Science in the Soul

by Richard Dawkins

  I want to return now to the charge that science is just a faith. The more extreme version of this charge – and one I often encounter as both a scientist and a rationalist – is an accusation of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves as great as that found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit of justice in this accusation; but as zealous bigots, we scientists are mere amateurs at the game. We’re content to argue with those who disagree with us. We don’t kill them.

  But I would want to deny even the lesser charge of purely verbal zealotry. There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There’s all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority or revelation. Science is founded on rational belief. Science is no religion.

  * * *

  *1 In 1996 I was honoured to be given the Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association at their conference in Atlanta. This is the very slightly abridged text of my acceptance speech.

  *2 See the first piece in this volume, ‘The values of science and the science of values’.

  Atheists for Jesus*1

  LIKE A GOOD recipe, the argument for a movement called ‘Atheists for Jesus’ needs to be built up gradually, with the ingredients mustered in advance. Start with the apparently oxymoronic title. In a society where the majority of theists are at least nominally Christian, the words ‘theist’ and ‘Christian’ are treated as near synonyms. Bertrand Russell’s famous advocacy of atheism was called Why I Am Not a Christian rather than, as it probably should have been, Why I Am Not a Theist. All Christians are theists, it seems to go without saying.*2

  Of course Jesus was a theist, but that is the least interesting thing about him. He was a theist because, in his time, everybody was. Atheism was not an option, even for so radical a thinker as Jesus. What was interesting and remarkable about Jesus was not the obvious fact that he believed in the god of his Jewish religion but that he rebelled against Yahweh’s vengeful nastiness. At least in the teachings that are attributed to him, Jesus publicly advocated niceness and was one of the first to do so. To those steeped in the Sharia-like cruelties of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, to those brought up to fear the vindictive, Ayatollah-like god of Abraham and Isaac, a charismatic young preacher who advocated generous forgiveness must have seemed radical to the point of subversion. No wonder they nailed him.

  Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matt. 5: 38–44, King James version)

  My second ingredient is another paradox and originates in my own field of Darwinism. Natural selection is a deeply nasty process. Darwin himself remarked: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.’ It was not just the facts of nature, among which he singled out the larvae of ichneumon wasps and their habit of feeding within the bodies of live caterpillars, that upset Darwin. The theory of natural selection itself seems calculated to foster selfishness at the expense of public good; violence, callous indifference to suffering, short-term greed at the expense of long-term foresight. If scientific theories could vote, Evolution would surely vote Republican.*3 My paradox comes from the un-Darwinian fact, which any of us can observe in our own circle of acquaintances, that so many individual people are kind, generous, helpful, compassionate, nice – the sort of people of whom we say, ‘She’s a real saint,’ or, ‘He’s a true Good Samaritan.’

  We all know people to whom we can sincerely say: ‘If only everybody were like you, the world’s troubles would melt away.’ The milk of human kindness is only a metaphor, but, naive as it sounds, I contemplate some of my friends of both sexes, and I feel like trying to bottle whatever it is that makes them so kind, so selfless, so apparently un-Darwinian.

  Darwinians can come up with explanations for human niceness: generalizations of the well-established models of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, the stocks-in-trade of the ‘selfish gene’ theory, which sets out to explain how altruism and cooperation among individual animals can flow from self-interest at the genetic level. The sort of superniceness I am talking about in humans goes too far. It is a misfiring, even a perversion of the Darwinian take on niceness. But if it is a perversion, it’s the kind of perversion we need to encourage and spread.

  Human superniceness is a perversion of Darwinism, because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection. It is also, although I haven’t the space to go into detail about this third ingredient of my recipe, an apparent perversion of the sort of rational choice theory by which economists explain human behaviour as calculated to maximize self-interest.

  Let’s put it even more bluntly. From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human superniceness is just plain dumb. But it is the kind of dumb that should be encouraged – which is the purpose of my article. How can we do it? How shall we take the minority of supernice humans whom we all know, and increase their number, perhaps until they even become a majority in the population? Could superniceness be induced to spread like an epidemic? Could superniceness be packaged in such a form that it passes down the generations in swelling traditions of longitudinal propagation?

  Well, do we know of any comparable examples, where stupid ideas have been known to spread like an epidemic? Yes, by God! Religion. Religious beliefs are irrational. Religious beliefs are dumb and dumber: superdumb. Religion drives otherwise sensible people into celibate monasteries or crashing into New York skyscrapers. Religion motivates people to whip their own backs, to set fire to themselves or their daughters, to denounce their own grandmothers as witches, or, in less extreme cases, simply to stand or kneel, week after week, through ceremonies of stupefying boredom. If people can be infected with such self-harming stupidity, infecting them with niceness should be a doddle.

  Religious beliefs most certainly spread in epidemics and, even more obviously, they pass down the generations to form longitudinal traditions and promote enclaves of locally peculiar irrationality. We may not understand why humans behave in the weird ways we label religious, but it is a manifest fact that they do. The existence of religion is evidence that humans eagerly adopt irrational beliefs and spread them, both vertically in traditions and horizontally in epidemics of evangelism. Could this susceptibility, this palpable vulnerability to infections of irrationality, be put to genuinely good use?

  Humans undoubtedly have a strong tendency to learn from and copy admired role models. Under propitious circumstances, the epidemiological consequences can be dramatic. The hairstyle of a football player, the dress sense of a singer, the speech mannerisms of a game-show host – such trivial idiosyncrasies can spread through a susceptible age-cohort like a virus. The advertising industry is professionally dedicated to the science – or it may be an art – of launching memetic epidemics and nurturing their spread. Christianity itself was spread by the equivalents of such techniques, initially by St Paul and later by priests and missionaries who systematically set out to increase the numbers of converts in what sometimes turned out to be exponential growth. Could we achieve exponent
ial amplification of the numbers of supernice people?

  I recently had a public conversation in Edinburgh with Richard Holloway, former bishop of that beautiful city. Bishop Holloway has evidently outgrown the supernaturalism that most Christians still identify with their religion (he describes himself as post-Christian and as a ‘recovering Christian’). He retains a reverence for the poetry of religious myth, which is enough to keep him going to church. And, in the course of our Edinburgh discussion, he made a suggestion that went straight to my core. Borrowing a poetic myth from the worlds of mathematics and cosmology, he described humanity as a ‘singularity’ in evolution. He meant exactly what I have been talking about in this essay, although he expressed it differently.*4 The advent of human superniceness is something unprecedented in four billion years of evolutionary history. It seems likely that, after the Homo sapiens singularity, evolution may never be the same again.

  Be under no illusions, for Bishop Holloway was not. The singularity is a product of blind evolution itself, not the creation of any unevolved intelligence. It resulted from the natural evolution of the human brain, which, under the blind forces of natural selection, expanded to the point where, all unforeseen, it overreached itself and started to behave insanely from the selfish gene’s point of view. The most transparently un-Darwinian misfiring is contraception, which divorces sexual pleasure from its natural function of gene propagation. More subtle overreachings include intellectual and artistic pursuits that squander, by the selfish genes’ lights, time and energy that should be devoted to surviving and reproducing. The big brain achieved the evolutionarily unprecedented feat of genuine foresight: it became capable of calculating long-term consequences beyond short-term selfish gain. And, at least in some individuals, the brain overreached itself to the extent of indulging in that superniceness whose singular existence is the central paradox of my thesis. Big brains can take the driving, goal-seeking mechanisms that were originally favoured for selfish-gene reasons and divert (subvert? pervert?) them away from their Darwinian goals and into other paths.

  I am no memetic engineer, and I have very little idea how to increase the numbers of the supernice and spread their memes through the meme pool. The best I can offer is what I hope may be a catchy slogan: ‘Atheists for Jesus’ would grace a T-shirt. There is no strong reason to choose Jesus as icon instead of some other role model from the ranks of the supernice such as Mahatma Gandhi (not the odiously self-righteous and hypocritical Mother Teresa, heavens no*5). I think we owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense that he inevitably espoused as a man of his time. And perhaps the oxymoronic impact of ‘Atheists for Jesus’ might be just what is needed to kick-start the meme of superniceness in a post-Christian society. If we play our cards right, could we lead society away from the nether regions of its Darwinian origins into the kinder and more compassionate uplands of post-singularity enlightenment?

  I think a reborn Jesus would wear the T-shirt. It has become a commonplace that, were he to return today, he would be appalled at what is being done in his name by Christians ranging from the Catholic Church with its vast and ostentatious wealth to the fundamentalist religious right with its stated doctrine, explicitly contradicting Jesus, that ‘God wants you to be rich’. Less obviously but still plausibly, in the light of modern scientific knowledge, I think he would see through supernaturalist obscurantism. But, of course, modesty would compel him to turn his T-shirt around to read ‘Jesus for Atheists’.

  AFTERWORD

  This essay is worded on the assumption that Jesus was a real person who existed. There is a minority school of thought among historians that he didn’t. They have a lot going for them. The gospels were written decades after Jesus’ purported death, by unknown disciples who never met him but were motivated by a powerful religious agenda. More, their conception of historical fact was so different from ours that they blithely made stuff up in order to fulfil Old Testament prophecies. Matthew’s virgin birth story was invented to fulfil an apparent prophecy of Isaiah which actually stemmed from a mistranslation of a Hebrew word meaning ‘young woman’ into a Greek word meaning ‘virgin’. The earliest books of the New Testament are among the epistles, and they say almost nothing about Jesus’ life, just plenty of made-up stuff about his theological significance. There’s a suspicious shortage of mentions of him in any extra-biblical documents. For my purposes here I don’t really care, one way or the other. If he was a fictional or mythical character, then it is that fictional character whose virtues I want us to emulate. The credit should go either to a man called Jesus or to the writer who invented him. The point of my essay remains.

  But as a separate question, it is quite interesting to ask whether he really did exist. Jesus is the Latin form of Yehoshua, Yeshua, Yeshu, Joshua, and there were plenty of those around at the time. There were also plenty of wandering preachers, and the two sets probably overlapped. In that sense there easily could have been several Jesuses. Some of them may have suffered crucifixion: there was a lot of that about, too, in Roman times. But did any of them walk on water, turn water into wine, have a virgin mother, raise himself or anyone else from the dead, or perform any miracles that violated the laws of physics? No. Did any of them say anything so good as the Sermon on the Mount? Either one of them did, or somebody else made it up and put it into a fictional character’s mouth, and that’s all that matters for my essay here. Superniceness is worth spreading and religion may show us a way to spread it.

  * * *

  *1 This was another of my columns in Free Inquiry, December 2004–January 2005.

  *2 Jews do it differently. Many people proudly call themselves Jewish atheists and observe festivals, holy days and even dietary laws. Hardly anybody self-describes as a Christian atheist, although many atheists including me lustily sing Christmas carols. Others, at least in Britain, feign religious belief and go to church as a ruse to get their children into Christian schools – because, as I documented in the 2010 Channel 4 TV programme Faith School Menace, they believe that faith schools tend to get good exam results. That belief is self-fulfilling because it boosts the demand to get into faith schools, and those schools consequently are able to select the best candidates for entry.

  *3 Cynics might see this as a promising approach towards educating Republican politicians who attempt to subvert the teaching of evolution in schools. Maybe I should start with Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen who, in 2009, introduced a bill in the legislature to get me banned from lecturing at the State University on the grounds (an idiosyncratic interpretation of the role of a university, to say the least) that my ‘statements on the theory of evolution’ were ‘not representative of the thinking of the majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’.

  *4 He didn’t mean singularity in the sense used by the transhumanist futurist Ray Kurzweil, but was advancing a different metaphorical development of the physicists’ term.

  *5 See Christopher Hitchens’ The Missionary Position for substantiation of this negative judgement.

  V

  LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD

  READING RICHARD DAWKINS on issues of public concern, whether ethics or education, law or language, can feel like plunging into a chilly sea for a swim – from the first sharp intake of breath to increasing exhilaration to emergence with a tingling sense of well-being. It has something to do, I think, with the combination of clarity of thought, felicity of expression, serious engagement with the issue at hand and sober confidence in the capacity of objective reason to offer, if not always solutions, positive paths forward in the real world.

  Given the title of this section, it may seem perverse to begin with a piece that draws its own title from an ancient Greek thinker known more for his preoccupation with the ideal. But that is precisely the point. The key idea here, that of ‘essentialism’ or the ‘tyranny of the discontinuous mind’, lies in a fundamental misconception in ways of thinking about the world; in repudiating it, th
is essay shows how the way we think, and the way we use language, influence the ways in which we observe, analyse and understand what goes on around us. This is a masterclass in relating theoretical concept to practical experience.

  Among the targets of that essay are ‘finger-wagging, hectoring lawyers’ demanding yes-or-no answers to complex questions about risk, safety, guilt. The legal system comes in for more criticism in the second piece, ‘ “Beyond reasonable doubt”?’, which interrogates the practice of trial by jury with a forensic rigour most barristers would be proud to marshal.

  ‘But can they suffer?’ tackles the conundrum of pain, and our human perceptions of it in ourselves and in other beings. It challenges the widely held ‘speciesist’ assumption that privileges human experience over that of other animals, and offers good reason to doubt that there is any correlation between mental capacity and the capacity to suffer pain. ‘I love fireworks, but…’ brings the theme of non-human distress closer to home in calling for more consideration of how pets and wild animals – not to mention war veterans – experience the explosive noise that is part of so many displays.