David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

These comical declarations may be abbreviated by observing that Atkins is persuaded that not only is science a very good thing, but no other thing is good at all.

Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things. “Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate,” Victor Stenger affirms, “that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach.” What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise. Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings. They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to count them at all. It is, as science writer Tom Bethell notes, “an article of our secular faith that there is nothing exceptional about human life.”

The thesis that we are all nothing more than vehicles for a number of “selfish genes” has accordingly entered deeply into the simian gabble of academic life, where together with materialism and moral relativism it now seems as self-evident as the law of affirmative action. To anyone who has enjoyed the spectacle of various smarmy insects shuffling along the tenure track at Harvard or Stanford, the idea that we are all simply “survival machines” seems oddly in conflict with the correlative doctrine of the survival of the fittest. This would not be the first time that an ideological system in conflict with the facts has found it prudent to defer to itself.

And with predictably incoherent results. After comparing more than two thousand DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist, Dean Hamer, concluded that a person’s capacity to believe in God is linked to his brain chemicals. Of all things! Why not his urine? Perhaps it will not be amiss to observe that Dr. Hamer has made the same claim about homosexuality, and if he has refrained from arguing that a person’s capacity to believe in molecular genetics is linked to a brain chemical, it is, no doubt, owing to a prudent sense that once that door is open, God knows how and when anyone will ever slam it shut again.

Neither scientific credibility nor sound good sense is at issue in any of these declarations. They are absurd; they are understood to be absurd; and what is more, assent is demanded just because they are absurd. “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, “ in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories” (my emphasis).

Why should any discerning man or woman take the side of science, or anything else, under these circumstances? It is because, Lewontin explains, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

If one is obliged to accept absurdities for fear of a Divine Foot, imagine what prodigies of effort would be required were the rest of the Divine Torso found wedged at the door and with some justifiable irritation demanding to be let in?

If nothing else, the attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives. They are, these narratives, immensely seductive, so much so that looking at them with innocent eyes requires a very deliberate act. And like any militant church, this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

It is this that is new; it is this that is important.

WHETHER GOD exists—that is one question. Whether belief in his existence plays an important role in human life—that is another. “Religion’s power to console,” Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “doesn’t make it true.” Perhaps this is so, but only a man who has spent a good deal of time snoring on the down of plenty could be quite so indifferent to the consolations of religion, wherever and however they may be found. One wonders, in any case, why religion has the power to console and why it has had this power over the course of human history.

Writing about the arts and their degraded state, Camille Paglia begins by affirming that she is a “professed atheist.” She is nonetheless persuaded that “a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack.” The connection between what she sees (a good deal that is awful) and what she believes (There is no God) is not one that she is inclined to make. When faced with irreconcilable alternatives, she proposes to straddle the difference, a position as difficult in thought as it is uncomfortable in gymnastics. Her calls for the study of comparative religion at least afford the consumer the luxury of choice without the penalty of commitment. “I view each world religion,” she writes, “as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe.”

I daresay that a telescope does a better job in revealing the size of the universe than any of the world religions, and if sublimity is wanted, it is hardly to be expected from a system of thought assumed to be false.

There remains another possibility. There may in fact be a connection between the importance of religious belief in life and the existence of the Deity in reality.

Not a logical connection, no. But a connection nonetheless, and so a clue.

And let us be honest: When it comes to clues, we could all use a few more.

During the living centuries of the Arab empire, a magnificent series of stellar observatories glittered like jewels throughout the archipelago of its conquests. The observatory played an important role in the religious life of devout Moslems. It was not— it was never —the expression of disinterested curiosity. More so than either Jews or Christians, men of the Moslem faith were called upon carefully to mark the schedule of their devotions. The art devoted to such concerns was known as the ilm al-miqât. And an art it was. During the Middle Ages, the Moslem world, for all its luxury and sophistication, had no more access to sophisticated clocks than the Christian world, and in the Christian West, men kept time so carelessly that even the arrival of the Easter holidays was a matter of profound uncertainty. Caliphs in Baghdad counted time by means of either a water clock or an hourglass, and yet the Koran commanded fivefold prayers each day, and it commanded the faithful to face the shrine of Kaaba in Mecca as they prayed—tasks requiring considerable mental dexterity. The Islamic calendar was based on the phases of the moon. The community preparing to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, which marks the beginning of the lunar year, would need to spot the crescent moon just as it shed its blush in the evening sky. Before the creation of sophisticated astronomical tables, men with exceptionally sharp eyesight were sent to distant mountaintops to spot the moon’s appearance; their cries then echoed down through the valleys and thence by a chain of cries back to Baghdad itself. (In France, the night of the crescent moon is still called la nuit de doute —the night of doubt.) By the thirteenth century, these scientific chores were assigned to professionals, the so-called muwaqqit. Resident in mosques, they were responsible for regulating the time of prayer. “In Islam, as in no other religion,” the historian David King has remarked, “the performance of various aspects of religious ritual has been assisted by scientific procedure.”