Huxley was himself an agnostic, but as a member of the commission he firmly insisted that religion should be taught in schools together with science. Every child should be taught the Christian Bible as an integral part of English culture. In recent times the scope of religious instruction in England has been extended to include Judaism and Islam. As a result of this policy, no strong antagonism between religious parents and public schools has arisen, from 1870 until the present day. The teaching of religion in public schools coincided with a decline of religious belief and a growth of religious tolerance. Children exposed to religion in public schools do not as a rule take it seriously. We do not know whether Huxley foresaw the decline of religion in England, but there is no doubt that he would have welcomed this unintended consequence of his educational policy.
It is unfortunate that Huxley’s solution of the problem of religious education is not available to the United States. Every country is different, especially in matters concerning religion, and no single solution to the problem of religious education fits all. In each country, a workable solution has to be found by political compromise between conflicting views, within the rules imposed by the local culture. To be workable, a solution does not need to be scientifically or philosophically consistent. When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: “Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according.” The rules governing religious education should be administered with a similar freedom of interpretation.
Dennett also advocates more intensive research on religion considered from a scientific point of view. Here again, we can all agree with the recommendation, but we may disagree about the meaning of “research.” Dennett limits research to scientific investigations studying religious activities and organizations as social phenomena. In my opinion, such research, looking at religion from the outside, can be helpful but will never throw much light on the central mystery. The central mystery is the perennial sprouting of religious practices and beliefs in all human societies from ancient times until today. My mother, who was a skeptical Christian like me, used to say, “You can throw religion out of the door, but it will always come back through the window.” I recently experienced a vivid demonstration of the truth of my mother’s words. I went with my wife to visit the monastery of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow, the ancient headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church. The young guide who showed us around said almost nothing about the ancient buildings and works of art that we were supposed to be admiring. Instead she talked for an hour about her own faith and the mystical influences that she felt emanating from the old saints of the church in their tombs. After three generations of atheistic government and official suppression of religion, here it was sprouting again from its roots.
Let me state frankly my own philosophical prejudices in opposition to Dennett. As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told one another around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The testimony of saints and mystics, including the young lady at Sergiev Posad, is the raw material out of which a deeper understanding of religion may grow.
The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations. The research that Dennett advocates, using only the scientific tool kit that was designed for a different purpose, will always miss the goal. We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.
The best source of information about modern Islamic terrorists that I know of is a book, Understanding Terror Networks, by Marc Sageman.2 Sageman is a former United States foreign service officer who worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Chapter 5 of his book, he describes in detail the network that planned and carried out the September 2001 attacks on the United States. He finds that the bonds holding the group together, during its formative years in Hamburg, were more personal than political. He concludes: “Despite the popular accounts of the 9/11 perpetrators in the press, in-group love rather than out-group hate seems a better explanation for their behavior.”
To end this review, I would like to introduce another recently published book, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney.3 This contains extensive extracts from diaries written by seven of the young men who died in suicidal missions or as kamikaze pilots in the closing months of World War II. The diaries give us firsthand testimony of the thoughts and feelings of these young soldiers who knew that they were fated to die. Their thoughts and feelings are astonishingly lucid and free from illusions. Some of them expressed their feelings in poetry. All of them were highly educated and familiar with Western literature in several languages, having spent most of their brief lives in reading and writing. Only one of them, Hayashi Ichizo, was religious, having grown up in a Japanese Christian family. His Christian faith did not make self-sacrifice easier for him than for the others. He had read Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death and carried it with him on his final mission together with his Bible.
All of the young men, including Hayashi, had a profoundly tragic view of life, mitigated only by happy memories of childhood with family and friends. They were as far as it was possible to be from the brainwashed zombies that contemporary Americans imagined to be piloting the kamikaze planes. They were thoughtful and sensitive young men, neither religious nor nationalistic fanatics.
Here I have space to mention only one of them, Nakao Takanori, who must speak for the rest. Nakao left a poem beginning, “How lonely is the sound of the clock in the darkness of the night.” In his last letter to his parents, a week before his death, he wrote,
At the farewell party, people gave me encouragement. I did my best to encourage myself. My co-pilot is Uno Shigeru, a handsome boy, aged nineteen, a naval petty officer second class. His home is in Hyogo Prefecture. He thinks of me as his elder brother, and I think of him as my younger brother. Working as one heart, we will plunge into an enemy vessel. Although I did not do much in my life, I am content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life, leaving nothing ugly behind me.
We have no firsthand testimony from the young men who carried out the September 11 attacks. They were not as highly educated and as thoughtful as the kamikaze pilots, and they were more influenced by religion. But there is strong evidence that they were not brainwashed zombies. They were soldiers enlisted in a secret brotherhood that gave meaning and purpose to their lives, working together in a brilliantly executed operation against the strongest power in the world. According to Sageman, they were motivated like the kamikaze pilots, more by loyalty to their comrades than by hatred of the enemy. Once the operation had been conceived and ordered, it would have been unthinkable and shameful not to carry it out.
Even after recognizing the great differences between the circumstances of 1945 and 2001, I believe that the kamikaze diaries give us our best insight into the state of mind of the young men who caused us su
ch grievous harm in 2001. If we wish to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we wish to take effective measures to lessen its attraction to idealistic young people, the first and most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we can understand them. The kamikaze diaries give us a basis on which to build both respect and understanding.
1. Viking Penguin, 2006.
2. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
3. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
V
Bibliographical Notes
1. This essay, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995, was originally a lecture given at a conference in Cambridge, England, in November 1992. It was published in the proceedings of the conference, Nature’s Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision, edited by John Cornwell (Oxford University Press, 1995).
2. This essay, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997, is an abbreviated version of a lecture given at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 1995. The lecture was published as Chapter 5 in Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1997).
3. Foreword to Thomas Gold, The Deep Hot Biosphere (Springer-Verlag, 1999).
4. Review of Michael Crichton, Prey (HarperCollins, 2002), in The New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003.
5. Review of Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (MIT Press, 2002), in The New York Review of Books, May 15, 2003.
6. Review of Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin (Random House, 2003), in Nature, April 24, 2003.
7. Review of Tom Stonier, Nuclear Disaster (Meridian Books, 1963), published in Disarmament and Arms Control (1964), pp. 459–461.
8. “Generals,” from Chapter 13 in Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (Harper and Row, 1984).
9. “Russians,” from Chapter 15 in Dyson, Weapons and Hope.
10. “Pacifists,” from Chapter 16 in Dyson, Weapons and Hope.
11. This essay, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, March 6, 1997, is another piece of the same lecture from which Chapter 2 was taken, also published in Chapter 5 of Dyson, Imagined Worlds.
12. Preface to Ending War: The Force of Reason: Essays in Honor of Joseph Rotblat, edited by Maxwell Bruce and Tom Milne (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
13. Review of Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945 (Knopf, 2004); and Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg, 1943, translated from the German and with a foreword by Joel Agee and with photographs by Erich Andres (University of Chicago Press, 2004), in The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2005.
14. Review of Yuri Manin, Mathematics and Physics, translated from the Russian by Ann and Neil Koblitz (Birkhäuser, 1981); and Paul Forman, Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment, Vol. 3 of Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), published in Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 5 (1983), pp. 54–57.
15. Review of Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Perseus, 2001), published in American Journal of Physics, Vol. 70 (2002), pp. 462–463.
16. Review of Timothy Ferris, Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril (Simon and Schuster, 2002), in The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002.
17. Review of James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Pantheon, 2003), in The New York Review of Books, July 3, 2003.
18. Review of Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (Norton, 2003), in The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003.
19. Review of Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Knopf, 2004), in The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2004.
20. This chapter is the text of a talk given at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on October 27, 2004, to celebrate Oppenheimer’s hundredth birthday. The extract from Lansing Hammond’s letter of 1979 was previously published in a preface that I wrote for Atom and Void, a collection of Oppenheimer’s public lectures (Princeton University Press, 1989). Other parts of the chapter are borrowed from Chapter 11, “Scientists and Poets,” of my book Weapons and Hope.
21. Review of Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); and Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious (Pantheon, 2005), in The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2005.
22. Review of Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, 2005), in The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2005.
23. Review of Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited and with an introduction by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books, 2005), in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005.
24. Bernal Lecture given at Birkbeck College, London, May 1972, published as Appendix D, pp. 371–389, to Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Carl Sagan (MIT Press, 1973).
25. Review of Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (Addison-Wesley, 1998); and John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale University Press, 1998), in The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1998.
26. Foreword to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman, edited by Jeffrey Robbins (Perseus, 1999). Copyright © 1999 by Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, LLC.
27. Review of Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience, translated from the French by Bart K. Holland (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), in The New York Review of Books, March 24, 2004.
28. Preface to Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, edited and with an introduction by Pat McCarthy (Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
29. Review of Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking Penguin, 2006) in The New York Review of Books, June 22, 2006.
About the Author
FREEMAN DYSON has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly version of the theory of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.
Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2007). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
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