The GOD Delusion (15 page)

I
forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should
read all the histories of Christ, as well of those
whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be
Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these
Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and
you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the
reason of those ecclesiastics.

The
gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps
because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly
implausible than those in the four canonical ones. The Gospel of
Thomas, for example, has numerous anecdotes about the child Jesus
abusing his magical powers in the manner of a mischievous fairy,
impishly transforming his playmates into goats, or turning mud into
sparrows, or giving his father a hand with the carpentry by
miraculously lengthening a piece of wood. * It will be said that nobody
believes crude miracle stories such as those in the Gospel of Thomas
anyway. But there is no more and no less reason to believe the four
canonical gospels. All have the status of legends, as factually dubious
as the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

* A.
N. Wilson, in his biography of Jesus, casts doubt on the story that
Joseph was a carpenter at all. The Greek word
tekton
does
indeed mean carpenter, but it was translated from the Aramaic word
naggar,
which could mean craftsman or learned man. This is one of
several constructive mistranslations that bedevil the Bible, the most
famous being the mistranslation of Isaiah's Hebrew for young woman
(almab)
into the Greek for virgin
(partbenos).
An
easy mistake to make (think of the English words 'maid' and 'maiden' to
see how it might have happened), this one translator's slip was to be
wildly inflated and give rise to the whole preposterous legend of
Jesus' mother being a virgin! The only competitor for the title of
champion constructive mistranslation of all time also concerns virgins.
Ibn Warraq has hilariously argued that in the famous promise of
seventy-two virgins to every Muslim martyr, 'virgins' is a
mistranslation of 'white raisins of crystal clarity'. Now, if only that
had been more widely known, how many innocent victims of suicide
missions might have been saved? (Ibn Warraq, 'Virgins? What virgins?',
Free
Inquiry
26: 1, 2006, 45-6.)

Most
of what the four canonical gospels share is derived from a common
source, either Mark's gospel or a lost work of which Mark is the
earliest extant descendant. Nobody knows who the four evangelists were,
but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they
wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history but was simply
rehashed from the Old Testament, because
the gospel-makers were devoutly convinced that the life of Jesus must
fulfil Old Testament prophecies. It is even possible to mount a
serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never
lived at all, as has been done by, among others, Professor G. A. Wells
of the University of London in a number of books, including
Did
Jesus Exist?.

Although
Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general
regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a
reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not
consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity. In the
farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John
Adams, 'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the
Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed
with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.'

Dan
Brown's novel
The Da Vinci Code,
and the film made
from it, are arousing huge controversy in church circles. Christians
are encouraged to boycott the film and picket cinemas that show it. It
is indeed fabricated from start to finish: invented, made-up fiction.
In that respect, it is exactly like the gospels. The only difference
between
The Da Vinci Code
and the gospels is that
the gospels are ancient fiction while
The Da Vinci Code
is
modern fiction.

The
immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian
religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid
of losing their incomes.

—
BERTRAND
RUSSELL

'Newton
was religious. Who are you to set yourself up as superior to Newton,
Galileo, Kepler, etc. etc. etc.? If God was good enough for the likes
of them, just who do you think you are?' Not that it makes much
difference to such an already bad argument, some apologists
even add the name of Darwin, about whom persistent, but demonstrably
false, rumours of a deathbed conversion continually come around like a
bad smell,* ever since they were deliberately started by a certain
'Lady Hope', who spun a touching yarn of Darwin resting against the
pillows in the evening light, leafing through the New Testament and
confessing that evolution was all wrong. In this section I shall
concentrate mostly on scientists, because - for reasons that are
perhaps not too hard to imagine -those who trot out the names of
admired individuals as religious exemplars very commonly choose
scientists.

*
Even I have been honoured by prophecies of deathbed conversion. Indeed,
they recur with monotonous regularity (see e.g. Steer 2003), each
repetition trailing dewy fresh clouds of illusion that it is witty, and
the first. I should probably take the precaution of installing a
tape-recorder to protect my posthumous reputation. Lalla Ward adds,
'Why mess around with deathbeds? If you're going to sell out, do it in
good time to win the Templeton Prize and blame it on senility.'

Newton
did indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until -
significantly I think - the nineteenth century, when there was less
social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess
religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it. There have
been exceptions, of course, in both directions. Even before Darwin, not
everybody was a believer, as James Haught shows in his
2000
Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt.
And
some distinguished scientists went on believing after Darwin. We have
no reason to doubt Michael Faraday's sincerity as a Christian even
after the time when he must have known of Darwin's work. He was a
member of the Sandemanian sect, which believed (past tense because they
are now virtually extinct) in a literal interpretation of the Bible,
ritually washed the feet of newly inducted members and drew lots to
determine God's will. Faraday became an Elder in 1860, the year after
The
Origin of Species
was published, and he died a Sandemanian
in 1867. The experimentalist Faraday's theorist counterpart, James
Clerk Maxwell, was an equally devout Christian. So was that other
pillar of nineteenth-century British physics, William Thomson, Lord
Kelvin, who tried to demonstrate that evolution was ruled out for lack
of time. That great thermodynamicist's erroneous datings assumed that
the sun was some kind of fire, burning fuel which would have to run out
in tens of millions of years, not thousands of millions. Kelvin
obviously could not be expected to know about nuclear
energy. Pleasingly, at the British Association meeting of 1903, it fell
to Sir George Darwin, Charles's second son, to vindicate his
un-knighted father by invoking the Curies' discovery of radium, and
confound the earlier estimate of the still living Lord Kelvin.

Great
scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the
twentieth century, but they are not particularly rare. I suspect that
most of the more recent ones are religious only in the Einsteinian
sense which, I argued in Chapter 1, is a misuse of the word.
Nevertheless, there are some genuine specimens of good scientists who
are sincerely religious in the full, traditional sense. Among
contemporary British scientists, the same three names crop up with the
likeable familiarity of senior partners in a firm of Dickensian
lawyers: Peacocke, Stannard and Polkinghorne. All three have either won
the Templeton Prize or are on the Templeton Board of Trustees. After
amicable discussions with all of them, both in public and in private, I
remain baffled, not so much by their belief in a cosmic lawgiver of
some kind, as by their belief in the details of the Christian religion:
resurrection, forgiveness of sins and all.

There
are some corresponding examples in the United States, for example
Francis Collins, administrative head of the American branch of the
official Human Genome Project.* But, as in Britain, they stand out for
their rarity and are a subject of amused bafflement to their peers in
the academic community. In 1996, in the gardens of his old college at
Cambridge, Clare, I interviewed my friend Jim Watson, founding genius
of the Human Genome Project, for a BBC television documentary that I
was making on Gregor Mendel, founding genius of genetics itself.
Mendel, of course, was a religious man, an Augustinian monk; but that
was in the nineteenth century, when becoming a monk was the easiest way
for the young Mendel to pursue his science. For him, it was the
equivalent of a research grant. I asked Watson whether he knew many
religious scientists today. He replied: 'Virtually none. Occasionally I
meet them, and I'm a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I
can't believe anyone accepts truth by revelation.'

*
Not to be confused with the unofficial human genome project, led by
that brilliant (and non-religious) 'buccaneer' of science, Craig Venter.

Francis
Crick, Watson's co-founder of the whole molecular genetics revolution,
resigned his fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge,
because of the college's decision to build a chapel (at the behest of a
benefactor). In my interview with Watson at Clare, I conscientiously
put it to him that, unlike him and Crick, some people see no conflict
between science and religion, because they claim science is about how
things work and religion is about what it is all for. Watson retorted:
'Well I don't think we're
for
anything. We're just
products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty
bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating
having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.

The
efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists
who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the
unmistakably hollow sound of bottoms of barrels being scraped. The only
website I could find that claimed to list 'Nobel Prize-winning
Scientific Christians' came up with six, out of a total of several
hundred scientific Nobelists. Of these six, it turned out that four
were not Nobel Prize-winners at all; and at least one, to my certain
knowledge, is a non-believer who attends church for purely social
reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi 'found that
among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in
literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared
to the populations they came from'.
⁵²

A
study in the leading journal
Nature
by Larson and
Witham in 1998 showed that of those American scientists considered
eminent enough by their peers to have been elected to the National
Academy of Sciences (equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society
in Britain) only about 7 per cent believe in a personal God.
⁵³
This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact
opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of whom
more than 90 per cent are believers in some sort of supernatural being.
The figure for less eminent scientists, not elected to the National
Academy, is intermediate. As with the more distinguished sample,
religious believers are in a minority, but a less dramatic minority of
about 40 per cent. It is completely as I would expect that American
scientists are less religious than the American public generally, and
that the most distinguished scientists are the least religious of all.
What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of
the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.
⁵⁴

It
is faintly amusing that the leading creationist website, 'Answers in
Genesis', cites the Larson and Witham study, not in evidence that there
might be something wrong with religion, but as a weapon in their
internal battle against those rival religious apologists who claim that
evolution is compatible with religion. Under the headline 'National
Academy of Science is Godless to the Core',
⁵⁵
'Answers in Genesis' is pleased to quote the concluding paragraph of
Larson and Witham's letter to the editor of
Nature:

As
we compiled our findings, the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] issued
a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an
ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some
conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures
readers, 'Whether God exists or not is a question about which science
is neutral.' NAS president Bruce Alberts said: 'There are many very
outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people,
people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.' Our survey
suggests otherwise.

Alberts,
one feels, embraced 'NOMA' for the reasons I discussed in 'The Neville
Chamberlain school of evolutionists' (see Chapter 2). 'Answers in
Genesis' has a very different agenda.

The
equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences in Britain (and the
Commonwealth, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India,
Pakistan, anglophone Africa, etc.) is the Royal Society. As this book
goes to press, my colleagues R. Elisabeth Cornwell and Michael Stirrat
are writing up their comparable, but more thorough, research on the
religious opinions of the Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS). The
authors' conclusions will be published in full later, but they have
kindly allowed me to quote preliminary results here. They used a
standard technique for scaling opinion, the Likert-type seven-point
scale. All 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society who possess an email
address (the great majority) were polled, and about 23 per cent
responded (a good figure for this kind of study). They were offered
various propositions, for example: 'I believe in a personal God, that
is one who takes an interest in individuals,
hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions,
and passes judgement.' For each such proposition, they were invited to
choose a number from 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement).
It is a little hard to compare the results directly with the Larson and
Witham study, because Larson and Witham offered their academicians only
a three-point scale, not a seven-point scale, but the overall trend is
the same. The overwhelming majority of FRS, like the overwhelming
majority of US Academicians, are atheists. Only 3.3 per cent of the
Fellows agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists
(i.e. chose 7 on the scale), while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed
(i.e. chose 1 on the scale). If you define 'believers' as those who
chose 6 or 7, and if you define 'unbelievers' as those who chose 1 or
2, there were a massive 213 unbelievers and a mere 12 believers. Like
Larson and Witham, and as also noted by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle,
Cornwell and Stirrat found a small but significant tendency for
biological scientists to be even more atheistic than physical
scientists. For the details, and all the rest of their very interesting
conclusions, please refer to their own paper when it is published.
⁵⁶