Worlds leading living atheist see's America as slipping back into the dark ages

[Guest guest]

The atheist

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why

God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America

has slipped back into the Dark Ages.

 

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/index.html

 

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By Gordy Slack

 

 

April 28, 2005 | Richard Dawkins is the world's most

famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also

the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist.

Publication of his 1976 book, " The Selfish Gene, "

thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome,

irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The

book provoked everything from outrage to glee by

arguing that natural selection worked its creative

powers only through genes, not species or individuals.

Humans are merely " gene survival machines, " he

asserted in the book.

 

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory

in such subsequent books as " The Blind Watchmaker, "

" Unweaving the Rainbow " and " Climbing Mount

Improbable. " His recent work, " The Ancestor's Tale, "

traces human lineage back through time, stopping to

ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

 

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural

selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a

new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1.

Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he

suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who

was on the opposite side of a British political

debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins

kept his hands at his side and said, " You, sir, are an

ignorant bigot. "

 

 

" The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of

Evolution "

 

By Richard Dawkins

 

Houghton Mifflin

673 pages

Nonfiction

 

 

Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of

the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford

University, a position created for him in 1995 by

Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this

year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British

television to make a documentary about the destructive

role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled

" The Root of All Evil. "

 

I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance

International annual conference in Los Angeles, where

he presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard

Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During

our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as

gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp

white shirt and soft blazer.

 

Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any

questions at all about its validity?

 

It's often said that because evolution happened in the

past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct

evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's

rather like a detective coming on the scene of a

crime, obviously after the crime has been committed,

and working out what must have happened by looking at

the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the

clues are a billionfold.

 

There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes

throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein

sequences, of morphological characters that have been

analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the

idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The

distribution of species on islands and continents

throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if

evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in

space and in time are exactly what you would expect if

evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all

pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing

in the wrong direction.

 

British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what

would constitute evidence against evolution, famously

said, " Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian. " They've

never been found. Nothing like that has ever been

found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But

all the fossils that have been found are in the right

place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the

fossil record. There's nothing wrong with that. Why

shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at

all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong

place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution.

Evolution is a fact.

 

Still, so many people resist believing in evolution.

Where does the resistance come from?

 

It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from

bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the

idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated

theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded,

primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is

at present undergoing an epidemic in the United

States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the

United States.

 

My American friends tell me that you are slipping

towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very

disagreeable for the very large number of educated,

intelligent and right-thinking people in America.

Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered

by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

 

But the broad direction of history is toward

enlightenment, and so I think that what America is

going through at the moment will prove to be a

temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the

future. My advice would be, Don't despair, these

things pass.

 

You delve into agnosticism in " The Ancestor's Tale. "

How does it differ from atheism?

 

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism

because you can neither prove nor disprove the

existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a

weak position. It is true that you can't disprove

anything but you can put a probability value on it.

There's an infinite number of things that you can't

disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit

around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless

there is some positive reason to think that they do

exist.

 

Believing in God is like believing in a teapot

orbiting Mars?

 

Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about

everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world

seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine

creator. But the philosopher David Hume already

realized three centuries ago that this was a bad

argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You

can't statistically explain improbable things like

living creatures by saying that they must have been

designed because you're still left to explain the

designer, who must be, if anything, an even more

statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can

never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can

only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is

explained by a designer but that's because the

designer himself, the engineer, is explained by

natural selection.

 

Those who embrace " intelligent design " -- the idea

that living cells are too complex to have been created

by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible

with the existence of God.

 

There is just no evidence for the existence of God.

Evolution by natural selection is a process that works

up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are

easy to explain. The engineer or any other living

thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable

by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of

evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary

biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the

illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever

come into the universe anywhere.

 

So why do we insist on believing in God?

 

From a biological point of view, there are lots of

different theories about why we have this

extraordinary predisposition to believe in

supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child

mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible

to infection the same way a computer is. In order to

be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey

whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it

vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs

that say, " Spread me, copy me, pass me on. " Once a

viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop

it.

 

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural

selection to obey and believe what parents and other

adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that

child brains should be susceptible to being taught

what to do and what to believe by adults. But this

necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas,

useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances

and other religious customs, will also be passed down

the generations. The child brain is very susceptible

to this kind of infection. And it also spreads

sideways by cross infection when a charismatic

preacher goes around infecting new minds that were

previously uninfected.

 

You've said that raising children in a religious

tradition may even be a form of abuse.

 

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with

religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child.

I find it very odd that in our civilization we're

quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4

years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these

children are much too young to know what they think

about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream

of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child.

And yet, for some reason we make a privileged

exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it

would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.

 

 

You are working on a new book tentatively called " The

God Delusion. " Can you explain it?

 

A delusion is something that people believe in despite

a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely

distinguishable from childhood delusions like the

" imaginary friend " and the bogeyman under the bed.

Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and

not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The

word " delusion " also carries negative connotations,

and religion has plenty of those.

 

 

" The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of

Evolution "

 

By Richard Dawkins

 

Houghton Mifflin

673 pages

Nonfiction

 

What are its negative connotations?

 

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no

evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between

incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned

argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of

those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead,

disagreements are settled by other means which, in

extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists

disagree among themselves but they never fight over

their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go

out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of

philosophers, historians and literary critics.

 

But you don't do that if you just know your holy book

is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that

his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up

to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be

persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder

religious zealots throughout history have resorted to

torture and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy

wars and purges and pogroms, to the Inquisition and

the burning of witches.

 

What are the dark sides of religion today?

 

Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11,

the Northern Ireland " troubles, " genocide, which turns

out to be " credicide " in Yugoslavia, the subversion of

American science education, oppression of women in

Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic

Church, which thinks you can't be a valid priest

without testicles.

 

Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell

felt that the religious worldview would fade as

science and reason emerged. Why hasn't it?

 

That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued

in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in

the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We're seeing a

rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning

theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in

the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle:

Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very

large numbers of people in the United States and in

Europe who don't to that worldview are

caught in the middle.

 

Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush

and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of

faith and violence against the side of reason and

discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are

right and the other is evil. Each believes that when

he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if

he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the

next world would be even swifter. The delusional " next

world " is welcome to both of them. This world would be

a much better place without either of them.

 

Does religion contribute to the violence of Islamic

extremists? Christian extremists?

 

Of course it does. From the cradle, they are brought

up to revere martyrs and to believe they have a fast

track to heaven. With their mother's milk they imbibe

hatred of heretics, apostates and followers of rival

faiths.

 

I don't wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that

are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing

the killing. What I do suggest is that in places like

Northern Ireland, religion was the only available

label by which people could indulge in the human

weakness for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant

murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant,

they're not playing out doctrinal disagreements about

transubstantiation.

 

What is going on is more like a vendetta. It was one

of their lot's grandfathers who killed one of our

lot's grandfathers, and so we're getting our revenge.

The " their lot " and " our lot " is only defined by

religion. In other parts of the world it might be

defined by color, or by language, but in so many parts

of the world it isn't, it's defined by religion.

That's true of the conflicts among Croats and the

Serbs and Bosnians -- that's all about religion as

labels.

 

The grotesque massacres in India at the time of

partition were between Hindus and Muslims. There was

nothing else to distinguish them, they were racially

the same. They only identified themselves as " us " and

the others as " them " by the fact that some of them

were Hindus and some of them were Muslims. That's what

the Kashmir dispute is all about. So, yes, I would

defend the view that religion is an extremely potent

label for hostility. That has always been true and it

continues to be true to this day.

 

How would we be better off without religion?

 

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we

are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the

privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each

one of us enjoys through having been being born. An

astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who

could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny

minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you

have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous

desire for a second one. The world would be a better

place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It

would also be a better place if morality was all about

doing good to others and refraining from hurting them,

rather than religion's morbid obsession with private

sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

 

Are there environmental costs of a religious

worldview?

 

There are many religious points of view where the

conservation of the world is just as important as it

is to scientists. But there are certain religious

points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic

religions, people actually believe that because they

read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation,

the world is going to come to an end some time soon.

People who believe that say, " We don't need to bother

about conserving forests or anything else because the

end of the world is coming anyway. " A few decades ago

one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can't

laugh. These people are in power.

 

 

Unlike other accounts of the evolution of life, " The

Ancestor's Tale " starts at the present and works back.

Why did you decide to tell the story in reverse?

 

The most important reason is that if you tell the

evolution story forwards and end up with humans, as

it's humanly normal to do so because people are

interested in themselves, it makes it look as though

the whole of evolution were somehow aimed at humanity,

which of course it wasn't. One could aim anywhere,

like at kangaroos, butterflies or frogs. We're all

contemporary culmination points, for the moment, in

evolution.

Which French author wrote the original novel The

Phantom of the Opera?

 

 

 

If you go backward, however, no matter where you start

in this huge tree of life, you always converge at the

same point, which is the origin of life. So that was

the main reason for structuring the book the way I

did. It gave me a natural goal to head toward -- the

origin of life -- no matter where I started from. Then

I could legitimately start with humans, which people

are interested in.

 

 

" The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of

Evolution "

 

By Richard Dawkins

 

People like to trace their ancestry. One of the most

common types of Web sites, after ones about sex, is

one's family history. When people trace the ancestry

of that name, they normally stop at a few hundred

years. I wanted to go back 4,000 million years.

 

The idea of going back towards a particular goal

called to my mind the notion of pilgrimage as a kind

of literary device. So I very vaguely modeled the book

on Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales, " where the pilgrims

start off as a band of human pilgrims walking backward

to discover our ancestors. We are successively joined

by other pilgrims -- the chimpanzee pilgrims at 5

million years, then the gorilla pilgrims, then the

orangutan pilgrims. Starting with humans, there are

only about 39 such rendezvous points as you go back in

time. It's a rather surprising fact. Rendezvous 39 is

where we meet the bacteria pilgrims.

 

The idea that evolution could be " random " seems to

frighten people. Is it random?

 

This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If it was

random, then of course it couldn't possibly have given

rise to the fantastically complicated and elegant

forms that we see. Natural selection is the important

force that drives evolution. Natural selection is

about as non-random a force as you could possibly

imagine. It can't work unless there is some sort of

variation upon which to work. And the source of

variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the

sense that it is not directed specifically toward

improvement. It is natural selection that directs

evolution toward improvement. Mutation is random in

that it's not directed toward improvement.

 

The idea that evolution itself is a random process is

a most extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it's

deliberately put about maliciously or whether these

people honestly believe such a preposterous absurdity.

Of course evolution isn't random. It is driven by

natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.

 

Is there an emotional side to the intellectual

enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?

 

Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a scientist

who calls himself or herself religious, you'll often

find that that's what they mean. You often find that

by " religious " they do not mean anything supernatural.

They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to

the natural world that you've described. Einstein had

it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word

" God " to describe it, which has led to a great deal of

misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I

have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of

many scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious

feeling. And there are those who wish to call it

religious and who therefore are annoyed when a

scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, " No,

you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can't

be an atheist. " That's a confusion of language.

 

Some scientists say that removing religion or God from

their life would leave it meaningless, that it's God

that gives meaning to life.

 

" Unweaving the Rainbow " specifically attacks the idea

that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview

makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the

scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is

almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly

privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few

decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can

understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And

those of us fortunate enough to be living today are

even more privileged than those of earlier times. We

have the benefit of those earlier centuries of

scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own,

we have the privilege of knowing far more than past

centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any

schoolchild could tell him today. That's the kind of

privileged century in which we live. That's what gives

my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite,

and that it's the only life I've got, makes me all the

more eager to get up each morning and set about the

business of understanding more about the world into

which I am so privileged to have been born.

 

Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer

but given genetic technologies, our descendants will

be. What does this mean about the future of evolution?

 

It's an interesting thought that in some remote time

in the future, people may look back on the 20th and

21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time

when evolution stopped being an undirected force and

became a design force. Already, for the past few

centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have

in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals

like pigs and cows and chickens. That's increasing and

we're getting more technologically clever at that by

manipulating not just the selection part of evolution

but also the mutation part. That will be very

different; one of the great features of biological

evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.

 

In general, evolution is a blind process. That's why I

called my book " The Blind Watchmaker. " Evolution never

looks to the future. It never governs what happens now

on the basis on what will happen in the future in the

way that human design undoubtedly does. But now it is

possible to breed a new kind of pig, or chicken, which

has such and such qualities. We may even have to pass

that pig through a stage where it is actually less

good at whatever we want to produce -- making long

bacon racks or something -- but we can persist because

we know it'll be worth it in the long run. That never

happened in natural evolution; there was never a

" let's temporarily get worse in order to get better,

let's go down into the valley in order to get over to

the other side and up onto the opposite mountain. " So

yes, I think it well may be that we're living in a

time when evolution is suddenly starting to become

intelligently designed.

 

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