The God Delusion

"Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. You hear this over and over again. I’m often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and often they’re religious schools – not fundamentalist schools, but colleges of a historically religious type. And very often I will hear: “Oh I expected you to be small and dark-haired and wear glasses!” The image of the atheist woman is kind of like what the image of the feminist used to be, someone too ugly to get a man. But part of it is also humorlessness. People will often say to me, “Oh you’re so funny.” “Well, yeah!” Dawkins also explains a lot about why he disagrees with people who reconcile science and religion. I agree with him on this. I actually do think they are irreconcilable. I know lots of people who have reconciled them, but that’s only because the human brain has this incredible capacity to believe two contradictory things at the same time. That is how people are able to reconcile science and religion. But really they’re hard to reconcile, and I think when you read Dawkins he explains that very well, why you when you say “I’m religious but I also believe in science,” you’re kind of avoiding the question of the ways in which scientific reality provable as by natural experiment comes into conflict with belief in events that contradict the laws of nature. At some point it becomes too great inconsistency. Well I really don’t see how you could be an evolutionary biologist and not be an atheist. But the fact is that among top level scientists there are some who aren’t. The head of the National Institutes of Health here in America is a devout Christian. That does not stop him from being head of the NIH and believing in scientific medicine. I’m not saying there aren’t people who live with these two ideas, I’m simply saying I certainly couldn’t, and I don’t think there’s any consistency to doing it. Richard Dawkins explains that very well, but I don’t call that being a strident atheist! Here is the exact analogy of someone who is religious but also “believes in science.” It’s like when we get married. We know what the divorce rate is in the western world, but we all believe that it doesn’t apply to us, that we’re going to be in love “till death do us part”, just like the Book of Common Prayer says. We know that a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, but when we take that step and get married ourselves, we are acting on quite another hope. I think people who are religious but are not against science are doing the same thing. They are, in a way, covering all the bases. But it makes more sense to believe in eternal love, even though you know that in most cases it doesn’t last, because there can always be an exception. There really are some people who stay in love forever. But you can’t give me any proof that anyone has ever risen from the dead. I’m always open. That’s why Ingersoll is right about the atheist being agnostic and vice versa – if you want to bring all of the dear friends that I’ve lost to death in the last 10 years to dinner tonight, and I’ll sit down and make spaghetti and we’ll all eat together, I will reconsider my stance on eternal life. Yeah, right. That’s why everybody was so tolerant in 16th and 17th century England, because they were Christians. I’m really glad you asked that question. The idea that some of the worst things happened under countries that were officially atheist, well firstly, lots of people never embraced atheism. The salient point about the Soviet Union, like Hitler’s Germany (which was not officially atheist), is that when secular ideology is treated as something that cannot be challenged and that need not be proven, then it becomes a religion. Stalinist Communism was every bit as much a religion as Roman Catholicism at the height of the Inquisition. Why? It was a religion because its tenets could not be challenged. And if they contradicted the laws of nature, they couldn’t be challenged either. An entire generation of Soviet biologists and agronomists were destroyed because Stalin had a favourite biologist named Lysenko, and Lysenko’s basic belief was – and this went right along with Communist ideology – that you could change species by changing their behaviour, in other words a new Soviet man, or a new Soviet cow, could be made genetically different by the teachings you gave them. Scientists who said no – and everything we know and have proved about science including Mendelian genetics says that it is not true – went to the gulags and were killed. Soviet science was two generations behind the West when it emerged from this era in the mid-1960s. So what I say is that in fact what is often used as proof that religion is good is proof that religion is bad, because religion doesn’t have to call itself Christianity, or have Yahweh or Jesus as its idol, it can have secular idols. The characteristic of a religion is that no evidence-based challenge is allowed. Soviet Communism fit that model perfectly, and as soon as evidence-based challenge was allowed, it took just 30 years to collapse, which may seem long, but as historical time goes is not long at all."