On a smaller scale, cameraswith appropriate filters can 'see' in the ultraviolet and take photo-graphs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots thatare visible to, and seemingly 'designed' for, insect eyes but whichour unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral windowof similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burka: they areblind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do -into the 'ultraviolet garden'.*
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My attitude to assisted suicide, by contrast, takes off from MarkTwain's observation, already quoted. Being dead will be nodifferent from being unborn - I shall be just as I was in the time ofWilliam the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There isnothing to fear in that.
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I suppose, for completeness, we should consider the reverse pos-sibility. Rather than gods evolving from ancestral binkers, couldbinkers have evolved from ancestral gods? This seems to me lesslikely. I was led to think about it while reading the American psy-chologist Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in theBreakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book that is as strange as itstitle suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rub-bish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.
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It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God - imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant - and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not.
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Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill fourmain roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation andinspiration. Historically, religion aspired to explain our ownexistence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves.In this role it is now completely superseded by science, and I havedealt with it in Chapter 4. By exhortation I mean moral instructionon how we ought to behave, and I covered that in Chapters 6 and7.1 have not so far done justice to consolation and inspiration, andthis final chapter will briefly deal with them.
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Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to con-vince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view providesno justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, outof our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyaltyto the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanismor Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriagesand funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs thathistorically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.
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'The-Brights.net' (an Americaninitiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights' in the same way as homo-sexuals successfully rebranded themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous insetting out the rules for children to sign up: 'The decision to be aBright must be the child's. Any youngster who is told he or shemust, or should, be a Bright can NOT be a Bright.' Can you evenbegin to imagine a church or mosque issuing such a self-denyingordinance?
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The Supreme Court was asked to rule in 1972, when someAmish parents in Wisconsin withdrew their children from highschool. The very idea of education beyond a certain age wascontrary to Amish religious values, and scientific educationespecially so. The State of Wisconsin took the parents to court,claiming that the children were being deprived of their right to an142 education. After passing up through the courts, the case eventuallyreached the United States Supreme Court, which handed down asplit (6:1) decision in favour of the parents. The majority opinion,written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, included the following: 'Asthe record shows, compulsory school attendance to age 16 for Amish children carries with it a very real threat of undermining theAmish community and religious practice as they exist today; theymust either abandon belief and be assimilated into society at large, or be forced to migrate to some other and more tolerant region.'
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If I had wanted to interview real extremists by modern American standards, I'd have gone for 'Reconstructionists' whose 'Dominion Theology' openly advocates a Christian theocracy in America.
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Indeed, a good alternative title forWarraq's book might have been The Myth of Moderate Islam,which is the actual title of a more recent article in the (London) Spectator (30 July 2005) by another scholar, Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. 'Byfar the majority of Muslims today live their lives without recourseto violence, for the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If youwant peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you canfind bellicose verses.'
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As the Medawars were entirely right to point out, the logicalconclusion to the 'human potential' argument is that we potentiallydeprive a human soul of the gift of existence every time we fail toseize any opportunity for sexual intercourse. Every refusal of anyoffer of copulation by a fertile individual is, by this dopey 'pro-life'logic, tantamount to the murder of a potential child! Even resistingrape could be represented as murdering a potential baby (and, bythe way, there are plenty of 'pro-life' campaigners who would denyabortion even to women who have been brutally raped). TheBeethoven argument is, we can clearly see, very bad logic indeed. I
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A consequentialist or utilitarian is likely to approach the abortion question in a very different way, by trying to weigh up suffering. Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.) Does the pregnant woman, or her family, suffer if she does not have an abortion? Very possibly so; and, in any case,given that the embryo lacks a nervous system, shouldn't the mother's well-developed nervous system have the choice?
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This is not to deny that a consequentialist might have grounds to oppose abortion. 'Slippery slope' arguments can be framed by consequentialists (though I wouldn't in this case). Maybe embryos don't suffer, but a culture that tolerates the taking of human life risks going too far: where will it all end? In infanticide? The moment of birth provides a natural Rubicon for defining rules, and one could argue that it is hard to find another one earlier in embryonic development. Slippery slope arguments could therefore lead us to give the moment of birth more significance than utilitarianism, narrowly interpreted, would prefer.
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Arguments against euthanasia, too, can be framed in slipperyslope terms. Let's invent an imaginary quotation from a moralphilosopher: 'If you allow doctors to put terminal patients out oftheir agony, the next thing you know everybody will be bumpingoff their granny to get her money. We philosophers may have grownout of absolutism, but society needs the discipline of absolute rulessuch as "Thou shalt not kill," otherwise it doesn't know where tostop. Under some circumstances absolutism might, for all thewrong reasons in a less than ideal world, have better consequencesthan naive consequentialism! We philosophers might have a hardtime prohibiting the eating of people who were already dead andunmourned - say road-killed tramps. But, for slippery slopereasons, the absolutist taboo against cannibalism is too valuable tolose.'
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The Bongolese have a completely different concept of "in", accord-ing to which you are only truly "in" a place if you are an anointedelder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.'
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Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere.
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Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.'
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the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness ... is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while. That was written in 1902, and Wells was regarded as a progressive in his own time. In 1902 such sentiments, while not widely agreed,would have made for an acceptable dinner-party argument.Modern readers, by contrast, literally gasp with horror when they see the words. We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today.
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Here he is in a debate in 1858with Stephen A. Douglas: I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man 105 am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. Had Huxley and Lincoln been born and educated in our time,they would have been the first to cringe with the rest of us at theirown Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone.
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Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
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Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable(many people cannot tell the difference).
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I'm inclined tosuspect (with some evidence, although it may be simplistic to drawconclusions from it) that there are very few atheists in prisons. I amnot necessarily claiming that atheism increases morality, althoughhumanism - the ethical system that often goes with atheism -probably does. Another good possibility is that atheism iscorrelated with some third factor, such as higher education,intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counteract criminalimpulses.
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Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing -whether by God or by each other - in order to stop us frombehaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believethat I do not need such surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you.
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Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper.If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commitrobbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoralperson, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide coursearound you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would con-tinue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance,you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary forus to be good.
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The message of Hauser'sbook, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moraljudgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind thatevolved over millions of years to include a set of principles forbuilding a range of possible moral systems. As with language, theprinciples that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radarof our awareness.'
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Such rules of thumb influence us still, not in a Calvinisticallydeterministic way but filtered through the civilizing influences ofliterature and custom, law and tradition - and, of course, religion.
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If our moral sense, like our sexual desire, is indeed rooted deep inour Darwinian past, predating religion, we should expect thatresearch on the human mind would reveal some moral universals,crossing geographical and cultural barriers, and also, crucially,religious barriers. The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his bookMoral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Rightand Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thoughtexperiments originally suggested by moral philosophers.
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I am suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness - toaltruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity. In ancestral times, wehad the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin andpotential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longerthere, but the rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? It is just likesexual desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we seea weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate)than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the oppositesex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Bothare misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.
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We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to bealtruistic, generous or 'moral' towards each other. First, there is thespecial case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation:the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in'anticipation' of payback. Following on from this there is, third, theDarwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity
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For there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game-theoretic conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve anelement of punishment of cheats. Mathematical theory allows twobroad classes of stable solution to 'games' of this kind. 'Always benasty' is stable in that, if everybody else is doing it, a single niceindividual cannot do better. But there is another strategy which isalso stable. ('Stable' means that, once it exceeds a critical frequencyin the population, no alternative does better.)
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