A RESPONSE TO THE GOD DELUSION

by
Jim Sexton
(c) 2010
 INTRODUCTION

In 1903, on a train bound for Lourdes, France, two fateful passengers met. One
was a woman named Marie Bailly who was suffering from the final stages of tubercular
peritonitis. The other was Alexis Carrel, a skeptic, surgeon, biologist, and Nobel
Laureate of Medicine. Upon hearing of the woman's plight, Carrel offered to examine
her himself and personally confirmed what two doctors had already told her: she was
doomed; there was nothing medicine could do for her. Carrel wasn't even sure she would
survive the rest of the trip to Lourdes. He had in fact seen a number of similar cases in
his own practice and believed that something as ineffectual as the power of suggestion
that she might find in her belief in the possibility of a miraculous healing at Lourdes was
totally incapable of reversing what was clearly an organic disease in its final stage. She
was in far too bad a shape for a little wishful thinking and the placebo effect to be of any
help. Her heartbeat was irregular and racing, her breathing rapid and shallow, and she
was very, very weak. Upon arriving at Lourdes, Carrel continued to observe her as she
was wheeled down to the Grotto where the shepherd Bernadette had seen visions of the
Virgin Mary. The poor woman was lying motionless, her heart was racing and her face
was turning blue. Carrel looked around the grotto, which was illuminated by hundreds of
votive candles, its' entrance lined with rosaries and discarded crutches, and then glanced
back at Marie Bailly. Right before his eyes, she was slowly rallying. Carrel, like any
good skeptic, assumed that he was hallucinating. Such a thing was "impossible"! But, he
felt that the hallucination itself was scientifically interesting and that it might help explain
the alleged cases of miraculous healing as the mere delusions of uncritical observers. It
was 2:40 PM. Ms. Bailly's face continued to change, the pain leaving her eyes, her
distended abdomen slowly flattening out, her stomach returning to normal. Poor Carrel
felt as if he were going mad. By 3:00 PM the distension in her abdomen had completely
disappeared. By four o'clock she had improved enough to talk and move her limbs
without pain. At seven that evening, when Carrel visited her in the hospital to inspect
her, she was sitting up in bed, the gleam back in her eye, the color back in her checks.
Her abdomen was normal and the hard tumor masses Carrel had personally seen and
touched only a few hours ago were completely gone. This was no hallucination. God
had clearly reached out and cured Marie Bailly through the intercession of the Blessed
Virgin Mary! And many other similar cases of miraculous healings at Lourdes have been
well documented and approved as genuine!
So, are you impressed? Are you convinced? Unless you were already one of the
Catholic Faithful, I'm guessing that you are not convinced, even if you were impressed to
one degree or another. In fact, I suspect that you might even have a number of
reservations about this story. And if you're one of those people who thinks highly of The
God Delusion, I'd bet good money that right now you are angry and hardly able to
contain yourself. You are, to say the least, skeptical.
And that's good. That's very good. A clear thinking and critically minded person
will note first that even if the reversal of Marie Bailly's condition did in fact happen as
described, there is absolutely no logical necessity to jump to the conclusion that it was
because of "God." And I agree (yes, the story was a setup—I'm trying to make a point—
but we will return to the story later). The next issue the skeptic might press is to question
where and what is the "evidence" for all these "similar cases of miraculous healings" that
have been "well documented". You want to see the so-called proof for yourself, don't
you? You have doubts that the facts were properly interpreted—nay, more—you have
doubts that the supposed facts are even accurate. Right? I mean, so far all I've delivered
is what you might call an anecdote, and arguing from anecdotal evidence is rather weak,
is it not? So-called miraculous cures must be happening all the time around the world.
The body is a very complicated thing, after all. If I were a televangelist, I could, as
Dawkins points out in Unweaving the Rainbow (p. 149), claim on air that God would
answer my prayers and produce ex nihilo a miraculous healing between now and next
weeks broadcast (Dawkins' example is different but the principle is the same). "Next
week," I could confidently claim, "someone will call in to witness the power of God and
Jesus Christ, delivering to our wondering ears a tale of miraculous healing." And if the
viewing audience is large enough, the chance that some more or less "miraculous"
healing (or something interpreted to be so) would take place over a seven day period
might be very, very good. In fact, we might find if we studied it statistically that the
chance of such a thing not happening is rather small, and that it would be a good bet for a
televangelist preacher to make.
Similarly, for the case of Lourdes we could argue that if many tens of thousands
of people make a pilgrimage to Lourdes every year, chances are very good that there will
be at least a handful of seemingly "miraculous" cures, but, clearly, it might be the case
that they would have just happened anyway, especially if you added the unknown x-
factor of the placebo effect and wishful thinking into the mix in some way or another.
Bravo for critical thinking! This is all good stuff to consider. Very, very good. It
is a sign of an active and skeptical mind. I approve.
But . . . I wonder . . . did the reader bring anywhere near the same level of
skepticism and critical thought to bear on any of the anecdotal tales or other
unsubstantiated claims to be found in The God Delusion? Sadly, I suspect that very few
Dawkins-heads1 brought anything close to the same level of skepticism and critical
thinking to their reading of The God Delusion. Because, make no mistake, The God
Delusion is badly in need of some real skepticism—some actual critical enquiry.
Consider, just for starters, the anecdote of Edgardo Mortara, (p. 349) which
begins Chapter 9: the story of a Jewish boy who was forcibly taken from his Jewish
family because their Catholic servant girl had performed an emergency baptism on him
while he was ill. According to the Catholic Church his baptism meant he was a Catholic,
and cannon law forbid a Catholic to be raised by Jews, and thus he was taken away from
his family and raised by the Church. The Papacy would not budge on the issue and
maintained their stance in the face of worldwide outrage.
Dawkins specifically labels this an "anecdote" right in the first sentence, and
states that he is not implying that anything like this awful story could happen today
(although, it certainly does happen, just not in the same trappings nor for the same
reasons). Dawkins is telling this story because he claims that it "sheds a pitiless light" on

                                                                                                               
1  Do you find the term "Dawkins-head" to be insulting? If so, did you also find the term "Faith-head" to be insulting as
well?
present-day religious attitudes towards children. OK, fine, but this leads one to expect
something more substantial in the way of evidence later on. Anecdotes are great
rhetorical devices, and I have no objection to their appropriate use, but a single anecdote
does not a case make. An anecdote only sheds light on something if the general case of
which it is a concrete example is, in fact, true—i.e. statistically significant for our
purposes here. Dawkins sprinkles impressive sounding claims over the next several
pages, saying that this story "was by no means unusual in Italy at the time," and "Edgardo
Mortara's history was entirely typical of many others," and ". . . such stories were
distressingly frequent in nineteenth-century Italy . . . ," and (my favorite) ". . . this story
of the Italian Inquisition and its attitude to children is particularly revealing of the
religious mind, and the evils that arise specifically because it is religious," but you will
look in vain for any footnotes, any actual supporting evidence of all the many other cases
similar to Edgardo Mortara's. It's just not there. Maybe it's true. Maybe the evidence is
in David I. Kertzer's book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. It certainly wouldn't
surprise me if it were true—but either way it's just one more among hundreds of things in
The God Delusion that needs looking into in my opinion. Let's assume there are
additional supporting cases like Edgardo's, and move on.
The much more important point to enquire about is Dawkins' claim that this story
is particularly revealing of the evils that arise in the minds of those who are religious,
precisely because they are religious. The anecdote of Edgardo Mortara's purpose was to
shed light on the form and shape that these evils will take, whatever the particulars,
whatever the age in which they appear. Armed with this powerful searchlight we will
more easily apprehend and understand the evidence of Dawkins' claim regarding the evils
that arise specifically from the religious mind. That was the point of the anecdote. It
wasn't meant to be evidential. It was meant to exemplify, hence the lack of footnotes
referencing all the other similar cases in those days. OK. Great. I'm on board with that.
So, let's just continue on from the Mortara case and see what we find in the very
next section. Here, Dawkins is making the case that Christian children who are taught the
doctrine of Hell and Damnation are suffering psychological abuse that is significantly
worse than even sexual abuse at the hands of a priest (of which, however, far too much is
made today, he asserts). I hope I don't need to point out that this is a very serious and
sweeping claim. I was impressed with his chutzpah here, I have to say. Not a popular
argument to make, after all, and counter to most people's first impressions (certainly
counter to mine), but I'm always happy to listen to something that runs counter to the
general prejudices and trends of the time provided it's more than just bald assertion. So,
what is the evidence that Dawkins offer us? Because the evidence needs to be solid and
forceful to justify such a statement. Well, Dawkins himself was the victim of a religious
teacher "whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety" and it was
an "embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience" (TGD, p. 355—unfortunately there
is no discussion of the damage Dawkins' religious upbringing inflicted on him personally,
not here, nor anywhere else in this chapter, despite the fact that the logic of his arguments
would seem to require it). Next, we hear the story of an off-the-cuff remark made after a
lecture in Dublin where in response to a question from the audience, Dawkins replied that
as horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-
term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place,
and (wouldn't you know it) the audience applauded. OK, yes, he admits, they weren't
representative of the country at large, presumably, being mostly Dublin intellectuals. But
. . . later . . . he received a letter from an American woman in her forties who had been
brought up Roman Catholic, and to whom two unpleasant things had happened growing
up. First she was sexually abused by her parish priest in his car, and around the same
time, she was given to understand that a little school friend of hers was burning in hell
because her friend had the misfortune to be Protestant when she died tragically and
unexpectedly. According to this American woman, the sexual fondling was just "yucky"
and didn't have any long term consequences, but she spent many a night terrified that the
people she loved would go to hell. It gave her nightmares, and her adult view on the
matter is that the second unpleasant thing to happen to her in her childhood (fear of Hell)
was by far the worse. Dawkins then goes on to mention Pastor Keenan Roberts and his
"Hell Houses" designed to—literally—put the fear of hell into children. Certainly, this is
an example of a direct attempt to psychologically impress and scar children, but there is
no discussion of how many of these Hell Houses there are, nor how many people are in
Pastor Roberts congregation, nor of what percentage of parents send their children to
these Hell Houses, nor how many other congregations use such techniques. But, don't
worry, there's no need to question it; Dawkins himself assures us that "We cannot write
off Pastor Roberts as an extremist wingnut. Like Ted Haggard, he is mainstream in
today's America." The fear of Hell can be very real, he tells us. In fact, he received a
letter from a woman who, despite her intellectual realization that evolution is a far
superior explanation of the world, is still plagued by a deep down fear of hell fire, despite
what her logical mind may tell her. She wrote to Dawkins to get the name of a
psychotherapist he had mentioned on air who deals with treating such disorders. The
psychotherapist herself is the next piece of evidence. Jill Mytton was a childhood
member of an odious religious sect known as The Exclusive Bretheren, and was brought
up to be terrified of hell, and even today the recollection of it still has the power to affect
her. Then there's a digression into how devastating it can be for atheists to come out of
the closet, so to speak; and Dawkins mentions another letter he has received, then
mentions a comedian whose routine turns this subject material from her own life into
comedy, then goes on to mention a preacher who converted from devout fundamentalism
to atheism and wrote a book about it, and then he talks of two professors who wrote
letters to him on a similar subject. Finally, he mentions how in a televised conversation
he asked the psychologist Jill Mytton to compare the trauma of a child brought up to
really believe in hell to the trauma of sexual abuse. She answered "That's a very difficult
question . . . I think there are a lot of similarities actually, because it is about abuse of
trust; it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and able to relate to the
world in the normal way . . . it's a form of denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self
in both cases."
Despite the fact that she doesn't really answer the question as to which is worse,
her testimony, as a psychologist acquainted both personally and professionally with the
Exclusive Bretheren and the effects of its indoctrination on its members, carries
somewhat more weight in my opinion than any of the earlier anecdotes, but even so,
assessing the quality of her testimony would only be possible if we knew the depth and
breadth of her experience. Does she only treat victims of really odious groups like the
Exclusive Bretheren? Or even only just victims of that one group? How many people has
she treated? Does she have experience with victims of sexual abuse? Because, after all,
that is the question she is being asked, and that is the case Dawkins is trying to make.
You can't properly compare two things if you have only limited knowledge of one of
them. More importantly, what would she say about the typical upbringing of a child of
Christian parents? My own experience and that of my wife, friends and most of my
acquaintances would suggest that the fear of hell is not taught or is only rarely taught.
This is, of course, only anecdotal—if I lived in the so-called Bible Belt, it would surely
be different—but that's the point: we need more than anecdotes to reasonably decide such
a question as this. We need to know what percentage of Christian families indoctrinate
children with the fear of Hell? Isn't that overwhelmingly important information to have
in regards to Dawkins' argument here? Yet, in place of actual verified statistics of the
nature of the indoctrination of beliefs of American Christians, especially as they relate to
hellfire and damnation, Dawkins gives us yet another letter (from a "concerned American
colleague") warning that Europeans need to know that there is a "traveling theo-freak
show" here in America that might soon be mainstream in a true American theocracy. Not
really the same as modern objectively gathered demographic information, is it? But, oh, I
forgot: we also have the single statistic (p. 358) that the particularly appalling Pastor Ted
Haggard is president of the thirty-million strong National Association of Evangelicals. I
spent a few minutes on the NAE website. (Pastor Ted is no longer president, by the
way). The NAE  represents "more than 45,000 local churches from over 40 different
denominations" (emphasis mine) and can thus hardly be considered as a unified body in
regards to its beliefs and agendas, certainly not with regard to the emphasis placed on
hellfire and damnation in any case. The NAE also states "We affirm the principles of
religious freedom and liberty of conscience, which are both historically and logically at
the foundation of the American experiment. They are properly called the First Freedom
and are now vested in the First Amendment." So, not an organization seeking an
American Theocracy, then.
There are many different shades of differences regarding the "doctrine" of Hell.
We need to differentiate between the mere mentioning of Hell as a place and possible
outcome (probably almost universal among Christian denominations), from the
indoctrination of it as a certain and terrifying outcome for all but the select few. From
what I've seen, the hell taught in today's churches is so watered down (i.e. whitewashed)
and presented as so improbable (e.g.—"In order to go to hell you have to, at the time of
your death, with full awareness of your choice, deny God and refuse His grace—and who
would do that?) that I suspect it instills little systematic fear in children. Surely, if the
psychological damage due to fear of hell and damnation is so great as to be worse even
than sexual abuse, psychologists everywhere must have experience and knowledge of
this. Where are the polls of all the many practicing psychologists? Why is there no
political dialogue about—and outrage over—this mainstream psychological scarring?
These are honest questions on my part! They aren't just rhetorical. They need answers if
the argument presented is to stand. It is within the rights of someone—nay it is even their
duty—to critically examine things and ask for supporting evidence. Maybe even the
minimum version of hell does instill systematic fear in children. Or maybe not. I don't
know. I raise these challenges not because I am trying to write-off the thesis but because
I want to know the truth and if we want that—if we want to have more than opinions on
the subject—we'll need to do much better than the material presented in The God
Delusion in support of this claim. What Dawkins' gives us to support his exemplifying
anecdote is merely more anecdotes! Anyone can come up with a fair number of
anecdotes (or expert testimony, even) in support of almost any argument, and they might
well be rhetorically compelling, but it is not scientific to generalize from a single data
point or even from a dozen, unless you can show that the number of data points that you
have is statistically significant.
I wouldn't be surprised if at this point many Dawkins enthusiasts suspect that I'm
some sort of meme-ridden faith-head who simply hates Dawkins and The God Delusion
because I'm huwt dat anywon wud challwenge my faiwth. Sob.
Not so. (Although, would it matter one whit in regards to the arguments I made
above?) In point of fact my own opinions on the Christian doctrines of hell, damnation,
and salvation are somewhat in-line with Dawkins' views. If I had children, and if anyone
tried to "teach" them about hell or salvation, I would have a very negative reaction
indeed. I would carefully shield my children from all such Christian notions, especially
from the Christian denigration and degradation of sex, sexuality, pleasure, the body, the
senses, and the worldly. I am no Christian. And all those stories that Dawkins' tells in
Chapter 9 of The God Delusion make me angry and sad. I do not doubt them! Yet, as
much as I value emotions and feelings and as much as I rely on these functions to help
guide my moral understanding and my actions, I refuse to confuse them with reason, and
I refuse to allow them to force my reason to accept a general claim that is insufficiently
supported by the evidence. Extreme claims and extreme positions are intellectually
exciting and energetic. People tend to gravitate towards them. This naturally places
careful reasoning from solid evidence and the qualified claims that result from this at a
rhetorical disadvantage relative to extreme positions confidently asserted and backed by
emotionally powerful anecdotes, yet, I hope I need not have to point out that this in no
way addresses the truth value of either. And have you really considered just how extreme
Dawkins' claims are here and in the rest of this chapter of The God Delusion? Can you
really, with a straight face, seriously claim that any child raised as a Catholic suffers a
fate worse than being the victim of sexual abuse? That's just beyond the pale, over the
top, out-freaking-rageous. If you qualify it a bit, and say that any child raised in fear
suffers a fate worse than being the victim of sexual abuse, then I think it's arguable, but
you can't simply equate this with a Christian upbringing! It simply isn't true in my
opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the burden of proof rests squarely on those trying to
make this connection, and they have manifestly failed to meet that burden here.
"So what?" you might ask; if this is the worst that I can say about The God
Delusion I might have better spared myself the effort of writing and posting this
response. Well, I would reply to this with two points: first, an honest and thoughtful
discussion of a book is always a good thing. It spurs you on to more questions, further
reading and research, and gets you thinking. My intention here is not to be a partisan for
religion, but rather is to be an interlocutor in the discussion generated by The God
Delusion. Second, my consideration of the Edgardo Mortara anecdote and chapter 9 was
only, as I said, just for starters. This is, after all, the Introduction. The points I wanted to
make about chapter 9 of The God Delusion did not require a lengthy preceding
discussion, and are closer to the surface of things, rather than the heart of the matter. I do
have more important points to make, but most of them will be made later on. However,
not all of them. I have two more things I'd like to talk about in my introduction. I'd like
to touch on Richard Dawkins' reprehensible drive-by character assassination of C. G.
Jung, and his gross misrepresentation of Stephen J. Gould's Rocks of Ages.
If you go to any college or university and find a humanities professor of some
kind—perhaps even a religions professor, or an anthropologist or a professor of
psychology or philosophy—and present to them Dawkins' spectrum of human judgment
about the existence of a personal creator God like the God of the evangelical Christians,
and run through the seven milestones along the spectrum, from 1 (complete and utter
certainty of the existence of God) to 7,(complete and utter certainty of the non-existence
of God) and ask them to pick a representative figure for milestone 1 from Western
civilization or popular culture, living or dead, what do you think the chance is that that
professor would chose Carl Jung? If you're not sure, let me help you: almost zero.
Anyone who knows anything about Carl Jung knows that he was not a man of "faith" as
the word is used here, yet Dawkins claims:
It is in the nature of faith that one is capable, like Jung, of holding a belief without adequate
reason to do so (Jung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded
with a loud bang.) (TGD, p.74)

When I first read this part of The God Delusion I was totally clueless as to where in the
world Jung would have ever said, when asked if he believed in God, that "I do not
believe, I know." One of my best friends is writing her thesis on Jung, so I asked her
about this, and she thought that maybe it came from an interview. I went online and to
the library looking for transcripts and books of interviews Jung had given, but had no
luck finding this quote and, needless to say, Dawkins doesn't attribute it. Then, as I was
sitting in front of my computer, stumped, a horrible thought came to me, and I was like
"Oh, no. No. It can't be that simple, can it?" and I typed some words like "Jung
Interview God don't believe know" (or whatever they were—I don't remember the exact
search words I used) and do you know what popped up? A You-Tube clip. A 28 second
You-Tube clip. In case you've never seen it, here is a transcript of those 28 seconds:
INTERVIEWER: And did he make you attend church regularly?
JUNG: That was quite natural. Everybody went to Church on Sunday.
INTERVIEWER: And did you believe in God?
JUNG: Oh yes.
INTERVIEWER: Do you now believe in God?
JUNG: Now? [long pause] Difficult to answer. [pause] I know. I needn't . . . I don't need to
believe, I know.

Leaving aside the point that it is impossible to tell in what sense he is using the words
"believe" and "know" from this little snippet of an interview, and that Dawkins was thus
very unwise to assume he knew what Jung meant, there is another snippet from this same
interview that is also available on You-Tube:
INTERVIEWER: Do you yourself believe that death is practically the end, or do you believe-
JUNG: Well I can't say . . . you see the word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I
must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing. And when I know it, I don't
need to believe it. If I . . . I don't allow myself, for instance, to believe a thing just for the sake
of believing it. I can't believe it. But when there are sufficient reasons to form a certain
hypothesis I shall accept these reasons, naturally. I shall say we have to reckon with the
possibility of so and so.
Now, please, tell me, how hard would it have been for Richard Dawkins to do just the
slightest bit of research to discover that what Jung meant when he said "I know" (I have
evidence) was the exact opposite of what Dawkins assumed (I don't need evidence)? For
the record, these two You-Tube snippets come from the October 1959 BBC "Face to
face" interview with John Freeman, given when Jung was 84 years old.
In any case, the question still remains, of course, what sort of evidence did Jung
think he had regarding God, and more importantly, what sort of "God" was it? Here are
three quotes that will help us start to answer these questions, taken from the "Matter of
Heart" DVD on Jung, which has the BBC interview on it, other interviews with Jung, and
with his friends and colleagues. The first is a quote from Jung, and the next two are from
colleagues:
I never could claim that any kind of human work could reveal something about the nature of god
or about his existence. I only know that the idea of god is a pattern, an age old pattern, a
primitive pattern, that always has been, and never lost what we call its numinosity. It is always
there and it still plays the same role as it always did. We can establish the existence of that
pattern. And that is for our practical purposes enough.
He always said he did not wish to discuss the existence of God because this was a metaphysical
question which he was not prepared to go into, but from the psychological point of view, he
knew that the god-image was within oneself.
For Jung religion was an attitude. For Jung religion was an attitude to life, and had absolutely
nothing to do with any kind of creator. And he was actually ambivalent about creeds, because
on the one hand he said that a creed would stop you from having an experience, and since he
believed that religion was not only an attitude but had to do with experience, personal
experience, if you block it by a creed, obviously you can't have an experience. But at the same
time he also thought that a creed might be a tremendously important framework for someone
whose ego was too weak to stand the horror, the void, of complete loneliness.

I don't want to get side-tracked into a long discussion of Jung and his actual positions on
things and his psychological ideas here, but this is certainly enough to see that Jung has
very different conceptions of these things than, say, a Fundamentalist Christian. He quite
simply does not properly represent milestone 1 on the spectrum of belief in God's
existence, and Dawkins' use of him here is an egregious error.
Moving on, what about Dawkins' presentation of Stephen J. Gould's "NOMA"
position as set forth in Rocks of Ages? Surely, Dawkins must have fairly presented
Gould's position, even if he disagreed with it, right? Sadly, no. Dawkins' coverage of
NOMA is as farcical and ridiculous as his use of Jung as the ultimate faith-head blind-
believer. His discussion of Stephen J. Gould's book Rock of Ages seriously distorts and
misrepresents both the book as a whole, and NOMA in particular, and has probably
caused a lot of people who actually do espouse what NOMA really is to disparage Rocks
of Ages (despite the fact that they've never read it) because they know they disagree with
such a stupid proposal as NOMA; no need to waste time on such nonsense. And this is
really quite a shame, as the book is well worth reading, despite Dawkins' assertion
(probably accurate) that it is one of Gould's less admired books (but keep in mind that
Stephen J. Gould is arguably one of the best science writers of his era). Dawkins picks a
single—and in my opinion far from sufficiently articulated and elaborated—paragraph
from the preamble of the book as the formulation for NOMA, and then says:
 This sounds terrific – right up until you give it a moment's thought. What are these ultimate
questions in whose presence religion is an honored guest and science must respectfully slink
away? . . . I would prefer to say that if indeed they lie beyond science, they most certainly lie
beyond the province of theologians as well (I doubt that philosophers would thank Martin Rees
for lumping theologians in with them).
What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?
[. . .]
[. . .] But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and
bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand
religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we
happen to have been brought up? . . . Or should we pick and chose among all the world's
religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what
criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious
moralities, why not cut the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
[. . .]
I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in
Rocks of Ages. As I say, we have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an
unworthy but powerful opponent, and I can only think that this is what Gould was doing. (TGD,
pp. 79-81)

Well, Dawkins need not puzzle over the mystery of how Gould could have meant
that we should "cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and bad?" or any other
similar thing, because that is not what Gould wrote and that is not what Gould meant.
That is Dawkins' caricature of what NOMA really is. I can't help but conclude that either
Dawkins was intentionally distorting things, or that he just didn't bother to actually read
Rocks of Ages. Gould specifically addresses the barrage of rhetorical questions that
Dawkins asks of him. Let's just pass from Dawkins' ridiculous distortion of NOMA, to
what Gould actually said:
These questions address moral issues about the value and meaning of life, both in human
form and more widely construed. Their fruitful discussion must proceed under a different
magisterium, far older than science (at least as a formalized inquiry), and dedicated to a quest for
consensus, or at least a clarification of assumptions and criteria, about ethical "ought," rather
than a search for any factual "is" about the material construction of the natural world. This
magisterium of ethical discussion and search for meaning includes several disciplines
traditionally grouped under the humanities—much of philosophy, and part of literature and
history, for example. But human societies have usually centered the discourse of this
magisterium upon an institution called "religion" (and manifesting, under this single name, an
astonishing diversity of approaches, including all possible beliefs about the nature, or existence
for that matter, of divine power; and all possible attitudes to freedom of discussion vs. obedience
to unchangeable tests or doctrines.)
I most emphatically do not argue that ethical people must validate their standards by overt
appeals to religion—for we give several names to the moral discourse of this necessary
magisterium, and we all know that atheists can live in the most firmly principled manner, while
hypocrites can wrap themselves in any flag, including (most prominently) the banners of God
and country. But I do reiterate that religion has occupied the center of this magisterium in the
traditions of most cultures.
Since every one of us must reach some decisions about the rules we will follow in
conducting our own lives . . . and since I trust that no one can be entirely indifferent to the
workings of the world around us . . . all human beings must pay at least rudimentary attention to
both magisteria of religion and science, whatever we chose to name these domains of ethical and
factual inquiry. Mere existence may be sustained by the minimal concern caricatured above.
 But real success—at least in the old-fashioned sense of genuine stature—requires serious
engagement with the deep and difficult issues of both magisteria. The magisteria will not fuse;
so each of us must integrate these distinct components into a coherent view of life. If we
succeed, we gain something truly "more precious than rubies," and dignified by one of the most
beautiful words in any language: wisdom. (Rocks of Ages, pp. 55-58)

Thus, Gould's understanding of NOMA clearly does not mean handing certain
questions over to a certain religious organization, or religious official! And clearly, Gould
means something much broader by the term "religion" than Dawkins does. A fact
Dawkins completely ignores, even while asking us to keep in mind his own preemptive
clarifications of terms early in The God Delusion. Dawkins himself is a de facto
advocate of NOMA and has been since at least 1976 when The Selfish Gene was
published. Consider this excerpt from that book:
This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not
advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not
saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this because I know I am in danger of
being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of
belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that
a human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very
nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it
does not stop it being true. This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would
extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a
society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you
can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because
we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may
then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever
aspired to. (TSG, pp. 2-3)

And also consider this single sentence from The God Delusion: "Similarly, we can all
agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the
least." (TGD, p. 80). This is NOMA! These two quotes are essentially a statement of
NOMA, no matter whether or not Dawkins refers to "NOMA" when making them.
NOMA means that neither ethics, nor morals, nor religious dogma, can adjudicate a
scientific matter, such as the origin and history of life on earth, or the ratio of the
circumference to the diameter of a circle, and similarly, scientific findings about the
natural world cannot dictate moral values or ethics. And please note the exact definition
of the word "adjudicate," for it appears again and again in Gould's discourse on NOMA.
It means "To hear and settle (a case) by judicial procedure"; "To act as a judge." Thus,
NOMA is not saying that there is no discourse, no connection between science and ethics.
Indeed, Gould maintains that each of, as individuals, must integrate the two "magisteria"
if we want to attain wisdom and a coherent view of life.
NOMA is not a political agreement or a bending over backwards to be polite to
religious people. Rather, it is a recognition of a philosophical truth about the relation of
things in one realm (the factual is) to things in another, disparate and incommensurate
realm (the ethical ought). Yes, religious organizations will adhere to or ignore NOMA as
it suits them, but this has no bearing on the status of NOMA as a philosophical principle.
In the same way, some people will act on Pascal's wager, and chose to "believe" in
"God," but these facts have no bearing on the philosophical consideration of actions
based on principle vs. actions based on rewards and punishment, and the higher value
most of us would attribute to the former. In addition, and for similar reasons, NOMA is
not "Permanent Agnosticism in Principle". For, as Dawkins notes (TGD, p. 84), NOMA
would place things like claims of historical miracles squarely in the magisterium of
factual inquiry. Was Jesus resurrected after being dead for three days? Does God
literally exist? These are all questions that fall into the magisterium of science. This
doesn't mean that a specific religious organization must renounce all such claims and
pare its God down to a non-interventionist "NOMA God" (as Dawkins suggests). It
means that the factual miracles, as well as the existence of God, which that religious
organization claims (e.g. Christianity) are completely within the purview of science and
are not exempt from scientific challenge and counter-evidence and ridicule. The God
Delusion does not violate NOMA when it rips the so-called "evidence" for the existence
of God into shreds. On the other hand if The God Delusion promoted a political agenda
of eugenics, for example, and claimed that Evolution and its evidence constituted a moral
mandate to regulate marriages, perform forced sterilizations of certain "undesirable" races
or classes of people, and allow a team of elite scientists to breed the human race, then
that would be a violation of NOMA. The problem that is at the heart of the confusion
and misunderstanding here is that Dawkins is the one who has pared "religion" down, not
Gould. Dawkins has defined "religion" to be of completely supernatural content:
I am aware that critics of religion can be attacked for failing to credit the fertile diversity of
traditions and world-views that have been called religious. Anthropologically informed works,
from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In
God's We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual.
Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility.
But that is not the way of this book. I decry supernaturalism in all its forms, and the most
effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on the form most likely to be familiar to my
readers – the form that impinges most threateningly on all our societies. Most of my readers will
have been reared in one or another of today's three 'great' monotheistic religions (four if you
count Mormonism), all of which trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham,
and it will be convenient to keep this family of traditions in mind throughout the rest of the
book. (TGD, p. 57)

This is his prerogative as an author, of course, but he then must translate terms when
dealing with another author whose definition is different. (If he did, he would have seen
the Gould was, in his terms, talking of the magisteria of ethics and science, not religion
and science). But this Dawkins does not do. And what is worse, he seems to have
confused definition with demonstration. Is all of what goes by the name "religion," past
and present, really just one big "bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual"?
Dawkins cites a few books, waves his hands a few times, and that's it; the matter is
settled. In a book entirely devoted to a consideration of religion, religion is, from the get
go, just baldly asserted to be superstition and nothing more. It's quite breath taking,
really! One thing I can tell you that it is not, however: it is not scientific; it is not
evidence based. We shall return to the question of what "religion" is at the beginning of
the next chapter, but before we do, I would like to briefly return to Gould's Rocks of
Ages.
It is very interesting and instructive to compare Gould's treatment of the weak and
strong anthropic principle with Dawkins own. In discussing two false ways to seek peace
(irenics) between science and religion in the closing chapter of Rocks of Ages Gould talks
about syncretism—the claim that science and religion should fuse to one big, happy
family where the facts of science reinforce and validate the precepts of religion, and
where God shows his hand (and mind) in the workings of nature—as the first such false
way, and why it is a violation of NOMA:
I also feel particularly sensitive about this issue because, as I wrote this book in the summer
of 1998, a deluge of media hype enveloped the syncretist position, as though some startlingly
new and persuasive argument had been formulated, or some equally exciting and transforming
discovery had been made. In fact, absolutely nothing of intellectual novelty had been added, as
the same bad arguments surfaced into a glare of publicity because the J. M. Templton
Foundation, established by its fabulously wealthy eponym to advance the syncretist program
under the guise of more general and catholic (small c) discussion about science and religion,
garnered a splash of media attention by spending 1.4 million bucks to hold a conference in
Berkeley on "science and the spiritual quest."
In a genuine example of true creation ex nihilo—that is, the invention of an issue by fiat of
media reports, rather than by force of argument or content of material—at least three major
sources preached the syncretist gospel in their headlines and vapidly uncritical reports: "Faith
and Reason, Together Again" (The Wall Street Journal, June 12); "Science and Religion:
Bridging the Great Divide" (The New York Times, June 30); and a cover story in Newsweek (July
20) simply titled "Science Finds God." Scientists could only be mystified by this last claim, but
at least we can now be certain about one of God's attributes: he sells newspapers and magazines.
The Times article admitted the intellectual torpor of the proceedings: "A kind of Sunday
school politeness pervaded the meeting, with none of the impassioned confrontations expected
from such an emotionally charged subject . . . The audience politely applauded after each
presentation. But there was little sense of intellectual excitement." But from whence could such
excitement arise in principle? If NOMA holds (and I devote this book to advocating the validity
of this proposition), then facts and explanations developed under the magisterium of science
cannot validate (or deny) the precepts of religion. Indeed, if we look at the so-called arguments
for syncretism, as described in these reports, they all devolve into a series of fuzzy statements
awash in metaphor and illogic. Consider just three examples, not chosen as egregiously silly,
but representative of the standard fare.
1. Wooly metaphor misportrayed as decisive content. [. . .]
2. Clutching at straws based on superficial similarity. [. . .]
3. Plain, old-fashioned illogic. The piece de resistance of modern syncretism, at least in
almost all public accounting I have ever read, lies in the so-called anthropic principle—a notion
with as many definitions as supporters, and which, in my view, is either utterly trivial in its
"weak versions" (the designation of supporters, not my deprecation), or completely illogical in
"strong versions." The Wall Street Journal explains the anthropic principle as "the biggest hint"
of God's presence in the finds of science:
What this means is that complex, carbon-based life—namely us—can exist only in a universe in which the
physical constants have been tuned just so. Take the ratio of gravity to electromagnetism. If gravity were a
tiny bit stronger, wed be pulled apart; if electromagnetism were a tiny bit stronger, we'd fall in on ourselves
like failed souffles.

Yes, but so what? The weak version only tells us that life fits well with nature's laws, and
couldn't exist if the laws were even the tiniest bit different. Interesting, but I see no religious
implications—and, in fairness, neither do most syncretists (thus their own designation as
"weak"). The "strong" version provides my favorite example of illogic in high places. Since
human life couldn't exist if the laws of nature were even a tad different, then the laws must be as
they are because a creating God desired our presence.
This argument reduces to pure nonsense based on the unstated premise—which then destroys
the "strong anthropic principle" by turning it into a classic example of circular reasoning—that
humans arose for good and necessary reasons (and that whatever allowed us to get here must
 therefore exist to fulfill our destiny). Without this premise (which I regard as silly, arrogant, and
utterly unsupported), the strong anthropic principle collapses upon the equal plausibility of this
opposite interpretation: "If the laws of nature were just a tad different, we wouldn't be here.
Right. Some other configuration of matter and energy would then exist, and the universe would
present just as interesting a construction, with all parts conforming to reigning laws of this
different nature. Except that we wouldn't be around to make silly arguments about this alternate
universe. So we wouldn't be here. So what." (I'm glad we are here, by the way—but I don't see
how any argument for God's existence can emerge from my pleasure.) (Gould, pp. 214-220)

Gould then talks about the second way towards a false irenics:
The second irenicist alternative to NOMA . . . requires only a paragraph or two of
commentary because no intellectual argument, but only current (and lamentable) social custom,
fuels the strategy. The syncretists may be silly, but at least they talk and try. The opposite
irenicism of "no offense, please, we're poltically correct" adopts the fully avoidant tactic of never
generating conflict by never talking to each other, or speaking in such muted and meaningless
euphemisms that no content or definition can ever emerge. Sure, we can avoid the language of
racial conflict if we vow never to talk about race. But what then can change, and what can ever
be resolved?
And, yes, we could bring science and religion into some form of coexistence under political
correctness if all scientists promised never to say anything about religion, and all religious
professionals swore that the troublesome S-word would never pass their lips. Contemporary
American culture has actually adopted this unholy contract for many issues that should be
generating healthy debate, and surely cannot ever be brought to a fair conclusion if we don't talk
to each other. Intellectuals can only regard such voluntary suppression of discussion as a
guarantee that tough but resolvable issues will continue to fester and haunt us, and as a sin—I
don't know how else to say this—against the human mind and heart. If we have so little
confidence in our unique mental abilities, and in our intrinsic goodwill, then what indeed is man
(and woman) that anyone should be mindful of us?
NOMA does cherish the separate status of science and religion—regarding each as a
distinctive institution, a rock for all our ages, offering vital contributions to human
understanding. But NOMA rejects the two paths to irenicism on either side of its own
toughminded and insistent search for fruitful dialogue—the false and illogical union of
syncretism, and the perverse proposal of "political correctness" that peace may best be secured
by the "three monkeys" solution of covering ears, eyes, and mouth. (pp. 220-221)

I quoted at such length to illustrate not only Gould's take on the anthropic principle, but
also to refute Dawkins' claim that Gould has taken the art of bending over backwards to
"positively supine lengths" in Rock of Ages. Simply not true. As for the "strong"
anthropic principle, Gould pretty much just rejects it with a succinct "so what?" and that's
the end of it. It needs no more response than that, in essence. All six numbers are tuned
"just so" to allow for atoms and molecules and life in the universe? Yeah? So, what?
Dawkins on the other hand, is more disturbed by this fact, enough so that he
brings up the possibility of many other universes, even ones that reproduce by passing on
their fundamental constants to their daughter universes, bringing a Darwinian crane to
cosmology. He feels that the precise tuning of all six fundamental constants of physics
does call for some kind of explanation. If our universe is the only one, and if all six
parameters are all indeed truly independent then apparently it does seem significant to
Dawkins that all six are precisely set in narrow ranges in order for life as we know it to
appear. It has the smell of design clinging about it. Therefore he looks to a Darwinian
evolution of universes to explain it. This is, of course, a pure flight of fancy, but the
more important point to make is that we have no way of knowing if those constants could
actually be different! When we consider life, we can look around us in our own solar
system and see many worlds with no life on them, and we can look backwards in time
and see the Earth before there was any life on it, and we can look forwards in time to the
death of our sun and see an Earth that again has no life on it. So life isn't universal and
ubiquitous. Its presence on Earth today calls for an explanation.
On the other hand, as far as we can tell, or even infer, the six fundamental
constants of physics are indeed constant and universally applicable. We can imagine a
universe with different constants, of course, but that doesn't mean it's possible (nor that
it's not). If you take this six-numbers line of thinking further, you have to ask the
question "Why can we explain the material universe?" Why does it all obey
mathematical laws? Why is there so much order? So much inherent order, in fact, that
sentient life can spontaneously be generated out of dead chaotic matter? If the six
numbers need explaining, then surely the very explicability of our universe needs even
more explaining. But, these things can't be explained. As Dawkins points out, if you
invoke (or hint at) a creator god to explain them, then there will be no less need to
explain the explanation. No, at the moment, something like the six-numbers observation,
or the observation of the orderliness and lawfulness of the universe just are. That's all we
can say about them. A future Theory of Everything may change that, may show that all
six fundamental constants fall out of one single parameter in a Theory of Everything, but
for now they are simply observations about the nature of our universe. This issue, by the
way, is often stated metaphorically as "Did God have any choice when creating the
Universe?" (with "God" being used in the Einsteinian sense).
One final observation about Rocks of Ages. Gould's own treatment and effective
definition of religion is also quite skewed, in my opinion. Dawkins makes religion only
supernatural, but Gould simply removes that pesky supernatural component with little
direct comment on the difficulty this component creates for NOMA and the discussion
between and the integration of, the two different magisteria. The problem is made
significantly worse by his outrageously indulgent first chapter "A Tale of Two
Thomases," in which he gives us two examples that are apparently violations of NOMA,
but which turn out to both actually not be violations of NOMA. The science violation is
the tale of doubting Thomas who demanded to see and touch Christ's wounds before he
would believe in the Resurrection. I think I know why Gould did this and what it means
but I don't want to take up any more time with Rocks of Ages. It is enough to point out
that Gould leaves the issue of the supernatural in religion mostly out of account, and out
of his definitions, explicit or implied, and that this is a serious drawback and failing of the
book. So what is the proper definition of "religion"? Can we do better? It is to this
question which I turn in the next chapter.
 RELIGION/OUTER

If you listen to someone like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher, you will come away
with an implicit definition of religion that reduces it to nothing but supernatural dogma;
to intellectual theories about what happens after you die and to beliefs about non-existent
fairy-tale-like-entities, such as angels or the soul. That's all that religion is to someone
like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins. According to Dawkins religious people are killing
each other over nothing more than different sets of beliefs about non-existent and
delusional supernatural superstitions, which is exactly like killing each other over the
question of who would win in a fight: an alien or a predator?2 They're both fictions,
fairy-tales, made-up nonsense. What does it matter? And if Dawkins' definition is
correct—if religion is indeed nothing more than supernatural superstition—then it's hard
not to see things from his perspective.
This biasing effect is the reason why almost all broad treatments of religion start
with a definition of religion: because this definition then preemptively skews the entire
treatment that follows in support of the views of the author. I'm sorry, but this is
unacceptable. If definition must be involved at some point, then let it be at the end, not
the start. Practically, no one actually needs a definition of "religion". No one will be
confused during a discussion if they are lacking a formal definition, and thus there is no
upside to formulating one ahead of time, and there are a number of downsides, the most
serious of which is the danger of removing something that really does belong in the
considerations.
Religion is a phenomenon that has roots which reach deep into prehistory and
which spread across every single region, culture, and society, and thus should be
examined in as untrammeled and unprejudiced a way as possible, at least in the
beginning. Dawkins or Dennett might point out that the common cold also is something
that has roots which reach deep into prehistory and which spread across every single
region, culture, and society, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't simply see it for what it is
without all sorts of ingratiating broad-mindedness and idiotic talk of being
"unprejudiced." And that's a fair observation, and perhaps upon examination we will find
a great many similarities between religion and a virus, and perhaps we will find that a
simple, narrow, straightforward definition is appropriate, even if religious people find it
insulting. Perhaps Dawkins is right to make that comparison. Or perhaps not. You don't
know until you examine the evidence. A write-off at this point simply will not do. You
can't legitimately write-off religion as mere superstition, as a virus of the mind, without
examination, without evidence. Obviously, documenting the breadth and depth of the
phenomenon of religion with many specific examples is beyond the scope of a paper like
this, but certainly we can make enough of a start and look at enough examples to get a
better idea of what "religion" is and what it is not.
Let's start with the outermost layer of things and enquire into the social and
functional effect of religion. If religion is mere delusion and superstition then its effect
will be most malignant. We should find that the purpose of a religious group is to
promote the group at the expense of any other groups and (more significantly) also at the
                                                                                                               
2  Clearly,  the  predator  would  win  as  anyone  who's  seen  Alien  vs.  Predator  knows!    Duh!  
expense of its hosts, its individual members. An organism which loses its immunity to
the common cold, or which fails to bolster its immunity to keep pace with the ever
increasing infectiousness of the virus, will eventually be removed from the population,
because it will fare less well in the survival of the fittest than those organisms which have
better immunity. A trait for more easily getting the common cold is not adaptive.
Similarly, if religion is a virus of the mind, we should expect to see the negative effect of
that on those who are infected, and thus, by extension, on the efficacy and nature of
religious groups as a whole. What I'm trying to get at here is what Machiavelli would
call the effectual truth of religion. If you are an alien anthropologist studying humanity,
looking down from the outside so to speak, what effects would you see from religion;
what behaviors would correlate to the phenomenon of religion? The virtue of this
approach is that it is not necessary to consider what is happening inside the religious
individual, nor is it necessary to digress into a metaphysical and philosophical discussion
about the nature of truth and reality and science and delusion and so on. To give an
analogous example from biology, I may not know the exact details of how a certain
species of beetle builds up its hard protective shell. I might have no clue as to the
chemical composition or what inner chemical processes the organism uses to build it, but
that does not stop me from observing that hard shells are adaptive and are beneficial for
the beetles in the survival of the fittest. In evolution, this distinction of causes is known
as proximate and ultimate.
What follows if we take the same approach with religion? Instead of spending a
lot of time talking about (or rather arguing about) the proximate details of religious
belief, let us inquire as to their ultimate character. Is the religious person "deceiving
themselves"? Are they "hypocritical"? Are they sincere and do they really "believe" all
that mumbo jumbo? For the purposes of this approach, it doesn't matter. We will place
all of that in a black box and simply enquire as to the output, the results.
OK. With the strategy clear, where shall we begin our investigation? Let's start
with Cargo Cults. One would think that if the viral, superstitious, and non-adaptive
nature of "religion" is going to show itself anywhere it would show itself here in this very
bizarre manifestation. Let's go back to the very beginning of the John Frum cult, which
was born on Tanna Island, Vanuatu (formerly known as the colonial New Hebrides).
British District Agent James Nicol was the first to write down the name John Frum,
during an inquiry held on 27 November 1940 to investigate the mysterious disappearance
of goats from the herds of the Seventh-day Adventist converts on the island. This inquiry
disclosed rumors that men were gathering secretly at night to drink kava and listen to the
words of a shadowy figure who named himself John Frum. The goats were disappearing
into earth ovens to feed the hungry crowds. Ironically, Nicols actual report, and all
subsequent administration accounts of the John Frum cult, kept in the British District
Agency office in Lenakel, disappeared by about the mid-1970's. However, enough is
known about them second hand, and from reports that were reproduced in other places,
that we have the general picture that they convey:
Administrative stories set forth a colonialist argument on John Frum and on cargo cults
generally. This perspective, at heart, is that John Frum is foolery or madness inflamed by
unwise mission interference with native culture. There is also little doubt in administrative
minds that the cult is ultimately subversive of the mission, and, eventually, of governmental
authority as well. (Cargo Cult, Lindstrom, p. 81)
Alexander Rentoul, a patrol officer in Papua and New Guinea, who for several months in
1943 replaced Nicols during the latter's vacation, sent a letter (" 'John Frum': Origin of
New Hebrides Movement") to the editor of Pacific Islands Monthly, in January of 1949.
This letter arrived in the midst of a heated dispute between missionaries and planters over
which party was to blame for cargo cults. Rentoul took the anti-mission side and said
that, yes, John Frum was anti-white but mostly he was anti-mission:
The result of all this . . . was that natives in large numbers left both Missions, and rejoined the
"heathen" in the various villages, announcing that they had left the John the Baptist Missions,
and formed instead the John Broom ("Jon Frum," he pronounced it) movement, the object of
which was to sweep (or "broom") the white people off the island of Tanna—Tanna for the
Tannese was their slogan. I believe that this movement did originate in this way and was first
prompted by dissatisfaction with the Missions, and that it had no connection with Communism
or other outside influence. The Tannese, in my opinion, are not the sort of weak-minded natives
likely to be influenced by such teachings, and are quite capable of starting a movement of their
own, directed primarily against the Missions, and only indirectly against some of the other
whites.

And I should add at this point that when Rentoul says that the natives left both Missions
"in large numbers" he is not kidding: on Sunday, 11 May 1941, almost the entirety of the
Presbyterian mission's thirty-five hundred strong congregation neglected to come to
church. Now that's a sharp turn around: almost overnight you lose your entire
congregation! Some missionaries, of course, saw the hand of Satan at work. Charles
McLeod, who reopened the White Sands mission station after the war, had little doubt
about who was behind the "apostasy of 1941". It was Satan:
Satan objects when his dominion is threatened. Night after night the heathens gathered in a
determined effort to win back their brothers. Heathen songs are sung all night every night.
Heathen dancing and its accompanying wickedness flourishes. There can be no question on
Tanna about dancing. Here it is the embodiment of evil . . . so you see that though there are
evidences that God's Spirit is working there are also evidences that evil is still in the heart of
Man Tanna. (News from the Field: White Sands. Quarterly Jottings from the New Hebrides 216
(Oct): 8.)

However, other missionaries saw it differently. S. J. Cooper, who presided over the
Presbyterian station at White Sands in the 1950s describes John Frum in this way:
On an island of about 400 square miles, and with only about 8,000 people, it might seem
ridiculous to talk of Nationalism. But this movement is Nationalistic. It is also religious. It has
welded together things from the old custom days and parts of Christian teaching. . . . It is this
mixture which has been so horribly and insidiously confusing to many folk on the edge of the
Church—not to mention many who have been "Christian" for years. (White Sands Tanna.
Quarterly Jottings from the New Hibrides 258 (April):8-9)

However, we should keep in mind that administrators and missionaries don't

necessarily strive for scientific objectivity whereas anthropologists do, so let us turn from
the reports of administrators and missionaries to a few of those from anthropologists. In
the early 1950s, French anthropologist Jean Guiart undertook field research on Tanna,
which resulted in what was to become the first detailed, and one of the more influential,
ethnographic accounts of a postwar Melanesian cargo cult. In his view,
 The myth of John Frum furnishes a synthesis, a possibility of coordinating sporadic actions; its
symbolism permits organization hidden from European curiosity, and provides the means to
search for a larger efficacy. Thanks to him the entire island now seeks independence . . . Despite
its messianic aspect, the myth of John Frum is only a means, a method of action. (translated
from the French and quoted in Cargo Cults, Lindstrom, p. 106.)

Peter Worsley, another anthropologist to study the subject, also echoes this. He claims
that these religions of divided, disorganized, and downtrodden peoples,
serve as an expression of reaction against what is felt as oppression by another class or
nationality . . . The main effect of the millenarian cults is to overcome these divisions and to
weld previously hostile and separate groups together into a new unity (The Trumpet Shall
Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia. London: Macgibbon & Kee. 1957. pp. 227-228)

And in fact, all subsequent anthropologists, to one degree or another, reaffirm that this is
indeed one of the most significant aspects of the phenomena known as "cargo cults,"
although it is rather noteworthy that the anthropologists also now wish to erase the very
term "cargo cult" and stress that the various movements that previously have all been
grouped under this term can actually not be considered as similar. Martha Kaplan's
excellent book on the Tukka movement is titled Niether Cargo Nor Cult, and in her
opinion, "Tuka was never primarily about goods; Navosavakadua's project focused on
issues of leadership, authority, and autonomy." (p. xiv). Unfortunately, the term "cargo
cult" has slipped the bounds of history and anthropology and has entered the realms of
journalism and entertainment, where truth is of only secondary importance, and telling a
good yarn is the highest priority (more on this in a moment).
Another point of general agreement is that the planters exploited the natives too
harshly as cheap plantation labor (I might better have said "slave labor" but I won't push
that point), and that the Missions broke down the natives ancient institutions and customs
and totally upset their previous way of life. Guiart goes so far as to say that the
Europeans were only reaping what they had sown when it came to their relations with the
Islanders (quoted in Lindstrom, p. 105). Historically, each side denied these claims, of
course, but reading between the lines it's easy to see that the native Islanders got the short
end of both sticks. There were incentives, of course—carrots as well as sticks. There
was the promise of education and European goods and money, but, seen politically, the
truth of all of this was the beginning of the end of native culture, freedom, and
independence. The natives were ill-treated, ill-used, and disrespected. Of that there is
little doubt, in my opinion.
So, now that we have some background and some of the primary evidence from
multiple sources in front of us, what can we say in regards to the effectual truth of the
John Frum cult? It seems pretty clear that the consensus is that the John Frum cult as
well as all the other cargo cults were primarily forms of political and cultural resistance.
John Frum didn't mean John "from America". He wasn't the apotheosis of an American
G.I. No. He was John Broom—an adversary to John the Baptist—who would sweep the
British and French, especially the missionaries, from the island. These cults organized
large groups of Islanders in resistance. Perhaps this was motivated by delusional beliefs,
or perhaps the beliefs only derived their impressive motive power because of the peoples
strong desire to offer resistance and to hold onto their autonomy and their heritage. From
the point of view of this chapter it doesn't matter. The essential political feature is
organized resistance—resistance to cultural and political dominance. They went back to
their dancing and ancient customs, and refused to work on the plantations and abandoned
the Christian Missions, and for that they were labeled as under the sway of Satan, or as
lazy. And now Dawkins would label them as "deluded". From this perspective we see a
different view: we see many thousands of people united, almost literally overnight,
against oppression and domination.
At this point I must make a short digression from our approach and consider
Dawkins own coverage of cargo cults in The God Delusion. Dawkins relies entirely upon
one single source: David Attenborough's 1960 book People of Paradise. Attenborough
went to Tanna with a movie camera to hunt the wild cargo cult (which resulted not only
in his book, but also in the 1960 BBC production Cargo Cult.) He was not an
anthropologist like Martha Kaplan who spent years living with natives Islanders in the
field, carefully observing and recording, determined to get to the truth of the matter. No,
Attenborough was an adventurer and a journalist. He was selling discovery and mystery:
if not the birth of a new religion, then at least its very early stages. Let's read what
Lamont Lindstrom has to say about him in Cargo Cults:
Here, Attenborough staked out two of the main motifs of adventurist cargoism: discovery
and mystery. Adventurers, like administrators and missionaries, prefer to entertain cultic
mystery. Like anthropologists, they make a point to experience personally their literary object.
Such personal experience is the basis of adventurist authority, as it is ethnographic authority.
Adventurers deal in discovery. They go on quests. They probe the mysterious. . . .
Adventurers, however, typically are in rather more of a hurry than are anthropologists, and if
they want quick cultural and historic detail, they need to draw upon the stories of other John
Frum subgenres as well as interviews with available local experts. Attenborough, for example,
clearly read his way through some of the extant John Frum archive, as his text repeats several
anthropological stories. He also, however, interviewed Australian trader and planter Bob Paul
who first settled on Tanna in the mid 1950s and stayed for the next twenty-five years. Affable
and commanding, Paul quickly emerged as the John Frum story agent, a go-between mediating
rambling adventurers and journalists and John Frum disciples and lieutenants. Attenborough
was only the first of many popular cargoists to buy into and circulate Bob Paul's stories. . . .
There is today a powerful lineage of Bob Paul John Frum stories, a narrative genealogy that
rivals Guiart's anthropological versions, and one that dominates popular John Frum writing.
More conscientious adventurers, like Attenborough, read some way into the thickening John
Frum archive. They combine in their texts both the Guiart/anthropological and the
Paul/administrative story lineages. Lazy ones just chatted with Bob Paul. (Cargo Cults, p. 116-
117).

Two main apocryphal items in the John Frum cargo cult stories are the result:
refrigerators (which are decidedly not desired by the islanders, yet are always included in
the "cargo" they supposedly desire) and the motif of endless waiting first set in play by
Attenborough and Bob Paul. This is the anecdote that Dawkins quotes on p. 238 of The
God Delusion, where Sam points out that Christians have been waiting for Christ for two
thousand years, so why is nineteen years objectionable. The interchange is narrated as if
it really happened to Attenborough, but you will not find any camera footage of this
exchange in Attenborough's film. Indeed, this is probably because it is a Bob Paul
story—and a really, really good one at that. One so good, Bob Paul kept purveying it to
journalists over the years, using more contemporary figures as needed. (Paul also
generously sold adventurers his tinned provisions and rented them his humble tourist
bungalows.) In fact, this anecdote is repeated, over three decades, no less than thirteen
times, placed in the mouths of different figures, the substance of which is essentially the
same:
The waiting motif, which repeats across the pages of three decades of John Frum writing, is
situated in the mouths of a variety of Islanders: Attenborough's Sam, the prophet Nampas, cult
leader Isac Wan, and anonymous native villagers. The actual identity of the person making this
comment, or whether any Tannese ever uttered the statement at all, is clearly unimportant. The
figure functions rather as a stylistic marker of cargoism as a genre. This is one of the
fundamental leitmotifs of cargoism: a sort of forlorn, unfulfilled waiting for a cargo that will
never arrive.
The subtext of this motif, of course, is that we are the cargo cultists too. The Tannese wait
for John, but we wait too. This subtext only reveals the obvious. The story of the cargo cult
recounts European desire, not Melanesian. Who else but we await the white-gleaming, ever-
filled, always giving, softly humming refrigerator that never will arrive? Cargo stories describe
ourselves more accurately and sometimes in better detail than they do the Tannese. John Frum
is ours. We have spirited away this island spirit. Although a few literate Tannese may also dip
into the John Frum archive from time to time to deploy his texts for local purposes, John's texts
speak mainly to us. (p. 144).

I hope the irony of this situation is not lost on the reader. Dawkins, in the process of
pointing out how stupid, deluded, and gullible religious people are, gullibly swallows
whole Attenborough's unscientific, sensationalized, and often apocryphal account without
actually bothering to verify it against the serious scientific anthropological studies which
exist in the literature on the subject. And more, he then uses this sensationalized
journalistic adventure account as the authority and basis from which to extract "four
lessons about the origins of religions generally" (TGD, p.239)! (And five pages before
that, near the start of the section, there was this sentence: "It is fascinating to guess that
the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread
initially at the same high speed." TGD, p. 234—the second most disingenuous sentence
in the entire book.) And these four lessons about the origins of religions come right after
he has made a hand waving gesture about cargo cults, saying that he doesn't want to make
too much of them! "Yeah, I don't want to make too much of them, I only want to use
them to show that this is essentially how all religions got their start, and I'm not even
going to inconvenience myself by doing any other research on the subject, by the way. I
can't be bothered." This is just one example among many of what happens when an
author's derision for something prevents him from making any kind of critical enquiry.
Dawkins asks "How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such
polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they
two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or
a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one
figment of the imagination and many." (TGD, p. 56).
Indeed. Who cares? What kind of person is going to spend dozens of hours
reading hundreds of pages on cargo cults to find out what the real nature of the
"delusions" were or are? Dawkins banks on the answer to this being "not the kind of
person who will read my book." He found some great anti-religious cargo and has ported
it home and is happily cashing in on it. He was not skeptical about it and he doesn't
expect you to be either. Consider what this says about him and his reliability as an
author. And this is only just one of many things like this in The God Delusion. I'm sorry,
call me old fashioned, but I care. I care about the truth simply because it is the truth and
has value in and of itself. You can take a who-cares attitude towards something you do
not cover and are not concerned with, but you can not take it for anything you attack or
defend or use as evidence. You must care.
But I digress. Let us return to our plan of attack and look at another example of a
religion and its social effect. Let's tackle the functional and social reality of the early
Christian Church head on, since this is so relevant to The God Delusion and to the
religious climate today. Will we find that the "cult" of early Christianity spread like a
virus? Will we find one city after another infected with this insidious new and more
virulent form of superstition, leaving increasing bigotry, violence, hatred, useless
delusional practices, and an us-vs.-them mentality in its wake? Let's take a look. Rodney
Stark in his 1996 book The Rise of Christianity: A sociologist reconsiders history, takes
just such a functionalist look at the early Christian Church, which was a tiny sect of
about 1,000 members in the year 40. Stark examines twenty-two Roman cities both
qualitatively and quantitatively in his book.
The typical Roman city, he tells us, was incredibly crowded, filthy, and prone to
catastrophic disaster. For example, Antioch, during six hundred years of intermittent
Roman rule suffered eight major earth quakes, four all-consuming fires, eleven
occupations and conquests by unfriendly forces, six major periods of rioting, at least
three killer epidemics, and at least five serious famines, among lesser, but still quite
serious disasters. In all, Stark tells us, there were forty-one natural or social
catastrophes—an average of one every fifteen years (Stark, p. 159). Further, the people
that filled Roman cities belonged to a diversity of ethnic groups that hated each other.
Not only did walls surround the city of Antioch to keep unfriendly forces out, but they
also existed within the city to divide ethnic factions:
Any accurate portrait of Antioch in New Testament times must depict a city filled with misery,
danger, fear, despair, and hatred. A city where the average family lived a squalid life in filthy
and cramped quarters, where at least half of the children died at birth or during infancy, and
where most of the children who lived lost at least one parent before reaching maturity. A city
filled with hatred and fear rooted in intense ethnic antagonism and exacerbated by a constant
stream of strangers. A city so lacking in stable networks of attachments that petty incidents
could prompt mob violence. A city where crime flourished and all the streets were dangerous at
night. And perhaps above all, a city repeatedly smashed by cataclysmic catastrophes: where a
resident could expect literally to be homeless from time to time, providing that he or she was
among the survivors. (Stark, pp. 160-161)

It is in this social and political environment that the early Christian Church in Antioch (as
well as many other cities) appeared and took root. What sort of effect did it have? Was
there an action similar to a virus? Imagine what that would look like: if you add a disease
to an already bad situation, you will invariably make it worse; if during an earthquake
you also add a cholera epidemic, things will be much, much worse than without it. If
religion is nothing but supernatural delusion and superstitious practices, then it cannot
fail to be a drain on valuable resources and, in general, a practical disaster. Imagine a
cholera victim deciding that they must forgo drinking water the day before taking
Communion at Mass! He would be denying his body something practically important
because a religious superstition tells him that the Body of Christ cannot be profaned by
common substances like food or drink. That's not good practice for someone who is
falling ill. And if religion in general, and Christianity in particular, only encourages the
factiousness and us-vs.-them mentality of humanity, as Dawkins claims, then throwing it
into an already contentious and factious environment could only make things worse.
So what did happen? Rather the opposite of what we would expect from a virus.
During the plagues in Antioch, for example, the Christians were an island of compassion,
order, and life-saving action. While Pagans and Christians alike caught the disease, the
Christians unsparingly cared for the sick, tending to their every need despite the danger to
themselves. According to modern estimates, in these cases of smallpox or measles
epidemics, which is what the plagues in Antioch and similar cities were most likely to
have been, simple nursing practices make the difference between life and death, reducing
mortality by two-thirds or even more. (Stark, p. 89). The non-Christians, in comparison,
most often behaved in the very opposite way, pushing sufferers away and fleeing even
their dearest relations, throwing them into the roads before they were dead, leaving their
corpses unburied. (Stark, p. 82). Knowingly risking your own life for a person whose
only tie to you is that he or she shares your faith, your religion, is remarkable. Christian
Charity wasn't just talk—it was real deeds with real consequences. Time and time again,
the Christians stuck together and treated each other with love and friendship and charity.
If someone was hungry, they were fed; if someone was sick, they were cared for; if
someone was thirsty, they were given water; if someone was naked, they were clothed—
just as Matthew 25:35-40 says. The early Christian Church was, to speak in ethnologist
terms, a "conspiracy of doves", although I do not think there is any question of "group
selection" here, because we are considering a cultural and social phenomenon, over very
short time-scales, by evolutionary standards anyway. In addition, it should be mentioned
that Christians also cared for the "heathen", whether they were interested in converting or
not. They didn't care for them to the same extent that they cared for their fellow
Christians, but they did care for them more so than other Pagans did. Once again,
Christian charity was more than just a word. In a chaotic and hostile world, belonging to
a trustworthy group of loving and caring people meant everything. Christianity stood out
because individual Christians stood out markedly in their behavior, deeds, and actions.
Cynics today may see only failed used car salesmen in Christian preachers, claiming they
only exist to fleece gullible people of their hard earned money, but back in the early days
of the Christian Church, this was simply not the case. Christianity bonded people
together into groups with a common code of conduct which proved to be beneficial for
both the individual and the group, as well as for the larger environment (the city) in
which it arose.
Other advantages that accrued to Christianity as a group were a significantly
higher birth-rate, and a higher status accorded to women. Yes, that's right, despite
whatever transpired in later centuries, women in the early Church were in a relatively
better situation than they were in Roman society at large, and were even able to take on
leadership roles within the church which were denied to them elsewhere. The Christian
policy of turning-the-other cheek and forgiving (nay, loving!) your enemies also helped
the larger political situation of the cities in which these groups lived. Far from being a
virus-like destabilizing phenomenon, early Christianity was a phenomenon of order,
stability, and friendship. And in a larger environment of fear, hatred, disorder, and
disaster, this was highly appealing, and, also, very practically useful at the group level.
The final example I would like to briefly touch upon is the Water-Temple system
of Bali. There, on the terraced sides of a volcano, a sophisticated system of aqueducts
distributes water vital for the production of rice. This system of aqueducts and their
branching points is quite complicated and intricate in its own right, but above and beyond
that, at every branching point of the water distribution, there stands a temple devoted to a
supernatural deity, complete with attendant priests. The Water-Temple system has all the
outward appearance of being just so much religious mumbo-jumbo, like something lifted
straight from a Hollywood movie. However, despite this, the religious beliefs and
practices associated with the Water-Temple system actually have the practical effect of
prudently guiding and planning the distribution of water and the schedule of rice planting,
so as to achieve a near optimal trade-off between pest control and water use. J. S.
Lansing, in his 1991 book, Priests and programmers: Technologies of power in the
engineered landscape of Bali, has carefully documented the history and function of this
fascinating Water-Temple. Initially, he tells us, outside observers were horrified that
something so important as a sophisticated system of water distribution and agriculture
was governed by superstition. One American engineer exclaimed "These people don't
need a high priest, they need a hydrologist!" (Lansing, p. 115). It was regarded as
simply inconceivable that any practical wisdom (or much of it) could be embodied in a
religion.
Yet, they were wrong. The Dutch, who conquered Bali in the nineteenth century
and whose own country is a miracle of hydraulic engineering could find little to improve
upon in Balinese rice production. And in more recent times a "green revolution"
experiment on this water distribution and rice production system proved disastrous,
resulting in an explosion of pests and inequitable distribution of water, creating a crisis
that no amount of technology or modern high-yield crops could fix. The experiment was
pronounced a failure and the system was returned to its original religious basis. An
ecosystem ecologist named James Kramer even created a detailed computer simulation
model which showed that the water temple system was close to optimal at solving the
trade-off between water use and pest control.
I am indebted to David Sloan Wilson's book Darwin's Cathedral: evolution,
religion, and the nature of society, for pointing out these studies of early Christianity and
the Water-Temple system of Bali, and I would like to now quote from Darwin's
Cathedral itself as we near the close of this chapter:
FACTUAL AND PRACTICAL REALISM

One hallmark of religion is its otherworldly nature that to a nonbeliever seems detached from
reality. In addition to their gods, religions make the real world otherworldly by altering the
nature of the people that actually did exist and the events that took place among them. As we
have seen, the New Testament Gospels make poor history, not simply because memory fades
with time, but because historical veracity was subordinated to the symbolic use of narratives
about people and events to motivate action.
Those who regard themselves as nonreligious often scorn the otherworldliness of religion as
a form of mental weakness. How could anyone be so stupid as to believe in all that hocus-pocus
 in the face of such contrary evidence? The stance can itself be criticized for misconstruing and
cheapening a set of issues that deserves our most serious attention as scientists and intellectuals.
In the first place, much religious belief is not detached from reality if the central thesis of this
book is correct. Rather, it is intimately connected to reality by motivating behaviors that are
adaptive in the real world—an awesome achievement when we appreciate the complexity that is
required to become connected in this practical sense. It is true that many religious beliefs are
false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of
realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence and a practical realism based on
behavioral adaptedness. An atheist historian who understood the real life of Jesus but whose
own life was a mess as a result of his beliefs would be factually attached to and practically
detached from reality.
In the second place, much religious belief does not represent a form of mental weakness but
rather the healthy functioning of the biologically and culturally well-adapted human mind.
Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged.
Adaption is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other
forms of thought. Evolutionary biologists should be especially quick to grasp this point because
they appreciate that the well-adapted mind is ultimately an organ of survival and reproduction.
If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism, such that our beliefs can become more
adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time.
To paraphrase evolutionary psychologists, factual realists detached from practical reality were
not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who
must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective.
In the third place, disparaging the otherworldly nature of religion presumes that nonreligious
belief systems are more factually realistic. It is true that nonreligious belief systems manage
without gods, but they might still distort the facts of the real world as thoroughly as the Four
Gospels of the New Testament. We know this is the case for patriotic versions of history, which
are as silly and weak-minded for people of other nations as a given religion for people of other
faiths. Many intellectual traditions and scientific theories of past decades have a similar silly
and purpose-driven quality, once their cloak of factual plausibility has been yanked away by the
hand of time. (pp. 227-229)

It is this "practical realism" as Wilson calls it, which is one of the (many) things that is
left out of account in The God Delusion. However, backing up for a moment, I in no way
think that I have "proved" that the supernatural component of religion is always directed
at factual reality and behavioral motivation and group ethics. Not by a long shot. Nor
was this my intention. As you may recall from the beginning of this chapter, my
intention was to see if there was something that had been left aside in the "definition" of
religion that Dawkins and others use. Dawkins holds that religion itself, in its entirety, is
a "by-product" of a child's necessary gullibility, of random cultural drift, and of memes.
It is, he claims, entirely spurious and delusional and superstitious. However, we have
seen that in at least several important cases, the supernatural component of religion
motives behaviors and makes possible group organization and action. In short, that it
embodies practically useful and necessary courses of action and behavior. Of course,
Dawkins implicitly recognizes that this is the case, otherwise religion would not impinge
so threateningly on all of civilization. "Yes," he would probably admit, "religion does
motivate groups—groups like Creationists who want to ban the teaching of evolution in
school, and groups like Al Qaeda whose members are willing to kill themselves in order
to kill others—most of them innocent bystanders." My response, first of all, is that, yes,
the supernatural element of religion has been and still is responsible for some rather
horrific behavior, from the witch hunts to the burning of wives on their dead husbands'
funeral pyres, to cannibalism and human sacrifice, to simple pervasive bigotry and
discrimination. However, any belief system can motivate such behaviors even if they
contain nothing supernatural. Marxism and Communism come readily to mind and
would furnish us with an ample file drawer full of fresh horror. Nor are bigotry and
discrimination in any way confined to those who hold supernatural religious beliefs. I've
personally witnessed blatant discrimination against homosexuals from secular and
atheistic people.
Suicide terrorism, however, Dawkins argues, is confined to religious fanatics and
would vanish if we could only get rid of religion, the most dangerous form of superstition
that the world knows. It is to this subject that we turn in the next chapter.
 SUICIDE TERRORISM

On the very first page of the preface to The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins' asks
us to imagine a world without religion:
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11,
no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no
Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslin massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ
Killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired
televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give til it hurts').
Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no
flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. (TGD, p. 23-24)

It's a powerful image, and it's a theme that runs throughout the entire book: if only we
could get rid of that dangerous and delusional supernatural form of superstition called
"religion" the world would be a better place. There would be no fighting in Northern
Ireland because there would be no more labels to identify the two sides and thus no
differentiation between "us" and "them" to allow the fighting. There would be no suicide
terrorism because there would be no one delusional enough to believe that by killing
himself for Islam he will enter paradise and be given 72 virgins to bed. If only there were
no religion, the world would be a better place because the motive power for such
dangerous and damaging behavior would be drained away.
Personally, I've talked with a number of people who point to 9/11 as the moment
when they turned actively against religion. Before that, despite the fact that they were
non-believers of one stripe or another they took a live-and-let-live attitude towards
believers, but after 9/11 that was no longer an option: if religion could motivate people to
commit such atrocities as 9/11 then religion needed to go. Of course, in response to 9/11
a flood of apologists for religion in general, and Islam in particular, were loudly
proclaiming that the Islamic Fundamentalism of the 9/11 terrorists was a perversion of
the true Islamic faith, while other commentators were even more loudly disagreeing and
assuring us all that "moderate" Islam is a "myth", and that fundamentalist extremism is a
natural outgrowth of, and is inherent in, the Islamic faith.
Yet, in all of this, one thing was rarely questioned: few people wondered if we
really did know that Islamic Fundamentalism was the cause of 9/11. Sounds crazy, right?
It's obvious that it must have been the cause, isn't it? But, actually, if you think about it,
the simple fact that the 9/11 terrorists were Islamic Fundamentalists is not in itself
evidence of a causal connection between their acts of terrorism and their religious views,
for the same reason that Stalin being an atheist is not evidence of a causal connection
between his atheism and his crimes against humanity. Pundits and theorists have plenty
of pet theories for which they find supporting evidence, of course, but what we need are
not a priori pet theories and pop-psychology notions about terrorist motivations, but
actual evidence and facts—the stuff of real scientific inquiry—out of which a more
general understanding (a "theory") may emerge. There's a world of difference between
finding evidence to fit a notion, and forming an understanding from full and careful
consideration of all available reliable information—and what is astonishing to me is how
little of this latter approach there is in the contemporary dialog on the subject.
 Yet, highly significant, objectively gathered scientific evidence does indeed exist
and has been easily available since at least 2005 thanks to the efforts of political scientist
Robert. A. Pape and the University of Chicago, which assembled a team of graduate
students fluent in the main relevant languages—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Tamil—for an
intensive survey of regional newspapers, broadcast transcripts, and other materials not
currently translated into English on suicide terrorists. The project gathered literature
documenting individual suicide terrorists from the main suicide terrorist groups
themselves as well as all publicly available information on suicide attacks from the main
organizations in target countries that collect such data. In addition, the project also
amassed all other relevant data already available in English. The raw data are available at
the archive for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism at the University of Chicago.
Altogether, between 1980 and 2003 there were 315 suicide terrorist attacks worldwide
carried out by 462 suicide attackers (Dying to Win, Robert A. Pape, p. 3, p. 203.) While
practically speaking no such set of data will ever be perfect, these data represent the most
comprehensive and reliable survey currently available. Since 9/11 looms so large in the
minds of most US citizens, let's start with an examination of al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda is a specifically Sunni movement, and Osama bin Laden practices a
Sunni form of Islamic fundamentalism called Salafism, so anyone who joins al Qaeda
must be at least tolerant of Salafism, and most can safely be assumed to be influenced by,
and supportive of, Salafism. Important scholars and policy makers have observed these
facts and come to the conclusion that the ideology of Salafism is a principal cause of al-
Qaeda's terrorism. As Pape points out, "the central question is whether this is true." To
answer this question, he analyzed the statistical relationship between Salafi-influenced
societies and the demographic information on the terrorists that successfully carried out
suicide attacks for al-Qaeda. This approach has two main advantages: first, if Salafism is
indeed a principle cause of al-Qaeda's terrorism, then we should find that Salafi-
influenced individuals are more likely to join al-Qaeda, and thus that countries with large
Salafi-influenced populations will yield more recruits than countries with fewer Salafi-
influenced people, in proportion to their Salafi-influenced population. Statistical analysis
therefore bypasses subjective psychological analysis based, in general, on insufficient
information. Second, the set of al Qaeda suicide terrorists who actually completed their
missions is a complete and known set, in contrast to the incompletely known set of all the
people who are members of al Qaeda. In addition, these are the people we are most
interested in: the most deadly sub-group of ad Qaeda.
While a strong statistical correlation is not in itself sufficient to prove causality, it
is a necessary condition. So, if the correlation is missing, or only weak, with low odds
against it being due to chance, then this argues quite strongly against the thesis that
Salfism is the cause of al Qaeda suicide terrorism. Let's examine the results that can be
gleaned from the data. The table below shows Sunni countries with and without Salafi-
influenced populations, the populations are in millions of Muslims, millions of Salafi-
influenced Muslims, and the number of al Qaeda suicide terrorists from those countries.
Below the table is Robert Pape's analysis and explanatory text:
Table 13. Salafi Influence and al-Qaeda

Sunni Countries with Salafi-influenced Populations (population in millions, 200)

Country Muslims Salafi-influenced Al-Qaeda Suicide Terrorists
____________________________________________________________________________
Somalia 10 5
Algeria 31 19
Tunisia 10 5 1
Egypt 62 23 2
Sudan 21 21
Nigeria 68 37
Afghanistan 25 10 3
Pakistan 149 43 2
Bangladesh 114 14
Indonesia 185 26 3
Yemen 18 8 3
Saudi Arabia 21 18 34
Jordan 6 2
Oman 2 2
Total 722 233 48

Sunni Countries without Salafi-influenced Populations

Country Muslims Salafi-influenced Al-Qaeda Suicide Terrorists

____________________________________________________________________________
Morocco 28 12
Mauritania 3
Senegal 9
Mali 10
Guinea 5
Sierra Leone 3
Chad 4
Burkina Faso 6
Malaysia 13
Uzbekistan 21
Turkmenistan 4
Tajikistan 5
Kyrgyzstan 3
Turkey 67 4
UAE 2 2
Kuwait 2
Syria 15
Albania 2
Niger 7
Total 212 18

Table 13 reports the size of the Salfi-influenced population in every Sunni-majority country
with a population over 1 million or more (there were no al-Qaeda suicide terrorists from smaller
countries) as of about 2000. In countries with Salafi-influenced populations, there are 233
million Salafi influenced people and 48 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists, or 1 suicide terrorist per 5
million Salafi. In countries without Salafi-influenced populations, there are 205 [million] Sunni
Muslims and 18 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists, or 1 per 12 million. Comparing the relative
frequency of al-Qaeda suicide terrorists in these two groups of countries, al-Qaeda suicide
terrorists are twice as likely to come from Salafi-influenced populations as from Sunni Muslims
in other countries.
 However, when we examine the effect of the absolute number of the Salafi-influenced
population on the absolute number of terrorists from any country, the effect is not statistically
significant even at the most generous confidence level of 0.1. On average, there are 3.5 million
Salafi-influenced Sunnis per al-Qaeda suicide terrorist, but this includes numerous extreme
outliers. Pakistan produced far fewer terrorist and Saudi Arabia and Morocco far more than
would be consistent with a direct relationship between Salafism and suicide terrorism. For the
numbers to produce a significant relationship, one would have to discount the majority of al-
Qaeda suicide attackers.
We can test for alternative ways in which Salafism could cause suicide terrorism, but these
also fail to produce significant results. . . .
This means that we can discount both of the two main mechanisms that might lead Salafism
to cause terrorism. Whether we think the odds of someone becoming an al-Qaeda terrorist
increases directly with the size of the Salafi-influenced population or whether the odds increase
as a spillover effect of living in a country with a sizable Salafi-influenced population, the odds
that someone from a Salafi-influenced country will become an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist are not
significantly better than chance. (Pape, p. 112)

So, while there is a weak correlation, it is nowhere near strong enough to support
causality. However, the data does indicate a different, and very statistically significant,
correlation—one that is strong enough to point to a possible source of causality: the
presence of American combat operations in the suicide terrorists' country of origin:
(Pape's analysis and explanatory text follow the tabulated data below)
Table 14. American Military Presence in Sunni Countries and al-Qaeda

Sunni Countries with American Combat Operations

Country Muslims (millions) Al-Qaeda Suicide Terrorists
____________________________________________________________________________
Afghanistan 25 3
Saudi Arabia 21 34
Turkey 67 4
Uzbekistan 21 0
UAE 2 2
Oman 2 0
Kuwait 2 0
Total 140 43 (1 per 3.2 million)
All Other Sunni Countries
Total 794 23 (1 per 35 million)

Table 15. American Military Presence in Salafi Countries Versus Other Sunni Countries
and al-Qaeda

Countries with Salafi-Influenced Populations and American Combat Operations

Country Muslims (millions) Al-Qaeda Suicide Terrorists
____________________________________________________________________________
Afghanistan 25 3
Saudi Arabia 21 34
Oman 2 0
 Total 48 37 (1 per 1.3 million)
All Other Sunni Countries
Total 886 29 (1 per 31 million)

By contrast, the presence of American combat operations matter substantially. As Table 14

shows, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are ten times more likely to come from a Sunni country with
American military presence than from another Sunni country. These odds are far better than a
coin flip, statistically significant at the standard benchmark of .05. This means that the chances
that the presence of American combat troops does not increase the risk of someone from that
country becoming an al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are less than 5 in 100. Even if the effect of
Salafi-influenced populations on al-Qaeda suicide terrorism were assumed to be significant,
American military presence would remain five times as powerful as a predictor of al-Qaeda
suicide terrorism.
Further, deploying American combat troops to a Salafi-influenced population matters
tremendously. As Table 15 shows, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are twenty times more likely to
come from a Salafi-influenced population with American military presence than from another
Sunni country, a result that is statistically significant at the standard benchmark of .05.
Moreover, statistical analysis shows that this high level of risk is due simply to the addition of
American military presence to Salafi-influenced population, not to a special feature of the
interaction of the two. Even if the effect of Salafi-influenced populations on al-Qaeda suicide
terrorism were assumed to be significant, American military presence in a Salafi-influenced
country would remain ten times as powerful as Salafism alone as a predictor of al-Qaeda suicide
terrorism. ( p. 112)

Pape goes on to examine the 24 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists not associated with American
military presence and shows that nineteen (79 percent) are "from four Muslim countries,
all of which have regimes that are close allies of the United States and all of whose
suicide terrorists are associated with the cause of national liberation in their own
countries. This suggests that al-Qaeda's truly transnational appeal for martyrdom is thin
and springs mainly from national causes." He sums up as follows:
Overall, analysis of al-Qaeda's suicide terrorists shows that its most lethal forces are best
understood as a coalition of nationalist groups seeking to achieve a local change in their home
countries, not as a truly transnational movement seeking to spread Islam or any other ideology to
non-Islamic populations. Religion matters, but mainly in the context of national resistance.( p.
117)

Of course, since al-Qaeda is a specifically religious organization, we could still argue that
religion, while not a sufficient condition, is almost certainly a necessary one. Further, if
the notion of a "moderate" Islam is indeed a myth, as some suggest, then the distinction
between Salafi- and non-Salafi- influenced populations is spurious and unimportant. I
mean, isn't it the case that all of the al Qaeda suicide terrorists were Muslim? And isn't
that entirely unsurprising? After all, who would blow themselves up if they weren't
deluded by the belief in an afterlife, in an eternal reward for the insane act of suicide
terrorism? In order to attempt to answer that question, let's move from the narrow
consideration of al Qaeda to a broad overview of the data for all suicide attacks and all
suicide terrorist groups. The main reason for doing so is simply because being of the
Islamic faith is a prerequisite for joining al Qaeda, just as being male is a prerequisite, so
we must move to suicide terrorist groups that do not place such a restriction on
membership. What will we find?
The first and most highly significant thing that will jump out at you is that the
leading instigators of suicide attacks (who committed 76 of the 315 successful suicide
attacks) are the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are adamantly
opposed to religion. The group does not mention God or an afterlife in its propaganda,
nor does it make any supernatural promises of any kind to those members who carry out
suicide attacks. More importantly, an overall analysis of the ideological demographics of
all 384 of the 462 suicide attackers whose ideology we have ascertained runs counter to
what conventional wisdom (and The God Delusion) would lead you to expect:
Of the 384 attackers for whom we have data, 166, or 43 percent, were religious, while 218, or 57
percent, were secular. Even if we assume that all unaccounted-for attackers (77) were religious,
the results would still be a nearly even split—52 percent religious versus 48 percent secular.
Suicide terrorism is not overwhelmingly a religious phenomenon. (Pape, p. 210)

And earlier in this chapter of Dying to Win, prior to the detailed analysis of various
factors, Pape sumed up the overall picture that the survey reveals:
Overall, this survey shows that the profile of suicide attackers is nearly the opposite of what
many now assume. Suicide terrorists are not primarily from religious cults whose members are
uneducated, isolated from society, and easily brainwashed into pursuing delusional aspirations.
Nor are suicide terrorists mainly from criminal gangs whose members are motivated by youthful
impulsiveness, personal satisfaction in harming others, or the anti-social habits of a life of crime.
Nor are suicide terrorists drawn from the ranks of the mentally ill, individuals so depressed that
they cannot hold a job, enjoy life, or otherwise lead productive lives and thus seek to die as an
end in itself.
In general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane, or economically
destitute individuals, but are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people
who could be expected to have a good future. The profile of a suicide terrorist resembles that of
a politically conscious individual who might join a grassroots movement more than it does the
stereotypical murderer, religious cult member, or everyday suicide.
These findings have an important implication for our understanding of what motivates an
individual to become a suicide bomber. Although there are important exceptions, these data
support the finding in Chapter 9 that suicide terrorism is not usually an act of egoistic suicide by
which the individual seeks relief from a painful existence. Rather, it is commonly a form of
altruistic suicide, in which high levels of social integration and respect for community values can
lead successful individuals to commit suicide out of a sense of duty. (Pape, pp. 200-201)

But what sort of a "sense of duty" would motivate someone to kill themselves in order to
kill others, usually non-combatant civilians? How could a person come to such a pass?
One clue has already been mentioned several times: nationalism. Of the 315 suicide
attacks only fourteen were not part of an organized coercive campaign attempting to gain
specific concessions from a target government. In fact, of the 18 campaigns waged by
suicide groups from 1980 to 2003, all of them were in response to military occupation of
their homeland by a democratic state. This is highly significant.
However, what is also highly significant is that military occupation by a foreign
government only coincides with suicide terrorism when there is a religious difference
between the occupiers and the occupied. When India (a Hindu nation) occupied Tamil
Eelam (the predominantly Hindu homeland of the Tamil Tigers), there was eventually
aggressive resistance to the occupation, but there were no suicide attacks. Once India left
and Sri Lankan Buddhist Sindhalese again occupied Tamil Eelam, the LTTE resumed
suicide attacks.
But why would a religious difference matter so much? And what is meant by
"religion" here? In what sense does it appear in the data? The answers to these questions
will take us into a much broader understanding of "religion" than Richard Dawkins
would like us to have (as they did in the last chapter), but this is the only way to really
understand what is going on. A religious difference means so much more than a
difference of intellectual dogma regarding non-existent entities and questions. A Tamil
Tiger suicide attacker, raised without any intellectual religious dogma, is still in many
important ways a "Hindu". Restricting "religion" only to intellectual supernatural dogma
blinds one to the most important things about a culture. Inextricably interwoven into a
"religion" is a whole worldview and system of ethical thought and understanding. The
predominant religion of a persons homeland almost always has a significant influence on
that persons morals, principles and gut feelings about the world. And these things can
often be harmoniously combined with a completely non-supernatural ideology such as
Marxism despite their original religious association. Ideas matter. Ethics matter. Morals
matter. People hold them near and dear to their hearts. Add into that the notion of a
homeland and ancestors and traditions and history and customs, and you have something
people will die for. It's not so strange, really. The difference between risking your life
for your country in a war, and knowingly giving it up for the same reasons, as the
Kamikaze Japanese pilots did in WW II, is maybe not so great.
Or is it? After all, terrorism means making no distinction between combatants
and non-combatants. It means having no uniform, following no Geneva convention, and
making no distinction between the enemy soldiers, and the enemy civilians. This is the
usual (and valid) distinction to be made, and it would certainly apply to the Kamikaze
pilots vs. the Tamil Tigers, for example. This brings us back to the issue of religious
difference. It isn't only that this difference raises the level of the struggle to a cultural
and ethical one, which means that people are more willing to knowingly die to prevail; it
also means that the suicide terrorist organization can demonize the enemy. The only way
to add a veneer of "necessary evil" to the act of killing innocent civilians is to portray
them as monsters: as people who have lost their humanity due to their religion (or lack
thereof), as people who knowingly and wittingly condone the atrocities committed
against the occupied peoples—or as people who permit it to happen due to their sloth,
stupidity, selfishness, and apathy, as people who are "infected" with the great evil of
XYZ, which threatens us all—threatens our very civilization. The occupiers don't just
have a different agenda and political organization, they are alien, they are sub-human.
They are incapable of being reasoned with, and lack basic human sentiments of
compassion and concern. They are evil or are at least a great source of evil that must be
gotten rid of.
Sound familiar? It should. For it is the very way that Dawkins portrays religious
believers in The God Delusion. You want to know why religious difference matters so
much? Go grab a copy of The God Delusion. There. There you go. You hold the
answer in your hands. Just imagine someone that really and truly believes in what that
book presents: religion is a great evil on all levels—social, historical, individual,
psychological. It is child abuse. It is suicide terrorism. It is insane. It is delusional.
OK? Got it? In fact, imagine you are this person. Now imagine that your predominantly
secular and atheistic homeland, devoted to furthering a scientific understanding of the
world, is invaded by Christian Fundamentalists who take over the government and social
institutions and re-work everything into a theocracy, complete with military soldiers,
check points, and enforced compliance with Christian ethical norms. TV shows are
censored, magazines are shut down, newspapers are monitored, schools are "re-
populated" with acceptable teachers who teach Christianity and Creationism, and all
government monies for scientific research are drastically curtailed, especially for
anything relating to evolution. Got it? Now imagine that friction between the non-
religious homeland factions and the religious occupiers increases and violence escalates.
Imagine that your own daughter's wedding is abruptly ended when an errant bomb from
an occupier's plane kills her, her husband-to-be, the flower girl, the bridesmaids, and a
dozen other bystanders. Imagine that you escape the destruction and live. Imagine many
more such incidents in the country. Now imagine that you come to believe that a local
resistance movement can end the occupation and expel the invaders in four or five years
if a handful of committed people step up and are willing to strap a bunch of explosives to
themselves in order to compel the enemy to leave. If you've actually followed me this
far, then you are in the ballpark of understanding the individual motivation of suicide
terrorists. (And is it really so hard to understand? If Republican Conservatives can get
so worked up over a centrist politician like President Obama, imagine how they would be
if he really were a fascist and really were re-making the US into something like Hitler's
Germany.)
For example, the father of Saeed Hotari, a suicide bomber in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, said he offered "no apologies" for his son's action and the people he
killed, saying "There are no apologies from Israelis when our people die." He said that
the popular Israeli view that the suicide bombers kill themselves because they are
promised seventy-two virgins in the afterlife is a means to avoid considering their real
motivations:
Before they ask me how my son could do something like that, they should ask what the
conditions were that led him to do it. Why do people kill themselves? Are they fond of death?
Is it a fashion? Since 1948, the Jews have taken more and more of our land. My son wasn't a
radical person. He was radicalized by the anger, by the humiliation. Look before your eyes.
We are living in a jail. I would be a liar to say I feel sorry for the people who are oppressing us
day by day. (Pape, p. 233)

In his final statement, Hassan Hotari explained why concern about Israeli retaliation does
not deter community support for suicide terrorism against Israelis, "If we don't fight, we
will suffer. If we do fight, we will suffer, but so will they."
Suicide terrorism is not caused by religious delusions. Nor is religion even a
necessary component. Suicide terrorism is a response to occupation and invasion by a
democratic foreign military, and almost always only appears when (1) the occupiers have
different values and worldviews, (2) the suicide terrorists are part of an nationalistic
organized coercive campaign that appears to have a chance of successfully attaining
certain concessions or goals, and (3) when there is broad community support for suicide
terrorism. In this sense, it is true that trying to restrict the phenomenon of suicide
terrorism to "extremism" or "fundamentalism" is a myth, but not because all religion is
"extreme" or leads to extremism, but because all viable communities have a certain
amount of patriotism and cohesion and sense of shared values that makes them resistant
to violent and oppressive occupation by people who have markedly different values and
worldviews.
And I have to get a little bit agitated at this point and wonder how uninformed
Richard Dawkins would really need to be in order to truly believe that the "troubles" in
Northern Ireland are only a function of a religious distinction, which would never have
arisen if there had been no religious labels (like "Catholic" and "Protestant") to pin on
people? Hello? Don't you think that—oh, I don't know—the occupation of the North of
Ireland by Britain's military and the splitting off of Northern Ireland from Southern
Ireland and, say perhaps, the political subjugation of Northern Ireland to the United
Kingdom have anything to do with the IRA's terrorist agenda? Does Dawkins seriously
think that it would all just evaporate if the people involved weren't religious? Not a
chance. If Britain were to pull out of Northern Ireland and give it complete national
independence to do whatsoever it wanted, then the troubles would evaporate overnight—
or at least the IRA would immediately stop its terrorist activities. Once again, religion is
a red herring. The real issue in regards to Northern Ireland and the IRA is nationalism
and an occupying military force. But note that while the IRA is a terrorist organization, it
is not a suicide terrorist organization because broad community support for terrorism is
lacking in Northern Ireland and because the religious difference is relatively small, both
sides being Christian and having a great many shared values and worldviews.
The world without religion that Dawkins asks us to imagine is a fiction. Even if
all supernatural belief and dogma were eradicated today, there would still be all manner
of ills and calamities tomorrow, just as there were yesterday. Moral and philosophical
first-principles and ideals and ethical systems of thought do not need a supernatural basis
to exist, and they would continue to hold power even if all supernatural belief
disappeared.
 RELIGION/INNER

At this point I'd like to peel back another layer of the metaphorical onion I
mentioned in the second chapter. It's the next layer down because it still rests on
objective scientific results—or my discussion of it will so rest—but in another sense, it is
the inner-most layer in that the subject is the inner mental experience of "religion" and
"spirituality". Dawkins is quite fond of what I call "the write-off," and one of the write-
offs that appears in The God Delusion is the notion that religious people are suffering
from a misfiring of one or more brain modules that are useful in other circumstances, or
once were useful in the distant past, but are no longer useful. He focuses in on "the
gullible child" as the kind of thing that he believes is the explanation for the origins of
religion and religious belief, but he insists that he is not wedded to that one hypothesis, as
long as any alternative hypotheses are also by-product types of explanation. Thus, he's
not really interested in providing a practically useful working hypothesis that we could
then test against reality. His real aim is to provide plausible deniability to any of the
traditional views of religion. It's a write-off. And once it's been deployed, it is quickly
forgotten—for example, he doesn't discuss how Cargo Cults could have arisen so quickly
given his theory that the natural gullibility of children and random cultural drift are what
are responsible for religious belief. Nor does he discuss this theory in relation to adult
conversions, or how polytheistic cultures could adopt each others gods and goddesses or
recognized them under different names in a different society. No need. Who cares? We
can't be bothered with all the delusional nonsense that humans have dreamed up
throughout history. It's enough to know that something like his explanation must be true
(without proof, of course). The degree of disdain that this implies for the subject is
extreme. If you come up with a theory to explain the nature of a class of "delusions" and
your theory fails to account for their history and dynamics properly, you can't then turn
around and say, "yeah, whatever, who cares? They're all delusions anyway. Some other
theory of the same kind as mine must be true instead." Imagine a scientist taking such a
stance towards any area of active research! The "kind" of explanation is not good
enough. It may be a start, but that's all it is. And in this case, as I mentioned, it's not
even that, because his explanation doesn't explain many of the documented religious
phenomena, and because his notion of the "gullible child" is incorrect as we shall see in a
later chapter. Just because you can think of a possible way that something might be
evolutionarily useful does not mean that it actually is or was useful in this way, nor that
the phenomenon you've dreamed up even actually exists. Of course, for good measure,
Dawkins also throws in his ultimate write-off—the meme—and I'm sure that this is what
he would fall back on to explain situations where the gullible child write-off fails.
However, I will defer the discussion of memes for a later chapter, where they will be
given full and complete consideration. For now, let's focus on the misfiring brain module
hypothesis.
Are religious people really suffering from a misfiring of some brain circuit, such
as the "circuit" for "falling in love" (Dennett's proposal)? And how could we determine
this? Fortunately, much brain research has been conducted by neuroscientists over the
last two decades on just these types of questions, and their results will allow us to
examine the entire class of misfiring-brain-module-hypotheses in an empirical and
scientific way. However, before I discuss that research, I'd like to consider "falling in
love" more generally, as it has relevance to our topic as a whole, and to the by-product
theory in particular. Dawkins mentions Helen Fisher's book Why We Love: The nature
and chemistry of romantic love, and says that:
The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of
romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary.
Look at it this way. From the point of view of a man, say, it is unlikely that any one woman of
his acquaintance is a hundred times more lovable than her nearest competitor, yet that is how he
is likely to describe her when 'in love'. Rather than the fanatically monogamous devotion to
which we are susceptible, some sort of 'polyamory' is on the face of it more rational.
(Polyamory is the belief that one can simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex,
just as one can love more than one wine, composer, book, or sport.) We happily accept that we
can love more than one child, parent, sibling, teacher, friend or pet. When you think of it like
that, isn't the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love positively weird? Yet it is what
we expect, and it is what we set out to achieve. There must be a reason.
Helen Fisher and others have shown that being in love is accompanied by unique brain states,
including the presence of neurally active chemicals (in effect, natural drugs) that are highly
specific and characteristic of the state. (TGD pp. 214-215)

For starters, I need to point out that Helen Fisher does not think that romantic love is
"insane". On the contrary, in her preface, she says "Moreover, I am convinced that this
passion is a foundation stone of human social life, that just about every human being who
has ever lived has felt the ecstasy and the despair of romantic love. Perhaps most
important, a clearer understanding of this whirlwind may help people find and sustain this
glorious passion." (p. xi) And later in the book she says:
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, poets, philosophers, and dramatists have regarded passion
and reason as separate, distinct, even opposing phenomena. Plato summed up the dichotomy,
saying that one's desires were like wild horses; the intellect was the "charioteer" who must
subdue and direct these cravings. The belief that one must employ reason to triumph over one's
baser drives has trickled through the centuries. Early Christian theologians cemented this
precept in Western thought: emotions and desires were temptations, sins that must be conquered
by reasoning and willpower.
Neuroscientists now believe, however, that reason and passion are inexorably lined in the
brain. And I think these connections say something important about controlling romantic love.
(p. 207)

And note that "controlling" romantic love, for Helen Fisher, does not mean "subduing" or
"eliminating", but rather how to "find and sustain" and work with the "glorious" passion
of romantic love to enhance your life.
Yet, Dawkins puts romantic love into the category of a "by-product". The
purpose of romantic love, evolutionarily speaking, was to secure a mother-father pair
long enough to allow them to parent the children to maturity. The feeling that your
partner is the one is the proximate cause of staying together in the face of an onerous and
time consuming duty such as parenting, but the ultimate cause and explanation for this
feeling is not that it is really "true," but that it motivates an adaptive behavior. Strictly
speaking then, starting from Dawkins' position here, we could argue that "love" is a
delusion. Further, note that despite his misreading of Helen Fishers stance on romantic
love, it would be ridiculously easy to show that romantic love is a source of great evil in
the world: stalkers, jealous rages, crimes of passion, the great waste of energy involved in
all this falling-in-love time and time again, divorce, re-marriage, second marriages —
wouldn't people be so much better off without romantic love? What if Dawkins wrote a
book titled The Love Delusion? What then? Do you think that book would be a best-
seller too? Do you think people would start labeling themselves a-romantics and start
ridiculing all those "weak minded" people who are so resistant to reason that they allow
themselves to "fall" for "falling in love"? Would they call romantics "love-heads" and
decry their ability to ignore reality? Sure, maybe belief "in love" does give consolation,
but that doesn't make it true now does it? And what of the ridiculous and extreme respect
shown to "love"? What's up with that? Why all the songs and movies and TV shows that
center around love and finding love? Isn't it time we all outgrew such a vestigial and
delusional phenomenon? It's no longer needed. Let us break the spell of love, and move
on to a brave new world of more sensible and rational modes of interacting and rearing
children. etc. etc.
I'm sure you get the picture. And I'm sure you can see that The Love Delusion
would be anything but a best seller. Yet, strictly speaking, you can make the case that
love is a by-product, a misfiring brain module. Even if this is true, so what? That doesn't
change the fact that romantic love is indeed a foundation stone of human culture and is a
beautiful and wonderful thing—an essential part of the human condition.
In any case, despite Dawkins' claim on p. 215 of The God Delusion,
neuroscientists have not found that religious experiences and romantic love excite the
same brain areas, nor that they trigger the release of the same neurochemicals. Yes, some
of the emotions associated with religious and spiritual experiences and practices overlap
with those of being in love, but that is true of a great many other things as well. What it
would take to prove a falling-in-love by-product theory of religion is to find very similar
brain patterns on fMRI scans. And we don't find those. Not for the effect of religious
and spiritual practices generally, nor for the special cases of "mystical" or "spiritual"
experiences.
How do I know? Well, because I have studied some of the available results of the
neuroscientific research on religion and spirituality and its effect on the brain. My main
sources were The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, and How
God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman. The first
book was written by a neuroscientist who is also, in some sense, a "believer" and most of
the book argues for a "non-materialistic" view of the mind and is definitely driven by this
agenda. Nonetheless, The Spiritual Brain's most important contribution is unaffected by
this, and is solid scientific research: fMRI and QEEG scans of the brains of Carmelite
nuns while they recalled and relived their most significant mystical experiences. The
second book, How God Changes Your Brain, is written by two neuroscientists who are
not religious and is crammed full of scientific research, is incredibly well documented
and foot-noted, and, despite its' title, is not driven by any ideological agenda (and is the
book I would recommend—avoid the Beauregard book; I will quote the only important
parts of it below.) I also read two other books on neuroscience and neural plasticity
which were very interesting, if somewhat less relevant to our current topic: Train Your
Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by
Norman Doidge.
 In The Spiritual Brain, Beauregard is attempting to answer one main question
with his study of Carmelite nuns: is there a "God module" in the brain that would explain
religious/spiritual/mystical experiences (RSME's)? His findings are that not only is there
no such module, but that the scans he took are all significantly different from each other
and that they involve many different brain regions, indicative of a complex,
multidimensional experience:
From a neural perspective, the key finding from [fMRI] Study 1 was that many brain regions,
not just the temporal lobes, are involved in mystical experiences. These include the inferior
parietal lobule, visual cortex, caudate nucleus, and left brain stem as well as many other areas.
Our findings demonstrate that there is no single "God spot" in the brain located in the
temporal lobes. Rather our objective and subjective data suggest that RSME's are complex and
multidimensional and mediated by a number of brain regions normally implicated in perception,
cognition, emotion, body representation, and self-consciousness. (p. 272)
Second, when the nuns were recalling autobiographical memories, the brain activity was
different from that of the mystical state. So we know for certain that the mystical state is
something other than an emotional state. The abundance of theta activity during the mystical
condition clearly demonstrated a marked alteration of consciousness in the nuns. It is
noteworthy that previous QEEG studies have shown increased theta activity in the frontal cortex
during a type of Zen meditation called Su-soku, and a blissful state in meditation. (p. 275)

In relation to the falling-in-love by-product theory, (and in the interests of full disclosure)
I should mention that theta waves have sometimes (but not in general) also been
associated with sexual arousal in adults, and that I can tell you from personal experience
that there are similarities between the experiences of meditative bliss and those of sexual,
romantic bliss. It's not for nothing that the East produced a book like the Kama Sutra or a
practice such as Tantra. However, that said, there are also important differences between
the two experiences, and, they do not active the same brain modules according to fMRI
scans. In addition, at this point it is important to clarify that anyone can experience
meditative bliss with enough meditation practice, but an RSME is not guaranteed to
occur, no matter how many hours of meditation or contemplative prayer you log. And,
on the other hand, people who have never practiced meditation at all and who are not
religious can and do experience so-called RSME's.
Let's move on to the second book I mentioned. Newberg and Waldman were
focused much more broadly on researching the effects of spiritual and religious practices
on the brain, including meditation divorced from any religious dogma or even any
mention of "God", as well as other mindfulness, prayer, and guided visual imagery
techniques. They present the same finding as Beauregard in relation to a "God spot" in
the brain:
To summarize, the neural varieties of religious experience are just that—varieties. There is
no "God spot," nor is there any simple way to categorize religious beliefs. The data points to an
endless variety of ways in which spiritual practices can affect the cognitive, emotional, and
experiential processes of the brain, and each one of these experiences will lead to a different
notion about God. (p. 60)

Interestingly enough, they mention Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher
Hitchens in the very first chapter. Let's see what they have to say:
 Recently there has been a spate of antireligious books—among them, The God Delusion,
Richard Dawkins; The End of Faith, Sam Harris; and God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens—
that argue that religious beliefs are personally and societally dangerous. But the research, as we
will outline throughout this book, strongly suggests otherwise. (p. 6)

Ultimately, it is a mistake to assume that any self-assigned label, category, or description of

religious belief accurately captures a person's value system or morality. Furthermore, our
research suggests that the more a person contemplates his or her values and beliefs, the more
they are apt to change.
The recent spate of antireligious "scholarship" that has landed on the bestseller lists should
also be viewed with skepticism. Mark and I are particularly disappointed with the lack of
empirical evidence that these writers have cited that even mildly suggests that religion is
hazardous to your health. The psychological, sociological, and neuroscientific data simply
disagree. The problem isn't religion. The problem is authoritarianism, coupled with the desire
to angrily impose one's idealistic beliefs on others.
One should also remember that during the twentieth century, tens of millions of people were
killed by nonreligious and antireligious regimes, while far fewer have been killed in the name of
an authoritarian God. Even when it comes to suicide bombings, half of the people involved have
been found to be nonreligious. Instead, their acts of violence were carried out for purely
political or socially motivated reasons. As we documented in our previous book, human beings
have a neurological and biological propensity to act in profoundly hostile ways. On the other
hand, our research shows that the majority of spiritual practices suppress the brain's ability to
react with anger or fear.
There is, however, a shadow side to religious and political organizations, especially when
their tenets stipulate that there is only one absolute and undeniable truth. When such individuals
band together, they unconsciously foster an "us versus them" mentality that neurologically
generates fear and hostility toward people who hold different beliefs. Neuroscience tells us that
the moment we see an angry face, or hear angry words, our brain kicks into overdrive,
generating stress chemicals that will makes us fight or run. Anger generates anger, and the
angrier a group of people get, the greater the possibility that violence will erupt. (pp. 11-12)

Note the very important distinctions that these two neuroscientists raise right away: they
distinguish between someone's nominal religion and that persons value system or
morality; they distinguish between authoritarianism and religion (which are not in
general the same, although obviously in some cases they can be and are the same); and
they distinguish between organizations and spiritual and religious practices. These
distinctions are essential to understanding what is really going on in the world today.
At this point I'd like to briefly digress to consider Dawkins' coverage of Hitler and
Stalin and his naive view of atheists. Like a thin insulating layer between explosively
reactive components, there are only a couple dozen pages between his assertion that "I do
not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres,
York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto, or, of course, the
Buddhas of Bamiyan" (p. 283) and his discussion of Hitler and Stalin on p. 308. He
seems to think that the only way that religious people bring Hitler and Stalin into a
discussion is to try to show that atheism caused them to commit such atrocities, and by
implication, that if they had been religious they would not have killed so many people—
you need God to be moral, in other words. Well, I've been involved in a number
discussions on these topics, and I have never once heard a religious person make this
argument. I agree that if they did make it that it would be illogical, just as Dawkins says.
But all of this is just a distraction from the main point that should be drawn in the
consideration of Stalin and Hitler. And that is that you do not need "religion" in order to
get good people to do evil deeds. Any strong belief system combined with an
authoritarian organization will do, even if it totally lacks any supernatural content. Stalin
was an atheist. Yet despite this, Stalin and his followers certainly did dismantle and
destroy the Church in Russia, both in a physical, material sense, and in a social, political
sense. He may not have literally sat in a bulldozer while razing a church, but he was
indeed responsible for essentially the same things. Atheists can and do act in
reprehensible ways. I personally knew one atheist who desecrated a Church graveyard by
knocking over and breaking tombstones. When questioned about it, he spoke eloquently
about how delusional religious belief was and how much time, money, and energy was
wasted on it, and on buildings like Churches. It's really sweet how naive Dawkins is on
the subject, and I actually think it speaks highly about his goodwill and good intentions
and high mindedness. But it's still naive. And rather funny, too. Did you know that he
gave out the combination to his bike lock in one of his books because he was sure that no
one who would read his books would ever steal his bike? And then, guess what
happened? Wait for it . . . . yes . . . his bike was stolen. I'm sorry that happened to you,
Richard, but don't worry: it couldn't have been an atheist who stole your bike! It was
probably the religious girlfriend or boyfriend of an atheist who noticed the combination
while their partner was reading your book. That could have been the case, right? No
need to give up your faith in the superior moral nature of atheists.
But I digress. Let's get back to religion and spirituality and their effects on the
brain. Dawkins hammers home, time and time again, that religion has evil consequences:
that it causes anger and dissent and suppresses basic human feelings of goodwill and
decency. This is why religious people can rip a boy from his parents, or burn women at
the stake, or flog women merely for showing an inch of skin, or force a living, breathing
wife to burn atop her husbands funeral pyre. Religion changes people for the worse,
impairing their ability to feel compassion and empathy. Or so he claims. But what does
the evidence show?
In short, the evidence shows that many religious and spiritual practices actually
suppress and diminish negative and destructive emotions such as anger and fear, and that
they actually increase positive and social emotions such as empathy, kindness, and
compassion. Meditation has also been shown to increase cognitive functioning and to
prevent age related cognitive decline—it's good for your brain, in other words. Note,
however, that not everyone actually practices what they preach. This is so true, in fact,
that it's a truism, a cliche. Simply physically going to Church and sitting and listening to
the sermon has not been shown to have the positive effects I just mentioned.
Intellectually mumbling a few prayers for five minutes before bedtime will probably do
little or nothing for your brain, nor to enhance positive emotions and states or suppress
negative ones. Dogma is not practice. Dawkins treats religion as if it were nothing more
than an intellectual theory, but the heart of religion is not to be found in the intellect. In
order to experience any of the positive effects that have been found to correlate with
spiritual and religious practice, you must actually practice. Think of it this way: if you
want to get limber, you must stretch. Mentally knowing all the different positions you
can assume in order to stretch which muscles and tendons and being aware of the general
physiological theory behind stretching and why it happens and what conditions and
practices are most conducive to increasing your pliability—all of that will not make you
one bit more limber if you never actually stretch.
Many meditative and spiritual practices have been shown to be good for your
brain, for your health, and for your emotional wellbeing and balance. Far from
suppressing or impairing compassion and normal human sensibilities, they enhance them.
Such practices balance the left and right brain functioning, and improve the
communication and integration of the two hemispheres of the brain:
If you analyze the data collected from meditation studies, one of the most influential factors
is time. The longer and more frequently you meditate, the more changes you'll notice in the
brain. Beginning meditators show little or no change in brain function after one or two practice
sessions. However, most studies, like ours, have found small but significant changes in brain
activity after only eight weeks of daily practice.
Those who practice daily for thirty minutes or longer, and for many years, show the greatest
differences in neural activity,3 not only when they are meditating, but when they are also at rest.
Richard Davidson, who is the head of the Waisman Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging
and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin, has been working with some of the most advanced
meditators in the world. He and his team have found that these gifted individuals have
extraordinary skills in manipulating specific parts of the brain that control thoughts and
emotions,4 including the capacity to generate compassion in situations that virtually no one else
can obtain.5
Davidson's findings also demonstrate that the neuroplasticity of the brain is greater than we
have imagined.6 Another important study, recently released by the Psychiatric Neuroimaging
Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, also showed that meditation enhanced the
brain's thickness and neuroplasticity.7 Normally when we age, our cerebral cortex thins. (p. 62)

Our neurological findings have shown that different types of meditation and prayer affect
different parts of the brain in different ways, and each one appears to have a beneficial effect on
our neurological functioning and physical and emotional health. . . .
By manipulating our breath, body, awareness, feelings, and thoughts, we can decrease
tension and stress. We can evoke or suppress specific emotions and focus our thoughts in ways
that biologically influence other parts of the brain. From a neuroscientific perspective, this is

                                                                                                               
3  Creswell JD, Way BM, Eisenberger NI, Liebermann MD. Neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness during affect labeling.
Psychosom Med. 2007 Jul-Aug;69(6):560-5

Pagnoni G, Cekic M. Age effects on gray matter volume and attentional performance in Zen meditation. Neurobiol Aging. 2007
Oct;28(10):1623-7.

Brefczynski-Lewis JA, Lutz A, Schaefer HS, Levinson DB, Davidson RJ. Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term
meditation practitioners. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Jul 3;104(27):11483-8

Holzel BK, Ott U, Hempel H, Hackl A, Wolf K, Stark R, Vaitl D. Differential engagement of anterior cingulate and adjacent medial
frontal cortex in adept meditators and non-meditators. Neurosci Lett. 2007 Jun 21;421(1):16-21.
4  Brefczynski-Lewis, JA, Lutz A, Scjaefer JS, Levinson DB, Davidson RJ. Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term
meditation practitioners. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2007 Jul 3;104(27)11483-8.
5  Goleman, D. Destructive Emotions. Bantam Books, 2003.
6  Slagter HA, Lutz A, Greischar LL, Francis AD, Nieuwenhuis S, Davis JM, Davidson RJ. Mental training affects distribution of
limited brain resources. PLoS Biol. 2007 Jun;5(6):e138.

Lutz A, Greischar LL, Rawlings NB, Ricard M, Davidson RJ. Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony
during mental practice. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Nov 16;101(46):16369-73.
7  Lazar SW, Kerr CE, Wasserman RH, Gray JR, Greve DN, Treadway MT, McGarvey M, Quinn BT, Dusek JA, Benson H, Ruch SL,
moore CI, Fischl B. Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. Neuroreport. 2005 Nov 28;16(17):1893-7.
 astonishing because it upsets the traditional view that we cannot voluntarily influence
nonconscious areas in the brain. Only human beings can think themselves into happiness or
despair, without any influence from the outside world. Thus, the more we engage in spiritual
practices, the more control we gain over our body, mind, and fate. (p. 63)

We also found that advanced meditators had a higher level of parietal activity when they
were not meditating. This suggests that meditation, over time, strengthens one's sense of self in
relationship to the world, as well as to the spiritual dimensions of life. It also suggests that
conscious manipulation of parietal activity strengthens this part of the brain in the same way that
intellectual activity strengthens the frontal lobe. Indeed, increased parietal activity is associated
with increased consciousness, alertness, and the ability to resonate to other people's feelings and
thoughts. (p. 52)

At this point, you might be thinking "OK, fine, it's all well and good to show that mental
exercises, such as mediation, are beneficial, but this is different than prayer, which is just
a one-sided intellectual request-fest with a non-existent God. Certainly that isn't the same
as meditation." Well, first of all, some of the results quoted above did include
contemplative prayer as well as meditation in the footnoted studies. Secondly, the
assumption that prayer is nothing but conceptual sub-verbal or verbal requests is simply
wrong. Prayer can be nothing but that—and I suspect that for far too many Christians it
is little more than this, unfortunately—but traditionally, the term "prayer" has a much
wider and deeper meaning. Prayer is putting yourself before the divine, and opening
yourself up to it, communing with it, loving it, and contemplating it. Whether or not "the
divine" even exists, these practices profoundly alter your neural state and are far more
than an intellectual wish-list. The Rosary, for example, involves three sets of five guided
meditations or contemplations, as well as sub-verbalized prayers to measure these out and
mark the transitions from one contemplation to the next. When one becomes proficient
in praying the Rosary, the sub-verbalized words of the prayers are like background music
which keep the left intellectual brain occupied, while the imaginative, image- and feeling-
based empathetic right brain is allowed greater than normal scope and activity in order to
focus on the subject of contemplation. Saint Ignatius of Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises"
are also contemplative, meditative prayers within the Christian Tradition. And there are
many more examples. These practices are classified under the rubric of "prayer" but are
very different than just mumbling a few requests to "God". Indeed, they, like Zen
meditation, move your mind away from its normal waking state into one that is very
different. One such modern technique is called the "Centering Prayer": you choose a
word that has a sacred meaning and focus on it for twenty minutes or longer as you sit
comfortably with eyes closed. When distracting thoughts or feelings intervene, you
gently return to your sacred word. Dr. Newberg had the opportunity to study the effects
of just this practice, and reports on it in his book:
In the summer of 1999. I had the opportunity to study a group of nuns who had been
practicing the Centering Prayer for a minimum of fifteen years. This was the first brain-scan
study of Christian contemplative practitioners, and we discovered that the neurological changes
were significant and very different from how the human brain normally functions.8 Even more
surprising, the neurological changes were nearly the same as those we recorded from a group of
Buddhist practitioners, who obviously nurtured very different beliefs. This evidence confirmed

                                                                                                               
8  Newberg A, Pourdehnad M, Alavi A, d'Aquili EG. Cerebral blood flow during meditative prayer: preliminary findings and
methodological issues. Percept. Mot Skills. 2003 Oct;97(2):625-30
 our hypothesis that the benefits gleaned from prayer and meditation may have less to do with a
specific theology than with the ritual techniques of breathing, staying relaxed, and focusing one's
attention upon a concept that evokes comfort, compassion, or a spiritual sense of peace. Of
course, the more you believe in what you are meditating or praying about, the stronger the
response will be. (p. 48)

Thus meditative or contemplative prayer is remarkably similar to eastern meditation in its

effects on the brain.
However, once again, we might question the label "spiritual". Since theology and
dogma can be very different—or can even be removed entirely from the practices
mentioned—isn't it disingenuous to label them "spiritual"? What would the difference
between a mental exercise and a spiritual exercise be (if any)? Wouldn't the same
neurological benefits flow from intense contemplation on a scientific problem or theory,
such as Evolution or the Big Bang? Well, yes and no. Learning and contemplating
something like Evolution or General Relativity is indeed good for your brain and does
indeed induce beneficial neurological changes. However, they are fundamentally
different than the ones induced by so-called spiritual practices:
Contemplating God will change your brain, but I want to point out that meditating on other
grand themes will also change your brain. If you contemplate the Big Bang, or immerse yourself
in the study of evolution—or choose to play a musical instrument, for that matter—you'll change
the neural circuitry in ways that enhance your cognitive health. But religious and spiritual
contemplation changes your brain in a profoundly different way because it strengthens a unique
neural circuit that specifically enhances social awareness and empathy while subduing
destructive feelings and emotions. This is precisely the kind of neural change we need to make
if we want to solve the conflicts that currently afflict our world. And the underlying mechanism
that allows these changes to occur relates to a unique quality known as neuroplasticity: the
ability of the human brain to structurally rearrange itself in response to a wide variety of positive
and negative events. (p. 14)

Scientific conceptual contemplation activates the intellectual, conceptual, logical left

brain, whereas religious and spiritual contemplative and meditative practices activate the
emotional, artistic, empathetic, intuitive right brain. This is what makes a practice
"spiritual". It is the inner, emotional, empathetic, nonverbal, non-conceptual dimension
that is the true spiritual dimension, not blind dogmatic conceptual belief in things
"supernatural":
In her recent book, My Stroke of Insight, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes her
extraordinary experience when, at the age of thirty-seven, she had a stroke. It caused substantial
neurological damage to the left side of her brain, but it also resulted in an incredibly euphoric
experience in which she felt intimately and profoundly connected with everything. She argued
that the right side of the brain, when freed from the abstract reductionistic thinking of the left
hemisphere, allows a person to experience the deeply compassionate and spiritual part of our
human nature. Fully recovered, Dr. Taylor says she can now easily shift between the scientific
and transcendent sides of her brain. Her experience supports the notion that each of us has an
inner capacity to access these wonderful parts of who we are—a notion supported by our brain-
scan research at the University of Pennsylvania. (p. 59).

And this is why Dawkins reduction of religion to a dogmatic conceptual system of

intellectual belief—to a "God Hypothesis"—is so profoundly wrong. It is also the reason
why artists and poets have only rarely looked to science and the scientific worldview for
their inspiration. Not because science isn't poetic and inspiring and wonderful—it
certainly is all of those things—but because that inspiration activates the wrong
hemisphere of the brain: the abstract and intellectual hemisphere of the brain, and not the
artistic and "transcendent" side, which is the realm of music, art, poetry, and creativity.
Science portrays an outer, objective world, whereas artists are interested in the inner,
subjective world.
Dawkins claims that religious people don't want scientists to discover things—
that by doing so they think that scientists "unweave the rainbow" making it less
wonderful by explaining it—and that they like things to remain "mysterious" and are
singularly fond of the term. But this is not what is truly meant by the religious term
"mystery". The religious meaning of "mystery" is quite different than the scientific one,
or the one indicated by the term "mystery novel"; it's not used to indicate something that
might in principle be explained when we gain more knowledge and insight or a more
general theory or better instruments, but which is now currently unexplained. No. A
religious or spiritual mystery refers to a situation where the "mystery" can never be
"explained" in objective scientific terms because there is no viable correspondence
between the inner experience and the outer objective label. "Mystics" refuse to articulate
in words their most profound and important inner experiences not because they are
obscurantists, but because they feel that these experiences are so rare and so complex and
so difficult to fully compass that to put them into words would be to reduce and diminish
them. It's not that they don't want to know the answer—don't want anyone to ruin their
comforting illusions—it's that they want to remain as close as possible to the inner
experience and so refuse to pigeonhole it. Thus, "mystery," in this sense, refers not to a
lack of knowledge and the desire to remain in that state of lack of knowledge, but rather it
refers to ineffable knowledge and a desire to remain as close as possible to that
knowledge. The genuine mystic isn't against knowledge and explanation at all; he or she
just holds that objective conceptual language can not reliably express all experiences that
a human being can have.
Or, if we reverse the direction, a "mystery" can also legitimately refer to
something for which someone does have an objective label, but which will never be able
to be matched to an inner subjective experience. To Helen Keller, color and sound were
mysteries. She nonetheless conceptualized things as colored and resonant, and spoke of
them as such:
Since my education began I have always had things described to me with their colors and
sounds, by one with keen senses and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore, I habitually
think of things as colored and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense accounts for
another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction asserts its right and accounts for the
rest. Inclusive or all, the unity of the world demands that color be kept in it whether I have
cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, happy in the
happiness of those near to me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow. (The
Story of My Life, 1902, quoted in UTR, p. 257).

Color and sound were, to her, mysteries, and she knew they would always remain so.
This didn't mean that she didn't want to know as much as possible about color and sound
and what science had found out about them. It didn't mean that she felt that explanation
"unweaved" the rainbow. It meant that no matter how much objective and scientific
information she gathered on color and sound that a whole dimension of human
experience (two dimensions, actually) would remain forever inaccessible to her. Many
religious people maintain that there are some things that are to us as color and sound were
to Helen Keller, whose essential nature will always remain a mystery. Perhaps they are
incorrect about this, or perhaps not, but the important point I am making here is that this
is in no way comparable to the anti-intellectualism and desire to remain in ignorance
about the world which Dawkins decries in Unweaving the Rainbow.
On the other hand, I absolutely do not think that every time a religion or religious
person calls something a "mystery" that it necessarily really is a legitimate religious
mystery. On the contrary, much (if not most) of the time that the word is used by the
religious, it is simply covering over plain old fashioned illogic, contradiction, nonsense,
or inanity. Calling the doctrine of the Trinity a "mystery" is just a way to cover over the
fact that it is a kluge, a patch, a welding together of incompatible theologies and notions,
and that it just plain makes no sense. Nor is the resurrection of Jesus a religious
"mystery". Either it really literally happened. Or it didn't. It is an object of scientific
knowledge (at least in principle). If it really did happen, then it is a mystery in the
scientific sense, in the same way that miraculous reversals and cures of terminal illnesses
are a mystery in the scientific sense: we currently have no explanation for them. But they
are certainly objects of experience, inner and outer, as well as objectively describable
events. There's no mystery (in the legitimate religious sense) about what "terminally ill"
or "fully recovered" mean, nor is it hard to imagine the experience of being critically ill
and then fully recovering. All of us, numerous times, have been sick and then recovered.
It's like that, only more so. No mystery. I don't mean to belabor the point, but I did want
to try to ensure that I was understood. Let's move on.
There's one final thing that I want to consider before we leave this chapter, and
that is to ask the simple question that if we really do know that certain kinds of religious
practices are good for your brain, what do we know about what is bad for your brain?
Shouldn't there be some kind of neuroscience explanation for Hitler's Germany, for the
Holocaust, for Stalin's Russia, for suicide bombings? Well, we touched on the answer to
these questions briefly in the beginning of this chapter, but it deserves more discussion.
Anger. Chronic anger is really, really bad for your brain, and impairs logical thinking
and the healthy processing of emotions. Cynicism and labeling and an us versus them
group mentality go along with this pathological state like infection in a dirty wound.
Anger interrupts the functioning of your frontal lobes. Not only do you lose the ability to be
rational, you lose the awareness that you're acting in an irrational way. When your frontal lobes
shut down, it's impossible to listen to the other person, let alone feel empathy or compassion.
Instead, you are likely to feel self-justified and self-righteous, and when that happens the
communication process falls apart. Anger also releases a cascade of neurochemicals that
actually destroy those parts of the brain that control emotional reactivity. (Newberg and
Waldman, pp. 19-20)

We all harbor a pack of neurological wolves in our brain. The old ones reside in the limbic
system, and they are filled with aggression and fear. They're fast, efficient, and potentially
deadly, and they've been running the show for 150 million years. The younger ones reside in our
frontal lobes and anterior cingulate, where empathy, reason, logic, and compassion reside.
These pups are playful and imaginative, but they are also neurologically vulnerable and slow
when compared to the activity in the emotional parts of the brain.
 So when it comes to making sophisticated moral decisions, which one will win? The selfish
brain or the cooperative one? Again, as with the two wolves, it depends on the one you feed. If
you allow anger and fear to dominate, you will lose the neurological ability to think logically
and act compassionately toward others. In fact, it is nearly impossible to find peace and serenity
if your mind is preoccupied by negative, anxious, or hateful thoughts.
Excessive anger or fear can permanently disrupt many structures and functions in both your
body and your brain. These destructive emotions interfere with memory storage and cognitive
accuracy, which, in turn, will disrupt your ability to properly evaluate and respond to social
situations.9 Anger makes people indiscriminately punitive, blameful, pessimistic, and
unilaterally careless in their logic and reasoning skills.10 Furthermore, anger encourages your
brain to defend your beliefs—be they right or wrong—and when this happens, you'll be more
likely to feel prejudice toward others.11 You'll inaccurately perceive anger in other people's
faces,12 and this will increase your own distrust and fear. It's an insidious process that feeds on
itself, and it can influence your behavior for very long periods of time.13 Eventually it will even
damage important structures in your brain.
Nor is it good for your heart. Regardless of your age, gender, or ethnicity—anger, cynicism,
hostility, and defensiveness will increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular
problems.14 What makes anger particularly dangerous is that it blinds you to the fact that you're
even angry; thus it gives you a false sense of certainty, confidence, and optimism.15

                                                                                                               
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Hoeksema S, Peterson BS. Neural and behavioral substrates of mood and mood regulation, Biol Psychiatry, 2002 Sep 15;52(6):478-
502
10  For the most comprehensive overview of anger published to date, see Lerner JS, Tiedens LZ. Portrait of the angry decision maker:
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Tiedens LZ, Linton S. Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: the effects of specific emotions on information processing.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2001 Dec;81(6):973-88.

Lerner JS, Goldberg JH, Tetlock PE. Sober second thought: the effects of accountability, anger and authoritarianism on attributions of
responsibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 1998;24(6), 563-74
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projection: how fundamental social motives can bias interpersonal perception. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2005 Jan;88(1):63-78
12  Hugenberg K, Bodenhausen GV. Facing prejudice: implicit prejudice and the perception of facial threat. Psychol Sci. 2003
Nov;14(6)640-3
13  Lerner JS, Keltner D. Fear, anger, and risk. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2001 Jul;81(1)146-159.
14  Thomas KS, Nelsen RA, Dimsdale JE. Relationships between hostility, anger expression, and blood pressure dipping in an
ethnically diverse sample. Psychosom Med. 2004 May-Jun;66(3):298-304.
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Shapiro D, Goldstein JB, Jamner LD. Effects of anger/hostility, defensiveness, gender, and family history of hypertension on
cardiovascular reactivity. Psychophysiology. 1995 Sep;32(5):425-35
15  Lerner JS, Tiedens LZ. Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition. J
Behavioral Decision Making. 2006:19:115-137.
 When people use their religion or politics—or even humor or teasing16—as a weapon to
aggressively disparage others who embrace different beliefs, they unwittingly stimulate the other
person's brain to retaliate with similar aggression. Aggression and hostility shut down activity in
the anterior cingulate and striatum—the two key areas of the brain that control anger and fear—
and when this occurs, the amygdala takes over, generating a "fight or flight" response that is
spread through every other part of the brain.17 (How God Changes Your Brain, pp 132-133)

Even the very act of categorizing and labeling things, especially people, reinforces our
natural tendency towards prejudice and an us-versus-them mentality:
Our brain automatically places objects and people into separate distinguishable groups, and
then we select a preference for one group over the other. We will root for our favorite baseball
team and disparage the challenging team, and we will tend to distrust whatever the opposing
political party says. The same holds true for anyone we perceive as being a member of a
"different" group—be it religious, political, or ethnic—and when we do this, the tendency is to
treat the other group unfairly. As many studies have confirmed, the "in" group will always
orchestrate scenarios that are less favorable for any "out" group.18 In-group morality is also
associated with intergroup conflict.19 (p. 138)

But there is a simple solution. As Princeton University professor Susan Fiske explains, if
you want to decrease your natural tendency toward prejudice and out-group bias, don't
"categorize" yourself. People, she states, can get beyond—and even prevent—"their automatic
use of category-driven impression formation and decision making."20 You'll do your brain, and
society, a lot of good if you don't identify yourself as Christian, Muslim, Jew, or atheist. Even
labels like Democrat, Republican, or American can trigger an unconscious "us versus them"
mentality in your brain. (p. 138)

One of the things that saddens and frustrates me most about The God Delusion is how
often Dawkins does chose to label and categorize people, reducing them to a group, then
reducing the group to something pitiable like delusional dogmatic belief. We hear about
"faith heads"; how they are immune to reason. Michael Ruse is stuffed into the "Neville
Chamberlain" school of evolutionists. Behind every preacher is the "wreck of a used car
salesman". So and so is an "atheist-but-er" (as in "I'm an atheist, but . . ."). Does it really
have to be this way? Is it really helpful? Doesn't this sort of thing foster the very evils
that he is accusing religion of being guilty of? If Dawkins is so concerned with the us-

                                                                                                               
16  Anderson CA, Carnagey NL, Eubanks J. Exposure to violent media: the effects of songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts
and feelings. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003 May;84(5):960-71

Warm TR. The role of teasing in development and vice versa. J Dev Behav Pediatr. 1997 Apr;18(2):97-101

Ueno Y. [The relation between the attitude toward humor, aggression and altruism] Sinrigaku Kenkyu. 1993 Oct;64(4):247-54.

Prerost FJ. Locus of control and the aggression inhibiting effects of aggressive humor appreciation. J Pers Assess. 1983 Jun;47(3)294-
9.

Sinnott JD, Ross BM. Comparison of aggression and incongruity as factors in children's judgments of humor. J Genet Psychol. 1976
Jun;128(2d Half):241-9.
17  Beaver JD, Lawrence AD, Passamonti L, Calder AJ. Appetitive motivation predicts the neural response to facial signals of
aggression. J Neurosci. 2008 Mar 12;28(11):2719-25.
18  Miller A. (ed.) The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. Guilford Press. 2004.
19  Cohen TR, Montoya RM, Insko CA. Group Morality and intergroup relations: cross-cultural and experimental evidence. Pers Soc
Psychol Bull. 2006 Nov;32(11):1559-72.
20  Fiske ST. Bias against outgroups. In Miller, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. Guilford press, 2004.
versus-them mentality that religion foments, wouldn't it be better not to foment such a
mentality in his own books?
Dawkins even refuses to find any connection between religion and ethics or social
morality and claims that religion is either neutral towards or is the outright enemy of
positive social change. Gould, on the other hand, claims that ethics and its discussion has
traditionally been centered on religion. What is the truth? Let us consider this topic in
our next chapter.
 MORALITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

According to Dawkins in The God Delusion, religion is always opposed to moral

and social change. The moral zeitgeist changes from decade to decade—who knows how
and who knows why—but the important point, in his mind, is that religion is always an
obstacle to such positive, progressive change. Religion is a conservative, ignorant force
that stands in the way—or at least never lends a helping hand.
As always, Dawkins refuses to allow any subtlety of thought, or intellectual
discernment get in the way of his attack on "religion". In order to untangle this complex
of issues, we will need to bring in one of the distinctions we have thus far discussed:
namely, the distinction between religious organizations, and religion as a personal
worldview and spiritual discipline. If this seems like disingenuous verbal slight of hand,
let me frame it in scientific terms. Consider that in a great many cases of scientific
advancement, the scientific establishment vigorously and forcefully resisted the new
ideas and philosophies being championed by a single scientist or small group of
scientists. In many cases, it wasn't until after the death of the scientist that his or her
ideas were accepted into the mainstream establishment thought. Boltzman and his
theories, for example, were blackballed and ridiculed and he consequently committed
suicide, yet his work now forms much of the foundational theory of statistical
thermodynamics and solid state physics. In more recent times, a number of the
neuroscientists who found early evidence of neuroplasticity and of the growth of new
neurons in adulthood and even into old age, were also discredited and disparaged for no
good scientific reason whatsoever. Their experimental evidence and methods were
sound. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that both neuroplasticity and the
growth and introduction of new neurons into an adult brain challenged the reigning
dogma of the time—the scientific zeitgeist, if you will—and it was easier for the
establishment to write off these scientists and their results as anomalies (or worse) than to
question fundamental assumptions.
In short, despite the fact that the scientific establishment was resistant to some of
the changes in the scientific zeitgeist, the individual people who forced the issues were
scientists. Further, you'd never say "Oh, yeah, the scientific zeitgeist moves on with time,
making progress with every decade—who knows how or why?—for our purposes, it is
enough to know that it does make progress through the ages." You wouldn't say this
because you know why the "scientific zeitgeist" makes progress: because of the sweat,
blood, and tears of individual scientists who devote their lives to making it progress. It
doesn't just "happen" like the precession of the earths axis.
Similarly, the moral zeitgeist progresses because of great men and women like
Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harriett Tubman, who devote their very lives to
making it progress. And, certainly, not just due to these "great" men and women, either:
an untold number of unknown or little known figures also inconvenienced themselves for
their moral beliefs. Maybe they housed fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad;
maybe they simply verbally stood up to bigotry or racism in small everyday situations
and conversations; maybe they marched in protest or donated money or volunteered their
time; but, however they helped, they were and are as important as the salient figures of
social change—for without a growing tide of support behind them, someone like Gandhi
could not singlehandedly propagate the changes he wished to see in society and which he
embodied in his life.
It is certainly true, of course, that religious organizations can and do get in the
way of moral and social progress, yet it is also true that in a great many cases, the people
who helped to bring about the positive social changes of history were themselves
"religious" individuals. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Gandhi were all
deeply religious people. Richard Dawkins tries to downplay and diminish this. Consider
this paragraph from chapter 7:
What impels it in its consistent direction? We mustn't neglect the driving role of individual
leaders who, ahead of their time, stand up and persuade the rest of us to move on with them. In
America, the ideals of racial equality were fostered by political leaders of the calibre of Martin
Luther King, and entertainers, sportsmen and other public figures and role models such as Paul
Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson. The emancipation of slaves and of
women owed much to charismatic leaders. Some of these leaders were religious; some were not.
Some who were religious did their good deeds because they were religious. In other cases their
religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his
philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not. (TGD, p. 307).

That last sentence is the most disgusting and disingenuous sentence in the entire book.
Dawkins is making the case that religious motivation isn't a large part of what moves the
moral zeitgeist. (Actually, he's doing one of his write-offs here, really.) He's waving his
hands a bit to fend off just such an argument as I am making right now. But look more
carefully at the logical construction: some leaders were religious, but some were not.
Some who were religious were motivated by their religion, but some were not ("In other
cases their religion was incidental"). So we have three categories that are built up so far:
(1) both religious, and religiously motivated, (2) religious, but not religiously motivated,
and (3) not religious (and thus certainly not religiously motivated). Now comes the nasty
rhetorical conjuring trick after the misdirection: yes, Martin Luther King was a Christian,
but he learned non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi "who was not".
It's really a brilliant piece of conflation, obfuscation, and misdirection, worthy of
even the most corrupt and mendacious politician who ever lived. Strictly speaking, and
examined in isolation, that last sentence is totally correct and truthful. Gandhi wasn't a
Christian. He was a Hindu. And Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed learn non-violent
civil disobedience directly from Gandhi. But, non-violent civil disobedience is a method
for bringing about social change, not a motivation. And the distinction between Christian
and Hindu isn't one of religion vs. non-religion, and is completely misleading given the
preceding categories built up in the paragraph! When I first read this sentence, I was sure
that Dawkins was trying to say that Gandhi wasn't religious, and I was flabbergasted!
Gandhi was most certainly religious. Deeply religious, in fact. But, then upon re-reading
it, I saw that I had misunderstood. And then I realized that that was precisely what
Dawkins had intended, and I was deeply disgusted. This sort of thing should be beneath
him. You don't set someone up to expect a discussion of motivation and it's connection
to religion or non-religion, and then talk about method and Christian vs. "he was not", i.e.
not-Christian, i.e. Hindu—not unless you are trying to skillfully mislead people into
thinking that Gandhi was a secular figure whose main motivation had nothing to do with
religion, and thus that Martin Luther King's motivation had nothing to do with religion
since he learned non-violent resistance from Gandhi.
Yet, was Gandhi's religion "incidental" to his politics and social reform?
Dawkins definitely implies this, at the very least, especially earlier on in The God
Delusion. However, if you look into the cases of Martin Luther King and Mahatma
Gandhi you will find that both were deeply religious people who were strongly motivated
by their religious worldview. Gandhi was a Hindu, and this meant that he was tolerant of
other faiths and points of view—this is an inherent part of Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu
religion, and it is also where Gandhi got the basis for his non-violent method of protest.
It is simply not true that "any follower of any religion believes that theirs is the sole way,
truth, and light." (TGD, p.49, quoting Mueller). Look up the Jain religion in an
encyclopedia or online at wikipedia and see for yourself. Or listen to Gandhi's own
words. I will be quoting from The Gandhi Reader, edited by Homer A. Jack, published
in 1956 by Indiana University Press. Perhaps the most relevant essay is "Hinduism"
(written by Gandhi himself, first published in Young India, October 6, 1921):
I call myself a Sanatani Hindu because—
1. I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and all that goes by the name of Hindu
Scriptures and therefore in Avataras (divine incarnations) and rebirth.
2. I believe in Varnashrama Dharma21 in a sense strictly Vedic, but not in its present popular and
crude sense [i.e. Untouchability].
3 I believe in "Cow Protection" in a much larger sense than the popular belief.
4. I do not disbelieve in "idol-worship."
5. I believe implicitly in the Hindu aphorism that no one truly knows the Scriptures who has not
attained perfection in Innocence (Ahimsa), Truth (Satya), and Self-control (Brahmacharya), and
who has not renounced all acquisition or possession of wealth.
6. I believe, along with every Hindu, in God and His Oneness, in rebirth and salvation.
That which distinguishes Hinduism from every other religion is its "Cow Protection," even
more than its Varnashrama. Varnashrama is in my opinion inherent in human nature, and
Hinduism has simply reduced it to a science. It attaches to birth. A man cannot change "Varna"
by choice. Not to abide by Varna is to disregard the law of heredity.
I do not believe in the exclusive divinity of the Vedas. I believe the Bible, the Koran, and the
Zend Avesta to be as much divinely inspired as the Vedas. My belief in the Hindu Scriptures
does not require me to accept every word and every sense as divinely inspired. Nor do I claim to
have any first-hand knowledge of these wonderful books. But I do claim to know and feel the
truths of the essential teaching of the Scriptures. I decline to be bound by any interpretation,
however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason or moral sense.
[. . .]
Hinduism has reached the highest limit of self-restraint. It is undoubtedly a religion of
renunciation of the flesh, so that the spirit may be set free. By restricting a Hindu's choice of a
bridge for his son to a particular group he exercises rare self-restraint.

                                                                                                               
21  Varnashrama Dharma is the Religion of Caste, the very one used to justify Untouchability.
 Hinduism does not regard the married state as by any means essential for salvation.
Marriage is a "fall" even as "birth" is a fall. Salvation is freedom from birth and hence from
death also.
Prohibition against intermarriage and interdining is essential for a rapid evolution of the soul.
But this self-denial is no test of Varna (Caste). A Brahmin may remain a Brahmin, though he
may dine with his Shudra brother, provided he has not left off his duty of service by knowledge.
It follows from what I have said above that restraint in matters of marriage and dining is not
based upon notions of superiority. A Hindu who refuses to dine with another from a sense of
superiority altogether misrepresents his Hindu religion.
Unfortunately, today Hinduism seems to consist merely in "eating" and "not eating."
Hinduism is in danger of losing its substance; it is resolving itself into a matter of elaborate rules
as to what and with whom to eat. Abstemiousness from meat is undoubtedly a great aid to the
evolution of the spirit; but it is by no means an end in itself. Many a man eating meat and dining
with everybody, but living in the fear of God, is nearer to his salvation than a man religiously
abstaining from meat and many other things, but blaspheming God in every one of his acts.
The central fact of Hinduism, however, is "Cow Protection." "Cow Protection" to me is one
of the most wonderful phenomena in all human evolution; for it takes the human being beyond
his species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is
enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the cow was selected for apotheosis is
obvious to me. The cow was in India the best companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not
only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity. One
reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the "mother" to millions of Indian mankind. Protection of
the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God. The ancient seer, whoever he
was, began in India with the cow. The appeal of the lower order of creation is all the more
forcible because it is speechless. "Cow Protection" is the gift of Hinduism to the world; and
Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.
[. . .]
I can no more describe my feeling for Hinduism than for my own wife. She moves me as no
other woman in the world can. Not that she has no faults; I dare say she has many more than I
see myself. But the feeling of an indissoluble bond is there. Even so I feel for and about
Hinduism with all its faults and limitations. Nothing elates me so much as the music of the Gita
or Tulsidas's Ramayana, the only two books in Hinduism I may be said really to know. When
on one occasion I fancied I was taking my last breath the Gita was my solace.
I know the vice that is going on today in all the great Hindu shrines, but I love them in spite
of their unspeakable failings. There is an interest which I take in them and in no other. I am a
reformer through and through. But my zeal never leads me to the rejection of any of the
essential things of Hinduism.
I have said that I do not disbelieve in idol-worship. An idol does not excite any feeling of
veneration in me. But I think that idol-worship is part of human nature. We hanker after
symbolism. Why should one be more composed in a church than elsewhere? Images are an aid
to worship. No Hindu considers an image to be God. I do not consider idol-worship sin.
It is clear from the foregoing that Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it there is room
for the worship of all the prophets of the world. It is not a missionary religion in the ordinary
sense of the term. It has no doubt absorbed many tribes in its fold, but this absorption has been
of an evolutionary, imperceptible character. Hinduism tells everyone to worship God according
to his own faith, and so it lives at peace with all religions. . . .
"Untouchability" is repugnant to reason and to the instinct of pity or love. A religion that
establishes the worship of the cow cannot possibly countenance or warrant a cruel and unhuman
boycott of human beings; and I should be content to be torn to pieces rather than disown the
suppressed classes. Hindus will certainly never deserve freedom, nor get it, if they allow their
noble religion to be disgraced by the retention of the taint of untouchability; and as I love
 Hinduism dearer than life itself, the taint has become for me an intolerable burden. Let us not
deny God by denying to a fifth of our race the right of association on an equal footing. (pp. 167-
172.)

I quoted at some length in order to give the reader the context and atmosphere of the
essay as a whole. Note the distinctions that Gandhi makes. He makes a distinction
between observing the letter of a religion, and observing the spirit of the religion;
between the current practice of the central articles of the Hindu faith and their true
meaning. I find it remarkable and highly important that Gandhi, who fought against
untouchability with every fiber of his being, still upheld the religious notion of Caste
upon which untouchability was defended (wrongly, in Gandhi's view). So, Gandhi
absolutely does not hold that faith is arbitrary, and thus, in his opinion, a faith can be
perverted. If you hold that "faith" is "blind belief" in "supernatural" entities, then the
notion of a perversion of faith is laughable as it's all arbitrary anyway. But, if you
understand that a "faith" is (potentially) a whole worldview and philosophy and
metaphysics, then you know that there is at least the possibility of an internal consistency
and a unique "spirit" that inspires all the concrete details. This is true of any worldview
or philosophy worthy of the name, regardless of whether or not it has any supernatural
content. This is why we speak of the possibility of observing the "letter" of the law, but
not the "spirit" of the law. Also note that Gandhi finds the very notion of religious
tolerance and support for a "secular" country (where all faiths are given equal
opportunity) within and espoused by Hinduism itself. The very "secular India" of
Gandhi's dreams, mentioned by Dawkins early on in The God Delusion (TGD, pp. 67-
68), isn't due to the incidental nature of Gandhi's religious faith, but comes directly from
it, in Gandhi's own opinion.
Let's consider another document written by Gandhi. Like many religious leaders,
he had his own ashram where his students would live and study and work under his
direction and following his precepts. He wrote out these precepts for his Satyagraha
Ashram, established in 1915:
No work done by any man, however great, will really prosper unless it has a distinct religious
backing. But what is Religion? I for one would answer: "Not the Religion you will get after
reading all the scriptures of the world. Religion is not really what is grasped by the brain, but a
heart grasp."
Religion is a thing not alien to us. It has to be evolved out of us. It is always within us: with
some, consciously so; with others, quite unconsciously. But it is always there. And whether we
wake up this religious instinct in us through outside assistance or by inward growth, no matter
how it is done, it has got to be done, if we want to do anything in the right manner, or to achieve
anything that is going to persist.
Our scriptures have laid down certain rules as maxims of human life. They tell us that
without living according to these maxims we are incapable of having a reasonable perception of
Religion. Believing in these implicitly, I have deemed it necessary to seek the association of
those who think with me in founding this Institution. The following are the rules that have been
drawn up and have to be observed by everyone who seeks to be a member. (p. 137)

Then follow the vows of Truth, Ahimsa,, Celibacy, Control of the Palate, Non-Theiving,
Swadeshi, Fearlessness, the vow regarding the Untouchables, the vow regarding
education through the vernaculars, the vow of Khaddar, and finally, and of maximal
interest to us, the vow of The Religious Use of Politics:
Politics, divorced from religion, has absolutely no meaning. If the student world crowd the
political platforms of this country, that is not necessarily a healthy sign of national growth; but
this does not mean that you, in your student life, ought not to study politics. Politics are a part of
our being; we ought to understand our national institutions. We may do this from our infancy.
So in our Ashram every child is taught to understand the political institutions of our country and
to know how the country is vibrating with new emotions, with new aspirations, with new life.
But we want also the steady light, the infallible light of religious faith; not a faith which merely
appeals to the intelligence, but a faith which is indelibly inscribed on the heart. First we want to
realize our religious consciousness, and immediately we have done that the whole department of
life is open to us; and it should then be a sacred privilege of all, so that when young men grow to
manhood they may do so properly equipped to battle with life. Today what happens is this:
much of the political life is confined to the students, but immediately they cease to be students
they sink into oblivion, seeking miserable employments, knowing nothing about God, nothing of
fresh air or bright light, or of real vigorous independence such as comes out of obedience to
those laws that I have placed before you on this occasion. (p. 144)

Clearly, then, Gandhi did not divorce his politics from his religion, and even went so far
as to say that to do so would be to render politics meaningless.
Similarly strong cases can be made for Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman,
but in the interests of expediency, I will simply invite readers to investigate these and
other such prominent figures for themselves. The importance of religion in the personal
lives of the majority of people who might be considered as "Nobel Peace prize" nominees
(for example) is inescapable. What I would like to consider now is whether or not
religious organizations were ever positive forces for social change. Is it really the case
that no Church or religion was ever at the forefront of an important social change, such as
the abolition of slavery or women's suffrage? And that, on the contrary, they had nothing
to do with such positive social change and even obstructed it? No it is not. In point of
fact, American history shows that religious movements have played critical roles in the
promotion of human rights, helping to abolish slavery, establishing rights for women and
children, and spearheading the civil-rights movement of the twentieth century. (see The
Religious History of America, E.S. Gaustad, HarperOne, 2004, for an extensive
overview.) However, this isn't to say that religious organizations are always agents of
moral and social progress, either! There are plenty of good examples of backward,
ignorant, and bigoted resistance to social change from prominent and powerful religious
organizations, and from the rank and file of their followers. All I'm trying to establish is
that they do not always playing this role—not by a long shot.
What of individual morality and ethics, however? Dawkins makes the point that
if someone says to you that we "need God to be moral" that you should immediately stop
the debate and disassociate yourself from someone who admits that he or she would rape
and steal and murder without a Sky Bully threatening eternal punishment for such
actions. However, as usual, Dawkins totally misrepresents what the vast majority of
religious people mean when they claim that we need "God" to be "moral". I have never
met a religious person who would be at all interested in raping or stealing or murdering if
he or she became convinced that "there was no God". Such individuals certainly may
exist, but I strongly suspect that they are rare. (And thank goodness for that!) No, this is
most certainly not what religious people are talking about when they claim this. They
mean that they would find no internal psychic lever with which to motivate themselves to
perform selfless acts of good. It's one thing to refrain from stealing and murdering and
raping; it's quite another to seriously risk your own life by caring for a plague victim who
is a complete stranger to you. Or to spend ten hours a week volunteering at a soup
kitchen to feed the homeless. Or to practice strict inner discipline, carefully restraining
your various desires and fighting against what you see as your moral weaknesses.
Yet, even with this distinction, we still fall far short of a full understanding of
what most religious people mean when they say that we need God to be good. What is
missing is the larger understanding of God that they have that Dawkins rejects. With
only rare exceptions, all religious people will point out that if you have a notion of good
and evil and moral and immoral, then that is already a partial belief in God. This may
seem illogical to someone who is an atheist, but it is a vitally important point to grasp if
you actually want to understand the "religious mind". If all you want to do is ridicule
religion and the religious and fight against their political agendas, then you obviously
need not care about understanding them as they understand themselves. But, if you seek
the truth, you cannot misrepresent your subject, even if he or she is someone you
consider an "enemy" or a force for ill.
Richard Dawkins' record on this count is abysmal. He's happy to point out the
sincerity and inner point of view of the religious when they are Young Earth Creationists
or when they spout outrageous crap that flies in the face of reason and moral sense and
humane sentiment. But otherwise? Forget it. Terry Eagleton in his review of The God
Delusion put it this way:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of
British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on
theology. ("Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion,"
London Review of Books, October 19. 2006.)

Dawkins addresses this and similar criticisms in the preface to the paperback edition of
The God Delusion, saying that he didn't bother with an extensive study and presentation
of theology because it would not have illuminated his "central question of whether God
exists" (TGD, p. 14). He then goes on to quote the "Courtier's Reply" published by P.Z.
Myers on his "Pharyngula" website:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr. Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of
serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of
Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's
consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat.
We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Mperor's
raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion . . . Dawkins
arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emporer of
nudity . . . Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell
the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not
spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to
recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of
Imaginary Fabrics.

The problem with this, however, is that Dawkins' central question in The God Delusion is
not the question of God's existence. That's fully dispensed with by page 190 and there
are 230 more pages following, not including notes and bibliography and index, and this is
a very conservative accounting because even within the first 190 pages, much of the
discussion veers off to touch on the evils of religion and belief, the folly of religion, and
so on. And honestly, it's never really a question in the book. All of the definitions and
contexts that frame the discussion all assume—from the outset—that God is a delusion.
For the sake of this discussion let's just go with this and agree that, OK, yes,
"God" as an objective supernatural being is a delusion and does not exist. The Emperor
has no clothes. Fine. However, following the Emperor-has-no-clothes metaphor,
suppose that the question of whether or not the Emperor's laws are just arises. Someone
makes the point, say, that the current Emperor's handling of taxation and agricultural
policy is very enlightened and far superior to the way the Senate handled these things
when it was in power. Someone else pipes up and argues that, no, on the contrary, the
Emperor is a tyrant and a bully and is sucking the lifeblood out of the country. The first
person defends his view with economic and agricultural data and by quoting from the
relevant sections of the Emperors written policy on these subjects. The second person, on
the other hand, disdains investigating any evidence from finance or agriculture, and
defends his ignorance by saying, "Oh, PLEASE! The Emperor has no clothes! Why do I
even need to bother with an investigation into the effects of his policies?"
Wouldn't you agree that that defense is no defense at all? Maybe the Emperor is
nude. So what? How does that affect the question of his policies on taxation and
agriculture? It doesn't. Similarly, even if God doesn't exist, that does not mean you can
just assume anything you want about religious faith and belief, making up definitions to
suit your argument irrespective of actual practice and theology. Yet, somehow, in
Dawkins' mind, the fact that there is no God means that faith is blind belief, because
obviously, faith is nothing more than belief in God, and God is nothing more than a
supernatural Sky Bully. Where did he get this, I wonder? Certainly not from studying
theology! He claims that religious people insist that God isn't a white-bearded man in the
sky, and Dawkins says that, yes, he knows that, but that nonetheless the God that
religious people believe in is hardly less silly than a white-bearded guy sitting in the
clouds, and that religious people are only trying to divert attention away from this fact
when they insist that God isn't a white-bearded old man in the sky.
My experiences and conversations strongly suggest otherwise. Religious people
point this out to each other, especially when one is older and one is younger, in order to
underscore the fact that God is much more than a being sitting "out-there"; that God is
also "in here", in the heart, in the moral understanding, in the intelligence, in the small
quiet voice of conscience. And this is reflected in how religious people understand the
term "faith". Whether or not God exists, the nature of God and of belief and of a
religious worldview is still a valid object of inquiry. You can't blow it off by saying
"Who cares? I can't be bothered. God doesn't exist."
Consider the question of "faith". In fact, let's narrow it down to a consideration of
Christian "faith." What is it? There are whole books written on the subject and it is
constantly discussed and is a persistent topic of contemplation for many Christians. I'm
sounding like Myer's "Courtier" at this point, am I not? Can we apply his logic here and
say that the subtleties of "faith" and its contemplation are irrelevant if God doesn't exist?
Well, maybe. It depends on what faith is. If faith is just blind belief and rank
superstition, then Myers and Dawkins are right and we might as well be discussing how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But if religious people's understanding of
"faith" is much more than this, and includes things like morality and ethics and
fundamental assumptions about life, then we can't write it off by saying that God doesn't
exist. Whether or not God exists, morality and ethics and philosophy and metaphysics all
certainly do exist.
Here's what we're going to do: I was recently given a book on faith by Harry
Fosdick which I'm told is a classic work on the subject, titled "The Meaning of Faith",
first published in 1917. I'm going to amuse myself by randomly opening the book a
couple times and presenting the material on that page in full. It will be completely
random and there will be no do-overs. I've never read the book and I don't know what I
will find. Perhaps the two pages I end up with will be entirely unhelpful and will even
hurt my argument here, but I'm willing to bet that it will bear out what I am saying, and I
think it's just too funny for me to commit to these two pages no matter what they turn out
to be. ( "[. . .]" will indicate a sentence fragment at the top or bottom of the page.) Let's
begin!:
[. . .] He is in the attitude of saying: I have found great living in Christ. No argument for the
Christian experience can be quite so convincing as the Christian experience itself. I am bound to
have that life if I honestly can, and I will search to see whether there is any insuperable
intellectual difficulty in the way of it

II

One of the initial perplexities of faith concerns the sort of intellectual assurance which we
have a right to expect. In a laboratory of physics, the investigator gathers facts, makes
inductions as to their laws, and then verifies his findings. He uses a simplicity of procedure and
gains a finality of result that makes all other knowledge seem relatively insecure. To be sure, the
scientist may seek long for his truth and make many ineffectual guesses that prove false, but, in
the end, he reaches a conclusion so demonstrable that every man of wit enough to investigate the
subject must agree that it is so. How the Christian wishes for such certainty concerning God!
Before, however, any one surrenders confidence in God, because confessedly the
affirmations of religious faith cannot be established by such methods as a physicist employs,
there is ample reason for delay. We are certain that heat expands and cold contracts, and we can
prove the fact and state its laws. But are we not also sure that it is wrong to lie and right to tell
the truth? This conviction about truthfulness at least equals in theoretical certainty and in
practical right to determine conduct, our confidence in heat's expanding power. This conviction
about truthfulness does actually sway life more than does any single scientific truth that one can
name. Let us then set ourselves to prove our moral confidence by such methods as the physical
laboratory can supply—with yard sticks, and Troy weight scales, and test tubes, and meters! At
once it is evident that if we are to hold only such truth as is amenable to the demonstration of a
laboratory, we must bid farewell to every moral conviction that hitherto has influenced our lives.
God, banished because the physicist cannot prove him, will have good company in exile!
Moreover, all our esthetic convictions will have to share that banishment. We know that
some things are beautiful. [. . .] (p. 117)

The second random pick has only two sentences on the page, as it is the last page of a
chapter, and they make no sense at all without the discussion on the preceding page, so I
will go again:
 [. . .] There was no vital, intelligent connection between his faith in God and his ideals of
character and service. One verse should be made to flame in Christian pulpits: "If any provideth
not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied his faith and is worse than an
unbeliever" (1 Tim. 5 : 8). Domestic fidelity is here only typical of all basic moral obligations.
What this verse says in principle is clear: theoretical unbelief is not the worst sin in God's sight;
any man who fails in the fundamental duties of rectitude and service has thereby denied the faith
and is worse than an atheist.
O thou holy One and just! if alone the pure in heart can see thee, truly we must stand afar
off, and not so much as lift up our eyes unto heaven. Were it not that thou hast help and pity for
the contrite spirit, we could only cry "Depart from us, we are sinful men, O Lord!" For idle
words, for proud thoughts and unloving deeds; for wasted moments and reluctant duties, and too
eager rest; for the wandering desire, the vain fancy, the scornful doubt, the untrustful care; for
impatient murmurs, and unruly passions, and the hardness of a worldly heart; thou Lord, canst
call us unto judgment, and we have naught to answer thee. But, O thou Judge of men, thou art
witness that we do not love our guilty ways; make our conscience true and tender that we may
duly hate them, and refuse them any peace as enemies to thee. Stir up within us a great and
effectual repentance that we may redeem the time which we have lost, and in the hours that
remain may do the work of many days. Thou knowest all our secret snares; drive from us every
root of bitterness: with thy severity pluck out, O Lord, the thorns of sin from our entangled souls,
and bind them as a crown of contrition around our bleeding brows and having made our peace
with thee may we henceforth watch and pray that we enter not again into temptation, but bear
our cross with patience to the close. Amen.—James Martineau.

Fourth Week, Fifth Day

Some of the most lamentable perversions of religious faith arise from inadequate ideas of
God. Consider, for example, the way Manasseh thought that the Divine ought to be worshipped.
(p. 84)

Despite the fact that my selections were randomly picked, note how a pro pos they are to
our discussion. Fosdick is going out of his way to insist that "faith" is more than
intellectual belief—that it is moral rectitude and service to others; that one can have
inadequate ideas of "God"; that "sin" is to be found inside, in our desires and lusts and
laziness and in our impatience and our unruly passions—when we fail or are reluctant in
our duties; when we speak idle words and have proud thoughts. Christian morality
consists primarily in a continual inner struggle against desires and temptations and
weaknesses. Not killing and not raping and not stealing are easy. Few people are even
remotely tempted by such things. But try only just not to gossip about anyone or to not
speak an unkind word or to not give in to anger for three weeks. See if you can even
come close to doing these things. Few can. Or try just mild fasting for three weeks—
even just try refraining from eating any desserts for three weeks. See how quickly your
resolve weakens and the struggle begins in earnest. This is what "being good" means to a
Christian. And for many people, there would be little reason to engage in this struggle if
it weren't for their religious beliefs.
So, when you ask a religious person about a world without God, you are, by their
own definitions, asking about a world without good or evil, without morality, without
truth. And it is indeed patently obvious that you can't be good without an ability to
determine and understand what "good" is. It is true that some so-called religious people
reduce this question to a literal reading of some sacred text, such as the Bible, out of
which morality is supposed to flow, and Dawkins points out that no Christian literally
follows the moral injunctions in the Bible—not all of them, anyway. And thus, if there is
some other standpoint from which to pick and chose which moral injunctions to follow
and which to not follow, then you can just skip the middleman (so to speak) and go
directly to a moral understanding without invoking "God" or the Bible. Yes, certainly,
this is true. It's just that most religious people, like Gandhi, hold that reason and moral
sense are a manifestation of God within us, and thus that they have at least an equal (or
even superior) standing with holy writ. This is why they speak of an understanding of the
"heart", and why Gandhi insists that religion is "Not the Religion you will get after
reading all the scriptures of the world. Religion is not really what is grasped by the brain,
but a heart grasp." Religion, in this sense, is indeed at the center of ethics and morality,
by both definition and practice. If only more "religious" people were of this mindset!
This brings me to the end of the more objective and external facets of this
response and to the beginning of somewhat more internal and philosophical and
metaphysical facets, to which we will turn in our next chapter.
 TEACUPS AND TOOTH FAIRIES

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion makes very effective use of Bertrand
Russell's hypothetical orbiting teapot in order to illustrate that while absence of proof is
not proof of absence, this does not at all address the likelihood of a hypothesis being true.
The point of the claim that there is a china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars is its
absurdity. We can't imagine any possible way for it to be true. Or can we? We could, I
suppose, imagine a secretly launched space probe, along the lines of Voyager, with lots
of cultural artifacts, such as tea, a teapot and teacup, chopsticks, and so on—all for the
purpose of sending a bit of earth "culture" out there to be preserved indefinitely, and
possibly found. Yet before the probe gets beyond Mars it is hit by an asteroid and its
cultural bits are spread out and deflected along various trajectories, and, just by chance,
the teapot is sent into a stable orbit between Earth and Mars.
However, while this fancy is quite amusing, it misses the point of Russell's teapot.
In order to start to grasp that point, let's assume we've been transported back to pre-space-
travel earth. There are no rockets to launch satellites into space, and thus the orbiting
teapot hypothesis is truly and fully absurd and impossible. Yet nonetheless, it can't be
positively disproven as even the most powerful telescopes would be incapable of
resolving something so small as a teapot that far out into space. The absurdity of it, along
with the impossibility of positively disproving it, is the point. None of us would place the
likelihood of the existence of such a teapot on an equal footing with its non-existence,
even though we can't disprove the teapot. Of course, many people make the perfectly
valid observation that no one has ever even suggested that such a teapot exists (not in
earnest, anyway), and that no one has ever claimed to see this hypothetical teapot in a
telescope. Nor are there any phenomenon linked to the teapot, either directly or
indirectly. And, certainly, these are all valid observations, but, again, they still miss the
point of Russell's teapot. In order to fully and completely grasp that point, suppose that
not only have we been transported to pre-space-travel earth, but also to an alternate
reality in which everyone is taught from early childhood on that such a teapot does exist,
and that it is spoken of and believed in by the great majority of people. Now we have
almost fully grasped the point of this instructive and powerful Celestial Teapot. In this
imaginary reality, despite the total absurdity of the idea of such a teapot existing and the
total lack of any kind of proof for its existence, direct or indirect, everyone nonetheless
believes in the great Celestial Teapot, and even more, disbelief in the teapot is frowned
upon and few even dare admit to having any doubts on the subject. Absurd, isn't it?
Now, to finally come to end of the lesson taught by Russell's teapot, all you need to do is
realize that this imaginary reality isn't imaginary at all, but rather that everything directly
corresponds one-to-one to our own reality. "God" is this teapot, and his existence is
equally improbable and equally lacking any evidentiary support. Or so Richard Dawkins
would say.
The teapot is meant to be a stand-in for a practically infinite number of real world
things, from ghosts, to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, to (in this case) the existence of a
personal God. The advantage of the patently absurd nature of the teapot stand-in is that it
allows people to see things from a different point of view (the atheist one, in this case).
The problem with the teapot metaphor in this case, and with The God Delusion in
general, is that it assumes and implies that religion can be simply equated with belief in
God, and that God can be simply equated with the absurd hypothetical orbiting teapot.
Neither of these things is true. All along in this paper I have been pointing out how
"religion" is much more than dogma and intellectual belief in supernatural agents. This is
the case even for the three main monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity,
which stress a supernatural creator God, and it is so much more the case for the even
more numerically significant religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Zen
Buddhism, for example, totally lacks any concept of a supernatural agent. No "belief" of
any kind is necessary to practice Zen Buddhism, at any level. Dawkins asserts early on in
The God Delusion that he is only calling out supernatural gods and that he is not
considering Buddhism and Confucianism, and that he has in mind primarily the three
great monotheistic faiths, and yet these early caveats are quickly forgotten and little or no
distinction is made or even implied in the ensuing discussion, and Buddhism is
specifically included in his diatribe in a couple places. And this isn't even considering his
"followers" some of whom are the new iconoclasts, calling "bullshit" on any and all
things "religious" or "spiritual" with total nonchalance and disregard and lack of
discrimination, as if Dawkins had never spoken any caveats and qualifications. I really,
really dislike seeing Zen Buddhists included in the same category as Southern Baptists or
Pentecostals. The comparison is as absurd as Russell's teapot. It's an affront to common
sense. Not that me saying this yet again will make the slightest bit of difference.
Whatever. Moving on . . .
If we want to play fair, one of the problems with equating "God" with the orbiting
teapot is that it classifies God as an object "out there" and baldly asserts by the analogy
that there is absolutely no possibility of any evidence for its "existence". Yet the great
religious men and women of history have all said the same thing about the Divine,
however they imagined or characterized it. "God" is to be found inside, in the "heart,"
they have all insisted. You don't look outside for signs of the divine, you look inside.
"God" isn't some white-bearded dude sitting in the clouds. Dawkins has heard this many
times, of course, and he thinks that he knows this already and finds it tiresome (which it
is), and yet he consistently considers only the outer reality of things. He talks about God
"crashing" through the universe to communicate with people, as if God were separate and
beyond, when religious people all insist that God is in everything, in me, in you, in the
dirt, in the air. And when Dawkins chooses to talk about someone who has a personal
experience that convinces him or her of the existence of "God", he tells the story of
someone who literally hears the voice of the devil while he and his girlfriend are out
camping. But, as it turns out, it was actually a bird that has a fell cry, well known to local
biologists. *snicker*. (I will decline to comment on just how inane and asinine this
choice of example of a conversion experience is, except to say that it would be hard to
pick a worse one.) An outer event is apparently the only personal experience Dawkins
can imagine that would "prove" the "existence" of something like God. When he
discusses Fatima, he gives the readers only two choices: either Fatima didn't happen
because the sun didn't "really" get ripped from its orbit, destroying all life on earth in the
process, or it was a delusion because it was all in their heads because the sun didn't
actually dance. Yet, the most significant part of Fatima is left untouched by these idiotic
considerations. Of course the sun didn't literally get ripped from its orbit and get thrust
around by the hand of God! No religious person would ever claim that. What they
would claim is that God touched the hearts and souls of the people there. This is how
God works, they tell us. A real conversion experience is not founded on mere
intellectual arguments or dogma, nor on literal, physically manifest miracles. In a real
conversion experience, you suddenly see the world in a whole new way and all your
assumptions are upset and rearranged, and everything makes so much more sense than it
did the moment before. To use one of Dawkins' favorite metaphors, the Necker cube has
flipped. Most conversion experiences are brought on by some seemingly insignificant
event. A glance at a picture. A song. A snow flake falling from the sky. Or by nothing
outer at all. Yet these seemingly trivial (or non-existent) outer events cause or correlate
to events of great inner significance, to profound changes of (or the formation of) a
persons worldview. Richard Dawkins description of the conversion (through his books)
of Douglass Adams is one example of what a true conversion sounds like.
So, when religious people speak of hearing the "voice of God" very, very few of
them mean this literally. It's the same "voice" that Julia Sweeny "heard" that told her
there was no God. True conversion to a religious worldview is organic, deep, and broad,
involving every part of a persons being, not just the intellect. It's roots reach deep into
foundational assumptions about life, the universe, and everything—into morality and
metaphysics and emotions and imagination and attitudes towards desire and will and
reason and other inner realities. Dawkins always restricts religion to only intellectual
dogma concerning supernatural improvable things, and thus faith becomes blind belief,
and conversion nothing more than delusion or mental illness. Yet, does anyone seriously
think that someone like Gandhi founded his whole life and worldview and work and
purpose on a handful of intellectual dogmatic delusions which he was incapable of
examining and seeing for what they were? For me, that's completely untenable and
lacking all support in the facts. Read about Gandhi's life. Read his own testimony. See
for yourself. Gandhi is one of the people who "used to be" an agnostic, by the way.
Dawkins tells us that this is only a ploy used by the religious to get some "street cred".
Do you think that Gandhi fits this cynical observation? Personally, I highly doubt it.
But, in any case, the point is that Gandhi, and other thoughtful religious people, infer the
existence of God from many interior things—things which most assuredly do exist, such
as the inner voice of conscience, morality, philosophy, metaphysics, reason, and so on. If
you can only see things from the atheist point of view, then you cannot see how anyone
sane could connect "God" to "reason" or "morality"—but that is a failing of your empathy
and imagination. Whether or not religious people are ultimately correct in their
inferences, the point is that from their point of view God is not a teapot because
his/her/its existence can be inferred and experienced from interior things.
However, this is not to say that there isn't a "teapot" component to even a
sophisticated religious person's conception of "God". There undoubtedly usually is such
an objective external component, and Dawkins' critique and Russell's teapot apply quite
well to this component. Religious people, especially those of the three great monotheistic
faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, most definitely do hold to the objective
existence of a personal God, and will argue "scientifically" for His existence quite
forcefully, and (in my opinion) quite hopelessly. I'm not trying to say that Russell's
teapot has no application here! It certainly does and it brings a vitally important point
into the discussion. I am only questioning the extent of its applicability. For even
Fundamentalists usually hold that peoples' sense of common human decency and inner
moral compass is something given by God, and will consider these things alongside
Scripture and Theology. And someone like Gandhi will out and out state that he rejects
any interpretation of Scripture "however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason or
moral sense." Far from allowing dogma and scripture to override their innate moral sense
(as Dawkins' suggests that religious people do), many use this innate moral compass
when interpreting Scripture, and consider it to be God-given and divine.
Dawkins would say that this sort of understanding of "God" is not supernatural,
and that he has no problem with it—he mentions several times religious people who use
their religion merely to provide an ethical structure to their life and who do not "believe"
anything "supernatural" and he appears to have no problem with this sort of "religion".
Thus, he splits off this component and formulates the "God Hypothesis" for the purposes
of his argument. And this is all well and good. The problem is that he never
acknowledges that he has done this and never refers to the part that was separated off.
More than this, he implicitly denies it: when he says something like "what could a
theologian bring to the discussion that a moral philosopher or ethicist could not?" and
when he doubts that theology is even a subject at all, he is implying that morality and
ethics and philosophy are not part of theology, which is patently untrue. Read almost any
ten pages of theology and you will be very unlikely not to also find what would
accurately be categorized as moral philosophy or ethics or metaphysics. Any theologian
worth his or her salt must also be a philosopher and an ethicist. Granted, not all of those
people who are called "theologians" will be "worth their salt" so-to-speak, but
nonetheless, it is incorrect to categorically deny that they have any expertise or
knowledge of anything except teapots! Simply not true.
Another problem (if we want to play fair) with the teapot metaphor is that it sets
up an all or nothing scenario: either the teapot exists or it doesn't. And if you don't find
the teapot's existence to be at all credible, then you're done—end of consideration. Yet,
things are rarely that simple. To illustrate this to the reader I will consider something
which is held by most people to be an out and out teapot, no ifs ands or buts about it:
astrology. Dawkins himself dwells at length on astrology in Unweaving the Rainbow and
many will think that this is the last word on the subject; after all, how could any
reasonable person give the slightest consideration to astrology? Can't it just be rejected
out of court?
Well, that's just the problem that I'm addressing: the fact that someone considers
astrology to be a teapot has the practical result that they will disdain to actually
investigate it. This applies especially strongly even to Richard Dawkins himself, despite
his coverage of it. The first thing you need to know about something is what it really is.
Not what the popular conception of it is, not what your assumptions about it are, not what
your prejudices tell you, but what it actually is. To Richard Dawkins, astrology is
nothing more or less than the horoscopes and the associated astrological "signs" that
appear in the local papers—and many people have this understanding. If you do zero
investigation, if you do not enquire at all, this is what you will think. Yet, if you spend
just a few minutes at a bookstore or online you will discover something quite odd: you
will find nothing about daily or yearly horoscopes and how to create them in any of the
general texts or websites about astrology. "Horoscopes" are discussed, but by this term a
persons natal chart is indicated, which is the position of the planets and signs at the
moment, and seen from the place of, someone's birth. You will find that the "signs"
mentioned in the newspaper refer to the position of the sun in this chart—i.e. a persons
sun sign.
But, whatever! Who cares?!? Right? It's all bullshit, isn't it? What do the
position of the stars have to do with anything? It's clearly a teapot! There can be no
causal link!
Well, actually, modern tropical astrology isn't concerned with the position of the
stars. The signs being referred to are not the constellations of the same name which
astronomers know. The zodiac of astrology is a set of twelve regions in space along the
ecliptic, referenced to the vernal equinox. What does this mean? Quite simply, it means
that the signs are precisely correlated to the seasons of the year. Now, see, suddenly
we've gone from a teapot, from something patently absurd—the idea that the distant stars
have a determining influence on personality—to something that, prima facie, is anything
but absurd—the idea that the time of year of a persons birth has an influence on
personality. Certain rhythms and cycles and developmental stages exist and certain
massive changes in a child's developing brain happen at some of these stages. Is it really
so obviously absurd that the amount of daylight and other seasonal variations could have
an effect? Personally, I didn't think so. Which is why I looked into it somewhat to see
what I would find. I found a website for people who have Myers-Briggs type INTJ and a
thread there asking all the INTJ's what their astrological sign was. Going by the 50 or so
people who were polled there appears to be no correlation between being an INTJ (which
is at least, to first order, a somewhat objective measure of personality) and any of the
signs. For me, this evidence suggests that the time of year a person is born has little or no
correlation with their personality.
So . . . astrology is a teapot then, right? Well, yes, the thesis that the position of
the sun and the planets along the ecliptic, and the sign rising on the Eastern horizon, at
the time and place of a persons birth, determines someone's personality does seem to me
to be a teapot. However, despite the fact that this thesis is absurd, there is still a great
deal more to astrology than this thesis. Allow me to explain. Consider that the MBTI
has 16 types, based on a four digit binary word. This is not so different than 12 sun signs.
The difference is that a person's MBTI is found via their own answers to specially
designed questions. The MBTI is, to some degree, "scientific". But there's no reason that
the same thing couldn't be done with the astrological signs, if we so desired. The
question is "are the signs useful and insightful categories into which to try to place
people?" Let's leave that question alone for the moment to consider something more
basic. Dawkins complains that 12 signs are too few in number to accurately categorize
people. And I agree, and it is one of the problems I have with the MBTI, which has only
four more categories. However, a "personality profile" according to astrology is not
simply which of 12 sun signs a person is. As the word "sun" in front of "sign" indicates,
this is only one parameter. Also included would be signs for: the moon, Mercury, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, as well as the sign rising on the
Eastern horizon. This is 12 to the 11th power, or 743,008,370,688 different possible
personality profiles, which is 10 orders of magnitude greater than the MBTI. And if you
think that those extra position for all the different planets are meaningless and are just
padding out the result, you'd be wrong. Each of the planets stands for an inner faculty or
area of human experience and how a person relates to it and manages it. Mercury stands
intellect and reasoning, the Moon for emotions, Venus for affection and the social urge,
Mars for aggression and action, Jupiter for generosity and idealism, Saturn for discipline
and wisdom, Uranus for creativity and change, Neptune for intuition and imagination,
and Pluto for the unconscious, phobias, obsessions, etc.
So, a test could certainly be made that would determine how to place people's
personalities for each of these areas, and you would have an astrological profile not based
on irrelevant factors, but on peoples' own responses to specifically designed questions.
OK. Fine. But, so what? Any bored teenager could make up even more categories and
even more slots (signs) in which to put them, but that would not necessarily be better or
more useful than the simple MBTI.
Too true. And this brings us back to the question of whether or not the signs and
the "planets" (or rather, what they stand for) are useful and insightful. Personally, I find
that the answer is yes. And many people, who in no way "believe" in astrology, agree
with me. For example, the great teacher of creative writing, and novelist in his own right,
John Gardner, advised his creative writing students to study astrology in order to deepen
their insight into the human psyche and personality. Astrology has value as a tool for
gaining greater insight into the inner world of the psyche. And backing up for a moment,
I need to point out that the body of astrology is much more than just assigning signs to
various areas of human life, like love and war and intellect—but that, more importantly,
it predicts the dynamics that will result from the relations and interactions between them.
If you are a certain type of person in "love", and a certain type of person in "war", how do
these two assignations relate to each other? What are the consequences and interactions
between them? These are the so-called "aspects" of a horoscope, and, going by my own
enquiry into astrology, they really do seem to be insightful and accurate—as much as
these sorts of things can be given the nature of things in this realm. So, does Mars and its
position in the sky have anything to do with whether or not you will be a great athlete? I
highly doubt it. But, assuming that you are pretty well characterized by a certain Mars
sign (whether or not it has anything to do with your natal chart assignments), and that you
are also pretty well characterized by a certain Venus sign, are the resulting aspects and
their predictions reasonable and psychologically accurate? That is a totally different
consideration.
So, we've gone from astrology as a scientific theory—where it fails miserably—to
astrology as a study of the psyche and human nature, where it merits serious
consideration. You can make the exact same argument in regards to Greek Myth. If you
take the Greek Myths to be only early proto-scientific attempts to explain the physical
world, they are more or less worthless except as historical curiosities; but if you take
them to be investigations into the human psyche, then they will reveal important truths
and insights. However, seeing things from a different perspective like this is only
possible if you bother to look. If your disdain for the subject is so great that you "can't be
bothered", you may possibly be discarding something of significant value. It is from one
of these different perspectives that I would like to consider the issue of the gullible child
and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, and so on. However, before we leave the topic of
Russell's teacup, there is one last point I would like to make regarding it.
 The word "probability" was used in regards to the hypothetical teacup, which is
meant to be a stand-in for any number of other things. Is the hypothesis likely, we asked.
What is the chance of it being true? And along these same lines, we have Dawkins
spectrum of belief, qualified by how likely a person believes God's existence to be. This
gives the proceedings a scientific air. There is a pretension to objectivity and quantitative
calculations.
Yet, this is indeed only a pretension, for you cannot have a probability outside of
a theory (or data set) which enables you to assign such a probability. If I say that a
person is "unlikely" to roll ten 6's in a row with a six-sided die, or that someone is
"unlikely" to draw an inside card to complete a flush, these are proper uses of the term
"unlikely". I can actually assign a number to just how unlikely it is. I can say that the
odds are 1 in about 60.5 million for rolling ten 6's in a row, for example. Similarly, given
dynamical, structural, and strength of materials considerations, I can say how likely the
failure of a certain part in a certain application is, assuming that it contains no defects in
its manufacture. These are true and legitimate estimates of probability.
However, historically (for example), when someone said that it was "highly
unlikely" that light would turn out to be a wave, and that the notion of a bright spot in the
shadow of a sphere was ridiculous, what they were really saying was no more or less
scientific than "I doubt it" or "I don't believe it". Instead of likelihood, what Russell's
teapot is actually getting at is credibility. Is it credible that there is a teapot orbiting the
earth beyond Mars? No it is not. But if there actually were a teapot out there, then its'
likelihood would actually be 100 percent, just as the likelihood that light was a wave was
100 percent. Neuroscientists used to consider the growth of new neurons in an adult
brain to be "impossible" and yet, not only was it possible it was actual. This is an
important distinction to understand while throwing around words such as "possibility"
and "likelihood" in a pseudoscientific way. When used in this way, they are really just
synonyms for "doubt" and "credibility" and so on.
But I digress. It's a minor point. Let's move on to consider Richard Dawkins
claim that children are gullible and will believe whatever you tell them. In a very
revealing 1991 essay, Viruses of the Mind, he says:
A beautiful child close to me, six and the apple of her father's eye, believes that Thomas the
Tank Engine really exists. She believes in Father Christmas, and when she grows up her
ambition is to be a tooth fairy. She and her school-friends believe the solemn word of respected
adults that tooth fairies and Father Christmas really exist. This little girl is of an age to believe
whatever you tell her. If you tell her about witches changing princes into frogs she will believe
you. If you tell her that bad children roast forever in hell she will have nightmares. I have just
discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being
sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?

I can only suppose that Mr. Dawkins has never actually spent any significant amount of
time with children, or that he has some sort of supernaturally suggestive power over
them—a modern pied piper, if you will—that makes his encounters markedly different in
nature than everyone else's, because any parent will tell you that children do not
automatically believe whatever you tell them! I could mention countless examples from
my own and my friends and relatives experience that would belie this claim, and I'm sure
that the reader, with only the least amount of personal research, could do so as well. But,
this is only part of the problem with Dawkins' presentation here. The bald assertion that
children will believe whatever you tell them is so untenable and over-stated that it has
little force. The far more obfuscating and confusing aspect of his view is the glib
conflation of fairy tales, make believe play (pretense), religious indoctrination, belief, and
trust. I can guarantee you that this six-year old does not "believe" in Thomas the Tank
Engine. Nor does she "disbelieve" in it either. Thomas the Tank Engine, fairy tale
witches, frog princes, and pretend tea sets are all part of her mental world, but this does
not mean that they have the same nature and substance as an adults' firmly believed
religious dogma, nor that she holds them to "exist" in the same way as her parents or their
annoying friend who sometimes visits. When parents read stories to their children,
especially fairy tales, they do not present them in the same way as an injunction not to
touch a candle flame or a warning not to get in a car with a stranger or the news of a
family trip to grandma's house. The purpose of fairy tales is enchantment and delight.
Fairy tales are about play not factual realism or dogma. And children sense this. Nay,
more. Children seek this out and even create it themselves. Children love play and
make-believe and stories and pretend. Even if their parents never uttered one word about
anything imaginary or non-existent, they would find pretense all on their own, and would
play make-believe.
A great deal of attention has been directed recently at pretense in the field of
developmental psychology, largely because of the fact that autistic children do not
engage in pretense of any kind. They are very concrete. The train shaped toy in front of
them is not a train. It is a block of wood of a certain shape with round rolling objects
towards the corners. They do not think of it as a train and they will not play with it as if
it were one. Normal children, however, naturally do this, and can and do get quite
elaborate in their exercises of making something stand for something else—of pretending
and making-believe. This is an essential aspect of their mental development. It does not
mean that they "believe" in Thomas the Tank Engine. It isn't hard to learn about these
things from a basic book on child psychology, covering Piaget and Vygotsky and others,
and their theories and experiments and research, and pretense and play, and the
development of children's moral sense, and so on. Personally, I read How the Child's
Mind Develops by David Cohen, but there are many others. Even if Dawkins has had
limited experience with children, I would have expected him to at least read a few basic
texts in the field of developmental psychology. But instead of doing that, and supporting
his claims with significant evidence in the context of established and tested theories, he
once again resorts to anecdotes (or rather an anecdote) to back up his claims. Consider
this narration from Unweaving the Rainbow of one of Dawkins' encounters with a child
(the same child mentioned in the 1991 essay, I would guess):
I remember once trying gently to amuse a six-year-old child at Christmas time by reckoning up
with her how long it would take Father Christmas to go down all the chimneys in the world. If
the average chimney is 20 feet long and there are, say, 100 million houses with children, how
fast, I wondered aloud, would he have to whizz down each chimney in order to finish the job by
dawn on Christmas Day? He'd hardly have time to tiptoe noiselessly into each child's bedroom,
would he, since he'd necessarily be breaking the sound barrier? She saw the point and realized
that there was a problem, but it didn't worry her in the least. She dropped the subject without
pursuing it. The obvious possibility that her parents had been telling falsehoods never seemed to
cross her mind. She wouldn't have put it in these words but the implication was that if the laws
of physics rendered Father Christmas's feat impossible, so much the worse for the laws of
 physics. It was enough that her parents had told her he went down all the chimneys during the
few hours of Christmas Eve. It must be so because Mummy and Daddy said it was. (UTR, p.
141)

You know, frankly, when I read this, the main thought that comes to my mind is "what an
asshole!" Yeah, I'm sure that it was "gently amusing" for this particular six year old to be
taken through the process of trying to divide 20 feet times 100 million houses into 8
hours of darkness to get a velocity, that, she would be told, was greater than the "sound
barrier" (which I'm sure she was well acquainted with). Give me a break! This is
bullshit. She did not think that "if the laws of physics rendered Father Christmas's feat
impossible, so much the worse for the laws of physics." A far more plausible narration of
what was going through her mind is that some adult was trying to lecture her, and that it
was not amusing, and that she didn't understand it and didn't care about it and that she
had no use for him and would just nod and say "yes" and "uh-huh" until he would go
away or turn to more interesting activities or conversations. She had no frame of
reference or critical faculty with which to evaluate and understand what Dawkins was
telling her. She couldn't say "so much the worse for physics" because she didn't
comprehend the physics presented to her. It was all abstract and intellectual. Father
Christmas, on the other hand, didn't enter her understanding in this abstract way. He
wasn't a theory or a dogma. Rather, he was more like a game, a time of year, a character
from a fairy tale. He entered her mental world in the same way that her dad pulling off
her nose with his hand and showing it to her did. All of these things are about delight and
enchantment, not indoctrination or belief. Children delight in them not because they
believe them, but because they are fun and playful.
One of the best examples of what I am talking about comes straight from
Dawkins' own childhood, as told in Unweaving the Rainbow:
On All Fools' Day one year, when my sister and I were children, our parents and our uncle
and aunt played a simple trick on us. They announced that they had rediscovered in the attic a
little aeroplane which had belonged to them when young and they were going to take us up for a
ride. Flying was less commonplace then, and we were thrilled. The only stipulation was that we
had to be blindfolded. They led us by the hand, giggling and stumbling across the lawn, and
strapped us into our seats. We heard the noise of the engine starting up, there was a lurch and up
we went for a bumpy, swaying, reeling ride. From time to time we evidently passed through the
high treetops, for we felt the branches gently brushing us and a pleasant, rushing wind in our
faces. Finally we 'landed', the lurching ride came to an end on terra firma, the blindfold was
removed and amid laughter all was revealed. There was no aeroplane. We had not travelled
from the spot on the lawn where we had started. We had simply been sitting on a garden seat
which our father and uncle had lifted and slewed and bumped around to simulate aerial
movement. No engine, only the noisy vacuum cleaner, and a fan to blow wind in our faces.
They and the tree branches brushing against us had been wielded by our mother and aunt
standing by the seat. It had been fun while it lasted.
Credulous, faith-filled children that we were, we had looked forward to the promised flight
for days before it happened. It never occurred to us to wonder why we must be blindfolded.
Wouldn't it have been natural to ask what was the point of going for a joyride if you couldn't see
anything? But no, our parents simply told us that, for some reason unspecified, it was necessary
to blindfold us; and we accepted it. Perhaps they fell back on the time-honoured recipe of 'not
spoiling the surprise'. We never wondered why our elders had kept from us the secret that at
least one of them must be a trained pilot – I don't think we even asked which one. We just didn't
have the skeptic's turn of mind. We had no fear of crashing, such was our faith in our parents.
 And when the blindfolds were removed and the joke was on us, we still didn't stop believing in
Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, angels, heaven, the Happy Hunting Ground and the other
stories that those same elders had told us. (UTR, pp. 138-139)

Now, see, right from the first sentence, Dawkins mischaracterizes and misportrays this
event. He says that his parents and aunt and uncle "played a trick on us". And at the end,
when the blindfolds were removed, he states that the "joke was on us". But, clearly this
was no trick, no joke: this was an adventure and a delight. Dawkins even says this
explicitly:
I love my parents for taking me for a ride, high as a kite, through the treetops; and for telling me
about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, about Merlin and his spells, about baby Jesus and
the Three Wise Men. All these stories enrich childhood and, together with so many other things,
help to make it, in memory, a time of enchantment. (UTR, p. 142)

He loved his parents for "taking him for a ride". This is what they did: they took him and
his sister for a joyful ride through the treetops. They didn't play a trick on them, or make
them the butt of a joke! And the fact that neither he nor his sister questioned why they
needed to be blindfolded nor demanded to know who was going to fly the plane and if
that person was a licensed pilot, and so on, doesn't mean that they were being gullible and
credulous and "faith filled" It means that they weren't going to turn down a good time
and a chance to play. It means that they did trust their parents; that they did have "faith"
in them (in the sense that one is a "faithful" friend or spouse, and not in the religious
sense.) They knew from past experience that something delightful and fun was in store
for them and they were happy to enjoy the ride—literally, in this case.
Dawkins and his sister, from this example, obviously had very loving parents and
a very safe and secure childhood. Now, if you tried to do this with children who did not
have a safe and secure and positive childhood, then matters would have turned out very
differently. Children such as that would not have trusted anyone to blindfold them and
"take them for a ride". They already would have had many painful experiences involving
breaches of trust and being used and being the butt of jokes, and they would have resisted
this scenario at every turn. And it is very sad and painful to see this in a child, for you
know what it means that they are this way. Childhood has not been a time of
enchantment and delight for them. Quite the opposite. But this does not mean that they
will be more likely to grow up to be discerning skeptics and scientists. On the contrary,
children who have a childhood filled with imagination and pretend are the very ones who
are actually being given the best atmosphere in which to develop their mental powers.
And delight and enchantment need not end with childhood. Many people enjoy
science-fiction and fantasy and role playing games, and story telling, and many more
such exercises of the imagination and pretend, well into old age. Dawkins implies that
the enchantment ends because gullible children grow up and grow out of their gullibility
and thus can no longer believe in tooth fairies or Santa Claus. But, you don't need to
"believe" in such things in order to find Christmas time or fairy tales delightful. Indeed,
Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and Thomas the Tank Engine are very different than items
of belief, such as religious dogma, parables, or stories. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy
and trick-or-treating aren't about history or objective reality. They are about enchantment
and play. Religious dogma and sacred stories, on the other hand, are presented as
objectively true, or as having actually occurred. And this is a vitally important
distinction, even if the religious story is every bit as false from a literal, factual
perspective, as a fairy tale. One would think that this distinction would be obvious, as it
is essentially the distinction between fact and fiction. However, as the phrase "fact or
fiction" demonstrates, "fiction" is today often taken as a pejorative, and as a synonym for
"false". Unfortunately, the inability to appreciate and understand the nature of fantasy
and fairy tale (or myth for that matter) is all too widespread, largely because many people
believe that if it isn't literally true then it is at best harmless, and at worst delusional—as
if the people who read fantasy are the same people who are against science and a
scientific worldview!
Consider Dawkins' treatment of the TV show The X-Files in Unweaving the
Rainbow. According to Dawkins, The X-Flies is essentially anti-rational propaganda:
The cult of The X-Files has been defended as harmless because it is, after all, only fiction.
On the face of it, that is a fair defense. But regularly recurring fiction – soap operas, cop series
and the like – are legitimately criticized if, week after week, they systematically present a one-
sided view of the world. The X-Files is a television series in which, every week, two FBI agents
face a mystery. One of the two, Scully, favours a rational, scientific explanation; the other
agent, Mulder, goes for an explanation which either is supernatural or, at the very least, glorifies
the inexplicable. The problem with The X-Files is that routinely, relentlessly, the supernatural
explanation, or at least the Mulder end of the spectrum, usually turns out to be the answer. I'm
told that, in recent episodes, even the sceptical agent Scully is starting to have her confidence
shaken, and no wonder.
But isn't it just harmless fiction, then? No, I think the defense rings hollow. Imagine a
television series in which two police officers solve a crime each week. Every week there is one
black suspect and one white suspect. One of the two detectives is always biased towards the
black suspect, the other biased towards the white. And week after week, the black suspect turns
out to have done it. So, what's wrong with that? After all, it's only fiction! Shocking as it is, I
believe the analogy to be a completely fair one. I am not saying that supernaturalist propaganda
is as dangerous or unpleasant as racist propaganda. But The X-Files systematically purveys an
anti-rational view of the world which, by virtue of its recurrent persistence, is insidious. (UTR,
p. 28)

Now, Dawkins clearly hasn't watched much X-Files ("I'm told that, in recent episodes . .
."), nor given it much thought (he can't be bothered). Those of you readers who have
watched a fair number of episodes will know that the X-Files is not even close to being
anti-rationalist propaganda. And the reason why this is so will also refute the validity of
Dawkins' racist cop show analogy. Consider the racist cop show. Racism is not
something like a ghost or a space alien. It isn't something which is so far removed from
peoples' experience as to be astonishing or incredible. Certainly, many of us are rightly
shocked when we encounter it, but it is all too real and all too plausible and all too actual
in the real world. A cop show which portrayed an unending procession of black
criminals would be presenting something that is at least possible in the real world. This
view of the world would be one that many racist people might actually have. (Or
historically speaking, one that many racist people actually did have.) Propaganda, in
order to be propaganda, must present itself as true and credible. It has to be designed to
convince others that its world-view is correct. There would be nothing to prevent
Dawkins' hypothetical cop show from being credible—that is to say, no outright obstacles
to people taking it to be an accurate picture of "how things really are".
 The X-Files, on the other hand, as a literal portrayal of the real world, is
manifestly incredible and unbelievable. It is not the real world! Not by any stretch of the
imagination! Not even close! Hello?!? It's fantasy! It's unreal. No one sane actually
believes that the X-Files is how things really are. They couldn't possibly believe that, as
the nature of reality in the show changes from episode to episode, sometimes quite
radically. And, demographically speaking, fans of the X-Files are definitely not "anti-
rationalists".
In contrast, consider Ghost Hunters. Now, that show would be a good candidate
for supernatural propaganda, if not anti-rationalist propaganda. The episodes are
presented as actual, real, video-taped encounters with ghostly or other "paranormal"
phenomena. It's not presented as fiction. There aren't actors. And nothing so incredible
happens that would stop some significant percentage of the population (presumably it's
viewership) from really believing it. Or at least seriously entertaining such belief. Ghost
Hunters is presented as a documentary, as reality television. All of these things make it a
quite different case than the case of The X-Files.
The X-Files presents a world in which uncanny, "supernatural", and scientifically
inexplicable things are true. You, as the viewer, get to see the "proof" of this with your
own eyes. The rules have changed. It's not our world anymore. We've been transported
to an alternate reality, which might look a lot like our world, but which is fundamentally
different because things that are outright impossible in our world are actual in that world.
When an episode starts, you don't know what the new rules are. That's part of the fun!
There are rules, and there is an "explanation" of sorts, but it is pure fantasy and fiction,
and the new reality is unfolded in an atmospheric and dramatic way, with a lot of special
effects and theatrics. Moreover, Mulder and Scully work as a team. Ultimately, they
don't offer competing "explanations" of things, but rather offer complementary views.
Mulder relies heavily on Scully's scientific findings. He needs her. And Scully relies on
Mulder's intuition and (way) outside-the-box thinking. Personally, I think that the two of
them are metaphorical representations of the left and right sides of the brain: emotion and
reason, image and word, science and art, etc.
But, however that may be, we have a serious case of Dawkins barking up the
wrong tree here. If he's looking to combat anti-rationality, science fiction and fantasy
and comic books and role playing games are a really, really bad choice of targets, as a
great many scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and the like, are into such
things. If these things were inherently anti-rational, this would not be the case. Dawkins
view of The X-Files is, frankly, rather ridiculous. Moreover, horror, as a genre, actually
needs a supernatural component in order to be less horrific and more artistic. The
supernatural component isn't added because the writer wants to propagate an anti-rational
view of the world. It isn't added because people might literally believe it. It is added
precisely because people will not. The supernatural component moves something which
would otherwise be just horrific and horrible and unappealing, into something which
becomes Horror, and which will be found interesting and entertaining by a great many
more people than simply the story of, say, an axe-murderer. The supernatural element is
added for artistic reasons.
In all of the things we've considered in this chapter, we've taken the same
approach. We have moved from an outer, factual, objective view, to an inner,
metaphorical, subjective view—from literalism to literature. We have thus humanized
and defended, through understanding and a change of perspective, what some people
would reduce. However, the ultimate battle of perspectives lies exactly here in the
interior. Are our emotions and inner experiences, our thoughts and decisions, our very
minds, are all these things merely "epiphenomena" that are really a by-product of
something else, of something more fundamental and more mechanistic? Do people who
defend a theory or a religion or a political party do so because they are really convinced
and in control, or does the theory or religion or party think them, spreading like a virus
from mind to mind? Let us consider this question—the question of memes—in the next
chapter.
 MEMES

I have been thinking seriously about memes for many months now, asking very
basic questions about them and their underlying theory. The most important question, of
course, is what is a meme? Dawkins introduced the concept many years ago now in his
book The Selfish Gene, and for all I know he may have mentioned it in print prior even to
this. The essential idea is that the most fundamental principle of the evolution and nature
of life, according to Dawkins, is replicating entities. Or to be more exact, slightly
inaccurately replicating entities. The gene as we know it is only one example of this, and
life elsewhere in the universe, in whatever form it exists, will be based on some kind of
self-replicating entity and on the resulting differential survival of these entities. That is
all that is needed for a form of Darwinian evolution to take place. The first thing that
self-replicates, whatever it may be—silicon based, ammonia based, or even based on
electronic reverberations—will become widespread just by definition, just because it is
self-replicating. And as soon as that happens, any copying errors in the replication
process which just happen by chance to improve that entity's survival in the soup relative
to other self-replicating entities will, again by definition, make it even more widespread
than its fellows, and thus we have the beginnings of Darwinian evolution. Nay, more, we
have all that is needed for Darwinian evolution.
Do we have to go to distant planets in order to find such replicators apart from the
ubiquitous DNA molecule? Dawkins thinks that a new replicator is staring us all right in
the face, right here on this planet! He proposes that the new replicators which he calls
memes (the word rhymes with "cream") are the fundamental unit of cultural transmission
in human society. Culture is the new soup—culture in a "scientific" sense, and not in the
sense of knowing all sorts of stuff about museums and opera and fine wines. Here is
perhaps the most relevant paragraph for answering the question of what a meme actually
is:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or
of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to
body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from
brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist
hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it
in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading
from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this
chapter: '. . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but
technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning
it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking—the meme for, say, "belief in life
after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous
systems of individual men the world over.' (TSG, p. 192)

However, it is very important to note that despite his inclusion, in this early presentation
of memes, of scientific ideas in the same breath as many other examples of memes, he
later sets them apart by differentiating between memes that are viruses of the mind and
memes that are not. Consider this passage from his 1991 essay Viruses of the Mind
where he is answering the question "Is science a virus?":
No. Not unless all computer programs are viruses. Good, useful programs spread because people
evaluate them, recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses spread solely because they
embody the coded instructions: "Spread me.'' Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a
kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces
that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious. They are exacting, well-honed
rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out in
textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability,
consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of
cultural milieu, and so on. Faith spreads despite a total lack of every single one of these virtues.
You may find elements of epidemiology in the spread of scientific ideas, but it will be largely
descriptive epidemiology. The rapid spread of a good idea through the scientific community may
even look like a description of a measles epidemic. But when you examine the underlying
reasons you find that they are good ones, satisfying the demanding standards of scientific
method. In the history of the spread of faith you will find little else but epidemiology, and causal
epidemiology at that. The reason why person A believes one thing and B believes another is
simply and solely that A was born on one continent and B on another. Testability, evidential
support and the rest aren't even remotely considered. For scientific belief, epidemiology merely
comes along afterwards and describes the history of its acceptance. For religious belief,
epidemiology is the root cause.

And this is a good beginning in our consideration of what a meme is. If you think about
it carefully, according to the fundamental analogy employed here, memes must ultimately
be found to replicate not because they are advantageous for something else, but because
they are advantageous for themselves. A song that gets "stuck" in your head is one
example of this sort of replication. We don't keep whistling or singing the song and
hearing it in our heads because it is somehow beneficial for us. We may do so in spite of
the fact that we actually hate the song. It spreads because it is "catchy". In other words,
it spreads because for whatever reasons, its characteristics lend themselves to spreading.
An example of this is the common error in the lyrics of the Auld Lang Syne song which
Dawkins discusses. The error occurs because it makes the resulting (and incorrect)
phrase more prominent and audible in a room full of people. This very characteristic is
what makes it spread! Not because it makes more sense, not because it fits the song
better, not because it is correct—it is not—but simply because it is, by its nature, more
spreadable: you can hear the incorrect version better, and thus in a room full of people,
some of whom are singing the "correct" version, and some of whom are singing the
incorrect version, it is the incorrect one (in this case) that people will tend to hear, and
thus it will tend to spread all on its own, just by virtue of this feature, without any
conscious choice or awareness on the part of its hosts.
Now this is indeed how a virus spreads. It spreads because it replicates and
transmits and for no other reason. People don't like to get the common cold, don't intend
to get it, and actually take steps to fend off the possibility of getting it. In the same way,
Dawkins and his wife have to take care not to whistle or sing infectious songs, especially
right before bed, for fear of infecting the other person:

My wife and I both occasionally suffer from sleeplessness when our minds are taken over by
a tune which repeats itself over and over in the head, relentlessly and without mercy, all through
the night. Certain tunes are especially bad culprits, for example Tom Lehrer's 'Masochism
 Tango'. This is not a melody of any great merit (unlike the words, which are brilliantly rhymed),
but it is almost impossible to shake off once it gains hold. We now have a pact that, if we have
one of the danger tunes on the brain during the day (Lennon and McCartney are other prime
culprits), we shall under no circumstances sing or whistle it near bedtime, for fear of infecting
the other. This notion that a tune in one brain can 'infect' another brain is pure meme talk. (UTR,
p. 302)

In these examples, as I said, the action is indeed exactly analogous to the notion of a gene
(or at least to Dawkins' presentation of the gene), to a fundamental unit of replication,
that is fundamental precisely because it replicates.
Let's take it one level up (you will see the sense in which I mean this as my
presentation unfolds). Let's consider the case of a song or a joke or a fashion or a bit of
gossip that the "host" actually wants in their head and finds enjoyable. In this case, you
actually take some trouble to get the notes right or learn the details of the joke and how to
tell it well, or go to many different stores looking for items of clothing that fit the new
fashion, and so on. It many cases, the song or joke or what not, actually does not posses
the feature of self-replication. In some cases, you listen to the song over and over again
because when you want to hear it in your head you are unable to capture it and get it
right. You need to hear it again in all its glory and detail precisely because it does not
automatically jump into your head and infect you. Indeed, in many cases, composers of
songs intentionally add at least three layers to any part of the song in order to prevent
people from automatically encompassing it. They want it to be both very enjoyable and
not "catchy" in the sense we are discussing here. Why is the song enjoyable? Well,
ultimately, personal taste is not disputable, and is subjective, but to first order we could
say that it has musical merit when the harmonics of the notes match up in certain ways,
and when the lyrics, like a good poem, harmonize meaning, rhyme, and rhythm. This, of
course, presupposes some other basis of consideration than replication because of
replication, simply because of something being inherently good at spreading. In many
cases, musical aficionados will actually seek out pieces that are not even that appealing at
first listen, but that over time and over many listenings and even with actual study of the
score and libretto become highly enjoyable and are seen as works of great power and
sophistication. These are the things that spread because they are recommended by others
who are deemed knowledgeable, and absolutely not because they are "catchy". This is
certainly not the same as the previous class of things that have been called "memes". I
will discuss why this is so a bit later.
Next we come to things that take a great deal of effort in order to acquire: a skill
such as carpentry or piano tuning, a intellectual discipline or field such as calculus or
electrodynamics or macro-economics, or martial arts, driving a car, and so on. These
things may never be found by their "hosts" to be enjoyable. People may learn carpentry
or plumbing as a way to earn a living, and they may become quite expert in their
respective skill sets, but they may never come to the point where they would find the
exercise of their skills really enjoyable just for their own sake. Indeed, here the analogy
with the gene as a fundamental replicator totally breaks down. The scientific idea
spreads not because it is good at spreading, not because it is enjoyable psychologically,
nor because it prevents psychological anxiety, or anything else like that, but precisely
because it is a good scientific idea and because it meets certain criteria of "goodness"
established by the field itself. The scientific idea could even be initially highly
unappealing and un-catchy, but due to its support from experiment and its harmonization
with established scientific theory, and its power to explain and predict, it may spread
widely and deeply. All of these things rest upon established criteria and methods and the
resulting conscious and deliberate evaluation. The new method or new tool or new
material in plumbing spreads because it saves time, money or effort, or because it yields
superior results, because it is better plumbing—and not because it is "good at spreading"
or "infectious" or because it "spreads itself".
And really, all of these criteria and methods which are used to evaluate things
themselves in turn rely on conscious understanding. You can not decide that something
is a better material for use in a plumbing application, or a better method of assembly or
what not, without the ability to consciously and intelligently evaluate reality. So, for
example, when Dawkins tries to get around one of the objections to his theory of memes
he states that the intention of the master carpenters action—driving a nail with a
hammer—is obvious to his apprentice and is what is important, and that because of this
the apprentice doesn't need to carefully replicate every intricate detail of the hammer
blow. Those details aren't important for the "meme". The meme is the notion of "drive
the nail into the wood until it is flat", and the action only needs to be roughly imitated,
only enough to accomplish the intention, etc. Even if this is true the point I am trying to
make is that this relies on understanding. You can't know what your master intends
unless you are self-consciously aware and intelligent. And once you bring in that
consideration, then you bring in a whole other basis for evaluation and for the conditions
under which something or other will spread. You can call it a "meme", but it has totally
lost any connection with self-replication. A scientific idea will absolutely not, in general,
"propagate itself" or "parasitize" the brains of others. A scientific idea in someone's
mind, in order to be a scientific idea at all, requires the context of a whole field, of many
theories, of intelligent understanding, and above all, of a deliberate, conscious effort to
grasp and assimilate and understand the idea. As a former physics TA and physics and
astronomy lab teacher, I can tell you that many students wish this situation were
otherwise, but alas, this is the way it is.
Furthermore, as someone who has himself been an apprentice (and a journeyman
as well) I can tell you from personal experience that mimeses is not enough. I took a
leave of absence from physics graduate school in order to learn to tune, repair, and
rebuild pianos. I apprenticed for a year and a half under the direct supervision of a
master piano technician at his shop, as well as out in the field. He was able to explain
very clearly the theory behind tuning, and what I was listening for, and so on. And also
any aspect of rebuilding and repairing he could explain things very well indeed. In every
case except one, he was able to convey the intention and the theory—the understanding.
However, when it came to tuning-hammer technique, he was more or less intuitive. He
personally knew how to manipulate the tuning pin and string in order to put a very stable
and accurate tuning on a piano, but he could not explain to me why and how he was
moving the tuning lever around. Obviously, the basics of hammer technique were clear,
and he was able to explain those, but the subtleties were another matter, particularly in
his case, since he applied forces into and out of the plane of rotation of the pin and tuning
lever. I very much wanted to learn his technique as he was one of the very best tuners in
the area, especially when it came to stability, and I felt sure that his "jerk tuning" or
"impulse tuning" technique was partly responsible. So, without a real understanding, I
simply proceeded to imitate, as best I could, the technique.
This strategy was not very successful, and for the first year I struggled with
stability issues in my tuning. Then, a number of months later, when I was a journeyman
at a piano shop here in Ithaca, one of the local piano technicians actually did know the
theory behind jerk-tuning, and explained it to me in detail. After that, everything
changed. I was able to understand the goal and purpose of those in and out of plane
forces, and I very quickly—within a week, actually—was able to put extremely stable
tunings on pianos. When it comes to complex human skills and their transmission,
understanding is everything. Imitation is nothing. Imitation is only the gross outward
reality. Understanding gives you the fine, detailed inner reality, which is the only thing
that will allow you to put a concert level tuning on a grand piano, or to precisely cut a
complex wood furniture or cabinet joint, or to truly grasp a set of theories, such as
Evolution.
Finally, at the highest level, come things which are themselves the basis for
understanding: things such as the scientific method, philosophy and metaphysics, and
methods such as Zen meditation. Zen meditation spreads not because it is infectious—
believe me, it is really not!—but because it results in personal insight and understanding
that can not be achieved conceptually. If you persist in the practice of Zen meditation,
you will find out for yourself why it is greatly to be valued and why someone would want
to practice it. It requires a continual and relentless commitment and effort on the part of
the student. As a fad, Zen may have spread like wildfire, and the word "Zen" and a
certain conceptual understanding of it, may indeed be memes. I would say that they
actually are, in fact. But the practice itself is anything but a meme. Like martial arts, it
is a method for achieving a goal. The goal in martial arts is self defense. The goal in Zen
is enlightenment, which is self-understanding. If Dawkins ever persisted in the practice
of Zen meditation, he would find himself immune from those pesky song memes that
bother he and his wife at bedtime. Right now, (judging by his vulnerability to brain
worms) he has what a Zen master would call a "monkey mind". If he practiced
meditation, that would change. As mentioned in a previous chapter, meditation has been
shown to have measurable and tangible benefits for brain function. More important than
that, however, is that it develops self-awareness, which is the ultimate foundation of
intelligence and understanding. Thus, things at this highest level refine and perfect and
build the methods and criteria which are used to evaluate things at the lower levels, and
which give one the power to greatly resist infection from those viruses of the mind that
exist at the lowest level.
These considerations exclude the greater part of human culture from Dawkins
theory of memes, and collapse things back into a biological consideration of the
evolutionary survival advantages of understanding and intelligence and self-awareness.
The only way to try to rescue the theory of memes from this state of affairs is to postulate
that our understanding itself is due to an already existing complex of memes, as Dennett
does so postulate. The problem with this is that it offers no mechanism for how a bunch
of self-replicating entities in the culture soup could come together to form something so
organic as understanding and intelligence. One can clearly see the advantages of
understanding and intelligence for the biological, physical survival of organisms. It is
much harder to imagine how intelligence could arise from a differential survival of
psychological infectiousness effectiveness. What does the change in song lyrics
mentioned, which makes them more audible, have to do with understanding? What does
the infection power of a song snippet (for whatever causes) have to do with intelligence?
Indeed, intelligence doesn't arise for these reasons. Intelligence arises for evolutionary
reasons, and can be seen in organisms that have no "culture" whatsoever. Intelligence
and understanding precede culture, and are its ultimate foundation. Certainly, many
components of culture have no ground in understanding, and are even an affront to it.
Sometimes they are, like Dawkins shows, based on psychological needs: they allay
anxiety, or promote pleasant inner states, for example. Some of these are even viral in
nature, and can correctly be called memes. But hardly all of them can be so categorized!
On the contrary: even a practice whose sole purpose is to make you feel happier is
actually grounded in biology because the feeling of happiness is the proximate
evolutionary mechanism whose ultimate cause is survival—and this is true even if the
proximate mechanism is a by-product or misfiring. Even in those cases, you would still
not say that the practice spreads because it is by nature spreadable and catchy. You
would say that it spreads because it activates an internal mechanism whose ultimate
purpose is to be found in evolution. Things like catchy songs that do actually spread
simply because they are inherently prone to spread aren't very common, and aren't very
significant. Memes are a joke. Literally. Sorry, Dawkins, all your base are belong to us.
Not to mention the fact that memes haven't been "honed" (to use Dawkins word)
by the scientific process and methodology. Not even close. There are no set of
repeatable experiments, done by various different labs and researchers, that even verify
the existence of memes in the sense that Dawkins claims for them. An internet meme is
one thing, but the meme as the basis for and fundamental unit of all cultural transmission
is quite another. In his own words, Dawkins tells us that scientific methodology requires
that ideas satisfy the criteria of "testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability,
consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence
of cultural milieu, and so on." Well? Bring these things on for the "meme"! Is the idea
even experimentally falsifiable? The idea of memes is certainly applied to the world by
people like Susan Blackmore or Richard Brodie, but they simply assume the truth and
theoretical status of the idea without investigation and then apply it to situations. This is
not science. All we have, even after thirty years are Dawkins lame thought experiments,
which he might some day like to actually conduct. Well great. Sorry. Not good enough.
The idea of the meme is indeed a good meme, is viral in nature, and does tend to bypass
critical thought and appeals to those people who can't think well and are prone to
assigning agency in cases where there is none. If anyone were really serious about the
meme, they'd be doing serious research on it, not writing popular books, or putting up a
website about the religion of virus. Too stupid. If you're so scared of being taken over
by ideas that you need to preemptively "infect yourself" with ideas you approve of, then
you really shouldn't be on the internet at all. Do us all a favor and go see a qualified
psychologist who can maybe help you with your issues.
 CONCLUSION

Finally, at long last, we have come to the end of this paper, and I would like to
return to the beginning, to the story of Alexis Carrel and the miraculous recovery of
Marie Bailly. I suggested a number of considerations in relation to this story. Firstly,
that there was no logical necessity to attribute the healing to God. Secondly, that there
was no evidence provided in the story to support the contention that many similar
miraculous cures have happened at Lourdes and have been well documented, and finally,
that if such cures were happening all over the world regardless, that brining a bunch of
people to Lourdes every month would only appear to show the miraculous effectiveness
of Lourdes to heal and cure, as these recoveries would have happened anyway. I
suggested that if we examined the statistics, we might find that a more or less
"miraculous" cure was almost guaranteed to happen at Lourdes every month, simply due
to the volume of traffic going through it.
What I'd like to point out is that suggesting that the statistics might show
something is not the same as actually investigating. If you just leave it there, it's nothing
more than a write-off. We all tend to be strongly biased towards those things which we
already hold to be true. We all tend to see only reinforcing evidence of our own views in
the world around us. This is true even for scientists; maybe even especially true for us.
We may seek contrary evidence within our own scientific field of study, but few of us will
seek contrary evidence when it comes to broader investigations. There most assuredly
are documented and medically inexplicable cases of sudden recovery. The knee-jerk
reflex to dismiss anything that is difficult to explain scientifically will not help science to
make progress, and indeed, has in the past presented serious obstacles and difficulties to
such progress, Dawkins naive views on the subject notwithstanding. Instead of ruining
the careers of those neuroscientists who found evidence of neuroplasticity and the growth
of new neurons, the scientific establishment should have gone out of its way to try to
replicate the results. It should have sought contrary evidence, not dismissed it. But it did
not.
Similarly, if you only ever read things with which you agree, you are doing
yourself a great disservice. On the back cover of The God Delusion, a blurb from The
Economist claims that "Atheists will love Mr. Dawkins's incisive logic and rapier wit, and
theists will find few better tests of the robustness of their faith." While the first part is
true, the second totally misses the mark. The God Delusion is atheist propaganda—it is
intended to convince people of the correctness and cogency of the atheist worldview—
and its intended audience is atheists and agnostics and lapsed or ex- theists. No religious
person is going to be at all convinced or even mildly discomforted by The God Delusion
(although it will make them angry, of course) for the same reason that no evolutionary
biologist is bothered by the attacks of young earth creationists. Scientists are not
bothered by these attacks because they can clearly see that the creationists don't actually
understand Evolution. Their arguments might be persuasive to fellow creationists, but
will not touch a scientist. In the same way, when Dawkins consistently reduces faith and
religion to blind belief in outer supernatural agents he immediately shows the religious
reader that he has no clue what the frack he is talking about. When he talks about suicide
terrorism or Carl Jung or Stephen J. Gould's Rock of Ages; when he covers cargo cults,
when he presents the misfiring brain module theory of religious experience, when he
talks of childhood – in all of these things he shows the informed reader that he doesn't
know what he is talking about. He is not interested in the truth. He is interested in
scoring points, in ridiculing, in scoffing, in debunking, but certainly not in actually
investigating. He only investigates to find material to support what he already believes.
This is unacceptable.
I would implore you, the reader, to do better than this. I would suggest that you
hold yourself to a higher level of understanding than this. It's what a true scientist should
do.