The GOD Delusion (24 page)

declared by fiat
that it
could not. Who was I to say that rational argument was the only
admissible kind of argument? There are other ways of knowing besides
the scientific, and it is one of these other ways of knowing that must
be deployed to know God.

The
most important of these other ways of knowing turned out to be
personal, subjective experience of God. Several discussants at
Cambridge claimed that God spoke to them, inside their heads, just as
vividly and as personally as another human might. I have dealt with
illusion and hallucination in Chapter 3 ('The argument from personal
experience'), but at the Cambridge conference I added two points.
First, that if God really did communicate with humans that fact would
emphatically not lie outside science. God comes bursting through from
whatever other-worldly domain is his natural abode, crashing through
into our world where his messages can be intercepted by human brains -
and that phenomenon has nothing to do with science? Second, a God who
is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people
simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them
simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such
bandwidth! God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of
silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have
something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the
largest brain or the largest computer we know.

Time
and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had
to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must
have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the
name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore,
whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we
very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word 'God'
carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that
we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane
which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present
complex existence. To suggest that the original prime mover was
complicated enough to indulge in intelligent design, to say nothing of
mindreading millions of humans simultaneously, is tantamount to dealing
yourself a perfect hand at bridge. Look around at the world of life, at
the Amazon rainforest with its rich interlacement of lianas,
bromeliads, roots and flying buttresses; its army ants and its jaguars,
its tapirs and peccaries, treefrogs and parrots. What you are looking
at is the statistical equivalent of a perfect hand of cards (think of
all the other ways you could permute the parts, none of which would
work) - except that we know how it came about: by the gradual-istic
crane of natural selection. It is not just scientists who revolt at
mute acceptance of such improbability arising spontaneously; common
sense balks too. To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown
which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a
being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million
people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to
find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent,
thought-denying skyhookery.

I am
not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But
the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out
to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral
reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn't
have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a
better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered. Maybe the
'inflation' that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the
first yoctosecond of the universe's existence will turn out, when it is
better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside
Darwin's biological one. Or maybe
the elusive crane that cosmologists seek will be a version of Darwin's
idea itself: either Smolin's model or something similar. Or maybe it
will be the multiverse plus anthropic principle espoused by Martin Rees
and others. It may even be a superhuman designer -but, if so, it will
most certainly
not
be a designer who just popped
into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don't believe for a
moment) our universe was designed, and
a fortiori
if
the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice,
forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end
product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a
version of Darwinism in another universe.

The
last-ditch defence by my critics in Cambridge was attack. My whole
world-view was condemned as 'nineteenth-century'. This is such a bad
argument that I almost omitted to mention it. But regrettably I
encounter it rather frequently. Needless to say, to call an argument
nineteenth-century is not the same as explaining what is wrong with it.
Some nineteenth-century ideas were very good ideas, not least Darwin's
own dangerous idea. In any case, this particular piece of namecalling
seemed a bit rich coming, as it did, from an individual (a
distinguished Cambridge geologist, surely well advanced along the
Faustian road to a future Templeton Prize) who justified his own
Christian belief by invoking what he called the historicity of the New
Testament. It was precisely in the nineteenth century that theologians,
especially in Germany, called into grave doubt that alleged
historicity, using the evidence-based methods of history to do so. This
was, indeed, swiftly pointed out by the theologians at the Cambridge
conference.

In
any case, I know the 'nineteenth-century' taunt of old. It goes with
the 'village atheist' gibe. It goes with 'Contrary to what you seem to
think Ha Ha Ha we don't believe in an old man with a long white beard
any more Ha Ha Ha.' All three jokes are code for something else, just
as, when I lived in America in the late 1960s, 'law and order' was
politicians' code for anti-black prejudice.* What, then, is the coded
meaning of 'You are so nineteenth-century' in the context of an
argument about religion? It is code for: 'You are so crude and
unsubtle, how could you be so insensitive and ill-mannered as to ask me
a direct, point-blank question like "Do you believe in miracles?" or
"Do you believe Jesus was born of a virgin?"
Don't you know that in polite society we don't ask such questions? That
sort of question went out in the nineteenth century.' But think about
why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious
people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer
that is embarrassing, if it is yes.

* In
Britain 'inner cities' had the equivalent coded meaning, prompting
Auberon Waugh's wickedly hilarious reference to 'inner cities of both
sexes'.

The
nineteenth-century connection is now clear. The nineteenth century is
the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to
believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When
pressed, many educated Christians today are too loyal to deny the
virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because
their rational minds know it is absurd, so they would much rather not
be asked. Hence, if somebody like me insists on asking the question, it
is I who am accused of being 'nineteenth-century'. It is really quite
funny, when you think about it.

I
left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my
conviction that the argument from improbability - the 'Ultimate 747'
gambit - is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and
one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer
despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennett
rightly describes it as 'an un-rebuttable refutation, as devastating
today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues
two centuries earlier. A skyhook would at best simply postpone the
solution to the problem, but Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he
caved in.'
⁷⁴
Darwin, of course, supplied the
vital crane. How Hume would have loved it.

This
chapter has contained the central argument of my book, and so, at the
risk of sounding repetitive, I shall summarize it as a series of six
numbered points.

1. 
One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the
centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance
of design in the universe arises.

2. 
The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to
actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a
watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting
to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. 
The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis
immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The
whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining
statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate
something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for
only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly
from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. 
The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian
evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown
how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability
and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from
simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in
living creatures is just that - an illusion.

5. 
We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of
multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same
explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of
explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological
version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the
anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our
limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. 
We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics,
something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the
absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the
relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the
anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating
skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

If
the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of
religion - the God Hypothesis - is untenable. God almost certainly does
not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far. Various
questions now follow. Even if we accept that God doesn't exist, doesn't
religion still have a lot going for it? Isn't it consoling?

Doesn't
it motivate people to do good? If it weren't for religion, how would we
know what is good? Why, in any case, be so hostile? Why, if it is
false, does every culture in the world have religion? True or false,
religion is ubiquitous, so where does it come from? It is to this last
question that we turn next.

5

THE
ROOTS OF RELIGION

To
an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious
rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation,
should suggest as vividly as a mandrill's bottom that religion may be
adaptive.

MAREK
KOHN

THE
DARWINIAN IMPERATIVE

Everybody
has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all human
cultures have it. It gives consolation and comfort. It fosters
togetherness in groups. It satisfies our yearning to understand why we
exist. I shall come to explanations of this kind in a moment, but I
want to begin with a prior question, one that takes precedence for
reasons we shall see: a Darwinian question about natural selection.

Knowing
that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what
pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured
the impulse to religion. The question gains urgency from standard
Darwinian considerations of economy. Religion is so wasteful, so
extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates
waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching
the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. Unrelentingly and
unceasingly, as Darwin explained, 'natural selection is daily and
hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the
slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all
that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever
opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being'. If a
wild animal habitually performs some useless activity, natural
selection will favour rival individuals who devote the time and energy,
instead, to surviving and reproducing. Nature cannot afford frivolous
jeux
d'esprit.
Ruthless utilitarianism trumps, even if it doesn't
always seem that way.

On
the face of it, the tail of a peacock is a
jeu d'esprit par
excellence. It
surely does no favours to the survival of its
possessor. But it does benefit the genes that distinguish him from his
less spectacular rivals. The tail is an advertisement, which buys its
place in the economy of nature by attracting females. The same is true
of the labour and time that a male bower bird devotes to his bower: a
sort of external tail built of grass, twigs, colourful berries, flowers
and, when available, beads, baubles and bottle caps. Or, to choose an
example that doesn't involve advertising, there is 'anting': the odd
habit of birds, such as jays, of 'bathing' in an ants' nest or
otherwise
applying ants to the feathers. Nobody is sure what the benefit of
anting is - perhaps some kind of hygiene, cleaning out parasites from
the feathers; there are various other hypotheses, none of them strongly
supported by evidence. But uncertainty as to details doesn't - nor
should it - stop Darwinians from presuming, with great confidence, that
anting must be 'for' something. In this case common sense might agree,
but Darwinian logic has a particular reason for thinking that, if the
birds didn't do it, their statistical prospects of genetic success
would be damaged, even if we don't yet know the precise route of the
damage. The conclusion follows from the twin premises that natural
selection punishes wastage of time and energy, and that birds are
consistently observed to devote time and energy to anting. If there is
a one-sentence manifesto of this 'adaptationist' principle, it was
expressed - admittedly in somewhat extreme and exaggerated terms - by
the distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin: 'That is the one
point which I think all evolutionists are agreed upon, that it is
virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in
its own environment.'
⁷⁵
If anting wasn't
positively useful for survival and reproduction, natural selection
would long ago have favoured individuals who refrained from it. A
Darwinian might be tempted to say the same of religion; hence the need
for this discussion.