The End of Faith (6 page)

EVERY sphere of genuine discourse must, at a minimum, admit of discourseand hence the possibility that those standing on its fringe can come to understand the
truths that it strives to articulate. This is why any sustained exercise of reason must
necessarily tran- scend national, religious, and ethnic boundaries. There is, after all,
no such thing as an inherently American (or Christian, or Caucasian) physics.21 Even spirituality and ethics meet this criterion of univer- sality because human beings,
whatever their background, seem to converge on similar spiritual experiences and ethical
insights when given the same methods of inquiry. Such is not the case with the “truths” of
religion, however. Nothing that a Christian and a Mus- lim can say to each other will
render their beliefs mutually vulner- able to discourse, because the very tenets of their
faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without
evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very
nature of faith to serve as an imped-

iment to further inquiry. And yet, the fact that we are no longer killing people for
heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, how- ever sacred, cannot survive the company
of good ones forever.

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a
diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic
hygiene. There are still a num- ber of cultures in which the germ theory of disease has
yet to put in an appearance, where people suffer from a debilitating ignorance on most
matters relevant to their physical health. Do we “tolerate” these beliefs? Not if they put
our own health in jeopardy.22

Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences.
Many Muslims, for instance, are con- vinced that God takes an active interest in women's
clothing. While it may seem harmless enough, the amount of suffering that this incredible
idea has caused is astonishing. The rioting in Nigeria over the 2002 Miss World Pageant
claimed over two hundred lives; inno- cent men and women were butchered with machetes or
burned alive simply to keep that troubled place free of women in bikinis. Earlier in the
year, the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing
scores of teenage girls trapped in a burn- ing building.23 Why? Because the girls were not wearing the tradi- tional head covering that Koranic law
requires. Fourteen girls died in the fire; fifty were injured. Should Muslims really be
free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines?

Gathering Our Wits

Recent events have done more than expose our vulnerability to the militant discontents of
the world: they have uncovered a dark cur- rent of unreason in our national discourse. To
see how much our cul- ture currently partakes of the irrationality of our enemies, just
substitute the name of your favorite Olympian for “God” wherever this word appears in
public discourse. Imagine President Bush

addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: “Behind all of life and all
history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus.” Imagine his speech to Congress (September 20, 2001) containing the sentence “Freedom and
fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them.” Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity
and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases
appropriate to the four- teenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words
like “God” and “crusade” and “wonder-working power” mean to him. Not only do we still eat
the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted
that the Bush White House “is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study
cells, like a whited monastery.”24 This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world. We should
be humbled, perhaps to the point of spontaneous genuflection, by the knowledge that the
ancient Greeks began to lay their Olympian myths to rest several hundred years before the
birth of Christ, whereas we have the likes of Bill Moyers convening earnest gather- ings
of scholars for the high purpose of determining just how the book of Genesis can be
reconciled with life in the modern world. As we stride boldly into the Middle Ages, it
does not seem out of place to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse
will wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others already have.

Two hundred years from now, when we are a thriving global civ- ilization beginning to
colonize space, something about us will have changed: it must have; otherwise, we would have killed ourselves ten
times over before this day ever dawned. We are fast approaching a time when the
manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking; the requisite
information and technology are now seeping into every corner of our world. As the
physicist Martin Rees points out, “We are entering an era where a single person can, by
one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years. .
. .”25 Given the power of our technology,

we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs will not make good neighbors in the future.
We have simply lost the right to our myths, and to our mythic identities.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with
one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified
by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the
unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is
the very antithesis of religious faith.

While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily
likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint
and suicidally stupid. Our primary task in our discourse with one another should be to
identify those beliefs that seem least likely to survive another thou- sand years of human
inquiry, or most likely to prevent it, and sub- ject them to sustained criticism. Which of
our present practices will appear most ridiculous from the point of view of those future
gen- erations that might yet survive the folly of the present? It is hard to imagine that
our religious preoccupations will not top the list.26 It is natural to hope that our descendants will look upon us with grati- tude. But we
should also hope that they look upon us with pity and disgust, just as we view the
slaveholders of our all-too-recent past. Rather than congratulate ourselves for the state
of our civilization, we should consider how, in the fullness of time, we will seem hope-
lessly backward, and work to lay a foundation for such refinements in the present. We must
find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
Given the present state of our world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.

It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absur- dity of most of our
religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived. In this sense, what
follows is written very much in

the spirit of a prayer. I pray that we may one day think clearly enough about these
matters to render our children incapable of killing themselves over their books. If not
our children, then I sus- pect it could well be too late for us, because while it has
never been difficult to meet your maker, in fifty years it will simply be too easy to drag
everyone else along to meet him with you.27

The Nature of Belief

IT IS OFTEN argued that religious beliefs are somehow distinct from other claims to knowledge about
the world. There is no doubt that we treat them differentlyparticularly in the degree to which we demand, in ordinary discourse, that
people justify their beliefsbut this does not indicate that religious beliefs are special
in any impor- tant sense. What do we mean when we say that a person believes a given proposition about the world? As with all questions about familiar mental events,
we must be careful that the familiarity of our terms does not lead us astray. The fact
that we have one word for “belief” does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary
phe- nomenon. An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory: while people commonly refer
to their failures of “memory,” decades of experiment have shown that human memory comes in
many forms. Not only are our long-term and short-term memories the products of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits; they have themselves
been divided into multiple subsystems.1 To speak simply of “memory,” therefore, is now rather like speaking of “experience.”
Clearly, we must be more precise about what our mental terms mean before we attempt to
understand them at the level of the brain.2

Even dogs and cats, insofar as they form associations between people, places, and events,
can be said to “believe” many things about the world. But this is not the sort of
believing we are after. When we talk about the beliefs to which people consciously
subscribe“The house is infested with termites,” “Tofu is not a dessert,” “Muham- mad
ascended to heaven on a winged horse”we are talking about

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 51

beliefs that are communicated, and acquired, linguistically. Believing a given proposition
is a matter of believing that it faithfully repre- sents some state of the world, and this
fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should
function.3 In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that
propositions about the world logically cohere. These constraints apply equally to matters
of religion. “Freedom of belief” (in anything but the legal sense) is a myth. We will see
that we are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt
unjustified beliefs about science or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like “poison” or “north” or “zero.” Anyone who would lay
claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to
him.

Beliefs as Principles of Action

The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional
truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions of
truth and falsity, logical necessity and contradiction, human beings are able to knit
together private visions of the world that largely cohere. What neural events underlie
this process? What must a brain do in order to believe that a given statement is true or false?. We currently have no idea. Language processing must play a large role, of course, but the
challenge will be to discover how the brain brings the products of perception, memory, and
reasoning to bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into the very
substance of our living.

It was probably the capacity for movement, enjoyed by certain primitive organisms, that
drove the evolution of our sensory and cognitive faculties. This follows from the fact
that if no creature could do anything with the information it acquired from the world,

nature could not have selected for improvements in the physical structures that gather,
store, and process such information. Even a sense as primitive as vision, therefore, seems
predicated on the exis- tence of a motor system. If you cannot catch food, avoid becoming
food yourself, or wander off a cliff, there does not seem to be much reason to see the
world in the first placeand certainly refinements in vision, of the sort found everywhere
in the animal kingdom, would never have come about at all.

For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higher- order cognitive states
(of which beliefs are an example) are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action.
In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and con- sider the likely
consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are pro- cesses by which our
understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to
guide our behavior.4

THE power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion
that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter
of moments. Consider the following proposition:

Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.

What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would
loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a
daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are
renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung
upon its hinges.

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes con- siderably. Some propositions
are so dangerous that it may even be

ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraor- dinary claim, but it
merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place
their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring
them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no
talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise
tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United
States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western pow- ers are bound to
attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the
Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.5

The Necessity for Logical Coherence

The first thing to notice about beliefs is that they must suffer the company of their
neighbors. Beliefs are both logically and semanti- cally related. Each constrains, and is
in turn constrained by, many oth- ers. A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic (e.g., airplanes exist) and more derivative (e.g., 747s are better than 757s). The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms “husband” and “wife” mutually define one another.6 In fact, logical and semantic constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because
our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be
free from contradiction (at least locally). If I am to mean the same thing by the word
“mother” from one instance to the next, I cannot both believe my mother was born in Rome and believe my mother was born in Nevada. Even if my mother were born on an air- plane flying at supersonic speeds, these
propositions cannot both be true. There are tricks to be played hereperhaps there is a
town called “Rome” somewhere in the state of Nevada; or perhaps “mother”

means “biological mother” in one sentence and “adoptive mother” in anotherbut these
exceptions only prove the rule. To know what a given belief is about, I must know what my words mean; to know what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally
consistent.7 There is just no escaping the fact that there is a tight relationship between the words we
use, the type of thoughts we can think, and what we can believe to be true about the world.

And behavioral constraints are just as pressing. When going to a friend's home for dinner,
I cannot both believe that he lives north of Main Street and south of Main Street and then act on the basis of what I believe. A normal degree of psychological and bodily integra- tion
precludes my being motivated to head in two opposing direc- tions at once.

Personal identity itself requires such consistency: unless a per- son's beliefs are highly
coherent, he will have as many identities as there are mutually incompatible sets of
beliefs careening around his brain. If you doubt this, just try to imagine the
subjectivity of a man who believes that he spent the entire day in bed with the flu, but
also played a round of golf; that his name is Jim, and that his name is Tom; that he has a
young son, and that he is childless. Multiply these incompatible beliefs indefinitely, and
any sense that their owner is a single subject entirely disappears. There is a degree of
logical incon- sistency that is incompatible with our notion of personhood.

So it seems that the value we put on logical consistency is neither misplaced nor
mysterious. In order for my speech to be intelligible to othersand, indeed, to myselfmy beliefs about the world must largely cohere. In order for my behavior to be informed by
what I believe, I must believe things that admit of behavior that is, at a min- imum, possible. Certain logical relations, after all, seem etched into the very structure of our world.8 The telephone rings . . . either it is my brother on the line, or it isn't. I may believe
one proposition or the otheror I may believe that I do not knowbut under no cir-
cumstances is it acceptable for me to believe both.

Departures from normativity, in particular with respect to the

rules of inference that lead us to construct new beliefs on the basis of old ones, have
been the subject of much research and much debate.9 Whatever construal of these matters one adopts, no one believes that human beings are
perfect engines of coherence. Our inevitable failures of rationality can take many forms,
ranging from mere logical inconsistencies to radical discontinuities in subjectivity
itself. Most of the literature on “self-deception,” for instance, sug- gests that a person
can tacitly believe one proposition, while suc- cessfully convincing himself of its
antithesis (e.g., my wife is having an affair, my wife is faithful), though considerable controversy still surrounds the question of how (or whether) such
cognitive contor- tions actually occur.10 Other failures of psychological integration ranging from “split-brain” patients to cases
of “multiple- personality”are at least partially explicable in terms of areas of belief
processing in the brain that have become structurally and/or functionally partitioned from
one another.

The American Embassy

A case in point: While traveling in France, my fiancee and I experi- enced a bizarre
partitioning of our beliefs about the American embassy in Paris:

Belief system 1: As the events of September 11 still cast a shadow over the world, we had decided to
avoid obvious terrorist targets while traveling. First on our list of such places was the
American embassy in Paris. Paris is home to the largest Muslim population in the Western
world, and this embassy had already been the tar- get of a foiled suicide plot. The
American embassy would have been the last place we would have willingly visited while in
France.

Belief system 2: Prior to our arrival in Paris, we had great diffi- culty finding a hotel room. Every hotel
we checked was full,

except for one on the Right Bank, which had abundant vacancies. The woman at reservations
even offered us a complimentary upgrade to a suite. She also gave us a choice of viewswe
could face the inner courtyard, or outward, overlooking the American embassy. “Which view
would you choose?” I asked. “The view of the embassy,” she replied. “It's much more
peaceful.” I envisioned a large, embassy garden. “Great,” I said. “We'll take it.”

The next day, we arrived at the hotel and found that we had been given a room with a
courtyard view. Both my fiancee and I were dis- appointed. We had, after all, been
promised a view of the American embassy.

We called a friend living in Paris to inform her of our where- abouts. Our friend, who is
wise in the ways of the world, had this to say: “That hotel is directly next to the
American embassy. That's why they're offering you an upgrade. Have you guys lost your
minds? Do you know what day it is? It's the Fourth of July.”

The appearance of this degree of inconsistency in our lives was astounding. We had spent
the better part of the day simultaneously trying to avoid and gain proximity to the very same point in space. Realizing this, we could scarcely have been more surprised
had we both grown antlers.

But what seems psychologically so mysterious may be quite trivial in neurological terms.
It appears that the phrase “American embassy,” spoken in two different contexts, merely
activated dis- tinct networks of association within our brains. Consequently, the phrase
had acquired two distinct meanings. In the first case, it sig- nified a prime terrorist target; in the second, it promised a
desir- able view from a hotel window. The significance of the phrase in the world, however, is single and indivisible, since only one build- ing answers to this name in
Paris. The communication between these networks of neurons appeared to be negligible; our
brains were effectively partitioned. The flimsiness of this partition was revealed by just
how easily it came down. All it took for me to

unify my fiancee's outlook on this subject was to turn to hershe who was still silently
coveting a view of the American embassy and say, with obvious alarm, “This hotel is ten
feet from the Amer- ican embassy!” The partition came down, and she was as flabber- gasted
as I was.

And yet, the psychologically irreconcilable facts are these: on the day in question, never
was there a time when we would have will- ingly placed ourselves near the American
embassy, and never was there a time when we were not eager to move to a room with a view
of it.