Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (57 page)

Today, increasingly many on the science side argue that this separation was at best a temporary armistice, at worse an act of cowardice and capitulation, and that science should now usurp the religious realm in order to conquer it and make people less superstitious, more knowledgeable, and happier. I’m skeptical, in part because a main justification for the move stems from a false premise: that religion is a childish attempt at explaining phenomena, to be replaced by science since we now know better.

A common refrain among new-atheist missionaries is that a main aim of religion, other than getting people to join to kill, has been to provide a unified theory of the world of the sort that science now seeks in more cautious and measured ways.
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As Christopher Hitchens (who is often right, but not about this) puts it:

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody … had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.
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Bravo for Hitchens’s kids, but their knowledge is irrelevant to what religion is about. Religion survives science, as it does secular ideology, not because it is prior to or more primitive than science or secular reasoning, but because of what it affectively and collectively secures for people, however “infantile” such reassurance may seem to some. Religious adults are not childish or weak-minded: Studies show that, at least in our societies, religious adults have very different mind-sets from those of children, concentrating more on the moral dimensions of their faith and less on its supernatural attributes.

Science is the attempt to associate the flux of our perceptible experiences into a logically thorough structure of thought, in which each event is uniquely and convincingly correlated with that structure in ways that are collectively identifiable and replicable. Science aims to reveal how facts are reliably coordinated with, and conditioned by, one another. This open yet systematic curiosity about nature is a neutral vessel as far as morality is concerned: It plies the skies of reason and can cause great evil, when targeted to war and domination, or great good, when carrying out the aims of healing the sick, reducing poverty, or promoting civil and human rights.

Religion, by contrast, is less interested in how the universe has always been than in how our tiny piece of it ought to be, however that flies in the face of logical or empirical consistency. It isn’t concerned with the rational foundation of material existence, but withthe moral worth of human values and goals that don’t necessarily lend themselves to logical justification or empirical confirmation. But it is a moral vessel that can be steered across the sea of our tragic comedy in practically any direction: toward great evil or great good, or it may confound its moral bearings and be cast adrift in cults going nowhere.

From a scientific perspective, human beings are accidental and incidental products of the material development of the physical universe, almost wholly irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description of its functioning. Beyond Earth, there is no intelligence—however alien or like our own—that is watching out for us or cares. We are alone. But when we focus on the “incidental” case of human existence, human intelligence and reason searches for the hidden traps and causes in our surroundings, for intelligence evolved with and will always remain leashed to our animal passions—in the struggle for survival, the quest for love, the yearning for social standing and belonging. This intelligence does not easily suffer loneliness, any more than it abides the looming prospect of death, whether individual or collective.

But doesn’t religion impede science, and vice versa? Not necessarily. Leaving aside the sociopolitical stakes in the opposition between science and religion, a crucial difference between science and religion is that factual knowledge as such is not a principal aim of religious devotion, but plays only a supporting role.

Only in the last decade has the Catholic Church acknowledged the factual plausibility of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin. In 1992 the Catholic Church cleared Galileo’s name, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II apologized to God (not to Galileo) for the trial. The earlier religious rejection of their theories stemmed from challenges posed to a cosmic order unifying the moral and material worlds. A long lag time was necessary to refurbish and remake the moral and material connections in such a way that would permit faith in a unified cosmology to survive. But many believerstoday shun the orthodoxy of such totalizing religious views of the world, and are happy to give science its due. As Al Gore quipped to White House reporters, “People have known for years that you can have the Earth circle around the sun and still believe in God.”
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THE REALIST ILLUSION

To avoid misunderstanding, let me say right away that I consider as bunk most of the claims by postmodernists and by many in cultural studies that scientific knowledge is merely a local (Western elite) worldview and is no more or less “socially constructed” than discourse about race or the manifest destiny of empires and nations. Science is guided by a faith in reason that always flies ahead of the facts (for example, in the use of mathematical prediction), but is “conformable to nature”
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(in part, I think, because the world contains countable things—like stars, stones, and seasons—that can be put into increasingly precise correspondence with one another by a mind equipped by mathematics and evolved with other means to do so).

There are deep and unresolved debates about what exactly gives science its privileged path to empirical truth and knowledge of a reality that transcends our own existence. Yet I have no doubt that it produces knowledge, the validity of which is independent of human observation. What I do doubt—because I find it factually false—is the claim by Sam Harris and others “that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered, and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them”
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as we can be right or wrong about beliefs in atomic structures or
E = mc
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For example, the founding principles of human rights—liberty, equality, fraternity, or even sovereignty over one’s own body and the pursuit of happiness—were anything but “natural” and “self-evident.” Human rights weren’t discovered, but invented for social engineering of a kind unprecedented in human history.

The political and social movement for recognition of human rights began in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly with the Jean Calas affair in France (1760s): he was broken on the wheel and water-boarded. The Italian politician Cesare Marquis de Beccaria, commenting on the case, proposed making such “torments” of an individual human being a measure of the “contempt of all mankind.” In
Inventing Human Rights,
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Lynn Hunt chronicles how the right to protect the body from torment became the first human right accorded to individuals.

Through the emotional reaction to their violation, “human rights” became “self-evident.” This helped to define the concepts of “individual” and “humanity” for Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. These concepts became cornerstones of our moral culture, first inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, then in the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and more recently in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Monotheism created the concept of a single humanity, worthy of improvement and salvation. However, belonging to humanity guaranteed “equal rights” before God only in paradise, not on earth. For the religious orders of the day, individual bodies could be butchered, burned at the stake, disemboweled, drawn and quartered, and mutilated and tortured in public spectacles. England only banned burning at the stake in 1790, a year after France abolished all forms of judicial torture. These spectacles were sacrificial displays of individual suffering that were meant to repair the body politic that had been sinned against. The individual sinner would not be reformed or rehabilitated but given over to the crowd as an offering for the greater good. In countries that still publicly administer beheadings, stoning to death, amputation of limbs, flogging and other insults to the body and person, these practices do not generate moral outrage but represent redemption. Hidden torture in detention centers lacks even this redemptive quality.

Ideas of “self-evident,” “natural,” and “human” rights are anything but inherently self-evident or natural in the history of our species. For example, the culturally widespread and age-old practice of slavery flourished in Europe and America into the nineteenth century, lingering in lynchings through America’s Jim Crow South into the 1960s. It was only banned in Saudi Arabia and Muscat in 1970 and in Niger in 2003, and still is practiced along the fringes of the Sahara. Racism and subordination of women remain, of course, very much a part of the modern world, although in many places they have become less noxious than in the Stone Age.

The American and French republics began to render real the fictions of individual and equal rights through new mores, laws, and wars, and not through independent scientific discoveries.

The belief that true knowledge and discovery of facts about morality and (nonhuman) nature is a philosophical conceit common both to religious dogmatists and new-atheist “realists.” But whereas religious dogmatists see all facts as products of some divine fantasy, new-atheist realists imply that fact and fantasy have no common ground in the brave new world of scientific realism applied to human affairs. In both cases, dogma can be dangerous.

OVERBLOWING IDEOLOGY

The scientific ignorance and tomfoolery of many of the new atheists with regard to religion, and history, makes me almost embarrassed to be an atheist.
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But when foolishness is promoted as a course of political action, then it becomes potentially dangerous to everyone’s health. A sentiment that only feeds into the current wave of violence is Harris’s suggestion in
The End of Faith
that a total war on Islam may be unavoidable.

Islam and religious ideology per se aren’t the principal causes of suicide bombing and terror in today’s world—at least no more than are soccer, friendship, or faith for a better future. What is the causeof the current global wave of terrorism, then? Nothing so abstract or broad as any of these things, but bits of all of them, embedded and acting together in the peculiar sorts of small-and large-scale social networks that are emerging in this time in history.

Throughout human history, it is commitment to a religious or transcendental dream that ultimately sustains cooperation and competition between large groups, including the motivation for people to kill and die for others who aren’t genetic kin. We’ve also seen that the connection of the jihadi nightmare with Islam across the world and the centuries is only fragmentary and diffuse. Even a superficial examination of studies and experiments in human cognition and reasoning demonstrates unequivocally that ideas do not “invade” and occupy minds, or spread from mind to mind like self-replicating viruses or genes, as Dawkins and company maintain.
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However simple and appealing may be the notion of an ideology as a self-replicating high-fidelity “meme,” psychologically that’s pretty baseless and unrelated to how the mind actually works
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—almost as distant from reality as the claim that religion itself is the greater cause of human group violence.

Over the course of human history, and across the world today, religion has helped to promote tyranny and rebellion against oppression, to inspire monumental works of creativity and of stunning stupidity, to keep people in fear and to diminish their fears, to deliver justice and to excuse injustice, to help and to harm children and other living things.
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The scientific study of religion and irrationality suggests that neither is likely to go away or even be greatly diminished by science and rational debate.
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Reason’s greatest challenge—in politics, ethics, or everyday life—is to gain knowledge and leverage over unreason: to cope with it, compete with it, and perhaps channel it; not to fruitlessly try to annihilate it by reasoning it away.

I certainly don’t criticize the Four Horsemen and other scientificallyminded new atheists for wanting to rid the world of dogmatically held beliefs that are vapid, barbarous, anachronistic, and wrong. I object to their manner of combat, which is often shrill, scientifically baseless, psychologically uninformed, politically naive, and counterproductive for goals we share.

CHAPTER 23
HUMAN RITES: NATURAL ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

The anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessities. Agitated by fears and hopes of this nature … men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.