The Devil's Delusion

WHETHER GOD exists—that is one question. Whether belief in his existence plays an important role in human life—that is another. “Religion’s power to console,” Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “doesn’t make it true.” Perhaps this is so, but only a man who has spent a good deal of time snoring on the down of plenty could be quite so indifferent to the consolations of religion, wherever and however they may be found. One wonders, in any case, why religion has the power to console and why it has had this power over the course of human history.

Writing about the arts and their degraded state, Camille Paglia begins by affirming that she is a “professed atheist.” She is nonetheless persuaded that “a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack.” The connection between what she sees (a good deal that is awful) and what she believes (There is no God) is not one that she is inclined to make. When faced with irreconcilable alternatives, she proposes to straddle the difference, a position as difficult in thought as it is uncomfortable in gymnastics. Her calls for the study of comparative religion at least afford the consumer the luxury of choice without the penalty of commitment. “I view each world religion,” she writes, “as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe.”

I daresay that a telescope does a better job in revealing the size of the universe than any of the world religions, and if sublimity is wanted, it is hardly to be expected from a system of thought assumed to be false.

There remains another possibility. There may in fact be a connection between the importance of religious belief in life and the existence of the Deity in reality.

Not a logical connection, no. But a connection nonetheless, and so a clue.

And let us be honest: When it comes to clues, we could all use a few more.

THE SEEING EYE

During the living centuries of the Arab empire, a magnificent series of stellar observatories glittered like jewels throughout the archipelago of its conquests. The observatory played an important role in the religious life of devout Moslems. It was not—it was never—the expression of disinterested curiosity. More so than either Jews or Christians, men of the Moslem faith were called upon carefully to mark the schedule of their devotions. The art devoted to such concerns was known as the ilm al-miqât. And an art it was. During the Middle Ages, the Moslem world, for all its luxury and sophistication, had no more access to sophisticated clocks than the Christian world, and in the Christian West, men kept time so carelessly that even the arrival of the Easter holidays was a matter of profound uncertainty. Caliphs in Baghdad counted time by means of either a water clock or an hourglass, and yet the Koran commanded fivefold prayers each day, and it commanded the faithful to face the shrine of Kaaba in Mecca as they prayed—tasks requiring considerable mental dexterity. The Islamic calendar was based on the phases of the moon. The community preparing to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, which marks the beginning of the lunar year, would need to spot the crescent moon just as it shed its blush in the evening sky. Before the creation of sophisticated astronomical tables, men with exceptionally sharp eyesight were sent to distant mountaintops to spot the moon’s appearance; their cries then echoed down through the valleys and thence by a chain of cries back to Baghdad itself. (In France, the night of the crescent moon is still called la nuit de doute—the night of doubt.) By the thirteenth century, these scientific chores were assigned to professionals, the so-called muwaqqit. Resident in mosques, they were responsible for regulating the time of prayer. “In Islam, as in no other religion,” the historian David King has remarked, “the performance of various aspects of religious ritual has been assisted by scientific procedure.”

A BESTIAL INDULGENCE OF APPETITE

And now a question: Does the Koran commend the study of the natural world? And an answer: It does. “At the last Judgment,” the Turkish devout Said Nursî remarked, “the ink spent by scholars is equal to the blood of martyrs.” But those scholars celebrated at the last judgment were apt to be scholars of religion and so bound by the inerrancy of the Koran. “Allah turns over the night and the day,” reads a well-known Koranic verse, “most surely there is a lesson in this for those who have sight” (24.44). It is hardly surprising that Moslem mathematicians and astronomers, from the late seventh to the early fifteenth century, regarded their scientific curiosity, on those occasions when they were called upon to justify it, as if their scientific pursuits comprised an exercise calculated to increase their devotion.

But of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to the general proscription against gluttony, and once engaged, even if engaged initially in the service of religion, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly, until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself. The more encompassing the scope of scholarship, the more open to doubt the scholar becomes, so that in the end only curiosity remains indisputably of value. This is true whether the object of curiosity is religion or science.

Writing in 1420 or 1430, the astronomer Ulugh Beg described science in a way that suggests nothing of the martyr’s blood. “Intellects are in agreement,” he wrote, “and minds are in accord as to the excellence of science and the worthiness of scientists.” By “science,” Ulugh Beg meant observation—the power of the eye, aided by various instruments, to see. The benefits conferred by sight are very often matters of self-improvement. “Science sharpens the intellect and strengthens it; it increases sagacity, and augments perspicacity.” But benefits transcend the personal. Those sciences whose principles are “indisputable and self-evident” have the merit of being “common to people of different religions,” Ulugh Beg affirmed.

These sentiments are entirely modern. They might well have been expressed by a committee of the National Science Foundation. They were expressed by a committee of the National Science Foundation: “Science extends and enriches our lives, expands our imagination and liberates us from the bonds of ignorance and superstition.” They are on display in every high school textbook.

And there is hardly any reason to suppose them true.

It is a point that did not fail to escape the notice of the most perceptive of the Arab philosophers, the gazelle, Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazâli. Writing with remarkable pre-science about the scientists he called naturalists, and this in the eleventh century, Al Ghazâli was quite prepared to admit that their studies served to reveal “the wonders of creation.” No one “can make a careful study of anatomy and the wonderful uses of the members and organs [of the human body] without attaining to the necessary knowledge that there is a perfection in the order which the framer gave to the animal frame, and especially to that of man.”

At once, Al Ghazâli withdraws the commendation that he has just offered. A complicated inference is set in play. The naturalists argue, he observes, that “intellectual power in man is dependent on [his] temperament.” It is a point that neurophysiologists would today make by arguing that the mind (or the soul) is dependent on the brain, or even that the mind is the brain. From this it follows that “as the temperament is corrupted, intellect is also corrupted and ceases to exist.” When the brain is destroyed, so, too, the mind. Death and disease mark the end of the mind. On the naturalistic view, Al Ghazâli argues, “the soul dies and does not return to life.” The globe of consciousness shrinks in each of us until it is no larger than a luminous point, and then it winks out.

But if this is a matter of fact, Al Ghazâli argues, it is a matter of profound scientific and moral consequence. Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter or mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin. This is a question that Darwinian biology has not yet answered. By the same token, to place in doubt the survival of the soul is to “deny the future life—heaven, hell, resurrection, and judgment.” And this is to corrupt the system of justice by which life must be regulated, because “there does not remain any reward for obedience, or any punishment for sin.”

With this curb removed, Al Ghazâli predicts, men and women will give way to “a bestial indulgence of their appetites.”

As he so often does, Al Ghazâli has managed to express a very complex current of anxiety common not only in the Moslem world but in the world at large.

If it is hardly unknown, this medieval Arabic anxiety, it no longer controls the moral imagination in any secular society. It does not control mine and I suppose it does not control yours either. A great many men and women do suspect that scientific curiosity, if unchecked, might be a dangerous force. Like any dangerous force, scientific curiosity is dangerous because in the end it turns upon itself. The stories both of Faust and Frankenstein suggest that this is so. But a bestial indulgence of appetite? This is not a phrase, nor does it evoke an idea, that anyone in the West now finds plausible. Quite the contrary. It is religion, Christopher Hitchens claims, that is dangerous, because it is “the cause of dangerous sexual repression.” Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression? Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacements for the original ten, the first encourages men and women “to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else.” What Hector Avalos has called “the Enlightenment project” of allowing men and women to regulate their own conduct by means “reason and experience” may in the early twenty-first century have led to a certain tastelessness in public entertainment, but what of it?

Worse things have happened.

The conviction that in Western Europe and the United States nothing worse has happened is one reason that so many scientific atheists affirm that they are of the Enlightenment party. It is a party everyone is eager to join, Noam Chomsky because he is a “child” of the Enlightenment, the rest of us because for the moment, there are no other parties at all.

Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France: all perished, all—/Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, /Head after head, and never heads enough /For those that bade them fall.

Why should the sins of the fathers be visited on their children?

DOUBLE-ENTRY BOOKKEEPING

For scientists persuaded that there is no God, there is no finer pleasure than recounting the history of religious brutality and persecution. Sam Harris is in this regard especially enthusiastic, The End of Faith recounting in lurid but lingering detail the methods of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition. If readers require pertinent information concerning the strappado, or other instruments of doctrinal persuasion, they may turn to his pages. There is no need to argue the point. A great deal of human suffering has been caused by religious fanaticism. If the Inquisition no longer has the power to compel our indignation, the Moslem world often seems quite prepared to carry the burden of exuberant depravity in its place.

Nonetheless, there is this awkward fact: The twentieth century was not an age of faith, and it was awful. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot will never be counted among the religious leaders of mankind.

Nor can anyone argue that the horrors of the twentieth century were unanticipated. Although they came as a shock, they did not come as a surprise. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov exclaims that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Throughout the nineteenth century, as religious conviction seeped out of the institutions of Western culture, poets and philosophers had the uneasy feeling that its withdrawal might signal the ascension of great evil in the world.

In this they were right.

What gives Karamazov’s warning—for that is what it is—its power is just that it has become part of a most up-to-date hypothetical syllogism:

The first premise:

And the second:

The conclusion:

Whereupon there is a return to a much older, vastly more somber vision of life and its constraints, one that serves to endow the phrase bestial indulgence with something more by way of content than popularly imagined.

In 2007, a number of scientists gathered in a conference entitled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival” in order to attack religious thought and congratulate one another on their fearlessness in so doing. The physicist Steven Weinberg delivered an address. As one of the authors of the theory of electroweak unification, the work for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, he is a figure of great stature. “Religion,” he affirmed, “is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion” (italics added).

In speaking thus, Weinberg was warmly applauded, not one member of his audience asking the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?

If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.

If the facts about the twentieth century are an inconvenience for scientific atheism, suitably informed thought may always find a way to deny them. The psychologist Steven Pinker has thus introduced into the discussion the remarkable claim that “something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.”

The good news is unrelenting: “On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture.”

“Some of the evidence,” Pinker goes on to say, “has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler.

Here is rather a more accurate assessment of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Anyone persuaded that they represent a “shockingly happy picture” should make the modest imaginative effort to discern the immense weight of human misery conveyed by these statistics:

First World War (1914–18): 15 million

Russian Civil War (1917–22): 9 million

Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime (1924–53): 20 million

Second World War (1937–45): 55 million

Chinese Civil War (1945–49): 2.5 million

People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong’s regime (1949–75): 40 million

Tibet (1950 et seq.): 600,000

Congo Free State (1886–1908): 8 million

Mexico (1910–20): 1 million

Turkish massacres of Armenians (1915–23): 1.5 million

China (1917–28): 800,000

China, Nationalist era (1928–37): 3.1 million

Korean War (1950–53): 2.8 million

North Korea (1948 et seq.): 2 million

Rwanda and Burundi (1959–95): 1.35 million

Second Indochina War (1960–75): 3.5 million

Ethiopia (1962–92): 400,000

Nigeria (1966–70): 1 million

Bangladesh (1971): 1.25 million

Cambodia, Khmer Rouge (1975–78): 1.65 million

Mozambique (1975–92): 1 million

Afghanistan (1979–2001): 1.8 million

Iran–Iraq War (1980–88): 1 million

Sudan (1983 et seq.): 1.9 million

Kinshasa, Congo (1998 et seq.): 3.8 million

Philippines Insurgency (1899–1902): 220,000

Brazil (1900 et seq.): 500,000

Amazonia (1900–1912): 250,000

Portuguese colonies (1900–1925): 325,000

French colonies (1900–1940): 200,000

Japanese War (1904–5): 130,000

German East Africa (1905–7): 175,000

Libya (1911–31): 125,000

Balkan Wars (1912–13): 140,000

Greco–Turkish War (1919–22): 250,000

Spanish Civil War (1936–39): 365,000

Franco Regime (1939–75): 100,000

Abyssinian Conquest (1935–41): 400,000

Finnish War (1939–40): 150,000

Greek Civil War (1943–49): 158,000

Yugoslavia, Tito’s regime (1944–80): 200,000

First Indochina War (1945–54): 400,000

Colombia (1946–58): 200,000

India (1947): 500,000

Romania (1948–89): 150,000

Burma/Myanmar (1948 et seq.): 130,000

Algeria (1954–62): 537,000

Sudan (1955–72): 500,000

Guatemala (1960–96): 200,000

Indonesia (1965–66): 400,000

Uganda, Idi Amin’s regime (1972–79): 300,000

Vietnam, postwar Communist regime (1975 et seq.): 430,000

Angola (1975–2002): 550,000

East Timor, conquest by Indonesia (1975–99): 200,000

Lebanon (1975–90): 150,000

Cambodian Civil War (1978–91): 225,000

Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979–2003): 300,000

Uganda (1979–86): 300,000

Kurdistan (1980s, 1990s): 300,000

Liberia (1989–97): 150,000

Iraq (1990–): 350,000

Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95): 175,000

Somalia (1991 et seq.): 400,000

In considering Pinker’s assessment of the times in which we live, the only conclusion one can profitably draw is that such an excess of stupidity is not often to be found in nature.

AN INSULT TO HUMAN DIGNITY

Does something in the very nature of a secular society make the monstrous possible? At the very least, Hitler and Stalin would seem to offer the prosecution a good deal of space in which to maneuver.

And the defense?

Richard Dawkins accepts Stalin as a frank atheist, and so a liability of the sort that every family admits, but he is at least sympathetic to the thesis that Hitler’s religious sentiments as a Catholic were sincere. Why stop with Hitler? No doubt some members of the SS took communion after an especially arduous day in the field murdering elderly Jewish women, and with vengeful Russian armies approaching Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, who had presided over the Third Reich’s machinery of extermination and had supervised the desecration of churches and synagogues from one end of Europe to the other, confessed to an associate that he was persuaded of the existence of a Higher Power. The death of Franklin Roosevelt inspired Joseph Goebbels to similarly pious sentiments. The deathbed conversion is generally regarded as the mark of desperate insincerity. Throughout their careers, these scum acted as if no power was higher than their own. Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.

That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

One might think that in the dark panorama of wickedness, the Holocaust would above all other events give the scientific atheist pause. Hitler’s Germany was a technologically sophisticated secular society, and Nazism itself, as party propagandists never tired of stressing, was “motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific.” The words are those of the historian Richard Weikart, who in his admirable treatise, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, makes clear what anyone capable of reading the German sources already knew: A sinister current of influence ran from Darwin’s theory of evolution to Hitler’s policy of extermination. A generation of German biologists had read Darwin and concluded that competition between species was reflected in human affairs by competition between races.

These observations find no echo at all in the literature of scientific atheism. Christopher Hitchens is prepared to denounce the Vatican for the ease with which it diplomatically accommodated Hitler, but about Hitler, the Holocaust, or the Nazis themselves he has nothing to say. This is an odd omission for a writer who believes that religion poisons everything, and suggests that his eye for poison in political affairs tends under conditions of polemical stress to wander irresolutely.

When it comes to the Holocaust, Sam Harris, like so many others, approaches anti-Semitism and finds it surprisingly to his taste.

So far as the persecution of the Jewish people goes, Harris is opposed, if only because everyone outside the Arab world is. No great moral effort is required to reach this judgment.

“The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages culminating in the Holocaust,” Harris writes, “makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles on themselves.”

Having rejected the suggestion as an impossibility, Harris at once proceeds to embrace it.

The Jewish people, it would appear, did bring their suffering on themselves for “their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture—that is, for the content of their own sectarian beliefs” (my emphasis). This is nicely in line with opinions advanced recently by the historian David Irving. “The Jews,” he has concluded, “were the authors of their own misfortune.” Recently released from an Austrian prison, where he had been incarcerated on charges of Holocaust denial, David Irving is not generally considered a figure serious men and women are eager to enlist in their cause.

Although Harris is officially committed to assigning the blame for intolerance on the intolerant, there is blame enough left over to assign some to the intoleree as well. “The ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod of intolerance to this day” (italics added). To be a lightning rod for intolerance is a moral defect, the more so when the remedy—get rid of those divisive sectarian beliefs—lies close at hand.

If you find it difficult to imagine that after close study of the Bava Mezia, the chapter of the Talmud that deals with the law of gifts, Hermann Göring decided that it was “the ideology of Judaism” that justified Nazi policies, then you have insufficiently appreciated just how divisive Jewish beliefs must have seemed to stout Göring, a man of well-known sensitivity to the delicacy of ideological deviance.

The contrary case has all the merits of the truth. For reasons that they could not make clear, even to themselves, the men controlling the Third Reich determined that it would be a fine thing to exterminate 9 million European Jews. In the SS and the German army, they found a willing instrument to hand. Much occupied in the closing days of the war with preserving their reputation—their reputation for diabolical wickedness—members of the SS took a perverse satisfaction in assuring one another that whatever they had done, it would not be believed, and if believed, blame would be assigned to their victims. In this, they were correct. More than fifty years after the Holocaust, a great many placid, well-meaning, and well-fed men and women persist in imagining that however monstrous the Holocaust, deep down the Jewish people, if they did not encourage their destruction, invited it nonetheless. “Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.”

No doubt the civilizing insights of modernity appear considerable in Santa Barbara, where Sam Harris lives; but as travel broadens one’s mind, it enlarges one’s perspective, and those civilizing insights of which he writes are apt to seem a good deal less persuasive five thousand miles farther to the east, where modernity expressed itself in cattle cars rumbling from all the ancient civilized cities of Europe in order days later to deposit their famished, suffering victims at German extermination camps.

Some insight. Some modernity. Some civilization.

Having dismissed Jewish beliefs as divisive, Harris is concerned to affirm that they are misguided as well:

“It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.”

On the other hand, I suppose that Harris might speculate on what is equally an interesting matter of evidence, a concept that he values in the abstract and on every occasion ignores in the particular. The Jewish people yet live, and even in Eastern Europe—even in Poland—they have returned to their ancestral homes; but the thousand-year Reich, that lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens, or ground under Russian tank treads, or destroyed by American artillery, or left to wander in its exiled millions across all the violated borders of Central Europe. And if God did not protect his chosen people precisely as Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.

TROUBLINGLY UNTROUBLED

There is a queer quality of logical brittleness to everything that Harris writes, because every argument he advances stops before it has become relevant. The moral concerns that are prompted by biology? The list is already long: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, infanticide, cloning, animal-human hybrids, sexual deviancy. It will get longer, as scientists with no discernible sense of responsibility to human nature come extravagantly to interfere in human life. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris argues that “qualms” about stem-cell research are “obscene,” because they are “morally indefensible.” And they are morally indefensible because they represent nothing more than “faith-based irrationality.”

These remarks are typical; they embody a style. And they invite the obvious response. Beyond the fact that it is religiously based, just what makes the religious objection to stem-cell research irrational?

Those who find these questions troubling—me, for sure—find them troubling because atheists such as Sam Harris remain so resolutely untroubled by them. His convictions are as tranquil as his face is unlined. That bat squeak of warning that so many religious believers hear when they consider stem-cell research, abortion, or euthanasia sounds at a frequency to which he is insensitive.

This is very odd considering that what moral philosophers have called the slippery slope has proven in recent decades to be slippery enough to seem waxed. It is, if anything, more slippery than ever. In 1984, Holland legalized euthanasia. Critics immediately objected that Dutch doctors, having been given the right to kill their elderly patients at their request, would almost at once find reasons to kill patients at their whim. This is precisely what has happened. The Journal of Medical Ethics, in reviewing Dutch hospital practices, reported that 3 percent of Dutch deaths for 1995 were assisted suicides, and that of these, fully one-fourth were involuntary. The doctors simply knocked their patients off, no doubt assuring the family that Grootmoeder would have wanted it that way. As a result, a great many elderly Dutch carry around sanctuary certificates indicating in no uncertain terms that they do not wish their doctors to assist them to die, emerging from their coma, when they are ill, just long enough to tell these murderous pests for heaven’s sake to go away. The authors of the study, Henk Jochensen and John Keown, reported with some understatement that “Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow.”

Euthanasia, as Dr. Peggy Norris observed with some asperity, “cannot be controlled.”

If this is so, why is Harris so sure that stem-cell research can be controlled?

And if it cannot be controlled, just what is irrational about religious objections to social policies that when they reach the bottom of the slippery slope are bound to embody something Dutch, degraded, and disgusting?

How many scientific atheists, I wonder, propose to spend their old age in Holland?

WHAT MAKES MEN GOOD?

Nothing. This is the answer of historical experience and a troubled common sense. It is the answer of Christian theology, and finds its expression in the doctrine of original sin. Having been asked by his biographer, James Boswell, for his opinion of original sin, Dr. Johnson responded in words to which he drew particular attention: “With respect to original sin, the inquiry is not necessary, for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from crimes” (italics added).

One need hardly be a Christian to appreciate the wisdom in these remarks. When Christopher Hitchens asks how much self-respect “must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin,” the only honest answer is that for most of us, self-respect is possible only if the squirming is considerable.

Men are not by nature good. Quite often, quite the contrary. And for this reason they must be restrained, by threats if possible, by force if necessary. “Perhaps,” Richard Dawkins speculates, “I… am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God.”

I am under most circumstances the last person on earth to think Richard Dawkins a Pollyanna, but in this case I defer to his description. Why should people remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God? Do people remain good when unpoliced by the police? If Dawkins believes that they do, he must explain the existence of the criminal law, and if he believes that they do not, then he must explain why moral enforcement is not needed at the place where law enforcement ends.

To scientific atheists, the ancient idea that homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to man—leaves them shaking their heads in poodle-like perplexity. Sam Harris has no anxieties whatsoever about presenting his own views on human morality with the enviable confidence of a man who feels that he has reached the epistemological bottom. “Everything about human experience,” he writes, “suggests that love is more conducive to human happiness than hate is.” It goes without saying, of course, that Harris believes that this is an objective claim about the human mind.

If this is so, it is astonishing with what eagerness men have traditionally fled happiness.

THE STILL SMALL VOICE

If the universe is as scientists say it is, then what scope remains for statements about right or wrong, good or bad? What are we to say about evil and great wickedness? Whatever statements we might make are obviously not about gluons, muons, or curved space and time. “The problem,” the philosopher Simon Blackburn has written, “is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”

Blackburn is, of course, convinced that the chief task at hand in facing this question—his chief task, in any case—“is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order.” It is a strategy that merits admiration for the severity of mind it expresses. It is rather as if an accomplished horseman were to decide that his chief task were to learn to ride without a horse.

If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.

These are familiar questions in philosophy, and if they have been long asked, they have remained long unanswered. David Hume asked in the eighteenth century whether ought could be derived from is, and concluded that it could not: There is a gap between what is and what ought to be. The world of fact and the world of value are disjoint. They have nothing to say to one another. The ensuing chilliness between what is and what ought to be has in the twentieth century grown glacial. The more that science reveals what is, the less it reveals what ought to be. The traditional biblical view—that what ought to be is a matter chiefly of what God demands—thus stands on his existence, the very point challenged by scientific atheism.

But if scientific atheists are disposed to challenge God’s existence—the party line, after all—they are far less willing to reflect on what His dismissal entails. At some time after it had become clear that Nazi Germany would lose the Second World War, and before the war had actually been lost, one of the senior party officers—perhaps it was Himmler—in confronting the very complicated series of treaty obligations that Germany had accepted with respect to its satraps, wondered out loud, “What, after all, compels us to keep our promises?” It is a troubling question, and one that illustrates anew the remarkable genius for moral philosophy that the Nazis enjoyed.

What does?

In many ways, the issues raised by the existence of moral laws suggest a surprising connection between the laws of physics and the laws of morality. In both cases, questions arise very quickly as to the source of such laws and the reason for their truth.

We do not know why the laws of nature are true, even though we can sense that the question hides some sort of profound mystery.

A similar discussion has long been current in philosophy and has its source in Plato’s Euthyphro. There Socrates asks whether what is good is good because the gods have declared it so, or whether the gods have declared it so because it is good.

To the question what makes the laws of moral life true, there are three answers: God, logic, and nothing. Each is inadequate.

If moral laws reflect the will of God, then He might presumably change his mind, and tomorrow issue a new set of commandments encouraging rape, plunder, murder, or the worship of false idols. Many devoutly religious men and women would say that this is his perfect right. He is God, after all. But if tomorrow God were to encourage rape as a very good thing, would rape become a very good thing, or would we conclude, along with Richard Dawkins, that considering his poor life choices, God is a repellent figure and to hell with Him?

If, on the other hand, God chooses the right or the good because it is right or good, then the power of his imperative has its source in the law, and not in his will. “Thou shall not kill,” we may imagine God saying to the ancient Hebrews, “because it is wrong. I am here only to convey the message.”

If this is so, then God must be demoted to what is plainly a constabulary role. Having no hand in creating the moral law, he is occupied in enforcing it. Logic prevails, or if not logic, then something in the laws of right and wrong that enforces their binding sense.

This is an attractive position, one that philosophers would wish to embrace, since it preserves some sense of a moral order without compromising their consensual position that their chief business is to decline an appeal to a supernatural order. And yet it is very difficult to find a way in which to justify the view that moral principles reflect some underlying cosmic necessity. They are no more like the laws of logic or mathematics than the laws of physics. Although some moral principles do appear universal in every human society, both in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia, societies were constructed in which familiar moral principles were inverted or discarded. To the extent that these societies survived, before they were destroyed by war or incompetence, they seemed perfectly able to flourish, their leaders never for a moment troubled by the thought that killing a great many people involved them in some form of intellectual inconsistency.

There remains nothing as a possibility in thought, if only by a process of elimination, and nothing is the preferred possibility in moral thought for the same reason it is the preferred possibility in physical thought: If logic is unavailing, then better nothing than God. This is just what Simon Blackburn means by refusing appeal to a supernatural order.

Nothing in moral philosophy has a familiar face. It is the position expounded both by freshmen in philosophy classes and all the enemies of humanity. We do not believe in any absolute moral truths, my students have always told me, although truths about grading seem a remarkably curious exception. Who could fail to hear the inner voice connecting this form of moral relativism to Himmler’s? He, too, was a great believer in nothing, and nothing is just what so many scientific atheists believe as well.

What else is left?

Like so many other positions, moral relativism has been promoted from the back of the college classroom to its podium. “The West,” the philosopher Richard Rorty writes, “has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition—one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather than the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives.” The words the free consensus, although sonorous, come to nothing more than the declaration that just so long as there is rough agreement within society, what its leaders say goes. This was certainly true of Nazi Germany. Many details of the final solution were kept hidden, but the view that the Jews of Europe were a problem requiring solution was so widespread in German society as to have appeared a commonplace. Die Juden sind unser Unglück, as a thick-fingered German butcher might have said—The Jews are our misfortune. The decision physically to kill them all expressed very nicely “the free consensus” of Germany’s citizens. Had it not, the final solution could never have taken place. It did not reflect the consensus of citizens in Denmark, Italy, or Bulgaria, and in those countries there was no final solution, there was no mass deportation, and there were no extermination camps, and in all three cases, Nazi officials were left muttering in frustration at the fact that curiously enough these were places where people did not sufficiently appreciate the gravity of the Jewish problem.

Curiously enough.

Richard Rorty was to his great credit honest in facing the consequences of his own moral posture. He had no criticism to offer Nazi Germany beyond a personal sense of revulsion.

If moral imperatives are not commanded by God’s will, and if they are not in some sense absolute, then what ought to be is a matter simply of what men and women decide should be. There is no other source of judgment.

What is this if not another way of saying that if God does not exist, everything is permitted?

These conclusions suggest quite justifiably that in failing to discover the source of value in the world at large, we must in the end retreat to a form of moral relativism, the philosophy of the fraternity house or the faculty dining room—similar environments, after all—whence the familiar declaration that just as there are no absolute truths, there are no moral absolutes.

Of these positions, no one believes the first, and no one is prepared to live with the second.

This is precisely the dilemma in which we find ourselves.