It is the most absurd ploy in which radical Christian fascists pretend that they are any better than radical Islamists

Richard Dawkins
February 24, 2007

Biology and Bull***

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character
in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a
misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent
bully?

By David P. Barash

All books supporting religion are alike. All books attacking it do so
in their own way (well, maybe not, but doesn't this start us off on a
nice Tolstoyan note?). In any event, religion's interface with science
- long fraught - seems especially so these days, with a bevy of books
criticizing religion as well as defending it.

Why so much attention, just now? Exhibit A: creationist efforts to
undermine the teaching of evolution, masquerading as "intelligent
design". Next, the takeover of the U.S. executive branch by right-wing
Christian Ayatollahs, combined with presidential assertions that his
policies are undertaken in furtherance of god's will, not to mention
efforts to break down the Jeffersonian "wall of separation" between
church and state. Add to this the so-called 'war on terror', which is
largely a struggle with radical Islam in response to the latter's
faith-based [radical Christian] initiative against the United States.

Meanwhile, American stem-cell research continues to be hobbled by the
insistence that every fertilized cell has been "ensouled" and is
therefore human and holy. And don't forget the conspicuous rise of the
right-wing evangelical movement in the United States - bastion of
religiosity in the developed world - featuring such gems as right-wing
Christian Ayatollah Pat Robertson's assertion that catastrophes, from
natural hurricanes to unnatural terrorism, are brought about by god's
displeasure with the sexually or textually sinful.

In short, it is fair to say that "they" (religious zealots) started
it, as they usually do. It was the Catholic Church that burned Bruno
and persecuted Galileo, not the other way around. When have atheists
claimed that religious devotees will burn in hell, or sought to hurry
them along not with words but flaming faggots? Polls consistently show
Americans more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is an
anencephalic ax murderer (but religious) than the most admirable
atheist. In any event, it appears that despite - or, perhaps, because
of - being an oppressed minority, some atheists are finally madder
than hell (and/or mad at hell) and unwilling to "take it" any more.

In his 2003 book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris pointed out that alone
of all human assertions, those qualifying as "religious", almost by
definition, automatically demand and typically receive immense
respect, even veneration. Claim that the Earth is flat, or that the
Tooth Fairy exists, and you will be deservedly laughed at. But
maintain that according to your religion, a 6th century desert tribal
leader ascended to heaven on a winged horse, and you are immediately
entitled to deference. (By the way, is the similar claim that a
predecessor ascended to heaven, roughly 600 years earlier, without aid
of a winged horse less ridiculous ... or more?) It has long been, let us
say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious
faith - belief without evidence - should go unchallenged. Much of the
recent uproar comes from just such challenging, among which biologists
have been prominent.

Like Mark Twain's celebrated comment about stopping smoking, scholars
have found it easy to explain religion: they've done it hundreds of
times, in psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical,
anthropological and economic terms. Biologists, by contrast, have been
Johnnies-come-lately, a neglect that has been changing of late, as
growing numbers seek to explore the evolutionary factors - the likely
"adaptive significance" - of religion. Indeed, given that religion is,
in one form or another, a cross-cultural universal, that it has had
such powerful effects on human beings (for good and ill), and yet its
biological underpinnings remain so elusive, religion is an especially
ripe topic for biologists' scrutiny.

It would seem both a fertile field and a frustrating one. Thus, on the
one hand, religious belief of one sort or another seems to qualify as
a cross-cultural universal, therefore suggesting that it might well
have emerged, somehow, from the cross-cultural universality of human
nature, the common evolutionary background shared by all Homo sapiens.
But on the other, it often appears that religious practice is fitness-
reducing rather than enhancing; if so, then genetically mediated
tendencies toward religion should have been selected against. Think of
the frequent religious advocacy of sexual restraint (not uncommonly,
outright celibacy), of tithing, self-abnegating moral duty and other
seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic
denial of the "evidence of our senses" in favor of faith in things
asserted but not clearly demonstrated. What might be the fitness-
enhancing benefits of religion that compensate for these costs? The
question itself is novel: social scientists, for example, have long
considered religion as a thing sui generis, not as a behavioral
predisposition that arose because in some way it contributed to the
survival and reproduction of its participants.

For Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion: http://richarddawkins.net/godDelusion),
as well as Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), religion is primarily
the misbegotten offspring of memes that promote themselves in human
minds: essentially, religion as mental virus, and thus, something
adaptive for "itself" and not for its "victims". Or it could be a
nonadaptive byproduct of something adaptive in its own right. For
example, children seem hard-wired to accept parental teaching, since
such input is likely to be fitness-enhancing ("This is good to eat",
"Don't pet the saber-tooth", and so forth). This, in turn, makes
children vulnerable to whatever else they are taught ("Respect the
Sabbath", "Cover your hair") as well as - if we are to believe Freud,
in The Future of an Illusion - downright needy when it comes to parent-
like beings, leading especially to the patriarchal sky-god of the
Abrahamic faiths.

Anthropologist Weston La Barre developed a similar argument, in Shadow
of Childhood, going on to propose that prayer is unique to our
species, resulting from our prolonged, neotonous, developmental
trajectory: "No other animal when in distress or danger magically
commands or prayerfully begs the environment to change its nature for
the organism's specific benefit. Calling upon the 'supernatural' to
change the natural is an exclusively human reaction. ... One doubts that
even herding animals like the many antelope species in Africa have
gods they call upon when they fall behind the fleeing herd and are
about to be killed by lions, wild dogs, cheetahs or hyenas. Antelope
infancy and parenthood do not present such formative extravagancies.
And in the circumstances the belief itself would be highly
maladaptive".

For Dawkins in particular, religious belief is not only maladaptive -
and unjustified - but, given the susceptibility of young children to
adult indoctrination, the very teaching of religion to defenseless
children is a form of child abuse! Other hypotheses of religion as
maladaptive include anthropologist Pascal Boyer's grandly titled
Religion Explained, which essentially argues that natural selection
would have favored a mechanism for detecting "agency" in nature,
enabling its possessor to predict who is about to do what (often, to
whom). Since false positives would be much less fitness-reducing than
false negatives (i.e., better to attribute malign intent to a tornado
- and thus take cover - than to assume it is benign and suffer as a
result) selection would promote hypersensitivity, or "overdetection",
essentially a hair-trigger system whereby motive is attributed not
only to other people, and mastodons, but also trees, hurricanes, or
the sun. Add, next, the benefit of "decoupling" such predictions from
the actual presence of the being in question ("What might my rival be
planning right now?") and the stage is set for attributing causation
to "agents" whose agency might well be entirely imagined.

Boyer's work, in turn, converges on that of Stewart Guthrie, whose
1995 book, Faces in the Clouds, made a powerful case for the potency
of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to see human (or human-like)
images in natural phenomena. This human inclination has morphed into a
more specific, named phenomenon: pareidolia, the perception of
patterns where none exists (some recent, "real" examples: Jesus's face
in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary's outline in a semi-melted hunk of
chocolate, Mother Teresa's profile in a cinnamon bun.)

Not all biologically based hypotheses for the evolution of religion
are negative, however. In Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson
explores the possibility that religious belief is advantageous for its
practitioners because it contributes to solidarity - including but not
limited to moral codes - that benefits the group and wouldn't
otherwise be within reach. This notion, appealing as it might be, is
actually a logical and mathematical stretch for most biologists,
relying as it does upon "group selection". The problem is that even if
groups displaying a particular trait do better than groups lacking it,
selection acting within such groups should favor individuals who
"cheat". Mathematical models have shown that group selection can work,
in theory, but only if the differential survival of religious groups
more than compensates for any disadvantage suffered by individuals
within each group. It is at least possible that human beings meet this
requirement, especially when it comes to religion, since within-group
self-policing could maintain religiosity; it certainly did during the
Inquisition.

Biologist Lewis Wolpert seeks to examine the penchant for faith in a
book whose title derives from an interchange between Alice and the Red
Queen, in which the latter points out that "sometimes I've believed as
many as six impossible things before breakfast". Wolpert describes and
interprets various widespread logical fallacies, examining their
diverse origins in brain pathology, neurochemical impacts, and other
cognitive limitations, seeking to understand why so many people, in
the words of H. L. Mencken, "believe passionately in the palpably not
true." His book is a useful compendium of hallucinations,
confabulations and other self-delusions, with the intriguing added
thesis that much science is itself counter-intuitive (the Earth going
round the sun rather than vice versa, the fact that even a
demonstrably solid object is mostly empty space, the mutability of
species, quantum "weirdness", etc.)

Wolpert maintains that "true causal reasoning" is unknown among other
animals and often highly flawed in our own species. Yet, as
anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out, people simply cannot look
at the world "in dumb astonishment or blind apathy", so they struggle
for explanations - objectively valid or not - resulting inevitably in
beliefs. Wolpert then suggests that "those with such beliefs most
likely did better." But the bulk of Six Impossible Things ... details
inaccurate beliefs: How might the holders of false beliefs "do
better"? (In short, what is the adaptive significance?) One
possibility is that faith in miracles, in golden plates upon which
divine wisdom has been inscribed, or in the reality of bright blue
elephant-headed gods are not false after all. Another is that such
faith has beneficial by-products, like placebo. For now, it isn't
clear how attachment to one or many gods actually paid off, since,
although a deity may have turned water into wine and helped bring down
the walls of Jericho in the distant past, such parent-like beneficence
hasn't been reliably documented in recent millennia.

Primatologist and anthropologist Barbara King enters the fray with
Evolving God, a knowledgeable, readable, and entertaining excursion
into the prehistory of religion, with a refreshing orientation toward
nonhuman primates as well as early hominids; Evolving God also has the
added merit of pushing beyond the Abrahamic "big three", including a
handy account of religious archeology. King's touchstone is
"belongingness", that "hominids turned to the sacred realm because
they evolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with their social
partners, because the resulting mutuality engendered its own
creativity and generated increasingly nuanced expressions of
belongingness over time, and because the human brain evolved to allow
an extension of this belongingness beyond the here and now".

King is convincing about the merits and allure of belongingness, but
less so - indeed, she is distressingly silent - when it comes to the
adaptive significance of cozying up to the ineffable. If, as she
suggests, "at bedrock is the belief that one may be seen, heard,
protected, harmed, loved, frightened, or soothed by interaction with
God, gods, or spirits", then what in the real world of biology and
reproductive fitness has anchored human biology to this bedrock? A
feeling of belongingness sounds nice, as does one of cheerfulness, or
the contentment that comes from having a full belly ... but to be
adaptive, one ought to have a genuinely full belly. By the same token,
there is little doubt that many people derive consolation from
religion, but it would little avail our ancestors, confronted by a
saber-tooth, to be consoled by a faith-based certainty that it is
really a *** cat, or that to be mauled by said feline guarantees a
rapid ascent to heaven - especially if it makes such ascent more
likely! No matter how exalted, feelings divorced from reality can be
dangerous delusions.

King is quick to dismiss a "genetic approach" to understanding the
evolution of religiosity, heaping what may be appropriate scorn on
Dean Hamer's simplistic, over-hyped claim for The God Gene. But the
author of Evolving God doesn't seem to realize that any evolutionary
approach is necessarily, at its heart, a genetic one. We must
conclude, sadly, that a convincing evolutionary explanation for the
origin of religion has yet to be formulated. Such an account, were it
to arise, would doubtless be unconvincing to believers in any event,
because whatever it postulated, it would not conclude that religious
belief arose because (1) it simply represents an accurate perception
of god, like identification of a predator or of a prospective mate, or
(2) it was installed in the human mind and/or genome by god,
presumably for his glory and our counter-evidentiary enlightenment.

David Hume began his essay, The Natural History of Religion (1757) as
follows: "As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost
importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our
attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that
concerning its origin in human nature". So far, we've been concerned
with religion's "origin in human nature". Next, it's "foundation in
reason".

The four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse are Dawkins,
Harris, Dennett, and Sagan. All are (or in the case of Carl Sagan, who
died in 1996, were) passionate advocates of reason, committed to the
proposition that religion is essentially unreasonable.

Sagan delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in
1985, and we can all be grateful that they are finally available in
print; only slightly updated by Ann Druyan, Sagan's wisdom is fresh
and relevant today, offering the humane, courageous, and rational
vision that became the astronomer's trademark. We owe much to Carl
Sagan, not least his Sisyphean efforts at banishing scientific
illiteracy and his tireless exhortations in favor of basic planetary
hygiene, all abundantly on display in The Varieties of Scientific
Experience. Readers will want to join me, as well, in offering a
posthumous thank you to Sagan for acquainting us with Rupert Brooke's
hilarious poem, "Heaven". (It's too long to quote here, but, as Casey
Stengel used to say, you can look it up - on the Web.)

William James delivered an earlier set of Gifford Lectures, turning
them into his renowned The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which
he defined religion as a "feeling of being at home in the Universe".
Carl Sagan certainly had that sense and labored, with great success,
to share it. His Varieties leave no doubt that for Sagan, this feeling
leaves little or no room for religion, a point he makes with
extraordinary grace and often, laugh-out-loud humor.

Carl Sagan is associated with the assertion that "extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence", a dictum applicable not only to
various assertions of the paranormal, but to religion as well ...
assuming that one has the chutzpah to subject such claims to critical
scrutiny. Bertrand Russell, for example, once asked how we might
respond to someone's heartfelt assertion that a perfect China teapot,
too small to be detected, was in elliptical orbit between the Earth
and Mars. Whose responsibility, for example, would it be to "prove"
it? And if the teapot's non-existence could not be verifiably ruled
out, does this mean that claims in its favor must be granted equal
plausibility with the alternative, null hypothesis?

These and other issues are also confronted by Richard Dawkins in "The
God Delusion" (http://richarddawkins.net/godDelusion), whose overt
hostility to religion, combined with the brashness and brilliance of
his writing, has evoked fury among the faithful and consternation
among the decorous. He has the effrontery to dispatch various "proofs"
of god's existence: those of Aquinas, Anselm, and what he calls the
arguments from beauty, from personal experience, from scripture, and
from admired religious scientists. He also tackles the evolution of
religion and what's bad about the "good book", while disputing the
claim that religion is necessary for morality, all the while pulling
no punches about why he is so unabashedly hostile to religion.
(Honestly, is there anything hostile about suggesting that "The God of
the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-
freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully"?)

Most effective is Dawkins' chapter titled "Why there almost certainly
is no god", which not only sheds logical light on the so-called
anthropic principle and the "worship of gaps", but - not surprisingly
for a renowned evolutionary biologist - demolishes (yet again) the
hoary "argument from design". This chestnut has had numerous stakes
driven through its heart, but like a cinematic version of the undead,
it keeps resurrecting itself, staggering, zombie-like and covered with
flies, back into public view. Dawkins confronts the version concocted
by renowned astronomer Fred Hoyle, who evidently knew more about stars
than about evolution. According to Hoyle, the probability of living
things having been created by a completely chance process is about
that of a windstorm, blowing through a junkyard, spontaneously
creating a Boeing 747.

Dawkins agrees that indeed, chance alone would not be up to the task
but then shows, painstakingly, that natural selection is precisely the
opposite of chance: its an extraordinarily efficient way of generating
extreme nonrandomness. Moreover, god as ultimate explanatory device
for complexity is especially depauperate since we cannot credibly
maintain that god is less complex than a Boeing 747. In short, god,
for Dawkins, is "the ultimate 747": insofar as the problem is
explaining complexity, it hardly suffices to posit, as a satisfactory
answer, the spontaneous and uncaused existence of something infinite
orders of magnitude more complex.

Dawkins grants that god cannot be conclusively disproved, but he also
urges that religion not be granted any special benefit of doubt. "if
by 'God', wrote Carl Sagan, "one means the set of physical laws that
govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is
emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the
law of gravity". Dawkins adds that "The metaphysical or pantheistic
God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist,
miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God
of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary
language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of
intellectual high treason".

The boilerplate, and politically safe if intellectually craven stance
on science and religion has long been that the two are independent
domains, the former telling what is and the latter, why (this was the
gravimen of Stephen Jay Gould's "Rocks of Ages", which argued for
"nonoverlapping magesteria" between science and religion). Part of the
attention-grabbing novelty of the Four Horsemen has been their refusal
to abide by this dichotomy, their insistence that when religion makes
egregiously false "truth claims" against science, it must be
confronted, and that, moreover, religion itself can and should be
"naturalized", that is, subjected to the same scrutiny that science
brings to other phenomena.

This project is especially intense for America's most biologically
astute philosopher, Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell involves
breaking the taboo against looking skeptically and scientifically at
religion. He doesn't like what he sees. And for Sam Harris (a graduate
student in neurobiology when not endeavoring to épater les religieux)
there is a felt need to take the United States in particular by the
scruff of its neck and rub its nose in the dangers and absurdities of
religious belief. His Letter to a Christian Nation was written in
response to criticisms leveled by believers, following his earlier
antireligious pronouncement, The End of Faith. His Letter is aptly
named: more a letter than a book (perhaps coincidentally, many of the
volumes herein considered are very slender). In both books, Harris is
especially provocative in condemning not only religious excess, but
even religious tolerance as, essentially, a "gateway drug" that opens
the door not only to faith (irrationality, as Harris sees it) but also
to its more extreme and violent manifestations. It would be
interesting to see if, as the result of the recent drumbeat of
antireligious books, the number of out-of-the-closet atheists
increases, as others feel more validated in publicly affirming their
unbelief ... or if, turned off by the vehemence of the opponents, the
ranks of faithful actually increases.

In any event, Harris is especially incensed at the consequences of
what he views as religious extremism, and whereas The End of Faith was
especially critical of Islam - although not sparing of Christianity or
Judaism - Letter is explicitly concerned with fundamentalist
Christianity and is unyielding in its alarm and disdain:

"If the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire,
some significant percentage of the American population would see a
silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to
them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to
happen-the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that
beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future
for ourselves-socially, economically, environmentally, or
geopolitically. ... The fact that nearly half of the American population
apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma,
should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency".

Reacting to what he saw as the excesses of the Enlightenment, William
Blake wrote his great poem, "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau",
which continued: "Mock on, mock on: 'tis all in vain!/ You throw the
sand against the wind,/ And the wind blows it back again", and ends:
"The Atoms of Democritus/ And Newton's Particles of Light/ Are sands
upon the Red Sea shore,/ Where Israel's tents do shine so bright".

It has been said that the 20th century was dominated by physics, and
the 19th, by chemistry and geology. The 21st? - at least, so far?
Biology: with genomics, cloning, stem-cell research, neurobiology and
evolutionary biology having replaced "rocket science" as emblematic of
difficult/important. It is therefore notable - and not surprising -
that biologists have been so much in the vanguard of science looking
at religion, and that, moreover, other biologists have also been
prominent in responding to the current, biology-inspired Enlightenment
Redux. Instead of those Atoms of Democritus and Newton's Particles of
Light, we have Darwin's evolution by natural selection and Dawkins'
selfish genes. Mock on, mock on, Dawkins and Harris, Dennett and Sagan
.... Francis Collins and Joan Roughgarden have picked up Blake's mantle,
pitching their bright, shining tents against the vain sands of your
disbelief.

While the Four Horsemen resort to a modern version of Kant's sapere
aude ("dare to know"), Collins and Roughgarden dare to believe, and to
bespeak their faith. At the same time, neither are strangers to
scientific knowing: Collins is a renowned medical geneticist, head of
the Human Genome Project, and Roughgarden, a mathematical ecologist
and evolutionary theorist. In The Language of God, Collins shares his
personal journey from atheist to Evangelical Christian. (Throughout
this extended Road-to-Damascus moment, C. S. Lewis - whose misogyny
and militarism Collins delicately ignores - features prominently.)
Collins is no fundamentalist, however; he acknowledges the consilience
of modern evolutionary science, arguing passionately and effectively
that "New Earth Creationists" do not only science but their own faith
a disservice by denying reason and evidence. He approvingly quotes
Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has
endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo
their use." But he also claims that "The Big Bang cries out for a
divine explanation." (And here I thought it cries out for physics.)

Collins argues that his faith comes primarily from two sources, the
existence of what he calls "the Moral Law", and the "universal human
longing for God". As to the former, is there really one - the - Moral
Law? Some people feel it is lawful to suppress and kill those who
disagree with them, or to worship idols, mutilate their genitals
(typically with religious sanction), or define themselves as the only
true human beings. Collins is greatly impressed, nonetheless, that
people have a single, deep, shared knowledge of right and wrong, which
he might find less impressive if he were more familiar with basic
sociobiology. Thus, Collins seems not to understand that infanticidal
male behavior in langur monkeys does not preclude the use of
"altruism" at other times, and by other species, as a means of mate
attraction, or that the evolutionary biology of altruism via kin
selection is based on identity of genes via common descent, not just
in ants but in any sexually reproducing organisms. Taken together or
in various combinations, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group
selection, third-party effects, courtship possibilities, as well as
simple susceptibility to social and cultural indoctrination - to which
one might add the Kantian Categorical Imperative - provide biologists
with more than enough for a Laplacean conclusion: god is no longer
needed to explain Moral Law. (This is not to say that god is hereby
excluded, just that the existence of such presumed Law is a thin reed
upon which to lean religious faith, given that other, biologically
verified interpretations exist.)

As to that longing for god, Francis Collins asks "Why would such a
universal and uniquely human hunger exist, if it were not connected to
some opportunity for fulfillment? ... Why do we have a 'God-shaped
vacuum' in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled?" As
his spiritual mentor, C. S. Lewis, pointed out "A baby feels hunger:
well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well,
there is such a thing as water". Many people would love to live
forever. Does this mean that there is immortality? (I guess so: if
they believe in the right religion.) Indeed, why would Janis Joplin
have sung, "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?" unless a Mercedes
Benz exists? Evidently the existence of a Mercedes-shaped hole in Ms.
Joplin's heart means that it was meant to be filled.

Collins is more persuasive, although certainly not original, when
trotting out the Anthropic Principle, the argument that the universe
is uniquely pre-tuned to bring about life in general and human life in
particular. There are a number of physical constants and laws such
that if any had been even slightly different, life might well have
been impossible. For example, for roughly every billion quarks and
antiquarks, there is an excess of one quark - otherwise, no matter. If
the rate of expansion immediately after the Big Bang had been a teeny
tiny fraction smaller than it was, the universe would have recollapsed
long ago. If the strong nuclear forces holding atomic nuclei together
had been just a smidgeon weaker, then only hydrogen would exist; if a
hair stronger, all hydrogen would promptly have become helium, and the
solar furnaces inside stars -which we can thank for the heavier
elements - would never have existed.

Both Dawkins and Sagan also examine this argument, which Dawkins
caricatures as "god-as-dial-twiddler". It is oddly tautological, in
that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to
wonder about it. In Fred Hoyle's science fiction novel, The Black
Cloud, it is explained that the probability of a golf ball landing on
any particular spot is exceedingly low - and yet, it has to land
somewhere! The Anthropic Principle can also be "solved" by multiple
universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist;
this might apply not only to horizontally existing multi-verses, but
to the same one occurring differently in time if there have been (and
will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at
all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the
physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the
nature of matter and energy. And isn't it more than a little arrogant
to maintain that the gazillions of galaxies, with their mega-
gazillions of stars, were expressly created by god so that he could
bring forth Homo sapiens on the third planet from our particular sun,
just so that we might "seek fellowship" with him?

The Language of God reveals Collins to be a decent, kind, generous and
humane individual (ditto, by the way, for the writings of the Four
Horsemen). Unlike the latter, however, Collins desperately hopes for a
reconciliation - or at least, a lessening of animosity - between
believers and non, and one hopes he might serve as an ambassador from
science to evangelical Christianity, immunizing the latter against
fear of the former. He would also like to missionize in the other
direction. Recall the rabbi, visited by two members of his
congregation who hold mutually contradictory positions, whereupon he
reassures each that he is correct. The rabbi's wife reproves him,
noting, "They can't both be right", whereupon the rabbi agrees,
"You're right too!" Collins fervently maintains that both religion and
science can be right.

Thus, he explicitly denies a strict interpretation of scripture -
e.g., Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, Jonah inside the whale, etc. -
eschewing literality when biblical accounts run obviously contrary to
current science. At the same time, he believes fervently in other
things, notably Jesus' resurrection, and the reality of a personal god
who answers prayer. What, then, is his preferred basis for choosing to
believe some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply
clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing
those that can, then isn't he indulging in another incarnation of the
"god of the gaps" that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What
about, say, the Book of Revelations? Does the director of the Human
Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin
and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? Was he haploid or diploid? Is it
necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer
believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation,
archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?

Joan Roughgarden is more limited in her purview, specifically aiming
at a reconciliation between Evolution and Christian Faith, rather than
Collins' concern with Christian faith and science more generally.
Advocates of "Theistic Evolution" (the claim that god chose to work
via evolution, thereby eliminating any incompatibility) will doubtless
applaud, while fundamentalist believers and materialist-minded
unbelievers will not, although devotees of either will agree that
Roughgarden is well-meaning, and adroit at summoning up New Testament
parables in support of her nonconfrontationalist position.

Her bottom-line claim is that "the Bible is perfectly consistent with
the two main facts of evolution - that all of life belongs to a common
family tree and that species change over generations". But as to that
"common family tree", what are we to make of the soul, which
Roughgarden clearly believes is real, and uniquely possessed by human
beings? How could "ensoulment" not bespeak a radical discontinuity,
unless chimps, gorillas, orangs, etc., are granted souls (or semi-
souls) as well? What about dogs? Crickets? Cantaloupes? Regarding
"species change over generations", Genesis clearly asserts god's
command that each living thing is to bring forth offspring "after his
kind", which would certainly preclude changing into another kind.

Roughgarden ostensibly speaks from her scientific roots when she avers
that "Jesus' teachings about generosity, kindness, love, and inclusion
of all don't depend one whit on miracles". But on the next page, she
recounts that "Even after his death, Jesus continued to downplay
miracles. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to a group of his
disciples ..." Wait a minute! If the resurrection of Jesus is not a
miracle, what then is it? An article of faith, and thus exempt? A
scientific fact?

Evolution and Christian Faith is a "plague-on-both-your houses"
chastisement of "selfish genery" as well as of intolerant
fundamentalism, and thus likely (along with Collins' book) to appeal
to the "can't we all get along?" moderates among us: "We simply don't
have to let ourselves get caught up in these polarizing positions,"
according to Roughgarden. "We can insist on a better tenor of
discourse".

Edward O. Wilson - reigning dean of American organismal biologists -
is also eager for reconciliation between science and religion, for the
sake of policy, not polity. The Creation, written as an epistolary
reaching-out to an unnamed southern Baptist preacher, is subtitled "an
appeal to save life on earth". Wilson's journey was the inverse of
Collins' - reared a pious Baptist in rural Alabama, he became a famous
atheist scientist. Wilson's anguish, however, is not so much over the
reduction in civility across the science-theology divide than about
the reduction in planetary biodiversity, the imminence of large-scale,
anthropogenic, species extinctions. Wilson's hope, powerfully
expressed, is that doctrinal differences between religion and science
could be put aside in favor of shared struggle defending the natural
world: "Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on
the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we
share. ... I suggest that we set aside our differences in order to save
the Creation ... Surely we can agree that each species, however
inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at this moment, is a
masterpiece of biology, and well worth saving. ... Prudence alone
dictates that we act quickly to prevent the extinction of species and,
with it, the pauperization of Earth's ecosystems - hence of the
Creation".

In an oft-noted article published four decades ago in SCIENCE,
historian Lynn White argued that the historical roots of our
ecological crisis derive from the book of Genesis, which gave human
beings their marching orders: to achieve dominion over nature. And to
be sure, Judeo-Christian theologians have not generally distinguished
themselves in support of nature (St. Francis and a few others
excepted). Yet there is reason for hope, for the prospect of common
cause on behalf of "the creation". The National Association of
Evangelicals, for example, has become increasingly open to
environmental defense, including concerns about global warming. This
welcome development is based on precisely the switch from "dominion"
to "stewardship" that Wilson advocates. Nor is it likely to be unique.
I would bet that somewhere - even in that Heart of Darkness that
constitutes the Bush Administration - there beats at least some
sensitivity to preserving the Earth's natural treasures.

"However the tensions eventually play out between our opposing
worldviews", Wilson observes to his imaginary pastor at the end of The
Creation, "however science and religion wax and wane in the minds of
men, there remains the earthborn, yet transcendental, obligation we
are both morally bound to share".

Amen.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,665,Biology-and-Bull***,David-P-Barash

Books Discussed in this Essay:

* Religion Explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought,
by Pascal Boyer. (Basic Books, 2002)

* The Language of God: a scientist presents evidence for belief, by
Francis Collins. (The Free Press, 2006)

* The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

* Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C.
Dennett. (Viking Press, 2006)

* Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. (Knopf, 2006)

* Evolving God: a provocative view of the origins of religion, by
Barbara King. (Doubleday, 2007)

* Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion, by L. A.
Kirkpatrick. Guilford Publications, 2005.

* Evolution and Christian Faith: reflections of an evolutionary
biologist, by Joan Roughgarden. (Island Press, 2006)

* The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the
search for god, by Carl Sagan. (The Penguin Press, 2006)

* Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
by David Sloan Wilson. (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

* The Creation: an appeal to save life on earth, by Edward. O. Wilson.
(W. W. Norton, 2006)

* Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of
belief, by Lewis Wolpert. (W. W. Norton, 2007)

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