IS GOD DEAD OR JUST IN A COMA?
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
—Jonathan Swift1
One quiet Sunday morning, I stroll down the driveway of my home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, to pick up the newspaper. As I arrive at the bottom—we live on a hill—a Cadillac drives up the street and stops right before me. A big man in a suit steps out, sticking out his hand. A firm handshake follows, during which I hear him proclaim in a booming, almost happy voice, “I’m looking for lost souls!” Apart from perhaps being overly trusting, I am rather slow and had no idea what he was talking about. I turned around to look behind me, thinking that perhaps he had lost his dog, then corrected myself and mumbled something like, “I’m not very religious.”
This was of course a lie, because I am not religious at all. The man, a pastor, was taken aback, probably more by my accent than by my answer. He must have realized that converting a European to his brand of religion was going to be a challenge, so he walked back to his car, but not without handing me a business card in case I’d change my mind. A day that had begun so promisingly now left me feeling like I might go straight to hell.
I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice. By contrast, in the southern Netherlands—known as “below the rivers”—Catholicism was important during my youth. It defined us, setting us apart from the above-the-rivers Protestants. Every Sunday morning, we went to church in our best clothes, we received catechism at school, we sang, prayed, and confessed, and a vicar or bishop was present at every official occasion to dispense holy water (which we children happily imitated at home with a toilet brush). We were Catholic through and through.
But I am not anymore. In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the “neo-atheists” of today so obsessed with God’s nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism?2 What does atheism have to offer that’s worth fighting for?
As one philosopher put it, being a militant atheist is like “sleeping furiously.”3
Losing My Religion
I was too restless as a boy to sit through an entire mass. It was akin to aversion training. I looked at it like a puppet show with a totally predictable story line. The only aspect I really liked was the music. I still love masses, passions, requiems, and cantatas and don’t really understand why Johann Sebastian Bach ever wrote his secular cantatas, which are so obviously inferior. But other than developing an appreciation of the majestic church music of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and others, for which I remain eternally grateful, I never felt any attraction to religion and never talked to God or felt a special relationship. After I left home for the university, at the age of seventeen, I quickly lost any remnant of religiosity. No more church for me. It was hardly a conscious decision, certainly not one I recall agonizing over. I was surrounded by other ex-Catholics, but we rarely addressed religious topics except to make fun of popes, priests, processions, and the like. It was only when I moved to a northern city that I noticed the tortuous relationship some people develop with religion.
Much of postwar Dutch literature is written by ex-Protestants bitter about their severe upbringing. “Whatever is not commanded is forbidden” was the rule of the Reformed Church. Its insistence on frugality, black dress code, continuous fight against temptations of the flesh, frequent scripture readings at the family table, and its punitive God—all contributed greatly to Dutch literature. I have tried to read these books, but have never gotten very far: too depressing! The church community kept a close eye on everyone and was quick to accuse. I have heard shocking real-life accounts of weddings at which the bride and groom left in tears after a sermon about the punishment awaiting sinners. Even at funerals, fire and brimstone might be directed at the deceased in his grave so that his widow and everybody else knew exactly where he’d be going. Uplifting stuff.
In contrast, if the local priest visited our home, he could count on a cigar and a glass of jenever (a sort of gin)—everyone knew that the clergy enjoyed the good life. Religion did come with restrictions, especially reproductive ones (contraception being wrong), but hell was mentioned far less than heaven. Southerners pride themselves on their bon vivant attitude to life, claiming that there’s nothing wrong with a bit of enjoyment. From the northern perspective, we must have looked positively immoral, with beer, sex, dancing, and good food being part of life. This explains a story I heard once from an Indian Hindu who married a Dutch Calvinist woman from the north. Although the woman’s parents didn’t have the faintest idea what a Hindu was, they were relieved that their new son-in-law was at least not Catholic. For them, belief in multiple deities was secondary to the heretic and sinful ways of their next-door religion.
The southern attitude is recognizable in Pieter Brueghel’s4 and Bosch’s paintings, some of which bring to mind Carnival, the beginning of Lent. Carnival is big in Den Bosch, when the city is known as Oeteldonk, and also celebrated in nearby Catholic Germany, in cities like Cologne and Aachen, where Bosch’s family came from (his father’s name, “van Aken,” referred to the latter city). Bosch must have been well versed in the zany Carnival atmosphere, and its suspension of class distinctions behind anonymous masks. Just like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival is deep down a giant party of role reversal and social freedom. The Garden of Earthly Delights achieves the same by depicting everyone in his or her birthday suit. I am convinced that Bosch intended this as a sign of liberty rather than the debauchery some have read into it.
Possibly, the religion one leaves behind carries over into the sort of atheism one embraces. If religion has little grip on one’s life, apostasy is no big deal and there will be few lingering effects. Hence the general apathy of my generation of ex-Catholics, which grew up with criticism of the Vatican by our parents’ generation in a culture that diluted religious dogma with an appreciation of life’s pleasures. Culture matters, because Catholics who grew up in papist enclaves above the rivers tell me that their upbringing was as strict as that of the Reformed households around them. Religion and culture interact to such a degree that a Catholic from France is really not the same as one from the southern Netherlands, who in turn is not the same as one from Mexico. Crawling on bleeding knees up the steps of the cathedral to ask the Virgin of Guadalupe for forgiveness is not something any of us would consider. I have also heard American Catholics emphasize guilt in ways that I absolutely can’t relate to. It is therefore as much for cultural as religious reasons that southern ex-Catholics look back with so much less bitterness at their religious background than northern ex-Protestants.
Egbert Ribberink and Dick Houtman, two Dutch sociologists, who classify themselves, respectively, as “too much of a believer to be an atheist” and “too much of a nonbeliever to be an atheist,” distinguish two kinds of atheists. Those in one group are uninterested in exploring their outlook and even less in defending it. These atheists think that both faith and its absence are private matters. They respect everyone’s choice, and feel no need to bother others with theirs. Those in the other group are vehemently opposed to religion and resent its privileges in society. These atheists don’t think that disbelief should be kept locked up in the closet. They speak of “coming out,” a terminology borrowed from the gay movement, as if their nonreligiousness was a forbidden secret that they now want to share with the world. The difference between the two kinds boils down to the privacy of their outlook.
I like this analysis better than the usual approach to secularization, which just counts how many people believe and how many don’t. It may one day help to test my thesis that activist atheism reflects trauma. The stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.
Serial Dogmatism
Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black. This is upsetting, of course, and explains why atheists have become so vocal in demanding their place at the table. They prod the elephant to see whether they can get it to make some room. But the elephant also defines them, because what would be the point of atheism in the absence of religion?
As if eager to provide comic relief from this mismatched battle, American television occasionally summarizes it in its own you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up way. The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News invited David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group, to discuss billboards proclaiming religion a “scam.” Throughout the interview, Silverman kept up a congenial face, claiming that there was absolutely no reason to be troubled, since all that his billboards do is tell the truth: “Everybody knows religion is a scam!” Bill O’Reilly, a Catholic, expressed his disagreement and clarified why religion is not a scam “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.” This was the first time I had heard the tides being used as proof of God. It looked like a comedy sketch with one smiling actor telling believers that they are too stupid to see that religion is a fraud, but that it would be silly for them to take offense, while the other proposes the rise and fall of the oceans as evidence for a supernatural power, as if gravity and planetary rotation can’t handle the job.5
All I get out of such exchanges is the confirmation that believers will say anything to defend their faith and that some atheists have turned evangelical. Nothing new about the first, but atheists’ zeal keeps surprising me. Why “sleep furiously” unless there are inner demons to be kept at bay? In the same way that firefighters are sometimes stealth arsonists and homophobes closet homosexuals, do some atheists secretly long for the certitude of religion? Take Christopher Hitchens, the late British author of God Is Not Great. Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all of the world’s troubles on religion.6 Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti–Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa.
Some people crave dogma, yet have trouble deciding on its contents. They become serial dogmatists. Hitchens admitted, “There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb,”7 thus implying that he had entered a new life stage marked by doubt and reflection. Yet, all he seemed to have done was sprout a fresh dogmatic limb.
Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners. This ensures sparkling conversations when different kinds of them get together the way male birds gather at “leks” to display splendid plumage for visiting females. It almost makes one believe in the “argumentative theory,” according to which human reasoning didn’t evolve for the sake of truth, but rather to shine in discussion. Universities everywhere have set up crowd-pleasing debates between religious and antireligious intellectual “giants.” One such debate took place in 2009 at a large science festival in Puebla, Mexico. My own contribution concerned a different, more scientific session, but I sat in the audience of four thousand when we were being warmed up for the ultimate war of words. Asked whether they believed in God, about 90 percent of the people raised their hand in affirmation. The debate itself was set up in a distinctly unintellectual fashion. The stage showed a boxing ring (ropes around poles, red boxing gloves dangling in the corner), and the speakers walked one by one onto stage to martial music. They were the usual suspects. Apart from Hitchens, we got Dinesh D’Souza, Sam Harris, the philosopher Dan Dennett, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
I would be surprised if a single member of the audience changed his or her mind as a result of the debate, either from believer to nonbeliever or the other way around. We learned that religion is the source of all evil and inferior to science as a guide to reality, but also that without religion there would be no morality and no hope for those who fear death. Without God, moral rules are “nothing but euphemisms for personal taste,” exclaimed the rabbi, waving his hands above his head as if throwing pizza dough. Others spoke in a humorless, almost menacing tone, as if anyone who’d ignore their message would inevitably get into trouble. God isn’t a fun topic.
The circus-like atmosphere left me with my original question about evangelical atheists. It’s easy to see why religions try to recruit believers. They are large organizations with monetary interests that do better, the more people join them. They erect cathedrals, like the one I visited in Puebla, and chapels like the Capilla del Rosario with its 23½-carat gilded stucco. I’ve never seen such a blindingly ornate interior, probably paid for by generations of poor Mexican farmers. But why would atheists turn messianic? And why would they play off one religion against another? Harris, for example, biliously goes after the “low-hanging fruit” of Islam, singling it out as the great enemy of the West.8 Throw in a few pictures of burqas, mention infibulation, and who will argue with your revulsion of religion? I am as sickened as the next person, but if Harris’s quest is to show that religion fails to promote morality, why pick on Islam? Isn’t genital mutilation common in the United States, too, where newborn males are routinely circumcised without their consent? We surely don’t need to go all the way to Afghanistan to find valleys in the moral landscape.
If some religions are worse than others, then some must be better. I’d love to hear the atheist perspective on what makes for a good religion, or the reason why different religions support different moralities. Could it be that religion and culture interact to the point that there is no universal morality? Instead of pondering such problems, audiences are stirred up to abhor practices alien to them, which is about as easy as making them squirm at a chain-saw murder.
Then there is the persistent myth that science trumps religion in every possible way, and that science distracts from religion, and vice versa, as in a zero-sum game. This approach goes back to nineteenth-century American polemists, who famously declared that if it were up to religion, we’d still believe in a flat earth.9 This was pure propaganda, however. Speculation about our planet’s roundness began with Aristotle and other ancient Greeks, and every major scholar during the so-called Dark Ages was fully aware of it. Dante’s Divine Comedy portrays the earth as a sphere, and the exterior panel of Bosch’s Garden triptych takes an in-between approach by showing a flat earth floating in a transparent ball surrounded by a black cosmos. When it comes to evolution, too, there is a tendency to point at religion as a solid opponent while ignoring that the Roman Catholic Church never formally condemned Darwin’s theory or put his works on the Index (the list of forbidden books). The Vatican has endorsed evolution as a valid theory compatible with the Christian faith. Admittedly, its endorsement came a bit late, but it is good to realize that resistance to evolution is almost entirely restricted to evangelical Protestants in the American South and Midwest.
The connection between science and religion has always been complex, including both conflict, mutual respect, and the church’s patronage of the sciences. The first copiers of books on which science came to rely were rabbis and monks, and the first universities grew out of cathedral and monastic schools. The papacy actively promoted the establishment and proliferation of universities. At one of the first ones, in Paris, students cut their hair in tonsure to show allegiance to the church, and the oldest document in the archives of Oxford University is its Award of the Papal Legate of 1214. Given this intertwinement, most historians stress dialogue or even integration between science and religion.
Neo-atheists keep pitting the two against each other, however. Their audiences pee in their pants with delight when the flat-earth canard gets trotted out. This is not to say, however, that religious narratives are much better. They, too, play fast and loose with the facts. In Puebla, D’Souza featured near-death experiences as scientific proof of the afterlife. After a brush with death, some patients report having floated outside of their bodies or having entered a tunnel of light. This surely seems bizarre, but D’Souza failed to bring up new neuroscience of a small brain area known as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). This area gathers information from many senses (visual, tactile, and vestibular) to construct a single image of our body and its place in the environment. Normally, this image is nicely coherent across all senses, so that we know who and where we are. The body image is disturbed, however, as soon as the TPJ is damaged or stimulated with electrodes. Scientists can deliberately make people feel that they are hovering above their own body or looking down on it, or have them perceive a copy of themselves sitting next to them, like a shadow (“I looked younger and fresher than I do now. My double smiled at me in a friendly way”).10 Together with the hallucinogenic qualities of anesthetic drugs and the effects of oxygen depletion on the brain, science is getting close to a materialist explanation of near-death experiences.
Bosch’s Ascent of the Blessed (part of his Visions of the Hereafter) depicts the tunnel of light associated with near-death experiences that have inspired mythology and religion since the dawn of humanity.
Rabbi Boteach, too, relied on questionable evidence to champion religion. He explained that many human families take care of Down syndrome children, which they obviously would never do without religion. They’d simply get rid of “defective” offspring, he said. The problem with this assertion, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, is that archaeological data tell quite a different story. Our lineage is equipped with such powerful nurturing instincts that offspring are not easily neglected or abandoned, no matter their condition. I’m not saying it never happens, but long before any of the current religions, Neanderthals and early humans took care of the handicapped. This is also true for our primate kin. There are many examples, but I’ll limit myself to two that I know firsthand.
Azalea was a trisomic rhesus monkey; she had three copies of one chromosome, just as in human Down syndrome.11 Another similarity was that she was born to a female beyond the age at which macaques normally conceive. Growing up in a large zoo troop, Azalea was seriously retarded in both motor development and social skills. She’d make the most incomprehensible blunders, such as threatening the alpha male. Rhesus monkeys are quick to punish anyone who breaks the rules, but Azalea got away with almost anything, as if the other monkeys realized that nothing they did would change her ineptness. We human observers were fond of Azalea for her sweet character, and it seemed that the rest of the troop was, too. She died naturally at three years of age.
Then there was Mozu, a Japanese macaque in the Japanese Alps, in Jigokudani. Mozu could barely walk, and certainly not climb, as she congenitally lacked both hands and feet. During the winter, which is severe in this area, she was forced to plow through the snow while her troopmates jumped from branch to branch. A frequent star of Japanese nature documentaries, Mozu was fully accepted by the other monkeys to the point that she lived a long life and raised no fewer than five offspring. I saw her high up in the mountains and noticed that she spent most of her time with the other monkeys, away from people, so that the occasional handouts of food from tourists can’t account for her survival. Even though there is no record of other monkeys’ actively assisting her, her story goes to show that the unfit can thrive and reproduce in primate societies. Similarly, human life before religion was not necessarily dog-eat-dog. Instead of making us do things we normally wouldn’t, religion may render its chief contribution by endorsing and promoting certain natural tendencies. This is obviously a much more modest contribution than what the rabbi had in mind.
Dogmatists pound their drums so hard that they can’t hear one another. Their audiences, on the other hand, are unaware of the traveling dog and pony shows featuring the same adversaries over and over, who simulate surprise and “gotcha” moments. The only voice of reason in Puebla was that of Dan Dennett, who spoke about religion not as something hateful but rather as a phenomenon that begs investigation as part of human society, human nature even. Clearly, religion is man-made, so the question is what good does it do for us. Are we born to believe and, if so, why? Dennett is not as sure as the neo-atheists with whom he is often lumped together that religion is irrational or that the world would be a better place if its demise were hastened, noting, “I am still agnostic about that.”12
Azalea was a trisomic rhesus monkey, a condition similar to human Down syndrome. She was more dependent than other juveniles. Here she is being held like an infant by her older sister at an age where this isn’t normal anymore. Despite her mental handicap, she was remarkably well integrated and accepted.
Droppings in a Cuckoo Clock
My first experience with proselytizing was almost too comical to be true. At the time, I had a room on the fourth floor of a university dormitory, in Groningen. One morning, I heard a knock on my door, and two young American Mormons in jackets and ties stood in front of me. Curious to hear about their faith, I invited them in. They proceeded to set up an easel and a board on which they pasted felt figures and text labels to explain the story of an ordinarily named American, who had seen the Lord in a pillar of light. Later, he was led by an angel to holy texts on golden plates.
All of this happened just over a century ago. I listened to their incredible tale and was just about to ask how this Joseph Smith convinced others of his special encounter, when we were rudely interrupted. I often left a window open to let Tjan, my pet jackdaw, fly in and out. He was free outside, but would come in before dark to be fed and locked up for the night. While the two young men patiently recounted God’s appearance in a cave, Tjan sailed into the room looking for a landing spot. He went for the highest point, which was the head of one of the Mormons standing in front of his board. A large black bird landing on him was the last thing he’d expected. I saw the panic on his face and quickly tried to reassure him that this was just Tjan, a bird with a name, who wouldn’t hurt anyone. I have never seen two people pack up so quickly: they were gone in no time, out the door, running for the elevator. While they collected their things, I heard them talk of the “devil.”
My having spoiled Tjan as a baby with the fattest earthworms I could dig up made him extra large for his species. He was such a curious and intelligent character, who’d fly above me on strolls through the park. But of course he was black, noisy, and crow-like, reminding the Mormons of a creature that might steal their souls. As a result, they never got to answer my question, nor did they have a chance to explain how Smith translated the golden plates engraved with “reformed Egyptian” by gazing at “peep stones” placed in the bottom of his hat. Smith was smart enough to sympathize with his skeptics: “If I had not experienced what I have, I couldn’t have believed it myself.”13
So, why did people believe him? Smith met with a great deal of derision and hostility (he was killed by a lynch mob at the age of thirty-eight), but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now counts 14 million followers. It is obvious that believers are not looking for evidence, because the only item that might have been helpful, the set of golden plates, had to be returned to the angel. People simply believe because they want to. This applies to all religions. Faith is driven by attraction to certain persons, stories, rituals, and values. It fulfills emotional needs, such as the need for security and authority and the desire to belong. Theology is secondary and evidence tertiary. I agree that what the faithful are asked to believe can be rather preposterous, but atheists surely won’t succeed in talking people out of their faith by mocking the veracity of their holy books or by comparing their God with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The specific contents of belief are hardly at issue if the overarching goal is a sense of social and moral communion. To borrow from a title by the novelist Amy Tan, to criticize faith is like trying to save fish from drowning. There’s no point in catching believers out of the lake to tell them what is best for them while putting them out on the bank, where they flop around until they expire. They were in the lake for a reason.
Accepting that faith is driven by values and desires makes at once for a great contrast with science, but also exposes common ground, since science is less fact-driven than is widely assumed. Don’t get me wrong, science produces great results. It has no competition when it comes to understanding physical reality, but science is also often, like religion, based on what we want to believe. Scientists are human, and humans are driven by what psychologists call “confirmation biases” (we love evidence that supports our view) and “disconfirmation biases” (we disparage evidence that undermines our view). That scientists systematically resist new discoveries was already the topic of a 1961 article in the illustrious pages of Science, which added the mischievous subheading “This source of resistance has yet to be given the scrutiny accorded religious and ideological sources.”14
A good example is taste aversion. We remember food that has poisoned us so well that we gag at the thought of it. This reaction is of great survival value, yet it violated behaviorist dogma. Founded by B. F. Skinner, behaviorism claims that all behavior is shaped by reward and punishment, which works better the shorter the time interval between the act and its consequences. So, when the American psychologist John Garcia reported that rats avoid poisoned foods after just a single bad experience, even if the nausea sets in only hours later, no one believed him. Leading scientists made sure his study didn’t appear in any mainstream journal. The author kept getting rejections, the most infamous one contending that his findings were no more likely than finding bird shit in a cuckoo clock. The “Garcia effect” is now well established, but the early reaction illustrates how much scientists hate the unexpected.
My own story concerns the discovery, in the mid-1970s, that chimpanzees make up after fights by kissing and embracing their opponents. Reconciliation behavior has now been demonstrated in many primates, but when one of my students needed to defend a study of this behavior before a committee of psychologists, she got an earful. We had naïvely assumed that these psychologists, who knew only rats, would have no opinion about primates, yet they were adamant that reconciliation in animals was out of the question. It didn’t fit their thinking, which excluded emotions, social relationships, and everything else that makes animals interesting. I tried to change their minds by inviting them to the zoo where I worked so that they could see for themselves what chimpanzees do after fights. To this proposal, however, they replied bafflingly, “What good would it do to see the actual animals? It will be easier for us to stay objective without this influence.”
It is said that the ancient king of Sardis complained that “men’s ears are less credulous than their eyes.” Only here it was reversed: these scientists feared that their eyes might tell them something they didn’t want to hear. Like the rest of humanity, scientists apply flight-or-fight responses to data: they go for the familiar and avoid the unfamiliar. I have to think of this each time I hear neo-atheists claim that their God denial makes them smarter than believers and rational like scientists. They like to present themselves as emotion-free, “just the facts, ma’am” kind of thinkers. In a column in USA Today, Jerry Coyne, a fellow biologist and self-declared “gnu-atheist” (yes, “gnu” as in “wildebeest,” which is Dutch for “wild beast”), called faith and science utterly incompatible “for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are.” He then proceeded to draw little aureoles around the heads of scientists:
Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority rejected. No finding is deemed “true”—a notion that’s always provisional—unless it’s repeated and verified by others. We scientists are always asking ourselves, “How can I find out whether I’m wrong?”15
Oh, how I wish I had colleagues like Coyne! Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they are is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives. Academics have petty jealousies, cling to their views long after they have become obsolete, and are upset every time something new comes along that they failed to anticipate. Original ideas invite ridicule, or are rejected as ill informed. As the neuroscience pioneer Michael Gazzaniga complained in a recent interview,
There is a profound inhibitory effect on new ideas by people and ideas that “got there first,” telling their story over and over while new observations struggle up from the bottom. The old line that human knowledge advances one funeral at a time seems to be so true!16
This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives. There is no lack of historical examples, such as resistance to the wave theory of light, to Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation, to continental drift, and to Röntgen’s announcement of X-rays, which was initially declared a hoax. Resistance to change is also visible when science continues to cling to unsupported paradigms, such as the Rorschach inkblot test, or keeps touting the selfishness of organisms despite contrary evidence. Scientists praise the “plausibility” and “beauty” of theories, making value judgments on the basis of how they think things work, or ought to work. Science is in fact so value laden that Albert Einstein denied that all we do is observe and measure, saying that what we think exists is a product almost as much of theory as of observation. When theories change, observations follow suit.17
If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better. We also buy into a certain outlook without critically weighing each and every underlying assumption and often turn a deaf ear to evidence that doesn’t fit. We may even, like the psychologists on my student’s committee, deliberately turn down a chance to get enlightened. But even if scientists are hardly more rational than believers, and even if the entire notion of unsentimental rationality is based on a giant misunderstanding (we cannot even think without emotions), there is one major difference between science and religion. This difference resides not in the individual practitioners but in their culture. Science is a collective enterprise with rules of engagement that allow the whole to make progress even if its parts drag their feet.
Darwinists Deserve a Darwin Award
What science does best is to incite competition among ideas. Science instigates a sort of natural selection, so that only the most viable ideas survive and reproduce. As an example, let’s say that I believe that life is passed on through little homunculi inside sperm. You, in contrast, believe it’s done by mixing the traits of both parents. Along comes an obscure Moravian monk fond of peas. By cross-pollinating pea plants, he shows that traits pass from both parents to their offspring yet remain fully separate. They can be dominant, recessive, homozygote, or heterozygote. What ridiculous complexity!
The homunculus idea was nice and simple, but couldn’t explain why offspring often look like their mother. The blending of traits sounded great, too, but would inevitably kill off variation, because the entire population would converge on some average. At first, the monk’s work was criticized, then ignored and forgotten. Science was simply not ready for it. Fortunately, it was rediscovered decades later. The scientific community compared ideas, looked at evidence, listened to arguments, and began to favor the monk’s explanation. Since his experiments were successfully replicated, Gregor Mendel is now celebrated as the founder of genetics.
In comparison, religion is static. It does change with a changing society, but rarely as a result of evidence. This sets up a potential conflict with science, such as the never-ending clash about evolution. The real point of contention in this particular case is relatively minor, however, at least for the biologist. How humans relate to the rest of nature is hardly the core of evolutionary theory, yet it constitutes the main stumbling block for religious detractors. One rarely hears objections to the evolution of plants, bacteria, insects, or other animals: it’s all about our own precious species. If we weren’t put on earth by God, so the thinking goes, we’d lack purpose. To understand this obsession with human origins, keep in mind that the Judeo-Christian tradition arose with little or no awareness of other primates. Desert nomads knew only antelopes, snakes, camels, goats, and the like. No wonder that they saw a yawning gap between human and animal, and reserved the soul just for us. Their descendants were shocked to the core of their beliefs when, in 1835, the first live anthropoid apes went on display at the London Zoo. People were offended, unable to hide their disgust. Queen Victoria judged the apes “painfully and disagreeably human.”18
Human exceptionalism is still very much alive in the social sciences and the humanities. They remain so resistant to comparisons of humans with other animals that even the word “other” bothers them. The natural sciences, in contrast, having suffered less religious contamination, march inexorably toward ever greater human-animal continuity. Carl Linnaeus placed Homo sapiens firmly within the primate order, molecular biology revealed human and ape DNA to be nearly identical, and neuroscience has yet to find a single area in the human brain without an equivalent in the monkey’s. It is this continuity that is controversial. If we biologists could just debate evolution without ever mentioning humans, no one would lose a night’s sleep over it. It would be like our discussing how chlorophyll works or whether the platypus counts as a mammal. Who cares?
I was largely unaware of evolution skepticism before coming to the United States, and quickly categorized it with other incomprehensible national penchants, such as love of guns and contempt for soccer. That evolution denial is as American as apple pie became clear again in 2011 when forty-nine of the fifty-one Miss USA Pageant contestants answered the question “Should evolution be taught in schools?” by hedging their bets. The jury is still out on evolution, they said, and there are so many religious views and scientific theories that it’s better to teach all sides. Miss Alabama even felt that evolution should flat-out not be taught at all. In a case of divine justice, the title was won by Miss California, who explicitly endorsed evolution, saying she was a “huge science geek.”
No less than 30 percent of Americans read the Bible as the actual word of God. But this is still only half of those who feel that the Bible is either an inspired text not intended to be taken literally or a book of legends and moral precepts.19 This is great to know for those trying to get an evolutionary message across. The nonliteralist majority is (or should be) their target audience, since they are most likely to listen. Except, of course, if the discussion opener is a slap in the face. Unfortunately, all this talk about how science and religion are irreconcilable is not free of consequences. It tells religious people that, however open-minded and undogmatic they may be, worthy of science they are not. They will first need to jettison all beliefs held dear. I find the neo-atheist insistence on purity curiously religious. All that is lacking is some sort of baptism ceremony at which believers publicly repent before they join the “rational elite” of nonbelievers. Ironically, the last one to qualify would have been an Augustinian friar growing peas in a monastery garden.
The greatest public defender of evolution this country has ever known was Stephen Jay Gould. During his heyday, Gould was so popular that he single-handedly carried an entire magazine, Natural History, which since his death has become only a shadow of its former self. Gould was always a pleasure to read, especially for his eye-opening excursions into science history, which he seemed to know like his back pocket. One doesn’t need to agree with all of his opinions and every fact he touted—I most certainly don’t—to recognize that he was the face of evolution and its foremost advocate. He wrote with such contagious enthusiasm that he inspired thousands of young Americans to go into science.
His defense of evolution included frequent warnings against the racism and genetic determinism associated with it in the old days. He also vehemently resisted the idea that every single human behavior deserves an evolutionary account. “Darwinian fundamentalism,” as he disparagingly called it, holds that everything we do is controlled by genes and serves to propagate them. Gould explained that Darwin himself doubted such a sweeping role for natural selection, and I have already mentioned the many kinds of altruism that are left unexplained. Dismissing such behavior as “mistakes” doesn’t solve much. And this isn’t the only behavior that makes little evolutionary sense. Think of smoking, masturbation, bungee jumping, boozing, setting off fireworks, and rock climbing. Maladaptive behavior is in fact so common in our species that we make fun of it. The Darwin Awards were invented to honor “those who improve the species by accidentally removing themselves from it.”
This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to put human behavior on an evolutionary footing. There really is no alternative. Indeed, I predict that fifty years from now Darwin’s portrait will hang in every psychology department. Yet, the field still teems with “just so” stories that are hard to take seriously, from the proposal that male-pattern baldness serves as a signal of wisdom to the opposite sex (something we need to tell all those men with an illusory head of hair), to The Natural History of Rape, which is the actual title of a book that has harmed evolutionary psychology more than any other. The big mistake, of course, is to assume that if something is genetic, such as baldness, it must be good for you. Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and breast cancer all have a genetic basis, but no one would want to argue that they increase fitness.
In the case of rape, however, we don’t even have a genetic basis to work with. There is no evidence whatsoever that sexual violence is heritable. Still, this didn’t stop Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer from speculating about its evolutionary benefits. Extrapolating straight from the sexual behavior of flies, the authors proposed that men rape in order to spread their genes. Worse, the authors absolved themselves from producing actual data, since most important effects must have occurred during human prehistory. With this past being a closed book, all we were left with was unrestrained storytelling. The authors never answered the question why, if rape is all about procreation, one-third of its victims are nonreproductive, such as children and the elderly.20
I agree with Gould that we gain little from evolutionary guesswork about each and every human behavior. Gould made himself many enemies, though, by voicing skepticism. Several skirmishes between him and the evolutionary establishment unfolded in the pages of the New York Review of Books in 1997. It was a sight to behold, all those outsized egos tumbling over each other with innuendos, criticism by hearsay, name-calling (one was ridiculed as another’s “lapdog”), or acting as if they’d never heard of one another. The vitriol obviously didn’t help them close ranks. Creationists were rubbing their hands in delight, and exploited the row to their own ends as was reflected in remarks about theoretical discord in places as unexpected as the Miss USA Pageant. Someone should have nominated those Darwinists for a Darwin Award.
But this confrontation was nothing compared with the reaction to another Gould opinion. An atheist himself, he declared science and religion compatible well before neo-atheists decided they were not. Following his untimely death, in 2002, Gould thus became a lightning rod for his lack of intolerance.
Somethingism
In his famous essay, published in the same year as the above lovefest with fellow evolutionists, Gould recalled running into a group of lunching priests at the Vatican. The priests expressed worry about a new brand of creationism that had sprung up, known as intelligent design. They asked Gould why on earth evolution was still under attack. In his essay, the paleontologist commented on the profound irony that he, an ex-Jew, had to reassure Catholic priests that evolution was in fact doing fine and that the opposition was restricted to a small segment of the American population.
This story was Gould’s way of hinting that the alleged war between science and religion is overblown. Blanket statements about “religion” are problematic anyway, since the term covers everything from monotheism to polytheism, and from a rigid belief system to spirituality. Buddhism, for example, actually welcomes the idea of evolving organisms, which agrees perfectly with its view that all life is interconnected and in flux.21 But even within religions, such as Christianity or Islam, cultural diversity is so great that practices and ideas abhorred in one corner are often supported in another. Indonesian Sunnis have about as much in common with Iranian Shi’a as Swedish Lutherans with Baptists in the American South. With a better grasp of these issues than most, Gould borrowed the term “magisterium” (teaching authority) from a papal document to make the point that science and religion occupy separate spheres of knowledge. They don’t touch on the same problems. Speaking of “nonoverlapping magisteria,” he designated this view NOMA.
We face two distinct sets of questions, one related to physical reality and the other to human existence. Given how little science tells us about the second question, a French biologist, Matthieu Ricard, turned his back on a promising career in science to become a Buddhist monk. I have met Matthieu several times, and it isn’t hard to detect an inner peace in him that few people possess. On the basis of fMRI scans of his brain during meditation, he has been dubbed the “happiest man in the world” (a title he gives a Gallic shrug). Neuroscientists measured the highest activation ever in his left prefrontal cortex, which is associated with positive emotions. Even though Matthieu still talks with the precision of a scientist, he abandoned science long ago, arguing that all it delivered was “a major contribution to minor needs.”22 This echoes Leo Tolstoy’s complaint that whenever he asked scientists about the meaning of life, such as what we should do with it, he “received an innumerable quantity of exact replies concerning matters about which I had not asked.”23
Few scientists follow in Matthieu’s footsteps, however. Instead of turning to religion, the majority of us are agnostic or atheist. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that science answers questions of meaning and purpose, however. Even the scientists who recently confirmed the “God particle” knew that it was a far cry from confirming why we are on earth and even less whether or not God exists. No, the big difference for scientists is that the thirst for knowledge itself, the lifeblood of our profession, fills a spiritual void taken up by religion in most other people. Like treasure hunters for whom the hunt is about as important as the treasure itself, we feel great purpose in trying to pierce the veil of ignorance. We feel united in this effort, being part of a worldwide network. This means that we also enjoy this other aspect of religion: a community of like-minded people. At a recent workshop, a retired astronomer teared up while discussing humanity’s place in the cosmos. He stopped talking for two minutes, causing his audience to become restless, before explaining that he had pursued this question since childhood. The sight of images from billions of light years ago still overwhelms him, making him realize how much we are connected with the universe. He wouldn’t call it a religious experience, but it sounded very much like it.
Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it’s impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape’s. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself. This is a familiar theme among ape experts, who will tell you how their very first eye contact radically changed not only how they viewed their subjects but also their own place in the world. It is precisely this impact that upset Queen Victoria. Staring into the ape’s mirror, she felt the metaphysical ground shifting underneath her royal feet. Seeing the same orangutan and chimpanzee at the same zoo, Darwin reached quite a different conclusion; he invited anyone convinced of man’s superiority to come take a look. Darwin felt a connection where the queen felt a threat.
Watching a magnificent landscape or a sunset over the ocean, most of us feel like a minuscule part of the universe, the way scientists feel while looking through a microscope or telescope, analyzing whale song, digging up dinosaur bones, or running after chimps in the forest. The chimps dive into the undergrowth while their bipedal cousins struggle with a large bush knife to keep up with every turn they take, listen to every hoot, and document every social encounter. Accompanying my late friend Toshisada Nishida, a Japanese primatologist known for his fieldwork in Tanzania, I was struck by his habit of chewing every leaf or fruit he saw the wild chimps eat. He wanted to know how they tasted, he said, but for me it was the ultimate act of feeling one with a kindred species. The same identification was at play when a young British primatologist, Fiona Stewart, did what no one had done before: sleep in tree nests built by chimpanzees. Nests had always been studied from the ground, with binoculars, but Stewart spent the night in them. She discovered advantages over sleeping on the ground, such as a deeper sleep and fewer insect bites. Other scientists trail dolphins in speedboats, having given each one a name and recognizing them by their fins. Or they fly ultralight aircraft followed by fledgling whooping cranes in order to introduce them to the air. All of this rests on attraction to the natural world, which often started early in life. Specialized knowledge about a tiny section ties us to its grandeur and complexity, which spreads in all directions, across all degrees of magnification, and across endless time. We are in awe of the mysteries we seek to decipher, which deepen with every layer we peel away.
I therefore fully understand how a prominent cell biologist, Ursula Goodenough, could write a book entitled The Sacred Depths of Nature, or how Einstein could believe in Spinoza’s God. Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher from Amsterdam, picked up skeptical strands of thought that had been around in the Netherlands since the days of Bosch and Erasmus, crystallizing them into an impersonal God. Not the traditional omniscient father figure in the sky, but an abstract supernatural force tied to nature. He thus laid the groundwork for a rationalist worldview in which scripture represents not the word of God but merely the opinion of human mortals. His message was not well received, to say the least, and Spinoza was excommunicated from his Sephardic Jewish community.
Einstein subscribed to Spinoza’s God, but had no hostility toward religion, saying about its pervasiveness that a belief seemed to him “preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life.”24 As it was with Gould, tolerance is key. Dogmatism closes the mind, whether it is the blindness of biblical literalists for science or the self-righteousness of some atheists. A recent illustration is the palace coup against Paul Kurtz, writer of the internationally celebrated Humanist Manifesto and founder of the Center of Inquiry. The legendary eighty-five-year-old became persona non grata in his own organization for not supporting Blasphemy Day and other silly ways to mock religion. This is how Kurtz himself explained the situation:
They wanted to be hard on religion. Now, I don’t like God. I think she’s a myth. I don’t think there’s evidence for her. But, on the other hand, many people believe in religion. Although I believe in criticizing them, I don’t hate them. I’m not nasty towards them. So there’s a difference in how you deal with religion. Many of my colleagues, I call them former altar boys, so hated religion that they couldn’t help expressing that.25
Kurtz’s altar boy reference hints at the serial dogmatism mentioned earlier, which simply redraws the boundaries of intolerance. Anti-something movements will go the way of the dodo, however, unless they manage to replace what they dislike with something better. They will need to come up with a viable alternative. No secular movement can get around Tolstoy’s questions. The increasingly secular Dutch even coined a word for this: “ietsism.” “Ism” is the same as in English, and “iets” means “something.” The typical “ietsist” doesn’t believe in a personalized God, and follows no traditional religion, yet thinks there must be more between heaven and earth than what meets the eye. There must be something.
The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms, and there are tons of faithful people with an open mind, who pick and choose only certain parts of their religion and have no issue with science whatsoever. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma. The God debate in Puebla was intellectually dishonest and sanctimonious on both sides. Where do people get convictions stronger than anything I have ever experienced in my life? What is their secret? Convictions never follow straight from evidence or logic. Convictions reach us through the prism of human interpretation. As a French philosopher aptly summarized, “strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.”26
Let me therefore close this chapter with a quotation from John Steinbeck, the American novelist, since it illustrates the other side: the seeking, wondering, and pondering human mind open to any and all influences. This is the mind that has driven us forward through the ages despite the intellectual ossification humans are prone to. Steinbeck depicts science and religion as equivalent forms of holistic knowledge. He probably would have agreed with Goodenough that the membrane separating Gould’s two magisteria is “semi-permeable.”27 Like so many of our bodies’ membranes, it lets chemicals through in both directions. After all, science has the potential to affect our social and moral outlook, such as when it promotes environmental awareness or invents a pill that offers women sexual freedom. Conversely, existential questions feed into science, as in the debate about humane versus medical considerations in the treatment of patients. “Should we keep everyone alive for as long as we can?” is not a question that science can answer. In many areas, it is hard to tell where our worldview ends and science begins, and vice versa. We need to step beyond a simple dichotomy between the two and consider the whole of human knowledge. Steinbeck tried his hand at it in the following passage from The Log from the Sea of Cortez, about a scientific expedition along the Pacific Coast:
And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.28