Outgrowing God

by Richard Dawkins

  Abby: Well, I can apply the slippery slope argument to abortion, too. I agree that an early embryo can’t feel pain or fear or sorrow at being aborted. But there’s a slippery slope all the way to the moment of birth and beyond. If you allow abortion, isn’t there a risk of sliding down the slippery slope all the way past the moment of birth? Mightn’t we end up murdering one-year-old babies just because they are a nuisance? Then two-year-olds. And so on?

  Connie: Yes. I must say that sounds at first like a fair point. But the moment of birth is a pretty good barrier – a pretty good ‘safety railing’ – one that we are accustomed to respecting. Although it hasn’t always been so. In ancient Greece they would wait till a baby was born, take one look at it and then decide if they wanted to keep it. If not, they’d leave it out on a cold hillside to die. I’m so glad we don’t do that now. By the way, late abortions are very rare, and only done for urgent reasons, usually to save the mother’s life. The vast majority of abortions are early. And did you realize that many conceptions abort spontaneously without the woman even knowing she was pregnant?

  But actually, although I just used the slippery slope argument, I must admit that I prefer to do away with barriers and lines altogether. You absolutists want to draw a hard and fast line between human and non-human. Does an embryo become human at the moment of conception, when the sperm first joins the egg? Or at the moment of birth? Or at some point between, in which case precisely when? I prefer to ask a different question. Not ‘When does it become human?’ but ‘When does it become capable of feeling pain and emotion?’ And there is no sudden moment when that happens. It’s gradual.

  The same is true in evolutionary time. We don’t kill humans to eat them. We do kill pigs to eat them. Yet we are cousins to pigs, which means that, if we follow our ancestors backwards and pigs’ ancestors backwards, sooner or later we’ll hit the shared ancestor. Think back through our family tree. On the way to the ancestor we share with pigs, we’ll pass through ape men, monkey-like creatures and so on. Now, imagine that those ape-man species had not gone extinct. At what point would you say, ‘Right, that’s it, from now on back they aren’t human any more’? You are an absolutist who wants to draw an absolute line between humans and animals. But I’m a consequentialist who prefers not to draw lines at all, if we can avoid it. In this case my question would not be ‘Is this creature human?’ but ‘Can this creature suffer?’ And I presume some animals can suffer more than others. Including pigs, by the way.

  Abby: Your moral arguments seem logical. But even you have to start with some kind of absolutist belief. In your case you start by simply saying ‘Causing suffering is wrong.’ You offer no justification for that.

  Connie: Yes, I admit that. But I still think my absolutist belief that ‘Causing suffering is wrong’ makes more sense than your absolutist belief, ‘It says so in my holy book.’ I think if anybody were to torture you you’d pretty quickly agree.

  You can carry on the argument between Abby and Connie yourself. I hope I’ve taken it far enough to show you the kind of way moral philosophers argue. You’ve probably guessed that absolutists are often religious, although it’s not a hard and fast rule. The Ten Commandments are clearly absolutist. So, usually, is the very idea of living by a set of rules.

  It’s possible for non-religious philosophers to devise rule-based moralities, however. Various schools of moral philosophers, called deontologists, believe you can justify rules on grounds other than simply looking up statements in a holy book. For example, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated a rule called the Categorical Imperative: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ The key word here is ‘universal’. A rule encouraging stealing is ruled out, for example, because if it were universally adopted, that is, if everybody stole, no one would benefit: thieves prosper only in a society dominated by honest victims. If everybody told lies all the time, lying would cease to have meaning because there wouldn’t be any reliable truth to compare it with. A modern deontological theory proposes that we should devise our moral rules behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. Pretend you don’t know whether you are rich or poor, gifted or untalented, beautiful or ugly. Those facts lie concealed behind the imagined ‘veil of ignorance’. Now devise the system of values you’d like to live under, given that you can’t know whether you will be at the top of the heap or the bottom. Deontology is interesting, but I’ll say no more about it here in a book about religion.

  The argument about when, in the womb, a ‘person’ begins is very much a religious argument. Many religious traditions see the immortal soul as entering the body at some definite moment. Roman Catholics think it’s the moment of conception. The Catholic Doctrine of the Faith entitled Donum Vitae is very clear on the point:

  From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already…Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life.

  It would seem that whoever wrote that had never thought of the ‘identical twin’ argument: the one Connie the consequentialist used.

  You’ve probably guessed that my sympathies lie with Connie more than with Abby. I must admit, however, that consequentialist thought experiments sometimes lead in uncomfortable directions. Suppose a coal miner is trapped underground by a fall of rock. We could rescue him, but it would cost a lot of money. What else might we do with that money? We could save a lot more lives and reduce a lot more suffering by spending it on food for starving children around the world. Shouldn’t a true consequentialist abandon the poor miner to his fate, never mind his weeping wife and children? Maybe, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t bear to leave him underground. Could you? But it’s hard to justify the decision to rescue him on purely consequentialist grounds. Not impossible but hard.

  Let’s return to the main topic of this chapter. Do we need God in order to be good? I’ve spent quite a lot of time on moral philosophy, but moral philosophy is just one of the routes through which moral values change. Along with journalism, dinner-table conversations, debates in parliamentary chambers and student unions, legal judgments and so on, moral philosophy contributes to the shifting ‘something in the air’ which makes twenty-first-century morality different from, say, eighteenth-century morality, according to which slavery was a good thing. By the way, there seems no obvious reason for the trend to stop. What will twenty-second-century morality look like?

  Our modern morality, whether we are religious or not, is very different from biblical morality. Or Quranic morality. Thank goodness. And the Great Spy Camera in the Sky is surely not a praiseworthy reason to be good. So perhaps we should all give up the idea that we ‘need God in order to be good’.

  Would that mean we should all give up believing in God? No. Not for that reason alone. He might still exist even if we don’t need him in order to be good. A god could be bad by our own moral standards, like the God character we met in Chapter 4, and that still wouldn’t mean he can’t exist. Evidence is the only reason to believe in the existence of anything. Is there any evidence, any good evidence anywhere, for any kind of god or gods?

  I presume you don’t believe in almost all of the many gods listed in Chapter 1, or in the hundreds more that I didn’t mention. Chapters 2 and 3 might have convinced you that holy books like the Bible and the Quran don’t provide any good reason to believe in any gods. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 might have led you away from believing that religion is necessary for us to be good. But you might still cling to belief in some kind of higher power, some sort of creative intelligence who made the world and the universe and – perhaps above all – made living creatures, including us. I clung to such a belief myself until I was about 15, because I was so deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things. Especially by the fact that living
things look as though they must have been ‘designed’. I finally gave up on the very idea of any gods when I learned about evolution and the true explanation for why living things look designed. That explanation – Charles Darwin’s explanation – is as beautiful and subtle as the living things that it explains. But it takes time to develop. It will occupy most of Part Two of this book. But even that is not long enough to do justice to such a big subject. I hope it may interest you enough to lead you to other books on evolution.

  Imagine a gazelle out on the African savanna, running for its life away from a sprinting cheetah, whimpering out what may well be its last breath. Perhaps, like me, you sympathize with the gazelle. But the cheetah has hungry cubs. If she can’t catch prey she, and her cubs, will starve. Which might be a more unpleasant death than the gazelle’s swift one.

  If you’ve seen a film of a gazelle and a cheetah running – perhaps one of David Attenborough’s documentaries – you’ve probably noticed how beautifully, how elegantly designed both animals seem to be. Both of these muscular, taut-sprung bodies have ‘fast’ written all over them. The top speed of a cheetah is around 100 kilometres per hour. That’s about 60 miles per hour. Some reports even put the top speed as high as 70 mph, which is quite a feat when you have no wheels, only feet to propel you. And a cheetah can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds, which is about what a Tesla (in ‘insane mode’) or a Ferrari can do.

  The cheetah can’t keep it up for long. Cheetahs are sprinters, unlike wolves, who are long-distance runners. Although their top speed is slower (more like 40 mph), wolves persevere and can eventually run their prey down. Cheetahs need to stalk their prey until they are really close, close enough for a final, short sprint. Anything longer than a sprint exhausts them and they have to give up the chase. Gazelles can’t run as fast as cheetahs (again, about 40 mph), but they ‘jink’ (dodge from side to side) which makes it hard for a sprinting cheetah to catch them – especially because, when you are sprinting at very high speed, it is hard to turn.

  Like other antelopes, gazelles also ‘pronk’ when being chased. Pronking (or ‘stotting’) means leaping high into the air. This is surprising, because it must slow their progress and consume energy. It might be a signal to the cheetah: ‘Don’t bother to chase me, I’m a strong, fit gazelle who can leap high into the air. This probably also means I’m harder to catch than other gazelles. You’d be better off going for another member of my herd.’ The gazelle doesn’t think these arguments out. Its nervous system is just programmed to pronk, without understanding why. Whether by pronking or jinking, if a gazelle can evade capture for just long enough that the sprinting cheetah gets tired and has to stop, it’s safe. For another day.

  Both cheetahs and gazelles seem superbly ‘designed’. The spine of the cheetah bends way, way back, and then thrusts the other way, almost bending double, powering the legs in a frenzied gallop. Its lungs are unusually large for an animal that size. So are the nostrils and air tubes, because of the need to get lots of oxygen into the blood fast. The heart, too, is especially large, to pump plenty of that oxygen-rich blood to the muscles, frantic with effort. But, quite apart from the size of the heart, the fact of having a heart at all, having this complicated four-chambered pump working away constantly, is remarkable enough. The mathematics of heart pumping has been cleverly worked out. I won’t even try to explain it because it’s too complicated for me to understand myself.

  How did all this complexity come about? Must it have been designed by a mathematically minded genius? The answer is an emphatic, if surprising, no – and we’ll see why in the following chapters.

  Now think of the cheetah’s eye, menacingly fixed on its prey while it alternately crouches and creeps stealthily forward. Or the gazelle’s eye, restlessly scanning for lurking big cats. The vertebrate eye is a camera. A digital camera really because, instead of a film at the back, it has a retina with millions of tiny light-sensitive cells. We can call them photocells. Each photocell is connected, via a series of nerve cells, to the brain. There are several ‘maps’ of the retina in the brain. By ‘map’ I mean a corresponding pattern, so that cells next to each other in the brain are connected to photocells next to each other in the retina in the same orderly fashion, both side-to-side and up-and-down on the map.

  The resemblance to a camera goes further. The pupil is widened or narrowed by special muscles attached to the iris (the coloured part of the eye). You can see this if you look at your own eyes in a mirror. Hold a torch pointing at your left eye, and then switch it on while looking at the right eye in the mirror. You’ll see the pupil shrink. In an automatic camera, too, the ‘iris diaphragm’ (even the name comes from the eye) opens or closes just the right amount to let the right amount of light in. It shrinks the aperture when the sun comes out. Expands it when the sun goes in. Exactly like the iris in the eye. The pupil doesn’t have to be round, like ours, by the way. Gazelle pupils are horizontal slits. Cat pupils are vertical slits in bright light, widening to circles when light levels are low. What matters is that the pupil, and the muscles surrounding it, control how much light gets into the eye. Incidentally, the image on the retina is upside down. Can you see why that doesn’t matter? Why it doesn’t mean the world looks upside down to us?

  Again like a camera, an eye contains a lens that can be focused on near objects and then refocused on distant objects – or, of course, anywhere in between. Cameras and fish eyes do it by moving the lens back and forth. The eyes of cheetahs, gazelles, humans and other mammals do it in a less obvious way. They change the shape of the lens itself, using special muscles attached to the lens. Chameleons, which have independently swivelling eyes on little conical turrets, can focus the two eyes independently (using the fish/camera method, not the lens-squeezing method), and they judge the distance to a target, such as a fly, by measuring what they have to do to focus on it. The fly then doesn’t know what hit it. In fact what hit it – at great speed – was the chameleon’s tongue, which (amazingly) is longer than the chameleon itself, shooting out explosively like a sticky harpoon. The tongue harpoon is then reeled in, complete with the doomed insect stuck to the tip.

  Chameleons and cheetahs have something in common. Both stalk their prey slowly and stealthily until they are close enough. Close enough for what? In the cheetah’s case, for a final, explosive sprint. In the chameleon’s case there is a kind of final sprint, too. But the sprint is by the tongue alone while the body stays rock steady. You remember the cheetah accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds? The chameleon’s tongue has the equivalent of 300 times that acceleration. But it hits (or misses) the fly long before it actually reaches 60 mph. After all, the tongue is only (only!) slightly longer than the chameleon’s whole body, so there isn’t time to reach 60 mph, even at that phenomenal rate of acceleration.

  Once again, this all looks as though it demands a designer, doesn’t it? Once again, it really doesn’t, as we’ll see in the next chapters.

  Exactly how the chameleon’s tongue works has long been a bit of a mystery. One early suggestion was that it was inflated by hydraulic pressure, like an erecting penis only much faster. The hydraulic method is also used by jumping spiders (lovable little creatures which leap high into the air, having belayed themselves to the ground with a silk thread). Blood is pumped violently into the legs, which abruptly straighten and shoot the spider upwards. Butterfly and moth tongues work like that, too. They are coiled up at rest, then uncoiled by hydraulic pressure like a ‘party horn’ – one of those toys you blow into, and it shoots out into somebody’s face, often making a blaring noise.

  Although it’s partly wrong, that hydraulic theory did get one thing right: the chameleon tongue is hollow. But instead of containing only fluid under pressure, it also contains a long, stiff, lubricated spike called the hyoid process. Obviously the tongue is much longer than the hyoid spike. So the resting tongue has to be accommodated in folds around the spike. Wrapped round and round are strong m
uscles. This fact naturally suggested the next theory of how the tongue works – again wrong, but closer to the truth. This was the theory that when the muscles contract around the hyoid spike the lubricated hollow tongue is squeezed outwards from its telescopic folds. Like when you squeeze an orange pip (seed) and it shoots off. That’s almost what happens. But not quite.

  The thing is, no muscle can contract fast enough to deliver the ‘insane’ acceleration of the chameleon tongue. For that sort of acceleration, the energy provided by the muscles needs to be stored ahead of time and then released later. That’s how catapults work. And crossbows and longbows. Your arm muscles aren’t capable of throwing an arrow very fast, but a bendy bow is. Your arm muscles slowly pull the bowstring back and the muscular energy is stored in the bending bow. Then the stored energy is suddenly released when your fingers let go, and the arrow shoots off much faster and more lethally than you could possibly throw it. The energy originally came from your muscles slowly pulling. The release of the energy is postponed and sudden: stored in the bow. In a catapult, the energy of your arm muscles is stored in the stretched elastic.

  How does stored energy power the chameleon’s tongue? The muscles around the hyoid spike do indeed provide the energy to shoot the tongue out. But, as with a catapult or bow, that energy is stored. It’s stored in an elastic sheath which lies between the muscle and the well-lubricated hyoid spike. It’s this elastic sheath, rather than the muscles themselves, which ‘squeezes the orange pip’ when finally the spring-loaded mechanism is suddenly released and the harpoon tongue shoots out: much faster because of the elastic sheath than it would be if the muscles squeezed the ‘orange pip’ directly.

  The tongue is not sharp, like a harpoon. Instead, it has a sort of knob on the end. The knob is sticky and it has a suction cup. This sticks to the poor insect, which is then reeled into the chameleon’s mouth by a different set of muscles called the retractor muscles. The knob is a relatively heavy projectile, whereas the rest of the tongue is more like a dangly rope. The knob travels ‘ballistically’ – which means that, once it has been launched, it’s no longer under the chameleon’s control. Just like the stone from a catapult or the arrow from a bow. Or indeed a harpoon, which it more strongly resembles because, like the chameleon’s tongue, it remains tethered to the launching apparatus. An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is so called because, once launched, it’s on its own. As opposed to a guided missile, whose course is corrected while in flight, to help it home in on the target.