The End of Faith (9 page)

gambling and swearing, and they demanded that everyone living in sin get married
immediately. Li Muisis [an abbot of Tournai] recorded happily that the number of marriages
increased consid- erably, profanity was no longer heard, and gambling declined so much
that the makers of dice turned to making rosaries. He also recorded that in this newly
virtuous place 25,000 citizens died of the plague and were buried in large pits on the
outskirts of the town.29

Where did the religious beliefs of these people leave off and their worldly beliefs begin?
Can there be any doubt that the beleaguered Christians of the fourteenth century were
longing for knowledge (that is, beliefs that are both true and valid) about the plague, about its cause and mode
of transmission, and hoping, thereby, to find an effective means by which to combat it?
Was their reliance upon the tenets of faith enforced by anything but the starkest
ignorance? If it had been known, for instance, that this pestilence was being deliv- ered
by merchant shipsthat rats were climbing ashore from every hold and that upon each rat
were legions of fleas carrying the plague bacilluswould the faithful have thought their
energies best spent cutting the tongues out of blasphemers, silencing bells, dressing in
bright colors, and making liberal use of enemas? A sure way to win an argument with these
unhappy people would have been with peni- cillin, delivered not from a land where other
“cultural perspectives” hold sway, but from higher up on the slopes of the real.

Faith and Madness

We have seen that our beliefs are tightly coupled to the structure of language and to the
apparent structure of the world. Our “freedom of belief,” if it exists at all, is minimal.
Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No.
Evidence (whether sensory or logical) is the only thing that suggests that a

given belief is really about the world in the first place. We have names for people who have many beliefs for which
there is no ratio- nal justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them
“religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad,” “psychotic,” or “delusional.”
Most people of faith are perfectly sane, of course, even those who commit atrocities on
account of their beliefs. But what is the difference between a man who believes that God
will reward him with seventy-two virgins if he kills a score of Jewish teenagers, and one
who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace
through his hair dryer? There is a difference, to be sure, but it is not one that places
religious faith in a flattering light.

It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by
ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in
conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously
wrong with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an
accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the
Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental
illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code
on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core
beliefs absolutely are. This is not surpris- ing, since most religions have merely
canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us
as though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believ- ing what no sane
person could believe on his own. In fact, it is diffi- cult to imagine a set of beliefs
more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our
religious traditions. Con- sider one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:

I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitia- tory sacrifice is
offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood,
together with the soul

and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and sub- stantially present
in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance
of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this
change the Catholic mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and
entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.30

Jesus Christwho, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily
into the heavenscan now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over
your favorite Bur- gundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a
lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that
he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap
the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new gener- ation of children is taught that religious propositions need not
be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies
of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing our- selves over ancient literature. Who
would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

What Should We Believe?

We believe most of what we believe about the world because others have told us to.
Reliance upon the authority of experts, and upon the testimony of ordinary people, is the
stuff of which worldviews are made. In fact, the more educated we become, the more our
beliefs come to us at second hand. A person who believes only those propo- sitions for
which he can provide full sensory or theoretical justifica- tion will know almost nothing
about the world; that is, if he is not swiftly killed by his own ignorance. How do you
know that falling from a great height is hazardous to your health? Unless you have

witnessed someone die in this way, you have adopted this belief on the authority of others.31 This is not a problem. Life is too short, and the world too complex, for any of us to go
it alone in epistemologi- cal terms. We are ever reliant on the intelligence and accuracy,
if not the kindness, of strangers.

This does not suggest, however, that all forms of authority are valid; nor does it suggest
that even the best authorities will always prove reliable. There are good arguments and
bad ones, precise observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final
judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about the world.

Consider the following sources of information:

1. The anchorman on the evening news says that a large fire is burning in the state of
Colorado. One hundred thousand acres have burned, and the fire is still completely
uncontained.

2. Biologists say that DNA is the molecular basis for sexual repro- duction. Each of us
resembles our parents because we inherit a complement of their DNA. Each of us has arms
and legs because our DNA coded for the proteins that produced them during our early
development.

3. The pope says that Jesus was born of a virgin and resurrected bodily after death. He is
the Son of God, who created the uni- verse in six days. If you believe this, you will go
to heaven after death; if you don't, you will go to hell, where you will suffer for
eternity.

What is the difference between these forms of testimony? Why isn't every “expert opinion”
equally worthy of our respect? Given our analysis thus far, it should not be difficult to
grant authority to 1 and 2 while disregarding 3.

Proposition 1: Why do we find the news story about the fire in Colorado persuasive? It could be a hoax.
But what about those tele-

vised images of hillsides engorged by flame and of planes dropping fire retardant? Maybe
there is a fire, but it is in a different state. Per- haps it's really Texas that is
burning. Is it reasonable to entertain such possibilities? No. Why not? Here is where the
phrase “common sense” begins to earn its keep. Given our beliefs about the human mind, the
success of our widespread collaboration with other human beings, and the degree to which
we all rely on the news, it is scarcely conceivable that a respected television network
and a highly paid anchorman are perpetrating a hoax, or that thousands of firefight- ers,
newsmen, and terrified homeowners have mistaken Texas for Colorado. Implicit in such
commonsense judgments lurks an under- standing of the causal connections between various
processes in the world, the likelihood of different outcomes, and the vested interests, or
lack thereof, of those whose testimony we are considering. What would a professional news
anchor stand to gain from lying about a fire in Colorado ? We need not go into the details
here; if the anchor on the evening news says that there is a fire in Colorado and then
shows us images of burning trees, we can be reasonably sure that there really is a fire in
Colorado.

Proposition 2: What about the “truths” of science? Are they true'? Much has been written about the inherent provisionality of scien- tific theories. Karl
Popper has told us that we never prove a theory right; we merely fail to prove it wrong.32 Thomas Kuhn has told us that scientific theories undergo wholesale revision with each
gener- ation and therefore do not converge on the truth.33 There's no telling which of our current theories will be proved wrong tomorrow, so how
much confidence can we have in them? Many unwary con- sumers of these ideas have concluded
that science is just another area of human discourse and, as such, is no more anchored to
the facts of this world than literature or religion are. All truths are up for grabs.

But all spheres of discourse are not on the same footing, for the simple reason that not
all spheres of discourse seek the same footing (or any footing whatsoever). Science is science because it represents

our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the world are true (or at
least not false).34 We do this by observation and experiment within the context of a theory. To say that a
given scientific theory may be wrong is not to say that it may be wrong in its every
particular, or that any other theory stands an equal chance of being right. What are the
chances that DNA is not the basis for genetic inheritance? Well, if it isn't, Mother Nature sure has a lot of
explaining to do. She must explain the results of fifty years of experimentation, which
have demonstrated reliable corre- lations between genotype and phenotype (including the
repro- ducible effects of specific genetic mutations). Any account of inheritance that is
going to supersede the present assumptions of molecular biology will have to account for
the ocean of data that now conforms to these assumptions. What are the chances that we
will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance ? They are effectively zero.

Proposition 3: Can we rely on the authority of the pope? Millions of Catholics do, of course. He is, in
fact, infallible in matters of faith and morality. Can we really say that Catholics are wrong to believe that the pope knows whereof he speaks? We surely can.

We know that no evidence would be sufficient to authenticate many of the pope's core beliefs. How could
anyone born in the twentieth century come to know that Jesus was actually born of a
virgin? What process of ratiocination, mystical or otherwise, will deliver the necessary
facts about a Galilean woman's sexual history (facts that run entirely counter to
well-known facts of human biol- ogy) ? There is no such process. Even a time machine could
not help us, unless we were willing to keep watch over Mary twenty-four hours a day for
the months surrounding the probable time of Jesus' conception.

Visionary experiences, in and of themselves, can never be suffi- cient to answer questions
of historical fact. Let's say the pope had a dream about Jesus, and Jesus came to him
looking fresh from Da Vinci's brush. The pope would not even be in a position to say that

the Jesus of his dream looked like the real Jesus. The pope's infalli- bility, no matter how many dreams and visions he may
have had, does not even extend to making a judgment about whether the his- torical Jesus
wore a beard, let alone whether he was really the Son of God, born of a virgin, or able to
raise the dead. These are just not the kinds of propositions that spiritual experience can
authenticate.

Of course, we could imagine a scenario in which we would give credence to the pope's
visions, or to our own. If Jesus came saying things like “The Vatican Library has exactly
thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and twenty-six books” and he turned out to be right, we
would then begin to feel that we were, at the very least, in dia- logue with someone who had something to say about the way the world is. Given a sufficient
number of verifiable statements, plucked from the ethers of papal vision, we could begin
speaking seriously about any further claims Jesus might make. The point is that his
authority would be derived in the only way that such authority ever isby making claims
about the world that can be corroborated by further observation. As far as proposition 3
is con- cerned, it is quite obvious that the pope has nothing to go on but the Bible
itself. This document is not a sufficient justification for his beliefs, given the
standards of evidence that prevailed at the time of its composition.

W H A T about our much championed freedom of religious belief? It is no different from our
freedoms of journalistic and biological beliefand anyone who believes that the media are
perpetrating a great fire conspiracy, or that molecular biology is just a theory that may
prove totally wrong, has merely exercised his freedom to be thought a fool. Religious
unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains
among the principal causes of armed conflict in our world. Before you can get to the end
of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what someone else believes
about God. Perhaps it is time we demanded