Essential reading for all….

Well that’s pretty much it. Thanks to everyone who came on to abuse me without addressing a single point I raised. You strengthened my case no end! Thanks also to James, without whom none of this would have been possible. He, at least, managed to raise a few points. This passage though I do find a touch troubling:

[Laurence] says “polls have show that around 36% of young British Muslims think apostasy should be punishable by death. As a matter of interest, how high would that figure have to go before ‘vile’ and ‘pernicious’ becomes about right?” This is of course to completely miss the point since if Islam were so vile and pernicious, 64% of Muslims wouldn’t be able to disregard this core belief. Of that 36% I have no doubt that most of them don’t really believe in apostasy beyond paying lip service to it.

It’s almost as if James is saying that only 100% would merit a raised eyebrow, as opposed to a mere third of young British Muslims. And even then, they’d only be paying “lip service” to executing apostates. Does James really have no conception of the living hell to be endured by a young woman or homosexual, say, being raised in a household where “lip service” to such barbaric and outdated notions is still being paid?

What if it were 36% of Conservatives paying “lip service” to some ghastly idea straight out of the dark ages. Would we make any political capital out of that, or would we seek to play it down? This is the double standard which the faiths have worked so hard to maintain, and one which it would appear James has bought into hook, line, and sinker – that somehow, when it comes to religion, “it’s different.” Why? Because it is. Why? It just is!

And what exactly is so difficult about the concept that good people may so easily become infected by bad ideas? That we can and should and must attack the theology, while understanding that, to some extent, Muslims are simply the victims of their own religion? I don’t hate those 36% in the least. Frankly, I just think they are suffering from a form of mental illness and need help. Patronising? Maybe, but that’s honestly what I think.

What I definitely don’t think is that religion is just “what you make of it” – a statement which is either false or meaningless – take your pick. That this degree of denial should come from one of our most intelligent and secular bloggers, merely confirms what a mountain we still have to climb before we really get the insanity of religion on the ropes.

OK, that’s it, I’m out of here. Unless, of course, you want to continue the discussion . . .

No lecture series would be complete without a recommended reading list. This basically covers the a*** of the lecturer against the inevitable errors and omissions of his own exposition. “You’ll have to turn to the reading list for a more detailed treatment,” he will say. So here it is!

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – a bit heavy going as you might expect. But the chapter on miracles is fairly readable, and that is the important bit.

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden – explains evolution as only Dawkins can. Should be read by every child in the land.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith – in my view, the best of the post 9/11 anti-God diatribes. Should be read by every condescending atheist in the land.

Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction – this tiny book sets out the philosophical arguments against God in the simplest terms. Another one for the Christmas stocking methinks.

Victor Stenger, God, the Failed Hypothesis – and this one sets out the scientific arguments against God. Probably wouldn’t appeal to those without a strong interest in science.

Ludovic Kennedy, All in the Mind: Farewell to God – superb historical sweep charting the rise and fall of God. Great reference book.

OK, that’s enough books. If you’re still “doing God” after reading that little lot, then I don’t think there’s a great deal more I can do to help you. But make no mistake – you do need help!

Sam Harris shot to prominence in 2004 with his best-selling book The End of Faith, which has managed to draw sharp criticism from religionist and secularist alike – a sure sign that he must be doing something right! It’s a superb book – packed with useful insight and displaying a fine mastery of the English language. I don’t agree with all of it. In particular, the final chapter caused some of us a few difficulties, especially when he started quoting Padmasambhava approvingly! But for exposing the duplicitous role of the “religious moderate” in unwittingly providing comfort and cover for the “religious extremist,” I’m afraid he scores a perfect ten in my book. “By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.” I don’t think I could have put it any better myself!

But that is all by the way, because our interest here is in questions of science and philosophy – and so to his lesser-known day job as a neuroscience PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. When I first heard about Harris’s research, I assumed that he was going to stick probes onto people’s heads, and try to show that religious beliefs were fundamentally different in some way from “normal” beliefs. In fact, he’s doing something far more interesting – he’s trying to show that they’re the same. I’ll let him explain what he’s up to:

What I believe, though cannot yet prove, is that belief is a content-independent process. Which is to say that beliefs about God – to the degree that they really are believed – are the same as beliefs about numbers, penguins, tofu, or anything else. This is not to say that all of our representations of the world are acquired through language, or that all linguistic representations are on the same logical footing. And we know that different regions of die brain are involved in judging the truth of statements drawn from different content domains. What I do believe, however, is that the neural processes governing die final acceptance of a statement as “true” rely on more fundamental, reward-related circuitry in our frontal lobes – probably the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odours. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense. And false statements may quite literally disgust us.

All of this is very much in its infancy, and doubtless will not be the work of just one man. Ultimately this may turn out to be a futile quest – it may not be possible to prove that all belief is on an equal footing, indeed it may not even be true. But we’ll just follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads to God (which would be a first)! If you’re interested, Harris had an initial paper published before Christmas. It’s available here (pdf), though I can’t claim to understand any of it.

That said, I do find this idea highly plausible. We all know, or should do, just how malleable and suggestible the human brain is. One of my favourite demonstrations of this involves Derren Brown making a nice lady act like she was under some kind of voodoo spell. First, she can’t move her legs, then she can’t move her arms, and finally she can’t even speak – all courtesy of Derren manipulating the little levers in her brain to convince her that there really might be something in this voodoo doll malarkey after all.

The moral is that, “As a nice lady thinks, so she will act.” Or as Harris would say, “A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.” Yet, time and again, I seem to come right up against this tired old false dichotomy, so cherished by liberals, between belief and action. “People are free to think and say whatever they like, as long as they keep off my front lawn.” If only I had a pound – hey, 50p even! – for every time I had heard that glib sentiment, I would have long since retired to Hawaii and you could all blissfully carry on without me.

Of course the sentiment is valid in a strictly legal sense but, in just about every other sense, it is hopelessly outdated. Beliefs are in no way separate from actions. In fact, beliefs are actions, and can be just as lethal. The neural activity which constitutes a belief connects directly to a nervous system running through your arm and finger, which pulls the trigger, that fires a bullet, that kills the President, which starts a nuclear war – it’s all of a piece. To think otherwise, is essentially to buy into a philosophical dualism of the mind which bit the dust ages ago.

Beliefs have potentially devastating consequences – 9/11 should have proved that beyond any doubt but, as the fatuous search for “root causes” continues apace, one has to wonder whether 2,998 may not have died in vain. Yet Harris is out to show that beliefs in the Koran, Islamic jihad, the afterlife, etc., are fundamentally no different in character from beliefs about the weather! Of course, some of the more batshit crazy ideas may be a little harder to acquire, taking years of persistent indoctrination not unlike the lengthy process of learning a musical instrument. But once acquired – once the brain has accepted that the belief “tastes good” – then pretty much everything else follows for better or for worse.

Religious belief, or indeed any other belief, is emphatically not a private matter. Rather, a belief is merely an action primed, cocked, and ready for battle. If we are “as liberals” to insist that it is not beliefs but only actions which matter, then I fear we may find ourselves having to clear up the mess following one 9/11 and 7/7 after another. It is time that we went after the bad ideas with a vengeance. The claims of religion are false – we are now in a position to state this with overwhelming confidence. If liberalism means one thing, then it must surely be about setting the individual free. It isn’t entirely clear to me just how shackling ourselves to the ignorance of the past can form any part of this project.

Question for the reader: When we observe how easily the mind may be altered by hypnosis or drugs, why do some of us appear to imagine that religion is quite incapable of performing the same trick?

The first and perhaps most obvious problem is, as has already been touched upon, that evolution falsifies a literal interpretation of Genesis. However, most Christians don’t seem to get too exercised over the fact that the “word of God” is wildly inaccurate. Six days, 14 billion years – we’ve all been there, especially the software engineers among us. Besides, this was not exactly news in 1859. Earlier that century, geologists had already noted, through studying rocks and stuff, that the biblical time-scales were simply infeasible.

Nevertheless, to this day the “debate” still largely seems to centre around questions concerning whether the Hebrew word for “day” means just one revolution of the earth, or whether it really means “f***ing ages.” Indeed, there are times when I get to wondering if this fatuous argument is not prosecuted purely in order to distract attention from what is maybe the bigger embarrassment – namely that evolutionary theory drives a coach and horses through the foundational Christian doctrine of the fall and redemption.

If you attend the extended Christmas or Easter liturgies, as bizarrely I still do, you will find that the story begins (where else?) with Adam eating an apple – the “felix culpa” from which all else follows. Of course modern Christians don’t take this too literally either. There was no apple, no Adam and Eve as such, no serpent, no garden – rather the story merely symbolises mankind’s fall from grace into its present disordered and unhappy state from which it now cries out to the Almighty for salvation. It’s just an allegory, stupid.

Except . . . it’s not exactly a brilliant allegory either. I thought that allegories were supposed to inform and illuminate, but this one just misleads. Because neither was there any “fall from grace.” Instead, we started out as pond scum, became fish, then small furry creatures, monkeys, and finally humans (missing out a few steps there). And how did that happen? It all came about on account of the struggle for survival – a bitter and ongoing fight over finite resources – ultimately, a fight to the death. And get this: it’s been that way for the best part of 500 million years. Here’s Dawkins:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

Great! And whose fault is all of that? It’s God’s fault. That’s right – the big cheese himself. That’s the way he chose to set things up, in his “infinite wisdom.” But now, maybe sensing that we were not far off stumbling upon the truth, God plays an absolute blinder. He tries to blame it all on us. He tells us that all this misery is a consequence of human “sin” and then, just to complete the illusion, sends his only son to “save us” by dying a horrible death, doubtless imagining (correctly as it happens) that we might be impressed with that sort of thing.

This is what I mean when I state unequivocally that the position staked out by the religious moderate is intellectually bankrupt. I’m not terribly impressed with Christians who believe in evolution. Granted, they may not be flying in the face of modern science with all the arrogance and ignorance of an evangelical nut-job. No, instead they’re just worshipping – yes, worshipping – the most cynical bastard in all of history, literature, or mythology.

I’m really looking forward to the day of judgement. I can’t wait to see the look of dismay on God’s face when it finally dawns on him that he’s actually going to be entering the dock himself.

Question for the reader: Why would the omniscient, benevolent, and omnipotent creator of the universe appear to be so cruel, wasteful, and lazy?

P.S. Don’t panic! It’s just a theory!

Charles Darwin invented Darwin’s theory of evolution. You knew that, didn’t you? But possibly the most important thing to understand about Darwin’s theory is that it is . . . just that – a theory. A bloody good theory, but nonetheless . . . just a theory. A theory of massive explanatory and predictive power, which has, over the course of the last century, created a unity and coherence out of the biological sciences, while simultaneously shedding a powerful light upon that which could scarcely be of greater import – the very nature of the human condition itself. But . . . when all’s said and done (and I really can’t stress this enough) . . . just a theory.

Darwin studied theology at Cambridge (now there’s an irony) before heading off on a sailing trip around the Galápagos Islands off the coast of modern Ecuador. The adventure was to have a number of onerous consequences. Firstly, it resulted in Darwin losing his Christian faith. Sadly, he also lost his health which was never to return for the remainder of his life. And finally, he changed the world utterly and irrevocably. Not bad for a boat trip.

Darwin made a close study of species, especially finches, and discovered that they were all slightly different from one island to the next. This led him to the conclusion that, though distinct, the various species of finches were clearly descended from some common ancestor. So this got him to wondering whether all species might not be related by way of a gradual series of increments, the overall difference (and this is the key insight) being one of degree not of kind.

Darwin spent the rest of his life working on his little theory, including a whacking eight years on barnacles alone. He liked barnacles. The writings of Thomas Malthus provided him with an explanatory mechanism – now known as “survival of the fittest” – for why species might undergo such a gradual “evolution.” Really the only bit missing was the genetic understanding which was to come later. Eventually, spurred on by the knowledge that Alfred Wallace was coming to roughly the same conclusion, he let off his little bombshell in 1859.

Reaction to The Origin of Species was mixed. Some people said that his findings contradicted the Bible, and therefore could not possibly be true. These folk live on to this day and are known as “creationists,” but they are a very tiny minority – in America, only 53% for instance (according to those pesky polls). Others performed a soft shoe shuffle and said that they had never really believed in Genesis literally anyhow. These people are called religious “moderates.” Darwin’s own reaction was a little more dramatic. He said he felt as though he was confessing to a murder.

But perhaps the most telling reaction of all came from the wife of the Bishop of Birmingham who is reported to have said to her husband, “My dear, let us hope that it is not true; but, if it is true, let us hope that it does not become generally known.” So much for the Protestant liberal tradition. Of course I have no idea whether or not she actually said that, but it’s certainly what she should have said. For nothing, but nothing, has been more corrosive to the project of religion than the theory of evolution through natural selection. Here’s why:

Question for the reader: How concerned should we be to learn that the most powerful nation on Earth appears to be in the grip of a medieval superstition?

Tall trees are encouraged because they provide a canopy that supports the growth of berry-bearing plants, or under-storey trees like hazel that can be coppiced.

Do you know Stephen, I’m slightly surprised that, in these environmentally aware days, we are still delivering leaflets at all. I mean does anyone actually take the trouble to read an election leaflet? And if they did, why do we think it would make the slightest difference to their voting intentions? Have you ever switched to Labour on the back of a stunning leaflet? The only reason we persist with the practice, I imagine, is because we are unwilling to concede the tiny advantage to our opponents which would accrue if they continued to leaflet while we stopped. And so it is that we all wind up participating in this mindless orgy of A4 distribution. Here’s a good quote from the Gospel according to Richard Dawkins:

Why are forest trees so tall? Simply to overtop rival trees. A sensible utility function would see to it that they were all short. They would get exactly the same amount of sunlight, with far less expenditure on thick trunks and massive supporting buttresses. But if they were all short, natural selection couldn’t help favouring a variant individual that grew a little taller. The ante having been upped, others would have to follow suit. Nothing can stop the whole game escalating until all trees are ludicrously and wastefully tall.

But just because nature (God?) is ludicrously wasteful, doesn’t mean that we have to be too. I reckon that if we are serious about our green credentials, then we should adopt a policy of unilateral disarmament and cease leafleting altogether. Never were so many trees culled in vain . . .

Please God, bring forth the Rapture.

Amen to that! And if Christians wouldn’t mind signing over all their property to me before the big day arrives, I’d be much obliged.

That’s normal for me.

Take this bilge off to your own blog so you can bore for England without detaining anyone else.

Look, you’re going to have to blame Martin Turner for this. He asked me (about a million comments ago) to explain how science and philosophy had debunked religion, without (naturally) addressing a single point I had made in the article. Basically, your punishment for addressing none of my points is that I am going to address all of yours.

Please.

I’m nearly there. I reckon I’m just going to cover Darwin, and maybe a short bit on Harris, and then wrap things up.

I’ve got some concentrated squash in the cupboard, it turns water into a remarkably tasty fruit-flavoured drink – do you want me to tell you how it works, or do you want to preserve the mystery?

Well that’s how I reckon Jesus did it – using some sort of concentrate. But of course that’s no miracle.