The GOD Delusion (2 page)

This
must be even truer today and, indeed, I present evidence for it in
Chapter 3. The reason so many people don't notice atheists is that many
of us are reluctant to 'come out'. My dream is that this book may help
people to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the
more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them.
There may be a critical mass for the initiation of a chain reaction.

American
polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews,
and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews,
however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political
lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who
wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not
organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing
atheists has been compared to herding
cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to
authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass
of those willing to 'come out', thereby encouraging others to do so.
Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot
of noise and they cannot be ignored.

The
word 'delusion' in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who
regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about. Three of them
wrote to me to propose a special technical term for religious delusion:
'relusion'.
²
Maybe it'll catch on. But for now I
am going to stick with 'delusion', and I need to justify my use of it.
The
Penguin English Dictionary
defines a delusion
as 'a false belief or impression'. Surprisingly, the illustrative
quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: 'Darwinism
is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its
destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.' Can that be the
same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against
Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we
might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated
as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to
me in numerous creationist quotations of my works, deliberately and
misleadingly taken out of context. Whatever Johnson's own meaning, his
sentence as it stands is one that I would be happy to endorse. The
dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as 'a
persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory
evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder'. The first
part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom
of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig,
author of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
when
he said, 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called
insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called
Religion.'

If
this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be
atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course,
dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance
built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took
centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more
effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening
a book like this, which is surely a
work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out
there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or
for other reasons didn't 'take', or whose native intelligence is strong
enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little
encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At very
least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, 'I
didn't know I could.'

For
help in the preparation of this book, I am grateful to many friends and
colleagues. I cannot mention them all, but they include my literary
agent John Brockman, and my editors, Sally Gaminara (for Transworld)
and Eamon Dolan (for Houghton Mifflin), both of whom read the book with
sensitivity and intelligent understanding, and gave me a helpful
mixture of criticism and advice. Their whole-hearted and enthusiastic
belief in the book was very encouraging to me. Gillian Somerscales has
been an exemplary copy editor, as constructive with her suggestions as
she was meticulous with her corrections. Others who criticized various
drafts, and to whom I am very grateful, are Jerry Coyne, J. Anderson
Thomson, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, Ursula Goodenough, Latha Menon and
especially Karen Owens, critic
extraordinaire,
whose
acquaintance with the stitching and unstitching of every draft of the
book has been almost as detailed as my own.

The
book owes something (and vice versa) to the two-part television
documentary
Root of All Evil?,
which I presented
on British television (Channel Four) in January 2006. I am grateful to
all who were involved in the production, including Deborah Kidd,
Russell Barnes, Tim Cragg, Adam Prescod, Alan Clements and Hamish
Mykura. For permission to use quotations from the documentary I thank
IWC Media and Channel Four.
Root of All Evil?
achieved
excellent ratings in Britain, and it has also been taken by the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It remains to be seen whether any
US television channel will dare to show it.*

*Bootleg
copies are being downloaded from numerous US websites. Negotiations are
under way for legitimate DVDs to be marketed. At the time of going to
press these negotiations are incomplete - updates will be posted at
www.richarddawkins.net.

This
book has been developing in my mind for some years. During that time,
some of the ideas inevitably found their way into lectures, for example
my Tanner Lectures at Harvard, and articles in
newspapers and magazines. Readers of my regular column in
Free
Inquiry,
especially, may find certain passages familiar. I
am grateful to Tom Flynn, the Editor of that admirable magazine, for
the stimulus he gave me when he commissioned me to become a regular
columnist. After a temporary hiatus during the finishing of the book, I
hope now to resume my column, and will no doubt use it to respond to
the aftermath of the book.

For
a variety of reasons I am grateful to Dan Dennett, Marc Hauser, Michael
Stirrat, Sam Harris, Helen Fisher, Margaret Downey, Ibn Warraq,
Hermione Lee, Julia Sweeney, Dan Barker, Josephine Welsh, Ian Baird and
especially George Scales. Nowadays, a book such as this is not complete
until it becomes the nucleus of a living website, a forum for
supplementary materials, reactions, discussions, questions and answers
- who knows what the future may bring? I hope that
www.richarddawkins.net/, the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation
for Reason and Science, will come to fill that role, and I am extremely
grateful to Josh Timonen for the artistry, professionalism and sheer
hard work that he is putting into it.

Above
all, I thank my wife Lalla Ward, who has coaxed me through all my
hesitations and self-doubts, not just with moral support and witty
suggestions for improvement, but by reading the entire book aloud to
me, at two different stages in its development, so I could apprehend
very directly how it might seem to a reader other than myself. I
recommend the technique to other authors, but I must warn that for best
results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear
sensitively tuned to the music of language.

1

A
DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER

I
don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the
structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to
appreciate it.

—
ALBERT EINSTEIN

The
boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly
found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled
stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants
and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the
time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring
up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the
turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the
rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in
religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was
ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a
teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen
like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down
my throat.*

*
Our sport during lessons was to sidetrack him away from scripture and
towards stirring tales of Fighter Command and the Few. He had done war
service in the RAF and it was with familiarity, and something of the
affection that I still retain for the Church of England (at least by
comparison with the competition), that I later read John Betjeman's
poem:

Our
padre is an old sky pilot,

Severely
now they've clipped his wings,

But
still the flagstaff in the Rect'ry garden

Points
to Higher Things . . .

In
another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars,
dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard
music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and
trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have
led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy
question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the
universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no
connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my
chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of
The
Origin of Species
- the famous 'entangled bank' passage,
'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would
certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might
have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting
around us':

Thus,
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the
higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of
life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a
few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.

Carl
Sagan, in
Pale Blue Dot,
wrote:

How
is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger
than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead
they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay
that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of
the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth
reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

All
Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that
religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same
aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply
religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her
professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's
positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic
about nature and the universe. To me, that
is
religion!'
But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. The Nobel
Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as
well as anybody, in
Dreams of a Final
Theory:

Some
people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is
inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One
hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature'
or 'God is the universe.'
Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning
we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God
in a lump of coal.

Weinberg
is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely
useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood
it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to
worship'.

Much
unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be
called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein
sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic
scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists
eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.
The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking's
A
Brief History of Time,
'For then we should know the mind of
God', is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe,
mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell
biologist Ursula Goodenough, in
The Sacred Depths of Nature,
sounds
more religious than Hawking or Einstein. She loves churches, mosques
and temples, and numerous passages in her book fairly beg to be taken
out of context and used as ammunition for supernatural religion. She
goes so far as to call herself a 'Religious Naturalist'. Yet a careful
reading of her book shows that she is really as staunch an atheist as I
am.

'Naturalist'
is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my childhood hero, Hugh
Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more than a touch of
the 'philosopher' naturalist of HMS
Beagle
about
him). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what
it still means for most of us today: a student of the natural world.
Naturalists in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been
clergymen. Darwin himself was destined for the Church as a young man,
hoping that the leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to
pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use 'naturalist' in a
very different sense, as the opposite of
supernaturalist.
Julian
Baggini explains in
Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
the
meaning of an atheist's commitment to naturalism: 'What most atheists
do believe is that although there is only
one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff
come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values - in short the full gamut of
phenomena that gives richness to human life.'