Truth
The Language of God 1
Abstract
Evidence for Belief?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Francis S Collins
Francis S Collins succeeded James Watson as the Director of the Human Genome Project, the immense task of cataloguing the three million human base pairs that make up our genetic code. The genetic code is specifically The Language of God he chose as the title of a book he wrote which is better explained by its subtitle, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. So his use of God in his description of the genetic code is not just metaphorical, as it might be had it been written by many other geneticists. Despite being among the most notable scientists of this generation, he believes in supernatural beings, resurrection of the dead, miracles and a whole spiritual world invisible to us apart from a vague sense that some people, often Christians in the west, have that it is there!
It seems de rigeur for Christians to claim they began their lives as atheists and came to their faith by the force of its logic. Believers these days are never just brought up as Christians and passively accepted Christianity, they have to show they chose it. Collins is no exception. He begins his book showing us how he came to Christianity from atheism. His parents were free thinkers who told him he ought not to take theology too seriously, but curiously, the occasion was when they were sending him and his older brother to church! He was aged 5! Collins explains this bizarre choice for free thinking parents as their way of teaching the boys music. They were being registered as choirboys at an Episcopal Church. It seems a singularly perverse choice for any such parents, and so it proved.
Collins says that while he was a choirboy, he let the theological concepts being preached from the pulpit wash over him “without leaving any discernable residue”. How long was he a choirboy? He simply says “years”, but despite these years of hearing Christian sermons and singing Christian hymns, it never had any influence on him! Despite them, he “had no idea who Christ was”, and was “only marginally aware of the concept of God”. Yet, his ignorance did not stop him making bargains with God, such as promising never to smoke—and nor did he. No one intelligent can accept this tale unquestioningly. Maybe Christians can. Either Collins was a peculiarly stupid little boy, and an equally stupid adult, and his scientific achievements count those hypotheses out, he has a terrible memory or he is less than honest. As a Christian, he can hardly be unaware of the principle attributed to Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits:
Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.
In any case, any scientist ought to know that young children are impressionable, and that is why Christians want their hands on us young, to drill into us that oxymoron, Christian truth, which, through early conditioning, makes “Christian children” into life long sociopaths. Collins has the symptoms, but naturally he cannot see them. Maybe it is wrong to call Christians like Collins “liars”, because lying has to be a conscious desire to deceive, and these people are obviously convinced that the falseness they have been taught to pass on is true. That is why they brag it is Christian truth, but they are part of a baleful chain of false conditioning that has to stop somewhere, as Collins seems to suspect when he notes that 45% of Americans will not accept evolution because they fear it contradicts their Christian truth. Whether someone lies out of ignorance, conditioning or choice, a lie is still false and misleading information. One might have expected a scientist, if not Christians, to take care about what they call true. Evidently not!
Though Collins could discern no residue of any Christian indoctrination from his childhood in a church choir, a few paragraphs on, he can still tell us that in his early teens he had a longing for something “outside himself”. He calls this experience, “spiritual”, a word that most commonly means “religious”. At college, he considered himself an agnostic, someone who sits on the fence, unwilling to decide either way about the existence of God, but he adds that it was not because he did not know whether God existed but because he did not “want to know”.
It seems plain that Collins spent his teens and early twenties in denial. Though he had been deeply impressed by something in his Christian teaching, he dare not admit it to himself. Was it loyalty to his free thinking parents? Who knows? But even the scanty outline he gives is not that of someone who has examined the facts of religion and free thought and rejected religion. Now he calls his denial, “willful blindness”, a phrase from C S Lewis, a huge influence on him. It is a typical Christian inversion of truth—it is the Christian who is willfully blind not the atheist. Though there is still not a shred of evidence for God, making atheism far from willfully blind, Christians are willfully blinded by their illusion of the glory of God.
Later, when Collins switched to medicine, the resignation of his Christian patients in North Carolina to their terminal afflictions deeply impressed him. They did not fear death. Of course, in North Carolina, most people are Christians. Had he been a doctor in any conurbation in the UK, would he have been impressed by the stoical resignation of the predominently non-religious patients he encountered there? Of course not. He is impressed by what impresses him, and that is what he calls “spirituality”. The loss of objectivity that religion brings is one of the reasons why Christianity and science are not compatible. Already, he is weighting events as more important when he judges them in some sense to be spiritual.
Now as Christianity promises Christians an everlasting life, albeit with no possible guarantees it is so, even critics recognize it is a “psychological crutch” for those afraid of death. Atheists might accept it is the only use of belief at all, though it has too large a downside for them to accept it as a convenient white lie. Even so, what amazes atheists is that most Christians have little or no such assurance. Death remains a gloomy prospect for them throughout their lives, when one might have thought they would have been happily ending this temporary sojourn for an altogether longer and brighter future. Of course, Christians at one time did this precisely, happily being fed to lions as martyrs, we are told, and more commonly, happily opening an artery as soon as they had been baptized so that they would go to heaven untainted by sin. It is another incompatibility between Christianity and science. Science wants the facts, Christianity wants to hide them.
Collins’ patients in North Carolina amazed him by not being angry with God for the terminal illnesses they were suffering from. Indeed, neither are atheists when they suffer from terminal illness. They do not have a God to blame! Collins is remarkably naïve or he is again being economical with the truth. A physician should have a working knowledge at least of psychology, and that would have stopped him from being constantly astonished. The whole of Christianity is a psychological trap for the unwary. As so-called faith is presented as a sort of loyalty to God, as well as a reason for divine favours, to try to break free of it is psychologically difficult. You might be willing to forgo the favours, but it seems intensely disloyal to have them offered and to refuse them, not just to God but one’s Christian friends. So, it is hard to reject Christianity without terrible feelings of guilt and fear of the ingrained consequences. The ones who succeed in breaking free of the Christian shackles are the ones to be admired, not those who voluntarily chain themselves up.
One of the most cringing habits of Christians is what they call piety, their rictus sycophancy to a figment of their imagination. Its motivation is the same as that of the subjects of eastern potenates, which is what God is notionally, of course. The subjects of these sultans and sheiks bow, and scrape while backing off from their lord, praising and flattering him, affirming his every whim and caprice, all for fear that one caprice might be to have you beheaded or worse. That is the purpose of worship. The Christian lord is looking on, and slight deviations from correct protocol will not go unnoticed, and will count when they get to the pearly gates. Collins seems just like this, yet is utterly unaware of it as a psychological problem. Christians know their sultan in the sky considers it a virtue.
Further evidence of his repressed faith is his story of being embarrassed when a terminal heart patient asked him what he believed. Why would anyone comfortable in their views, even if unorthodox, be embarrassed in this way? Yet Collins says he flushed with embarrassment. He was 26, and admits now that he had never seriously examined the case for or against belief. One might have thought that the child of committed free thinkers would instinctively look for reasons to be skeptical—a word Collins hardly uses—of belief. Instead, we find out he never seriously examines the case against belief ever, because his guilt drove him to look for reasons to believe. Following childhood indoctrination into religion and a subsequent rejection or suppression of it, Collins was ready for a classic conversion, as described for a hundred years by honest psychologists, and even in the bible, in the case of the true founder of the Christian religion, Paul.
Collins now finds he could not depend on the “robustness of his atheistic position”, though everything he has told us shows his atheistic position was never robust, and he had no inclination to substantiate it. He says he preferred to keep his actions unscrutinized. It seems he recognized he was already converted, and, like Paul, was trying to avoid facing it, but it forced itself on to him. So, he did not find atheistic authorities to back up his supposed atheism, but immediately sought out “religions”, and, at the instigation of a Methodist minister, he turned to Mere Christianity by C S Lewis. What atheist or even agnostic looking for a firm basis for their belief would turn for advice to a minister of the church? Collins was already converted, and was seeking justification for his new stance.
How had this son of free thinking parents come to this point? Collins treatment is that he had no idea what was happening. It was all entirely against his will, though he leaves a trail of clues that Christianity had been with him since a child. Even so, it seems he had not practised it in any convinced way. Practically, he was like most of the inhabitants of this little island, Great Britain, who live their lives with no recourse to religion at all, without feeling any need to declare any rejection of it. Collins was like this, but his repressed belief kept giving him pangs of conscience, and the source of his belief seems to have been his childhood Christian apprenticeship as a choirboy, with the almost subliminal droning of vicars constantly repeating Christian indoctrination. Whatever it was, something had impressed him, and something else, presumably loyalty to his parents, led to it being suppressed until his mid twenties. He does not tell us for a couple of hundred pages of his road to Damascus experience. It turns out to be a bit pitiful. He falls before his Lord when he sees a frozen waterfall in the Cascade Mountains! He was 27.
The “Moral Law”
Amazing though all this is, it is yet to get more incredible. What most convinces this great scientist is his sudden awareness of a “moral law” impressed into the human psyche. This law is the fact that human beings to a large degree can distinguish right from wrong, and broadly right and wrong are common across all human cultures. One might have thought a talented scientist might have approached this interesting observation scientifically, but not Collins. Already his religion had begun to erode his mind. Any questions he might have had that he could have approached scientifically were already answered—God! A hundred years ago, Emile Durkheim had noticed the same puzzles and answered them by the enquiry that all appeal to God curtails. No one thinks Durkheim ended all further enquiry—science is not like that—but, for believers, God does, and Collins does not even nod towards scientific answers to the “irreducible complexity” of his moral law.
Collins did allow himself to ask whether any such moral law applies to animals. He concludes that some do show “glimmerings” of it, but nevertheless decides it is peculiar to human beings! Is it further proof of the corrosive effects of belief? His explanation is that the “glimmerings” are not widespread among animals, and many more animal species do awful and immoral things. One might wonder whether any animal has ever done such awful and immoral things as the animal that has this “moral law”, but Collins is not troubled by any such thought. The fact that a new alpha male in a pride of lions will eat the young of its predecessor—explained by evolution—for Collins, proves that animals are immoral, and the “glimmerings” elsewhere count for nothing, dismissed in this cavalier and unscientific way.
Humans are animals, and the closest of them to humanity certainly show some traits once thought to have been exclusively human, like compassion and altruism. Collins is already abandoning science in a more than trivial way in exchange for mere Christianity. Something about Christianity makes even intelligent believers abandon every principle for faith. Once you do that you are on the way to the Inquisition and to witch burning—the abandonment, in short, of the principles of Christianity as expounded by Christ, not that most Christians have ever seriously applied them.
Collins actually shows some scientific inquisitiveness when he asks at this point:
Is the sense of right and wrong an instrinsic quality of being human, or just a consequence of cultural traditions?
Why, though, does he add the word “just”, demeaning cultural traditions? After all, religions, including his much loved Christianity are cultural traditions. His intention is plain. If some behaviour is not “intrinsic” then it is “just” habit. He wants the sense of right and wrong to be more than just habit—he wants it to be implanted by God—so he demeans the option he disdains. Hardly scientific, now, is it? In fact, the sense of right and wrong might well be partly intrinsic and partly cultural, but the intrinsic part is instinct, the influence of genetic inheritance, not God. Humans are strongly social animals—tens of millions commonly live in one city—and that is certain to be genetic. It is human nature to be social. Collins himself points out that we have evolved in the last 150,000 years or so from about only 10,000 people. They must have been social, and we still have their social drives and instincts.
Social living is genetically coded because it is advantageous to the individual, yet it requires each individual to yield some of its independence for the advantages that accrue from communal living. The individual can no longer do just as it likes, as it could if it were solitary. The benefit of group living, is that each animal helps the others in some way. If it is a question of predation, then they are all looking out for danger, and will utter an alarm call that all the others recognize, when a predator is seen. If it is a question of scarce food resources, then each will share a little of its food with others, and will let the others know when it finds a source of it. If one is unkempt, then other will help it groom itself. If one is hurt, then others will help to get it to safety, and help it while it recovers. Any animal that refused to do what membership of the group requires would be disciplined, ultimately by exclusion, leaving the outcast to fend for itself, or find another group that will accept it. Presumably, then it will have learned a lesson. There seems little doubt that any humans who refused to cooperate in this social contract will soon have died out, and so all humans now are social.
Does this litany of social behaviour trigger any thoughts to Collins, and any similarly minded Christians? Apparently not, yet it is the basis of just that “moral law” that Collins thinks can only be God given. Right and wrong is simply an awareness, instinctive, and cultural, of behaviour acceptable to others who constitute the human group. No God is needed to proclaim it as a law any more than God is needed to write a genetic code. It is behaviour that has evolved, and Dr Collins is an expert in biology, so ought to know it. Yet he makes a moral code the foundation of his belief in God! He wants his mentor, C S Lewis, unvaunted as a professional scholar of medieval English but greatly admired as an amateur Christian to back him up, but Lewis simply shows that all humans have the social instincts required by such a moral code.
Lewis, as an Oxford then a Cambridge scholar, had endless hours to study whatever he liked and to relate his findings, in whatever way he could as a clever man, to the Christianity he had adopted. He had looked at descriptions of many religions both in history and in modern times, and discovered, he tells us, they uniformly denounce “oppression, murder, treachery and falsehood” while advocating “kindness, almsgiving, impartiality and honesty”. He is speaking of quite different religions from Christianity, some of them perhaps not even religions at all in the sense Collins likes them of being spiritual, that is dependent on gods as the source of the laws and morals we have. Thus Lewis cites both Confucius and the Stoics. Christians like to say they adhere to the same standards but all too often do not, and spectacularly so, as in witchburning. Collins informs us that it is not an example of the abandonment of morality but arises from “strongly held but misguided conclusions”. Then he chillingly adds:
If you firmly believed that a witch is the personification of evil on earth, an apostle of the devil himself, would it not seem justified to take such drastic action?
It seems that torture and murder in the name of God is but a hair’s breadth away in the minds of people like Collins. His predecessor, James Watson, was publicly villified and flayed in the press not long ago for far less. For those who think such drastic action is justified, human morality is to ensure no one honest in society is disadvantaged—it protects people within society from exploitation by others. It precludes any sort of witch hunting because witch hunting is based on prejudice, not on any actual harm done to others in society. Witch hunting is identical to racism, and anyone, even of a different race, accepted into society and willing to accept its conditions are acceptable to it. Human society has to be attractive enough to all of its members, not just a few, otherwise it falls apart, and frequently has done throughout history.
The people with views so strongly and certainly held are those who delude themselves they are acting for a supernatural God, not for society, and by influencing others to do such immoral acts, they can rightly be expelled from society. It means being confronted before the law—the code of punishment for breaking the instinctive and cultural rules of society, in historical times, formalized in writing—and condemned to expulsion for leading society astray. Nowadays, expulsion is rarely possible, though exile was common until recently, and so imprisonment or state execution is substituted. The ones who promoted witch hunting were the leaders of the Christian churches, and they would have been punished thus had they not already corrupted society so thoroughly.
Collins does passingly consider that evolution might have had a part to play in the formation of a moral sense, and suddenly becomes dogmatically scientific about it. Altruism happens in many species in respect of kin, it being selected for genetically, and social animals often practice altruism within a social group. It is the purpose of society, what Collins disparages as “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. Collins does not regard this as “true” altruism, and has to exclude it and anything similar. So he uses a common Christian apologetic ploy—he eliminates on any spurious ground that which does not suit his argument. “True altruism” is giving without any expectation of receiving. Human beings will risk their own lives for others without any financial or material reward. That is truly awesome, he opines, presumably because it cannot easily be explained by simple genetic selection.
Collins often seems as though he does not understand selection at all. Remember he has told us that we have all descended from a group of only 10,000 people only 150,000 years ago. It is a small number and might suggest that humanity had been under severe environmental stress. Perhaps this small group had survived precisely because they were altruistic—they had helped each other even at personal risk—and we now have this genetic disposition. Society is a mutual benefit club, and all such clubs would be valueless unless individuals benefited from being in them. Yet the great geneticist can only see God as the answer.
Where there is a tendency towards social grouping, in other words when social grouping gives the individual an advantage, then those individuals that incline towards sociability will be selected, and the species will become more social. At first, perhaps it is just a protection mechanism—shrieking at the sight of a predator—but then those individuals in the group that show other traits, like a readiness to share food will have an advantage over those that will only sound a warning. So, it is possible for groups of individuals to become more and more sociable by selection. So far, our group is a sort of extended family having common genes, but once breeding outside the group is itself selected because such animals have greater genetic variability, are less inbred and healthier, then the group becomes a tribe and not merely an extended family, and the same is true when outcasts from other groups are accepted. At this point, members of the group might make sacrifices for an individual within the group with whom they are utterly unrelated.
Empathy
Is it possible for empathy to be inherited? Empathy is that very concern and compassion that moves us to help others. A mother’s love is undoubtedly inherited, and mothers who fail to show it, besides being despised and disdained in society, are more likely to lose their children and any related genes are more likely to disappear from the gene pool. So, mothers mainly do love their children. But intelligent animals can transfer habits culturally. Humans, with their long period of immaturity spend years with their mothers in groups of women who foraged for berries and roots to provide the group’s staple foods. In that situation, both the women’s love for their children and language becomes transferable to their children of both sexes as aspects of social bonding. Those lacking empathy could again have been killed, or excluded from society, when they will soon have fallen victims to hyenas, cats, dogs or baboons. Thus the inclination to empathize might almost have been deliberately selected, and the failing of modern society is not the breakdown of the family, but the previous breakdown of the groups of mothers and children who used once to show us how to behave.
Collins following Lewis, as usual, thinks empathy is what the early Christians called “agape”. It is a word of unknown roots which came into use only when the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek in the third century BC, where it translated the Hebrew ahem, a word of many meanings in the impoverished Hebrew language. It must have been coined or lifted out of obscurity by the authors of the Septuagint, perhaps from the root sound of ahem to the Greek speaking Jews of Alexandria, serving as a word for love without established conotations. Primarily, it is the love of those in society who need help, the weak, the poor, the orphan, the widow, and strangers, who, not being of the dominant tribal culture and protected specifically by it, have to be treated as helpless. It is love as a duty to God and therefore could well be translated as “empathy”. Agape as understood by the early Christians, however, soon fell out of fashion because of its unsavoury character, though Christians gloss over it. Christians had been celebrating agape with behaviour that was not decorous, and Paul had to impress upon his converts the meaning of the Eucharist as a remembrance of Christ to restrain those who regarded it as a Christian orgy.
Collins declares that the Lewisian interpretation of agape as empathy is a “major challenge to the evolutionist” and a scandal to “reductionist reasoning”, this latter a vice that is impossible for Christians. It would be one of God’s miracles as they habitually reduce everything to God, if it were not simply answered in that they are never guilty of any sort of reasoning—except fallacies.
As already seen, empathy is the source of altruism, and empathy is a social construct conditioned by humanity’s genetic nature as a social species. Social animals are selected genetically to behave socially, and therefore have characteristics necessary for its purpose. The intelligent or instinctive individual does not have to have any perceived benefit to want to help another in the same social group. The reason is the group—what Collins demeans—“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, though it ought not need saying that it goes far beyond mutual grooming. To offer life for the group is an extreme but not uncommon form of the same thing. The group has to fight off challenges from rival groups or predators, and social animals will give their lives in such circumstances, fighting for the group not merely for themselves.
Nor does even scratching have to be simultaneous or by turns about. Some animals can save up debts. They already have a primitive accounting system. They remember that another animal owes it a scratch, and they build up trust on the basis of the response of others—their honesty. Social animals also form attachments to each other, partly, at least, based on their balance sheet of debts, as any dog or cat owner knows. It is “willful blindness” to ignore all this just to find a gap for God. Now Collins and Christians generally cannot think like this because God, their preagreed answer, gets in the way, but their God is superfluous. No scientist should choose a supernatural “cause” for anything, especially when perfectly reasonable and likely hypotheses have not been scientifically discounted by adequate testing.
Anyway, Collins can only see altruism as a God given human trait. The loss is personal but the benefits accrue to everyone left alive in the society. Inasmuch as the society is essential for the continuation of the species it makes perfect sense when it helps to preserve the group. It also makes sense not to give your life away unnecessarily—to use reason along with empathy—and that is why such sacrifice is not common. When you cannot swim, it makes no sense to attempt to do it to save a drowning child. All too often you both die, yet the group instinct is strong enough for it to happen. It cannot therefore be God given, unless we are to accept, with Christians, that God is as stupid as they are. It is like the unintelligent examples of so-called “Intelligent Design” that Collins exposes later. Here, he cannot see any parallel. Morality is the central plank of his belief, so there is no way he will seriously consider rational explanations of it.
We are animals with a sense of the future. Some other animals have the same sense, maybe in a more rudimentary form. It means we do things for future rewards. It includes the accounting mechanism again. In a sense, the chimp dying in defense of the group is similar. They have a sense of the importance of the group—that it is more important than they are as an individual. Human beings, however, can value accolades. People choose to die as martyrs because they like the idea of being respected and admired, even though they are dead. Collins cites Mother Theresa as an example of altruism, but she received accolades in life, and perhaps liked the idea of being remembered after her death as a saint. So she raised large amounts of money for the Catholic Church as an incentive for her canonization. Collins has no regard for a plethora of natural explanations that could be examined. He does not need them because he has made up his mind in advance. It is not science.
Nor is the posing of irrational opposites—like his negating of any morality in animals by averaging over them all, irrespective of their different natures—a valid argument in a different context. Altruism manifests as a selective influence on mating choice in primate groups, yet he dismisses it because some animals will kill the offspring of a rival. It is a ridiculous argument, because, if that were the instinctive practice, it would be allowed in the moral law of that animal. It is only because Collins thinks his moral law in humans is some sort of absolute that he cannot see reason. And what is even more risible is that in practice human kings and chiefs only too often do indeed kill the offspring of their rivals, and the rivals themselves, when needs be.
Even God—if you believe the Jewish scriptures express God’s will—while forbidding murder in the original tablets He hands down to Moses in the story, elsewhere obliges people to commit murder on a massive scale by genocide, murder of children, and countless exceptions He makes throughout. Disgustingly He tells the Israelites they need not murder young girls but to keep them for themselves. What now could that mean? Willful blindness stops Collins from even noticing it, but the Christian holy word does not match up to Collins’ law of right and wrong. He certainly never observes upon the way the bible contradicts his fancied divinely moral law, even though he is no biblical inerrantist.
God and Society
It shows that the moral law of each tribe or culture was a social law which applied to those whose culture it was, and originally not to others. Each God was the totem of a social group, and the notional authority, often as a founding ancestor, of the group’s culture. The point today is that the earth has shrunk, and the only viable human social group is the whole human race, not any tribe, country or imperium within it. We just cannot remain exclusive any more in an age of weapons of mass destruction. A supernatural God is irrelevant. God as humanity within human society is what we have to start to see.
Collins seems able to have only one hypothesis in mind, failing to see any possible adaptations, or even a similar but quite different hypothesis that might be a better explanation. When kinship cannot explain altruism, for him no explanation except God is possible. It is the God delusion. If a superior man like Collins cannot think of an explanation then only God can!
Curiously, Collins mentions altruism as being of benefit to an entire group, but the example he gives of social insects is easily dismissed because the entire colony of ants, bees, termites or wasps are kin. We are not like the ant that sacrifices itself for the ant colony. Social vertebrates cannot be purely kin groups, with only a few exceptions like mole rats, perhaps, but humans and some other social animals are intelligent enough to recognize the importance of the group, though it is not a purely kinship community, or they do it instinctively from the broader genetic selection drive to be social. He says that selection only works through the individual, which is true enough as far as we know, but society benefits the individual, so the individual that chooses certain behaviour patterns to its advantage is selected above those who do not, and the inclination to social behaviour is strengthened generation to generation, with the specific social habits it entails.
And Collins now brags he is among those who will risk his life to save a drowning stranger, though he is not a good swimmer. Maybe so, but his motivation is not that a superbeing has programmed him to do it. He can take personal credit for his bravery. Humans are social, and expect others to help us in adverse circumstances because they would do the same. Some might be willing to die content to end their life with post mortem accolades as a hero. Many more social, intellectual and genetical reasons might be found and tested as to why we do it, but Collins is not willing to consider any of it except in the most superficial way. He will find God!
Now Collins mentions that the social argument implies hostility to those outside the group. Quite! It was the norm throughout history, and who can say with any credibility that it is not still true. Yet Collins says Mother Theresa and Oscar Schindler refute it! Can he be serious? The truth is not Mother Theresa or Oscar Schindler but Bush and Blair—Christians!—bombing Iraq, and the chosen people of God doing the same to the unfortunate Palestinians trapped in Gaza as the Nazis did to Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. Yes, it is also Islamic terrorists seeking martyrdom by suicide, but that feeble attempt to impose their own religious opinion on to others is necessary only because they, as yet, do not have weapons of mass destruction.
Cruelty and indifference when people want care and compassion just breeds martyrdom. What is the point of living in a society that is cruel? You might as well, die, and take a few of your oppressors with you. That is why there is now only one group—humanity itself. The point has already been made that there is now only one tribe, the human tribe. We can no longer be particular. We are all together in a shrinking world. We do not need to perpetuate fantastic Gods, we need to extend the care and compassion of tribal membership to the whole of human society. The powerful and supposedly pious western leaders lack any empathy for those receiving their bombs, even though they must know most of the people being killed are innocent. Collins’ concentration on Christian fantasy to the absolute disregard of any practical measures to rein in Jewish and Christian butchers shows he is devoid, in practice, of all human feeling.
Collins is fond of prefacing statements he believes with a qualifying sub clause. If so-and-so, then some absurd Christian belief. The conditional clause is rarely other than shallow, partial or ill considered. Here he thinks his law of right and wrong cannot be explained by evolution or culture, though he makes not a single convincing attempt to show he is willing to take any such possibilities seriously. To do so is “explaining it away”, not explaining it! Bias? Prejudice? This is a great scientist speaking:
If the law of human nature cannot be “explained away” as cultural artifact or evolutionary by product… then something truly unusual is going on…F S Collins
He will not face up to feasible natural answers that have not been eliminated or are worth exploring, and concludes that only God can be the answer—the God delusion. What scientist will seek a supernatural answer before he has exhausted all possible natural answers by proper scientific enquiry? None! So, Collins is a pseudo scientist. As soon as any scientist becomes a believer, his work has to be suspect. Presumably, the human genome project was too wide a project and had too many participants for him to fiddle, unless, of course, he fiddled the list of participants in advance, restricting it to Christian sympathizers. A Christian bias might seem unlikely but no science is valid until it has been repeatedly and independently confirmed. Such doubts ought never to be anywhere in sight, because belief and science cannot be allowed into the same room. Believers just cannot be objective. Their belief comes first.
As Collins has decided in advance that his concept of a moral law is inexplicable by natural means, it has necessarily been implanted by a “controlling power” outside the universe. It was a conclusion that “stunned” him by its “logic”. The “logic”—perhaps we should be glad to hear—is not his own but is, as usual, C S Lewis’s. Lewis gives a typical Christian argument, beginning with the very unlikely condition he wishes to prove—“if there is a controlling power outside the universe”—then it would have to show itself by planting something like the awareness of right and wrong within us. Lo! We have this morality. So, the controlling power must be there! This is the “stunning” logic that so impresses one of our top scientists.
Almost any emotion can be substituted for “something like the awareness of right and wrong” into this syllogism. Why not anger? The Hebrew God is often angry, so maybe he implanted us with anger. Why not the desire to burn allegedly wicked people, something that characterized Collins’ co-religionists for centuries. The Hebrew God in Revelation destroys the wicked by burning them in a sea of molten sulphur, so burning people is a Godly thing to do. Christians thought so, if no one else, and Collins has explained to us that it is justifiable. God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise, cursing them with the law of death. Sexual reproduction allowed them to make sure the race continued after they had died. In this biblical account, it is a consequence of the punishment, if not part of it. Sexual procreation is therefore evidence of God. Doubtless, even Collins cannot harmonize that with science.
No! The moral law was “a bright white light” shining into the “recesses” of his “childish atheism”, he tells us, plainly blinding him to all reason, and substituting cringingly childish Christianity. Then, yet another miracle—the “controlling power” beyond the universe suddenly metamorphoses into the Christian personal God. Collins yields all too easily to this farrago of pious nonsense. He ends his first chapter with this:
How can such beliefs be possible for a scientist? Aren’t many claims of science incompatible with the “show me the data” attitude of someone devoted to the study of chemistry, physics, biology and medicine?
Even though his argument for God centers on God acting in this world to put morality into the human skull, Collins declares that the “tools of science” were “not the right one to learn about Him”. Collins is clever enough to deduce God from his inadequate personal observations and analysis of human Nature, yet science is impotent. Collins is effectively saying that he is above science. He can do what science cannot. It is symptomatic of the God delusion.
Someone as brilliant as me cannot figure out a natural explanation of right and wrong in human beings.
The only thing that is more brilliant than me is God.
Therefore only God can be responsible.
Instead of reading the non-scientific trash of C S Lewis, Collins should have read the books of Victor Stenger, or better still had a face to face discussion with him. That, though, might have the disadvantage of actually persuading Collins he was wrong in his silly musings, because Stenger retains his faith in science and tries to apply it properly to the questions that Collins cannot cope with without his supernatural buddy. Stenger sought the truth of science and religion, and found it was science. Collins tries the same, comes down on the side of religion, but, as a prominent scientist, could not abandon science, and so claims he can harmonize the two. He does it by ignoring the science that does not suit him.
He is fond of citing other scientific poachers turned Christian gamekeepers, like Polkinghorne and Peacock, and wants to open up his mind to its “spiritual possibilities”. Just what does he mean by this? Does he believe in ghosts? They are spirits, aren’t they? Are these “spiritual possibilities” something in the world, or are they, like God, just in the head, and therefore unobservable and unproveable. Collins wants to harmonize, but fails to make his own dualistic beliefs coherent. One has to suspect he would like to make the same transition as Polkinghorne and Peacock. He would be a hero for Christians, but science would rather have him sane, for can anyone sane and a scientist seriously think there is a spiritual world for which there is no evidence:
Science’s domain is to explore Nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world.F S Collins
Yes indeed! The spiritual world is out of the range of science but can be explained subjectively via “the heart, the mind and the soul”. The heart is a pump. The mind depends on what it receives from the senses and experience. The soul is an ancient metaphor for life taken over by believers as life after death. One might be forgiven therefore for thinking the list is metaphorical, but apparently not. We are back to real gods, spirits, angels, demons, vampires, werewolves, genies, poltergeists, fairies. Every one can be explained subjectively as the object of imagination, so does Collins accept them all in the menagerie of the spiritual world? How far does this spiritual world extend?
If someone converses with the devil, are they mad, or is such debate to be lauded as an example of the spiritual world impinging on our own? For, have no doubt about it, conversations with the devil are indistinguishable from conversations with God, and the still small voice telling the Christian their duty is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. The voice can call someone to harmonize science and religion and it can call them to kill prostitutes by beating out their brains.
In Collins’ view, should anyone called to murder realize it is not God calling? Should the Christian Collins justified earlier for killing a witch have known it was wrong? If so and anyone defies the conscience they think is God’s voice calling them to some terrible crime in God’s name, then there is a higher law than God’s subjective law! The social law of right and wrong requires no God. It is right to help others out of compassion, and to do the opposite is wrong. Any society that had no such moral law would not be worth living in. No one could trust anyone else, and it would collapse, reverting to solitarism, until a new society reinstated morality and began to grow. History shows it repeatedly. Why is Collins unaware of it? Because Christianity is a morbid addiction that corrodes the mind, and that no child should be taught. It is dangerous.
Collins moves on to reiterate the persistent Christian con trick that doubt is part of belief. It is a wonder disbelief is not made part of belief in Christian theology. Of course, when people are invited to believe something that is quite alien to reality, doubt has to be a possible response, so it has to be shown to be healthily conducive to belief in some way. Normal experience neither demonstrates nor requires belief in God. Belief in God is confirmed by abnormal experiences, or simply by wishful thinking and desire to conform. When people are normal and have no abnormal experience that could confirm God, then normal experiences have to be given some twist to make them into revelations. Collins, for example, found joy and satisfaction in scientific discovery. It seems quite normal, but he twists it into some weird and abnormal mystery of God:
It transports the scientist into an experience that defies a completely naturalistic explanation.
Because something seems unusual, it is cause for us to believe it is supernatural, eh? Collins sounds to be on the fringe of insanity. If the joy of discovery defies a natural explanation, then what of the man who thinks he is Napoleon, or the man who thinks he is only one step down from God, as Christian theologians and apologists think they are? For Christians, such insane musings are signposts to something greater than ourselves from deep within the human psyche. The only living organism greater than ourselves is human society. It is a meta organism of human beings that each individual relies on. It has the power and the glory that the individual lacks. Society lives on after the individual has died, and the individual has everything it knows in childhood from the society into which it is born.
Moreover, formative societies had a supernatural leader, a totem, a father, a god which embodied all its values. God is a metaphor for society, but with the growth of huge nations and empires, the God has become divorced from society, as the Jewish scriptures show only too clearly, though believers do not get it. God has become an imagined supernatural being, which in today’s multicultural world generates its own societies within nation states, causing division and conflict. Belief in the “reality” of the supernatural God prevents any believer from seeing reality as it is! Collins, despite his intellect and scientific training is exactly like that, and has turned to preaching and proselytizing instead of sticking to the scientific knitting.
