Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

3. The Future of God – God’s Only Excuse

One key to the future of the human race is, strange as it may seem, something that probably isn’t there. He was never there; but he was always the most important player in the pack both for winners and for losers. He is the ELEPHANT not in the room. He is the means by which his self-proclaimed representatives make us resigned to our fate, stoic about calamity, fatalistic in the extreme.

His is the name called as we invade, bomb, crusade, invoke the law, terrorise. He may, of course, be entirely innocent of all that is done in his cause. He may not be the one to blame at all. Particularly if he’s absent. But what is done on his behalf continues to be one of the most malign influences in every country on Earth.

If we do not get this right and understand what is happening, I fear for our future.

– Robyn Williams

Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world and the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

– Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in Physics

God had a busy time in 2006. There were many books written about his nonexistence. One of them was mine.

There was one by philosopher Daniel Dennett-who actually looks like God on High in the clouds should look, all white beard and beatific smile suitably combined with a honeyed accent honed in Massachusetts and Oxford. Then biologist Louis Wolpert gave an engineering explanation for the invention of God, confessing as he did so that his son is a fundamentalist Christian and his chum is cosmic paranormalist Rupert Sheldrake. And then there was Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins is a friend of mine. I was his daughter’s babysitter. We have had meals at each other’s houses, love Oxford, have partners who appear on television, cherish the memory of our departed buddy Douglas Adams and are both angry about demagogues in cassocks creating mayhem. His book, The God Delusion, sold heaps and caused storms. The interesting thing is that his book, unlike my own small volume (Unintelligent Design), was attacked from both the right and the left. It is interesting to consider why.

The God Delusion was written with the explicit intention of removing any belief the reader might have in a deity. ‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’ When I read this in the opening chapter of Delusion, I was merely amused. At least he’s honest! Others reacted in quite a different way. They saw instead a foaming zealot, a snarling evangelical atheist riding the crimson chariot of the Antichrist. This is not the Richard Dawkins I know.

He is gently spoken, donnish, argumentative in that ever-so-Oxford way: ‘If you mean this… then that…’ or ‘I wouldn’t accept your premise-let’s unpack those assumptions’ and so on. All very pass the port and proper protocols. He would certainly not see himself as leading any kind of hostile movement raiding monasteries or burning basilicas. Or even as a member of a group who-with the possible exception of the Skeptics-are as unfascist a bunch of jovial iconoclasts as anyone could hope to meet (not even the shadow of a Robespierre among them). His ire with religion, which I share, is directed at the harm it does and at our polite pretense that things are otherwise.

Richard Dawkins is not remotely political (perhaps his greatest failing) but he is assumed to be so. The Selfish Gene, written 30 years ago, was taken to be a primer for rapacious come-what-may capitalism. It was nothing of the sort. When celebrating its 30th anniversary, he confessed that the title was given to him by the publishers and that it could equally easily have been called The Cooperative Gene. His own societal views are as unremarkably social-democrat as you would find at any Ivy-League campus sherry party; he is unusual only in the amount of confidence he has invested in science and the effortless elegance with which he is able to write about it.

What do his accusers say? Scientists on the left, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose, call him a reductionist, claiming he sees genes as independent ciphers marching relentlessly towards some hideously inhumane goal of their own. Their difference with Dawkins on biology is that they see whole organisms and populations at the forefront of selection, not just bits of them. Stephen Jay Gould, as far as I know, appeared only once in a public forum with Dawkins, in a debate broadcast on the Science Show, in which they referred to each other as ‘ships passing in the night’. It is interesting that in one of Gould’s last books he benignly separated religion and science into different ‘niagisteria’, implying they need not be in flagrant contradiction.

Terry Eagleton is more scathing. Eagleton is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, was once at Oxford and is solidly on the left. He writes:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. That is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgement on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia. they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.

Is this fair? How much of the vast scholarship on Christianity alone (from the begatting in the Old Testament to the various accounts of Jesus’ life in the New) does one have to swallow in one small lifetime- not to mention the literature of the main religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Bahai’ism, Jainism, Shinto and Zoroastrianism-before doing a scientific critique? One could never, on this requirement, be prepared. Physicist Professor Steven Weinberg wrote acidly that by Eagleton’s logic you could not criticise astrology without being able to cast a horoscope expertly. If you are denying the existence of something (flat-Earthism, fairies), you are not obliged to be a world authority on all its loopy manifestations to argue its fatuity.

But Eagleton is doing more than this. He is saying that Dawkins is dismissing an entire body of human thinking, with all its subtlety and undoubted benefit to humankind. He is saying religion does something necessary for us, irrespective of its possible connections to God.

‘Now it may well be,’ writes Eagleton on orthodox interpretations of what the Bible means, ‘that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy’ He continues:

Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront the case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledegook. Mainstream theology may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

What about the immeasurable damage this mainstream theology may be doing? Dawkins’s case is that we have evolved to be obedient to our parents so we may survive growing up in dangerous surroundings. This useful characteristic has, along the way, as a side effect, made us vulnerable to authority figures. We can be persuaded, with perplexing ease, to bend the knee to mad popes, dim kings, Jim Joneses, Pol Pots and Joe Stalins. Religion has undoubtedly brought benefits, but what we must now decide, if we are to have a future at all, is how much of this ‘gobbledegook’ we can still bear. Eagleton is right, however, about diplomacy. Telling your bearded adversaries that their cherished beliefs are balderdash probably won’t work-though I note that Eagleton, in his London Review of Books article on Dawkins, feels free to call his own clerical high school teachers ‘dimwitted’.

Richard Dawkins does not believe in God because the evidence is overwhelmingly against God’s existence. But he is not immovable: ‘I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the evidence were forthcoming’, he writes in The God Delusion.

This is where the second problem arises: the problem of fact. Dawkins is thoroughly committed to scientific criteria and, it appears, scientific criteria only. But science is a limited tool when it comes to human affairs. I wrote in Chapter 2 that science tells us who we are, or more precisely, who we are not. Science can pronounce on the intelligence of women and the fact that there is only one human species. It will be able to tell us which kinds of human society may flourish and which may not. But it cannot tell us how to live our lives and what values to believe in.

Steven Rose, Professor of Biology at the Open University, has written in The Conscious Brain and other books, that a full picture of our human lot can be achieved only by moving through the hierarchies of knowledge-the science certainly, but then additionally psychology, sociology, politics, history and philosophy. And somewhere between the last two categories: theology. You do not get a full picture of man or woman by means of biochemistry or physiology alone. It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether religion has a Darwinian explanation for its ubiquity, but you need more than natural selection to tell the whole story of us. Rose does this; Dawkins much less so. It is enough to build a chasm between them.

Eagleton, furthermore, also seems to be saying that religion may be wrong about God but is nonetheless useful for societies. No one denies that belief in God or an afterlife may be comforting, but the point Dawkins is making is, ‘Yes, but what’s the price tag?’ To what extent are social cohesion, passivity, euphoria and fine songs offset by Hernando Cortez, paedophile priests, the Inquisition and the Singing Nun? In April 2005 the New Statesman, in a cover story marking the death of Pope John Paul II, noted that ‘He helped keep the continent of Africa disease-ridden, famished and disastrously underdeveloped.’ And: ‘He did more to spread AIDS across Africa than the trucking industry and prostitution combined.’ This latter was a reference to, among other things, the refusal of the Pope to condone the use of condoms.

The writer, Michela Wrong, went on, ‘When I think of the Vatican’s record in Africa, I think of its failure to acknowledge what happened in Rwanda, where priests and nuns not only led the death squads to Tutsi refugees cowering in their churches, but provided the petrol to burn them alive, took part in the shootings and raped survivors. Rwanda was Africa ’s most devout Catholic nation, and the role the Church played in genocide is as shameful as its collaboration with the Nazis.’

There is a price tag and it is a large one. This is the anthropologist, Canadian Ronald Wright, on the invasion of the Americas by the Europeans in the name of God and of their sovereigns: ‘The demographic collapse that took place within decades of 1492 was proportionally the greatest human death toll in history-removing about nine-tenths of the New World’s people, or close to one-fifth of all mankind-yet this huge fact has still to penetrate general knowledge and standard reference works. As the historian Francis Jennings wrote in 1975: “Europeans did not find a wilderness here… they made one.’”

Those who saw David Puttnam’s film The Mission will recall some of the devious justifications found by the Catholic Church for genocide. America would have been invaded even without belief in a deity, and there is no doubt that disease accounted for millions of those who died, but there is nonetheless a case to answer, a massive one.

The answer offered by those who defend religion is that it is, naturally, changed in character by the society in which it develops. It’s not God’s fault, it’s ours. Religions are contingent. David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, writes:

Matters are not helped when natural scientists trade on their specific expertise to sound off, like gurus, on matters outside their competence. The offence against norms of social scientific practice is particularly unfortunate when someone simply points to some instance of ethno-religious and/or politico-economic conflict to identify religion as the source of ‘evil’. You might as well simply point to the beautiful design qualities of the Lesser Celandine to infer a Beautiful Designer.

All societies have religions, all societies do bad things great and small; therefore all religions are linked, perforce, with people’s actions. My question is whether religion makes matters worse-whether it is jeopardising our future.

Religion often requires unquestioning acceptance and zeal. It is an immensely powerful motivator of crowds. That’s why it works.

Science also produces unfortunate results. There are bombs, Zyklon B gas, land mines, mutants, narcotics, lobotomies, 4WDs, Chernobyl, Minamata disease, experiments on heads separated from bodies and stolen organ transplants. Is science itself to blame for such infamy, in the same way as Dawkins blames religion? Not quite. Science does not offer a way of living. It has no ‘thou shalts’ or ‘thou shalt nots’. Scientists who have offered life plans, such as B.F. Skinner, William Shockley or Trofim Lysenko, have stepped well outside their fields and debased the science they gave reference to. This is not the same as a scientist having a political viewpoint (most of us do); it is a question of whether the science itself is the essence of the ideology. Though Richard Dawkins is often accused of being a social Darwinist he is, by his own insistence, absolutely not one.

(B.F. Skinner was a charming Cambridge, Massachusetts, based psychologist who saw human beings as glorified automata who specifically did not have ‘wants’ or ‘will’ but were conditioned by reflexes, like rats in a box. He planned societies based on this ‘benign’ conditioning and even brought up his own daughter that way. Shockley was an IT genius who kicked off the transistor and semiconductor revolution and ultimately Silicon Valley. His views on racial purity and ‘degeneration’ were worthy of the Brownshirts. Lysenko was Stalin’s geneticist and made evolutionary principles malleable to suit the Soviet five-year plans. He ruined both Russian agriculture and the careers of his colleagues.)

So is religion like everything else we do-good, bad or indifferent? Is it wrong to single it out, as Dawkins does, as the villain in the piece? A new book by Keith Ward tackles this question by asking, bluntly, ‘is religion dangerous?’ He puts it on a par with other social institutions. In fact, the evidence (ah, you saw this coming) is mixed. Scientific American published a summary of surveys at the end of 2006. They quote a study by Gregory S. Paul, who found for the negative: ‘In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD [sexually transmitted disease] infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. Indeed, the US scores the highest (by far) in homicides, STDs, abortions and teen pregnancies.’

Believers are, on the other hand more generous donors to charity (+14 per cent) and produce more good works (+57 per cent) than non-believers. So religion, on these statistics, makes you more likely to kill and have the clap but also to be a good Samaritan.

The political split is also stark. Professors Pippa Norris (Harvard) and Ronald Inglehart (Michigan), in a study of ‘37 presidential and parliamentary elections in 32 nations in the past decade’, found that 70 per cent of the devout vote on the right while only 45 per cent of the secular do so. In terms of political parties, 60 per cent of Republicans in America are creationists, with only 11 per cent accepting evolution (I find this an extraordinary figure); on the Democrat side, 29 per cent are creationists and 44 per cent are for Darwin. As for a link between right-wing regimes and dangerousness- I could not possibly comment.

What does all this say about the future of God? The first thing is that he is distinct from the religions that claim to represent him. These religions often demand rigid adherence to dogmas, can be used as rallying points for bullies (whether the zealots really believe the pieties they shout is immaterial), and should be condemned as such. Religions that enclose the mind and inhibit free thinking are dangerous.

Proof of the existence or non-existence of God is also a long way off. Richard Dawkins can remain serenely godless. Even Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, admits there is no ‘proof, rather a state ‘of silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark,’ as he puts it. Well, no danger in that!

But there are no scientific absolutes either. Science may be tested with far more rigour than almost anything else we do (try doing brain surgery, flying a 747 or designing modern electronics on the basis of faith alone) but it can never be 100 per cent certain of anything. Michael Frayn’s book The Human Touch reminds us that even the most famous laws of physics and maths, from those of Euclid to Newton, still contain fudge. Science in all its glory is nonetheless a succession of approved approximations and agreed assumptions. Modern maths is so demanding that some proofs would need to be run through very fast computers for twenty years and still give us only 98-99 per cent assurance they are secure. At least, though, science demands and has inbuilt scepticism to keep it honest, in the long term anyway. Religion also has sceptical dialogues, but their intention is not to overthrow the entire system of belief.

As for ‘atheistic evangelism’, as I wrote in Unintelligent Design, most of us don’t think about God from one month to the next. Atheism is not a campaign of recruitment. Nor is it an absence of something, like the loss of a leg or a sense of smell.

And science can offer a means of understanding how a moral code can develop with altruism at its core. It is perfectly fair for Dawkins to be impatient with the Bible’s ethical code when he asks which part is to be the source-’the one demanding stoning to death or the plucking out of an eye, or the part offering love and forgiveness?’

Where I differ most from Richard Dawkins and his views on God is over the old chestnuts of first causes and multi-universes. Answering the question about where the universe came from by saying God made it should not be followed by the retort, ‘Who made God?’ Such regressions are demeaning. Why is there something rather than nothing? We just don’t know.

After barely 400 years of modern science, it is hardly surprising that there are many curly questions left to answer. The origin of the world is one of the biggest, and we may have to wait a long time for a convincing reply to come from anyone. Making one up as a debating point is silly. As for the puzzle of why our universe seems so suitable for life, we are told by some astrophysicists, such as Martin Rees, that this can be explained by there being countless parallel universes which are wholly hostile to life, so ours isn’t such a fluke. But until someone can prove these ‘multiverses’ exist, this is merely another sleight of hand.

Meanwhile, Paul Davies has sidestepped all this in his latest book, The Goldilocks Enigma. He doesn’t offer an explanation for the origin of the universe but does suggest why its laws may vary and need not be God-given. Davies sees the world as a kind of vast computer where different software (scientific laws) comes into play depending on its state. Thus, in the very first moments after the Big Bang or at the nano level, the laws are different from those at the mature state or macro level. There would be no need for a Great Physicist to have laid down the laws of nature before setting the grand scheme on its way.

This makes sense and gives convincing hope that there are good leads, scientifically, to be followed up. But we may still never know the ultimate astrophysical answer.

As for religion and society: Dawkins may be a trifle too ready to invoke science for my comfort, but this may well come from his living with Dr Who’s second most celebrated assistant, Lalla Ward.

My main reason for joining this debate last year had little to do with God himself. We are both resigned to constructive mutual neglect. What gave me outrage was the new transmogrification of creationism in the form of intelligent design (ID) and its stated attempt to replace science.

This attempt to invade schools in America, Britain and Australia may appear to have been dealt a death blow by the opinion handed down by Judge John E. Jones at the conclusion of the Dover case in 2005. But the resilience of the ID movement should never be underestimated. Its future is amazingly and disconcertingly bright.

Consider: only 40 per cent of Americans now accept the idea of evolution (down from 45 per cent in 1985); this puts the US 32nd out of a league of 33 mainly European countries (Science, 11 August 2006). Consider: in Britain, 48 per cent of the population accept evolution but 39 per cent prefer ID or creationism. Fifty-nine UK schools are using ID materials ‘as a useful classroom resource’. Consider: 11 per cent of Italians want Darwin removed from curricula (Nature, November 2006). Consider: the Discovery Institute in Seattle, from which the ID push is promulgated, is now funding a research lab called the Biologic Institute, where qualified scientists seek evidence for ID (New Scientist, December 2006). This institute is doing arcane-sounding research on protein folding and amino acids, and claiming it confirms non-Darwinian ideas. Other scientists say this is nonsense. The aim of Biologic, however, is to allow the ID movement to claim that, yes, they are part of science proper-and therefore should be allowed into schools as part of science courses. Devious!

Whatever one’s views of a pluralistic society, it is clear that many countries, most of all the US, have pushed hard-line religious attitudes and systematically placed right-wing Christians at the centre of administration, including that of scientific institutions.

Garry Wills gave a detailed analysis in the New York Review of Books in late 2006. This is an extract giving an indication of the takeover:

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services… He went beyond that to give them faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety. The evangelicals had complained for years that they were not able to affect policy because liberals left over from previous administrations were in all the health and education and social service bureaus, at the operational level. They had specific people they objected to, and they had specific people with whom to replace them…

It is little wonder that we have had a corresponding efflorescence in Tehran and other Muslim capitals of similarly tub-thumping evangelicals. But the extent of the operation in Washington is still not fully appreciated.

Wills goes on:

It is common knowledge that the White House let lobbyists have a say in the drafting of economic legislation in matters like oil production, pharmaceutical regulation, medical insurance and corporate taxes. It is less known that for social services, evangelical organizations were given the same right to draft bills and install the officials who implement them. Karl Rove [George W. Bush’s senior adviser] had cultivated the extensive network of religious-right organizations, and they were consulted at every step of the way as the administration set up its policies on gays, AIDS, condoms, abstinence programs, creationism, and other matters that concerned the evangelicals. All the evangelicals’ resentments… were now being addressed.

The evangelicals knew which positions could affect their agenda, whom to replace, and whom they wanted appointed. This was true for the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and Health and Human Services-agencies that would rule on or administer matters dear to the evangelical cause.

Despite this comprehensive takeover, the Christian right would complain that the President had not gone far enough.

When I was in my teens I met the Rev. Michael Scott. He was a delightful and unostentatious figure, often dressed more like a gardener on his way to the allotment than like a priest. Scott spent his time sailing boats directly into the intended sites of nuclear bomb tests. His bravery and commitment were astounding.

Bishop Trevor Huddleston I saw briefly. His stand in South Africa fighting apartheid was legendary. Huddleston persevered through the worst of the brutality and when it was unfashionable to be against the system. The Rev. Dr David Millikan, a former head of ABC Religion, has spent decades trying to understand why our children join cults and helping them recover from the experience. These men represent the heart of what the Church does best. Many women have done the same; many non-Christian religions as well.

Occasionally, however, I do a thought experiment. I wonder how many of the policies coming out of Washington, London and Canberra in the last ten years would have lapsed if put through the filter of the teachings of Jesus on love and forgiveness. If George W. Bush is a good example of a thoroughgoing Christian, then Heaven help us.

I draw several lessons from all this about the future of God and of ourselves.

The first is, inevitably, about education. Science may be imperfect and may have produced harm, but it is by a cosmic mile more reliable and potentially less hazardous than most human institutions. It is also the key to our survival. The relativism that demeans our times should not be allowed to go unchallenged. We are not in a knowledge supermarket, where the choice is up to the customer; we need critical thinking to help us dispose of the dross. Our schools and universities should be the front lines of this, not dupes of snake-oil merchants.

Second, we need to know other cultures better than we do. The war in Iraq has been a shocking disaster because the invaders had not a clue about how to behave in a foreign land. Terry Eagleton is half right when he asks that we should at least try to know something about the human values we are rejecting.

Thirdly, we need to grow up. Religion may have had its place in the forest and during medieval plagues. Today it is either a faint remnant in the hands of apologetic bishops or a rallying cry for rampaging crowds shouting vile loathings. A private conviction, politely held, is one thing. A national policy putting millions at risk is another.

As for God-he can look after his own future.

Postscript 1

Danny Wallace, 30, a comedian, took out a newspaper advert inviting everyone to join a new cult. It had no message. Despite this, people signed up. Danny started a website saying only ‘Join me’, still with no statement of purpose. People kept joining. They started calling Danny ‘Leader’.

Somewhat freaked, Danny, being a good bloke, decided to turn the cult’s raison d’être into random good works, like sending peanuts to pensioners. After five years this accidental organisation has 16,000 members Europe-wide. People are such keen joiners… and followers.

True story!

Postscript 2

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed-I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any of them. Mine is not a religion of the prison house. It has room for the least among God’s creations. But it is proof against the insolent pride of race, religion or colour.

– Mahatma Gandhi

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 All US presidential candidates say they know God personally-’He’s my senior adviser.’

2009 President of Iran promises to wipe out all infidels- non Muslims-’God willing!’ Darwin anniversary celebrations cancelled in US.

2010 Richard Dawkins publishes Why God Stinks; insists it is not meant to be provocative.

2010 Discovery Institute in Seattle says it can prove all humans were ‘intelligently designed’- with the exception of Richard Dawkins.

2011 Archbishop of Canterbury admits being an atheist. Says this is no impediment to doing his job.

2012 Terrorists blow up all kindergartens and school buses in Israel and southern England ‘in the name of Allah’.

2013 Lesbian becomes Archbishop of York.

2014 Degrees in intelligent design offered at Australian universities-because ‘they are so very well funded’, says Vice-Chancellors Committee.

2015 Israel bombs Iran with nuclear devices.

2016 Membership of Pentecostalists and other churches recruiting mainly young people reaches several billion worldwide. They denounce evolutionary biology.

2017 George Pell becomes Pope. Condemns condoms.

2018 Middle East wiped out.

2019 Pope George offers prayers for world peace.

2020 God announces (via ABC Radio National) he is giving up in disgust, leaving this universe and going off to start another one.