Keepers of the non-faith

WHAT a problem religious faith poses for learned men of empirical mind. How it baffles, angers, frightens them, prompts them to domesticate it or uproot it, leaf and bough. In a trio of new books, three scientists -- an English evolutionary theorist, a bestselling philosopher-turned-neuroscientist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist -- take Christianity to task. Their works comprise a new testament for atheists, in which science is the only acceptable gospel.

“I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented,” Richard Dawkins writes in “The God Delusion,” a sustained literary assault on what he considers the dangerous fallacies of revealed religion.

Dawkins -- author of eight previous books, including “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker,” and the Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford -- is easily the most imaginative theorist of evolutionary biology alive today and also its most combative. There is no more staunch defender of the scientific method in the culture wars over creationist beliefs than this handsome, hawk-faced don; no more influential advocate of reason and rationality; certainly no 21st century raisonneur more openly scornful of his religious adversaries. Few scientists are so irredeemably reductionist.

As Dawkins sees it, there is no heaven, no hell, no spark of the divine, just the periodic table of elements, enduring physical laws and the rule of natural selection. Moreover, he holds that science is the only rightful arbiter of knowledge about the universe and human nature, laying claim not only to what can be known but also to the meaning of the unknowable. His atheism is a linear dogma as old as doubt.

It is his professed faith that the universe can be understood -- and solely through empirical human inquiry. In proposing this doctrine, Dawkins is himself a fundamentalist, rejecting any compromise or accommodation. He argues for his materialist worldview in an imperious manner, revealing more about the struggle for hierarchy and authority than about the failure of spirituality or the elusive nature of the divine. “What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured guest and science must respectfully slink away?” he asks. “What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?”

Scattering secular fatwas with abandon, Dawkins assumes the mantle of an ayatollah of atheism. “Faith is evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument,” he writes. The God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” As for the New, Jesus, as conventionally viewed, is a “milksop.”

To Dawkins, a religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. Any scientist who sees traces of the divine in the inexplicable mysteries of cosmology or life’s origins is guilty of “intellectual high treason.” Mystical experience, he speculates, may be only a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.

In all this, Dawkins is just warming to the evangelical task he has set himself: to convert readers of a religious turn of mind to atheism. Yet much of his artful jeremiad is designed not to persuade those wavering on the verge of reason and rationality but rather to enrage believers of any sort, in order to bolster “atheist pride.” He casts atheism in America as a civil rights issue -- something like gay rights, save that instead of tolerance and equality under the law, he seeks elimination of other beliefs. Although stoutly proclaiming his opposition to all religions, he spends little time on the perceived shortcomings of Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains or Muslims. He ridicules the Bible but not the Koran. Buddhism and Confucianism, he says, aren’t worth his effort. Zen doesn’t come up. He reserves his ire for the Christian religion -- most particularly Christianity as practiced by fundamentalist sects in parts of the United States. “The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified,” he writes.

Clearly, Dawkins is deeply angered by recent court fights and school board clashes prompted by the incursions of intelligent design -- a movement, championed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, that maintains there is empirical evidence in nature for the existence of a guided creation. Federal courts have struck down efforts to force the teaching of such religious beliefs in public-school science classrooms. Dawkins properly gives the promoters of these false doctrines about the science of human origins a dose of their own overheated rhetoric.

Science and religion have not always been estranged; indeed, science began as a form of worship. The careful observation of God’s creation was thought to be a more reliable form of revelation. Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science, argued in 1605 that reason properly reveals God. Humankind cannot “search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works, divinity or philosophy,” he wrote, “but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both.”

Likewise, the astronomer Galileo Galilei held in 1615 that spiritual truth is to be found in the Bible and in nature alike: “For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects, nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.” Nature, he wrote, is “the observant executrix of God’s commands.”

Certainly, science as a tool of inquiry is unsurpassed, having proved to be the most reliable way to investigate the physical universe: rigorous yet open to revision, verifiable, conditional and self-correcting. Religion’s focus, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science observes, is on the meaning of things. “Different contexts of knowing require different forms of knowledge,” the world’s largest general scientific organization noted in “The Evolution Dialogues,” a recent analysis of the roles of religion and science.

Humanity does seem to be getting more enlightened, on the whole. Dawkins isn’t sure why, noting that some natural law may be at work: “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.” If human understanding evolves, surely the ability to apprehend the divine also evolves to keep pace, even if organized religion lags behind.

In “Letter to a Christian Nation,” Sam Harris, a Stanford University-trained philosopher, also takes dead aim at the Christian right. His short epistle sets out, in the spirit of Dawkins’ book, to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” Harris too is most troubled by the religious excesses of Christianity in the United States. “Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one’s friends,” Harris writes. A religious upbringing of any sort is a “ludicrous obscenity,” but (also as in Dawkins’ book) the excesses of Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs play hardly any part in his critique of belief.

Nevertheless, Harris fervently advocates the eradication of all religions. Religious faith may have served some useful purpose in the eons before humanity invented hedge funds, HDTV and the public support of science, he suggests, but surely it serves no valuable function now. “Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists,” Harris writes. “Scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not.... An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse.”

IT falls to E.O. Wilson, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist, to hope for some useful cooperation. He’d like to save the endangered planet, and as a secular humanist he seeks the help of fundamentalist Christians in preserving the world’s savaged environment by calling on a shared sense of stewardship.

In Wilson’s new book, “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” the difference in tone is striking. It cannot be solely because he is the best writer of the three -- he’s twice won a Pulitzer for nonfiction -- or the more accomplished scientist. A pioneer in the study of the evolution of behavior, Wilson is the founder of sociobiology and has been awarded the National Medal of Science, among other honors. A reader cannot help but think it is because Wilson was raised a Southern Baptist in Birmingham, Ala. Although he long ago abandoned the hard-shell evangelical Christian faith of his childhood, he acknowledges its lingering lyrical and spiritual power. Rarely has the divide between secular science and revealed religion been bridged so gracefully.

“For you, the glory of an unseen divinity,” Wilson writes, addressing a Southern Baptist pastor. “For me, the glory of the universe revealed at last. For you, the belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set men free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching. I may be wrong, you may be wrong. We may both be partly right.” With a cadence worthy of the Book of Common Prayer, Wilson continues: “Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing to, meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share.” *