Science in the Soul

by Richard Dawkins

  That is precisely what a modern ‘smart missile’ can do. Computer miniaturization has advanced to the point where one of today’s smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Center. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf War, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative?

  In the Second World War, before electronics became cheap and miniature, the psychologist B. F. Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the missile, the target would be for real.

  The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US authorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinner’s boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the southern end of Manhattan island. The pigeon has no idea that it is guiding a missile. It just keeps on pecking at those two tall rectangles on the screen, from time to time a food reward drops out of the dispenser, and this goes on until…oblivion.

  Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance systems, but there’s no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And no such missile large enough to do much damage could penetrate US airspace without being intercepted. What is needed is a missile that is not recognized for what it is until too late. Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous markings of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel. That’s the easy part. But how do you smuggle on board the necessary guidance system? You can hardly expect the pilots to surrender the left-hand seat to a pigeon or a computer.

  How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons? Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

  The natural assumption that the hijacker ultimately values his own life too, and will act rationally to preserve it, leads air crews and ground staff to make calculated decisions that would not work with guidance modules lacking a sense of self-preservation. If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining. A rational pilot complies with the hijacker’s wishes, gets the plane down on the ground, has hot food sent in for the passengers and leaves the negotiations to people trained to negotiate.

  The problem with the human guidance system is precisely this. Unlike the pigeon version, it knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction. Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man’s resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly? What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn’t mind being blown up. He’d make the perfect on-board guidance system. But suicide enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming.

  Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this – it’s a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don’t be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn’t appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there’s a special martyr’s reward of seventy-two virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.

  Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for seventy-two private virgins in the next.

  It’s a tall story, but worth a try. You’d have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.

  Facetious? Trivializing an unspeakable evil? That is the exact opposite of my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by deep grief and fierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don’t mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one’s own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

  If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?

  There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organization or priesthood, it is very, very cheap.

  Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliché: mindless cowardice. ‘Mindless’ may be a suitable word for the vandalizing of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on 11 September 2001. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

  It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

  * * *

  * Reactions to the religious crime now universally known as 9/11 were varied and passionate. I wrote several, of which this was the first, published in the Guardian just four days after the event.

  The theology of the tsunami*1

  I HAVE NEVER FOUND the problem of evil very persuasive as an argument against the existence of deities. There seems to be no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good. The question for me is why one thinks any God, good or evil or indifferent, exists at all. Most of the Greek pantheon sported very human vices, and the ‘jealous God’ of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction.*2 Tsunamis wo
uld be just up his street, and the more misery and mayhem, the better. I have always thought the ‘problem of evil’ was a relatively trivial difficulty for theists, compared to the argument from improbability, which is a genuinely powerful, indeed, knockdown argument against the very existence of all forms of unevolved creative intelligence.

  Nevertheless, my experience is that godly people who show no evidence of even beginning to understand the argument from improbability are reduced to quivering embarrassment, if not outright loss of faith, when confronted with a natural disaster or a major pestilence. Earthquakes, in particular, have traditionally shaken people’s faith in a deity, and December’s tsunami provoked a lot of agonized soul-searching on the question: ‘How can religious people explain something like this?’ The most prominent apparent quaverer was the archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican communion. It turned out that he had been traduced by the Daily Telegraph, a notoriously irresponsible and mischievous newspaper and one of several published in London that devoted many column inches to this knotty theological conundrum. The archbishop had not in fact said that the tsunami shook his own faith, only that he could sympathize with those who did have doubts.

  The most famous precedent, several commentators reminded us, is the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which deeply disturbed Kant and provoked Voltaire’s mockery of Leibniz, and his philosophical optimism, in Candide. The Guardian published a flurry of letters to the editor, headed by one from the bishop of Lincoln, who asked God to preserve us from religious people who try to ‘explain’ the tsunami. Other letter writers attempted just that. One clergyman conceded that there was no intellectual answer, just hints of an explanation that ‘will only be found in a life lived by faith, prayer, contemplation and Christian action’. Another clergyman cited the Book of Job, and thought he had found the beginnings of an explanation for suffering in Paul’s idea that the whole universe was experiencing something akin to the pains of a woman in childbirth: ‘The argument for the existence of God from design would be fatally flawed if the universe were seen as complete already. Religious believers see the totality of experience as part of a greater narrative moving towards an as yet unimaginable goal.’

  Is this the kind of thing theologians are paid to do? At least he didn’t sink to the level of a professor of theology in my university, who once suggested, during a televised discussion with me and my colleague Peter Atkins, among others, that the Holocaust was God’s way of giving the Jews the opportunity to be brave and noble. That remark prompted Dr Atkins to growl, ‘May you rot in hell!’

  My own initial response to the correspondence on the tsunami was published on 30 December:

  The Bishop of Lincoln (Letters, December 29) asks to be preserved from religious people who try to explain the tsunami disaster. As well he might. Religious explanations for such tragedies range from loopy (it’s payback for original sin) through vicious (disasters are sent to try our faith) to violent (after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, heretics were hanged for provoking God’s wrath). But I’d rather be preserved from religious people who give up on trying to explain, yet remain religious.

  In the same batch of letters, Dan Rickman says ‘science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can’. There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word ‘why’ does plate tectonics not provide the answer?

  Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.

  Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

  Letters to the editor necessarily have to be brief, and I failed to insure myself against the obvious charge of callousness. Among the onslaught that flooded the letters page the next day, one woman wondered what comfort science could offer to a parent whose child had been swept out to sea. Three letters were from doctors, who could justly claim more experience of human suffering than I could match. One of them deployed a bizarrely literal-minded interpretation of Darwinism: ‘If I were an atheist, I can’t imagine why I should bother to help anyone whose genes might compete with mine.’ Another lashed petulantly out at science ‘cloning sheep or cats’. The third attacked me personally, describing me as his personal bogeyman: ‘the atheist version of a door-stepping Jehovah’s Witness. An ayatollah without a deity – God help us.’

  I don’t usually come back for a second go, but I was anxious to dispel wanton misunderstanding, so I sent in another letter which was published the following day:

  It is true that science cannot offer the consolations that your correspondents attribute to prayer, and I am sorry if I seemed a callous ayatollah or a doorstepping bogeyman (Letters, December 31). It is psychologically possible to derive comfort from sincere belief in a nonexistent illusion, but – silly me – I thought believers might be disillusioned with an omnipotent being who had just drowned 125,000 innocent people (or an omniscient one who failed to warn them). Of course, if you can derive comfort from such a monster, I would not wish to deprive you.

  My naive guess was that believers might be feeling more inclined to curse their God than pray to him, and maybe there’s some dark comfort in that. But I was trying, however insensitively, to offer a gentler and more constructive alternative. You don’t have to be a believer. Maybe there’s nobody there to curse. Maybe we are on our own, in a world where plate tectonics and other natural forces occasionally cause appalling catastrophes. Science cannot (yet) prevent earthquakes, but science could have provided just enough warning of the Boxing Day tsunami to save most of the victims and spare the bereaved. Even worse, lowland floodings of the future are threatened by global warming which is preventable by human action, guided by science. And if the comforts afforded by outstretched human arms, warm human words and heartbroken human generosity seem puny against the agony, they at least have the advantage of existing in the real world.

  One of the most popular religious responses to natural disasters is ‘Why me?’ It underlay several of the replies to the first of my letters to the Guardian. The correct answer, ‘Unfortunately you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ is admittedly not much comfort. The world is divided into those who can see that the capacity to comfort has no bearing on the truth of a cosmic claim and those who cannot. When I, as a professional educator, meet one of the latter, I come close to despair.

  AFTERWORD

  If apparently undeserved natural disasters pose a challenge to the religious, apparently undeserved good fortune may be said to pose an equal and opposite challenge to the non-religious: whom are we to thank? And why, indeed, do we want to give thanks, just as we want to blame someone or something for our misfortunes? In a lecture I gave at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010, I suggested a Darwinian explanation for these impulses of gratitude and resentment based on the evolution of a sense of ‘fairness’.*3

  When a hurricane destroys our house but spares the house of a really vile criminal, we are overcome by a feeling of unfairness. When a twister roars across the plain and suddenly veers sideways in the nick of time, just when it was about to hit our town, we feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. We feel an urge to thank somebody, or some thing. Perhaps we don’t thank the hurricane itself (which we have the sense to realise isn’t listening), but we might thank ‘Providence’ or ‘Fate’ or something that we might call ‘God’ or ‘the gods’ or ‘Allah’, or whatever name our society gives to the target of such gratitude. And if the twister doesn’t veer out of the way, and does destroy our house and kill our family, we may then cry out to the same god or gods, and perhaps say something like, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ Or we mi
ght say, ‘This must be my punishment for sinning, this is the payback for my sins.’

  Disasters can also, strangely enough, be the subject of gratitude. Hundreds of thousands of people may die, in an earthquake or a tsunami, yet if one child is lost, presumed dead, and then discovered clinging to a piece of driftwood, the parents will feel an overwhelming urge to thank somebody, or some thing, that their child was restored to them after being presumed dead.

  The urge to feel ‘grateful’ in a vacuum, when there’s nobody there to thank, is very strong. Animals sometimes perform complicated patterns of behaviour in a vacuum – they are even called ‘vacuum activities’. The most spectacular example I know is from a German film I once saw of a beaver. This was a captive beaver, but I must first remind you of something that wild beavers do. They build dams, mostly of logs or branches, which they cut to size using their very sharp gnawing teeth and push into the growing dam. You might wonder why they build dams, by the way. The reason is that the dam makes a lake or pond, which helps them to find their food without being eaten. Beavers probably don’t understand why they do it. They just do it without thinking, because they have a mechanism in the brain that goes off like clockwork. They are like little dam-building robots. The clockwork behaviour patterns that form the components of dam-building routines are quite complicated and very different from the movements that any other animal does – because no other animal builds dams.

  Now, the beaver in the German film was a captive beaver, which had never built a real dam in its life. It was filmed in a bare room, with a bare cement floor: no river to dam, and no wood to dam it with. But, amazingly, this poor lonely beaver went through all the motions of building a dam in a vacuum. It would pick up phantom pieces of wood in its jaws, and carry them to its phantom dam, shoving them in, tamping them down, generally behaving as though it ‘thought’ there was a real dam there, and real wood to tamp into it.