The GOD Delusion (7 page)

I
find the following advice of Jefferson, again in his letter to Peter
Carr, moving:

Shake
off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are
servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her
tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the
existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason
than that of blindfolded fear.

Remarks
of Jefferson's such as 'Christianity is the most perverted system that
ever shone on man' are compatible with deism but also with atheism. So
is James Madison's robust anti-clericalism: 'During almost fifteen
centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial.
What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and
indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both,
superstition, bigotry and persecution.' The same could be said of
Benjamin Franklin's 'Lighthouses are more useful than churches' and of
John Adams's 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there
were no religion in it.' Adams delivered himself of some splendid
tirades against Christianity in particular: 'As I understand the
Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it
happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended
with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most
bloody religion that ever existed?' And, in another letter, this time
to Jefferson, 'I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most
fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has
preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief
has produced!'

Whether
Jefferson and his colleagues were theists, deists, agnostics or
atheists, they were also passionate secularists who believed that the
religious opinions of a President, or lack of them, were entirely his
own business. All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private
religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert
Sherman's report of George Bush Senior's answer when Sherman asked him
whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans
who are atheists: 'No, I don't know that atheists should be considered
as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation
under God.'
²²
Assuming Sherman's account to be
accurate (unfortunately he didn't use a tape-recorder, and no other
newspaper ran the story at the time), try the experiment of replacing
'atheists' with 'Jews' or 'Muslims' or 'Blacks'. That gives the measure
of the prejudice and discrimination that American atheists have to
endure today. Natalie Angier's
'Confessions of a lonely atheist' is a sad and moving description, in
the
New York Times,
of her feelings of isolation
as an atheist in today's America.
²³
But the
isolation of American atheists is an illusion, assiduously cultivated
by prejudice. Atheists in America are more numerous than most people
realize. As I said in the Preface, American atheists far outnumber
religious Jews, yet the Jewish lobby is notoriously one of the most
formidably influential in Washington. What might American atheists
achieve if they organized themselves properly?*

David
Mills, in his admirable book
Atheist Universe,
tells
a story which you would dismiss as an unrealistic caricature of police
bigotry if it were fiction. A Christian faith-healer ran a 'Miracle
Crusade' which came to Mills's home town once a year. Among other
things, the faith-healer encouraged diabetics to throw away their
insulin, and cancer patients to give up their chemotherapy and pray for
a miracle instead. Reasonably enough, Mills decided to organize a
peaceful demonstration to warn people. But he made the mistake of going
to the police to tell them of his intention and ask for police
protection against possible attacks from supporters of the
faith-healer. The first police officer to whom he spoke asked, 'Is you
gonna protest fir him or 'gin him?' (meaning for or against the
faith-healer). When Mills replied, 'Against him,' the policeman said
that he himself planned to attend the rally and intended to spit
personally in Mills's face as he marched past Mills's demonstration.

Mills
decided to try his luck with a second police officer. This one said
that if any of the faith-healer's supporters violently confronted
Mills, the officer would arrest Mills because he was 'trying to
interfere with God's work'. Mills went home and tried telephoning the
police station, in the hope of finding more sympathy at a senior level.
He was finally connected to a sergeant who said, 'To hell with you,
Buddy. No policeman wants to protect a goddamned atheist. I hope
somebody bloodies you up good.' Apparently adverbs were in short supply
in this police station, along with the milk of human kindness and a
sense of duty. Mills relates that he spoke to about seven or eight
policemen that day. None of them was helpful, and most of them directly
threatened Mills with violence.

*
Tom Flynn, Editor of
Free Inquiry,
makes the point
forcefully ('Secularism's breakthrough moment',
Free Inquiry
26:
3, 2006, 16-17): 'If atheists are lonely and downtrodden, we have only
ourselves to blame. Numerically, we are strong. Let's start punching
our weight.'

Anecdotes
of such prejudice against atheists abound, but Margaret Downey, of the
Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, maintains systematic
records of such cases.
²⁴
Her database of
incidents, categorized under community, schools, workplace, media,
family and government, includes examples of harassment, loss of jobs,
shunning by family and even murder.
²⁵
Downey's
documented evidence of the hatred and misunderstanding of atheists
makes it easy to believe that it is, indeed, virtually impossible for
an honest atheist to win a public election in America. There are 435
members of the House of Representatives and 100 members of the Senate.
Assuming that the majority of these 535 individuals are an educated
sample of the population, it is statistically all but inevitable that a
substantial number of them must be atheists. They must have lied, or
concealed their true feelings, in order to get elected. Who can blame
them, given the electorate they had to convince? It is universally
accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political
suicide for any presidential candidate.

These
facts about today's political climate in the United States, and what
they imply, would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams
and all their friends. Whether they were atheists, agnostics, deists or
Christians, they would have recoiled in horror from the theocrats of
early 21st-century Washington. They would have been drawn instead to
the secularist founding fathers of post-colonial India, especially the
religious Gandhi ('I am a Hindu, I am a Moslem, I am a Jew, I am a
Christian, I am a Buddhist!'), and the atheist Nehru:

The
spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised
religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have
frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost
always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and
bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested
interests.

Nehru's
definition of the secular India of Gandhi's dream (would that it had
been realized, instead of the partitioning of their country amid
an interfaith bloodbath) might almost have been ghosted by Jefferson
himself:

We
talk about a secular India . . . Some people think that it means
something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it
means is that it is a State which honours all faiths equally and gives
them equal opportunities; India has a long history of religious
tolerance . . . In a country like India, which has many faiths and
religions, no real nationalism can be built up except on the basis of
secularity.
²⁶

The
deist God is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible.
Unfortunately it is scarcely more likely that he exists, or ever did.
In any of its forms the God Hypothesis is unnecessary.* The God
Hypothesis is also very close to being ruled out by the laws of
probability. I shall come to that in Chapter 4, after dealing with the
alleged proofs of the existence of God in Chapter 3. Meanwhile I turn
to agnosticism, and the erroneous notion that the existence or
non-existence of God is an untouchable question, forever beyond the
reach of science.

*
'Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis,' as Laplace said when Napoleon
wondered how the famous mathematician had managed to write his book
without mentioning God.

The
robust Muscular Christian haranguing us from the pulpit of my old
school chapel admitted a sneaking regard for atheists. They at least
had the courage of their misguided convictions. What this preacher
couldn't stand was agnostics: namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak-tea, weedy,
pallid fence-sitters. He was partly right, but for wholly the wrong
reason. In the same vein, according to Quentin de la Bedoyere, the
Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williamson 'respected the committed
religious believer and also the committed atheist. He reserved his
contempt for the wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around
in the middle.'
²⁷

There
is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence
one way or the other. It is the reasonable position.

Carl
Sagan was proud to be agnostic when asked whether there was life
elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his
interlocutor pressed him for a 'gut feeling' and he immortally replied:
'But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve
judgment until the evidence is in.'
²⁸
The
question of extraterrestrial life is open. Good arguments can be
mounted both ways, and we lack the evidence to do more than shade the
probabilities one way or the other. Agnosticism, of a kind, is an
appropriate stance on many scientific questions, such as what caused
the end-Permian extinction, the greatest mass extinction in fossil
history. It could have been a meteorite strike like the one that, with
greater likelihood on present evidence, caused the later extinction of
the dinosaurs. But it could have been any of various other possible
causes, or a combination. Agnosticism about the causes of both these
mass extinctions is reasonable. How about the question of God? Should
we be agnostic about him too? Many have said definitely yes, often with
an air of conviction that verges on protesting too much. Are they right?

I'll
begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary
Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there
really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack
the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't
time to read the evidence, etc.). TAP would be a reasonable stance
towards the Permian extinction. There is a truth out there and one day
we hope to know it, though for the moment we don't.

But
there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall
call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). The fact that the
acronym spells a word used by that old school preacher is (almost)
accidental. The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions
that can never be answered, no matter how much evidence we gather,
because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. The question
exists on a different plane, or in a different dimension, beyond the
zones where evidence can reach. An example might be that philosophical
chestnut, the question whether you see red as I do. Maybe your red is
my green, or something completely different from any colour that I can
imagine. Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be
answered, no
matter what new evidence might one day become available. And some
scientists and other intellectuals are convinced - too eagerly in my
view - that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever
inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make
the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the
hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of
being right. The view that I shall defend is very different:
agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary
or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It is a scientific
question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say
something pretty strong about the probability. .

In
the history of ideas, there are examples of questions being answered
that had earlier been judged forever out of science's reach. In 1835
the celebrated French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote, of the stars:
'We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical
composition or their mineralogical structure.' Yet even before Comte
had set down these words, Fraunhofer had begun using his spectroscope
to analyse the chemical composition of the sun. Now spectroscopists
daily confound Comte's agnosticism with their long-distance analyses of
the precise chemical composition of even distant stars.
²⁹
Whatever the exact status of Comte's astronomical agnosticism, this
cautionary tale suggests, at the very least, that we should hesitate
before proclaiming the eternal verity of agnosticism too loudly.
Nevertheless, when it comes to God, a great many philosophers and
scientists are glad to do so, beginning with the inventor of the word
itself, T. H. Huxley.
³⁰

Huxley
explained his coining while rising to a personal attack that it had
provoked. The Principal of King's College, London, the Reverend Dr
Wace, had poured scorn on Huxley's 'cowardly agnosticism':