The God Delusion

1 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER \ I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the \ structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to \ appreciate it.\ \ —Albert Einstein \ \ DESERVED RESPECT \ \ 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 withsupernatural \ 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).3 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'.4 \ 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).\ Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from \ Einstein himself: 'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced \ there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and \ sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is \ religiousness. In this sense I am religious.' In this sense I too am religious, \ with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever \ ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is \ misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of \ people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl Sagan put it well: '. . . if by "God" \ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly \ there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not \ make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.' \ Amusingly, Sagan's last point was foreshadowed by the Reverend \ Dr Fulton J. Sheen, a professor at the Catholic University of America, as part \ of a fierce attack upon Einstein's 1940 disavowal of a personal God. Sheen \ sarcastically asked whether anyone would be prepared to lay down his life for \ the Milky Way. He seemed to think he was making a point against Einstein, \ rather than for him, for he added: 'There is only one fault with his cosmical \ religion: he put an extra letter in the word – the letter "s".' There is nothing \ comical about Einstein's beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would \ refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The \ metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the \ interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-\ answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary \ language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of \ intellectual high treason.\ \ \ * Our sport during lessons was to sidetrack him away from scripture and \ towards stirring tales of Fighter Command and the Few. He had done war \ service in the RAF and it was with familiarity, and something of the affection \ that I still retain for the Church of England (at least by comparison with the \ competition), that I later read John Betjeman's poem: Our padre is an old sky \ pilot, Severely now they've clipped his wings, But still the flagstaff in the \ Rect'ry garden Points to Higher Things . . .\ \ \ \ \ UNDESERVED RESPECT \ \ My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the \ other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to \ get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity \ to confuse. In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, \ of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the \ God of the Old Testament. I shall come to him in a moment. But before \ leaving this preliminary chapter I need to deal with one more matter that \ would otherwise bedevil the whole book. This time it is a matter of etiquette. \ It is possible that religious readers will be offended by what I have to say, and \ will find in these pages insufficient respect for their own particular beliefs (if \ not the beliefs that others treasure). It would be a shame if such offence \ prevented them from reading on, so I want to sort it out here, at the outset.\ A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society \ accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially \ vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of \ respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should \ pay to any other. Douglas Adams put it so well, in an impromptu speech \ made in Cambridge shortly before his death,5 that I never tire of sharing his \ words: \ \ Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy \ or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not \ allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? – because \ you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're \ free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument \ but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or \ down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if \ somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I \ respect that'.\ Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the \ Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this \ model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have \ an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the \ Universe . . . no, that's holy? . . . We are used to not challenging religious \ ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he \ does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed \ to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why \ those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we \ have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.\ \ Here's a particular example of our society's overweening respect \ for religion, one that really matters. By far the easiest grounds for gaining \ conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant \ moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of \ war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be \ a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents \ is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and \ illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.\ At the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a \ pusillanimous reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In \ Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' \ and 'Loyalists' respectively. The very word 'religions' is bowdlerized \ to 'communities', as in 'intercommunity warfare'. Iraq, as a consequence of \ the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, degenerated into sectarian civil war \ between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Clearly a religious conflict – yet in the \ Independent of 20 May 2006 the front-page headline and first leading article \ both described it as 'ethnic cleansing'. 'Ethnic' in this context is yet another \ euphemism. What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original \ usage of 'ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a \ euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats \ and Muslim Bosnians.6 \ I have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in \ public discussions of ethics in the media and in government.7 Whenever a \ controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that \ religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently \ represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or \ television. I'm not suggesting that we should go out of our way to censor the \ views of these people. But why does our society beat a path to their door, as \ though they had some expertise comparable to that of, say, a moral \ philosopher, a family lawyer or a doctor?\ Here's another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 \ February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a church in New \ Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, \ against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.8 Faithful members of the Centro \ Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God \ only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug \ dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug \ enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. \ Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and \ discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet the Supreme \ Court ruled, in 2005, that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal \ purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states \ where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. \ Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that \ they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their \ understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church \ claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such \ is the power of religion as a talisman.\ Seventeen years ago, I was one of thirty-six writers and artists \ commissioned by the magazine New Statesman to write in support of the \ distinguished author Salman Rushdie,9 then under sentence of death for \ writing a novel. Incensed by the 'sympathy' for Muslim 'hurt' and 'offence' \ expressed by Christian leaders and even some secular opinion-formers, I \ drew the following parallel: \ \ If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim – for \ all I know truthfully – that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A \ good part of the opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use \ claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational \ justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is \ that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected \ to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and \ you infringe 'religious liberty'.\ \ Little did I know that something pretty similar would come to pass \ in the twenty-first century. The Los Angeles Times (10 April 2006) reported \ that numerous Christian groups on campuses around the United States were \ suing their universities for enforcing anti-discrimination rules, including \ prohibitions against harassing or abusing homosexuals. As a typical \ example, in 2004 James Nixon, a twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right \ in court to wear a T-shirt to school bearing the words 'Homosexuality is a sin, \ Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!'10 \ The school told him not to wear the T-shirt – and the boy's parents sued the \ school. The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it \ on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn't: \ indeed, they couldn't, because free speech is deemed not to include 'hate \ speech'. But hate only has to prove it is religious, and it no longer counts as \ hate. So, instead of freedom of speech, the Nixons' lawyers appealed to the \ constitutional right to freedom of religion. Their victorious lawsuit was \ supported by the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, whose business it is \ to 'press the legal battle for religious freedom'.\ The Reverend Rick Scarborough, supporting the wave of similar \ Christian lawsuits brought to establish religion as a legal justification for \ discrimination against homosexuals and other groups, has named it the civil \ rights struggle of the twenty-first century: 'Christians are going to have to \ take a stand for the right to be Christian.'11 Once again, if such people took \ their stand on the right to free speech, one might reluctantly sympathize. But \ that isn't what it is about. The legal case in favour of discrimination against \ homosexuals is being mounted as a counter-suit against alleged religious \ discrimination! And the law seems to respect this. You can't get away with \ saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my \ freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my \ freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet \ again, religion trumps all.\ I'll end the chapter with a particular case study, which tellingly \ illuminates society's exaggerated respect for religion, over and above ordinary \ human respect. The case flared up in February 2006 – a ludicrous episode, \ which veered wildly between the extremes of comedy and tragedy. The \ previous September, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve \ cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Over the next three months, \ indignation was carefully and systematically nurtured throughout the Islamic \ world by a small group of Muslims living in Denmark, led by two imams who \ had been granted sanctuary there.12 In late 2005 these malevolent exiles \ travelled from Denmark to Egypt bearing a dossier, which was copied and \ circulated from there to the whole Islamic world, including, importantly, \ Indonesia. The dossier contained falsehoods about alleged maltreatment of \ Muslims in Denmark, and the tendentious lie that Jyllands-Posten was a \ government-run newspaper. It also contained the twelve cartoons which, \ crucially, the imams had supplemented with three additional images whose \ origin was mysterious but which certainly had no connection with Denmark. \ Unlike the original twelve, these three add-ons were genuinely offensive – or \ would have been if they had, as the zealous propagandists alleged, depicted \ Muhammad. A particularly damaging one of these three was not a cartoon at \ all but a faxed photograph of a bearded man wearing a fake pig's snout held \ on with elastic. It has subsequently turned out that this was an Associated \ Press photograph of a Frenchman entered for a pig-squealing contest at a \ country fair in France.13 The photograph had no connection whatsoever with \ the prophet Muhammad, no connection with Islam, and no connection with \ Denmark. But the Muslim activists, on their mischief-stirring hike to Cairo, \ implied all three connections . . . with predictable results.\ The carefully cultivated 'hurt' and 'offence' was brought to an \ explosive head five months after the twelve cartoons were originally \ published. Demonstrators in Pakistan and Indonesia burned Danish flags \ (where did they get them from?) and hysterical demands were made for the \ Danish government to apologize. (Apologize for what? They didn't draw the \ cartoons, or publish them. Danes just live in a country with a free press, \ something that people in many Islamic countries might have a hard time \ understanding.) Newspapers in Norway, Germany, France and even the \ United States (but, conspicuously, not Britain) reprinted the cartoons in \ gestures of solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, which added fuel to the flames. \ Embassies and consulates were trashed, Danish goods were boycotted, \ Danish citizens and, indeed, Westerners generally, were physically \ threatened; Christian churches in Pakistan, with no Danish or European \ connections at all, were burned. Nine people were killed when Libyan rioters \ attacked and burned the Italian consulate in Benghazi. As Germaine Greer \ wrote, what these people really love and do best is pandemonium.14 \ A bounty of $1 million was placed on the head of 'the Danish \ cartoonist' by a Pakistani imam – who was apparently unaware that there \ were twelve different Danish cartoonists, and almost certainly unaware that \ the three most offensive pictures had never appeared in Denmark at all (and, \ by the way, where was that million going to come from?). In Nigeria, Muslim \ protesters against the Danish cartoons burned down several Christian \ churches, and used machetes to attack and kill (black Nigerian) Christians in \ the streets. One Christian was put inside a rubber tyre, doused with petrol \ and set alight. Demonstrators were photographed in Britain bearing banners \ saying 'Slay those who insult Islam', 'Butcher those who mock \ Islam', 'Europe you will pay: Demolition is on its way' and, apparently without \ irony, 'Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion'.\ In the aftermath of all this, the journalist Andrew Mueller \ interviewed Britain's leading 'moderate' Muslim, Sir Iqbal Sacranie.15 \ Moderate he may be by today's Islamic standards, but in Andrew Mueller's \ account he still stands by the remark he made when Salman Rushdie was \ condemned to death for writing a novel: 'Death is perhaps too easy for him' – \ a remark that sets him in ignominious contrast to his courageous \ predecessor as Britain's most influential Muslim, the late Dr Zaki Badawi, \ who offered Salman Rushdie sanctuary in his own home. Sacranie told \ Mueller how concerned he was about the Danish cartoons. Mueller was \ concerned too, but for a different reason: 'I am concerned that the ridiculous, \ disproportionate reaction to some unfunny sketches in an obscure \ Scandinavian newspaper may confirm that . . . Islam and the west are \ fundamentally irreconcilable.' Sacranie, on the other hand, praised British \ newspapers for not reprinting the cartoons, to which Mueller voiced the \ suspicion of most of the nation that 'the restraint of British newspapers \ derived less from sensitivity to Muslim discontent than it did from a desire not \ to have their windows broken'.\ Sacranie explained that 'The person of the Prophet, peace be \ upon him, is revered so profoundly in the Muslim world, with a love and \ affection that cannot be explained in words. It goes beyond your parents, \ your loved ones, your children. That is part of the faith. There is also an \ Islamic teaching that one does not depict the Prophet.' This rather assumes, \ as Mueller observed,\ \ that the values of Islam trump anyone else's – which is what any follower of \ Islam does assume, just as any follower of any religion believes that theirs is \ the sole way, truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher \ more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to \ take it seriously . . .\ \ Except that if you don't take it seriously and accord it proper respect you are \ physically threatened, on a scale that no other religion has aspired to since \ the Middle Ages. One can't help wondering why such violence is necessary, \ given that, as Mueller notes: 'If any of you clowns are right about anything, \ the cartoonists are going to hell anyway – won't that do? In the meantime, if \ you want to get excited about affronts to Muslims, read the Amnesty \ International reports on Syria and Saudi Arabia.' \ Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical 'hurt' \ professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish \ stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan against \ the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed carrying a \ banner reading 'God Bless Hitler'.\ In response to all this frenzied pandemonium, decent liberal \ newspapers deplored the violence and made token noises about free speech. \ But at the same time they expressed 'respect' and 'sympathy' for the \ deep 'offence' and 'hurt' that Muslims had 'suffered'. The 'hurt' and 'suffering' \ consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or real pain of any \ kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in a newspaper that \ nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but for a deliberate \ campaign of incitement to mayhem.\ I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of \ it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of \ religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to \ disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defence. What \ is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect? \ As H. L. Mencken said: 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only \ in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is \ beautiful and his children smart.' \ It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for \ religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my \ way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more \ gently than I would handle anything else.\ \ Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton \ Mifflin Company.

CONTENTSPreface 11 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER 9 Deserved respect 11 Undeserved respect 202 THE GOD HYPOTHESIS 29 Polytheism 32 Monotheism 37 Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America 38 The poverty of agnosticism 46 NOMA 54 The Great Prayer Experiment 61 The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists 66 Little green men 693 ARGUMENTS FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE 75 Thomas Aquinas’ ‘proofs’ 77 The ontological argument and other a priori arguments 80 The argument from beauty 86 The argument from personal ‘experience’ 87 The argument from scripture 92 The argument from admired religious scientists 97 Pascal’s Wager 103 Bayesian arguments 1054 WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD 111 The Ultimate Boeing 747 113 Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser 114 Irreducible complexity 119 The worship of gaps 125 The anthropic principle: planetary version 134 The anthropic principle: cosmological version 141 An interlude at Cambridge 1515 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 161 The Darwinian imperative 163 Direct advantages of religion 166 Group selection 169 Religion as a by-product of something else 172 Psychologically primed for religion 179 Tread softly, because you tread on my memes 191 Cargo cults 2026 THE ROOTS OF MORALITY: WHY ARE WE GOOD? 209 Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? 214 A case study in the roots of morality 222 If there is no God, why be good? 2267 THE ‘GOOD’ BOOK AND THE CHANGING MORAL ZEITGEIST 235 The Old Testament 237 Is the New Testament any better? 250 Love thy neighbour 254 The moral Zeitgeist 262 What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren’t they atheists? 2728 WHAT’S WRONG WITH RELIGION? WHY BE SO HOSTILE? 279 Fundamentalism and the subversion of science 282 The dark side of absolutism 286 Faith and homosexuality 289 Faith and the sanctity of human life 291 The Great Beethoven Fallacy 298 How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism 3019 CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION 309 Physical and mental abuse 315 In defence of children 325 An educational scandal 331 Consciousness-raising again 337 Religious education as a part of literary culture 34010 A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 345 Binker 347 Consolation 352 Inspiration 360 The mother of all burkas 362Appendix: A partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion 375 Books cited or recommended 380 Notes 388 Index 400

\ From Barnes & NobleEvolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins is not an atheist who sits quietly in the pews. The scientist Discover dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler" refuses to regard religion as mere harmless nonsense; he views it instead as one of humanity's most pernicious creations. In The God Delusion, he attacks arguments for the existence of God; accuses religions of fomenting divisiveness, war, and bigotry and castigates believers in intelligent design.\ \ \ \ \ Jim HoltWhat Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio.\ — The New York Times\ \ \ Publishers WeeklyThe antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it. (Oct. 18) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalIn this hard-hitting critique of religious belief, Dawkins (Oxford Univ.) explains why the belief in God is both wrong and dangerous. Unlike his past works that only touch on the subject (e.g., The Selfish Gene; The Blind Watchmaker), this book is thorough and pulls no punches. Dawkins starts his "attack" by covering the various definitions of God as well as nearly every classical argument for the existence of God. He then proceeds to build his case based on a Darwinian/scientific perspective of why he believes there is no God, period. He concludes by offering a scientific explanation for religious belief but not before treating religious-based morality to his rapierlike criticisms. While he does acknowledge that many of his criticisms would also apply to political or sociocultural beliefs, he does not take that line of thought any further, which is a shame. Nonetheless, both fans of Dawkins and his many opponents will want to read this book. Recommended for all academic libraries and larger public libraries with an interest in the topic. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/06.]-Brad S. Matthies, Butler Univ. Lib., Indianapolis Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsDawkins's passionate disavowal of religion and his "I can no other answer make" statement that he is an atheist-and why you should be, too. Dawkins, eminent Oxford scholar, defender of evolution (The Ancestor's Tale, 2004) and spokesman for science (Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998), delivers ten chapters arguing the non-existence of god, along with documentation of the atrocities religions have wrought. This is exceptional reading-even funny at times. (A footnote declaims that in the promise of 72 virgins to Muslim martyrs, "virgins" is a mistranslation of "white raisins of crystal clarity.") By God, Dawkins means a supernatural creator of the universe, the prayer-listener and sin-punisher, and not the vague metaphoric god some invoke to describe the forces that govern the universe. Accordingly, Dawkins focuses heavily on the monotheistic religions with quotations from the Bible and Koran that sanction genocide, rape and the killing of unbelievers. Dawkins is concerned about fundamentalism in America, a phenomenon that stigmatizes atheists and is at odds with the Founding Fathers who ordained the separation of church and state. (Jefferson said, "The Christian God . . . is cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.") He worries that we abuse the vulnerability of children (who are primed via natural selection to trust elders) by indoctrinating them in religions they are too young to understand. Indeed, natural selection is Dawkins's strong card to explain why you don't need a god to account for the diversity, complexity and grandeur of the natural world. In other chapters, he uses evolutionary psychology and game theory to account for why we don't need a god to be good. He also conjectures thatreligion may have arisen as a byproduct of the ways our brains have evolved, and he invokes "memeplexes" (pools of memes, the cultural analogues of genes) to account for the spread of religious ideas. You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do. Bible-thumpers doubtless will declare they've found their Satan incarnate.\ \ \ \ \ From the Publisher“You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do.” —-Kirkus Starred Review\ \