Prior to the publication of The Jesus Conundrum I had not been aware of the rapidly growing literature on atheism which for the most part heaps scorn on individuals, especially scientists, who still hold on to the outmoded idea that God exists. When one goes to amazon.com and types the key word “atheism” thirty books appear immediately and when one then looks at readers’ reviews of, for instance, The God Delusion one finds more than 1500 reviews. Atheism is, therefore, a “hot topic” in our country which deserves critical thought and discussion.

            I have read five of these books and these are, in alphabetic order, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Dennett’s Breaking the Spell–Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Harris’ The End of Faith–Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, as well as A Letter to a Christian Nation, and Hitchens god is not Great–How Religion Poisons Everything. All have publication dates within the current century and have received wide critical acclaim. Four of them have obtained “New York Times Bestseller status,” while The Letter to a Christian Nation had to make do with “National Bestseller.” Nevertheless, it was regarded as, “A breath of fresh fire” by The Wall Street Journal. We are, therefore, dealing with a social phenomenon of considerable importance, which must be addressed forthrightly. Since there is a great deal of overlap and redundancy among these books I shall first give some information about the authors as well as key aspects of each book and subsequently discuss what I regard as a common fallacy in the thinking of the authors. This will be done in the order in which I have read the books.

Christopher Hitchens is a well known British journalist and author who in 1981 moved to the U.S. He is frequently seen on talk shows, espoused the Bush administration’s “interventionist foreign policy,” believes in “Islamofascism” and regards himself as a secular humanist and anti-theist. The essence of Hitchens’ book can be summarized as: If there was a creator god, he was not only incompetent but also malignant. As such, god is not only useless but harmful and there is no need to bother with him any more. Laplace’s answer to Napoleon why God had not appeared in his epoch-making calculations on Celestial Mechanics, "I did not need this hypothesis," is taken as the validation that God is obsolete. Inasmuch as this quote was also used by Dawkins it seems that the marquis may belatedly become an honorary patron saint of the atheistic community.

            Laplace (1749-1827) was a superb mathematician, astronomer and physicist whose work has made its re-appearance in some aspects of my profession. Electroencephalographers have always been confronted with the problem how to distinguish locally generated electrical brain activity from that which originates at a distance and is merely transmitted to a given area. This is, of course, of special importance in the surgical treatment of epilepsy. Bo Hjorth of Stockholm, Sweden, in 1975 adapted one of Laplace’s celestial formulas for the needs of electroencephalography and thus brought the heavens down to earth. The method was difficult to implement at that time because EEG machines were of the analog type, but with the advent of digital EEG systems and appropriate software Laplace’s idea can now be implemented with a mouse click. I have published several papers using the method and, therefore, have strong personal positive feelings for Laplace’s scientific work. Furthermore, in the context of Napoleon’s question his answer was correct. We may ask, however, whether or not the generalization which has been made in regard to this answer is valid.  Does it apply to all contingencies the human being encounters during life, as suggested by our atheists, or to some specific problems in regard to the physical universe?

We know too little about Laplace as a person and a single sentence is not likely to encompass the totality of his being. We do know, however, that he was a poor administrator. Napoleon, who had appointed him Minister of the Interior in November 1799, had to dismiss him less than six weeks later. In his memoirs from St. Helena Napoleon is quoted as having written, ”Geometrician of the first rank, Laplace was not long in showing himself a worse than average administrator; since his first actions in office we recognized our mistake. Laplace did not consider any question from the right angle: he sought subtleties everywhere, only conceived problems, and finally carried the spirit of "infinitesimals" into the administration.”

            Hitchens’ sees “The Need for a New Enlightenment” and his book is an entertaining polemic which strives to popularize the atheist point of view by pointing to all the misdeeds of the world’s religions, which he seems to regard as the norm rather than as exceptions. As mentioned he is by profession a journalist, has taken up Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme and seems intent to devote the rest of his life to “fight the enemy.” Since he is neither a philosopher nor a scientist deeper thoughts about the problem at hand need not be expected from him.

While Hitchens is a journalist and one can, therefore, adopt a “take it or leave it” attitude towards his work, this is not so readily the case for Sam Harris who has a B.A. in philosophy and had last year received a  Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA. Apart from articles for the general public he has also published, as first author, a paper on Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty (2008) as well as The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief (2009). I have made a point of “first authorship” because the scientific community currently suffers from an inflation of authors. When I publish a scientific paper today I have to list as “authors” all the people who were remotely connected with the data upon which the paper was based. Simply giving them credit in the Acknowledgments no longer suffices. When one reads, therefore, that a given scientist has by the age of 50 several hundred papers to his credit one needs to realize that this does not mean that he has actually written them or even done some of the work. If one wants to do original work and publish the results oneself one can do so for maximally two or three papers in a given year. On the other hand since the motto in academia is “publish or perish,” it is understandable that people want to see their name in print. Thus, articles with ten or more authors are no longer a rarity and I am making this point explicit because the general public has a right to know what really goes on today in the hallowed halls of Science.

In my review of The End of Faith on amazon.com I used as title, “Talmudic Thinking,” but made it clear that this was not meant in a pejorative sense and mentioned that I had discussed this type of thinking in The Moses Legacy. It is characterized by the person knowing the answer to a given question and then justifying it by a variety of idiosyncratic reasons, which may strike an unbiased observer as strange and unwarranted. I provided typical examples in The Moses Legacy and since it can be downloaded from this website I need not belabor the point.

            The reason why I used this title for the review was to make it clear to readers of the book that Harris did not follow the rules of science in this publication and readers should not expect, in view of his Ph.D., a scientifically reasoned treatise. The book is likewise written in a polemical style and essentially covers the same ground as that by Hitchens. Like the other mentioned authors he exalts “Reason” above all other aspects of human life and in the Epilogue he stated,

“My goal in the writing of this book has been to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture. Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world (both spiritual and mundane) our religions have seized upon ancient taboos and prescientific fancies as though they held ultimate metaphysical significance.”

            Yet, in spite of this aim he at times lets emotion overpower reason, succumbs to unwarranted generalizations and on one occasion even raised the ghost of FDR’s speechwriter when he wrote “our enemy is nothing other than faith itself [p.131].” He has no use for “tolerance”and wrote in the first chapter (Reason in Exile), “I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance–born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God–is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss [p.15].” Other morsels are: “faith is an impostor [p.66];” “Without faith, most Muslim grievances against the West would be impossible even to formulate, much less avenge [p. 138];” “Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation’s phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars.  Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia [p.149];” “Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and to not pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others?  I believe that the answer to this question is no [p.152].”

            Although Harris limits the term “faith” to religious faith, it is still apparent that he confuses it with “religious dogmas” of a given faith. He assumes in addition that members of a given religious denomination accept all of the dogmas and should automatically feel obligated to act on them. This is clearly not the case. His views on the Muslim religion seem to be largely shaped by the phenomenon of suicide bombers and he ignores their modern origin in the Israeli-Palestinian war. I am deliberately using the word “war” rather than the usual term “conflict” because it is fought on one side by soldiers with tanks, planes and infantry, while the other side has rocks, rifles, bombs and, so far ineffectual, rockets.  Before this war the conflict was originally over land rather than religion. The Zionists were mainly atheists and religious Jews wanted no part of them, as documented in Whither Zionism?which can be downloaded from this site. The early kibbutzim settlers had a Marxist ethos for whom God was either non-existent or irrelevant. The religious Jews who had lived in the land for generations had gotten along well with their Muslim and Christian neighbors. They even regarded the foundation of the State in 1948 as illegitimate. Only the messiah had the right to form the State and Ben-Gurion clearly did not fit that role. The local Arabs, on the other hand, resented that portions of what they regarded as their country was arbitrarily given first by the British, subsequently by the United Nations to Jews, and eventually all of it was conquered by the

Israeli army. Religion simply was not a factor initially but has become one as a result of the humiliation local Arabs experienced and their powerlessness against Israel’s might. Inasmuch as it is sustained by U.S. taxpayers we have earned their ire. When no help is obtained from human beings it should not be surprising that people turn to God for redress of grievances. Furthermore, to cast “religion” exclusively in the role of the villain, as done by Harris and others, ignores the fact that religion tends to be used and exploited for very secular gains by unscrupulous individuals. This is not to say that religious fanatics do not exist, they do and can create havoc, but they are a small minority. It should be our duty to deal with those individuals on an individual basis rather than denounce all religion.

This applies also to the phenomenon of Muslim suicide bombers where a command to jihad and the promised 70 or 72 virgins (one finds both versions) are presented as the sole motivation for their acts. Inasmuch as this seems to be one of the main objections to the Muslim faith it requires further comment. Serious literature on this phenomenon is just beginning to emerge and the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) has established profiles of successful as well as unsuccessful suicide bombers.  I have not yet had an opportunity to study this aspect of the “Clash of Civilizations,” to use Huntington’s term, to any appreciable extent but am aware of Efraim Benmelech’s (Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University, and Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Claude Berrebi’s (Research Economist, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California) work. They have studied some of these data and published their findings under the title, “Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide bombers.” Their article http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/benmelech/files/JEP_0807.pdf did not enter into the question of motivation but the Israeli data base probably contains a considerable amount of information on these aspects and further studies are urgently needed to replace assumptions with statistical facts. That religion alone is not necessarily the main motivator is also revealed by the numbers of suicide attacks which have been carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. The  high water mark was during the second Intifada in 2002 and attacks have steadily decreased thereafter. Sean Yom and Basel Saleh carried out a Statistical Analysis up to 2004 (http://www.ecaar.org/Newsletter/Nov04/saleh.htm) and demonstrated this phenomenon. Although one might want to credit the “security wall” it should be noted that the decrease began before the construction of the wall and general support for suicide bombing has also steadily ebbed among Palestinians.  Yom and Saleh’s data also show that in most instances revenge was the major motive for the attacks rather than religion.

An example that Harris’ emotions can overpower reason is the following statement in regard to the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. “In such a situation, the only thing  to ensure our [emphasis added] survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.” He went on explaining that this would be a terrible thing to do, nevertheless, he did posit it. There is no doubt that a nuclear armed Iran would further destabilize the world, but it does not follow that “our survival” would be at stake. The State of Israel’s possibly, but not that of the U.S. unless we were to respond inappropriately. Harris’ mental conflation of the presumed needs of Israel with those of the U.S. is common in our media, but erroneous and does not follow the laws of reason.

While these were some examples of Harris’ thoughts which can be questioned there are obviously others to which one can subscribe. For instance he does admit to a “spiritual” component to human life and that there exists “a sacred dimension [p.16].” This is in contrast to Hitchens who takes pride in limiting himself to being “a mammal;”  a term he also uses for self-description. The last chapter of Harris’ book deals with “Experiments in Consciousness” and leaves room for spiritual experiences, which he distinguished from faith. In addition, he pointed out that, “The idea that brains produce [emphasis in the original] consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it [208].” This was regarded as apostasy by some readers and forced Harris to discuss it in an Afterword  for the paperback edition. The complaint was that “The End of Faith is not a truly atheistic book. It is really a stalking-horse for Buddhism, New–Age mysticism, or some other form of irrationality.” Harris defended his position but it is obvious that deviation from the party line of atheists will not readily be condoned by what one can only call “the faithful.”

I headlined my review of Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation with  “Harris’ Antichrist,” because it is a replay of Nietzsche’s arguments against the Christian Church with equal vigor. The book, published in 2007 has only 120 pages and is a reply to criticisms he has received from a mainly Christian readership. I won’t deal in detail with this book because the essential material is covered in all the others so let me just quote from the “Note to the Reader,”

“In Letter to a Christian Nation, I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed form. Consequently, liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the “Christian” I address. They should, however, recognize one hundred and fifty million of their neighbors. I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian Right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths [p.ix].”

What this says, in other words, and he is quite explicit on other occasions, everybody who has some form of Christian belief is an enabler of religious fanatics. Whether or not this stance is a dictate of reason or emotion I shall leave the reader to decide. I have used the above excerpt because the sentiment corresponds to that of, Dawkins and Dennett. It must, therefore be taken as one fundamental aspect of the atheist creed.

But before examining their views we have to return to Harris’ scientific publication. Only the second one needs to be mentioned because it builds on and encompasses the first one. In “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief" he demonstrated, by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; the technique was discussed in the March and April 2010 articles on this site), that what may be called, “a belief system” exists in the brain. But, and this is the crucial element, it is content neutral. With other words Harris and co-workers showed that people believe or disbelieve whatever is currently acceptable and conforms to their thought structure, regardless whether the content is religious or secular. Harris will now have to draw the consequences of his own scientific work and realize that an “End of Faith” is not in the cards. People will continue to believe with equal fervor whatever is fashionable and acceptable at any given time in history, regardless whether or not it is “reasonable.” What is reasonable today can be regarded as patent nonsense tomorrow.

            While Harris is still in his early forties there is potential room for spiritual growth (Wikipedia informs us that he “has studied with ‘several meditation masters’ in the Buddhist traditions”). This may not hold for Richard Dawkins who by the time of publishing The God Delusion had already reached the age of 65. He is a product of the British Empire, born in Kenya, of Anglican parents and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University. He has published and lectured extensively, has been accorded international recognition, was president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004, and retired from his post as Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science in 2008. As such he is clearly a person who deserves a careful hearing.

            Dawkins first book for the general public was The Selfish Gene which was published in 1976 and all of his subsequent publications built on that foundation. I bought the book but have not yet had a chance to read it and will, therefore, postpone a discussion of its contents for a later occasion. Wikipedia tells us that Dawkins has been referred to as “Darwin’s bulldog” and judging from The God Delusion this seems to be an appropriate term. In his opinion evolution with natural selection can adequately account for all the phenomena human beings encounter and it is positively harmful to believe otherwise. It is especially heinous to indoctrinate children with unfounded religious beliefs. He denies that his atheism is dogmatic and states that if adequate proof for the existence of the supernatural could be brought to his attention he might change his view.

            For the present, however, he espouses Laplace’s answer to Napoleon and uses Laplace’s probability theory to demonstrate that the existence of any kind of God, is extremely improbable. The book is full of valid scientific data and most of his points are well taken. It deserves wide readership followed by unbiased thought and discussion. In my review I have called it “An Atheist Manifesto,” because, in analogy to Marx and Engels of 1848, Dawkins clearly laid out the reasons why he believes what he does and what he sees as the purpose of his life. He intends to be a “consciousness-raiser.” In pages 23-26 of the Preface he lists four aspects he wanted to demonstrate 1) that “to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration and a brave and splendid one.” 2) since all arguments for God’s existence “are spectacularly weak” and other types of –theisms, deisms or agnosticism are likewise unsustainable, the “power of natural selection” is a sufficient explanation for our existence and well-being. 3) Religion has anthropologic roots which are perpetuated by childhood indoctrination. A child cannot be a Christian, Jew, Muslim etc. because the child is too young to have an opinion on the matter. For parents to transmit their religious beliefs to their children amounts to “child abuse.” 4) “Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind, and indeed, a healthy mind.” These opinions are explained and justified in great detail over a span of 448 pages.

            The goal of an atheistic world is to be achieved by a “Brights campaign [p.380].”  But since this idea occurs also in Dennett any discussion of it requires first a degree of familiarity with Breaking the Spell and other writings by Professor Dennett. He is currently 68 years old and his photo on Wikipedia reminds one of one of the biblical patriarchs with the appropriate luxurious beard. By profession he is a philosopher and currently the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. In 2004 the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. He has published extensively and the 35 papers and books, which are listed in the references of the book we are discussing here, probably represent only a small fraction of his literary output.

            The “spell” to be broken is the taboo which guards religious institutions and our current reluctance to discuss religious dogmas with individuals who belong to a different religion. The book is likewise very detailed and covers much the same ground as the others which have been discussed here, although with one major difference. Dennett admits to being a philosopher and as such he is “better at raising questions than answering them.”

Let me now point to some aspects Dennett and I agree on which can be found mainly in the last chapter section 5 entitled Patience and Politics. Although he wants atheism to take root,

“We must be patient and have faith [the sentiment Harris wanted to get rid of] in our open society, in knowledge, in continuing pressure to make the world a better place for people to live, and we must recognize that people need to see their lives as having meaning. The thirst for a quest, a goal, is unquenchable, and if we don’t provide benign or at least nonmalignant avenues, we will always face toxic religions.”

Christian Zionists who firmly believe in the “Rapture” (discussed in The Unholy Alliance May 1, 2002) and want to hasten the coming of Armageddon by joining Israeli zealots in their claim to the entire “Holy Land” and building the third temple on the site of  the current Muslim shrines in Jerusalem are mentioned as an example for the toxic group. The “End Times” movement is dangerous and an objective investigation of the people who adhere to it, possibly in high places of influence, need to be brought to public attention. Finally, “Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing [emphasis in the original] ignorance is shameful.”

            Dennett limits himself to explain his own point of view and gently urges readers to reconsider theirs on basis of the evidence presented. He does want, however, to make atheism not only acceptable but the dominant creed. This is to be achieved by the Humpty Dumpty strategy (February 1, 2010). That is: you take a commonly used word and give it a completely different meaning. Dawkins and Dennett point out that this has been successfully done by the homosexual community which immediately changed its image by calling themselves “gay.” The same can be achieved by atheists if they no longer regard themselves as “godless” but as “bright.” Dennett has officially endorsed the concept in an article for The New York Times on July 12, 2003 under the headline “The Bright Stuff,” which is an obvious allusion to our space pioneers. The article is reprinted on http://www.the-brights.net which also provides the views of that organization. The website informs us that there are “brights,” those individuals who  subscribe to the ideas in private, and that there are “Brights” who are registering themselves as (dues paying?) members  of the “movement.” Since the word “movement” translates into German as “die Bewegung,” which was used by the Nazis to describe their grab for power, I have a healthy dislike for such “movements” which include the current “tea parties.” In English the word is also used for one of our ”natural functions,” which actually rid the body of what might be called “the wrong stuff.”

            After having read these books I found them nice in theory, although even the theory that Science and natural evolution are the summum bonum is open to doubt, but unacceptable in practice. Let me be quite concrete because we live in the real world where other people matter. Martha and I moved to Utah 20 years ago because there are: beautiful mountains to ski on, a nice lake to sail on, a university where I can continue to work and Martha could have her horse to ride near-by. Religion did not enter into the picture at all, because we belong to the religious moderates who follow a live and let live life-style. Although Salt Lake City itself is becoming more cosmopolitan, the suburbs, and especially the area we live, is at least eighty per cent Mormon. Nevertheless, not all of us are. The first name of our neighbor across the street is Mohammed, that of our neighbor to the south of us is Jim, but his neighbor’s is Ahmed. Jim has a statue of St. Francis in his backyard which identifies him as Catholic, while our Buddha gently smiles upon all creation. All of us get along with each other and our private beliefs remain just that, private! Since the Constitution has interpreted even abortion legal under “the right to privacy,” I don’t think that I have a right to discuss my belief system with others unless I am directly asked to do so or for instance on these pages, which anyone is free to read or disregard.

What would happen if I were to take the mentioned books as a clarion call to bring the gospel of atheism to all of our neighbors including the Mormons? You know perfectly well the outcome and I don’t  have to describe it. So the edifice breaks down on a very practical level. Another aspect the authors have ignored is that atheism has been official doctrine during the period called la terreur of the French Revolution. Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins, I am excepting Dennett because he is a gradualist,  seem to be a reincarnation of Hébertists (followers of Jaques Hébert)  who adored the “Goddess of Reason” and reportedly planted her statue on the High Altar of Notre Dame on November 10, 1793. They also had done away with the Christian calendar; introduced a new one starting with the French Revolution and had renamed all the months of the year. It didn’t work. In the following year the Hébertists became part of the estimated 50,000 who were guillotined during that era and a few years later the eminently practical Napoleon made peace with the Church. The atheistic experiment was then tried again by Lenin and his followers starting in 1917. But that one began to crumble during WWII when Stalin saw that his people wouldn’t fight for scientific materialism but would do so to defend “Holy Mother Russia.” He had to enlist the help of what had remained of the  Orthodox Church and as they say “the rest is history,” with the official recognition of the Church after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We disregard history at our peril and I submit that militant atheism is going to be just as great a danger for our world in this century as religious fanaticism. This aspect as well as some other objections to the “Brights’ movement” will be discussed in the next installment.