The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning of witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane world. It is not the certainty of scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its uncertainty. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious tradition or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience?

Of course, science has made its own contribution to the world’s sorrows, but generally by giving us the means of killing each other, not the motive. Where the authority of science has been invoked to justify horrors, it really has been in terms of perversions of science, like Nazi racism and “eugenics.” As Karl Popper has said, “It is only too obvious that it is irrationalism and not rationalism that has the responsibility for all national hostility and aggression, both before and after the Crusades, but I do not know of any war waged for a ‘scientific’ aim, and inspired by scientists.”

Unfortunately I do not think that it is possible to make the case for scientific modes of reasoning by rational argument. David Hume saw long ago that in appealing to our past experience of successful science we are assuming the validity of the very mode of reasoning we are trying to justify. In the same way, all logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically. So we cannot simply dismiss the question why, if we do not find the spiritual comfort we want in the laws of nature, we should not look for it elsewhere—in spiritual authority of one sort or another, or in an independent leap of faith?

The decision to believe or not is not entirely in our hands. I might be happier and have better manners if I thought I were descended from the emperors of China, but no effort of will on my part can make me believe it, any more than I can will my heart to stop beating. Yet it seems that many people are able to exert some control over what they believe and choose to believe in what they think makes them good or happy. The most interesting description I know of how this control can work appears in George Orwell’s novel 1984. The hero, Winston Smith, has written in his diary that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four.” The inquisitor, O’Brien, takes this as a challenge, and sets out to force Smith to change his mind. Under torture Smith is perfectly willing to say that two plus two is five, but that is not what O’Brien is after. Finally, the pain becomes so unbearable that in order to escape it Smith manages to convince himself for an instant that two plus two is five. O’Brien is satisfied for the moment, and the torture is suspended. In much the same way, the pain of confronting the prospect of our own deaths and the deaths of those we love impels us to adopt beliefs that soften that pain. If we are able to manage to adjust our beliefs in this way, then why not do so?

I can see no scientific or logical reason not to seek consolation by adjustment of our beliefs—only a moral one, a point of honor. What do we think of someone who has managed to convince himself that he is bound to win a lottery because he desperately needs the money? Some might envy him his brief great expectations, but many others would think that he is failing in his proper role as an adult and rational human being, of looking at things as they are. In the same way that each of us has had to learn in growing up to resist the temptation of wishful thinking about ordinary things like lotteries, so our species has had to learn in growing up that we are not playing a starring role in any sort of grand cosmic drama.

Nevertheless, I do not for a minute think that science will ever provide the consolations that have been offered by religion in facing death. The finest statement of this existential challenge that I know is found in The Ecclesiastical History of the English, written by the Venerable Bede sometime around A.D. 700. Bede tells how King Edwin of Northumbria held a council in A.D. 627 to decide on the religion to be accepted in his kingdom, and gives the following speech to one of the king’s chief men:

Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.

It is an almost irresistible temptation to believe with Bede and Edwin that there must be something for us outside the banqueting hall. The honor of resisting this temptation is only a thin substitute for the consolations of religion, but it is not entirely without satisfactions of its own.

SALMAN RUSHDIE “Imagine There’s No Heaven” A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen

Born a Muslim in the year that his Indian homeland was fatally sundered by religious partition and war, Salman Rushdie has achieved global renown for his novels and for the way in which they illuminate cross-cultural migrations. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini publicly offered money in his own name to suborn his murder, adding the inducement of a ticket to paradise for anyone willing to take the bribe. Ever since, Rushdie has come to symbolize the defense of free expression and unfettered literary activity (it was his novel The Satanic Verses that was also the object of Khomeini’s mad rage) as well as the right of any person to apostatize from religion. In 1997, Rushdie contributed a letter to a UN-sponsored anthology, addressed to the six- billionth human child who was expected to be born that year. In consequence of Rushdie’s contribution, the ever- courageous Kofi Annan, who was at the time Secretary-General, withdrew his own introduction to the volume. Mr. Rushdie very handsomely agreed to update and expand his letter for this collection.

Dear Little Six Billionth Living Person,

As the newest member of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two sixty-four thousand dollar questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time: How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?

Oddly—as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with—it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, ineffable Being “somewhere up there,” an omnipotent creator whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand. That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven with at least one god in residence. This sky-god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or he danced. Or he vomited Creation out of himself. Or he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the single mighty sky-god is subdivided into many lesser forces—junior deities, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust: for infinite power, for too-easily-broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.

Many of these stories will strike you as extremely beautiful and, therefore, seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of “dead” religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity. It is possible that they may, at some point, come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s