The End of Faith (21 page)

Enter faith: we now find ourselves living in a world in which college-educated politicians
will hurl impediments in the way of such research because they are concerned about the
fate of single cells. Their concern is not merely that a collection of 150 cells may suffer its destruction.
Rather, they believe that even a human zygote (a fertilized egg) should be accorded all
the protections of a fully developed human being. Such a cell, after all, has the
potential to become a fully developed human being. But given our recent advances in the biology of cloning, as
much can be said of almost

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every cell in the human body. By the measure of a cell's potential, whenever the president scratches his nose he is now engaged in a diabolical culling of
souls.

Out of deference to some rather poorly specified tenets of Chris- tian doctrine (after
all, nothing in the Bible suggests that killing human embryos, or even human fetuses, is
the equivalent of killing a human being), the U.S. House of Representatives voted
effectively to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.

No rational approach to ethics would have led us to such an impasse. Our present policy on
human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable
intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems. In neurologi- cal
terms, we surely visit more suffering upon this earth by killing a fly than by killing a
human blastocyst, to say nothing of a human zygote (flies, after all, have 100,000 cells
in their brains alone). Of course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and
our capacity to suffer, remains an open question. But anyone who would dogmatically insist
that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception has nothing to
contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate. Those opposed to therapeutic
stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent
of a flat-earth society. Our discourse on the subject should reflect this. In this area of
public policy alone, the accommo- dations that we have made to faith will do nothing but
enshrine a perfect immensity of human suffering for decades to come.

BUT the tendrils of unreason creep further. President Bush recently decided to cut off
funding to any overseas family-planning group that provides information on abortion.
According to the New York Times, this “has effectively stopped condom provision to 16 coun- tries and reduced it in 13
others, including some with the world's highest rates of AIDS infection.”41 Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the
U.S. gov-

ernment has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be
squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use. It is no exaggeration to say
that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious
dogmatism. As Nicholas Kristof points out, “sex kills, and so does this kind of blush- ing
prudishness.”42

And yet, even those who see the problem in all its horror find it impossible to criticize
faith itself. Take Kristof as an example: in the very act of exposing the medievalism that
prevails in the U.S. gov- ernment, and its likely consequences abroad, he goes on to
chastise anyone who would demand that the faithful be held fully account- able for their
beliefs:

I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything, and I see no problem with
aggressively pointing out the dismal conse- quences of this increasing religious
influence. For example, evan- gelicals' discomfort with condoms and sex education has led
the administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at
home and abroad, not to mention more preg- nancies and abortions.

But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with out- rage at evangelical-backed
policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity
itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable. And liberals sometimes show more
intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghan- istan than that of Alabama, and more
interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.43

This is reason in ruins. Kristof condemns the “dismal consequences” of faith while
honoring their cause.44 It is true that the rules of civil discourse currently demand that Reason wear a veil
whenever she ventures out in public. But the rules of civil discourse must change.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no
suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain

WEST OF EDEN l69

that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the
killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance
their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the
third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc).
This inversion of priorities not only victim- izes innocent people and squanders scarce
resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable
approach to answering questions of right and wrong.

A Science of Good and Evil

Is THE difference between good and evil just a matter of what any particular group of
human beings says it is ? Consider that one of the greatest sources of amusement in
sixteenth-century Paris was cat burning. At the midsummer's fair an impresario would gather dozens of cats in a net, hoist them
high into the air from a special stage, and then, to everyone's delight, lower the whole
writhing bundle onto a bonfire. The assembled spectators “shrieked with laughter as the
animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.”1 Most of us would recoil from such a spectacle today. But would we be right to do so? Can we say that there are eth- ical truths of which all avid torturers of cats
are ignorant?

Many people appear to believe that ethical truths are culturally contingent in a way that
scientific truths are not. Indeed, this loss of purchase upon ethical truth seems to be one of the principal short- comings of secularism. The problem is that once we
abandon our belief in a rule-making God, the question of why a given action is good or bad becomes a matter of debate. And a statement like “Mur- der
is wrong,” while being uncontroversial in most circles, has never seemed anchored to the
facts of this world in the way that state- ments about planets or molecules appear to be.
The problem, in philosophical terms, has been one of characterizing just what sort of
“facts” our moral intuitions can be said to trackif, indeed, they track anything of the
kind.

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and
wrong are really questions about the

happiness and suffering of sentient creatures. If we are in a position to affect the
happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical respon- sibilities toward them2and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal
law. Taking happi- ness and suffering as our starting point, we can see that much of what
people worry about under the guise of morality has nothing to do with the subject. It is
time we realized that crimes without vic- tims are like debts without creditors. They do
not even exist.3 Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures of other
consenting adults has more than just too much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable
beliefs about the nature of right and wrong.

The fact that people of different times and cultures disagree about ethical questions
should not trouble us. It suggests nothing at all about the status of moral truth. Imagine
what it would be like to consult the finest thinkers of antiquity on questions of basic
science: “What,” we might ask, “is fire? And how do living systems repro- duce themselves?
And what are the various lights we see in the night sky?” We would surely encounter a
bewildering lack of con- sensus on these matters. Even though there was no shortage of
bril- liant minds in the ancient world, they simply lacked the physical and conceptual
tools to answer questions of this sort. Their lack of con- sensus signified their
ignorance of certain physical truths, not that no such truths exist.

If there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions, these answers will be best
sought in the living present. Whether our search takes us to a secluded cave or to a
modern laboratory makes no difference to the existence of the facts in question. If ethics
rep- resents a genuine sphere of knowledge, it represents a sphere of potential progress
(and regress). The relevance of tradition to this area of discourse, as to all others,
will be as a support for present inquiry. Where our traditions are not supportive, they
become mere vehicles of ignorance. The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more

get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that
two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not
harbor some rudi- mentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by
readingand, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testi- mony to this fact in any
case. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world, for while
nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, it is not merely so. Even monkeys will undergo
extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member of their species.4 Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet.

The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology reveals that our efforts
to ground ethics in religious conceptions of “moral duty” are misguided. Saving a drowning
child is no more a moral duty than understanding a syllogism is a logical one. We sim- ply
do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking
seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more
reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.

The anthropocentrism that is intrinsic to every faith cannot help appearing impossibly
quaintand therefore impossiblegiven what we now know about the natural world. Biological truths are simply not
commensurate with a designer God, or even a good one. The perverse wonder of evolution is
this: the very mechanisms that create the incredible beauty and diversity of the living
world guar- antee monstrosity and death. The child born without limbs, the sightless fly,
the vanished speciesthese are nothing less than Mother Nature caught in the act of
throwing her clay. No perfect God could maintain such incongruities. It is worth
remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created small- pox,
plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth
would be ground to dust for his crimes.

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia agoand who seems to have
abandoned them to bloodshed in his

name ever sinceis no one to consult on questions of ethics. Indeed, to judge him on the
basis of his works is a highly invidious under- taking. Bertrand Russell got here first:
“Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical
valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after
preparing the ground by many millions of years of life- less nebulae, would consider
Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H bomb.”5 This is a dev- astating observation, and there is no retort to it. In the face of God's
obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to
the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the
Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human pas-
sionsjealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books
reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridicu- lous fellowcapricious, petulant, and crueland
one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness.6 If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far
more in his image than we ever could have hoped.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is
traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have
surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely
heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.7 Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little
more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

Ethics and the Sciences of Mind

The connection between ethics and the scientific understanding of consciousness, while
rarely made, is ineluctable, for other creatures become the objects of our ethical concern
only insofar as we

attribute consciousness (or perhaps potential consciousness) to them. That most of us feel no ethical obligations toward rocksto treat
them with kindness, to make sure they do not suffer unduly can be derived from the fact
that most of us do not believe that there is anything that it is like to be a rock.8 While a science of conscious- ness is still struggling to be born, it is sufficient for
our purposes to note that the problem of ascertaining our ethical obligations to non-
human animals (as well as to humans who have suffered neurolog- ical injury, to human
fetuses, to blastocysts, etc.) requires that we better understand the relationship between
mind and matter. Do crickets suffer? I take it as a given that this question is both
coher- ently posed and has an answer, whether or not we will ever be in a position to
answer it ourselves.

This is the point at which our notions about mind and matter directly influence our
notions of right and wrong. We should recall that the practice of vivisection was given
new life by certain mis- steps in the philosophy of mindwhen Descartes, in thrall to both
Christian dogma and mechanistic physics, declared that all nonhu- man animals were mere
automata, devoid of souls and therefore insensible to pain.9 One of his contemporaries observed the imme- diate consequences of this view:

The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indif- ference and made fun of
those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks;
that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had
been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up
on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of blood, which was a
great subject of controversy.10

Cognitive chauvinism of this sort has not merely been a problem for animals. The doubt, on
the part of Spanish explorers, about whether or not South American Indians had “souls”
surely contributed to the

callousness with which they treated them during their conquest of the New World.
Admittedly, it is difficult to say just how far down the phylogenic tree our ethical
responsibilities run. Our intuitions about the consciousness of other animals are driven
by a variety of factors, many of which probably have no bearing upon whether or not they
are conscious. For instance, creatures that lack facial expres- sivenessor faces at allare
more difficult to include within the circle of our moral concern. It seems that until we
more fully under- stand the relationship between brains and minds, our judgments about the
possible scope of animal suffering will remain relatively blind and relatively dogmatic.11

THERE will probably come a time when we achieve a detailed under- standing of human happiness,
and of ethical judgments themselves, at the level of the brain.12 Just as defects in color vision can result from genetic and developmental disorders,
problems can undoubt- edly arise in our ethical and emotional circuitry as well. To say
that a person is “color-blind” or “achromatopsic” is now a straightfor- ward statement
about the state of the visual pathways in his brain, while to say that he is “an evil
sociopath” or “lacking in moral fiber” seems hopelessly unscientific. This will almost
certainly change. If there are truths to be known about how human beings conspire to make
one another happy or miserable, there are truths to be known about ethics.13 A scientific understanding of the link between inten- tions, human relationships, and
states of happiness would have much to say about the nature of good and evil and about the
proper response to the moral transgressions of others. There is every rea- son to believe
that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief
systems in the way that it has in every other sciencethat is, among those who are adequate
to the task.14 That so little convergence has been achieved in ethics can be ascribed to the fact that so
few of the facts are in (indeed, we have yet to agree about the most basic criteria for
deeming an ethical fact,

a fact). So many conversations have not yet been had; so many intu- itions have not yet been
exercised; so many arguments have not yet been won. Our reliance upon religious dogma
explains this. Most of our religions have been no more supportive of genuine moral inquiry
than of scientific inquiry generally. This is a problem that only new rules of discourse
can overcome. When was the last time that someone was criticized for not “respecting”
another person's unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should apply
to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well. Credit goes to Christopher Hitchens
for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our
slide toward the abyss: “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed
without evi- dence.”15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Moral Communities

The notion of a moral community resolves many paradoxes of human behavior. How is it,
after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from his labors at the crematoria and
be a loving father to his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: the Jews
he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral concern. Not only
were they outside his moral community; they were antithetical to it. His beliefs about
Jews inured him to the nat- ural human sympathies that might have otherwise prevented such
behavior.

Unfortunately, religion casts more shadows than light on this ter- rain. Rather than find
real reasons for human solidarity, faith offers us a solidarity born of tribal and
tribalizing fictions. As we have seen, religion is one of the great limiters of moral
identity, since most believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do
not share their faith. No other ideology is so eloquent on the subject of what divides one
moral community from another. Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious
identities are built,

the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share these premises follows
quite naturally. Needless to say, the suffering of those who are destined for hell can
never be as problematic as the suffering of the righteous. If certain people can't see the
unique wis- dom and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are so beclouded by sin, what
concern is it of mine if others mistreat them? They have been cursed by the very God who
made the world and all things in it. Their search for happiness was simply doomed from the
start.