Still, people may want to return to the a priori arguments as a safety net of sorts after they see what can be made of the empirical argument, the Argument from Design, including its recent variants invoking the Anthropic Principle. The Argument from Design is surely the most intuitive and popular argument, and has been for centuries. It just stands to reason (doesnât it?) that all the wonders of the living world have to have been arranged by some Intelligent Designer? It couldnât all just be an accident, could it? And even if evolution by natural selection explains the design of living things, doesnât the âfine tuningâ of the laws of physics to make all this evolution possible require a Tuner? (The Anthropic Principle Argument.) No, it doesnât stand to reason, and, yes, it could all just be the result of âaccidentsâ exploited by the relentless regularities of nature, and, no, the fine tuning of the laws of physics can be explained without postulating an Intelligent Tuner. I have covered these arguments quite extensively in Darwinâs Dangerous Idea (especially chapters 1 and 7), 17 so I will repeat not my counterarguments but only my summary of the retreat that Darwinâs dangerous idea has propelled during the last century and a half.
We began with a somewhat childish vision of an anthropomorphic, Handicrafter God, and recognized that this idea, taken literally, was well on the road to extinction. When we looked through Darwinâs eyes at the actual processes of design of which we and all the wonders of nature are the products to date, we found that Paley was right to see these effects as the result of a lot of design work, but we found a non-miraculous account of it: a massively parallel, and hence prodigiously wasteful, process of mindless, algorithmic design-trying, in which, however, the minimal increments of design have been thriftily husbanded, copied and re-used over billions of years. The wonderful particularity or individuality of the creation was due, not to Shakespearean inventive genius, but to the incessant contributions of chance, a growing sequence of what Crick (1968) has called âfrozen accidents.â
That vision of the creative process still apparently left a role for God as Lawgiver, but this gave way in turn to the Newtonian role of Lawfinder, which also evaporated, as we have recently seen, leaving behind no Intelligent Agency in the process at all. What is left is what the process, shuffling through eternity, mindlessly finds (when it finds anything): a timeless Platonic possibility of order. That is, indeed, a thing of beauty, as mathematicians are forever exclaiming, but it is not itself something intelligent but, wonder of wonders, something intelligible. Being abstract and outside of time, it is nothing with an initiation or origin in need of explanation.18 What does need its origin explained is the concrete Universe itself, and as Humeâs Philo long ago asked: Why not stop at the material world? It, we have seen, does perform a version of the ultimate bootstrapping trick; it creates itself ex nihilo, or at any rate out of something that is well-nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all. Unlike the puzzlingly mysterious, timeless self-creation of God, this self-creation is a non-miraculous stunt that has left lots of traces. And being not just concrete but the product of an exquisitely particular historical process, it is a creation of utter uniquenessâencompassing and dwarfing all the novels and paintings and symphonies of all the artistsâoccupying a position in the hyperspace of possibilities that differs from all others.
Benedict Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, identified God and Nature, arguing that scientific research was the true path of theology. For this heresy he was persecuted. There is a troubling (or to some, enticing) Janus-faced quality to Spinozaâs heretical vision of Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature): in proposing his scientific simplification, was he personifying Nature or depersonalizing God? Darwinâs more generative vision provides the structure in which we can see the intelligence of Mother Nature (or is it merely apparent intelligence?) as a non-miraculous and non-mysteriousâand hence all the more wonderfulâfeature of this self-creating thing. [Dennett, 1995b, pp. 184â85]
Should Spinoza be counted as an atheist or a pantheist? He saw the glory of nature and then saw a way of eliminating the middleman! As I said at the end of my earlier book:
The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselmâs âBeing greater than which nothing can be conceivedâ it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. The world is sacred. [1995b, p. 520]
Does that make me an atheist? Certainly, in the obvious sense. If what you hold sacred is not any kind of Person you could pray to, or consider to be an appropriate recipient of gratitude (or anger, when a loved one is senselessly killed), youâre an atheist in my book. If, for reasons of loyalty to tradition, diplomacy, or self-protective camouflage (very important today, especially for politicians), you want to deny what you are, thatâs your business, but donât kid yourself. Maybe in the future, if more of us brights will just come forward and calmly announce that of course we no longer believe in any of those Gods, it will be possible to elect an atheist to some office higher than senator. We now have Jewish and female senators and homosexual members of Congress, so the future looks bright.
So much for the belief in God. What about belief in belief in God? We still havenât inquired about all the grounds for this belief in belief. Isnât it true? That is, isnât it true that, whether or not God exists, religious belief is at least as important as the belief in democracy, in the rule of law, in free will? The very widespread (but far from universal) opinion is that religion is the bulwark of morality and meaning. Without religion we would fall into anarchy and chaos, in a world in which âanything goes.â
The last five chapters have exposed a variety of familiar tricks that have been rediscovered over and over and that tend to have the effect of protecting religious practices from extinction or erosion beyond recognition. If the grim side of this is the design of kleptocracies and other manifestly evil organizations that can prey on innocent people, the happy side is the design of humane and useful institutions that do not just deserve the loyalty of people but can effectively secure it. We still have not seriously addressed the question of whether religionsâsome religions, one religion, any religionâare social phenomena that do more good than harm. Now that we can see through some of this protective gauze, we are in position to address that question.
Chapter 8 The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism has led the devout to âsaveâ their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves. The result is that even the professors donât really know what they are professing. This makes the goal of either proving or disproving Godâs existence a quixotic questâbut also for that very reason not very important.
Chapter 9 The important question is whether religions deserve the continued protection of their adherents. Many people love their religions more than anything else in life. Do their religions deserve this adoration?
PART III RELIGION TODAY
CHAPTER NINE Toward a Buyerâs Guide to Religions
1 For the love of God
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time of tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm, deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.
âWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Most people believe in the belief in God, even those who canât manage to believe in God
(all the time). Why do they believe this? An obvious answer is that they want to be good. That is, they want to lead good and meaningful lives and they want this for others as well, and they can see no better way to do this than to put themselves in the service of God. This answer may be right, and they may be right, but before we can consider this answer with the care it deserves, we need to address a challenge. Some peopleâand you may be one of themâfind this whole setting of the issue objectionable. I will let Professor Faith try to give a fair expression of this point of view:
You insist on treating the question of religion as if it were like whether or not to switch jobs, or buy a car, or have an operationâa matter that ought to be settled by calmly and objectively considering the pros and cons, and then drawing a conclusion about the best course, âall things considered.â Thatâs not how we see it at all. It isnât that belief in the belief in God is our settled conviction, a matter of the best overall life policy we have been able to discover. It goes way beyond that! In the previous chapter you talked about âfake it until you make it,â but you never got around to describing the wonderful state of those who do âmake it,â whose honest attempts to imbue themselves with the spirit of God succeed in a burst of glory. Those of us who know the experience know that it is unlike any other experience, a joy warmer than the joy of motherhood, deeper than the joy of victory in sports, more ecstatic than the joys of playing or singing great music. When we see the light, it isnât just an âAha!â experience, like figuring out a puzzle or suddenly seeing the hidden figure in a drawing, or getting a joke, or being persuaded by an argument. It isnât arriving at a belief at all. We know, then, that God is the greatest thing that could ever enter our lives. It isnât like accepting a conclusion; itâs like falling in love.
Yes, I hear you. I deliberately gave this chapter a provocative title to energize this concern and put this objection in the limelight. I recognize the state youâre describing, and I would offer a friendly amendment: it isnât just like falling in love; it is a kind of falling in love. The discomfort or even outrage you feel when confronted by my calm invitation to consider the pros and cons of your religion is the same reaction one feels when asked for a candid evaluation of oneâs true love: âI donât just like my darling because, after due consideration, I believe all her wonderful qualities far outweigh her few faults. I know that she is the one for me, and I will always love her with all my heart and soul.â New England farmers are reputedly as tightfisted with their emotions as they are with their wallets and their words. Here is an old Maine joke:
âHowâs your wife, Jeb?â
âCompared to what?â
It would appear that Jeb is no longer in love with his wife. And if you are so much as willing to think about comparing your religion with others, or with having no religion at all, you must not be in love with your religion. This is a very personal love (not like the love of jazz, or baseball, or mountain scenery), but no single personânot the priest or the rabbi or the imamâor even any group of peopleâthe congregation of the faithful, sayâis the beloved. Oneâs undying loyalty is not loyalty to them, singly or together, but to the system of ideas that unite them. Of course, people sometimes do fall in loveâromantic loveâwith their priest or with a fellow parishioner, and this can be hard for them to distinguish from love of their religion, but Iâm not suggesting that this is the nature of the love most God-loving people experience. I am suggesting, however, that their unquestioning loyalty, their unwillingness even to consider the virtues versus the vices, is a type of love, and more like romantic love than brotherly love or intellectual love.
It is surely no accident that the language of romantic love and the language of religious devotion are all but indistinguishable, and it is similarly no accident that almost all religions (with a few austere exceptions, such as the Puritans and the Shakers and the Taliban) have given their lovers a cornucopia of beauty to ravish their senses: soaring architecture, with decoration applied to every surface, music, candles, and incense. The inventory of the worldâs great works of art is crowned by religious masterpieces. Thanks to Islam, we have the Alhambra, and the exquisite mosques of Isfahan and Istanbul. Thanks to Christianity, we have the Hagia Sofia and the cathedrals of Europe. You donât have to be a believer to be entranced by Buddhist, Hindu, and Shinto temples of surreal intricacy and sublime proportion. Bachâs Saint Matthew Passion and Handelâs Messiah and those miniature marvels the Christmas carols are among the most rapturous love songs ever composed, and the stories they set to music are themselves compositions of extraordinary emotional power. The film director George Stevens may not have been exaggerating when he called his 1965 movie on the life of Jesus The Greatest Story Ever Told. The competition is fierce, what with the Odyssey, the Iliad, Robin Hood, Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, The Diary of Anne Frank, and all the other great narratives of the worldâs literature, but for joy, danger, pathos, triumph, tragedy, heroes, and villains (but no comic relief), it is hard to beat. And of course the story has a moral. We love stories, and Elie Wiesel uses a story to explain this:
When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Maggid of Mezeritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: âMaster of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer,â and again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say, âI do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient.â It was sufficient, and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: âI am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.â And it was sufficient. For God made man because He loves stories. [1966, preface (not Wiesel, 1972, as many Web sites have it)]
We have been given a lot to love, and not just spectacularly beautiful art and stories and ceremonies. The daily actions of religious people have accomplished uncounted good deeds throughout history, alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick. Religions have brought the comfort of belonging and companionship to many who would otherwise have passed through this life all alone, without glory or adventure. They have not just provided first aid, in effect, for people in difficulties; they have provided the means for changing the world in ways that remove those difficulties. As Alan Wolfe says, âReligion can lead people out of cycles of poverty and dependency just as it led Moses out of Egyptâ (2003, p. 139). There is much for religion lovers to be proud of in their traditions, and much for all of us to be grateful for.
The fact that so many people love their religions as much as, or more than, anything else in their lives is a weighty fact indeed. I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love. Would a world with peace, but without love, be a better world? Not if the peace was achieved by drugging the love (and hate) out of us, or by suppression. Would a world with justice and freedom, but without love, be a better world? Not if it was achieved by somehow turning us all into loveless law-abiders with none of the yearnings or envies or hatreds that are the wellsprings of injustice and subjugation. It is hard to consider such hypotheticals, and I doubt if we should trust our first intuitions about
them, but, for what it is worth, I surmise that we almost all want a world in which love, justice, freedom, and peace are all present, as much as possible, but if we had to give up one of these, it wouldnâtâand shouldnâtâbe love. But, sad to say, even if it is true that nothing could matter more than love, it wouldnât follow from this that we donât have reason to question the things that we, and others, love. Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
Suppose I love music more than life itself. Other things being equal, then, I should be free to live my life in pursuit of the exaltation of music, the thing I love most, with all my heart and soul. But that still doesnât give me the right to force my children to practice their instruments night and day, or the right to impose musical education on everybody in the country of which I am the dictator, or to threaten the lives of those who have no love of music. If my love of music is so great that I am simply unable to consider its implications objectively, then this is an unfortunate disability, and others may with good reason assert the right to act as my surrogate, conscientiously deciding what is best for all, since my love has driven me mad, and I cannot rationally participate in the assessment of my own behavior and its consequences. There may well be nothing more wonderful than love, but love is not enough. A world in which baseball fansâ love of their teams led them so to hate the other teams and their fans that murderous war accompanied the playoffs would be a world in which a particular love, pure and blameless in itself, led to immoral and intolerable consequences.
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