cricket-loving, well-mannered, just
the sort of young men whose company one might have enjoyed.

Why
did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian
counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil
Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation
that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or
supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in
some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his
pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young
men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and
their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim
community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith
is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise
sane and decent people. Once again, Sam Harris put the point with
percipient bluntness, taking the example of the Al-Qaida leader Osama
bin Laden (who had nothing to do with the London bombings, by the way).
Why would anyone want to destroy the World Trade Center and everybody
in it? To call bin Laden 'evil' is to evade our responsibility to give
a proper answer to such an important question.

The
answer to this question is obvious - if only because it has been
patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself.
The answer is that men like bin Laden
actually
believe
what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the
Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their
lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our
neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to
paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so
fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to
accept this explanation?
¹³⁴

The
respected journalist Muriel Gray, writing in the (Glasgow)
Herald
on 24 July 2005, made a similar point, in this case with
reference to the London bombings.

Everyone
is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W Bush and
Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim 'communities'. But it has never
been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has
ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror
and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous
to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the
government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that
it isn't so.

Our
Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead
characterize their battle as a war against 'terror', as though terror
were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or
they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure 'evil'. But they are
not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are
motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what
they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their
religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious
idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their
acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and
not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have
been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning
faith.
Sam Harris quotes a failed Palestinian suicide bomber who
said that what drove him to kill Israelis
was 'the love of martyrdom ... I didn't want revenge for anything. I
just wanted to be a martyr.' On 19 November 2001
The New
Yorker
carried an interview by Nasra Hassan of another
failed suicide bomber, a polite young Palestinian aged twenty-seven
known as 'S'. It is so poetically eloquent of the lure of paradise, as
preached by moderate religious leaders and teachers, that I think it is
worth giving at some length: