How does religion compare with, say, science in providing these two types of consolation? Looking at Type 1 consolation first, it is entirely plausible that the strong arms of God, even if they are purely imaginary, could console in just the same kind of way as the real arms of a friend, or a St Bernard dog with a brandy cask around its neck. But of course scientific medicine can also offer comfort - usually more effectively than brandy.
Turning now to Type 2 consolation, it is easy to believe that religion could be extremely effective. People caught up in a terrible disaster, such as an earthquake, frequently report that they derive consolation from the reflection that it is all part of God's inscrutable plan: no doubt good shall come of it in the fullness of time. If someone fears death, sincere belief that he has an immortal soul can be consoling - unless, of course, he thinks he is going to hell or purgatory. False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment. This applies to non-religious beliefs too. A man with terminal cancer may be consoled by a doctor who lies to him that he is cured, just as effectively as another man who is told truthfully that he is cured. Sincere and wholehearted belief in life after death is even more immune to disillusionment than belief in a lying doctor. The doctor's lie remains effective only until the symptoms become unmistakable. A believer in life after death can never be ultimately disillusioned.
Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death. I can't help wondering how many people who claim such belief really, in their heart of hearts, hold it. If they were truly sincere, shouldn't they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him: 'Congratulations! That's brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.'155 The abbot, it seems, really was a sincere believer. But it is precisely because it is so rare and unexpected that his story catches our attention, almost provokes our amusement - in a fashion reminiscent of the cartoon of a young woman carrying a 'Make love not war' banner, stark naked, and with a bystander exclaiming, 'Now that's what I call sincerity!' Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday in the Seychelles? 'I can't wait!' Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside shower her with messages for those that have gone before? 'Do give my love to Uncle Robert when you see him . . .'
Why don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying? Could it be that they don't really believe all that stuff they pretend to believe? Or perhaps they do believe it but fear the process of dying. With good reason, given that our species is the only one not allowed to go to the vet to be painlessly put out of our misery. But in that case, why does the most vocal opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide come from the religious? On the 'Abbot of Ampleforth' or 'Holiday in the Seychelles' model of death, wouldn't you expect that religious people would be the least likely to cling unbecomingly to earthly life? Yet it is a striking fact that, if you meet somebody who is passionately opposed to mercy killing, or passionately against assisted suicide, you can bet a good sum that they will turn out to be religious. The official reason may be that all killing is a sin. But why deem it to be a sin if you sincerely believe you are accelerating a journey to heaven?
My attitude to assisted suicide, by contrast, takes off from Mark Twain's observation, already quoted. Being dead will be no different from being unborn - I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. But the process of dying could well be, depending on our luck, painful and unpleasant - the sort of experience from which we have become accustomed to being protected by a general anaesthetic, like having your appendix out. If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder. When I am dying, I should like my life to be taken out under a general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix. But I shall not be allowed that privilege, because I have the ill-luck to be born a member of Homo sapiens rather than, for example, Canis familiaris or Felis catus. At least, that will be the case unless I move to a more enlightened place like Switzerland, the Netherlands or Oregon. Why are such enlightened places so rare? Mostly because of the influence of religion.
But, it might be said, isn't there an important difference between having your appendix removed and having your life removed? Not really; not if you are about to die anyway. And not if you have a sincere religious belief in life after death. If you have that belief, dying is just a transition from one life to another. If the transition is painful, you should no more wish to undergo it without anaesthetic than you would wish to have your appendix removed without anaesthetic. It is those of us who see death as terminal rather than transitional who might naively be expected to resist euthanasia or assisted suicide. Yet we are the ones who support it.*
* One study of attitudes to death among American atheists found the following: 50 per cent wanted a memorial celebration of their life; 99 per cent supported physician-assisted suicide for those who want it, and 75 per cent wanted it for themselves; 100 per cent wanted no contact with hospital staff who promote religion. See http://nursestoner.com/myresearch.html.
In the same vein, what are we to make of the observation of a senior nurse of my acquaintance, with a lifetime's experience in running a home for old people, where death is a regular occurrence? She has noticed over the years that the individuals who are most afraid of death are the religious ones. Her observation would need to be substantiated statistically but, assuming she is right, what is going on here? Whatever it is, it doesn't, on the face of it, speak strongly of religion's power to comfort the dying.* In the case of Catholics, maybe they are afraid of purgatory? The saintly Cardinal Hume said farewell to a friend in these words: 'Well, goodbye then. See you in purgatory, I suppose.' What I suppose is that there was a sceptical twinkle in those kind old eyes.
* An Australian friend coined a wonderful phrase to describe the tendency for religiosity to increase in old age. Say it with an Australian intonation, going up at the end like a question: 'Cramming for the final?'
The doctrine of purgatory offers a preposterous revelation of the way the theological mind works. Purgatory is a sort of divine Ellis Island, a Hadean waiting room where dead souls go if their sins aren't bad enough to send them to hell, but they still need a bit of remedial checking out and purifying before they can be admitted to the sin-free-zone of heaven. In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had been purchased. The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase 'ill-gotten' might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
As recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was still able to tabulate the number of days' remission from purgatory that each rank in the hierarchy was entitled to grant: cardinals two hundred days, archbishops a hundred days, bishops a mere fifty days. By his time, however, indulgences were no longer sold directly for money. Even in the Middle Ages, money was not the only currency in which you could buy parole from purgatory. You could pay in prayers too, either your own before death or the prayers of others on your behalf, after your death. And money could buy prayers. If you were rich, you could lay down provision for your soul in perpetuity. My own Oxford College, New College, was
founded in 1379 (it was new then) by one of that century's great philanthropists, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. A medieval bishop could become the Bill Gates of the age, controlling the equivalent of the information highway (to God), and amassing huge riches. His diocese was exceptionally large, and Wykeham used his wealth and influence to found two great educational establishments, one in Winchester and one in Oxford. Education was important to Wykeham, but, in the words of the official New College history, published in 1979 to mark the sixth centenary, the fundamental purpose of the college was 'as a great chantry to make intercession for the repose of his soul. He provided for the service of the chapel by ten chaplains, three clerks and sixteen choristers, and he ordered that they alone were to be retained if the college's income failed.' Wykeham left New College in the hands of the Fellowship, a self-electing body which has been continuously in existence like a single organism for more than six hundred years. Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the centuries.
Today the college has only one chaplain* and no clerks, and the steady century-by-century torrent of prayers for Wykeham in purgatory has dwindled to a trickle of two prayers per year. The choristers alone go from strength to strength and their music is, indeed, magical. Even I feel a twinge of guilt, as a member of that Fellowship, for a trust betrayed. In the understanding of his own time, Wykeham was doing the equivalent of a rich man today making a large down payment to a cryogenics company which guarantees to freeze your body and keep it insulated from earthquakes, civil disorder, nuclear war and other hazards, until some future time when medical science has learned how to unfreeze it and cure whatever disease it was dying of. Are we later Fellows of New College reneging on a contract with our Founder? If so, we are in good company. Hundreds of medieval benefactors died trusting that their heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory. I can't help wondering what proportion of Europe's medieval treasures of art and architecture started out as down payments on eternity, in trusts now betrayed.
* Female - what would Bishop William have made of that?
But what really fascinates me about the doctrine of purgatory is the evidence that theologians have advanced for it: evidence so spectacularly weak that it renders even more comical the airy confidence with which it is asserted. The entry on purgatory in the Catholic Encyclopedia has a section called 'proofs'. The essential evidence for the existence of purgatory is this. If the dead simply went to heaven or hell on the basis of their sins while on Earth, there would be no point in praying for them. 'For why pray for the dead, if there be no belief in the power of prayer to afford solace to those who as yet are excluded from the sight of God.' And we do pray for the dead, don't we? Therefore purgatory must exist, otherwise our prayers would be pointless! Q.E.D. This seriously is an example of what passes for reasoning in the theological mind.
That remarkable non sequitur is mirrored, on a larger scale, in another common deployment of the Argument from Consolation. There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? Are we back to Binker again?
The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed. If science gives consolation of a non-material kind, it merges into my final topic, inspiration.
INSPIRATION
This is a matter of taste or private judgement, which has the slightly unfortunate effect that the method of argument I must employ is rhetoric rather than logic. I've done it before, and so have many others including, to name only recent examples, Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot, E. O. Wilson in Biophilia, Michael Shermer in The Soul of Science and Paul Kurtz in Affirmations. In Unweaving the Rainbow I tried to convey how lucky we are to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. For those of us lucky enough to be here, I pictured the relative brevity of life by imagining a laser-thin spotlight creeping along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in the darkness of the dead past, or the darkness of the unknown future. We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place? As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something. Emily Dickinson said,
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
If the demise of God will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavour to find out the truth about the real world. I see the human effort to understand the universe as a model-building enterprise. Each of us builds, inside our head, a model of the world in which we find ourselves. The minimal model of the world is the model our ancestors needed in order to survive in it. The simulation software was constructed and debugged by natural selection, and it is most adept in the world familiar to our ancestors on the African savannah: a three-dimensional world of medium-sized material objects, moving at medium speeds relative to one another. As an unexpected bonus, our brains turn out to be powerful enough to accommodate a much richer world model than the mediocre utilitarian one that our ancestors needed in order to survive. Art and science are runaway manifestations of this bonus. Let me paint one final picture, to convey the power of science to open the mind and satisfy the psyche.
THE MOTHER OF ALL BURKAS
One of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is the image of a woman swathed in shapeless black from head to toe, peering out at the world through a tiny slit. The burka is not just an instrument of oppression of women and claustral repression of their liberty and their beauty; not just a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cowed female submission. I want to use the narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else.
Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is a chink of brightness in the vast dark spectrum, from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at the short end. Quite how narrow is hard to appreciate and a challenge to convey. Imagine a gigantic black burka, with a vision slit of approximately the standard width, say about one inch. If the length of black cloth above the slit represents the short-wave end of the invisible spectrum, and if the length of black cloth below the slit represents the long-wave portion of the invisible spectrum, how long would the burka have to be in order to accommodate a one-inch slit to the same scale? It is hard to represent it sensibly without invoking logarithmic scales, so huge are the lengths we are dealing with. The last chapter of a book like this is no place to start tossing logarithms around, but you can take it from me that it would
be the mother of all burkas. The one-inch window of visible light is derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head. What science does for us is widen the window. It opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.
Optical telescopes use glass lenses and mirrors to scan the heavens, and what they see is stars that happen to be radiating in the narrow band of wavelengths that we call visible light. But other telescopes 'see' in the X-ray or radio wavelengths, and present to us a cornucopia of alternative night skies. On a smaller scale, cameras with appropriate filters can 'see' in the ultraviolet and take photographs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots that are visible to, and seemingly 'designed' for, insect eyes but which our unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral window of similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burka: they are blind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do -into the 'ultraviolet garden'.*
* 'The Ultraviolet Garden' was the title of one of my five Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, originally televised by the BBC under the general title 'Growing Up in the Universe'. The whole series of five lectures will be made available at www.richarddawlcins.net, the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
The metaphor of the narrow window of light, broadening out into a spectacularly wide spectrum, serves us in other areas of science. We live near the centre of a cavernous museum of magnitudes, viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems that are equipped to perceive and understand only a small middle range of sizes, moving at a middle range of speeds. We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics - which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy. The range of sizes, distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band, set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian cosmology at the larger.