No More Learning

tThe word appears in a section heading, 'Evolution and the Church's Magisterium', in the official English version of the Pope's message, but not in the original French version, which has no section headings. Responses to the Pope's message, and the text of the message itself, including one by me, were published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, 72 (1992), 4.
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? that of science, but not opposed to it, not even overlapping it. Such agnostic conciliation is, once again, easy to mistake for genuine convergence, a true meeting of minds.
At its most naive, this intellectual appeasement policy partitions up the intellectual territory into 'how questions' (science) and 'why questions' (religion). What are 'why questions', and why should we feel entitled to think they deserve an answer? There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think that they are therefore not beyond religion too. I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the Big Bang to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws of physics that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. 'Ah,' he smiled, 'Now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand over to our good friend the Chaplain. ' But why the Chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claim seriously? Once again, I suspect that my friend the Professor of Astronomy was using the Einstein/Hawking trick of letting 'God' stand for 'That which we don't understand'. It would be a harmless trick if it were not con- tinually misunderstood by those hungry to misunderstand it. In any case, optimists among scientists, of whom I am one, will insist that 'That which we don't understand' means only 'That which we don't yet understand'. Science is still working on the problem. We don't know where, or even whether, we shall ultimately be brought up short.
Agnostic conciliation, the decent liberal bending over backwards to concede as much as possible to anybody who shouts loudly enough, reaches ludicrous lengths in the following common piece of sloppy thinking. It goes roughly like this. You can't prove a negative (so far so good). Science has no way to disprove the existence of a supreme being (this is strictly true). Therefore belief (or disbelief) in a supreme being is a matter of pure individual inclination, and they are therefore both equally deserving of respectful attention! When you say it like that the fallacy is almost self-evident: we hardly need spell out the reductio ad absurdum. To borrow a point from Bertrand Russell, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a china teapot in elliptical orbit around the Sun. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't.
Now, if it be retorted that there actually are reasons X, Y and Z for finding a supreme being more plausible than a celestial teapot, then X,
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Y and Z should be spelled out because, if legitimate, they are proper scientific arguments which should be evaluated on their merits. Don't protect them from scrutiny behind a screen of agnostic tolerance. If religious arguments are actually better than Russell's teapot, let us hear the case. Otherwise, let those who call themselves agnostic with respect to religion add that they are equally agnostic about orbiting teapots. At the same time, modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
In any case, the belief that religion and science occupy separate
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magisteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that
religions still make claims about the world which, on analysis, turn out to be scientific claims. Moreover, religious apologists try to have it both ways, to eat their cake and have it. When talking to intellectuals, they carefully keep off science's turf, safe inside the separate and invulner- able religious magisterium. But when talking to a non-intellectual mass audience they make wanton use of miracle stories, which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Raising of Lazarus, the manifestations of Mary and the Saints around the Catholic world, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and very effective they are with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Every one of these miracles amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world. Theologians, if they want to remain honest, should make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles. Or you can keep your Lourdes and your miracles, and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magisteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge on science.
The desire to have it both ways is not surprising in a good propagan- dist. What is surprising is the readiness of liberal agnostics to go along with it; and their readiness to write off, as simplistic, insensitive extremists, those of us with the temerity to blow the whistle. The whistle-blowers are accused of flogging a dead horse, of imagining an outdated caricature of religion in which God has a long white beard and lives in a physical place called Heaven. Nowadays, we are told, religion has moved on. Heaven is not a physical place, and God does not have a physical body where a beard might sit. Well, yes, admirable: separate
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? magisteria, real convergence. But the doctrine of the Assumption was defined as an Article of Faith by Pope Pius XII as recently as 1 November 1950, and is binding on all Catholics. It clearly states that the body of Mary was taken into Heaven and reunited with her soul. What can that mean, if not that Heaven is a physical place, physical enough to contain bodies? To repeat, this is not some quaint and obsolete tradition, with nowadays a purely symbolic significance. It was in the twentieth century that (to quote the 1996 Catholic Encyclopedia) 'Pope Pius XII declared infallibly that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a dogma of the Catholic Faith', thereby upgrading to the status of official dogma what his predecessor, Benedict XIV, also in the twentieth century, had called 'a probable opinion, which to deny were impious and blasphemous'.
Convergence? Only when it suits. To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
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Dolly and the Cloth Heads
A news story like the birth of the cloned sheep Dolly is always followed by a flurry of energetic press activity. Newspaper columnists sound off, solemnly or facetiously; occasionally intelligently. Radio and television producers seize the telephone and round up panels to discuss and debate the moral and legal issues. Some of these panellists are experts on the science, as you would expect and as is right and proper. Equally appropriate are scholars of moral or legal philosophy. Both categories are invited to the studio in their own right, because of their specialized knowledge or their proven ability to think intelligently and speak clearly. The arguments that they have with each other are usually illuminating and rewarding.
The same cannot be said of the third, and most obligatory, category of studio guest: the religious lobby. Lobbies in the plural, I should say, because all the religions have to be represented. This incidentally multiplies the sheer number of people in the studio, with consequent consumption, if not waste, of time.
Out of good manners I shall not mention names, but during the admirable Dolly's week of fame I took part in broadcast or televised discussions of cloning with several prominent religious leaders, and it was not edifying. One of the most eminent of these spokesmen, recently elevated to the House of Lords, got off to a flying start by refusing to shake hands with the women in the television studio, apparently for fear they might be menstruating or otherwise 'unclean'. They took the insult more graciously than I would have, and with the 'respect' always bestowed on religious prejudice - but no other kind of prejudice. When the panel discussion got going, the woman in the chair, treating this bearded patriarch with great deference, asked him to spell out the harm that cloning might do, and he answered that atomic bombs were harmful. Yes indeed, no possibility of disagreement there. But wasn't the discussion supposed to be about cloning?
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3
? Since it was his choice to shift the discussion to atomic bombs, perhaps he knew more about physics than about biology? But no, having delivered himself of the daring falsehood that Einstein split the atom, the sage switched with confidence to history. He made the telling point that, since God laboured six days and then rested on the seventh, scientists too ought to know when to call a halt. Now, either he really believed that the world was made in six days, in which case his ignorance alone disqualifies him from being taken seriously. Or, as the chairwoman charitably suggested, he intended the point purely as an allegory - in which case it was a lousy allegory. Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop, sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop. The allegory of God resting on the seventh day cannot, in itself, tell us whether we have reached the right point to stop in some particular case. As allegory, the six-day creation story is empty. As history, it is false. So why bring it up?
The representative of a rival religion on the same panel was frankly confused. He voiced the common fear that a human clone would lack individuality. It would not be a whole, separate human being but a mere soulless automaton. When I warned him that his words might be offensive to identical twins, he said that identical twins were a quite different case. Why?
On a different panel, this time for radio, yet another religious leader was similarly perplexed by identical twins. He too had 'theological' grounds for fearing that a clone would not be a separate individual and would therefore lack 'dignity'. He was swiftly informed of the un- disputed scientific fact that identical twins are clones of each other with the same genes, like Dolly except that Dolly is the clone of an older sheep. Did he really mean to say that identical twins (and we all know some) lack the dignity of separate individuality? His reason for denying the relevance of the twin analogy was very odd indeed. He had great faith, he informed us, in the power of nurture over nature. Nurture is why identical twins are really different individuals. When you get to know a pair of twins, he concluded triumphantly, they even look a bit different.
Er, quite so. And if a pair of clones were separated by fifty years, wouldn't their respective nurtures be even more different? Haven't you just shot yourself in your theological foot? He just didn't get it - but after all he hadn't been chosen for his ability to follow an argument. I don't want to sound uncharitable, but I submit to radio and television producers that merely being a spokesman for a particular 'tradition', 'faith' or 'community' may not be enough. Isn't a certain minimal qualification in the IQ department desirable too?
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Religious lobbies, spokesmen of 'traditions' and 'communities', enjoy privileged access not only to the media but to influential committees of the great and the good, to governments and school boards. Their views are regularly sought, and heard with exaggerated 'respect', by parlia- mentary committees. You can be sure that, when an Advisory Commission is set up to advise on cloning policy, or any other aspect of reproductive technology, religious lobbies will be prominently represented. Religious spokesmen and spokeswomen enjoy an inside track to influence and power which others have to earn through their own ability or expertise. What is the justification for this?
Why has our society so meekly acquiesced in the convenient fiction that religious views have some sort of right to be respected auto- matically and without question? If I want you to respect my views on politics, science or art, I have to earn that respect by argument, reason, eloquence or relevant knowledge. I have to withstand counter- arguments. But if I have a view that is part of my religion, critics must respectfully tiptoe away or brave the indignation of society at large. Why are religious opinions off limits in this way? Why do we have to respect them, simply because they are religious?
How, moreover, do you decide which of many mutually contradictory religions should be granted this unquestioned respect: this unearned influence. If we invite a Christian spokesman into the television studio or the Advisory Committee, should it be a Catholic or a Protestant, or do we have to have both to make it fair? (In Northern Ireland the difference is, after all, important enough to constitute a recognized motive for murder. ) If we have a Jew and a Muslim, must we have both Orthodox and Reformed, both Shiite and Sunni? And why not Moonies, Scientologists and Druids?
Society, for no reason that I can discern, accepts that parents have an automatic right to bring their children up with particular religious opinions and can withdraw them from, say, biology classes that teach evolution. Yet we'd all be scandalized if children were withdrawn from Art History classes that teach the merits of artists not to their parents' taste. We meekly agree, if a student says, 'Because of my religion I can't take my final examination on the day appointed so, no matter what the inconvenience, you'll have to set a special examination for me. ' It is not obvious why we treat such a demand with any more respect than, say, 'Because of my basketball match (or because of my mother's birthday) I can't take the examination on a particular day. ' Such favoured treat- ment for religious opinion reaches its apogee in wartime. A highly intelligent and sincere individual who justifies his personal pacifism by
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? deeply thought-out moral philosophic arguments finds it hard to achieve Conscientious Objector status. If only he had been born into a religion whose scriptures forbid fighting, he'd have needed no other arguments at all. It is the same unquestioned respect for religions that causes society to beat a path to their leaders' doors whenever an issue like cloning is in the air. Perhaps, instead, we should listen to those whose words themselves justify our heeding them.
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Time to Stand Up
'To blame Islam for what happened in New York is like blaming Christianity for the troubles in Northern Ireland! '* Yes. Precisely. It is time to stop pussyfooting around. Time to get angry. And not only with Islam.
Those of us who have renounced one or another of the three 'great' monotheistic religions have, until now, moderated our language for reasons of politeness. Christians, Jews and Muslims are sincere in their beliefs and in what they find holy. We have respected that, even as we have disagreed with it. The late Douglas Adams put it with his customary
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good humour, in an impromptu speech in 1998 (slightly abridged):
Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigat- ing and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day, and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not?
- because you're not! ' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down, you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that. '
The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking, 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that? ' But I wouldn't have thought, 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or some- body from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think, 'Fine, we have
*Tony Blair is among many who have said something like this, thinking, wrongly, that to blame Christianity for Northern Ireland is self-evidently absurd.
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? different opinions'. But the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say, 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it. '
Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so? There's no other reason at all, it's just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it's very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas, but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.
Douglas is dead, but his words are an inspiration to us now to stand up
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and break this absurd taboo. My last vestige of 'hands off religion'
respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the 'National Day of Prayer', when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough! ' Let our tribute to the September dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.
Notwithstanding bitter sectarian hatreds over the centuries (all too obviously still going strong), Judaism, Islam and Christianity have much in common. Despite New Testament watering down and other reformist tendencies, all three pay historical allegiance to the same violent and vindictive God of Battles, memorably summed up by Gore Vidal in 1998:
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky- god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place
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for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.
In The Guardian of 15 September 2001,1 named belief in an afterlife as 94
the key weapon that made the New York atrocity possible. Of prior significance is religion's deep responsibility for the underlying hatreds that motivated people to use that weapon in the first place. To breathe such a suggestion, even with the most gentlemanly restraint, is to invite an onslaught of patronizing abuse, as Douglas Adams noted. But the insane cruelty of the suicide attacks, and the equally vicious, though numerically less catastrophic, 'revenge' attacks on hapless Muslims living in America and Britain, push me beyond ordinary caution.
How can I say that religion is to blame? Do I really imagine that, when a terrorist kills, he is motivated by a theological disagreement with his victim? Do I really think the Northern Ireland pub bomber says to himself, 'Take that, Tridentine Transubstantiationist bastards! ' Of course I don't think anything of the kind.
Theology is the last thing on the minds of such people. They are not killing because of religion, but because of political grievances, often justified. They are killing because the other lot killed their fathers. Or because the other lot drove their great grandfathers off their land. Or because the other lot oppressed our lot economically for centuries.
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all. I am not even claiming that religion is the only label by which we identify the victims of our prejudice. There's also skin colour, language and social class. But often, as in Northern Ireland, these don't apply and religion is the only divisive label around. Even when it is not alone, religion is nearly always an incendiary ingredient in the mix as well. And please don't trot out Hitler as a counter-example. Hitler's sub- Wagnerian ravings constituted a religion of his own foundation, and his anti-Semitism owed a lot to his never-renounced Roman Catholicism. *
*'My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God's Truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before - the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does
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? It is not an exaggeration to say that religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history. Who killed your father? Not the individuals you are about to kill in 'revenge'. The culprits themselves have vanished over the border. The people who stole your great grandfather's land have died of old age. You aim your vendetta at those who belong to the same religion as the original perpetrators. It wasn't Seamus who killed your brother, but it was Catholics, so Seamus deserves to die 'in return'. Next, it was Protestants who killed Seamus so let's go out and kill some Protestants 'in revenge'. It was Muslims who destroyed the World Trade Center, so let's set upon the turbaned driver of a London taxi and leave him paralysed from the neck down.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the 'historic homeland' of the Jews (though the horrific biblical stories of how Joshua and others conquered their Lebensraum might have made them wonder). Even if it wasn't justifiable at the time, no doubt a good case can be made that, since Israel exists now, to try to reverse the status quo would be a worse wrong.
I do not intend to get into that argument. But if it had not been for religion, the very concept of a Jewish state would have had no meaning in the first place. Nor would the very concept of Islamic lands, as some- thing to be invaded and desecrated. In a world without religion, there would have been no Crusades; no Inquisition; no anti-Semitic pogroms (the people of the diaspora would long ago have intermarried and become indistinguishable from their host populations); no Northern Ireland Troubles (no label by which to distinguish the two 'communities', and no sectarian schools to teach the children historic hatreds - they would simply be one community).
It is a spade we have here, let's call it a spade. The Emperor has no clothes. It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritically to avoid.
not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago - a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people. ' Adolf Hitler, speech of 12 April 1922, Munich. From Norman H. Baynes (ed. ), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939 (2 vols. , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1942),vol. 1,pp. 19-20. Seealso http://www. secularhumanism. org/library/fi/murphy_19_2. html http://www. nobeliefs. com/speeches. htm
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Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to accept them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death- deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
The resilience of this form of hereditary delusion is as astonishing as its lack of realism. It seems that control of the plane which crashed near Pittsburgh was probably wrestled out of the hands of the terrorists by a group of brave passengers. The wife of one of these valiant and heroic men, after she took the telephone call in which he announced their intention, said that God had placed her husband on the plane as His instrument to prevent the plane crashing on the White House. I have the greatest sympathy for this poor woman in her tragic loss, but just think about it! As my (also understandably overwrought) American correspondent who sent me this piece of news said:
Couldn't God have just given the hijackers a heart attack or something instead of killing all those nice people on the plane? I guess he didn't give a flying fuck about the Trade Center, didn't bother to come up with a plan for them. [I apologize for my friend's intemperate language but, in the circumstances, who can blame her? ]
Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God's goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?
The United States is the most religiose country in Christendom, and its born-again leader is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on Earth. Both sides believe that the Bronze Age God of Battles is on their side. Both take risks with the world's future in unshakeable, fundamentalist faith that God will grant them the victory. J. C. Squire's famous verse on the First World War spontaneously comes to mind:
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout 'Gott strafe England' and 'God save the King! ' God this, God that, and God the other thing - 'Good God! ' said God, 'I've got my work cut out! '
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people
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? rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the wilfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different after September 11th. 'All is changed, changed utterly. '
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One of the signs of growing older is that one ceases to be invited to be best man at weddings, or godfather at christenings. I have just begun to be called upon to write obituaries, speak eulogies and organize funerals. Jonathan Miller, on reaching the same landmark age, wrote a sad article, as an atheist, about atheist funerals. They are more than usually cheerless affairs, in his view. A funeral is the one occasion when he feels that religion actually has something to offer: not, of course, the delusion of an afterlife (as he would see it), but the hymns, the rituals, the vestments, the seventeenth-century words.
Loving the cadences of the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer as I do, I surprise myself by the strength of my disagreement with Dr Miller. All funerals are sad, but secular funerals, properly organized, are hugely preferable on all counts. I have long noticed that even religious funerals are memorable mostly for their nonreligious content: the memoirs, the poems, the music. After listening to a well-crafted speech by someone who knew and loved the deceased, my feeling has been: 'Oh, it was so moving hearing so-and-so's tribute; if only there could have been more like that, and fewer of those empty, hollow prayers. ' Secular funerals, by scrapping the prayers altogether, give more time for a beautiful memorial: a balance of tributes, music that evokes memories, poetry that may be alternately sad and uplifting, perhaps readings from the dead person's works, even some affectionate humour.
It is hard to think of the novelist Douglas Adams without affectionate humour, and it was much in evidence at his memorial service in the Church of St Martin in the Fields, in London. I was one of those who spoke, and my eulogy (4. 2) is reprinted here, as the second piece in this section. But earlier - indeed, I finished it the day after he died - I wrote a lament (4. 1) in The Guardian. The tone of these two pieces, one shocked and sad, the other affectionately celebratory, is so different that it seemed right to include both.
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In the case of my revered colleague the evolutionary biologist W. D.
Hamilton, it fell to me to organize his memorial service in the Chapel of New
College, Oxford. I also spoke a eulogy, and it is reproduced as the third
item (4. 3) in this section. In this service, the music was provided by New
College's wonderful choir. Two of the anthems had been sung at Darwin's
funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of them specially composed for Darwin:
a setting by Frederick Bridge of 'Happy is the man that findeth wisdom,
and the man that getteth understanding' (Proverbs 3:13). I like to think that
Bill, that dear, gentle, wise man, would have been pleased. At my
suggestion the score has been reprinted in the posthumous volume of Bill's
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collected papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, where it is certainly the
only copy in print.
I met John Diamond only once, shortly before he died. I knew of him as
a newspaper columnist and author of a courageous book, C: Because 96
cowards get cancer too, recounting his battle with a horrific form of throat cancer. When I met him at a cocktail party, he could not speak at all, and carried on lively and cheerful conversations by writing in a notebook. He was working on a second book, Snake Oil (4. 4), taking the lid off the 'alternative' medicine which, while he was dying, was almost daily thrust his way by quacks or their well-meaning dupes. He died before he could complete the book, and I was honoured to be invited to write the Foreword for its posthumous publication.
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? Lament for Douglas
This is not an obituary, there'll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
A sunny Saturday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to email as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen. What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other cliche, the words swelling before my eyes. It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is the right - or rather the wrong - Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. 'Man, man, man, man oh man,' the message concludes.
Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologized for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.
One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife - at his fortieth birthday party. He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter - I think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. As soon as I finished it I turned back to page one and read it straight through again - the only time I have ever done that, and
I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I didn't know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, for you can't understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don't know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on
all technical problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an email to Douglas. He would reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staffers of professional help lines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent email exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affec- tionately sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity are as comic in the world's silicon valleys as anywhere else.
He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer's block ('I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by') when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would literally lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone, and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.
He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. The moral of this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box,
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? manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about trans- mitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. 'But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there? '
Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computer has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. I officially received a happy piece of news yesterday, which would have delighted him. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to it is too late.
The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those cliches. We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall, upright, ever- green. It is the wrong time of year, but we'll give it our best shot. Off to the arboretum.
The tree is planted, and this article completed, all within 24 hours of his death. Was it cathartic? No, but it was worth a try.
LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS
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? Eulogy for Douglas Adams
Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, London, 17 September 2001
I believe it falls to me to say something about Douglas's love of science. * He once asked my advice. He was contemplating going back to univer- sity to read science, I think specifically my own subject of Zoology.