The GOD Delusion (32 page)

The
writer at this point seems to come to a belated recognition that his
language is not very Christian, for he goes on, more charitably:

However,
GOD teaches us not to seek vengeance, but to pray for those like you
all.

His
charity is short-lived, however:

I'll
get comfort in knowing that the punishment GOD will bring to you will
be 1000 times worse than anything I can inflict. The best part is that
you WILL suffer for eternity for these sins that you're completely
ignorant about. The Wrath of GOD will show no mercy. For your sake, I
hope the truth is revealed to you before the knife connects with your
flesh. Merry CHRISTMAS!!!

PS
You people really don't have a clue as to what is in store for you ...
I thank GOD I'm not you.

I
find it genuinely puzzling that a mere difference of theological
opinion can generate such venom. Here's a sample (original spelling
preserved) from the postbag of the Editor of the magazine
Freethought
Today,
published by the Freedom from Religion Foundation
(FFRF), which campaigns peacefully against the undermining of the
constitutional separation of church and state:

Hello,
cheese-eating scumbags. Their are way more of us Christians than you
losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens
will lose . . .

What
is it with cheese? American friends have suggested to me a connection
with the notoriously liberal state of Wisconsin - home of the FFRF and
centre of the dairy industry - but surely there must be more to it than
that? And how about those French 'cheese-eating surrender-monkeys'?
What is the semiotic iconography of cheese? To continue:

Satan
worshiping scum . . . Please die and go to hell ... I hope you get a
painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you
can meet your God, SATAN . . . Hey dude this freedom from religion
thing sux ... So you fags and dykes take it easy and watch where you go
cuz whenever you least expect it god will get you ... If you don't like
this country and what it was founded on & for,
get
the fuck out of it
and go straight to hell . . .

PS
Fuck you, you comunist whore . . . Get your black asses out of the
U.S.A. . . . You are without excuse. Creation is more than enough
evidence of the LORD JESUS CHRIST'S omnipotent power.

Why
not Allah's omnipotent power? Or Lord Brahma's? Or even Yahweh's?

We
will not go quietly away. If in the future that requires violence just
remember you brought it on. My rifle is loaded.

Why,
I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence?
One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
Bear in mind, through all this, that the Editor being abused and
threatened so viciously is a gentle and charming young woman.

Perhaps
because I don't live in America, most of my hate mail is not quite in
the same league, but nor does it display to advantage the charity for
which the founder of Christianity was notable. The following, dated May
2005, from a British medical doctor, while it is certainly hateful,
strikes me as more tormented than nasty, and reveals how the whole
issue of morality is a deep wellspring of hostility towards atheism.
After some preliminary paragraphs excoriating evolution (and
sarcastically asking whether a 'Negro' is 'still in the process of
evolving'), insulting Darwin personally, misquoting Huxley as an
anti-evolutionist, and encouraging me to read a book (I have read it)
which argues that the world is only eight thousand years old (can he
really
be a doctor?) he concludes:

Your
own books, your prestige in Oxford, everything you love in life, and
have ever achieved, are an exercise in total futility . . . Camus'
question-challenge becomes inescapable: Why don't we all commit
suicide? Indeed, your world view has that sort of effect on students
and many others . . . that we all evolved by blind chance, from
nothing, and return to nothing. Even if religion were not true,
it is better, much, much better, to believe a noble myth, like Plato's,
if it leads to peace of mind while we live. But
your
world
view leads to anxiety, drug addiction, violence, nihilism, hedonism,
Frankenstein science, and hell on earth, and World War III... I wonder
how happy
you
are in your personal relationships?
Divorced? Widowed? Gay? Those like you are never happy, or they would
not try so hard to prove there
is
no happiness nor
meaning in anything.

The
sentiment of this letter, if not its tone, is typical of many.
Darwinism, this person believes, is inherently nihilistic, teaching
that we evolved by blind chance (for the umpteenth time, natural
selection is the very
opposite
of a chance
process) and are annihilated when we die. As a direct consequence of
such alleged negativity, all manner of evils follow. Presumably he
didn't
really
mean to suggest that widowhood could
follow directly from my Darwinism, but his letter, by this point, had
reached that level of frenzied malevolence which I repeatedly recognize
among my Christian correspondents. I have devoted a whole book
(Unweaving
the Rainbow)
to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science,
and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic
negativity, so I shall restrain myself here. This chapter is about
evil, and its opposite, good; about morality: where it comes from, why
we should embrace it, and whether we need religion to do so.

Several
books, including Robert Hinde's
Why Good Is Good,
Michael
Shermer's
The Science of Good and Evil,
Robert
Buckman's
Can We Be Good Without God?,
and Marc
Hauser's
Moral Minds,
have argued that our sense
of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past. This section
is my own version of the argument.

On
the face of it, the Darwinian idea that evolution is driven by natural
selection seems ill-suited to explain such goodness as we possess, or
our feelings of morality, decency, empathy and pity. Natural selection
can easily explain hunger, fear and sexual lust, all of which
straightforwardly contribute to our survival or the preservation of our
genes. But what about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an
orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an
animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an
anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side
of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to
return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? Isn't
goodness incompatible with the theory of the 'selfish gene'? No. This
is a common misunderstanding of the theory - a distressing (and, with
hindsight, foreseeable) misunderstanding.* It is necessary to put the
stress on the right word. The selfish
gene
is the
correct emphasis, for it makes the contrast with the selfish organism,
say, or the selfish species. Let me explain.

* I
was mortified to read in the
Guardian
('Animal
Instincts', 27 May 2006) that
The Selfish Gene
is
the favourite book of Jeff Skilling, CEO of the infamous Enron
Corporation, and that he derived inspiration of a Social Darwinist
character from it. The
Guardian
journalist Richard
Conniff gives a good explanation of the misunderstanding:
http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1783900,00.html
.
I have tried to forestall similar misunderstandings in my new preface
to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of
The Selfish Gene,
just
brought out by Oxford University Press.

The
logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life
which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will
tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the
ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at
their own level in the hierarchy. That, precisely, is what selfish
means in this context. The question is, what is the level of the
action? The whole idea of the selfish gene, with the stress properly
applied to the last word, is that the unit of natural selection (i.e.
the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish
group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish
gene.
It is the gene that, in the form of information, either
survives for many generations or does not. Unlike the gene (and
arguably the meme), the organism, the group and the species are not the
right kind of entity to serve as a unit in this sense, because they do
not make exact copies of themselves, and do not compete in a
pool of such self-replicating entities. That is precisely what genes
do, and that is the - essentially logical - justification for singling
the gene out as the unit of 'selfishness' in the special Darwinian
sense of selfish.

The
most obvious way in which genes ensure their own 'selfish' survival
relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be
selfish. There are indeed many circumstances in which survival of the
individual organism will favour the survival of the genes that ride
inside it. But different circumstances favour different tactics. There
are circumstances - not particularly rare -in which genes ensure their
own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically.
Those circumstances are now fairly well understood and they fall into
two main categories. A gene that programs individual organisms to
favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of
itself. Such a gene's frequency can increase in the gene pool to the
point where kin altruism becomes the norm. Being good to one's own
children is the obvious example, but it is not the only one. Bees,
wasps, ants, termites and, to a lesser extent, certain vertebrates such
as naked mole rats, meerkats and acorn woodpeckers, have evolved
societies in which elder siblings care for younger siblings (with whom
they are likely to share the genes for doing the caring). In general,
as my late colleague W. D. Hamilton showed, animals tend to care for,
defend, share resources with, warn of danger, or otherwise show
altruism towards close kin because of the statistical likelihood that
kin will share copies of the same genes.

The
other main type of altruism for which we have a well-worked-out
Darwinian rationale is reciprocal altruism ('You scratch my back and
I'll scratch yours'). This theory, first introduced to evolutionary
biology by Robert Trivers and often expressed in the mathematical
language of game theory, does not depend upon shared genes. Indeed, it
works just as well, probably even better, between members of widely
different species, when it is often called symbiosis. The principle is
the basis of all trade and barter in humans too. The hunter needs a
spear and the smith wants meat. The asymmetry brokers a deal. The bee
needs nectar and the flower needs pollinating. Flowers can't fly so
they pay bees, in the currency of nectar, for the hire of their wings.
Birds called honeyguides
can find bees' nests but can't break into them. Honey badgers (ratels)
can break into bees' nests, but lack wings with which to search for
them. Honeyguides lead ratels (and sometimes men) to honey by a special
enticing flight, used for no other purpose. Both sides benefit from the
transaction. A crock of gold may lie under a large stone, too heavy for
its discoverer to move. He enlists the help of others even though he
then has to share the gold, because without their help he would get
none. The living kingdoms are rich in such mutualistic relationships:
buffaloes and oxpeckers, red tubular flowers and hummingbirds, groupers
and cleaner wrasses, cows and their gut micro-organisms. Reciprocal
altruism works because of asymmetries in needs and in capacities to
meet them. That is why it works especially well between different
species: the asymmetries are greater.

In
humans, IOUs and money are devices that permit delays in the
transactions. The parties to the trade don't hand over the goods
simultaneously but can hold a debt over to the future, or even trade
the debt on to others. As far as I know, no non-human animals in the
wild have any direct equivalent of money. But memory of individual
identity plays the same role more informally. Vampire bats learn which
other individuals of their social group can be relied upon to pay their
debts (in regurgitated blood) and which individuals cheat. Natural
selection favours genes that predispose individuals, in relationships
of asymmetric need and opportunity, to give when they can, and to
solicit giving when they can't. It also favours tendencies to remember
obligations, bear grudges, police exchange relationships and punish
cheats who take, but don't give when their turn comes.

For
there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game-theoretic
conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve an element of
punishment of cheats. Mathematical theory allows two broad classes of
stable solution to 'games' of this kind. 'Always be nasty' is stable in
that, if everybody else is doing it, a single nice individual cannot do
better. But there is another strategy which is also stable. ('Stable'
means that, once it exceeds a critical frequency in the population, no
alternative does better.) This is the strategy, 'Start out being nice,
and give others the benefit of the doubt. Then repay good deeds with
good, but avenge bad deeds.' In game theory language,
this strategy (or family of related strategies) goes under various
names, including Tit-for-Tat, Retaliator and Reciprocator. It is
evolutionarily stable under some conditions in the sense that, given a
population dominated by reciprocators, no single nasty individual, and
no single unconditionally nice individual, will do better. There are
other, more complicated variants of Tit-for-Tat which can in some
circumstances do better.