The End of Faith: Religion Terror and the Future of Reason Read online

  I am certain that such a summary dismissal of religious faith will seem callous to many readers, particularly those who have known its comforts at first hand. But the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor. If every physician told his terminally ill patients that they were destined for a complete recovery, this might also set many of their minds at ease, but at the expense of the truth. Why should we be concerned about the truth? This question awaits its Socrates. For our purposes, we need only observe that the truth is of paramount concern to the faithful themselves; indeed, the truth of a given doctrine is the very object of their faith. The search for comfort at the expense of truth has never been a motive for religious belief, since all creeds are chock-full of terrible proposals, which are no comfort to anyone and which the faithful believe, despite the pain it causes them, for fear of leaving some dark corner of reality unacknowledged.

  The faithful, in fact, hold truth in the highest esteem. And in this sense they are identical to most philosophers and scientists. People of faith claim nothing less than knowledge of sacred, redeeming, and metaphysical truths: Christ died for your sins; He is the Son of God; All human beings have souls that will be subject to judgment after death. These are specific claims about the way the world is. It is only the notion that a doctrine is in accord with reality at large that renders a person's faith useful, redemptive, or, indeed, logically possible, for faith in a doctrine is faith in its truth. What else but the truth of a given teaching could convince its adherents of the illegitimacy of all others? Heretical doctrines are deemed so, and accorded a healthy measure of disdain, for no other reason than that they are presumed to be false. Thus, if a Christian made no tacit claims of knowledge with regard to the literal truth of scripture, he would be just as much a Muslim, or a Jew-or an atheist-as a follower of Christ. If he were to discover (by some means that he acknowledged to be incontrovertible) that Christ had actually been born of sin and died like an animal, these revelations would surely deliver a deathblow to his faith. The faithful have never been indifferent to the truth; and yet, the principle of faith leaves them unequipped to distinguish truth from falsity in matters that most concern them.

  The faithful can be expected to behave just like their secular neighbors-which is to say, more or less rationally-in their worldly affairs. When making important decisions, they tend to be as attentive to evidence and to its authentication as any unbeliever. While Jehovah's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions, or Christian Scientists forgoing modern medicine altogether, may appear to be exceptions to this rule, they are not. Such people are merely acting rationally within the framework of their religious beliefs. After all, no mother who refuses medicine for her child on religious grounds believes that prayer is merely a consoling cultural practice. Rather, she believes that her ultimate salvation demands certain displays of confidence in the power and attentiveness of God, and this is an end toward which she is willing to pledge even the life of her child as collateral. Such apparently unreasonable behavior is often in the service of reason, since it aims at the empirical authentication of religious doctrine. In fact, even the most extreme expressions of faith are often perfectly rational, given the requisite beliefs. Take the snake-dancing Pentecostals as the most colorful example: in an effort to demonstrate both their faith in the literal word of the Bible (in this case Mark 16:18) and its truth, they "take up serpents" (various species of rattlesnakes) and "drink any deadly thing" (generally strychnine) and test prophecy ("it shall not hurt them") to their heart's content. Some of them die in the process, of course, as did their founder, George Hensley (of snake bite, in 1955)-proof, we can be sure, not of the weakness of their faith but of the occasional efficacy of rattlesnake venom and strychnine as poisons.

  Which beliefs one takes to be foundational will dictate what seems reasonable at any given moment. When the members of the "Heaven's Gate" cult failed to spot the spacecraft they knew must be trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, they returned the $4,000 telescope they had bought for this purpose, believing it to be defective.

  Where faith really pays its dividends, however, is in the conviction that the future will be better than the past, or at least not worse. Consider the celebrated opinion of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342-1413), who distilled the message of the Gospels in the memorable sentence

  "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." The allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sublime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end. Faith is offered as a means by which the truth of this proposition can be savored in the present and secured in the future. It is, I think, indisputable that the actual existence of such a mechanism, the fact that uttering a few words and eating a cracker is an effective means of redemption, the certainty that God is watching, listening, and waiting to bestow his blessings upon one and all-in short, the literal correspondence of doctrine with reality itself-is of sole importance to the faithful.

  The amazing pestilence reached Paris that June [of 1348], and it was to afflict the city for a year and a half....

  King Philip [VI] asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris for an explanation of the disaster. The professors reported that a disturbance in the skies had caused the sun to overheat the oceans near India, and the waters had begun to give off noxious vapors. The medical faculty offered a variety of remedies. Broth would help, for example, if seasoned with ground pepper, ginger, and cloves. Poultry, water fowl, young pork and fatty meat in general were to be avoided. Olive oil could be fatal. Bathing was dangerous, but enemas could be helpful. "Men must preserve chastity," the doctors warned, "if they value their lives."

  The King still worried about the divine wrath. He issued an edict against blasphemy. For the first offense, the blasphemer's lip would be cut off; a second offense would cost him the other lip, and a third the tongue....

  The town authorities reacted with a series of stern measures to halt the spreading panic. They ordered the tolling of the bells to cease. They outlawed the wearing of black clothing. They forbade the gathering of more than two people at a funeral, or any display of grief in public. And to placate the angry God who had brought this affliction, they banned all work after noon on Saturdays, all gambling and swearing, and they demanded that everyone living in sin get married immediately. Li Muisis [an abbot of Tournai] recorded happily that the number of marriages increased considerably, profanity was no longer heard, and gambling declined so much that the makers of dice turned to making rosaries. He also recorded that in this newly virtuous place 25,000 citizens died of the plague and were buried in large pits on the outskirts of the town. 29

  Where did the religious beliefs of these people leave off and their worldly beliefs begin? Can there be any doubt that the beleaguered Christians of the fourteenth century were longing for knowledge (that is, beliefs that are both true and valid) about the plague, about its cause and mode of transmission, and hoping, thereby, to find an effective means by which to combat it? Was their reliance upon the tenets of faith enforced by anything but the starkest ignorance? If it had been known, for instance, that this pestilence was being delivered by merchant ships-that rats were climbing ashore from every hold and that upon each rat were legions of fleas carrying the plague bacillus-would the faithful have thought their energies best spent cutting the tongues out of blasphemers, silencing bells, dressing in bright colors, and making liberal use of enemas? A sure way to win an argument with these unhappy people would have been with penicillin, delivered not from a land where other "cultural perspectives" hold sway, but from higher up on the slopes of the real.

  Faith and Madness

  We have seen that our beliefs are tightly coupled to the structure of language and to the apparent structure of the world. Our "freedom of belief," if it exists at all, is minimal. Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No. Evidence (whether sensory or logical) is the only thing tha
t suggests that a given belief is really about the world in the first place. We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad," "psychotic," or "delusional." Most people of faith are perfectly sane, of course, even those who commit atrocities on account of their beliefs. But what is the difference between a man who believes that God will reward him with seventy-two virgins if he kills a score of Jewish teenagers, and one who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hair dryer? There is a difference, to be sure, but it is not one that places religious faith in a flattering light.

  It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. Consider one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:

  I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.30

  Jesus Christ-who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens-can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

  What Should We Believe?

  We believe most of what we believe about the world because others have told us to. Reliance upon the authority of experts, and upon the testimony of ordinary people, is the stuff of which worldviews are made. In fact, the more educated we become, the more our beliefs come to us at second hand. A person who believes only those propositions for which he can provide full sensory or theoretical justification will know almost nothing about the world; that is, if he is not swiftly killed by his own ignorance. How do you know that falling from a great height is hazardous to your health? Unless you have witnessed someone die in this way, you have adopted this belief on the authority of others.31 This is not a problem. Life is too short, and the world too complex, for any of us to go it alone in epistemologi-cal terms. We are ever reliant on the intelligence and accuracy, if not the kindness, of strangers.

  This does not suggest, however, that all forms of authority are valid; nor does it suggest that even the best authorities will always prove reliable. There are good arguments and bad ones, precise observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about the world.

  Consider the following sources of information:

  1. The anchorman on the evening news says that a large fire is burning in the state of Colorado. One hundred thousand acres have burned, and the fire is still completely uncontained.

  2. Biologists say that DNA is the molecular basis for sexual reproduction. Each of us resembles our parents because we inherit a complement of their DNA. Each of us has arms and legs because our DNA coded for the proteins that produced them during our early development.

  3. The pope says that Jesus was born of a virgin and resurrected bodily after death. He is the Son of God, who created the universe in six days. If you believe this, you will go to heaven after death; if you don't, you will go to hell, where you will suffer for eternity.

  What is the difference between these forms of testimony? Why isn't every "expert opinion" equally worthy of our respect? Given our analysis thus far, it should not be difficult to grant authority to 1 and 2 while disregarding 3.

  Proposition 1: Why do we find the news story about the fire in Colorado persuasive? It could be a hoax. But what about those televised images of hillsides engorged by flame and of planes dropping fire retardant? Maybe there is a fire, but it is in a different state. Perhaps it's really Texas that is burning. Is it reasonable to entertain such possibilities? No. Why not? Here is where the phrase "common sense" begins to earn its keep. Given our beliefs about the human mind, the success of our widespread collaboration with other human beings, and the degree to which we all rely on the news, it is scarcely conceivable that a respected television network and a highly paid anchorman are perpetrating a hoax, or that thousands of firefighters, newsmen, and terrified homeowners have mistaken Texas for Colorado. Implicit in such commonsense judgments lurks an understanding of the causal connections between various processes in the world, the likelihood of different outcomes, and the vested interests, or lack thereof, of those whose testimony we are considering. What would a professional news anchor stand to gain from lying about a fire in Colorado ? We need not go into the details here; if the anchor on the evening news says that there is a fire in Colorado and then shows us images of burning trees, we can be reasonably sure that there really is a fire in Colorado.

  Proposition 2: What about the "truths" of science? Are they frae? Much has been written about the inherent provisionality of scientific theories. Karl Popper has told us that we never prove a theory right; we merely fail to prove it wrong.32 Thomas Kuhn has told us that scientific theories undergo wholesale revision with each generation and therefore do not converge on the truth.33 There's no telling which of our current theories will be proved wrong tomorrow, so how much confidence can we have in'them? Many unwary consumers of these ideas have concluded that science is just another area of human discourse and, as such, is no more anchored to the facts of this world than literature or religion are. All truths are up for grabs.

  But all spheres of discourse are not on the same footing, for the simple reason that not all spheres of discourse seek the same footing (or any footing whatsoever). Science is science because it represents our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the world are true (or at least not false).34 We do this by observation and experiment within the context of a theory. To say that a given scientific theory may be wrong is not to say that it may be wrong in its every particular, or that any other theory stands an equal chance of being right. What are the chances that DNA is not the basis for genetic inheritance? Well, if it isn't, Mother Nature sure has a lot of explaining to do. She must explain the results of fifty years of experimentation, which have demonstrated reliable correlations between genotype and phenotype (including the reproducible effects of specific
genetic mutations). Any account of inheritance that is going to supersede the present assumptions of molecular biology will have to account for the ocean of data that now conforms to these assumptions. What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

  Proposition 3: Can we rely on the authority of the pope? Millions of Catholics do, of course. He is, in fact, infallible in matters of faith and morality. Can we really say that Catholics are wrong to believe that the pope knows whereof he speaks ? We surely can.

  We know that no evidence would be sufficient to authenticate many of the pope's core beliefs. How could anyone born in the twentieth century come to know that Jesus was actually born of a virgin? What process of ratiocination, mystical or otherwise, will deliver the necessary facts about a Galilean woman's sexual history (facts that run entirely counter to well-known facts of human biology)? There is no such process. Even a time machine could not help us, unless we were willing to keep watch over Mary twenty-four hours a day for the months surrounding the probable time of Jesus' conception.

  Visionary experiences, in and of themselves, can never be sufficient to answer questions of historical fact. Let's say the pope had a dream about Jesus, and Jesus came to him looking fresh from Da Vinci's brush. The pope would not even be in a position to say that the Jesus of his dream looked like the real Jesus. The pope's infallibility, no matter how many dreams and visions he may have had, does not even extend to making a judgment about whether the historical Jesus wore a beard, let alone whether he was really the Son of God, born of a virgin, or able to raise the dead. These are just not the kinds of propositions that spiritual experience can authenticate. Of course, we could imagine a scenario in which we would give credence to the pope's visions, or to our own. If Jesus came saying things like "The Vatican Library has exactly thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and twenty-six books" and he turned out to be right, we would then begin to feel that we were, at the very least, in dialogue with someone who had something to say about the way the world is. Given a sufficient number of verifiable statements, plucked from the ethers of papal vision, we could begin speaking seriously about any further claims Jesus might make. The point is that his authority would be derived in the only way that such authority ever is-by making claims about the world that can be corroborated by further observation. As far as proposition 3 is concerned, it is quite obvious that the pope has nothing to go on but the Bible itself. This document is not a sufficient justification for his beliefs, given the standards of evidence that prevailed at the time of its composition.