The GOD Delusion (11 page)

fails
to grasp the real nature of the conflict. It's not just about evolution
versus creationism. To scientists like Dawkins and Wilson [E. O.
Wilson, the celebrated Harvard biologist], the
real
war
is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of
rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.
Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the greater enemy:
religion. While religion can exist without creationism, creationism
cannot exist without religion.
⁴⁰

I do
have one thing in common with the creationists. Like me, but
unlike the 'Chamberlain school', they will have no truck with NOMA and
its separate magisteria. Far from respecting the separateness of
science's turf, creationists like nothing better than to trample their
dirty hobnails all over it. And they fight dirty, too. Lawyers for
creationists, in court cases around the American boondocks, seek out
evolutionists who are openly atheists. I know - to my chagrin - that my
name has been used in this way. It is an effective tactic because
juries selected at random are likely to include individuals brought up
to believe that atheists are demons incarnate, on a par with pedophiles
or 'terrorists' (today's equivalent of Salem's witches and McCarthy's
Commies). Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could
instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: 'Has your knowledge of
evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?' I
would have to answer yes and, at one stroke, I would have lost the
jury. By contrast, the judicially correct answer from the secularist
side would be: 'My religious beliefs, or lack of them, are a private
matter, neither the business of this court nor connected in any way
with my science.' I couldn't honestly say this, for reasons I shall
explain in Chapter 4.

The
Guardian
journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote an article entitled 'Why
the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins'.
⁴¹
There's no indication that she consulted anybody except Michael Ruse,
and her article might as well have been ghostwritten by him.* Dan
Dennett replied, aptly quoting Uncle Remus:

I
find it amusing that two Brits - Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse -
have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American
folklore (Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard
Dawkins, March 27). When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads
with him: 'Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don't throw
me in that awful briar patch!' -where he ends up safe and sound after
the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski
writes
tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on
behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it! 'Oh golly,
Brer Fox, your forthright assertion - that evolutionary biology
disproves the idea of a creator God - jeopardises the teaching of
biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the
separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal
physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible . . .
⁴²

*
The same could be said of an article, 'When cosmologies collide', in
the
New York Times,
22 Jan. 2006, by the respected
(and usually much better briefed) journalist Judith Shulevitz. General
Montgomery's First Rule of War was 'Don't march on Moscow.' Perhaps
there should be a First Rule of Science Journalism: 'Interview at least
one person other than Michael Ruse.'

I am
not suggesting that my colleagues of the appeasement lobby are
necessarily dishonest. They may sincerely believe in NOMA, although I
can't help wondering how thoroughly they've thought it through and how
they reconcile the internal conflicts in their minds. There is no need
to pursue the matter for the moment, but anyone seeking to understand
the published statements of scientists on religious matters would do
well not to forget the political context: the surreal culture wars now
rending America. NOMA-style appeasement will surface again in a later
chapter. Here, I return to agnosticism and the possibility of chipping
away at our ignorance and measurably reducing our uncertainty about the
existence or non-existence of God.

Suppose
Bertrand Russell's parable had concerned not a teapot in outer space
but
life
in outer space - the subject of Sagan's
memorable refusal to think with his gut. Once again we cannot disprove
it, and the only strictly rational stance is agnosticism. But the
hypothesis is no longer frivolous. We don't immediately scent extreme
improbability. We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete
evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would
decrease our uncertainty. We'd be outraged if our
government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of
searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for
spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up
signals from intelligent aliens.

I
praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But
one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need
to know in order to estimate the probability. This might start from
nothing more than a listing of our points of ignorance, as in the
famous Drake Equation which, in Paul Davies's phrase, collects
probabilities. It states that to estimate the number of independently
evolved civilizations in the universe you must multiply seven terms
together. The seven include the number of stars, the number of
Earth-like planets per star, and the probability of this, that and the
other which I need not list because the only point I am making is that
they are all unknown, or estimated with enormous margins of error. When
so many terms that are either completely or almost completely unknown
are multiplied up, the product - the estimated number of alien
civilizations - has such colossal error bars that agnosticism seems a
very reasonable, if not the only credible stance.

Some
of the terms in the Drake Equation are already less unknown than when
he first wrote it down in 1961. At that time, our solar system of
planets orbiting a central star was the only one known, together with
the local analogies provided by Jupiter's and Saturn's satellite
systems. Our best estimate of the number of orbiting systems in the
universe was based on theoretical models, coupled with the more
informal 'principle of mediocrity': the feeling (born of uncomfortable
history lessons from Copernicus, Hubble and others) that there should
be nothing particularly unusual about the place where we happen to
live. Unfortunately, the principle of mediocrity is in its turn
emasculated by the 'anthropic' principle (see Chapter 4): if our solar
system really were the only one in the universe, this is precisely
where we, as beings who think about such matters, would have to be
living. The very fact of our existence could retrospectively determine
that we live in an extremely unmediocre place.

But
today's estimates of the ubiquity of solar systems are no longer
based on the principle of mediocrity; they are informed by direct
evidence. The spectroscope, nemesis of Comte's positivism, strikes
again. Our telescopes are scarcely powerful enough to see planets
around other stars directly. But the position of a star is perturbed by
the gravitational pull of its planets as they whirl around it, and
spectroscopes can pick up the Doppler shifts in the star's spectrum, at
least in cases where the perturbing planet is large. Mostly using this
method, at the time of writing we now know of 170 extra-solar planets
orbiting 147 stars,
⁴⁴
but the figure will
certainly have increased by the time you read this book. So far, they
are bulky 'Jupiters', because only Jupiters are large enough to perturb
their stars into the zone of detectability of present-day spectroscopes.

We
have at least quantitatively improved our estimate of one previously
shrouded term of the Drake Equation. This permits a significant, if
still moderate, easing of our agnosticism about the final value yielded
by the equation. We must still be agnostic about life on other worlds -
but a little bit less agnostic, because we are just that bit less
ignorant. Science can chip away at agnosticism, in a way that Huxley
bent over backwards to deny for the special case of God. I am arguing
that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of Huxley, Gould and many
others, the God question is not in principle and forever outside the
remit of science. As with the nature of the stars,
contra
Comte,
and as with the likelihood of life in orbit around them, science can
make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism.

My
definition of the God Hypothesis included the words 'superhuman' and
'supernatural'. To clarify the difference, imagine that a SETI radio
telescope actually did pick up a signal from outer space which showed,
unequivocally, that we are not alone. It is a non-trivial question, by
the way, what kind of signal would convince us of its intelligent
origin. A good approach is to turn the question around. What should we
intelligently do in order to advertise our presence to extraterrestrial
listeners? Rhythmic pulses wouldn't do it. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the
radio astronomer who first discovered the pulsar in 1967, was moved by
the precision of its 1.33-second periodicity to name it, tongue in
cheek, the LGM (Little Green Men) signal. She later found a second
pulsar, elsewhere in the sky and
of different periodicity, which pretty much disposed of the LGM
hypothesis. Metronomic rhythms can be generated by many non-intelligent
phenomena, from swaying branches to dripping water, from time lags in
self-regulating feedback loops to spinning and orbiting celestial
bodies. More than a thousand pulsars have now been found in our galaxy,
and it is generally accepted that each one is a spinning neutron star
emitting radio energy that sweeps around like a lighthouse beam. It is
amazing to think of a star rotating on a timescale of seconds (imagine
if each of our days lasted 1.33 seconds instead of 24 hours), but just
about everything we know of neutron stars is amazing. The point is that
the pulsar phenomenon is now understood as a product of simple physics,
not intelligence.

Nothing
simply rhythmic, then, would announce our intelligent presence to the
waiting universe. Prime numbers are often mentioned as the recipe of
choice, since it is difficult to think of a purely physical process
that could generate them. Whether by detecting prime numbers or by some
other means, imagine that SETI does come up with unequivocal evidence
of extraterrestrial intelligence, followed, perhaps, by a massive
transmission of knowledge and wisdom, along the science-fiction lines
of Fred Hoyle's
A for Andromeda
or Carl Sagan's
Contact.
How should we respond? A pardonable reaction would be
something akin to worship, for any civilization capable of broadcasting
a signal over such an immense distance is likely to be greatly superior
to ours. Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at
the time of transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us
to calculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time the
message reaches us (unless they have driven themselves extinct, which
is not unlikely).

Whether
we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien
civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in
ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their
technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would
seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century.
Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a
hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third
Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic' The miracles wrought by our
technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than
the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The
aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as
missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour
to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns,
telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.

In
what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not
be
gods?
In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very
important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial
difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in
their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex
enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No
matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't
start that way. Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in
Counterfeit
World,
have even suggested (and I cannot think how to
disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some
vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have
to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of
their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They
probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of
Darwinian evolution: some sort of cumulatively ratcheting 'crane' as
opposed to 'skyhook', to use Daniel Dennett's terminology.
⁴⁵
Skyhooks - including all gods - are magic spells. They do
no
bona fide
explanatory work and demand more
explanation than they provide. Cranes are explanatory devices that
actually do explain. Natural selection is the champion crane of all
time. It has lifted life from primeval simplicity to the dizzy heights
of complexity, beauty and apparent design that dazzle us today. This
will be a dominant theme of Chapter 4, 'Why there almost certainly is
no God'. But first, before proceeding with my main reason for actively
disbelieving in God's existence, I have a responsibility to dispose of
the positive arguments for belief that have been offered through
history.