The Blind Watchmaker: Darwin and a Godless Universe
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WARFARE: THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF ATHEISM
ONE OF THE most remarkable developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the relentless advance of the perception that there exists a permanent, essential conflict between the natural sciences and religion. Science is at war with religion—and that war can only lead to the elimination of religious belief as a relic of a superstitious age that is now long behind us. Science proves things, whereas religion depends on the authoritarian imposition of its dogmas, which fly in the face of evidence. To take the idea of God seriously is to commit intellectual suicide. Scientists are the Promethean liberators of humanity from their bondage to religious tradition and superstition.
That, in a nutshell, is the understanding of the relation between science and religion that has come to dominate the corporate consciousness of Western culture. It has always been like this, and this is the way it must be until religion has finally been eliminated. Religion has been the implacable opponent of scientific progress. Religion was violently opposed, for utterly stupid and self-serving reasons, to Copernicus’s theory of the solar system in the sixteenth century and to Darwin’s theory of evolution in the nineteenth. Two historical vignettes have been widely cited in the popular literature as illustrating this religious obscurantism: John Calvin’s criticism of the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus and Bishop Wilberforce’s dismissal of the Darwinian ideas of T. H. Huxley. As both also illustrate a somewhat different point, we may consider them in a little detail.
In his History of Western Philosophy, the great British atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell set out a popularized account of the complex evolution of modern Western philosophy, and the various obstacles it faced as it developed. One such major obstacle, in Russell’s view, was Christianity. Russell illustrated the “bigoted” nature of Christian theology with a racy account of the early fortunes of the Copernican theory of the solar system, and singled out John Calvin’s critique of the theory for special criticism. Did not the Bible say that the sun went round the earth? Well, that, according to Calvin, was the end of the matter. “Calvin,” wrote Russell, “demolished Copernicus with the text: ‘The world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved’ (Psa. xciii.I), and exclaimed: ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’” John Calvin emerges from this episode as an arrogant religious fool, typical of the kind of person who gets in the way of scientific progress. With the coming of atheism, such obscurantist ravings against advances in our knowledge could be silenced.
Even worse was the arrogance shown by the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, toward Darwin’s ally Thomas H. Huxley during the meeting of the British Association at Oxford on June 30, 1860, at which the theory of evolution was being discussed. After Wilberforce had delivered a typically arrogant and uninformed tirade against Darwin’s theory, he delivered what he thought would be a knockout blow—inquiring of Huxley whether it was “through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?” Huxley replied with great dignity that if he had a choice between having “a miserable ape for a grandfather” or a talented man who uses his gifts for “the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion,” he would choose the ape any day.
Both stories demonstrate the utter stupidity of religious thinkers, and the intellectual and moral superiority of their scientific peers. Yet both stories have something else in common. Both have been known to be completely false since about 1970, and are now viewed by historians as the urban myths of journalists too lazy to check their sources, perhaps telling us more about what certain people would like to believe than what actually happened.
Take the Calvin myth. The intellectual authority of the great atheist writer Bertrand Russell was such that few bothered to check out his assertions. Russell did not source his citation from Calvin, forcing others to work out where he got it from. The noted historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn attempted to track it down when studying early responses to Copernicus’s theory. Yet neither Kuhn nor anyone else could find anything like the quotation attributed to Calvin in any of his published writings. It did, however, feature prominently in the pages of Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896): “Calvin took the lead, in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the center of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm, and asked, ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’” Although White referred to a specific work by Calvin, at no point in that work—or anywhere else—did Calvin state anything even remotely resembling the words or thoughts attributed to him. So where did White get his quotation from? In a remarkable piece of literary detective work, Edward Rosen showed that the quotation could be traced back, not to any work of Calvin, but to a work published in 1886 by F. W. Farrer. Once more, no source was provided for the citation. The trail fizzled out at that point. Farrer was a cleric at Westminster Abbey in London who perhaps lacked the will and resources to check his facts. The remark attributed to Calvin thus had to be dismissed as pure invention.
The legend of the 1860 Wilberforce-Huxley exchange dates from the 1890s. As detailed studies of this event have made clear, contemporary accounts of that meeting of the British Association make no recognizable reference to this encounter, let alone to the ludicrous question that a later generation gleefully put into Wilberforce’s mouth, or the damning retort of Huxley. Both are journalistic inventions from thirty years later. As J. R. Lucas remarks of the legend of the Wilberforce-Huxley encounter, having surveyed the credibility of the primary sources upon which it was grounded: “About what actually happened in Oxford on 30 June 1860 it tells us very little; but about currents of thought in the latter part of the century, it tells us a lot.”
The 1890 account depicts Wilberforce as an ignorant cleric trying to score cheap points off Huxley, then being silenced and shamed. In fact, Wilberforce was thoroughly familiar with Darwin’s views, having written an extended review of Origin of Species five weeks prior to the 1860 meeting, which he summarized in his speech. Darwin himself granted that the review was “uncommonly clever” and that it pointed out “with skill all the most conjectural parts” of the book, identifying some serious weaknesses that he needed to address in a future work. Darwin’s 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication can be seen as a response to the specific criticisms made by Wilberforce. Yet the 1890s legend lives on, gracing the pages of even the most recent publications in this field. It is just as false yet just as widely believed as the legend of Darwin’s deathbed conversion to Christianity, which Lady Elizabeth Hope started in 1915. It all goes to confirm what Karl Marx once pointed out: if you say something often enough, people begin to believe that it is true.
The historical interaction of the natural sciences and religion is, as might be expected, far more complex and interesting than the wooden stereotypes of either atheist or religious propagandists might suggest. The really interesting question is why the antagonism between science and religion developed during the golden age of atheism, and whether it is likely to continue. The real issue is actually not so much what the natural sciences themselves teach, as the cultural evaluation of the scientific enterprise as a whole. The Calvin and Wilberforce myths are excellent examples of cultural stereotypes of science and religion, both disclosing and strengthening the dominant perception of this period—that an outmoded, arrogant, and discredited religion is in full retreat before a triumphant scientific advance. This take on things was brilliantly summarized in the words of Huxley himself (1860): “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.”
The complex and fascinating place of the natural sciences in the rise of atheism is best understood not by analyzing the many debates and publications of the period in a strictly chronological order, but by exploring three major aspects of the growing cultural acceptance of the sciences throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cultural understandings of the importance of the natural sciences are:
Each of these is an important element in underpinning an atheist worldview. In what follows, we shall trace their emergence and comment on their importance.
THE ORIGINS OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION
There has always been a sense in which the natural sciences are opposed to authoritarianism of any kind. As Freeman Dyson points out in his important essay “The Scientist as Rebel,” a common element of most visions of science is that of “rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the local prevailing culture.” Science is thus a subversive activity, almost by definition—a point famously stated in a lecture delivered to the Society of Heretics at Cambridge by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane in February 1923. For the Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam; for nineteenth-century Japanese scientists, science was a rebellion against the lingering feudalism of their culture; for the great Indian physicists of the twentieth century, their discipline was a powerful intellectual force directed against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism (not to mention British imperialism, which was then dominant in the region). And in Western Europe, scientific advance inevitably involved confrontation with the culture of the day—including its political, social, and religious elements. Inasmuch as the West has been dominated by Christianity, it is unsurprising that the tension between science and Western culture could be seen specifically as a confrontation between science and Christianity.
Most historians regard religion as having had a generally benign and constructive relationship with the natural sciences in the West. There were periods of tension and conflict, such as the Galileo controversy. Yet on closer examination, these often turn out to have had more to do with papal politics, ecclesiastical power struggles, and personality issues than with any fundamental tensions between faith and science. As leading historians of science regularly point out, the interaction of science and religion is determined primarily by historical circumstances and only secondarily by their respective subject matters. There is no universal paradigm for the relation of science and religion, either theoretically or historically. The case of Christian attitudes to evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century makes this point particularly evident. As the Irish scientist and historian David Livingstone makes clear in a groundbreaking study of the reception of Darwinism in two very different contexts—Belfast and Princeton—local issues and personalities were often of decisive importance in determining the outcome.
In the eighteenth century, a remarkable synergy developed between religion and the sciences in England. Newton’s “celestial mechanics” was widely regarded as at worst consistent with, and at best a glorious confirmation of, the Christian view of God as creator of a harmonious universe. Many members of the Royal Society of London—founded to advance scientific understanding and research—were strongly religious in their outlook, and saw this as enhancing their commitment to scientific advancement.
Yet all this changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The general tone of the late-nineteenth-century encounter between religion (especially Christianity) and the natural sciences was set by two works: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876). Both works reflect a strongly positivist view of history and a determination to settle old scores with organized religion. This contrasts sharply with the much more positive and settled relationship between the two typical in both North America and Great Britain up to around 1830, reflected in works such as William Paley’s Natural Theology.
For John William Draper, the natural sciences were Promethean liberators of humanity from the oppression of traditional religious thought and structures, particularly Roman Catholicism. “The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.” Draper was particularly offended by developments within the Roman Catholic church, which he regarded as pretentious, oppressive, and tyrannical. The rise of science (and especially Darwinian theory) was, for Draper, the most significant means of “endangering her position,” and was thus to be encouraged by all means available. Like many polemical works, History of the Conflict is notable more for the stridency of its assertions than for the substance of its arguments; nevertheless, the general tone of its approach would help create a mind-set.
The origins of Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom lie in the heated debates surrounding the foundation of Cornell University. Many denominational schools felt threatened by the establishment of the new university, and encouraged attacks on the fledgling school and White, its first president, accusing both of atheism. Angered by this unfair treatment, White decided to launch an offensive against his critics in a lecture delivered in New York on December 18, 1869, entitled “The Battle-Fields of Science.” Once more science was portrayed as a liberator in the quest for academic freedom. The lecture was gradually expanded until it was published in 1876 as The Warfare of Science. This book was supplemented by a further series of “New Chapters in the Warfare of Science,” published as articles in the Popular Science Monthly over the period 1885–92. The two-volume book of 1896 basically consists of the material found in the 1876 book, to which this additional material was appended.
White himself declared that the “most mistaken of mistaken ideas” was that “religion and science are enemies.” Nevertheless, this was precisely the impression created by his work, whether he himself intended it or not. The crystallization of the warfare metaphor in the popular mind was unquestionably catalyzed by White’s vigorously polemical writing. The widespread late-nineteenth-century interpretation of the Darwinian theory in terms of “the survival of the fittest” also lent weight to the imagery of conflict; was this not how nature itself determined matters? Was not nature itself a spectacular battlefield, on which the war of biological survival was fought? Was it not therefore to be expected that the same battle for survival might take place between religious and scientific worldviews, with the victor sweeping the vanquished from existence, the latter never to appear again in the relentless evolutionary development of human thought and knowledge?
The idea that science and religion are in perpetual conflict is no longer taken seriously by any major historian of science, despite its popularity in the late nineteenth century. One of the last remaining bastions of atheism survives only at the popular level—namely, the myth that an atheistic, fact-based science is permanently at war with a faith-based religion. Not only is this caricature clearly untrue in the present day, but historical scholarship has now determined it to be misleading and inaccurate in the past. Yet the myth still lives on in popular atheist writings, undisturbed by the findings of scholars. At least in the minds of some atheist propagandists, science is the supreme champion of atheism.
As a generation of historians has now pointed out, the notion of an endemic conflict between science and religion, so persuasively set out by White and Draper, is itself a social construction, created in the lengthening shadows of hostility toward individual clergy and church institutions. The interaction of science and religion is determined far more by their social circumstances than their specific ideas. The Victorian period itself gave rise to the social pressures and tensions that engendered the myth of permanent warfare between science and religion, and especially the Roman Catholic church as the “damnable perverter of mankind” (Thomas Huxley).
A significant social shift can be discerned behind the emergence of this conflict model. From a sociological perspective, scientific knowledge was advocated by particular social groups to advance their own specific goals and interests. There was growing competition between two specific groups within British society in the nineteenth century: the clergy and the scientific professionals. The clergy were widely regarded as an elite at the beginning of the century, with the “scientific parson” a well-established social stereotype. Among these we may number Gilbert White (1720–93), author of the classic Natural History of Selborne (1789).
With the appearance of the professional scientist, however, a struggle for supremacy began, to determine who would gain the cultural ascendancy within British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. The conflict model has its origins in the specific conditions of the Victorian era, in which an emerging professional intellectual group sought to displace a group that had hitherto occupied the place of honor. The rise of Darwinian theory appeared to give added scientific justification to this model: it was a struggle for the survival of the intellectually fittest. In the early nineteenth century, the British Association (a professional organization devoted to the advancement of science) had many members who were clergy; by the end of the century, the clergy tended to be portrayed as the enemies of science—and hence of social and intellectual progress. As a result, there was much sympathy for a model of the interaction of the sciences and religion that portrayed religion and its representatives in uncomplimentary and disparaging terms.
The conflict model of science and religion thus came to prominence at a time when professional scientists wished to distance themselves from their amateur colleagues, and when changing patterns in academic culture necessitated demonstrating its independence from the church and other bastions of the establishment. Academic freedom demanded a break with the church; to achieve this break it became expedient to depict the church as the opponent of learning and scientific advance and the natural sciences as their strongest advocates. The golden age of atheism witnessed the relentless advance of the sciences and the equally relentless retreat of faith from the public to the private domain. The cultural space within which religion was permitted to operate was gradually whittled down to private beliefs, which had no relevance to public policy.
Today, this stereotype of the warfare of science and religion lingers on in the backwaters of Western culture. Yet it has largely lost its credibility. The surging interest in the spiritual aspects of the natural sciences has been complemented by a new interest in the positive interaction of science and religion, evident in course titles such as “Science and the Spiritual Quest.” The growing realization that even many scientists who are Nobel laureates are interested in issues of faith has severely dented the case for a necessary link between science and atheism, or for the outdated stereotype of the perpetual war of science and faith. The simple fact is that there is no necessary connection between them: some scientists are religious and some are not.
ATHEISM AS A SCIENCE: THE DEMAND FOR RELIGIOUS PROOF
One of the most important scientific writers of the nineteenth century was William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), who was appointed professor of mathematics at University College, London, in 1871. A year earlier, an expedition to observe a solar eclipse came close to costing him his life, when his ship sank off the coast of Sicily. Although a very devout and fastidious Anglo-Catholic in his youth, Clifford’s perilous experience at sea appears to have convinced him of the improbability and immorality of Christian belief. From 1871 onward, he appears to have become obsessed with the idea that human progress could only be achieved through the systematic elimination of religious belief. He reserved a particular contempt for Christianity, especially in its Anglo-Catholic forms, which he regarded as no better than the pagan abominations he read about in his Old Testament.
Clifford clearly saw himself as being in the vanguard of a great advance in the fortunes of humanity, which, guided by reason and science, would rise above and finally transcend every previous achievement of civilization. Religion and its evidentially deficient allies of magic and superstition would simply fade away, overwhelmed by the new knowledge of the world:
The dim and shadowy outlines of the superhuman deity fade slowly away from us; and as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure—of Him who made all Gods and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says, “Before Jehovah was, I am.”
But how could religious belief be eliminated? In his highly influential Ethics of Belief (1871), Clifford developed a line of argument that has had a deep and lasting impact on discussions of the relation of science and religion: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” A refusal to engage in a critical evaluation of every belief, however daunting and distressing this may be, is an unforgiveable sin: “If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterward, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”
Whatever the belief may be—whether scientific, religious, or moral—we are under an absolute obligation to believe only what may be rigorously demonstrated by the strictest criteria of truth. Clifford opens his discussion of these questions with an analogy that presumably evoked some painful memories—a shipwreck.
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
The fundamental point is as moral as it is intellectual: beliefs must be warranted. The shipowner was a scoundrel. His belief may have been sincere, but it was utterly immoral to entertain such a belief when he had failed to investigate it thoroughly. “He did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.”
Clifford had no doubt that this rigorously evidential approach would undermine the claims of Christianity, especially its claims to supernatural knowledge of God through revelation and miraculous events. Nature was uniform; how could anyone legitimately believe such clear violations of the natural order.
No evidence, therefore, can justify us in believing the truth of a statement which is contrary to, or outside of, the uniformity of nature. If our experience is such that it cannot be filled up consistently with uniformity, all we have a right to conclude is that there is something wrong somewhere; but the possibility of inference is taken away; we must rest in our experience, and not go beyond it at all. If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
This relentless and persistent demand for verification of all beliefs anticipates some themes that came to prominence in the great debate over logical positivism in the 1950s, and is prone to many of the same difficulties. Yet the force of Clifford’s point was perceived as moral rather than intellectual. An absolute moral demand is placed on all human beings to prove what they believe. It was not long before religion was, once more, in headlong retreat. It was simply incapable of providing the evidential basis of belief that Clifford and others demanded.
Yet paradoxically, so was atheism. To conform to Clifford’s demands for evidential rigor, atheism must be demonstrated to be more than intellectually plausible, conceptually economical, or culturally attractive—it must be demonstrated to be true. Clifford had turned “Lockean caution about the nature of propositions into a straitjacket” (A. N. Wilson). Clifford’s legacy has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification that it has proved impossible to attain. A means of investigating reality had become the determinant of what was actually real in the first place.
Atheist writers of the nineteenth century often defined their position in terms of an absence—rather than a denial—of a belief in God, and argued that the burden of proof lay with those who had faith. A good example of this approach can be found in the writings of the socialist and women’s rights activist Annie Besant (1847–1933), especially in her Why I Do Not Believe in God (1887):
If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God’s existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him.
While there were many on both sides of the argument who preferred to overlook the point, the simple fact is that both atheism and Christian belief were found to lie beyond the available evidence. The burden of proof is equally distributed between the two. Both could be proposed; both could be defended; neither could be proved. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) pointed out in his Ancient Sage, the paradox was that nothing that was actually worth believing could be proved in the way Clifford demanded:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.
No wonder Thomas Huxley coined the term “agnostic” in 1869 to designate someone who recognized that the great questions of life lay beyond demonstration. As Huxley wrote in 1880: “Some twenty years ago, or thereabouts, I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with utmost confidence.” Huxley’s hostility was directed against both theist and atheist who thundered their dogmatic judgments without adequate foundations; in his view, it was impossible to arrive at any degree of metaphysical certainty in these matters. Religious and atheist might assert their beliefs with passion and power—yet their rhetoric had become detached from what could actually be proved. In such situations, the only moral response was to declare that the existence or nonexistence of God lay beyond true human knowledge—in effect, beyond meaningful adjudication. To do otherwise was to confuse “a conjecture with a certainty.” This piece of metaphysical diplomacy merely irritated all sides to the argument, who believed that Huxley was simply dodging the issues.
Despite these cautionary words, the belief that the natural sciences have conclusively settled the debate between faith and atheism has been developed by many scientific writers subsequently, perhaps most notably by the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins. In a series of recent works—including The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and A Devil’s Chaplain (2003)—Dawkins has argued consistently and vigorously for an atheistic worldview through an appeal to the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biology. Science, Dawkins asserts, proves things; it establishes its theories with certainty. The contrast with theology could not be more dramatic: “What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false.” While science proves things through evidence, religion deliberately asserts falsehoods that mislead, seduce, and oppress people.
As Dawkins went on to argue, “a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.” He is quite clear: science “is free of the main vice of religion, which is faith.” Really? The history of science shows a steady progression from one theory that was believed to be right in its day to another that replaces it—for example, the ether theory of light. As Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), a chemist and noted philosopher of science, pointed out, natural scientists find themselves having to believe some things that they know will later be shown to be wrong—but not being sure which of their present beliefs will turn out to be erroneous. How can Dawkins be so sure that his current beliefs are true, when history shows a persistent pattern of the abandonment of scientific theories as better approaches emerge? What historian of science can fail to note that what was once regarded as secure knowledge was eroded through the passage of time? Conveniently enough, Dawkins turns a blind eye to history.
He also turns another blind eye (how many does he have?) to the philosophy of science. It is certainly true that the natural sciences aim to offer the best possible explanation of the world, and that they have had considerable successes in doing so. But there are limits to this. The scientist regularly has to propose certain ideas that certainly fit in with experimental evidence, but that cannot be proved, and are thus taken on trust. I notice a firm recognition of this point in Dawkins’s hero, Charles Darwin himself. In his Origin of Species (1859), Darwin points out that his theory of natural selection has not been proven, and that all kinds of objections could reasonably be raised against it. But he still believes it was true, and that these difficulties will eventually be resolved. “A crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgement, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.” This does not sit easily with Dawkins’s simplistic mantra “science proves things.” The reality—as just about everyone else is perfectly happy to admit—is that the natural sciences offer what they believe to be the best possible explanation of things, but are perfectly prepared to abandon or modify this in the light of additional information.
The same issue emerged with Einstein’s theory of relativity, set out in November 1915, where certain confirming evidence was not available until nearly fifty years later. Einstein’s general theory of relativity was one of the most ambitious and exciting intellectual developments of the first decades of the twentieth century. If it was correct, Einstein declared, it predicted three important and observable consequences. First, it offered a highly accurate explanation of what is usually known as the anomalous precession of the planet Mercury. This had been observed since about 1865, but had never been accounted for. Second, it predicted that a beam of light would be deflected by the gravitational mass of the sun. The extent of this deflection could be very accurately calculated, and within ten years it was shown that Einstein’s theory corresponded superbly with the latest experimental findings.
There was, however, a third prediction. Einstein argued that the gravity of the sun would have an impact on the light it emitted. This “gravitational redshift” was due to the reduction of the velocity of light by the mass of the sun. But the extent of this reduction was infinitesimally small—just over two parts in a million. So minute was this effect that it simply could not be detected by any available means in the 1920s.
So what was to be done? Einstein’s theory seemed elegant, and it was impressively successful in explaining certain phenomena. But one of its predictions could not be confirmed. Perhaps Einstein was wrong, and his theory would have to be abandoned. Yet most did not think so. They believed that his theory was sufficiently persuasive to allow them to trust that, at some point in the distant future, final confirmation of its predictions would take place. In the meantime, they were perfectly prepared to live with this unresolved tension. They lived and thought as if Einstein’s theory was true, even though they knew that only a future generation could learn whether this was warranted or not. What they knew seemed good enough to them. They would trust that Einstein was right, and allow a future generation the luxury of knowing that he was.
In the event, the third prediction was finally confirmed in the 1960s, two generations later, when a new spectroscopic technique became available capable of observing the predicted effect. Yet nobody was entirely surprised. Nobody seems to have suspended belief in Einstein’s theory of relativity until this final confirmation came through.
So what is the relevance of this famous incident in the history of science to our reflections on Dawkins’s attitude to science? It shows that we can put our trust in a theory without having final confirmation of its truth. A theory can be plausible enough to gain our trust, even though some of its predictions and promises lie in the future. In short: it is about faith—a point long appreciated by Polanyi and other philosophers of science. So when Dawkins speaks of “proof,” he actually means something rather weaker, such as “good reasons for believing that something is right,” while realizing that it cannot actually be proved at present.
This is not a radical or controversial statement, but simply an accurate summary of the difficulties faced by the natural sciences as they seek to offer the best account of what we know about the world. It is simply not true that scientists believe theories because they have been “proved.” They believe them because they represent the best explanation of what may be observed. Dawkins’s overstatement here can be appreciated by considering two case studies, based on material we have just considered.
It is the year 1870. Charles Darwin holds that, with some necessary modifications, the ideas set out in his Origin of Species offer an excellent and deeply compelling account of the diversity of life-forms on the earth. Yet there is a serious difficulty. The very title of the book points to an explanation of how different species come into existence. Yet speciation—the formation of a new species by the accumulation of mutations—has never been demonstrated in real life or under laboratory conditions. Yet he holds on to the theory, believing that its explanatory ability and coherence are sufficient to justify it, and that the difficulty will one day be resolved. His theory has not been proved. Yet he believes it to be the best available. It can be trusted now, even though its final proof will lie some considerable distance in the future.
It is now the year 1930. Albert Einstein is passionately committed to his general theory of relativity, which has much to commend it. Yet he knows that one of its core predictions has not been observed. In the strict sense of the term, it has not been proved. Einstein, however, feels able to hold on to the theory, believing that its explanatory ability and coherence are sufficient to justify it, and that the difficulty will one day be resolved. While it cannot be proved correct now, he has faith that it will be confirmed in the future—and that he is justified in believing it now on the basis of its partial confirmation.
As Michael Polanyi insisted, there is always going to be an element of faith or trust in the natural sciences, precisely because so much cannot be proven. And when it comes to the question of God, as we shall see, nothing can be proven at all—despite the interesting exaggerations of those who tell us otherwise, on both sides of the argument.
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER: DARWIN AND A GODLESS UNIVERSE
There is no doubt that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution caused the smoldering crisis of faith in Victorian England to burst into flames. If any scientific development can be said to have converted the Western world to atheism, it is the theory originally proposed in Darwin’s Origin of Species and subsequently developed by Darwin and others into a full-blown account of the origins of biological life, including human beings. For Thomas Huxley, who had a particular animus against Roman Catholicism, Darwin’s theory of evolution was especially useful. “It occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism toward that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral and social life of mankind—the Catholic Church.”
The reaction in North America was similar. For the great American atheist Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–99), Darwin had destroyed the credibility of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before it would be swept away as an increasingly scientific culture recognized it as ignorant superstition. As he put it in Orthodoxy (1880), a scathing attack on the intellectual shallowness of Christian preachers:
This century will be called Darwin’s century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.
Yet it is not at all obvious why Darwinism should lead to atheism. To understand why it was understood in this way, we need to explore the specific cultural context within which the theory developed.
As has often been pointed out, the term “atheism” is intellectually derivative. While some interpret the term very loosely—“there are no spiritual beings”—the term is correctly, and more generally, understood to entail a denial of a specific conception of God. If “God” were defined as a supernatural being whose untroubled existence was invariably limited to the undefined (yet presumably remote) heavenly places—which is one influential way of reading both Aristotle and Plato—then Darwin’s theory would have no bearing whatsoever on whether God exists or not. In order for Darwin’s theory of evolution to have significance to the debate over atheism, a concept of God must be proposed that is demonstrably in conflict with Darwin at this point. Precisely such a conception of God emerged within British Protestantism in the nineteenth century, achieving cultural dominance. If the Darwinian theories were to have triggered a crisis of faith anywhere, it would have been in Victorian England.
The explanation of this remarkable fact lies in a highly influential group of publications that appeared around the end of the eighteenth century, including the Bridgewater Treatises and William Paley’s A View of the Evidence of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802). These were written against the background of a growing skepticism about traditional arguments for God’s existence, that actually seemed to end up making God redundant. William Paley (1743–1805) hit on a new way of defending God’s existence that proved a huge popular success. Paley argued that every aspect of the world pointed to evidence of intelligent design.
The influence of these works was immense. Undergraduates at Cambridge University throughout the nineteenth century were required to read Paley. As Aileen Fyfe has shown in a splendid study, Paley’s ideas were widely accepted by natural scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century at Cambridge University. Charles Darwin, himself an undergraduate at Christ’s College in this distinguished university, was no exception: “I was charmed and convinced of the long line of argumentation,” he later recalled. And well he might have been. Paley produced an immense array of observations, from the intricacy of the human eye to the arrangements of the seasons, which pointed to the entire biological world’s having been planned by a benevolent deity. Each aspect of the natural world seems to have been designed for its specific purpose. More than that; they interlocked with one another, as if the entire assembly—as opposed to its individual parts—appeared to have been put together with a definite purpose in mind.
With all these factors in mind, Paley presented an analogy that seemed to him to offer an admirable representation of the complexities he had observed: the watch. How could anyone look at a watch, with its complex system of interlocking wheels, springs, and other moving parts, and fail to see that it had been designed—not only that it had been deliberately constructed, but created with some specific purpose in mind? “[It] is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” How could anyone think otherwise? And nature displayed precisely the same evidences of design and interlocking of its constituent parts, forcing any unbiased observer to the conclusion that it, too, had been designed.
One of Paley’s most significant arguments is that mechanism implies what he terms “contrivance”—that is, design and construction for a specific purpose. Writing against the backdrop of the emerging industrial revolution, Paley sought to exploit the apologetic potential of the growing interest in machinery—such as “watches, telescopes, stocking-mills, and steam engines”—within England’s literate classes. Paley argues that only someone who is mad would suggest that such complex mechanical technology came into being by purposeless chance. Mechanism presupposes contrivance—that is to say, a sense of purpose and an ability to design and fabricate. Both the human body in particular and the world in general could be seen as mechanisms designed and constructed in such a manner as to achieve harmony of both means and ends. It must be stressed that Paley is not suggesting that there exists an analogy between human mechanical devices and nature. The force of his argument ultimately rests on an identity: nature is a mechanism, and hence was intelligently designed.
Paley’s arguments were regarded by many as irrefutable. Every aspect of the created world was designed and assigned to its special place by a benevolent creator at the beginning of the world. It was as if every natural creature seemed to shout: “We have been designed! We have a purpose!” In his haste to present a compelling argument from nature to God, Paley made some assumptions that were theologically incorrect, and—as events proved—apologetically disastrous. God was assumed to have created all species of plants and animals in their present forms. There had never been any change or development, nor need there have been. Many of his readers disagreed. Charles Kingsley’s novel The Water Babies (1863) argued that Paley’s notion of an artisan god and manual creation were far from the only way of interpreting Christian understandings of the issue. Kingsley insisted that the most distinctive aspect of the Christian doctrine of creation was that God made things to make themselves.
Yet Paley’s idea of “special creation” continued to be widely accepted, even into the 1850s. His case seemed unanswerable. Did not God create all things good, and hence requiring no modification? Might not the Book of Genesis be read literally as history, since every aspect of nature seemed to confirm this? Paley was a functionary of the established church, not a theologian; and in his desire to construct a simple and visualizable account of creation, he sowed the seeds of its ultimate destruction at the unwilling hands of Charles Darwin (1809–82).
Darwin’s five-year voyage of exploration on the Beagle initially involved travel to the South Seas and the mysterious lands of the Pacific Ocean; they eventually led to a new understanding of how biological life came into existence. As a young man, Darwin found Paley’s account of nature compelling, and saw little reason to challenge it. However, the mass of biological information that he accrued, both during his voyage on the Beagle and subsequently, seemed to him to raise serious difficulties for Paley’s belief that God made the world more or less as we now know it. A number of observations raised doubts in his mind about Paley’s account.
Darwin’s task was to develop an explanation that would account for these and other observations more satisfactorily than the alternatives that were then available. Although the historical account of how he arrived at his theory has perhaps been subject to a degree of romantic embellishment, it is clear that the driving force behind his reflections was the belief that the observational evidence could be most convincingly accounted for by a single theory of natural selection. He himself was quite clear that his explanation of the biological evidence was not the only one that could be adduced. He did, however, believe that it possessed greater explanatory power than its rivals, such as Paley’s doctrine of special creation. “Light has been shown on several facts, which on the theory of special creation are utterly obscure.”
It was clear to Darwin, as it was to his many readers, that the foundations of Paley’s arguments for the existence of God had been shattered. As Darwin wrote in his Autobiography: “The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.” Darwin, often presented as an atheist by antireligious propagandists, is best regarded as an agnostic, in Huxley’s sense of the word: one who ultimately believes that certain things simply cannot be known. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” As Frank Burch Brown concluded after a careful study of Darwin’s writings, his religious views were complex and not readily categorized.
His beliefs concerning the possible existence of some sort of God never entirely ceased to ebb and flow, nor did his evaluation of the merit of such beliefs. At low tide, so to speak, he was essentially an undogmatic atheist; at high tide he was a tentative theist; the rest of the time he was basically agnostic—in sympathy with theism but unable or unwilling to commit himself on such imponderable questions. Overall his thought regarding theological matters could best be described as being in what he himself termed a “muddle.”
Yet a close reading of Darwin’s writings shows that the main reason for his doubting the Christian concept of God had little to do with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s animus was primarily his visceral distaste for the “damnable doctrine” of eternal punishment for nonbelievers, which was popular in evangelical circles at the time (although his deep grief over the death of his daughter must also be noted here). As Geoffrey Rowell demonstrated some years ago, unease about this notion was widespread in the Victorian era, and had led many to reject this aspect of evangelical teaching. Perhaps surprisingly, Darwin’s rejection of God actually has little to do with the specifics of evolution, and much more to do with a general cultural dislike of some of the more noxious aspects of the hell-and-brimstone preaching of certain Victorian evangelicals, which came under increasing public criticism in the 1860s. So sensitive to this criticism was the great American evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837–99)—the Billy Graham of his age—that he chose not to mention the idea in his revivalist preaching campaigns. He knew that an increasingly sophisticated culture simply would not accept such an idea. Darwin here echoes the concerns of his age—yet on moral, not scientific, grounds.
While Darwin was certainly not an atheist in the sense of someone who denies the existence of a divine being, he had clearly given up any belief in a God who remotely resembled Archdeacon Paley’s watchmaker. There was no watch, and hence there could be no watchmaker. In place of Paley’s carefully ordered natural world, in which each species was created already adapted to its unchanging environment, Darwin proposed a battlefield, in which emerging species fought for existence in a desperate struggle for survival—and subsequently for their place in posterity. The evidence, in his view, allowed him to reach no other conclusion. The tragic death of his daughter Annie wrecked his belief in divine providence. His moral sense revolted against the popular religious idea that God condemned unbelievers to hell. But other concepts of God lay readily to hand. It was not surprising that many chose to adopt them.
The most obvious was adopted by many, both in England and the United States. Evolution was to be seen as the means by which God guided his creation to its present state. Paley was quite wrong to suggest that Christianity taught that things were created as we now find them. There was no difficulty in seeing Darwin’s theories as clarifying the means by which God providentially directed the evolutionary process. In 1884, Frederick Temple, who later became archbishop of Canterbury, argued that God did something rather more splendid than just make the world; he made the world make itself.
And the scientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away the force of this argument [the argument from design], is found on examination to confirm it and expand it. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever design the world was formed, that design was entertained at the very beginning and impressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearances of failure are not only to be accounted for by the limitation of our knowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the work before it has been completed.
God bestowed a genuine autonomy upon creation, and has, as it were, woven creation from the bottom upward: with matter giving rise to life and life giving rise to conscious reflective existence in humanity. Charles Kingsley found that it was “just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development . . . as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made.” The distinguished American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88) believed it was perfectly possible to reconcile evolutionary theory with faith. Instead of seeing God as the creator of fixed species, Gray pictured God as the designing power behind evolutionary change. Indeed, Gray went so far as to claim that “a theistic view of Nature” is implied in Darwin’s writings.
Especially in North America, a persistent and vocal minority has continued to insist that one must choose between Darwin and the Bible, even taking the debate to the law courts. In 1925, John Scopes, a biology teacher in one of Tennessee’s public schools, was accused of breaking a local law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The Scopes trial, which took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, was billed as a “duel to the death” between Christianity and atheism by prosecutor William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), three-time candidate for the presidency of the United States. The defense was led by the celebrated agnostic Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), one of America’s greatest attorneys. During the trial, Darrow was disallowed from using scientific testimony in his defense of Scopes. He hit upon a brilliant alternative.
The legal move was simple, yet had devastating consequences. Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a witness for the defense, and interrogated him concerning his views on evolution. Bryan was forced to admit that he had no knowledge of geology, comparative religions, or ancient civilizations, and showed himself to have hopelessly naive religious views. In the end, Bryan succeeded in winning the trial in the courtroom; Scopes was fined one hundred dollars. But the judgment of history has been with Darrow. The intelligentsia of North America, aided to no small extent by the journalist and literary critic H. L. Mencken (to whom Sinclair Lewis later dedicated Elmer Gantry), successfully portrayed those who opposed evolution on the basis of the Book of Genesis as intolerant, backward, and ignorant dolts who stood outside the mainstream of American culture. That perception remains firmly implanted in the Western soul.
Some works dating from the second half of the twentieth century did much to crystallize the growing popular perception that the idea of evolution necessarily entailed atheism. Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity (1971) set out the fundamental creed of the molecular biologists: change arises by chance and is propagated by necessity. It is utterly impossible to speak of “purpose” within the biological world. Evolutionary theory demands that we realize that our own existence is an accident, and come to terms with this disturbing thought. “We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.”
Monod argues that the natural sciences disclose a purposeless world, within which we must create our own values and beliefs. Nature itself has nothing to offer us as a guide. “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose.” Chance and Necessity, steeped in French philosophy and literature, was not the easiest work for an English-language audience to appreciate. Two popularizers stepped into the gap, offering highly readable accounts of the significance of Darwinism for culture.
Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker set out with brilliance and lucidity, perhaps for the first time at a popular level, the basics of modern evolutionary biology and their implications, not least for belief in God. One of Dawkins’s most important arguments is that the “appearance of design” can arise naturally within the evolutionary process. “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Dawkins pays a compliment to Paley, noting the plausibility of his ideas in a preevolutionary world. How could Paley be expected to know, in advance of his time, that what seemed to him to be evidence of “contrivance” was simply the outcome of a long, blind, and purposeless process of development? “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.” Any argument from design must now be abandoned, as the very notion of design has been discarded on evolutionary grounds. Evolutionary theory leads inexorably to a godless, purposeless world. Dawkins does not regard this as a problem, seeing plenty of excellent things in nature to excite and console him.
Others, however, have been puzzled, not so much by Dawkins’s atheism as by his insistence that this atheism is demanded by evolutionary theory. To them, Dawkins has shifted from popularizer to propagandist. To appreciate the importance of this point, we may turn to our second immensely successful evolutionary popularizer, Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002).
Gould followed Monod in setting out the implications for humanity of evolutionary theory. His major study Wonderful Life concludes with this sentence: “We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.” Gould’s own account of evolution makes it clear that there is no need to propose such ideas as design or purpose in accounting for the way things are; in fact, they are rendered redundant. Everything can be explained by the purely natural process of natural selection.
But is Darwinism atheistic? Here, Gould makes it clear that he is a natural scientist, not a religious pundit. In a 1992 critique of an antievolutionary work which posited that Darwinism was necessarily atheistic, Gould invoked the memory of Mrs. McInerney, his third-grade teacher, who was in the habit of rapping young knuckles when their owners said or did particularly stupid things:
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God’s method of action).
Gould rightly insists that science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God.
The empirical evidence is of critical importance here. As Gould stresses, this shows that some Darwinians are theists and others not. There is simply no valid means of settling this issue on scientific grounds. The suggestion that the Darwinian theory of evolution is necessarily atheistic goes way beyond the competency of the natural sciences and strays into territory where the scientific method cannot be applied. If it is applied, it is misapplied. Thus Gould points out that Charles Darwin was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), whereas the great American botanist Asa Gray, who advocated natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. More recently, he notes, Charles D. Walcott, the discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes. More recently still, the “two greatest evolutionists of our generation” show radically different attitudes to the existence of God: G. G. Simpson was a humanist agnostic, Theodosius Dobzhansky a believing Russian Orthodox. As Gould concludes, “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism.”
Although Gould regarded himself as an agnostic inclined toward atheism, his admirably fair summary of the situation favors neither atheist nor religious believer. At the personal level, he considered atheism to be “more of a suspicion” than a rigorously documented conclusion. The bottom line for Gould is that Darwinism actually has no bearing on the existence or nature of God. If Darwinians choose to pontificate on matters of religion, they stray beyond the straight and narrow way of the scientific method, and end up in the philosophical badlands. Either a conclusion cannot be reached on such matters or it is to be reached on other grounds, whether rational or emotional.
Gould’s analysis is borne out by a remarkable piece of empirical research, which blatantly contradicts both those who insist that the sciences inevitably lead to atheism and those who insist that they throw people into the arms of God. The natural sciences may lead some away from God and others to God. But to say that they must do one or the other is to move beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method, and to smuggle in religious or antireligious claims under a pseudo-scientific smokescreen.
Two major surveys of the religious beliefs of scientists, carried out at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, bear witness to a highly significant trend. One of the most widely held beliefs within atheist circles has been that as the beliefs and practices of the “scientific” worldview became increasingly accepted within Western culture, the number of practicing scientists with any form of religious beliefs would dwindle to the point of insignificance. A survey of the religious views of scientists, undertaken in 1916, showed that about 40 percent of scientists had some form of personal religious beliefs. At the time, this was regarded as shocking, even scandalous. The survey was repeated in 1996, and showed no significant reduction in the proportion of scientists holding such beliefs, seriously challenging the popular notion of the relentless erosion of religious faith within the profession. The survey cuts the ground from under those who argued that the natural sciences are necessarily atheistic. Of those questioned, 40 percent had active religious beliefs, 40 percent had none (and can thus legitimately be regarded as atheist), and 20 percent were agnostic.
The stereotype of the necessarily atheist scientist lingers on in Western culture at the dawn of the third millennium. It has its uses, and continues to surface in the rehashed myths of the intellectual superiority of atheism over its rivals. The truth, as might be expected, is far more complex and considerably more interesting.