Vanity of
vanities
?
Richard-Dawkins-God-Delusion
All of these people have other jobs to do.
In order to assist we have temporarily removed a lecture by Stephen Layfield from our website.
Of course, the school officials may well have been too busy to explain to journalists their stance on teaching creationism. But why, then, remove from their website the text of a lecture that does precisely that, and to which they could have referred the journalists, thereby saving themselves a great deal of time? No, they removed their head of science's lecture because they recognized that they had something to hide. The following paragraph is from the beginning of his lecture:
Let us state then right from the start that we reject the notion popularised, perhaps inadvertently, by Francis Bacon in the 17th century that there are 'Two Books' (i. e. the Book of nature & the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for truth. Rather, we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. However fragile, old-fashioned or naive this assertion may ostensibly appear, especially to an unbelieving, TV-drunk modern culture, we can be sure that it is as robust a foundation as it is possible to lay down and build upon.
You have to keep pinching yourself. You are not dreaming. This
334 THE GOD DELUSION
is not some preacher in a tent in Alabama but the head of science at a school into which the British government is pouring money, and which is Tony Blair's pride and joy. A devout Christian himself, Mr Blair in 2004 performed the ceremonial opening of one of the
146
later additions to the Vardy fleet of schools. virtue, but this is diversity gone mad.
Diversity may be a
Layfield proceeds to itemize the comparison between science and scripture, concluding, in every case where there seems to be a conflict, that scripture is to be preferred. Noting that earth science is now included in the national curriculum, Layfield says, 'It would seem particularly prudent for all who deliver this aspect of the course to familiarise themselves with the Flood geology papers of Whitcomb & Morris. ' Yes, 'Flood geology' means what you think it means. We're talking Noah's Ark here. Noah's Ark! - when the children could be learning the spine-tingling fact that Africa and South America were once joined, and have drawn apart at the speed with which fingernails grow. Here's more from Layfield (the head of science) on Noah's flood as the recent and rapid explanation for phenomena which, according to real geological evidence, took hundreds of millions of years to grind out:
We must acknowledge within our grand geophysical paradigm the historicity of a world-wide flood as outlined in Gen 6-10. If the Biblical narrative is secure and the listed genealogies (e. g. Gen 5; 1 Chro 1; Matt 1 & Lu 3) are sub- stantially full, we must reckon that this global catastrophe took place in the relatively recent past. Its effects are every- where abundantly apparent. Principal evidence is found in the fossil-laden sedimentary rocks, the extensive reserves of hydrocarbon fuels (coal, oil and gas) and the 'legendary' accounts of just such a great flood common to various population groups world-wide. The feasibility of maintain- ing an ark full of representative creatures for a year until the waters had sufficiently receded has been well documented by, among others, John Woodmorrappe.
In a way this is even worse than the utterances of know-nothings like Nigel McQuoid or Bishop Wayne Malcolm quoted above,
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 335
because Layfield is educated in science. Here's another astonishing passage::
As we stated at the beginning, Christians, with very good reason, reckon the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments a reliable guide concerning just what we are to believe. They are not merely religious documents. They provide us with a true account of Earth history which we ignore at our peril.
The implication that the scriptures provide a literal account of
geological history would make any reputable theologian wince. My
friend Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, and I wrote a joint letter
to Tony Blair, and we got it signed by eight bishops and nine senior
147
scientists.
Royal Society (previously Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser), both the biological and physical secretaries of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal (now President of the Royal Society), the director of the Natural History Museum, and Sir David Attenborough, perhaps the most respected man in England. The bishops included one Roman Catholic and seven Anglican bishops - senior religious leaders from all around England. We received a
perfunctory and inadequate reply from the Prime Minister's office, referring to the school's good examination results and its good report from the official schools inspection agency, OFSTED. It apparently didn't occur to Mr Blair that, if the OFSTED inspectors give a rave report to a school whose head of science teaches that the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog, there just might be something a teeny weeny bit wrong with the standards of the inspectorate.
Perhaps the most disturbing section of Stephen Layfield's lecture is his concluding 'What can be done? ', where he considers the tactics to be employed by those teachers wishing to introduce fundamentalist Christianity into the science classroom. For example, he urges science teachers to
note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly
The nine scientists included the then President of the
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THE GOD DELUSION
mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement. Wherever possible, we must give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data. We shall look at a few examples from each of Physics, Chemistry & Biology in due course.
The rest of Layfield's lecture is nothing less than a propaganda manual, a resource for religious teachers of biology, chemistry and physics who wish, while remaining just inside the guidelines of the national curriculum, to subvert evidence-based science education and replace it with biblical scripture.
On 15 April 2006, James Naughtie, one of the BBC's most experienced anchormen, interviewed Sir Peter Vardy on radio. The main subject of the interview was a police investigation of allegations, denied by Vardy, that bribes - knighthoods and peerages - had been offered by the Blair government to rich men, in an attempt to get them to subscribe to the city academies scheme. Naughtie also asked Vardy about the creationism issue, and Vardy categorically denied that Emmanuel promotes young-Earth cre- ationism to its pupils. One of Emmanuel's alumni, Peter French, has
148
equally categorically stated,
6000 years old. '* Who is telling the truth here? Well, we don't know, but Stephen Layfield's lecture lays out his policy for teaching science pretty candidly. Has Vardy never read Layfield's very explicit manifesto? Does he really not know what his head of science has been up to? Peter Vardy made his money selling used cars. Would you buy one from him? And would you, like Tony Blair, sell him a school for 10 per cent of its price - throwing in an offer to pay all his running costs into the bargain? Let's be charitable to Blair and assume that he, at least, has not read the Layfield lecture. I suppose it is too much to hope that his attention may now be drawn to it.
Headmaster McQuoid offered a defence of what he clearly saw as his school's open-mindedness, which is remarkable for its patronizing complacency:
the best example I can give of what it is like here is a sixth- form philosophy lecture I was giving. Shaquille was sitting
* To get an idea of the scale of this error, it is equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 700 yards.
'We were taught that the earth was
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 337
there and he says, 'The Koran is correct and true. ' And Clare, over here, says, 'No, the Bible is true. ' So we talked about the similarities between what they say and the places where they disagree. And we agreed that they could not both be true. And eventually I said, 'Sorry Shaquille, you are wrong, it is the Bible that is true. ' And he said, 'Sorry Mr McQuoid, you are wrong, it is the Koran. ' And they went on to lunch and carried on discussing it there. That's what we want. We want children to know why it is
149 they believe what they believe and to defend it.
What a charming picture! Shaquille and Clare went to lunch together, vigorously arguing their cases and defending their in- compatible beliefs. But is it really so charming? Isn't it actually rather a deplorable picture that Mr McQuoid has painted? Upon what, after all, did Shaquille and Clare base their argument? What cogent evidence was each one able to bring to bear, in their vigorous and constructive debate? Clare and Shaquille each simply asserted that her or his holy book was superior, and that was that. That is apparently all they said, and that, indeed, is all you can say
when you have been taught that truth comes from scripture rather than from evidence. Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds.
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING AGAIN
And now, here's another charming picture. At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.
Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label four- year-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their
338 THE GOD DELUSION
parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the
caption changed as follows: 'Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a
Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four. ' Wouldn't this be
a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet,
because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak
was heard, nor is it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine
the outcry if the caption had read, 'Shadbreet (an Atheist),
Musharaff (an Agnostic) and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged
four. ' Mightn't the parents actually be investigated to see if they
were fit to bring up children? In Britain, where we lack a con-
stitutional separation between church and state, atheist parents
usually go with the flow and let schools teach their children what-
ever religion prevails in the culture. 'The-Brights. net' (an American
initiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights' in the same way as homo-
sexuals successfully rebranded themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous in
setting out the rules for children to sign up: 'The decision to be a
Bright must be the child's. Any youngster who is told he or she
must, or should, be a Bright can NOT be a Bright. ' Can you even
begin to imagine a church or mosque issuing such a self-denying
ordinance? But shouldn't they be compelled to do so? Incidentally,
I signed up to the Brights, partly because I was genuinely curious
whether such a word could be memetically engineered into the
language. I don't know, and would like to, whether the trans-
mutation of 'gay' was deliberately engineered or whether it just
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happened. The Brights campaign got off to a shaky start when it
was furiously denounced by some atheists, petrified of being branded 'arrogant'. The Gay Pride movement, fortunately, suffers from no such false modesty, which may be why it succeeded.
In an earlier chapter, I generalized the theme of 'consciousness- raising', starting with the achievement of feminists in making us flinch when we hear a phrase like 'men of goodwill' instead of 'people of goodwill'. Here I want to raise consciousness in another way. I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 339
Here is a report, dated 3 September 2001, from the Irish Radio station KPFT-FM.
Catholic schoolgirls faced protests from Loyalists as they attempted to enter the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School on the Ardoyne Road in north Belfast. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers and British Army (BA) soldiers had to clear the protestors who were attempting to blockade the school. Crash barriers were erected to allow the children to get through the protest to the school. Loyalists jeered and shouted sectarian abuse as the children, some as young as four years of age, were escorted by the parents into the school. As children and parents entered the front gate of the school Loyalists threw bottles and stones.
Naturally, any decent person will wince at the ordeal of these unfortunate schoolgirls. I am trying to encourage us to wince, too, at the very idea of labelling them 'Catholic schoolgirls' at all. ('Loyalists', as I pointed out in Chapter 1, is the mealy-mouthed Northern Ireland euphemism for Protestants, just as 'Nationalists' is the euphemism for Catholics. People who do not hesitate to brand children 'Catholics' or 'Protestants' stop short of applying those same religious labels - far more appropriately - to adult terrorists and mobs. )
Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', 'Protestant child', 'Jewish child', 'Muslim child', etc. - although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that
340 THE GOD DELUSION
religion is something for her to choose - or reject - when she becomes old enough to do so.
A good case can indeed be made for the educational benefits of
teaching comparative religion. Certainly my own doubts were first
aroused, at the age of about nine, by the lesson (which came not
from school but from my parents) that the Christian religion in
which I was brought up was only one of many mutually incompat-
ible belief-systems. Religious apologists themselves realize this
and it often frightens them. After that nativity play story in the
Independent, not a single letter to the Editor complained of
the religious labelling of the four-year-olds. The only negative letter
came from 'The Campaign for Real Education', whose spokesman,
Nick Seaton, said multi-faith religious education was extremely
dangerous because 'Children these days are taught that all religions
are of equal worth, which means that their own has no special
value. ' Yes indeed; that is exactly what it means. Well might this
spokesman worry. On another occasion, the same individual said,
'To present all faiths as equally valid is wrong. Everybody is entitled
to think their faith is superior to others, be they Hindus, Jews,
Muslims or Christians - otherwise what's the point in having
151 faith? '
What indeed? And what transparent nonsense this is! These faiths are mutually incompatible. Otherwise what is the point of thinking your faith superior? Most of them, therefore, cannot be 'superior to others'. Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own con- clusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are 'valid', let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A PART OF LITERARY CULTURE
I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 341
decades than I was. Or maybe it isn't a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn't know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus's twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically
more religious than other parts of the developed world.
The King James Bible of 1611 - the Authorized Version - includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the original Hebrew too). But the main reason the English Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture. The same applies to the legends of the Greek and Roman gods, and we learn about them
without being asked to believe in them. Here is a quick list of biblical, or Bible-inspired, phrases and sentences that occur commonly in literary or conversational English, from great poetry to hackneyed cliche, from proverb to gossip.
Be fruitful and multiply ? East of Eden ? Adam's Rib ? Am I my brother's keeper? ? The mark of Cain ? As old as Methuselah ? A mess of potage ? Sold his birthright ? Jacob's ladder ? Coat of many colours ? Amid the alien corn ? Eyeless in Gaza ? The fat of the land ? The fatted calf ? Stranger in a strange land ? Burning bush ? A land flowing with milk and honey ? Let my people go ? Flesh pots ? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ? Be sure your sin will find you out ? The apple of his eye ? The stars in their courses ? Butter in a lordly dish ? The hosts of Midian ? Shibboleth ? Out of the strong came forth sweetness ? He smote them hip and thigh ? Philistine ? A man after his own heart ? Like David and Jonathan ? Passing the love of women ? How are the mighty fallen? ? Ewe lamb ? Man of Belial ? Jezebel ? Queen of Sheba ? Wisdom of Solomon ? The half was not told me ? Girded up his loins ? Drew a bow at a
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THE GOD DELUSION
venture ? Job's comforters ? The patience of Job ? I am escaped with the skin of my teeth ? The price of wisdom is above rubies ? Leviathan ? Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise ? Spare the
rod and spoil the child ? A word in season ?
Vanity of vanities ? To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose ? The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ? Of making many books there is no end ? I am the rose of Sharon ? A garden inclosed ? The little foxes ? Many waters cannot quench love ? Beat their swords into plowshares ? Grind the faces of the poor ? The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ? Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die ? Set thine house in order ? A voice crying in the wilderness ? No peace for the wicked ? See eye to eye ? Cut off out of the land of the living ? Balm in Gilead ? Can the leopard change his spots? ? The parting of the ways ? A Daniel in the lions' den ? They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind ? Sodom and Gomorrah ? Man shall not live by bread alone ? Get thee behind me Satan ? The salt of the earth ? Hide your light under a bushel ? Turn the other cheek ? Go the extra mile ? Moth and rust doth corrupt ? Cast your pearls before swine ? Wolf in sheep's clothing ? Weeping and gnashing of teeth ? Gadarene swine ? New wine in old bottles ? Shake off the dust of your feet ? He that is not with me is against me ? Judgement of Solomon ? Fell upon stony ground ? A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country ? The crumbs from the table ? Sign of the times ? Den of thieves ? Pharisee ? Whited sepulchre ? Wars and rumours of wars ? Good and faithful servant ? Separate the sheep from the goats ? I wash my hands of it ? The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath ? Suffer the little children ? The widow's mite ?
Physician heal thyself ? Good Samaritan ? Passed by on the other side ? Grapes of wrath ? Lost sheep ? Prodigal son ? A great gulf fixed ? Whose shoe latchet I am not
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 343
worthy to unloose ? Cast the first stone ? Jesus wept ? Greater love hath no man than this ? Doubting Thomas ? Road to Damascus ? A law unto himself ? Through a glass darkly ? Death, where is thy sting? ? A thorn in the flesh ? Fallen from grace ? Filthy lucre ? The root of all evil ? Fight the good fight ? All flesh is as grass ? The weaker vessel ? I am Alpha and Omega ? Armageddon ? De profundis ? Quo vadis ? Rain on the just and on the unjust
Every one of these idioms, phrases or cliches comes directly from the King James Authorized Version of the Bible. Surely ignorance of the Bible is bound to impoverish one's appreciation of English literature? And not just solemn and serious literature. The follow- ing rhyme by Lord Justice Bowen is ingeniously witty:
The rain it raineth on the just,
And also on the unjust fella.
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just's umbrella.
But the enjoyment is muffled if you can't take the allusion to Matthew 5: 45 ('For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust'). And the fine point of Eliza Dolittle's fantasy in My Fair Lady would escape anybody ignorant of John the Baptist's end:
'Thanks a lot, King,' says I in a manner well bred, 'But all I want is 'Enry 'Iggins' 'ead. '
P. G. Wodehouse is, for my money, the greatest writer of light comedy in English, and I bet fully half my list of biblical phrases will be found as allusions within his pages. (A Google search will not find all of them, however. It will miss the derivation of the short-story title 'The Aunt and the Sluggard', from Proverbs 6: 6. ) The Wodehouse canon is rich in other biblical phrases, not in my list above and not incorporated into the language as idioms or proverbs. Listen to Bertie Wooster's evocation of what it is like to
344 THEGODDELUSION
wake up with a bad hangover: 'I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head - not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones. ' Bertie himself was immensely proud of his only scholastic achievement, the prize he once earned for scripture knowledge.
What is true of comic writing in English is more obviously true of serious literature. Naseeb Shaheen's tally of more than thirteen hundred biblical references in Shakespeare's works is widely cited
152
and very believable. The Bible Literacy Report published in
Fairfax, Virginia (admittedly financed by the infamous Templeton Foundation) provides many examples, and cites overwhelming agreement by teachers of English literature that biblical literacy is
153
essential to full appreciation of their subject. Doubtless the
equivalent is true of French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and other great European literatures. And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage. Finally, to round off the list, you can't appreciate Wagner (whose music, as has been wittily said, is better than it sounds) without knowing your way around the Norse gods.
Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to con- vince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.
CHAPTER 10
A much needed gap?
What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blinki That is deep and sacred science.
MICHAEL SHERMER
AMUCHNEEDEDGAP? 347
'This book fills a much needed gap. ' The jest works because we simultaneously understand the two opposite meanings. Incidentally, I thought it was an invented witticism but, to my surprise, I find that it has actually been used, in all innocence, by publishers. See http://www. kcl. ac. uk/kis/schools/hums/french/pgr/tqr. html for a book that 'fills a much needed gap in the literature available on the post- structuralist movement'. It seems deliciously appropriate that this avowedly superfluous book is all about Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other icons of haute francophonyism.
Does religion fill a much needed gap? 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. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E. O. Wilson has
called Biophilia}
Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four
main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science, and I have dealt with it in Chapter 4. By exhortation I mean moral instruction on how we ought to behave, and I covered that in Chapters 6 and 7. 1 have not so far done justice to consolation and inspiration, and this final chapter will briefly deal with them. As a preliminary to consolation itself, I want to begin with the childhood phenomenon of the 'imaginary friend', which I believe has affinities with religious belief.
BlNKER
Christopher Robin, I presume, did not believe that Piglet and Winnie the Pooh really spoke to him. But was Binker different?
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THE GOD DELUSION
Binker - what I call him - is a secret of my own, And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone. Playing in the nursery, sitting on the stair, Whatever I am busy at, Binker will be there.
Oh, Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man, And Mummy is the best since the world began, And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But they can't See Binker.
Binker's always talking, 'cos I'm teaching him to speak
He sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar . . . And I have to do it for him 'cos his throat is rather sore.
Oh, Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man,
And Mummy knows all that anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But they don't Know Binker.
Binker's brave as lions when we're running in the park; Binker's brave as tigers when we're lying in the dark;
Binker's brave as elephants. He never, never cries . . .
Except (like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.
Oh, Daddy is Daddy, he's a Daddy sort of man,
And Mummy is as Mummy as anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan . . .
But they're not Like Binker.
Binker isn't greedy, but he does like things to eat,
So I have to say to people when they're giving me a sweet, 'Oh, Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two? ' And then I eat it for him, 'cos his teeth are rather new.
Well, I'm very fond of Daddy, but he hasn't time to play,
And I'm very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away, And I'm often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my
hair . . .
But Binker's always Binker, and is certain to be there.
A. A. MILNE, NOW We Are Six*
Is the imaginary-friend phenomenon a higher illusion, in a different category from ordinary childhood make-believe? My own experience is not much help here. Like many parents, my mother
Reproduced by permission of the A. A. Milne Estate.
A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 349
kept a notebook of my childish sayings. In addition to simple pre- tendings (now I'm the man in the moon . . . an accelerator . . . a Babylonian) I was evidently fond of second-order pretendings (now I'm an owl pretending to be a waterwheel) which might be reflexive (now I'm a little boy pretending to be Richard). I never once believed I really was any of those things, and I think that is normally true of childhood make-believe games. But I didn't have a Binker. If the testimony of their adult selves is to be believed, at least some of those normal children who have imaginary friends really do believe they exist, and, in some cases, see them as clear and vivid hallucinations. I suspect that the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults. I do not know whether psychologists have studied it from this point of view, but it would be a worthwhile piece of research. Companion and confidant, a Binker for life: that is surely one role that God plays - one gap that might be left if God were to go.
Another child, a girl, had a 'little purple man', who seemed to her a real and visible presence, and who would manifest himself, sparkling out of the air, with a gentle tinkling sound. He visited her regularly, especially when she felt lonely, but with decreasing frequency as she grew older. On a particular day just before she went to kindergarten, the little purple man came to her, heralded by his usual tinkling fanfare, and announced that he would not be visiting her any more. This saddened her, but the little purple man told her that she was getting bigger now and wouldn't need him in the future. He must leave her now, so that he could look after other children. He promised her that he would come back to her if ever she really needed him. He did return to her, many years later in a dream, when she had a personal crisis and was trying to decide what to do with her life. The door of her bedroom opened and a cartload of books appeared, pushed into the room by . . . the little purple man. She interpreted this as advice that she should go to university - advice that she took and later judged to be good. The story makes me almost tearful, and it brings me as close as I shall probably come to understanding the consoling and counselling role of imaginary gods in people's lives. A being may exist only in the imagination, yet still seem completely real to the child, and still give real comfort and good advice. Perhaps even better: imaginary
350 THE GOD DELUSION
friends - and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. And they are much cheaper than psychiatrists or professional counsellors.
Did gods, in their role as consolers and counsellors, evolve from binkers, by a sort of psychological 'paedomorphosis'? Paedo- morphosis is the retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. Pekinese dogs have paedomorphic faces: the adults look like puppies. It is a well-known pattern in evolution, widely accepted as important for the development of such human characteristics as our bulbous forehead and short jaws.
Of course, the school officials may well have been too busy to explain to journalists their stance on teaching creationism. But why, then, remove from their website the text of a lecture that does precisely that, and to which they could have referred the journalists, thereby saving themselves a great deal of time? No, they removed their head of science's lecture because they recognized that they had something to hide. The following paragraph is from the beginning of his lecture:
Let us state then right from the start that we reject the notion popularised, perhaps inadvertently, by Francis Bacon in the 17th century that there are 'Two Books' (i. e. the Book of nature & the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for truth. Rather, we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. However fragile, old-fashioned or naive this assertion may ostensibly appear, especially to an unbelieving, TV-drunk modern culture, we can be sure that it is as robust a foundation as it is possible to lay down and build upon.
You have to keep pinching yourself. You are not dreaming. This
334 THE GOD DELUSION
is not some preacher in a tent in Alabama but the head of science at a school into which the British government is pouring money, and which is Tony Blair's pride and joy. A devout Christian himself, Mr Blair in 2004 performed the ceremonial opening of one of the
146
later additions to the Vardy fleet of schools. virtue, but this is diversity gone mad.
Diversity may be a
Layfield proceeds to itemize the comparison between science and scripture, concluding, in every case where there seems to be a conflict, that scripture is to be preferred. Noting that earth science is now included in the national curriculum, Layfield says, 'It would seem particularly prudent for all who deliver this aspect of the course to familiarise themselves with the Flood geology papers of Whitcomb & Morris. ' Yes, 'Flood geology' means what you think it means. We're talking Noah's Ark here. Noah's Ark! - when the children could be learning the spine-tingling fact that Africa and South America were once joined, and have drawn apart at the speed with which fingernails grow. Here's more from Layfield (the head of science) on Noah's flood as the recent and rapid explanation for phenomena which, according to real geological evidence, took hundreds of millions of years to grind out:
We must acknowledge within our grand geophysical paradigm the historicity of a world-wide flood as outlined in Gen 6-10. If the Biblical narrative is secure and the listed genealogies (e. g. Gen 5; 1 Chro 1; Matt 1 & Lu 3) are sub- stantially full, we must reckon that this global catastrophe took place in the relatively recent past. Its effects are every- where abundantly apparent. Principal evidence is found in the fossil-laden sedimentary rocks, the extensive reserves of hydrocarbon fuels (coal, oil and gas) and the 'legendary' accounts of just such a great flood common to various population groups world-wide. The feasibility of maintain- ing an ark full of representative creatures for a year until the waters had sufficiently receded has been well documented by, among others, John Woodmorrappe.
In a way this is even worse than the utterances of know-nothings like Nigel McQuoid or Bishop Wayne Malcolm quoted above,
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 335
because Layfield is educated in science. Here's another astonishing passage::
As we stated at the beginning, Christians, with very good reason, reckon the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments a reliable guide concerning just what we are to believe. They are not merely religious documents. They provide us with a true account of Earth history which we ignore at our peril.
The implication that the scriptures provide a literal account of
geological history would make any reputable theologian wince. My
friend Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, and I wrote a joint letter
to Tony Blair, and we got it signed by eight bishops and nine senior
147
scientists.
Royal Society (previously Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser), both the biological and physical secretaries of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal (now President of the Royal Society), the director of the Natural History Museum, and Sir David Attenborough, perhaps the most respected man in England. The bishops included one Roman Catholic and seven Anglican bishops - senior religious leaders from all around England. We received a
perfunctory and inadequate reply from the Prime Minister's office, referring to the school's good examination results and its good report from the official schools inspection agency, OFSTED. It apparently didn't occur to Mr Blair that, if the OFSTED inspectors give a rave report to a school whose head of science teaches that the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog, there just might be something a teeny weeny bit wrong with the standards of the inspectorate.
Perhaps the most disturbing section of Stephen Layfield's lecture is his concluding 'What can be done? ', where he considers the tactics to be employed by those teachers wishing to introduce fundamentalist Christianity into the science classroom. For example, he urges science teachers to
note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly
The nine scientists included the then President of the
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THE GOD DELUSION
mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement. Wherever possible, we must give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data. We shall look at a few examples from each of Physics, Chemistry & Biology in due course.
The rest of Layfield's lecture is nothing less than a propaganda manual, a resource for religious teachers of biology, chemistry and physics who wish, while remaining just inside the guidelines of the national curriculum, to subvert evidence-based science education and replace it with biblical scripture.
On 15 April 2006, James Naughtie, one of the BBC's most experienced anchormen, interviewed Sir Peter Vardy on radio. The main subject of the interview was a police investigation of allegations, denied by Vardy, that bribes - knighthoods and peerages - had been offered by the Blair government to rich men, in an attempt to get them to subscribe to the city academies scheme. Naughtie also asked Vardy about the creationism issue, and Vardy categorically denied that Emmanuel promotes young-Earth cre- ationism to its pupils. One of Emmanuel's alumni, Peter French, has
148
equally categorically stated,
6000 years old. '* Who is telling the truth here? Well, we don't know, but Stephen Layfield's lecture lays out his policy for teaching science pretty candidly. Has Vardy never read Layfield's very explicit manifesto? Does he really not know what his head of science has been up to? Peter Vardy made his money selling used cars. Would you buy one from him? And would you, like Tony Blair, sell him a school for 10 per cent of its price - throwing in an offer to pay all his running costs into the bargain? Let's be charitable to Blair and assume that he, at least, has not read the Layfield lecture. I suppose it is too much to hope that his attention may now be drawn to it.
Headmaster McQuoid offered a defence of what he clearly saw as his school's open-mindedness, which is remarkable for its patronizing complacency:
the best example I can give of what it is like here is a sixth- form philosophy lecture I was giving. Shaquille was sitting
* To get an idea of the scale of this error, it is equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 700 yards.
'We were taught that the earth was
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 337
there and he says, 'The Koran is correct and true. ' And Clare, over here, says, 'No, the Bible is true. ' So we talked about the similarities between what they say and the places where they disagree. And we agreed that they could not both be true. And eventually I said, 'Sorry Shaquille, you are wrong, it is the Bible that is true. ' And he said, 'Sorry Mr McQuoid, you are wrong, it is the Koran. ' And they went on to lunch and carried on discussing it there. That's what we want. We want children to know why it is
149 they believe what they believe and to defend it.
What a charming picture! Shaquille and Clare went to lunch together, vigorously arguing their cases and defending their in- compatible beliefs. But is it really so charming? Isn't it actually rather a deplorable picture that Mr McQuoid has painted? Upon what, after all, did Shaquille and Clare base their argument? What cogent evidence was each one able to bring to bear, in their vigorous and constructive debate? Clare and Shaquille each simply asserted that her or his holy book was superior, and that was that. That is apparently all they said, and that, indeed, is all you can say
when you have been taught that truth comes from scripture rather than from evidence. Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds.
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING AGAIN
And now, here's another charming picture. At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.
Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label four- year-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their
338 THE GOD DELUSION
parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the
caption changed as follows: 'Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a
Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four. ' Wouldn't this be
a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet,
because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak
was heard, nor is it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine
the outcry if the caption had read, 'Shadbreet (an Atheist),
Musharaff (an Agnostic) and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged
four. ' Mightn't the parents actually be investigated to see if they
were fit to bring up children? In Britain, where we lack a con-
stitutional separation between church and state, atheist parents
usually go with the flow and let schools teach their children what-
ever religion prevails in the culture. 'The-Brights. net' (an American
initiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights' in the same way as homo-
sexuals successfully rebranded themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous in
setting out the rules for children to sign up: 'The decision to be a
Bright must be the child's. Any youngster who is told he or she
must, or should, be a Bright can NOT be a Bright. ' Can you even
begin to imagine a church or mosque issuing such a self-denying
ordinance? But shouldn't they be compelled to do so? Incidentally,
I signed up to the Brights, partly because I was genuinely curious
whether such a word could be memetically engineered into the
language. I don't know, and would like to, whether the trans-
mutation of 'gay' was deliberately engineered or whether it just
150
happened. The Brights campaign got off to a shaky start when it
was furiously denounced by some atheists, petrified of being branded 'arrogant'. The Gay Pride movement, fortunately, suffers from no such false modesty, which may be why it succeeded.
In an earlier chapter, I generalized the theme of 'consciousness- raising', starting with the achievement of feminists in making us flinch when we hear a phrase like 'men of goodwill' instead of 'people of goodwill'. Here I want to raise consciousness in another way. I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 339
Here is a report, dated 3 September 2001, from the Irish Radio station KPFT-FM.
Catholic schoolgirls faced protests from Loyalists as they attempted to enter the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School on the Ardoyne Road in north Belfast. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers and British Army (BA) soldiers had to clear the protestors who were attempting to blockade the school. Crash barriers were erected to allow the children to get through the protest to the school. Loyalists jeered and shouted sectarian abuse as the children, some as young as four years of age, were escorted by the parents into the school. As children and parents entered the front gate of the school Loyalists threw bottles and stones.
Naturally, any decent person will wince at the ordeal of these unfortunate schoolgirls. I am trying to encourage us to wince, too, at the very idea of labelling them 'Catholic schoolgirls' at all. ('Loyalists', as I pointed out in Chapter 1, is the mealy-mouthed Northern Ireland euphemism for Protestants, just as 'Nationalists' is the euphemism for Catholics. People who do not hesitate to brand children 'Catholics' or 'Protestants' stop short of applying those same religious labels - far more appropriately - to adult terrorists and mobs. )
Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', 'Protestant child', 'Jewish child', 'Muslim child', etc. - although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that
340 THE GOD DELUSION
religion is something for her to choose - or reject - when she becomes old enough to do so.
A good case can indeed be made for the educational benefits of
teaching comparative religion. Certainly my own doubts were first
aroused, at the age of about nine, by the lesson (which came not
from school but from my parents) that the Christian religion in
which I was brought up was only one of many mutually incompat-
ible belief-systems. Religious apologists themselves realize this
and it often frightens them. After that nativity play story in the
Independent, not a single letter to the Editor complained of
the religious labelling of the four-year-olds. The only negative letter
came from 'The Campaign for Real Education', whose spokesman,
Nick Seaton, said multi-faith religious education was extremely
dangerous because 'Children these days are taught that all religions
are of equal worth, which means that their own has no special
value. ' Yes indeed; that is exactly what it means. Well might this
spokesman worry. On another occasion, the same individual said,
'To present all faiths as equally valid is wrong. Everybody is entitled
to think their faith is superior to others, be they Hindus, Jews,
Muslims or Christians - otherwise what's the point in having
151 faith? '
What indeed? And what transparent nonsense this is! These faiths are mutually incompatible. Otherwise what is the point of thinking your faith superior? Most of them, therefore, cannot be 'superior to others'. Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own con- clusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are 'valid', let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A PART OF LITERARY CULTURE
I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 341
decades than I was. Or maybe it isn't a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn't know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus's twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically
more religious than other parts of the developed world.
The King James Bible of 1611 - the Authorized Version - includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the original Hebrew too). But the main reason the English Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture. The same applies to the legends of the Greek and Roman gods, and we learn about them
without being asked to believe in them. Here is a quick list of biblical, or Bible-inspired, phrases and sentences that occur commonly in literary or conversational English, from great poetry to hackneyed cliche, from proverb to gossip.
Be fruitful and multiply ? East of Eden ? Adam's Rib ? Am I my brother's keeper? ? The mark of Cain ? As old as Methuselah ? A mess of potage ? Sold his birthright ? Jacob's ladder ? Coat of many colours ? Amid the alien corn ? Eyeless in Gaza ? The fat of the land ? The fatted calf ? Stranger in a strange land ? Burning bush ? A land flowing with milk and honey ? Let my people go ? Flesh pots ? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ? Be sure your sin will find you out ? The apple of his eye ? The stars in their courses ? Butter in a lordly dish ? The hosts of Midian ? Shibboleth ? Out of the strong came forth sweetness ? He smote them hip and thigh ? Philistine ? A man after his own heart ? Like David and Jonathan ? Passing the love of women ? How are the mighty fallen? ? Ewe lamb ? Man of Belial ? Jezebel ? Queen of Sheba ? Wisdom of Solomon ? The half was not told me ? Girded up his loins ? Drew a bow at a
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THE GOD DELUSION
venture ? Job's comforters ? The patience of Job ? I am escaped with the skin of my teeth ? The price of wisdom is above rubies ? Leviathan ? Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise ? Spare the
rod and spoil the child ? A word in season ?
Vanity of vanities ? To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose ? The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ? Of making many books there is no end ? I am the rose of Sharon ? A garden inclosed ? The little foxes ? Many waters cannot quench love ? Beat their swords into plowshares ? Grind the faces of the poor ? The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ? Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die ? Set thine house in order ? A voice crying in the wilderness ? No peace for the wicked ? See eye to eye ? Cut off out of the land of the living ? Balm in Gilead ? Can the leopard change his spots? ? The parting of the ways ? A Daniel in the lions' den ? They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind ? Sodom and Gomorrah ? Man shall not live by bread alone ? Get thee behind me Satan ? The salt of the earth ? Hide your light under a bushel ? Turn the other cheek ? Go the extra mile ? Moth and rust doth corrupt ? Cast your pearls before swine ? Wolf in sheep's clothing ? Weeping and gnashing of teeth ? Gadarene swine ? New wine in old bottles ? Shake off the dust of your feet ? He that is not with me is against me ? Judgement of Solomon ? Fell upon stony ground ? A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country ? The crumbs from the table ? Sign of the times ? Den of thieves ? Pharisee ? Whited sepulchre ? Wars and rumours of wars ? Good and faithful servant ? Separate the sheep from the goats ? I wash my hands of it ? The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath ? Suffer the little children ? The widow's mite ?
Physician heal thyself ? Good Samaritan ? Passed by on the other side ? Grapes of wrath ? Lost sheep ? Prodigal son ? A great gulf fixed ? Whose shoe latchet I am not
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 343
worthy to unloose ? Cast the first stone ? Jesus wept ? Greater love hath no man than this ? Doubting Thomas ? Road to Damascus ? A law unto himself ? Through a glass darkly ? Death, where is thy sting? ? A thorn in the flesh ? Fallen from grace ? Filthy lucre ? The root of all evil ? Fight the good fight ? All flesh is as grass ? The weaker vessel ? I am Alpha and Omega ? Armageddon ? De profundis ? Quo vadis ? Rain on the just and on the unjust
Every one of these idioms, phrases or cliches comes directly from the King James Authorized Version of the Bible. Surely ignorance of the Bible is bound to impoverish one's appreciation of English literature? And not just solemn and serious literature. The follow- ing rhyme by Lord Justice Bowen is ingeniously witty:
The rain it raineth on the just,
And also on the unjust fella.
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just's umbrella.
But the enjoyment is muffled if you can't take the allusion to Matthew 5: 45 ('For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust'). And the fine point of Eliza Dolittle's fantasy in My Fair Lady would escape anybody ignorant of John the Baptist's end:
'Thanks a lot, King,' says I in a manner well bred, 'But all I want is 'Enry 'Iggins' 'ead. '
P. G. Wodehouse is, for my money, the greatest writer of light comedy in English, and I bet fully half my list of biblical phrases will be found as allusions within his pages. (A Google search will not find all of them, however. It will miss the derivation of the short-story title 'The Aunt and the Sluggard', from Proverbs 6: 6. ) The Wodehouse canon is rich in other biblical phrases, not in my list above and not incorporated into the language as idioms or proverbs. Listen to Bertie Wooster's evocation of what it is like to
344 THEGODDELUSION
wake up with a bad hangover: 'I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head - not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones. ' Bertie himself was immensely proud of his only scholastic achievement, the prize he once earned for scripture knowledge.
What is true of comic writing in English is more obviously true of serious literature. Naseeb Shaheen's tally of more than thirteen hundred biblical references in Shakespeare's works is widely cited
152
and very believable. The Bible Literacy Report published in
Fairfax, Virginia (admittedly financed by the infamous Templeton Foundation) provides many examples, and cites overwhelming agreement by teachers of English literature that biblical literacy is
153
essential to full appreciation of their subject. Doubtless the
equivalent is true of French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and other great European literatures. And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage. Finally, to round off the list, you can't appreciate Wagner (whose music, as has been wittily said, is better than it sounds) without knowing your way around the Norse gods.
Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to con- vince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.
CHAPTER 10
A much needed gap?
What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blinki That is deep and sacred science.
MICHAEL SHERMER
AMUCHNEEDEDGAP? 347
'This book fills a much needed gap. ' The jest works because we simultaneously understand the two opposite meanings. Incidentally, I thought it was an invented witticism but, to my surprise, I find that it has actually been used, in all innocence, by publishers. See http://www. kcl. ac. uk/kis/schools/hums/french/pgr/tqr. html for a book that 'fills a much needed gap in the literature available on the post- structuralist movement'. It seems deliciously appropriate that this avowedly superfluous book is all about Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other icons of haute francophonyism.
Does religion fill a much needed gap? 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. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E. O. Wilson has
called Biophilia}
Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four
main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science, and I have dealt with it in Chapter 4. By exhortation I mean moral instruction on how we ought to behave, and I covered that in Chapters 6 and 7. 1 have not so far done justice to consolation and inspiration, and this final chapter will briefly deal with them. As a preliminary to consolation itself, I want to begin with the childhood phenomenon of the 'imaginary friend', which I believe has affinities with religious belief.
BlNKER
Christopher Robin, I presume, did not believe that Piglet and Winnie the Pooh really spoke to him. But was Binker different?
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THE GOD DELUSION
Binker - what I call him - is a secret of my own, And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone. Playing in the nursery, sitting on the stair, Whatever I am busy at, Binker will be there.
Oh, Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man, And Mummy is the best since the world began, And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But they can't See Binker.
Binker's always talking, 'cos I'm teaching him to speak
He sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar . . . And I have to do it for him 'cos his throat is rather sore.
Oh, Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man,
And Mummy knows all that anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But they don't Know Binker.
Binker's brave as lions when we're running in the park; Binker's brave as tigers when we're lying in the dark;
Binker's brave as elephants. He never, never cries . . .
Except (like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.
Oh, Daddy is Daddy, he's a Daddy sort of man,
And Mummy is as Mummy as anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan . . .
But they're not Like Binker.
Binker isn't greedy, but he does like things to eat,
So I have to say to people when they're giving me a sweet, 'Oh, Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two? ' And then I eat it for him, 'cos his teeth are rather new.
Well, I'm very fond of Daddy, but he hasn't time to play,
And I'm very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away, And I'm often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my
hair . . .
But Binker's always Binker, and is certain to be there.
A. A. MILNE, NOW We Are Six*
Is the imaginary-friend phenomenon a higher illusion, in a different category from ordinary childhood make-believe? My own experience is not much help here. Like many parents, my mother
Reproduced by permission of the A. A. Milne Estate.
A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 349
kept a notebook of my childish sayings. In addition to simple pre- tendings (now I'm the man in the moon . . . an accelerator . . . a Babylonian) I was evidently fond of second-order pretendings (now I'm an owl pretending to be a waterwheel) which might be reflexive (now I'm a little boy pretending to be Richard). I never once believed I really was any of those things, and I think that is normally true of childhood make-believe games. But I didn't have a Binker. If the testimony of their adult selves is to be believed, at least some of those normal children who have imaginary friends really do believe they exist, and, in some cases, see them as clear and vivid hallucinations. I suspect that the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults. I do not know whether psychologists have studied it from this point of view, but it would be a worthwhile piece of research. Companion and confidant, a Binker for life: that is surely one role that God plays - one gap that might be left if God were to go.
Another child, a girl, had a 'little purple man', who seemed to her a real and visible presence, and who would manifest himself, sparkling out of the air, with a gentle tinkling sound. He visited her regularly, especially when she felt lonely, but with decreasing frequency as she grew older. On a particular day just before she went to kindergarten, the little purple man came to her, heralded by his usual tinkling fanfare, and announced that he would not be visiting her any more. This saddened her, but the little purple man told her that she was getting bigger now and wouldn't need him in the future. He must leave her now, so that he could look after other children. He promised her that he would come back to her if ever she really needed him. He did return to her, many years later in a dream, when she had a personal crisis and was trying to decide what to do with her life. The door of her bedroom opened and a cartload of books appeared, pushed into the room by . . . the little purple man. She interpreted this as advice that she should go to university - advice that she took and later judged to be good. The story makes me almost tearful, and it brings me as close as I shall probably come to understanding the consoling and counselling role of imaginary gods in people's lives. A being may exist only in the imagination, yet still seem completely real to the child, and still give real comfort and good advice. Perhaps even better: imaginary
350 THE GOD DELUSION
friends - and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. And they are much cheaper than psychiatrists or professional counsellors.
Did gods, in their role as consolers and counsellors, evolve from binkers, by a sort of psychological 'paedomorphosis'? Paedo- morphosis is the retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. Pekinese dogs have paedomorphic faces: the adults look like puppies. It is a well-known pattern in evolution, widely accepted as important for the development of such human characteristics as our bulbous forehead and short jaws.
