
By: Shelby Sherman
Re: Richard Dawkins

http://www.infidels.org/org/aha/publications/humanist/dawkins-science
-religion.html


Is Science a Religion?

                                   by Richard Dawkins

The 1996 Humanist of the Year asked this question in a speech 
accepting the honor from the American Humanist
Association.

   It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to 
humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many
others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the 
world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder
to eradicate.

   Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the 
principle vice of any religion. And who, looking at Northern 
Ireland or
the Middle East, can be confident that the brain virus of faith is 
not exceedingly dangerous? One of the stories told to the young
Muslim suicide bombers is that martyrdom is the quickest way to 
heaven -- and not just heaven but a special part of heaven
where they will receive their special reward of 72 virgin brides. 
It occurs to me that our best hope may be to provide a kind of
"spiritual arms control": send in specially trained theologians to 
deescalate the going rate in virgins.

   Given the dangers of faith -- and considering the 
accomplishments of reason and observation in the activity called 
science -- I
find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always 
seems to be someone who comes forward and says, "Of course,
your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science 
just comes down to faith, doesn't it?"

   Well, science is not religion and it doesn't just come down to 
faith. Although it has many of religion's virtues, it has none of 
it's
vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith 
not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its
pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians 
wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are
held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for 
them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required
evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists.

   One reason I receive the comment about science being a religion 
is because I believe in the fact of evolution. I even believe in
it with passionate conviction. To some, this may superficially look 
like faith. But the evidence that makes me believe in evolution
is not only overwhelmingly strong; it is freely available to anyone 
who takes the trouble to read up on it. Anyone can study the
same evidence that I have and presumably come to the same 
conclusion. But if you have a belief that is based solely on faith, I
can't examine your reasons. You can retreat behind the private wall 
of faith where I can't reach you.

   Now in practice, of course, individual scientists do sometimes 
slip back into the vice of faith, and a few may believe so
single-mindedly in a favorite theory that they occasionally falsify 
evidence. However, the fact that this sometimes happens
doesn't alter the principle that, when they do so, they do it with 
shame and not with pride. The method of science is so designed
that it usually finds them out in the end.

   Science is actually one of the most moral, one of the most 
honest disciplines around -- because science would completely
collapse if it weren't for a scrupulous adherence to honesty in the 
reporting of evidence. (As James Randi has pointed out, this
is one reason why scientists are so often fooled by paranormal 
tricksters and why the debunking role is better played by
professional conjurors; scientists just don't anticipate deliberate 
dishonesty as well.) There are other professions (no need to
mention lawyers specifically) in which falsifying evidence or at 
least twisting it is precisely what people are paid for and get
brownie points for doing.

   Science, then, is free of the main vice of religion, which is 
faith. But, as I pointed out, science does have some of religion's
virtues. Religion may aspire to provide its followers with various 
benefits -- among them explanation, consolation, and uplift.
Science, too, has something to offer in these areas.

   Humans have a great hunger for explanation. It may be one of the 
main reasons why humanity so universally has religion,
since religions do aspire to provide explanations. We come to our 
individual consciousness in a mysterious universe and long to
understand it. Most religions offer a cosmology and a biology, a 
theory of life, a theory of origins, and reasons for existence. In
doing so, they demonstrate that religion is, in a sense, science; 
it's just bad science. Don't fall for the argument that religion and
science operate on separate dimensions and are concerned with quite 
separate sorts of questions. Religions have historically
always attempted to answer the questions that properly belong to 
science. Thus religions should not be allowed now to retreat
away from the ground upon which they have traditionally attempted 
to fight. They do offer both a cosmology and a biology;
however, in both cases it is false.

   Consolation is harder for science to provide. Unlike religion, 
science cannot offer the bereaved a glorious reunion with their
loved ones in the hereafter. Those wronged on this earth cannot, on 
a scientific view, anticipate a sweet comeuppance for their
tormentors in a life to come. It could be argued that, if the idea 
of an afterlife is an illusion (as I believe it is), the 
consolation it
offers is hollow. But that's not necessarily so; a false belief can 
be just as comforting as a true one, provided the believer never
discovers its falsity. But if consolation comes that cheap, science 
can weigh in with other cheap palliatives, such as pain-killing
drugs, whose comfort may or may not be illusory, but they do work.

   Uplift, however, is where science really comes into its own. All 
the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport
at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly this feeling 
of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe -- almost worship --
this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern 
science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of
saints and mystics. The fact that the supernatural has no place in 
our explanations, in our understanding of so much about the
universe and life, doesn't diminish the awe. Quite the contrary. 
The merest glance through a microscope at the brain of an ant or
through a telescope at a long-ago galaxy of a billion worlds is 
enough to render poky and parochial the very psalms of praise.

   Now, as I say, when it is put to me that science or some 
particular part of science, like evolutionary theory, is just a 
religion
like any other, I usually deny it with indignation. But I've begun 
to wonder whether perhaps that's the wrong tactic. Perhaps the
right tactic is to accept the charge gratefully and demand equal 
time for science in religious education classes. And the more I
think about it, the more I realize that an excellent case could be 
made for this. So I want to talk a little bit about religious
education and the place that science might play in it.

   I do feel very strongly about the way children are brought up. 
I'm not entirely familiar with the way things are in the United
States, and what I say may have more relevance to the United 
Kingdom, where there is state-obliged, legally-enforced religious
instruction for all children. That's unconstitutional in the United 
States, but I presume that children are nevertheless given
religious instruction in whatever particular religion their parents 
deem suitable.

   Which brings me to my point about mental child abuse. In a 1995 
issue of the Independent, one of London's leading
newspapers, there was a photograph of a rather sweet and touching 
scene. It was Christmas time, and the picture showed
three children dressed up as the three wise men for a nativity 
play. The accompanying story described one child as a Muslim,
one as a Hindu, and one as a Christian. The supposedly sweet and 
touching point of the story was that they were all taking part
in this Nativity play.

   What is not sweet and touching is that these children were all 
four years old. How can you possibly describe a child of four
as a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu or a Jew? Would you talk 
about a four-year-old economic monetarist? Would you talk
about a four-year-old neo-isolationist or a four-year-old liberal 
Republican? There are opinions about the cosmos and the
world that children, once grown, will presumably be in a position 
to evaluate for themselves. Religion is the one field in our
culture about which it is absolutely accepted, without question -- 
without even noticing how bizarre it is -- that parents have a
total and absolute say in what their children are going to be, how 
their children are going to be raised, what opinions their
children are going to have about the cosmos, about life, about 
existence. Do you see what I mean about mental child abuse?

   Looking now at the various things that religious education might 
be expected to accomplish, one of its aims could be to
encourage children to reflect upon the deep questions of existence, 
to invite them to rise above the humdrum preoccupations of
ordinary life and think sub specie alternitatis.

   Science can offer a vision of life and the universe which, as 
I've already remarked, for humbling poetic inspiration far
outclasses any of the mutually contradictory faiths and 
disappointingly recent traditions of the world's religions.

   For example, how could children in religious education classes 
fail to be inspired if we could get across to them some inkling
of the age of the universe? Suppose that, at the moment of Christ's 
death, the news of it had started traveling at the maximum
possible speed around the universe outwards from the earth. How far 
would the terrible tidings have traveled by now?
Following the theory of special relativity, the answer is that the 
news could not, under any circumstances whatever, have
reached more that one-fiftieth of the way across one galaxy -- not 
one- thousandth of the way to our nearest neighboring
galaxy in the 100-million-galaxy-strong universe. The universe at 
large couldn't possibly be anything other than indifferent to
Christ, his birth, his passion, and his death. Even such momentous 
news as the origin of life on Earth could have traveled only
across our little local cluster of galaxies. Yet so ancient was 
that event on our earthly time-scale that, if you span its age with
your open arms, the whole of human history, the whole of human 
culture, would fall in the dust from your fingertip at a single
stroke of a nail file.

   The argument from design, an important part of the history of 
religion, wouldn't be ignored in my religious education classes,
needless to say. The children would look at the spellbinding 
wonders of the living kingdoms and would consider Darwinism
alongside the creationist alternatives and make up their own minds. 
I think the children would have no difficulty in making up
their minds the right way if presented with the evidence. What 
worries me is not the question of equal time but that, as far as I
can see, children in the United Kingdom and the United States are 
essentially given no time with evolution yet are taught
creationism (whether at school, in church, or at home).

   It would also be interesting to teach more than one theory of 
creation. The dominant one in this culture happens to be the
Jewish creation myth, which is taken over from the Babylonian 
creation myth. There are, of course, lots and lots of others, and
perhaps they should all be given equal time (except that wouldn't 
leave much time for studying anything else). I understand that
there are Hindus who believe that the world was created in a cosmic 
butter churn and Nigerian peoples who believe that the
world was created by God from the excrement of ants. Surely these 
stories have as much right to equal time as the
Judeo-Christian myth of Adam and Eve.

   So much for Genesis; now let's move on to the prophets. Halley's 
Comet will return without fail in the year 2062. Biblical or
Delphic prophecies don't begin to aspire to such accuracy; 
astrologers and Nostradamians dare not commit themselves to
factual prognostications but, rather, disguise their charlatanry in 
a smokescreen of vagueness. When comets have appeared in
the past, they've often been taken as portents of disaster. 
Astrology has played an important part in various religious 
traditions,
including Hinduism. The three wise men I mentioned earlier were 
said to have been led to the cradle of Jesus by a star. We
might ask the children by what physical route do they imagine the 
alleged stellar influence on human affairs could travel.

   Incidentally, there was a shocking program on the BBC radio 
around Christmas 1995 featuring an astronomer, a bishop, and
a journalist who were sent off on an assignment to retrace the 
steps of the three wise men. Well, you could understand the
participation of the bishop and the journalist (who happened to be 
a religious writer), but the astronomer was a supposedly
respectable astronomy writer, and yet she went along with this! All 
along the route, she talked about the portents of when
Saturn and Jupiter were in the ascendant up Uranus or whatever it 
was. She doesn't actually believe in astrology, but one of the
problems is that our culture has been taught to become tolerant of 
it, vaguely amused by it -- so much so that even scientific
people who don't believe in astrology sort of think it's a bit of 
harmless fun. I take astrology very seriously indeed: I think it's
deeply pernicious because it undermines rationality, and I should 
like to see campaigns against it.

   When the religious education class turns to ethics, I don't 
think science actually has a lot to say, and I would replace it with
rational moral philosophy. Do the children think there are absolute 
standards of right and wrong? And if so, where do they
come from? Can you make up good working principles of right and 
wrong, like "do as you would be done by" and "the
greatest good for the greatest number" (whatever that is supposed 
to mean)? It's a rewarding question, whatever your personal
morality, to ask as an evolutionist where morals come from; by what 
route has the human brain gained its tendency to have
ethics and morals, a feeling of right and wrong?

   Should we value human life above all other life? Is there a 
rigid wall to be built around the species Homo sapiens, or should
we talk about whether there are other species which are entitled to 
our humanistic sympathies? Should we, for example, follow
the right-to-life lobby, which is wholly preoccupied with human 
life, and value the life of a human fetus with the faculties of a
worm over the life of a thinking and feeling chimpanzee? What is 
the basis of this fence that we erect around Homo sapiens --
even around a small piece of fetal tissue? (Not a very sound 
evolutionary idea when you think about it.) When, in our
evolutionary descent from our common ancestor with chimpanzees, did 
the fence suddenly rear itself up?

   Well, moving on, then, from morals to last things, to 
eschatology, we know from the second law of thermodynamics that all
complexity, all life, all laughter, all sorrow, is hell bent on 
leveling itself out into cold nothingness in the end. They -- and 
we --
can never be more then temporary, local buckings of the great 
universal slide into the abyss of uniformity.

   We know that the universe is expanding and will probably expand 
forever, although it's possible it may contract again. We
know that, whatever happens to the universe, the sun will engulf 
the earth in about 60 million centuries from now.

   Time itself began at a certain moment, and time may end at a 
certain moment -- or it may not. Time may come locally to an
end in miniature crunches called black holes. The laws of the 
universe seem to be true all over the universe. Why is this? Might
the laws change in these crunches? To be really speculative, time 
could begin again with new laws of physics, new physical
constants. And it has even been suggested that there could be many 
universes, each one isolated so completely that, for it, the
others don't exist. Then again, there might be a Darwinian 
selection among universes.

   So science could give a good account of itself in religious 
education. But it wouldn't be enough. I believe that some familiarity
with the King James version of the Bible is important for anyone 
wanting to understand the allusions that appear in English
literature. Together with the book of common prayer, the Bible gets 
58 pages in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Only
Shakespeare has more. I do think that not having any kind of 
biblical education is unfortunate if children want to read English
literature and understand the provenance of phrases like "through a 
glass darkly," "all flesh is as grass," "the race is not to the
swift," "crying in the wilderness," "reaping the whirlwind," "amid 
the alien corn," "Eyeless in Gaza," "Job's comforters," and "the
widow's mite."

   I want to return now to the charge that science is just a faith. 
The more extreme version of that charge -- and one that I often
encounter as both a scientist and a rationalist -- is an accusation 
of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves as great as that
found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit of 
justice in this accusation; but as zealous bigots, we scientists are
mere amateurs at the game. We're content to argue with those who 
disagree with us. We don't kill them.

   But I would want to deny even the lesser charge of purely verbal 
zealotry. There is a very, very important difference between
feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we 
have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the
one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been 
internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody
else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all 
the difference in the world between a belief that one is
prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that 
is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or
revelation.



Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public 
Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His books include
The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and, 
most recently, Climbing Mount Improbable. This
article is adapted from his speech in acceptance of the 1996 
Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist
Association.



The above article was first published in the January/February 1997 
issue of The Humanist (Vol. 57, No. 1).

(c) Copyright 1996, 1997 by Richard Dawkins

Permission to republish this in electronic, print, microform, 
CD-ROM, or other form should be sought from the author through
the American Humanist Association, which can be contacted in the 
following ways:

AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION PO BOX 1188 AMHERST NY 14226-7188 USA

Phone: 1-800-743-6646 or 1-716-839-5080 E-mail: 
ap818@freenet.buffalo.edu

