from
The Four Horsemen
The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution
with
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins
Sam Harris
Daniel C. Dennett

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’. Or you might do it by ‘interpreting’ a Bronze Age text whose author was even more ignorant than you are.

We are not arrogant, not hubristic, to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth. Also honest is the frank admission of how much we don’t yet know – how much more work remains to be done. That is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance. Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don’t. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

You don’t have to be politically powerful or famous or eloquent or even notably influential in your community: you can be a sacrificial anode. The term sounds both dangerous and religious, but it is neither. It is well known among sailors and fishermen and others who work on boats and ships, and it goes by other names: cathodic protection system, or just zinc, or sometimes – a term I like because it conjures up such shocking images – sacrificial plate. [...]

When a steel boat or ship with a bronze or brass propeller sits in salt water, a battery of sorts is created, with electrons flowing spontaneously from steel to the alloy, eating it away at an alarming rate. A brand new solid-brass propeller can become pitted in a few days and destroyed in a few months; painting it with some protective shield is ineffective. The solution: bolt a small piece of zinc (other metals will work, but zinc for various reasons is best) to the steel (alternatively, thread a zinc nut of sorts on to the stainless steel propeller shaft) and your problem is solved. The modest piece of zinc, being galvanically more active than the brass or bronze alloy, ‘takes all the heat’ (the current) and allows itself to be sacrificed in order to protect the part that needs to do the heavy work. Once a year, you can easily replace the almost-depleted piece of zinc with a new sacrificial anode.

The political moral to be drawn from this analogy is obvious. If you are, say, a US senator or representative, or other official whose effectiveness would be seriously diminished by a reputation for extremism (in any dimension or direction), it helps mightily to have others a little further out there, visible and undaunted, who can tolerate being seen as ‘too radical’ because their livelihoods and security don’t depend (much) on such a reputation.

Just calmly letting the neighbours know that you are in favour of x, disapprove of y, think z is not to be trusted – in short, being not just an informed citizen but an informing citizen – can substantially contribute to the reduction of polarization and the gradual displacement of received opinion in the directions you favour.

The diversity of opinions among the four of us provides a good example of these factors at work. For once in my life, I get to play ‘good cop’, because I believe that we should be concerned to preserve the good that organized religions can do. Does religion ‘poison everything’, as my dear, late friend Hitch insisted on saying? Only in a very attenuated sense, I think. [...] I regret the residual irrationalism valorized by almost all religion, but I don’t see the state playing the succouring, comforting role well, so until we find secular successor organizations to take up that humane task, I am not in favour of ushering churches off the scene. I would rather assist in transforming these organizations into forms that are not caught in the trap of irrational – and necessarily insincere – allegiance to patent nonsense.

However disparate our interests, each of us was acutely aware that religious dogmatism hinders the growth of honest knowledge and divides humanity to no necessary purpose The latter is a dangerous irony, of course, because one of religion’s most vaunted powers is that it unites people. It does that, too, but generally by amplifying tribalism and spawning moralistic fears that would not otherwise exist.

Harris:

[...] I still use words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘mystical’ without furrowing my brow too much, to the consternation of many atheists. I think there is a range of experience that’s rare and is only talked about – without obvious qualms – in religious discourse. And because it’s only talked about in religious discourse, it is just riddled with superstition, and it’s used to justify various metaphysical schemes – which it can’t reasonably do.

Hitchens: If we could make one change, and only one, mine would be to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural. You, Sam, had a marvellous quotation in your blog from Francis Collins, the genome pioneer, who said whilst mountaineering one day he was just overcome by the landscape and then went down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ. A complete non-sequitur.

Harris: Exactly.

Hitchens: It’s never even been suggested that Jesus Christ created that landscape.

Hitchens:

But that would be an enormous distinction to make, and I think it would clear up a lot of people’s confusion – that what we have in our emotions, the surplus value of our personalities, aren’t particularly useful for our evolution. Or we can’t prove they are. But they do belong to us, all the same. They don’t belong to the supernatural and are not to be conscripted or annexed by any priesthood.

Harris: This is a point I think we should return to: this notion of the arrogance of science. Because there is no discourse that enforces humility more rigorously than science. Scientists in my experience are the first people to say they don’t know.

Hitchens: A lot of the talk that makes religious people not hard to beat, but hard to argue with, is precisely that they’ll say they’re in a permanent crisis of faith. There is, indeed, a prayer: ‘Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.’ Graham Greene says the great thing about being a Catholic was that it was a challenge to his unbelief. A lot of people live by keeping two sets of books.

Dennett: Yes.

Dawkins: Exactly.

Hitchens: It’s my impression that a majority of the people I know who call themselves believers, or people of faith, do that all the time. I wouldn’t say it was schizophrenia; that would be rude. But they’re quite aware of the implausibility of what they say. They don’t act on it when they go to the doctor, or when they travel, or anything of this kind. But in some sense they couldn’t be without it. But they’re quite respectful of the idea of doubt. In fact, they try and build it in when they can.

Dawkins: Well, that’s interesting then. So when they’re reciting the creed with its total sort of apparent conviction, this is a kind of mantra which is forcing them to overcome doubt by saying, ‘Yes, I do believe, I do believe, I do believe!’ Because really they don’t.

Dennett: Sure. And—

Dennett: And, of course, like their secular counterparts, they’re glad other people believe it. It’s an affirmation they wouldn’t want other people not to be making.

Dawkins: Yes, yes.

Harris: Well, also there’s this curious bootstrapping move, where they start with the premise that belief without evidence is especially noble. This is the doctrine of faith. This is the parable of Doubting Thomas. So they start with that and then add this notion, which has been hurled at me in various debates, that the fact that people can believe without evidence is itself a subtle form of evidence.

Hitchens: [...] One of the things that completely convicts religion of being fraudulent is the belief in the miraculous. The same people will say, ‘Well, Einstein felt a spiritual force in the universe,’ when what he said was the whole point about it is that there are no miracles. There are no changes in the natural order, that’s the miraculous thing. They’re completely cynical about claiming him.

Harris: And every religious person makes the same criticism of other religions that we do. They reject the pseudo-miracles and the pseudo-claims and certainties of others. They see the confidence tricks in other people’s faith. And they see them rather readily. Every Christian knows that the Qur’an can’t be the perfect word of the creator of the universe and that anyone who thinks it is hasn’t read it closely enough. We make a very strong case when we point that out, and point out also that whatever people are experiencing in church or in prayer, no matter how positive, the fact that Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and Christians are all experiencing it proves that it can’t be a matter of the divinity of Jesus or the unique sanctity of the Qur’an.

Dennett: Because there are seventeen different ways of getting there.

Dennett: [...] Noam Chomsky is quoted as saying there are two kinds of questions – problems and mysteries. Problems are solveable, mysteries aren’t. First of all, I just don’t buy that. But I buy the distinction, and say there’s nothing about mystery in science. There are problems; there are deep problems. There are things we don’t know; there are things we’ll never know. But they aren’t systematically incomprehensible to human beings. The glorification of the idea that these things are systematically incomprehensible, I think has no place in science.

Hitchens: Which is why I think we should be quite happy to revive traditional terms in our discourse, such as ‘obscurantism’ and ‘obfuscation’, which is what they really are. And to point out that these things can make intelligent people act stupidly.

Hitchens:

[...] We know there’ll be great new discoveries. We know we’ll live to see great things. But we know there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. That’s the whole distinction. The believer has to say, not just that there is a God – the Deist position that there may be a mind at work in the universe, a proposition we can’t disprove – but that they know that mind.

Harris: Exactly.

Hitchens: And can interpret it. They’re on good terms with it. They get occasional revelations from it. They get briefings from it. Now, any decent argument, any decent intellect, has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know.

Dennett: [...] Not so much in Breaking the Spell, but when I was working on my book on free will, Freedom Evolves, I kept running into critics who were basically expressing something very close to a religious view – namely, free will is such an important idea that if we gave up the idea of free will, people would lose the sense of responsibility and we would have chaos. And you really don’t want to look too closely. Just avert your eyes; do not look too closely at this issue of free will and determinism. And I thought about that explicitly in the environmental-impact category. OK, could I imagine that my irrepressible curiosity could lead me to articulate something, true or false, which would have such devastating effects on the world that I should just shut up and change the subject? I think that’s a good question, which we should all ask – absolutely! I spent a lot of time thinking hard about that, and I wouldn’t have published either of those two books if I hadn’t come to the conclusion that it was not only, as it were, environmentally safe to proceed this way but obligatory. I think you should ask that question. I do.

Dawkins: Before publishing a book, but not before deciding for yourself, ‘Do I think that this is true or not?’ One should never do what some politically motivated critics often do, which is to say, ‘This is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true.’

Dawkins: [...] Whether it’s astrology or religion or anything else, I want to live in a world where people think sceptically for themselves, look at evidence. Not because astrology’s harmful; I guess it probably isn’t harmful. But if you go through the world thinking that it’s OK to just believe things because you believe them without evidence, then you’re missing so much. And it’s such a wonderful experience to live in the world and understand why you’re living in the world, and understand what makes it work, understand about the real stars, understand about astronomy, that it’s an impoverishing thing to be reduced to the pettiness of astrology.

And I think you can say the same of religion. The universe is a grand, beautiful, wonderful place, and it’s petty and parochial and cheapening to believe in jinns and supernatural creators and supernatural interferers. I think you could make an aesthetic case that you’d want to get rid of faith.

Hitchens: [...] But the problem is this, whether we think, as I certainly very firmly do believe, that totalitarianism is innate in all religion because it has to want an absolute, unchallengeable, eternal authority.

Dennett: In all religions.

Hitchens: Must be so. The Creator whose will can’t be challenged. Our comments on his will are unimportant. His will is absolute, and applies after we’re dead as well as before we’re born. That is the origin of totalitarianism.

Hitchens: I think it’s a point we might spend a bit more time making. That the howling wilderness of nothingness is much more likely to result from holy war or religious conflict or theocracy than it is from a proper secularism, which would therefore I think, have to not just allow or leave or tolerate or condescend to or patronize but actually, in a sense, welcome the persistence of something like faith. I feel I’ve put it better now than I did at the beginning.

Harris: Well, what do you mean by ‘something like faith’?

Dennett: How like faith?

Hitchens: Something like the belief that there must be more than we can know.

Dennett: Well, that’s fine.

Harris: Dan Dennett believes that. That’s not faith.

Dennett: Yes, sure!

Harris: We know there’s more than we presently know and are likely to know.

Hitchens: That was my original point in saying that if we could find a way of enforcing the distinction between the numinous and the superstitious, we would be doing something culturally quite important. [...] The great cultural project, in other words, may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.