Abstracts V

Richard DAWKINS, The God Delusion, 2006.

[Over all more of a review, perhaps, than an abstract:] If someone said to me that “there are fairies [human-shaped beings with magical powers] at the bottom of the garden,” I would have the responsibility to set them straight, to disabuse them of that notion: while I cannot prove that there are no fairies, it is sufficient that after looking carefully, I have no evidence at all that there are. My responsibility would, I think, be even greater if the person said that the very absence of evidence was a reason for believing in the fairies. And even greater if those fairies told them to harm, even kill, others who did not believe in them. − After reading this book I can no longer 'sit on the fence' as regards organised religion, any more than I can as regards those fairies.

The author is a scientist who has much highly respected work to his credit in the area of genetics, and as such he knows well what evidence there is, and what evidence there is not − as well as I know the bottom of the garden. He is best known for books of popular science, like The Selfish Gene, 1989, but here the arguments he marshals come from a wider range: psychological experiments as well as the traditional discussions about religion, and religious texts themselves.

For many readers there will not be much in the book that is new, but one thought in it has radically changed my way of thinking and talking about religion: I had always, if not without discomfort [expressed on various occasions at the annual 'Interfaith Conference' at Atlantic College,] allowed the nice religious people to get away with disowning the atrocities committed by their fellow-believers. An enlightened Muslim would typically claim that those Muslims, for instance, who bombed and stoned to death other Muslims belonging to a different branch of the same faith were not following the tenets of their faith properly, (always side-stepping the issue that those perpetrating the violence would of course say that he, the enlightened Muslim, was not being a proper Muslim ...) I now accept that the 'nice' religious people are implicated in the murders: by insisting, for the sake of their own belief, that there is an area of our lives which is not subject to the evidential requirements we all expect in all other aspects of our living together in society, they have been giving cover to the fundamentalists and extremists − and we have let them. Is it surprising, then, that the author, even if he at times writes entertainingly, often sounds angry, as much at the fence-sitters as at believers? [See another personal take on this.]

He shows how religion can be explained as a social construct and be understood in psychological terms, even though he perhaps makes the point a little too often that there are no Christian, Muslim or whatever children, only children with Christian, Muslim or whatever parents. [This is similar to the form of Nietzsche's argument, culminating in the famous phrase “God is dead” (rather than “There is no God,”) that once someone understands religion properly, his faith will just go away.]

Along the way, he disposes of common arguments, such as that without religion we would be lacking a moral compass. Not only are instances of callous or violent behaviour (some of which were new to me though not to some of my religious friends) approved of in some religious texts, but religion actually distorts our natural moral judgement: in a neat experiment, behaviour that one group of Jewish children clearly recognised as immoral when it was attributed to a Chinese emperor, a similar group generally approved of when it was attributed to Joshua. And as he points out, even if it was true that society needs religion, not only would that not make its claims any more true, it would also be counter-productive to keep religion as 'necessary for the masses'. − Or that without appeal to divine creation much of the world around us cannot be explained, like the eye (− an updated version of the traditional 'argument from design'): as a geneticist, the author is on his home territory here, into which he had made earlier forays, in Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996.

Right though I am sure he is, Dawkins may sometimes underestimate the other side. Pascal, for instance, in putting forward his idea of the wager to explain his faith as a rational choice, was well aware that God, seeing through his base motives, would reject a fake believer; but he makes the further point that by going through the motions of believing, one may become less critical and arrive at a genuine faith.

Dawkins is clearly also right about an asymmetry in disagreements about religion: there is clearly no danger of someone shooting a priest after reading his book, whereas those who hold that our beliefs must be based on shared evidence are taking more of a risk. But then the fanaticism with which someone holds their beliefs is no evidence of their truth.

Jared DIAMOND, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, 2005.

The subtitle of this book is of course not quite accurate – societies don't choose to fail. But what they do is to make choices which result, often very suddenly, in their disappearance, with nearly everyone either dying or, if they manage it, moving away. That is what Diamond calls a collapse, and this book, his next bestseller after Guns, Germs and Steel, 1997, is a discussion of how and why this has sometimes happened, or has in other, similar situations been avoided.

After a quite personal description of a close-to-home situation, the environmental degradation over his own lifetime in contemporary Montana and its consequences for the people living there, the author first discusses a range of past societies, such as the Easter Islands, famous for their giant, abandoned stone statues, where a flourishing society declined within a very short time around 1680; and the Norse settlements in Greenland, which survived for 450 years as the most remote outpost of European civilisation, until within a very short time, after a change in climate and the disruption in the trade with the mainland, everyone in the two settlements seems to have just starved, around the beginning of the 17th century. The author's other examples of failures are the Polynesian societies on the Pitcairn islands, the Anasazi in the Southwestern US, and the Maya in Mexico and adjacent parts of Central America. In each case he considers a range of possible factors: 1. damage inadvertently inflicted on the environment, 2. climate change, 3. hostile neighbours, 4. decreased support by friendly neighbours, and 5. the society's responses to its problems. In different cases different combinations of these factors are found to have played a role, but what becomes apparent is that whatever other problems there were, the collapse in the end always resulted from an over-exploitation of natural resources - due to competition between chiefs whose status was expressed by those stone statues, or to blind adherence to patterns of agriculture and lifestock-raising that had been brought from the mainland – and the inability of the society to respond appropriately. The main aim of the book clearly is to make an environmental point.

Throughout the book Diamond attempts to apply a rigorous, comparative approach: thus, there are other islands in the Pacific, with similar kinds of conditions to those of the Easter Islands, which have been continuously and successfully settled; and where the Greenland Norse failed, the Inuit who arrived later, from North America, have survived until today, and the population of Iceland has managed to cope in a similar adverse environment. What enabled these societies to survive was that their way of life was less damaging to their environment, or that they realised, and drew back, in time when their actions began to be unsustainable. An example, and other ones are mentioned, of the latter situation is the successful, top-down change of policy when Japan in the early Tokugawa period was on the verge of a catastrophic deforestation (– a policy that is now pursued in parts of Europe.)

In our own times, the major factor behind the genocides in Rwanda may have been, as some people in the country are aware, population pressure – a problem that remains to be addressed. And the very different situations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, though they share one island provide a neat contrast, even though the more positive situation in which the latter finds itself may partly be due to a more fortunate starting point, and credit for the sustainable policies may have to go to an otherwise unsavoury leader. The other main discussions concern China and Australia, where the race is on between the increasing damage to the environment and a growing awareness and willingness to address the problems.

Nowadays it is the planet as a whole that is facing potentially devastating environmental damage rather than just individual regions, but they are due to the same social problems, writ large: failure to anticipate, failure to perceive, rational bad behaviour, disastrous values, other irrational failures and unsuccessful solutions. If despite these problems our situation is not quite hopeless, it is because of an increasing awareness of where we are heading. It is of course big business that is often held responsible for the threats to the global environment, but our societies depend on the extraction of resources, and the author mentions particular initiatives in mining, logging and fishing, where a combination of business sense and public pressure have begun to result in positive changes. To the author, the conclusion that it is the public that has the ultimate responsibility is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing.

In the last chapter, after making a list, under various headings, of "the most serious problems", and disposing of a series of one-liners often used either to deny or to play down the seriousness of the situation we are in, Diamond ends on a hopeful note: that in contrast to the victims of past collapses, we have the opportunity, not least through a book like this, to learn from their failures.