A
preeminent scientist – and the world's most prominent atheist – asserts
the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has
inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
With rigor and
wit, Richard Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the
sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still
illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers.
He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the
supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels
war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with
historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion
makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but
potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the
advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of
which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than
any faith could ever muster.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. The Wall Street Journal said his "passion is supported by an awe-inspiring literary craftsmanship." The New York Times Book Review
has hailed him as a writer who "understands the issues so clearly that
he forces the reader to understand them too." Among his previous books
are The Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain.
This is my favourite book of all time. In
an age of violent religious fundamentalism from both East and West, we
should be embarrassed to hear proud talk of blind faith. I hope that
those secure and intelligent enough to see the value of questioning
their beliefs will be big and strong enough to read this book. It is a
heroic and life-changing work.
Derren Brown (British illusionist, conjurer and caricature artist)
Also available here at NYTimes.com
The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He
suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the
tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of
ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details
at the time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly
shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of
the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the
rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in
religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was
ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a
teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen
like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down
my throat.
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the
stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the
unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of
frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same
emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the
other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to
nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It
has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my
chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of
The Origin of Species - the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with
birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and
with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would
certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might
have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting
around us':
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most
exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the
production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur
in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved.
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger
than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead
they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay
that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of
the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth
reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
All Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder
that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same
aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply
religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her
professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's
positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic
about nature and the universe. To me, that is religion!' But is
'religion' the right word? I don't think so. The Nobel Prize-winning
physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as
anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:
Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that
it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him.
One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better
nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the
word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that
'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.
Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become
completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally
understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate
for us to worship'.
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what
can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein
sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic
scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists
eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.
The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking's A
Brief History of Time, 'For then we should know the mind of God', is
notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of
course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula
Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than
Hawking or Einstein. She loves churches, mosques and temples, and
numerous passages in her book fairly beg to be taken out of context and
used as ammunition for supernatural religion. She goes so far as to
call herself a 'Religious Naturalist'. Yet a careful reading of her
book shows that she is really as staunch an atheist as I am.
'Naturalist' is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my childhood
hero, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more than a
touch of the 'philosopher' naturalist of HMS Beagle about him). In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still
means for most of us today: a student of the natural world. Naturalists
in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin
himself was destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the
leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to pursue his
passion for beetles. But philosophers use 'naturalist' in a very
different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini
explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an
atheist's commitment to naturalism: 'What most atheists do believe is
that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is
physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values
- in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human
life.'
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex
interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in
this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there
is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative
intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that
outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural
phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there is something that
appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly
understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within
the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less
wonderful.
Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out
not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is
certainly true of Einstein and Hawking. The present Astronomer Royal
and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes
to church as an 'unbelieving Anglican ... out of loyalty to the tribe'.
He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the
cosmos provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. In the course
of a recently televised conversation, I challenged my friend the
obstetrician Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to
admit that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn't
really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting it
but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed to be
interviewing me, not the other way around). When I pressed him, he said
he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure
his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has
not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural
claims. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call
themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an
ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a
confused and confusing willingness to label as 'religion' the
pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most
distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to
borrow Dan Dennett's phrase, they 'believe in belief'.
One of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science without
religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also
said,
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions,
a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it
clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is
the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it.
Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself? That his words can
be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No.
By 'religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is
conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between
supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the
other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods
delusional.
Here are some more quotations from Einstein, to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion.
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything
that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a
magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and
that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a
genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.
In greater numbers since his death, religious apologists
understandably try to claim Einstein as one of their own. Some of his
religious contemporaries saw him very differently. In 1940 Einstein
wrote a famous paper justifying his statement 'I do not believe in a
personal God.' This and similar statements provoked a storm of letters
from the religiously orthodox, many of them alluding to Einstein's
Jewish origins. The extracts that follow are taken from Max Jammer's
book Einstein and Religion (which is also my main source of quotations
from Einstein himself on religious matters). The Roman Catholic Bishop
of Kansas City said: 'It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race
of the Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of that
race.' Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: 'There is no other God but a
personal God ... Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He is
all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree
of learning in some field, they are qualified to express opinions in
all.' The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might
claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman
presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed
'fairyologist' on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he
and the bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained,
had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein
understood very well exactly what he was denying.
An American Roman Catholic lawyer, working on behalf of an ecumenical coalition, wrote to Einstein:
We deeply regret that you made your statement ... in which you
ridicule the idea of a personal God. In the past ten years nothing has
been so calculated to make people think that Hitler had some reason to
expel the Jews from Germany as your statement. Conceding your right to
free speech, I still say that your statement constitutes you as one of
the greatest sources of discord in America.
A New York rabbi said: 'Einstein is unquestionably a great
scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to
Judaism.'
'But'? 'But'? Why not 'and'?
The president of a historical society in New Jersey wrote a letter
that so damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is
worth reading twice:
We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you
do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found
through the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or
emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows,
religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person,
perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has
wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual
aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere
suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being;
(2) because I agree with the writer who said, 'There is a mean streak
in anyone who will destroy another's faith.' ... I hope, Dr Einstein,
that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more
pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do
you honor.
What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.
Less abject but more shocking was the letter from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma:
Professor
Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you,
'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ,
but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of
this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in
my power to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with
one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt the cause
of your people than all the efforts of the Christians who love Israel
can do to stamp out anti-Semitism in our land. Professor Einstein,
every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your
crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you
came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave
you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'
The one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein
was not one of them. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that
he was a theist. So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a
pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: 'I believe in
Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what
exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of
human beings'?
Let's remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a
supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating
the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and
influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic
belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He
answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by
performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we
do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a
supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to
setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The
deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific
interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural
God at all, but use the word God as a nonsupernatural synonym for
Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its
workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer
prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our
thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ
from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic
intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym
for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is
watered-down theism.
There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like 'God
is subtle but he is not malicious' or 'He does not play dice' or 'Did
God have a choice in creating the Universe?' are pantheistic, not
deistic, and certainly not theistic. 'God does not play dice' should be
translated as 'Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.'
'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the
universe have begun in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a
purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are
most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of
religious metaphor. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover
somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism -
for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of
money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a
scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion). . . .