The End of Faith (31 page)

See D. T. Gilbert et al., “Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of
False Information,” journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 601-13; D. T. Gilbert, “How Mental Systems Believe,” American Psychologist 46, no. 2 (1991): 107-19.

This explains why beliefs that are accidentally true do not constitute knowledge, even when they are justified. As the philosopher Edmund
Gettier observed long ago, we may believe something to be true (e.g., I may think the time
is exactly 12:31 a.m.), we may believe it for good rea- sons (I am currently looking at a
clock that reads 12:31 a.m.), and our belief may be true (it really is 12:31 a.m.), but we may not be in a state of knowledge about the world
(because, in the present instance, the clock is broken and shows the correct time only by
accident). While there are many philosophical niceties to be explored here, the basic fact
is that for our beliefs to be truly representative of the world, they must stand in the right relationship to the world.

Questions of epistemology seem to be stirring here: How, after all, is it possible for us
to have true knowledge of the world? Depending how one interprets words like “true” and
“world,” questions of this sort can seem either hopelessly difficult or trivial. As it
turns out, a trivial read- ing will be good enough for our present purposes. Whatever
reality is,

NOTES TO PAGES 64-73 251

in ultimate terms, the world of our experience displays undeniable reg- ularities. These
regularities are of various kinds, of course, and some of them suggest lawful connections
between certain events. There is a dif- ference between mere correlation, and juxtapositions of the sort that we deem to be causal. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume famously noted, this presents an interesting
puzzle, because we never encounter causes in the world, only reliable correlations. What,
exactly, leads us to attribute causal power to certain events, while withholding it from
others, is still a matter of debate. (See M. Wu and P. W. Cheng, “Why Causation Need Not
Follow from Statistical Association: Bound- ary Conditions for the Evaluation of
Generative and Preventative Causal Powers,” Psychological Science 10 [1999]: 92-97.) And yet, once we have our beliefs about the world in hand, and they are
guiding our behavior, there seems to be no mystery worth worrying about. It just so
happens that certain regularities (those we deem to be causal), when adopted as guides to
action, serve our purposes admirably; others that are equally regular (mere correlations,
epiphenomena) do not. Sur- prises here simply lead to a reevaluation of causal roles and
to the for- mation of new beliefs. We need not wrestle with Hume to know that if it is
heat we want, it is better to seek fire than smoke; nor need we know all the criteria we
employ in making causal judgments to appreciate the logical and behavioral implications of
believing that A is the cause of B, while C is not. Once we find ourselves believing anything (whether for
good or bad reasons), our words and actions demand that we rectify inconsistency wherever
we find it.

27 See H. Benson, with M. Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (New York: Scribner, 1996).

28 The shroud of Turin has been perhaps the most widely venerated relic of Christendom, for
it is believed to be the very shroud in which the body of Jesus was wrapped for burial. In
1988 the Vatican allowed small sec- tions of the shroud to be carbon-dated by three
independent laboratories (Oxford University, University of Arizona, and the Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich) in a blind study coordinated by the British Museum. All
three institutions concluded that the shroud was a medieval forgery dating from between
1260 and 1390.

29 O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 122-24.

30 The quoted passage is found in The Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church.

31 This explicit belief has behavioral and neural underpinnings that are implicit, and clearly a matter of our genetic inheritance. Lower animals, it will be noted, are not
in the habit of wandering off cliffs.

32 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; reprint, London: Routledge, 1972), and Objective Knowledge (1972; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

33 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).

34 Popper and Kuhn both had some very interesting and useful things to say about the
philosophy of science and about the problems we face in claiming to know how the world is,
but one effect of their work, particu- larly on those who haven't read it, has been to
engender the growth of ridiculous ideas across the quad. While there are genuine problems
of epistemology to be thought about, there are gradations of reasonableness that can be
appreciated by any sane person. Not all knowledge claims are on the same footing.

35 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon and Schuster 1957), 35.

36 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), strikes the same note. See also A. N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002).

3 In the Shadow of God

1 “As to squassation, it is thus performed: The prisoner hath his hands bound behind his
back, and weights tied to his feet, and then is drawn up on high, till his head reaches
the pulley. He is kept hanging in this man- ner for some time, that by the greatness of
the weight hanging at his feet, all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and
on a sudden he is let down with a jerk, by the slackening of the rope, but is kept from
coming quite to the ground, by which terrible shake, his arms and legs are disjointed,
whereby he is put to the most exquisite pain; the shock which he receives by the sudden
stop of his fall, and the weight at his feet stretching his whole body more intensely and
cruelly.” John Marchant, cited in J. Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (New York: Dorset Press, 1931), 169.

2 Ibid., 174-75,178.

NOTES TO PAGES 81-84 253

3 See Swain, Pleasures; O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982); and L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995).

4 For explicit mention of heresy in the New Testament, and of the natural intolerance of the
faithful to dissent, see 1 Cor. 11:19; Gal. 5:20; 2 Pet. 2:1; Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:10, 3:3, 14:33; Phil. 4:2; and Jude 19.

5 We need only recall the fate of William Tyndale, which came as late as 1536, after he
published his translation of the New Testament in English:

Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had underestimated the
gravity of his offense and the persistence of his sovereign [Henry VIII, in a pious mood].
British agents had never ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry's insistence
he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, tried for
heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted. His corpse was burned at the stake,
an admonition for any who might have been tempted by his folly.

See W. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and

the Renaissance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 204. 6 The Bible, however, demands that there be at least two witnesses attest-

ing that the accused has “served other gods,” and that they be the first to stone him
(Deut. 17:6-7). The Inquisition was forced, for the sake of effi- ciency, to relax this
standard.

7 Matt. 5:18. 8 Friedrich, End of the World, 70. 9 The Franciscans, it is true, shouldered their share of the burden. As Rus-

sell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 450:

If Satan existed, the future of the order founded by Saint Francis would afford him the
most exquisite gratification. The saint's imme- diate successor as head of the order,
Brother Elias, wallowed in luxury, and allowed complete abandonment of poverty. The chief
work of the Franciscans in the years immediately following the death of their founder was
as recruiting sergeants in the bitter and bloody wars of Guelfs and Ghibellines. The
Inquisition, founded seven years after his death, was, in several countries, chiefly
conducted by Franciscans. A small minority, called the Spirituals, remained true to his
teaching;

many of these were burnt by the Inquisition for heresy. These men held that Christ and the
Apostles owned no property, not even the clothes they wore; this opinion was condemned as
heretical in 1323 by John XXII. The net result of Saint Francis' life was to create yet
one more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to facilitate the
persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or freedom of thought. In view of his
own aims and character, it is impos- sible to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.

10 Friedrich, End of the World, 74. 11 Ibid., 96. 12 Compare much of what Jesus taught with the above quotation from John

15:6, or with Matt. 10:34“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
send peace, but a sword.” For a remarkably elegant demonstration of the incoherency of the
Bible, I recommend Burr's Self- contradictions of the Bible (1860). In it, Burr presents 144 propositions theological, moral, historical, and
speculativeall neatly opposed by their antitheses, in the following manner: God is seen and heard/God is invisible and cannot be heard; God is everywhere present,
sees and knows all things/God is not everywhere present, neither sees nor knows all
things; God is the author of evil/God is not the author of evil; Adultery
forbidden/adultery allowed; The father of Joseph, Mary's husband, was Jacob/The father of
Mary's husband was Heli; The infant Christ was taken into Egypt/The infant Christ was not
taken into Egypt; John was in prison when Jesus went into Galilee/John was not in prison
when Jesus went into Galilee; Jesus was crucified at the third hour/Jesus was crucified at
the sixth hour; Christ is equal with God/Christ is not equal with God; It is impossible to
fall from grace/It is possible to fall from grace; etc.all with supporting quotations from the Old and New Testa- ments. Many of these
passages represent perfect contradictions (that is, one cannot affirm the truth of one
without equally asserting the falsity of the other). There is, perhaps, no greater
evidence for the imperfection of the Bible as an account of reality, divine or mundane,
than such instances of self-refutation. Of course, once faith has begun its reign of
folly, even perfect contradictions may be relished as heavenly rebukes to earthly logic.
Martin Luther closed the door on reason with a single line: “The Holy Spirit has an eye
only to substance and is not bound by words.” The Holy Spirit, it seems, is happy to play
tennis without the net.

n It is true that Augustine was not a perfect sadist. He thought that

NOTES TO PAGES 85-89 255

heretics should be examined “not by stretching them on the rack, not by scorching them
with flames or furrowing their flesh with iron claws, but by beating them with rods.” See
P. Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 116-17.

14 Voltaire, “Inquisition,” Philosophical Dictionary, ed and trans. T. Bester- man (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 256.

15 From The Percy Anecdotes, cited in Swain, Pleasures, 181. 16 Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, 190-93. 17 W. Durant, The Age of Faith (1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton

Press, 1992), 784. 18 The Christians, while they were still a lowly sect, had been accused of the

same crime by pagan Romans. There were, in fact, many points of con- vergence between
witches and Jews in the mind of medieval Christians. Jews were regularly accused of
sorcery, and magical texts were often attributed (speciously) to Solomon and to a variety
of kabbalistic sources.

19 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 8, has this to say on the subject:

On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become
established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe;
gendercide rather than genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the
most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750,
with something between 40,000 and 50,000 execu- tions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.

Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this
period. Even to read of the Salem witch trials, which resulted in the hanging of “only”
nineteen people, is to be brought face to face with the seemingly boundless evil that is
apt to fill the voids in our understanding of the world.

20 C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 529.

21 R. Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 78.

22 There is some doubt as to whether the Fore, or any other people for that matter, ever
practiced systematic cannibalism (see the entry “cannibal- ism” in The Oxford Companion to the Body). If these doubts are borne out, an alternative explanation for the transmission of kuru
would have

to be found. But it should go without saying that its vector was not sor- cery. Scholarly
doubts about cannibalism seem somewhat far-fetched, however, given the widespread evidence
of it among modern African militias in countries like Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Angola, and
elsewhere. In such places, magical beliefs remain widespreadlike the notion that eating
your enemy's organs can make you immune to bullets. See D. Bergner, “The Most
Unconventional Weapon,” New York Times Maga- zine, March 26, 2003, pp. 48-53.

23 Friedrich Spee (1631), cited in Johnson, History of Christianity, 311. 24 Mackay, Delusions, 540-41. 25 B. Russell, Religion and Science (1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ.