Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".

by Richard Dawkins
Sunday, April 20, 2008

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!


Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:


Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.


It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.

Richard

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Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.

3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.

5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).

6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.

7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.

8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.

Yours sincerely

Richard Dawkins

From a 2007 National Secular Society newsletter:

Professor Dawkins is now routinely accused of being a mirror image of a religious extremist. This gentle biologist, whose only crime is to pose questions and challenge unreason, is suddenly on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the new religious thinking, the "religion" of atheism is as evil and threatening as that of the Taliban.

It is surprising how many people have fallen for this argument. Even some people who think of themselves as rationalists will come out with it (see: Atheists Split Over Message.) Why do they attack those who seek to buttress the integrity of science and demand evidence for claims that have wide-spread consequences for the safety of the world?

But as honorary associate A.C. Grayling has written: "It is worth pointing out an allied and characteristic bit of jesuitry employed by folk of faith. This is their attempt to describe naturalism (atheism) as itself a 'religion'. But, by definition, a religion is something centred upon belief in the existence of supernatural agencies or entities in the universe; and not merely in their existence, but in their interest in human beings on this planet; and not merely their interest, but their particularly detailed interest in what humans wear, what they eat, when they eat it, what they read or see, what they treat as clean and unclean, who they have sex with and how and when; and so for a multitude of other things, like making women invisible beneath enveloping clothing, or strapping little boxes to their foreheads, or iterating formulae by rote five times a day, and so endlessly forth; with threats of punishment for getting any of it wrong.
"But naturalism (atheism) by definition does not premise such belief. Any view of the world that does not premise the existence of something supernatural is a philosophy, or a theory, or at worst an ideology. If it is either of the two first, at its best it proportions what it accepts to the evidence for accepting it, knows what would refute it, and stands ready to revise itself in the light of new evidence. This is the essence of science. It comes as no surprise that no wars have been fought, pogroms carried out, or burnings conducted at the stake, over rival theories in biology or astrophysics.
"And one can grant that the word 'fundamental' does after all apply to this: in the phrase 'fundamentally sensible'."

Dawkins v. Collins Debate
by Gary J. Whittenberger

God Vs. Science was the featured debate in the November 13, 2006 issue of Time magazine between well-known scientists Dr. Francis Collins, who is a Christian, and Dr. Richard Dawkins, who is an atheist. The article reported a lively exchange between these two scientific heavyweights who answered questions from a moderator about various controversies involving religion and science. Skeptics and believers alike should read the original article. However, this essay will summarize the important points of the Time article and offer skeptical commentary.

In the first exchange, Dawkins and Collins apparently agreed that the proposition God exists is either true or false. Dawkins indicated that science is appropriate to the task of answering the question, but Collins disagreed: From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore Gods existence is outside of sciences ability to really weigh in.

Collins started on the wrong foot by doing a little question begging; he assumed Gods existence from the outset without presenting any evidence for the inference. But he also left the backdoor open for science to weigh in on Gods existence. By saying that God cannot be completely contained within nature, he implied that God can be partly contained within nature, which makes God open to scientific analysis. On the other hand, Collins implied that God is partly contained outside nature. Since we are part of nature, how could we ever get outside of it to see that there is anything on the other side? It is common for religious apologists like Collins to talk about things outside nature or the supernatural, but they always seem to fall short in presenting any evidence that anything supernatural exists. By inventing a category called supernatural and relegating hypothetical things to it, they apparently hope to protect those things from the requirement of evidence.

Dawkins indicated that before the theory of evolution it was thought that the idea of God was required to explain the complexity, purpose, beauty, and elegance of living things. But the theory of evolution showed that the God hypothesis was unnecessary for the explanation. Collins responded by saying that a God, being outside of nature and therefore outside of space and time, could have designed and activated evolution itself at the moment of his creation of the universe. Collins fails to consider all the consequences of inventing a realm or a being outside of nature. One important feature of nature is its orderliness. If God were outside of nature, wouldnt he be outside of orderliness? If so, then this would preclude him from having all the wonderful behavioral tendencies, such as perfect goodness, which are often ascribed to him. Collins is fond of saying that God is outside of space and time. What does this mean? Does it make any sense to say that something exists outside space and time? When we apply the word exists to something, dont we mean that we can observe it or its effects in space and time? Have we ever observed anything outside space and time? Collins seems to be caught in the quicksand of contradiction. Even if one entertains for a moment the odd notion that God could exist outside time, this seems to lead to a conclusion that he couldnt do anything, including the particularly spectacular act attributed to him, i.e. creating the universe.

Time is the measure of change. If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no action. If there is no action, there is no creation. If God were to exist outside of time, he would be impotent to do anything at all! By insisting that God exists outside of nature, Collins nearly makes his supernatural compartment so small that there isnt enough room for God.

In response, Dawkins indicated that it would be odd if God chose to create humans through a 14-billion-year process of evolution. Collins responded by saying that this roundabout way of producing humans would not be an odd course of action for a God not having the purpose of making his intention absolutely obvious to us. Collins postulates a sort of subtle God who doesnt want to give us too much information about his existence. Responding further to Dawkins, Collins said If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation? What would be so wrong with Gods posting obvious road signs? Collins implies the answer, i.e. by doing so, God would simply be forcing us to believe in him!

Collins seems to endorse the dubious notion that giving clear unambiguous information to people would be forcing them to take a certain course of action. If we were to emulate the God whom Collins envisions, we would dispense with any obvious road signs and would withhold clear information from adolescents about the connection between smoking cigarettes and getting lung cancer so that they wouldnt be forced to forgo smoking. Rather than addressing the subtle God that Collins imagines, Dawkins challenges the traditional God. He is certainly correct that the inefficiency of evolution, not to mention its errors of design, is inconsistent with the traditional idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being. This traditional kind of God would be more likely to operate through Creationism, but this hypothesized mode of operation is not supported by the evidence of biology, genetics, geology, and cosmology.

Collins and Dawkins then offered their differing views on the fine-tuning of our universe. According to this idea, if any of a half dozen of the physical constants of our universe had been just slightly different in value from what it actually is, then life as we know it, including human life, would not exist. The terminology gets a little confusing here. How can something that is a constant be different from what it is? When physicists and cosmologists talk about a physical constant, they mean a physical factor which has a certain value (represented by a particular number) which is constant throughout all times and places in our universe but which might possibly vary across different universes, if there were other universes. A physical constant would have the same value throughout any given universe, but might vary from one universe to another.

Dawkins proposed two possible explanations for the values of the physical constants we find in our universe. One is that these constants couldnt be any different from what they are; they simply are what they are. The other is that our universe is just one of a very large population of universes. Within this great mulitverse environment, there are bound to be some universes that have the physical constants at just the right values to support the development of life, and we find ourselves in one of them. Collins dealt with the improbability of the physical constants, life, and human life by suggesting that a super-being selected the physical constants to be what they are. God tuned the universe to make life possible. In supporting his own explanation, Collins ignored the first hypothesis mentioned by Dawkins and attempted to dismiss the second. He said that the application of Occams razor leads him to favor the God-as-tuner hypothesis. Dawkins responded by saying that the God hypothesis, although not impossible, is actually more improbable than the universe which it is designed to explain. Nevertheless, he advocated keeping an open mind when he said Its an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from.

Although Dawkins seems to present the two best currently available alternatives to Collins God hypothesis to explain the life-enabling values of the physical constants of our universe, he and Collins both seem to accept without any skepticism the proposition that our universe is improbable. But how can they just assume this? In my opinion, they do this through a misapplication of probability theory. In the debate they used the gravitational constant as an example. They correctly noted that if the gravitational constant (G) were different by one part in a hundred million million, then life, as we know it, would not be possible in our universe. One can imagine a range of values from X to Y, within which G is included (X≤G≤Y) and within which life is possible in our universe. Conversely, one can imagine a set of values outside the range of X to Y (i.e. <X and >Y) for which life is not possible in our universe. Dawkins and Collins jump to the conclusion that, since the former range of values is so small compared to the latter set of values, our universe must be really rare or improbable.

Not only do they ignore the idea that some other kind of life (life as we do not know it) might be possible outside the X to Y range and the idea that there is an infinite number of values between X and Y for which life might be possible in our universe, more importantly, they also assume that they know something very important about a population of universes. In order to conclude that a particular item with some feature is improbable, one must know at least two facts about the population from which the item is drawn as a sample. One must know how many items with the feature are in the population and how many items without the feature are in that same population (or alternatively, how many items altogether are in the population). One can then draw valid inferences about the probabilities of different samples. The problem is that neither Dawkins nor Collins nor anyone else knows these facts about any possible population of universes from which our particular one might have been drawn as a sample.

In fact, we do not know that any other universes exist at all! Without knowledge of other universes, Dawkins and Collins misuse probability theory to conclude that our universe is rare. Because they start with an unwarranted assumption, their further speculations along these lines cant go very far. Even if we knew that a universe supportive of life was improbable, which we dont know, purposeful selection among possible universes (the God hypothesis) is a worse explanation of our particular universe than is random selection.

More must be said about Collins contention that the application of Occams razor supports the God hypothesis over the multiverse hypothesis. It doesnt. The God hypothesis is less parsimonious than the multiverse hypothesis for two reasons:

it invents a totally new type of entity, a supernatural being outside time and space, which is not necessary with the latter hypothesis, and
it leads to the classic problem of infinite regress. If there must be something outside our universe, i.e. God, to explain the existence of our universe, then there must be something outside of God, i.e. Z, to explain God. Then something is needed to explain Z, ad infinitum.
At one point in the debate Collins said that those who interpret Genesis in a literal way reach conclusions at odds with the findings of science, especially on the age of the Earth and the way in which species are related. Alluding to St. Augustine and commenting on the book of Genesis, Collins said It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. It is just as likely or more likely that the writer of Genesis intended his narrative to be an accurate account of what happened during creation than that he intended his narrative to be metaphorical, figurative, or allegorical. Collins is able to avoid the conclusion that the Bible is very likely not the word of God by adopting a nonliteral interpretation. Dawkins suggested that in defending evolution from his fundamentalist colleagues Collins was simply having an in-house quarrel, something he should just avoid.

The debate then turned to a discussion of miracles. The Time moderator asked: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesnt it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method? It would have been better had he phrased his questions the other way around and asked if the scientific method undermines or throws off the claims of the Resurrection, the virgin birth, and other miracles. Nevertheless, Collins responded that if one accepts Gods existence, then it is not unreasonable to expect that God might occasionally intervene in the world in a miraculous way, and that if one accepts that Jesus was divine then the Resurrection is not a great logical leap. But these are big ifs, and although Collins tries to show that they are plausible, he offers no good evidence to show that they are probable.

The debaters expressed different views on the origin of altruistic feelings and behavior. Collins said that there is a good explanation for some altruism; it either involves helping family members who share our DNA or it involves helping others whom we expect to help us later in return. But he said that there is not a good naturalistic explanation for altruism of the type exhibited by people such as Oskar Schindler who provided safety to Jews during the reign of the Nazis. It appears that people sometimes risk their lives and in the process also their genes in order to help strangers from whom they have no expectations of help in return. Collins implied that this altruism is a sign of Gods existence and a gift from him. Dawkins asserted that altruism in these cases is a kind of carry-over from ancient times when altruism had survival value for people living in small clans. Going beyond altruism, Collins then pointed to the existence of moral law or the absolutes of good and evil within the human species as evidence for the existence of God. This morality among humans is supposed to show that beyond just being a creator of the universe, God cares about us. Dawkins responded that good and evil dont exist as independent entities but that good and bad things simply happen to people.

Collins moral law argument is another variation on the God of the Gaps theme. If science doesnt yet have a complete description of a phenomenon, then there must be a super-being behind the scenes who is responsible for whatever is in the gaps. A big problem with this approach is that it tends to put a damper on further investigation. Besides that, Collins has an obligation to present a positive case for Gods existence and not just rely on the current apparent weaknesses of rival hypotheses. Collins idea of a moral law is premature and far too rigid when one considers the variability in moral rules across different geographic areas, cultures, ethnicities, and religions. There are moral principles because humans are constantly deciding on how they should behave, especially towards each other, and there are some commonalities in these moral principles, but there is hardly a moral law. In fact, the absence of a moral law, a universally agreed upon set of moral rules, is more compatible with Gods nonexistence than with his existence. Wouldnt an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God have revealed a universal moral code to all peoples from the very beginning of our species and reinforced it with booster training sessions each generation?

When he tried to explain why he supports the opening of new stem cell lines, in contrast to a great many other religious people, Collins presented a confusing, almost incoherent discussion of the relationship of faith and reason: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. Part of the difficulty here is that faith has several different meanings and unfortunately Collins isnt clear about which meaning he intends. Faith may refer to a religion or worldview, as in My faith is Islam. It may refer to an attitude of trust or confidence, as in I have faith in my physician. Or it may refer to believing propositions without evidence or out of proportion to the available evidence. It is this latter meaning that goes against Collins platitude that Faith is not the opposite of reason. Reason involves believing propositions on the basis of evidence or in proportion to the available evidence. Thus, if not strictly the opposite of one another, faith and reason are certainly incompatible. And how does adding revelation to the mix help at all? Revelation is not a separate way of knowing immune from the light of reason. One must still look at the evidence to evaluate a claim that a holy book contains revelations from a supreme being.

In his concluding remarks Collins indicated that he is interested in many why questions for which he believes answers may not come from science but from the spiritual realm. In his concluding remarks Dawkins indicated his doubt that the future discoveries of science would support any of the beliefs of the traditional religions, beliefs that he regards as parochial, but nevertheless worthy of some respect. And on that conciliatory note, the debate was concluded.

Who won the debate? From the perspective of style or mode of expression, perhaps Collins won. At times, Dawkins seemed to come across as a bit testy and abrasive. He not only referred to fundamentalists as clowns, but several times he accused Collins of presenting cop outs. Collins, on the other hand, seemed more self-assured and gentlemanly in his interpersonal style. From the perspective of content or validity of argument, Dawkins won the debate hands-down. He made many points that Collins seemed helpless to rebut. Collins failed to show that he has found a satisfactory conciliation between religion and science, between faith and reason, or even that such a project is possible. Overall, the debate provided useful insights into the currently hot, but perennial issue of science versus religion.

From Skeptic's Dictionary Newsletter 72:

The God Delusion

If you are wondering whether Richard Dawkins has a death wish, read his latest book, The God Delusion. Fanatical believers won't get past the title and some might consider it their duty to punish anyone who would dare claim that God is deluded about anything.

Of course, that's not what the book is about, but it will hardly matter to some of Allah's self-anointed jihadists. (For some reason, my spell checker suggests I replace jihadist with nihilist. Go figure.) I've started reading the book and have found the first 100 pages or so very interesting. I also listened to DJ Grothe interview Dawkins about the book on his Point of Inquiry podcast. I now understand why Dawkins considers the existence of god to be a scientific question and why he feels no necessity to avoid offending religious evolutionists who might be allies in the fight against the intelligent design fanatics. I won't spoil it for those of you who have yet to read the book, so I will only note that I have come to agree with him that there is no special area of expertise when it comes to theology and philosophy regarding the existence of god. Stephen Jay Gould was wrong about "nonoverlapping magisteria" when he tried to argue that science and religion are compatible because each has its own domain and they don't overlap. There is nothing magisterial about irrational faith. Truth is truth. There is not a truth for reason and a truth for faith. To consider the musings of theologians about the Trinity as protected from rational analysis because it is a matter of faith is to abandon reason and admit that irrationality is as good as rationality as a basis for belief. That position can't even be argued for because it requires rationality to argue. Believing on faith is not something to be proud of; it is something a human being should be ashamed of. If we value truth, we must value reason. Faith is not the road to truth but the road to anything goes because we say so. To allow someone off the hook from having to defend his beliefs because he throws up the shield of faith is not only to grant him the right to be irrational, it is also to grant that his irrationality is on an equal footing with your rationality. We shouldn't allow that. We should make it clear that we think a human being should be embarrassed to think it a good thing to believe something on faith. And please do not confuse faith with trust or probability.

(see below for first chapter)

The God Delusion

First Chapter
By RICHARD DAWKINS

The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.

In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species - the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us':

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

All Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is religion!' But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.

Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'.

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, 'For then we should know the mind of God', is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than Hawking or Einstein. She loves churches, mosques and temples, and numerous passages in her book fairly beg to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for supernatural religion. She goes so far as to call herself a 'Religious Naturalist'. Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is really as staunch an atheist as I am.

'Naturalist' is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my childhood hero, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more than a touch of the 'philosopher' naturalist of HMS Beagle about him). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still means for most of us today: a student of the natural world. Naturalists in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin himself was destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use 'naturalist' in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist's commitment to naturalism: 'What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values - in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.'

Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly true of Einstein and Hawking. The present Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes to church as an 'unbelieving Anglican ... out of loyalty to the tribe'. He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a recently televised conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn't really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed to be interviewing me, not the other way around). When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as 'religion' the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow Dan Dennett's phrase, they 'believe in belief'.

One of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also said,

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself? That his words can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By 'religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.

Here are some more quotations from Einstein, to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

In greater numbers since his death, religious apologists understandably try to claim Einstein as one of their own. Some of his religious contemporaries saw him very differently. In 1940 Einstein wrote a famous paper justifying his statement 'I do not believe in a personal God.' This and similar statements provoked a storm of letters from the religiously orthodox, many of them alluding to Einstein's Jewish origins. The extracts that follow are taken from Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion (which is also my main source of quotations from Einstein himself on religious matters). The Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City said: 'It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race of the Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of that race.' Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: 'There is no other God but a personal God ... Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He is all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in some field, they are qualified to express opinions in all.' The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist' on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein understood very well exactly what he was denying.

An American Roman Catholic lawyer, working on behalf of an ecumenical coalition, wrote to Einstein:

We deeply regret that you made your statement ... in which you ridicule the idea of a personal God. In the past ten years nothing has been so calculated to make people think that Hitler had some reason to expel the Jews from Germany as your statement. Conceding your right to free speech, I still say that your statement constitutes you as one of the greatest sources of discord in America.

A New York rabbi said: 'Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism.'

'But'? 'But'? Why not 'and'?

The president of a historical society in New Jersey wrote a letter that so damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is worth reading twice:

We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who said, 'There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's faith.' ... I hope, Dr Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do you honor.

What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.

Less abject but more shocking was the letter from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma:

Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in my power to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt the cause of your people than all the efforts of the Christians who love Israel can do to stamp out anti-Semitism in our land. Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'

The one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein was not one of them. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was a theist. So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: 'I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings'?

Let's remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a nonsupernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like 'God is subtle but he is not malicious' or 'He does not play dice' or 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. 'God does not play dice' should be translated as 'Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.' 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the universe have begun in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism - for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion). . . .

Richard Dawkins: Beyond belief
The renowned evolutionary biologist tells John Crace why he finds the resurgence of religion so annoying

John Crace
Tuesday January 10, 2006
Guardian

Men are supposed to mellow in their mid-60s. Richard Dawkins appears to be going the other way. Never one to tolerate fools at the best of times, he's become noticeably less patient as the years roll by. "It does appear that I've become rather more grumpy," he says, without appearing that bothered one way or another. And despite a contented home life with his third wife, the actor Lalla Ward, there's a great deal to be grumpy about.
Back in 1976, as a 30-something research fellow recently returned to Oxford after the obligatory two-year stint in the US at the University of California at Berkeley, Dawkins secured his reputation with The Selfish Gene as a cutting-edge thinker and a man blessed with the common touch. Long before popularising science became a career route for academics, Dawkins managed to advance the scientific understanding of the evolutionary process, while making that knowledge accessible to the general reader.

There were two key parts to The Selfish Gene. The first was Dawkins's inversion of the process of natural selection. Instead of trotting out the established view that organisms use genes to self-replicate, Dawkins made the revolutionary suggestion that genes use organisms to propagate themselves, an idea that immediately answered many of the difficult questions of Darwinism, such as the apparent selflessness of some animal behaviour. The second important theme was the rehabilitation of memes, self-replicating cultural transmissions - "viruses of the mind" - that are passed on both vertically and horizontally within families. And it is the meme, or rather one particular meme, that is the prime cause of Dawkins's current grumpiness.

According to memetic theory, memes are subject to the same process of natural selection as genes. And yet one meme, the religious meme, steadfastly refuses to die. You can see where the religious meme sprung from: when the world was an inexplicable and scary place, a belief in the supernatural was both comforting and socially adhesive. But as our understanding of the world grew, you might have expected the religious meme to give way to rationalism. Yet the opposite has happened. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the Darwinian explanation of evolution, religious belief - and fundamentalist religion at that - remains as ingrained as ever.

Religion offends every bone in Dawkins's rational, atheist body. "You can see why people may want to believe in something," he acknowledges. "The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me. But to maintain such a belief in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is truly bewildering." If individual faith is, for Dawkins, an expression of an ignorance, collective faith and organised religion embody something much more pernicious. That is what drove him to make two films for Channel 4, the first of which was shown last night, and to write his new book, The God Delusion, to be published in September.

Dawkins describes these projects as "consciousness-raising exercises" but the films come across as full-frontal assaults. Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam all get both barrels. Powerful and well-argued, they are; subtle, they ain't. Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, gets a walk-on role as the liberal voice of religion, but mostly it's the fundamentalists of all faiths who fall under Dawkins's scrutiny. "They are profoundly wrong," he says, "but in some ways I have more sympathy with their views than I do with the so-called more liberal wings. At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see."

No such thing

What angers Dawkins most is the way religion gets such an easy ride. "We treat it with a politically correct reverence that we don't accord to any other institution," he says. "Even secularists talk about Jewish, Catholic and Muslim children. There's no such thing. Children aren't born with a particular religious gene. What they are is children of Jewish, Catholic and Muslim parents. If you started to talk about monetarist or Marxist children, everyone would consider you abusive. Yet for religion we make an exception. We are incapable of distinguishing between race and religion. There is some statistical correlation between the two, but they are very different entities and we shouldn't allow them to be confused."

Predictably, Dawkins has no time for faith schools. "Segregation has no place in the education system," he argues. "Take Northern Ireland. You could get rid of the climate of hostility within a generation by getting rid of segregated schooling. Separating Catholics and Protestants has fomented centuries of hostility." But Dawkins reserves his greatest scorn for creationists. "How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the north-east of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old."

Evolution offers Dawkins all the explanations he needs - "if there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection" - but he does acknowledge there are still large gaps in our knowledge. "Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang," he says, "but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence."

Unfortunately for Dawkins, it is into precisely these gaps that faith and superstition insinuate themselves, a problem made worse for secularists when scientists declare a religious affiliation. "I think the figures are somewhat overstated in this country," he says tersely, "as it's generally the same three scientists making their voices heard. Most scientists use the term God in the way that Einstein did, as an expression of reverence for the deep mysteries of the universe, a sentiment I share.

"In the US, the picture is rather different. Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism. In a recent survey, 40% of US scientists said they believed in God; however, when the sample was narrowed to those in the National Academy [the US equivalent of the Royal Society] the figure was down to 10%."

He didn't start out as an unbeliever. Dawkins was born into a middle-class family that went to church each Christmas. At school, Anglicanism, if not rammed down the throat, was at least a given. "I had my first doubts when I was nine," he recalls, "when I realised there were lots of different religions and they couldn't all be right. However I put my misgivings on hold when I went to Oundle and got confirmed. I only stopped believing when I was about 15."

Opponents have claimed that Dawkins offers a bleak view of humanity, something he categorically denies. "The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small," he argues, "and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun." But even he expresses regret at our long-term prospects. "Within 50 million years, it's highly unlikely humans will still be around and it is sad to think of the loss of all that knowledge and music."

Greatest skill

Dawkins's greatest skill has been to synthesise other people's material and come up with different ways of thinking about problems that revolutionise future research. But to write him off as an ideas man, pure and simple, is to lose sight of the man. He may not do any white-coat lab work these days but he can number-crunch with the best of them. In person, he's friendly rather than approachable, and there's a hint of distance that suggests someone more at home in front of a computer than with other people.

"I did used to be addicted to computer programming," he admits. "In the early days, there was no off-the-shelf software and I wrote everything, from my own word-processing programmes to more complex programmes simulating cricket sounds that were necessary for my research. However, I now view programming as a vice, so I don't allow myself to do it."

This split between the nerd and the populist has been evident all through his career. The nerd may have been more in evidence early on - not least when he was doing his doctorate and ignored the advice of his Nobel prize-winning supervisor, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and opted for a stats fest, "a classic piece of Popperian science", instead of a fluffier study of animal behaviour - but it's still around. Though Dawkins has held the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford since 1995 and gets more attention than most other scientists, you sense there's still a part of him that's not altogether comfortable in the public gaze.

It seems self-evident that his recent work has become more polemical, though he becomes strangely reticent when you suggest he's now a political figure as much as a scientist. "I don't know about that," he says. "I wouldn't want to make those claims." But then he adds that he wishes more scientists would stand up to be counted in the public arena.

There are similar competing pulls elsewhere. After declaring himself a recently converted anti-monarchist and delivering a withering attack on Prince Charles - "he's clearly soft on religion, just as he is on every dopey, half-baked failure to think" - he pulls back, saying he has nothing against Prince Charles as a person and giving the thumbs up to the Queen.

Even so, no one's ever going to die wondering what Dawkins really thinks. He may agonise over the thinking process and worry about how his ideas are interpreted, but the real voice always emerges in the end. Perhaps it is the populariser's dilemma: you get remembered for the soundbite rather than the complexity.

Put on the spot, Dawkins reveals he believes his lasting contribution to science is his 1984 book, The Extended Phenotype. Most lay people have long since forgotten or never heard of the book in which he argued that genes extend beyond their physical organisms - think beavers' dams and birds' nests - to ensure their survival.

But phenotypes have to remain on hold for the time being as it's religion that Dawkins has in his sights for the forseeable future. And what if, by some mischance, he were to find there is a God when he dies? He looks at me as if I were mad. "The question is so preposterous that I can hardly grace it with a hypothetical answer," he says finally. "But, to quote Bertrand Russell, I suspect I would say, 'There's not enough evidence, God'."

Curriculum vitae

Name: Richard Dawkins
Age: 64
Job: Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford
Likes: walking the dog
Dislikes: back-to-front baseball caps, gratuitous noise
Books: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale
Married: to Lalla Ward (of Dr Who fame), one daughter from previous marriage

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant
As the Religious Right tries to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas, Richard Dawkins speaks up for scientific logic

May 21, 2005

Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on. Science mines ignorance. Mystery that which we dont yet know; that which we dont yet understand is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.

Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or intelligent design theory (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.

It isnt even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.

The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms appear to have been carefully and artfully designed. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on appear to, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience in Kansas, for instance wants to hear.

The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.

The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. Bet you cant tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees? If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: Right, then, the alternative theory; intelligent design wins by default.

Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientists rejoicing in uncertainty. Todays scientist in America dare not say: Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frogs ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. Ill have to go to the university library and take a look. No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.

I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history. Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the readers appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore gaps in the fossil record.

Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous gaps. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a gap, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.

The creationists fondness for gaps in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You dont know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You dont understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please dont go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, dont work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Dont squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is Gods gift to Kansas.

Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestors Tale