(4) Preface to the paperback edition

Bespreekt reacties op de oorspronkelijke hardcover editie.

"As Daniel Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell, a bafflingly large number of intellectuals ‘believe in belief’ even though they lack religious belief themselves. These vicarious second-order believers are often more zealous than the real thing, their zeal pumped up by ingratiating broad-mindedness: ‘Alas, I can’t share your faith but I respect and sympathize with it.’"(5)

[Ja, walgelijk. Pseudo-tolerantie.]

Hij noemt kort de belangrijkste kritieken op zijn boek die op zijn website verschenen.

"You can’t criticize religion without a detailed analysis of learned books of theology. (...) I would happily have forgone bestseller-dom if there had been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question of whether God exists. The vast majority of theological writings simply assume that he does, and go on from there. For my purposes, I need consider only those theologians who take seriously the possibility that God does not exist and argue that he does." [mijn nadruk] (6)

"The next criticism is a related one: the great ‘straw man’ offensive. You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. (...) To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini."(8)

"I’m an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language. (...) The strongest language to be found in The God Delusion is tame and measured by comparison. If it sounds intemperate, it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime. (...) But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a ‘rant’." [mijn nadruk] (9-11)

"You are only preaching to the choir. What’s the point? (...) even taking it at face value there are good answers. One is that the non-believing choir is a lot bigger than many people think, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks I received all over North America on my book tour, the encouragement that people like Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and me are able to give is greatly appreciated. (...) Atheists as well as theists unconsciously observe society’s convention that we must be especially polite and respectful to faith. And I never tire of drawing attention to society’s tacit acceptance of the labelling of small children with the religious opinions of their parents." [mijn nadruk] (12)

"You are just as much of a fundamentalist as those you criticize. No, please, it is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.(...) It is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist’s equally passionate commitment to evidence. (...) My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"I’m an atheist myself, but religion is here to stay. Live with it. (...) I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is sometimes downright gleeful. I don’t think it’s masochism. More probably, we can put it down to ‘belief in belief’ again. These people may not be religious themselves, but they love the idea that other people are religious. This brings me to my final category of naysayers."(16)

"I’m an atheist myself, but people need religion.(...) What patronizing condescension! ‘You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion.’ (...) Isaac Asimov’s remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’. (...) Obviously there are exceptions, but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realize that non-belief is even an option. This is certainly true of most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been properly taught Darwin’s astounding alternative. Probably the same is true of the belittling myth that people ‘need’ religion." [mijn nadruk] (16-20)

(20) Preface

"You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages. I also want to raise consciousness in three other ways, which I’ll come on to." [mijn nadruk] (21)

"Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it."(22)

Beschrijving van de inhoud van het boek.

"Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind."(25)

(33) Chapter 1 - A deeply religious non-believer

Deserved respect

"A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief."(34)

"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."(36)

[Dat heb ik zelf letterlijk zo meegemaakt. Alsof sensitiviteit in combinatie met diepgaande gevoelens en gedachten voor het universum, de natuur, de mens, ook maar iets te maken heeft met religie. Het is de strategie van toeëigening.]

"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."(39)

"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."(39)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (41)

"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."(48)

"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."(49)

Undeserved respect

"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." [mijn nadruk] (50)

"I have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in public discussions of ethics in the media and in government. 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?"(53)

[Het foutieve idee dat moraal ook maar iets met religie te maken heeft, dat gelovigen weten wat goed en slecht is, en zo verder. ]

"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."(57)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (63)

(63) Chapter 2 - The god hypothesis

"I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion."(65)

Polytheism

"It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. But it widely is – an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism." [mijn nadruk] (66)

"Far better, of course, would be to abandon the promotion of religion altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that could fairly be described as obscene."(67)

"But that is not the way of this book. I decry supernaturalism in all its forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on the form most likely to be familiar to my readers – the form that impinges most threateningly on all our societies. Most of my readers will have been reared in one or another of today’s three ‘great’ monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism), all of which trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham, and it will be convenient to keep this family of traditions in mind throughout the rest of the book."(73)

Monotheism

"Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version with which I happen to be most familiar. For my purposes the differences matter less than the similarities. And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life."(76)

Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America

"Yet another hypothesis is that the religiosity of America stems paradoxically from the secularism of its constitution. Precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise. Rival churches compete for congregations – not least for the fat tithes that they bring – and the competition is waged with all the aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace."(82)

"The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified. Whether or not it is right to embrace the paradox and blame the secular constitution that they devised, the founders most certainly were secularists who believed in keeping religion out of politics, and that is enough to place them firmly on the side of those who object, for example, to ostentatious displays of the Ten Commandments in government-owned public places."(84)

"Meanwhile I turn to agnosticism, and the erroneous notion that the existence or non-existence of God is an untouchable question, forever beyond the reach of science."(92)

The poverty of agnosticism

"There is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence one way or the other. It is the reasonable position.(...) Agnosticism, of a kind, is an appropriate stance on many scientific questions, such as what caused the end-Permian extinction, the greatest mass extinction in fossil history."(93)

"The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions that can never be answered, no matter how much evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. The question exists on a different plane, or in a different dimension, beyond the zones where evidence can reach.(94)"

"... some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced – too eagerly in my view – that the question of God’s existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God’s existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right. The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability."(95)

"But Huxley, in his concentration upon the absolute impossibility of proving or disproving God, seems to have been ignoring the shading of probability. The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing."(99)

"Contrary to Huxley, I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice." [mijn nadruk] (99)

"Russell’s point is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds against." [mijn nadruk] (105)

"That you cannot prove God’s non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter."(106)

NOMA

"Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?"(110)

"Similarly, we can all agree that science’s entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up?" [mijn nadruk] (111)

"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful."(115)

The great prayer experiment

"More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain’s three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his weight behind an initiative, funded by – of course – the Templeton Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for sick patients improves their health."(120)

"The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise."(123)

"Needless to say, the negative results of the experiment will not shake the faithful."(127)

The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists

"Far from respecting the separateness of science’s turf, creationists like nothing better than to trample their dirty hobnails all over it. And they fight dirty, too. Lawyers for creationists, in court cases around the American boondocks, seek out evolutionists who are openly atheists. I know – to my chagrin – that my name has been used in this way. It is an effective tactic because juries selected at random are likely to include individuals brought up to believe that atheists are demons incarnate, on a par with pedophiles or ‘terrorists’ (today’s equivalent of Salem’s witches and McCarthy’s Commies)." [mijn nadruk] (131)

Little green men

"Suppose Bertrand Russell’s parable had concerned not a teapot in outer space but life in outer space – the subject of Sagan’s memorable refusal to think with his gut. Once again we cannot disprove it, and the only strictly rational stance is agnosticism. But the hypothesis is no longer frivolous. We don’t immediately scent extreme improbability. We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens."(135)

(141) Chapter 3 - Arguments for god’s existence

Thomas Aquinas’ ‘proofs’

"The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous."(142)

"To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading."(144)

"The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. (...) Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance."(146)

The ontological argument and other a priori arguments

"Arguments for God’s existence fall into two main categories, the a priori and the a posteriori. Thomas Aquinas’ five are a posteriori arguments, relying upon inspection of the world. The most famous of the a priori arguments, those that rely upon pure armchair ratiocination, is the ontological argument, proposed by St Anselm of Canterbury in 1078 and restated in different forms by numerous philosophers ever since."(147)

[Dat ontologische argument is net zo'n spelletje met woorden als de Sofisten én Plato zo vaak uithaalden. Argumenteren met vage begrippen zodat je overal uit kunt komen. Bah.]

The argument from beauty

"But the logic behind it is never spelled out, and the more you think about it the more vacuous you realize it to be. Obviously Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare."(157)

"If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents. It is simply assumed to be self-evident, which it most certainly is not."(159)

The argument from personal ‘experience’

"Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him – or of an angel or a virgin in blue – with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology."(160)

"Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination."(167)

"That is really all that needs to be said about personal ‘experiences’ of gods or other religious phenomena. If you’ve had such an experience, you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings."(169)

The argument from scripture

"The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’ Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus’ life. All were then copied and recopied, through many different ‘Chinese Whispers generations’ (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas. A good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents."(170)

"Sophisticated Christians do not need Ira Gershwin to convince them that ‘The things that you’re li’ble / To read in the Bible / It ain’t necessarily so’. But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there who think it absolutely is necessarily so – who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting their religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don’t they notice those glaring contradictions?"(173)

"Other refreshingly iconoclastic books of biblical criticism are Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version, already mentioned, and Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously."(175)

"It will be said that nobody believes crude miracle stories such as those in the Gospel of Thomas anyway. But there is no more and no less reason to believe the four canonical gospels. All have the status of legends, as factually dubious as the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table."(176)

"Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity."(177)

[De bijbel als autoriteit. Dat we daar zelfs maar bij stil moeten staan ... ]

The argument from admired religious scientists

"‘Newton was religious. Who are you to set yourself up as superior to Newton, Galileo, Kepler, etc. etc. etc.? If God was good enough for the likes of them, just who do you think you are?’ Not that it makes much difference to such an already bad argument, ... "(178)

"Great scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the twentieth century, but they are not particularly rare. I suspect that most of the more recent ones are religious only in the Einsteinian sense which, I argued in Chapter 1, is a misuse of the word. Nevertheless, there are some genuine specimens of good scientists who are sincerely religious in the full, traditional sense."(180)

"The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound of bottoms of barrels being scraped."(182)

Pascal’s wager

"Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception."(189)

"Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn’t God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging?" [mijn nadruk] (190)

[Prachtig.]

Bayesian arguments

"Unwin is a risk management consultant who carries a torch for Bayesian inference, as against rival statistical methods. He illustrates Bayes’ Theorem by taking on, not a murder, but the biggest test case of all, the existence of God."(194)

"God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument, as I shall show in the next chapter, demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed."(198)

(198) Chapter 4 - Why there almost certainly is no god

The ultimate Boeing 747

"The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument – but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.(...) The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist’s favourite argument – an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn’t understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas – in the relevant sense of chance – it is the opposite." [mijn nadruk] (199)

Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser

"Who, before Darwin, could have guessed that something so apparently designed as a dragonfly’s wing or an eagle’s eye was really the end product of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes?"(205)

Irreducible complexity

"Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power."(215)

"Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for the ‘jackpot or nothing’ fallacy is ‘irreducible complexity’ (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn’t. Either the wing flies or it doesn’t. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice – which is exactly what we should expect in theory."(217)

"The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.’ Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin’s time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis."(222)

The worship of gaps

"It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.(...) More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding." [mijn nadruk] (223)

"But in any case, note yet again the unwarranted use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the default assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition, therefore God must have intervened."(227)

"Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God. The speedy resort to a dramatic proclamation of ‘irreducible complexity’ represents a failure of the imagination. Some biological organ, if not an eye then a bacterial flagellar motor or a biochemical pathway, is decreed without further argument to be irreducibly complex. No attempt is made to demonstrate irreducible complexity."(228)

"Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’."(230)

"Without a word of justification, explanation or amplification, Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favour of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness on behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose ‘intelligent design’ creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school – a move of ‘breathtaking inanity’, to quote Judge Jones (phrase and man surely destined for lasting fame). This wasn’t the only embarrassment Behe suffered at the hearing, as we shall see." [mijn nadruk] (233)

The anthropic principle: Planetary version

"What the religious mind then fails to grasp is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one. The anthropic principle is the other. They are alternatives."(244)

"Of all the apparent gaps in the evolutionary story, the origin of life gap can seem unbridgeable to brains calibrated to assess likelihood and risk on an everyday scale: the scale on which grant-giving bodies assess research proposals submitted by chemists. Yet even so big a gap as this is easily filled by statistically informed science, while the very same statistical science rules out a divine creator on the ‘Ultimate 747’ grounds we met earlier."(248)

"The evolution of life is a completely different case from the origin of life because, to repeat, the origin of life was (or could have been) a unique event which had to happen only once. The adaptive fit of species to their separate environments, on the other hand, is millionfold, and ongoing." [mijn nadruk] (250)

The anthropic principle: Cosmological version

"Biologists, with their raised consciousness of the power of natural selection to explain the rise of improbable things, are unlikely to be satisfied with any theory that evades the problem of improbability altogether. And the theistic response to the riddle of improbability is an evasion of stupendous proportions."(258)

"A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. (...) Not all theologians go as far as Swinburne. Nevertheless, the remarkable suggestion that the God Hypothesis is simple can be found in other modern theological writings."(268)

An interlude at Cambridge

"Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who was I, a scientist, to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific arguments, such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own field, were inappropriate since theologians had always maintained that God lay outside science."(276)

"The theologians of my Cambridge encounter were defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not. Who was I to say that rational argument was the only admissible kind of argument? There are other ways of knowing besides the scientific, and it is one of these other ways of knowing that must be deployed to know God. The most important of these other ways of knowing turned out to be personal, subjective experience of God." [mijn nadruk] (277)

[Ook een manier om je immuun te maken voor kritiek. Ik voel het zo, dus is het zo.]

"To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery."(280)

"If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion – the God Hypothesis – is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far. Various questions now follow. Even if we accept that God doesn’t exist, doesn’t religion still have a lot going for it? Isn’t it consoling? Doesn’t it motivate people to do good? If it weren’t for religion, how would we know what is good? Why, in any case, be so hostile? Why, if it is false, does every culture in the world have religion? True or false, religion is ubiquitous, so where does it come from? It is to this last question that we turn next."(286)

(286) Chapter 5 - The roots of religion

The darwinian imperative

"Everybody has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all human cultures have it. It gives consolation and comfort. It fosters togetherness in groups. It satisfies our yearning to understand why we exist. I shall come to explanations of this kind in a moment, but I want to begin with a prior question, one that takes precedence for reasons we shall see: a Darwinian question about natural selection.
Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion. The question gains urgency from standard Darwinian considerations of economy. Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. (...) Nature cannot afford frivolous jeux d’esprit. Ruthless utilitarianism trumps, even if it doesn’t always seem that way." [mijn nadruk] (287)

"If anting wasn’t positively useful for survival and reproduction, natural selection would long ago have favoured individuals who refrained from it. A Darwinian might be tempted to say the same of religion; hence the need for this discussion."(289)

[Dat vind ik echt onzin: er is meer dan biologisch / evolutionair nut.]

"The fact that religion is ubiquitous probably means that it has worked to the benefit of something, but it may not be us or our genes. It may be to the benefit of only the religious ideas themselves, to the extent that they behave in a somewhat gene-like way, as replicators. I shall deal with this below, under the heading ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my memes’. Meanwhile, I press on with more traditional interpretations of Darwinism, in which ‘benefit’ is assumed to mean benefit to individual survival and reproduction." [mijn nadruk] (291)

Direct advantages of religion

"There is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from stress-related diseases. (...) In George Bernard Shaw’s words, ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.’"(294)

[Haha, prachtige uitspraak van Shaw.]

"At the very least, the consolation theory needs to be translated into Darwinian terms, and that is harder than you might think. Psychological explanations to the effect that people find some belief agreeable or disagreeable are proximate, not ultimate, explanations."(297)

[Waarom zou dat moeten? Alleen als je het biologische nut wil aantonen.]

"If neuroscientists find a ‘god centre’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me will still want to understand the natural selection pressure that favoured it. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god centre survive to have more grandchildren than rivals who didn’t?"(298)

Group selection

Het idee dat natuurlijke selectie ook groepen kan betreffen, waardoor een religieuze groep biologisch voordelen heeft boven een niet-religieuze groep.

"Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution. When it is pitted against selection at lower levels – as when group selection is advanced as an explanation for individual self-sacrifice – lower-level selection is likely to be stronger."(301)

[Dat bevat wel erg veel vooronderstellingen over natuurlijke selectie. Wordt dat allemaal gestaafd door onderzoek?]

Religion as a by-product of something else

"Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does. I find it helpful to introduce the by-product idea with an analogy from my own field of animal behaviour."(304)

"But my point is that we may be asking the wrong question. The religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. On this view, the propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se; it had some other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself as religious behaviour. We shall understand religious behaviour only after we have renamed it.
If, then, religion is a by-product of something else, what is that something else?"(308)

"For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that ‘Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but ‘You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail’ is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about morality and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children – nonsense as well as sense – using the same infectious gravitas of manner." [mijn nadruk] (312)

[Dat laat de vraag onbeantwoord waarom ouders hun kinderen allerlei zinloze irrationele adviezen zouden geven naast de werkelijk nuttige.]

"Religious leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the importance of getting the indoctrination in early."(314)

"The ethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions – many by-products, I should say, for the anthropologists especially are concerned to emphasize the diversity of the world’s religions as well as what they have in common."(314)

Psychologically primed for religion

"The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology."(318)

"One especially intriguing possibility mentioned by Dennett is that the irrationality of religion is a by-product of a particular built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain: our tendency, which presumably has genetic advantages, to fall in love."(327)

[Wat een gespeculeer ... ]

"We happily accept that we can love more than one child, parent, sibling, teacher, friend or pet. When you think of it like that, isn’t the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love positively weird? Yet it is what we expect, and it is what we set out to achieve. There must be a reason.
Helen Fisher and others have shown that being in love is accompanied by unique brain states, including the presence of neurally active chemicals (in effect, natural drugs) that are highly specific and characteristic of the state. Evolutionary psychologists agree with her that the irrational coup de foudre could be a mechanism to ensure loyalty to one co-parent, lasting for long enough to rear a child together. From a Darwinian point of view it is, no doubt, important to choose a good partner, for all sorts of reasons. But, once having made a choice – even a poor one – and conceived a child, it is more important to stick with that one choice through thick and thin, at least until the child is weaned.
Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?" [mijn nadruk] (328)

[Een voorbeeld van de eenzijdige benadering in de evolutionaire psychologie. Alsof er geen sociale en culturele invloeden zijn ... ]

"The equivalent of the moth’s light-compass reaction is the apparently irrational but useful habit of falling in love with one, and only one, member of the opposite sex. The misfiring by-product – equivalent to flying into the candle flame – is falling in love with Yahweh (or with the Virgin Mary, or with a wafer, or with Allah) and performing irrational acts motivated by such love."(332)

[Jammer. Dit kun je toch niet meer serieus nemen. En daarmee geef je de vijand (de gelovigen) weer alle wapens in handen.]

"An anthropological survey such as Frazer’s Golden Bough impresses us with the diversity of irrational human beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution."(335)

[Waarom zou dat aan de evolutie doen denken? Bovendien is nog steeds niet de vraag beantwoord hoe en waarom die irrationele opvattingen oorspronkelijk ontstaan zijn. Omdat een module in de hersenen een kortsluiting heeft gehad of zo? Een ineens waren die opvattingen er bij iemand? En die beïnvloedde anderen? En daarna werd het onderdeel van de socialisatie? Tjonge jonge. ]

Tread softly, because you tread on my memes

"This chapter began with the observation that, because Darwinian natural selection abhors waste, any ubiquitous feature of a species – such as religion – must have conferred some advantage or it wouldn’t have survived. But I hinted that the advantage doesn’t have to redound to the survival or reproductive success of the individual.(...) And it doesn’t even have to be genes that benefit. Any replicator will do. Genes are only the most obvious examples of replicators. Other candidates are computer viruses, and memes – units of cultural inheritance and the topic of this section."

[Die meme's moeten blijkbaar toch op biologische fenomenen lijken. Terwijl er voor 'cultural inheritance' natuurlijk allerlei zinvolle sociologische en antropologische verklaringen bestaan. ]

"I am not saying that memes necessarily are close analogues of genes, only that the more like genes they are, the better will meme theory work; and the purpose of this section is to ask whether meme theory might work for the special case of religion."(341)

"Nevertheless, it is not obviously silly to speak of a meme pool, in which particular memes might have a ‘frequency’ which can change as a consequence of competitive interactions with alternative memes."(342)

[Het is alleen overbodig en misleidend. Net zo overbodig en misleidend als over het betaan van een god praten.]

"My original purpose in advocating memes, indeed, was to counter the impression that the gene was the only Darwinian game in town – an impression that The Selfish Gene was otherwise at risk of conveying. Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd emphasize the point in the title of their valuable and thoughtful book Not by Genes Alone, although they give reasons for not adopting the word ‘meme’ itself, preferring ‘cultural variants’. Stephen Shennan’s Genes, Memes and Human History was partly inspired by an earlier excellent book by Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Other book-length treatments of memes include Robert Aunger’s The Electric Meme, Kate Distin’s The Selfish Meme, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie.
But it is Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine, who has pushed memetic theory further than anyone."

"The invisible hand of natural selection fills the gap. (...) The idea of cooperating cartels assembled by the invisible hand will turn out to be central to our understanding of religious memes and how they work."(353)

[O, net als de inzichtbare hand in de economie? En waarschijnlijk even onzinnig en speculatief? ]

"A memeplex is a set of memes which, while not necessarily being good survivors on their own, are good survivors in the presence of other members of the memeplex."(354)

"The role of genetic natural selection in the story is to provide the brain, with its predilections and biases – the hardware platform and low-level system software which form the background to memetic selection."(359)

[Ontzettend veel onhelder geklets hier. En hoeveel van wat er beweerd wordt is onderbouwd met onderzoek?]

Cargo cults

[Het blijft totaal onhelder hoe dat ontstaan van religies en sektes samenhangt met memes.]

(369) Chapter 6 - The roots of morality: why are we good?

"Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good. I shall discuss such questions in this chapter. But the doubts go further, and drive some religious people to paroxysms of hatred against those who don’t share their faith. This is important, because moral considerations lie hidden behind religious attitudes to other topics that have no real link with morality." [mijn nadruk] (370)

"This chapter is about evil, and its opposite, good; about morality: where it comes from, why we should embrace it, and whether we need religion to do so."(376)

"Several books, including Robert Hinde’s Why Good is Good, Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil, Robert Buckman’s Can We Be Good Without God?, and Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, have argued that our sense of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past. This section is my own version of the argument."(377)

"Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? Isn’t goodness incompatible with the theory of the ‘selfish gene’? No. This is a common misunderstanding of the theory ... "(377)

[Nog even afgezien van de vraag waarom we moreel gedrag zouden moeten terugvoeren op biologie en evolutie: ik vind heel dat taalgebruik op dit terrein veel te antropomorf. Genen 'zorgen ervoor dat' en zo meer. Alsof ze bewust iets nastreven. Natúúrlijk krijg je misverstanden als je een gen 'selfish' noemt. En ook dat gespring van dierengedrag naar het gedrag van mensen alsof er geen verschillen zijn is ergerlijk.]

"In general, as my late colleague W. D. Hamilton showed, animals tend to care for, defend, share resources with, warn of danger, or otherwise show altruism towards close kin because of the statistical likelihood that kin will share copies of the same genes." [mijn nadruk] (380)

"We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other. First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising." [mijn nadruk] (386)

[Moraal omvat meer dan altruïstisch en aardig zijn voor anderen.]

A case study in the roots of morality

Verwijzingen naar Hauser en zijn trolley-dilemma's.

"Where Hauser goes beyond the philosophers is that he actually does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal)." [mijn nadruk] (392)

[Wie namen er deel aan die onderzoeken? Was de spreiding ook universeel, m.a.w. namen er mensen aan deel uit alle mogelijke landen en groepen en culturen? En wat voor dilemma's legde hij voor aan die mensen? Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat iedereen dezelfde morele beslissingen zou nemen. Maar Dawkins heeft dat nodig om te kunnen zeggen dat moreel besef / geweten / etc. 'hardwired' is. Er zullen ongetwijfeld hersencellen bij betrokken zijn. Maar om nu te spreken van een soort van Universal Grammar zoals bij taal ... Zeer eenzijdig toch. Alsof alles in hersenen vastligt, terwijl hersenen onder invloed van de sociale en culturele omgeving voortdurend veranderen. Gelukkig verdwijnt al dat evolutionaire gezever hierna vele bladzijden naar de achtergrond en wordt het boek weer prettiger om te lezen.]

"As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them."(392)

"Hauser’s point is that such moral intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them strongly anyway, because of our evolutionary heritage."(396)

[Nou, je kunt nogal wat kritiek leveren op Hausers befaamde dilemma's. Ze zijn in veel opzichten niet levensecht. ]

If there is no god, why be good?

"As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.’"(399)

[Precies. ]

"Perhaps naïvely, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing – whether by God or by each other – in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance – and nor, dear reader, do you."(401)

"Such research evidence as there is certainly doesn’t support the common view that religiosity is positively correlated with morality. Correlational evidence is never conclusive, but the following data, described by Sam Harris in his Letter to a Christian Nation, are nevertheless striking.
While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the ‘red [Republican] states’ are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in ‘blue’ [Democrat] states, and 38 percent are in ‘red’ [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.
Systematic research if anything tends to support such correlational data. Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared seventeen economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that ‘higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies’."(404-405)

"The springboard for this discussion of moral philosophy was a hypothetical religious claim that, without a God, morals are relative and arbitrary."(412)

[Wat gewoonweg onzin is. ]

(412) Chapter 7 - The ‘good’ book and the changing moral zeitgeist

"There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America’s boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as – to use the contemporary jargon – a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find – I can put it no more gently – obnoxious.(...) Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed." [mijn nadruk] (412-413)

The old testament

"Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not."(423)

"All I am establishing is that modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad – a privileged source unavailable to atheists. They cannot get away with it, not even if they employ that favourite trick of interpreting selected scriptures as ‘symbolic’ rather than literal. By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal?"(430)

"As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.’ Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’"(435)

Is the new testament any better?

"Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis."(437)

"Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus’ ethical teachings were – at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament – admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of ‘atonement’ for ‘original sin’."(437)

"The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to have passed down the male line – transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?"(439)

Love thy neighbour

"Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness – its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity’s natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out-groups – would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world."(458)

The moral zeitgeist

"This chapter began by showing that we do not – even the religious among us – ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion."(459)

[Dat is opvallend kortzichtig. Die moraal is natuurlijk niet gebaseerd op de bijbel als zodanig maar op hoe autoriteiten die bijbel interpreteren, hoe die autoritatieve interpretaties binnen de gemeenschappen worden overgedragen en afgedwongen, hoe de sociale controle vervolgens werkt om generatie na generatie aan die interpretaties te binden, en zo verder. Zo'n 'heilig boek' is maar één ding, de 'organisatie' rondom een geloof een ander ding. Veel belangrijker is wat bepaalde mensen er van maken. ]

"One way to express our consensual ethics is as a ‘New Ten Commandments’. Various individuals and institutions have attempted this. What is significant is that they tend to produce rather similar results to each other, and what they produce is characteristic of the times in which they happen to live. Here is one set of ‘New Ten Commandments’ from today, which I happened to find on an atheist website.
Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
In all things, strive to cause no harm.
Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
Always seek to be learning something new.
Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
Question everything."(461)

[Daar kan ik me aardig in vinden. :-)]

"In my own amended Ten Commandments, I would choose some of the above, but I would also try to find room for, among others:
Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Value the future on a timescale longer than your own."(463)

[Daar kan ik ook mee leven ... ]

Volgt een groot stuk over veranderende waarden en normen door de jaren heen, door Dawkins gekoppeld aan 'Zeitgeist'.

"Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion. If forced to advance a theory, I would approach it along the following lines. We need to explain why the changing moral Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction." [mijn nadruk] (473)

[Nee hè, niet weer natuurlijke selectie en zo, hoop ik.]

"It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter of observed fact, it does move, and it is not driven by religion – and certainly not by scripture. It is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces like the one that propels Moore’s Law, describing the exponential increase in computer power. Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good."(476)

[O gelukkig, dat valt weer mee. ]

What about Hitler and Stalin? weren’t they atheists?

[Wat een onzinnig argument ... En waarom moet het weer over Hitler en Stalin gaan? Zo simplistisch. Laten we het eens over alle miljardairs of over Amerikaanse presidenten hebben ... ]

"Either Hitler’s professions of Christianity were sincere, or he faked his Christianity in order to win – successfully – cooperation from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the evils of Hitler’s regime can hardly be held up as flowing from atheism."(485)

"Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it? A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakeable faith that one’s own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises that the soldiers of God will go straight to a martyrs’ heaven." [mijn nadruk] (489)

(489) Chapter 8 - What’s wrong with religion? why be so hostile?

"I do not, by nature, thrive on confrontation. I don’t think the adversarial format is well designed to get at the truth, and I regularly refuse invitations to take part in formal debates.(...) In particular, for reasons explained in A Devil’s Chaplain, I never take part in debates with creationists."(490)

[Dat kan ik me goed voorstellen. ]

"But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: ‘Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?’ I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common."(491)

Fundamentalism and the subversion of science

"Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books." [mijn nadruk] (492)

"It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can’t see it – or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book.(...) But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming." [mijn nadruk] (494)

"As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect." [mijn nadruk] (495)

"Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue." [mijn nadruk] (500)

The dark side of absolutism

"It has to be admitted that absolutism is far from dead. Indeed, it rules the minds of a great number of people in the world today, most dangerously so in the Muslim world and in the incipient American theocracy (see Kevin Phillips’s book of that name). Such absolutism nearly always results from strong religious faith, and it constitutes a major reason for suggesting that religion can be a force for evil in the world." [mijn nadruk] (500)

Faith and homosexuality

"What kind of an electorate could, term after term, vote in a man of such ill-informed bigotry as Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina? A man who has sneered: ‘The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.’ The answer, I suppose, is the kind of electorate that sees morality in narrowly religious terms and feels threatened by anybody who doesn’t share the same absolutist faith."(507)

"Attitudes to homosexuality reveal much about the sort of morality that is inspired by religious faith. An equally instructive example is abortion and the sanctity of human life."(509)

Faith and the sanctity of human life

"Human embryos are examples of human life. Therefore, by absolutist religious lights, abortion is simply wrong: fully fledged murder. I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life.(...) The contemplation of embryos really does seem to have the most extraordinary effect upon many people of faith."(510-511)

[Dat heb ik ook altijd gevonden: wel tegen abortus, maar niet tegen de doodstraf, tegen geweld, tegen oorlogen, en zeker ook niet tegen dodelijke aanvallen op abortusklinieken, abortusartsen, en zo meer. Het is zo hypocriet als wat. Een embryo is onschuldig, weet je wel.]

"Slippery slope arguments might be seen as a way in which consequentialists can reimport a form of indirect absolutism. But the religious foes of abortion don’t bother with slippery slopes. For them, the issue is much simpler. An embryo is a ‘baby’, killing it is murder, and that’s that: end of discussion. Much follows from this absolutist stance. For a start, embryonic stem-cell research must cease, despite its huge potential for medical science, because it entails the deaths of embryonic cells." [mijn nadruk] (514)

"A certain kind of religious mind cannot see the moral difference between killing a microscopic cluster of cells on the one hand, and killing a full-grown doctor on the other."(515)

The great Beethoven fallacy

"The anti-abortionist’s next move in the verbal chess game usually goes something like this. The point is not whether a human embryo can or cannot suffer at present. The point lies in its potential. Abortion has deprived it of the opportunity for a full human life in the future. This notion is epitomized by a rhetorical argument whose extreme stupidity is its only defence against a charge of serious dishonesty. I am speaking of the Great Beethoven Fallacy, which exists in several forms."(522)

"As the Medawars were entirely right to point out, the logical conclusion to the ‘human potential’ argument is that we potentially deprive a human soul of the gift of existence every time we fail to seize any opportunity for sexual intercourse. Every refusal of any offer of copulation by a fertile individual is, by this dopey ‘pro-life’ logic, tantamount to the murder of a potential child!"(526)

How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism

"There are, then, people whose religious faith takes them right outside the enlightened consensus of my ‘moral Zeitgeist’. They represent what I have called the dark side of religious absolutism, and they are often called extremists. But my point in this section is that even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes."(531)

"The respected journalist Muriel Gray, writing in the (Glasgow) Herald on 24 July 2005, made a similar point, in this case with reference to the London bombings.
Everyone is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim ‘communities’. But it has never been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn’t so.
Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against ‘terror’, as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure ‘evil’. But they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them." [mijn nadruk] (534)

"The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’" [mijn nadruk] (536)

"The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism." [mijn nadruk] (537)

"More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them – given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by – to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades." [mijn nadruk] (540)

(541) Chapter 9 - Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion

"Amazingly for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn’t have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter."(544)

"To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd – but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place."(549)

"Even without physical abduction, isn’t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? Yet the practice persists to this day, almost entirely unquestioned. To question it is my main purpose in this chapter."(550)

Physical and mental abuse

"Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place."(553)

In defence of children

"Scientists may think it is nonsense to teach astrology and the literal truth of the Bible, but there are others who think the opposite, and aren’t they entitled to teach it to their children? Isn’t it just as arrogant to insist that children should be taught science?
I thank my own parents for taking the view that children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think."(570)

An educational scandal

"The rest of Layfield’s lecture is nothing less than a propaganda manual, a resource for religious teachers of biology, chemistry and physics who wish, while remaining just inside the guidelines of the national curriculum, to subvert evidence-based science education and replace it with biblical scripture."(587)

Consciousness-raising again

"How could any decent person think it right to label four-year-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their parents?"(590)

[Waar, maar dat geldt natuurlijk ook voor hun sociale en politieke en wat voor opvattingen dan ook. Punt is dat biologische ouders het recht hebben hun kinderen 'op te voeden' binnen bepaalde grenzen die de samenleving stelt (fysiek geweld bijvoorbeeld). De moderne overheid wil zich niet bezig houden met de opvattingen die die ouders hun kinderen dag in dag uit influisteren en weigert zelfs om de godsdienstvrijheid op te heffen of het onderwijs te versterken. Als je niet wilt dat ouders hun kinderen zelf opvoeden moet je de opvoeding door de staat laten doen en centraliseren, ook niet zo'n geweldig alternatief. Misschien moeten we tevoren maar een speciale IQ-test afnemen bij mensen die vader en moeder willen worden en iedereen die irrationale neigingen en opvattingen heeft meteen laten weten dat ze óf geen kinderen mogen krijgen óf hun kinderen in ieder geval niet zelf mogen opvoeden. Dat zou pas boeiend worden.]

Religious education as a part of literary culture

"Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to convince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage." [mijn nadruk] (602)

[Het eerste wel, het tweede punt niet zo. Maar ik zie huwelijk en begrafenis ook niet als religieuze rituelen. Waarom Dawkins wel? ]

(602) Chapter 10 - A much needed gap?

"Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science, and I have dealt with it in Chapter 4. By exhortation I mean moral instruction on how we ought to behave, and I covered that in Chapters 6 and 7. I have not so far done justice to consolation and inspiration, and this final chapter will briefly deal with them."(603)

Binker

"If the testimony of their adult selves is to be believed, at least some of those normal children who have imaginary friends really do believe they exist, and, in some cases, see them as clear and vivid hallucinations. I suspect that the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults. I do not know whether psychologists have studied it from this point of view, but it would be a worthwhile piece of research. Companion and confidant, a Binker for life: that is surely one role that God plays – one gap that might be left if God were to go."(606)

"A being may exist only in the imagination, yet still seem completely real to the child, and still give real comfort and good advice. Perhaps even better: imaginary friends – and imaginary gods – have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. And they are much cheaper than psychiatrists or professional counsellors."(608)

"Gods and binkers have in common the power to comfort, and provide a vivid sounding board for trying out ideas. We have not moved far from Chapter 5’s psychological by-product theory of the evolution of religion."(612)

Consolation

"The first thing to say in response to this is something that should need no saying. Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst – none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true."(612)

"I shall end this book by arguing, on the contrary, that it is an understatement to say that one can lead a happy and fulfilled life without supernatural religion. First, though, I must examine the claims of religion to offer consolation." [mijn nadruk] (615)

"If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder."(622)

[Onder invloed van al die religieus getinte wetgeving die er is.]

"In the same vein, what are we to make of the observation of a senior nurse of my acquaintance, with a lifetime’s experience in running a home for old people, where death is a regular occurrence? She has noticed over the years that the individuals who are most afraid of death are the religious ones." [mijn nadruk] (623)

"There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove."(627)

Inspiration

"As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something."(629)

The mother of all burkas

"One of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is the image of a woman swathed in shapeless black from head to toe, peering out at the world through a tiny slit. The burka is not just an instrument of oppression of women and claustral repression of their liberty and their beauty; not just a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cowed female submission. I want to use the narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else."(631)