Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

I’m currently reading, and enjoying, Richard Dawkin’s new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution. Apparently, he was inspired to write it when he realised that, in spite of the fact that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, many people don’t know that.

The book lays out the evidence in an easy-to assimilate way. Dawkins has had to be careful: he has been maliciously misquoted in the past by having short statements repeated out of context by creationists. (Apparently their ‘Christian’ morals don’t extend to honesty. And intellectual rigour is antithetical to creationism.)

As well as elucidating the scientific evidence, Dawkins tackles some of the muddle-headed ideas often thrown up by those who can’t cope with, or are scared of, evolution. For example, he carefully repeats that mankind is not descended from chimps, or any other kind of ape in existence today. We simply have a common ancestor – as we do with every other living thing.

Some of the other accusations thrown at evolutionists are more bizarre – almost to the point of cretinism, in my opinion. “I’ll believe we’re descended from monkeys when a chimp gives birth to a human” is one. This is so phenomenally stupid it’s hard to know where to begin. Dawkins makes a good stab at it, though. He also deals with the alleged ‘missing link’ (it isn’t missing), the lack of weird hybrids like the crocoduck in the fossil record (evolution doesn’t work that way so they should be missing) and the accusation that fossils show no intermediate stages (flat wrong on two counts: 1. There are plenty of fossil sequences that show steps along the evolutionary path; 2. Virtually all fossils are intermediate stages).

Then there’s the rallying cry of anti-evolutionists everywhere (or ‘history deniers’ as Dawkins rightly calls them): “what about the gaps in the fossil record?”.

Why wouldn’t there be gaps? What else could you expect? Fossilisation is a random happenstance relying on special conditions. Only a portion of the world’s rocks are capable of fossilising animals and plants during the rock’s formation. Special conditions must apply – conditions that don’t occur everywhere (a forest, for example, is not a good environment for creating fossils). Then the plant or animal has to be in the right place at exactly the right moment. Then we have to find the fossil. Untold millions must have been destroyed in the intervening period, by natural and human activity. Many more will be in strata where they will never be found. The fossil collections we have represent just a small fraction of the fossils that have been formed over the millennia.

Let’s consider an analogy. How many humans have lived and died? How many millions have been carefully buried, with clothes and grave goods in specially prepared ground? And yet how few do archaeologists find?

We’re lucky to have any fossils. And yet, the tens of thousands – or it is millions? – that we’ve been fortunate to find still paint a detailed and consistent picture. And they all fit beautifully with the theory of evolution. Indeed, ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, with his brilliant insight into the most important evolutionary mechanism – natural selection – every important discovery and advance, such as DNA, has fitted perfectly into the overall evolutionary picture.

(I’ll be dealing in more detail with some of the anti-evolutionary ‘arguments’ in my occasional series, Lies Believers Tell.)

All the arguments against evolution stem from one source. Ignorance. The very basis of these arguments is false because they rely on assumptions that simply are not true.

Creationists are the worst offenders. (Let’s remember that many religious people have no problem with evolution.) They listen only to each other. They repeat the same baseless lies and distortions because they don’t want evolution to be true. They prefer their ignorance because, however disconnected it might be from reality, it allows them to indulge in their bronze-age fantasies.

And this, sadly, is why I think Dawkins’ book won’t reach the people who need it most. Where truth and faith collide, the faithful will stick their fingers in their ears, incant loudly and give themselves up to ignorance.

The Greatest Show on Earth is available from:
 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The creationists are at it again. Schools in the UK are receiving copies of a glossy new book, Explore Evolution, published by the hilariously mis-named Truth in Science.

What could be better? Surely a book on evolution is a good thing? Except that this book is one gigantic lie.

The book is subtitled The Arguments for and against Neo-Darwinism, but the contents are not nearly so balanced as that phrase suggests. Indeed, the material is carefully and deliberately twisted, distorted and unbalanced in order that readers – and these are schoolchildren, remember – will come to the conclusion that the Theory of Evolution is flawed and that other ideas are just as valid.

The book is, in short, a piece of creationist propaganda, heavily and dishonestly disguised as science.

Truth in Science is not a scientific organisation, it is an evangelical religious organisation. It just doesn’t have the guts to say so. (The British Humanist Association, at its Humanist Life blog, has an interesting breakdown of Truth in Science’s board members.) Instead, it flatters itself that it has a mission to educate, when in fact its mission is to lie to children.

Here’s how the organisation’s website describes what it’s up to:

At Truth in Science, we wish to highlight the scientific weaknesses of Neo-Darwinism and to encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of evolution in schools and universities.

We consider it is time for students to be exposed to the fact that there is a modern controversy over Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and that this has considerable social, spiritual, moral and ethical implications.

Creationists are always moaning, ‘Teach the controversy’ – but it’s actually the last thing they need.

First, there is no controversy. Even that much is a lie. Evolution is an established fact, and natural selection its most significant mechanism. Yes, there are debates and controversies within evolutionary science: that is the nature of science. Unlike religious faith, scientific knowledge continuously grows and adapts. It is a living thing, imperfect, incomplete but always getting better. Science is fundamentally honest in its willingness to admit its shortcomings and admit errors. Creationists and other religious extremists often take advantage of this openness, deliberately misrepresenting it as a weakness when it fact it’s a strength.

There is no controversy between evolution and … well, anything else, least of all religious fantasy. ‘Creation science’ is no such thing – it’s fundamentalist religious dogma and does not belong anywhere near a science class. ‘Intelligent design’ is just creation science re-badged when the latter was seen by sane, intelligent people to be fraudulent and intellectually bankrupt. If it is dealt with at all in schools (and I’ve yet to see a convincing reason why it should be) it belongs alongside other outdated mythologies, like the Flat Earth, dragons and witches – perhaps a footnote in a comparative religion class.

We know that the ‘teach the controversy’ ruse is an attempt to get creationism on the same platform as evolution – to pretend that they are somehow equivalent and equally respectable. Yet, the more that creationists (whether or not they admit to being such) make this call, the more they highlight the fact that creationism is not the equal of evolution. All they really succeed in doing is advertising the dreadful inadequacy of their ideas.

Perhaps this is why they are now resorting to such underhand tactics.

You’ll note that the mission statement quoted above does not mention religion directly, let alone creationism. Truth in Science [sic], like so other creationist organisations, has to resort to dishonesty in trying to sneak through its message – by inventing ‘scientific weaknesses’ and pretending there is a ‘controversy’.

One assumes they know, at some level, that creationist ideas cannot stand by their own merits. They have none. They must disguise them as pseudo-science. They can’t ‘teach the controversy’ because that would mean presenting their case fully and honestly, which is doomed to failure. So they don’t want to teach the controversy – what they want to teach the UK’s children are lies and distortions.

And so a religious organisation attempts to push its ideas on children by not mentioning their religious origin. It’s rather like a drug dealer hanging around the school gates handing out bags of crack pretending they’re sweets.

Clearly, creationist organisations, such as Truth in Science [sic] do not have the courage of their convictions, nor do they have the decency to put their case honestly. Remind me again about ‘Christian’ morals…?

A round-up of some of the best books published in 2009 that humanists, atheists and freethinkers will want to have in their libraries.

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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

In his previous books, Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s leading evolutionary scientists, assumed that most people knew about the evidence for Darwinian evolution. But it seems that many don’t. It’s not just creationists who labour under the delusion that the evidence is somehow weak – or even missing. Even ordinary people persist in believing that evolution is ‘just’ a theory (by misunderstanding what scientists mean by ‘theory’), that it shows no intermediate stages, that evolution can’t deal with the complexity of the eye or the emergence of flight. And, of course, the evidence accumulates and gets stronger every day. In this timely work, Dawkins lays out what that evidence is, and shows us – beyond doubt – that evolution by natural selection is a fact.

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

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Ideas That Matter: Key Concepts for the 21st Century by A C Grayling

One of our leading philosophers guides you through some of the most important concepts that have shaped our time. The alphabetically ordered entries range across religion, philosophy, scientific theory and political movements. But it’s not just a dry reference work: as usual, Grayling leavens the important subject matter and profound implications with his accessible style, occasional seasonings of wit and customary passion. An invaluable lesson in how we got to where we are today.

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

* See note below about AC Grayling’s latest book, To Set Prometheus Free.

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The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas edited by Ariane Sherine

A collection of writings – some thoughtful, some iluminating some hilarious – from 42 committed non-believers. The collection was compiled by Guardian journalist Ariane Sherine, who was behind the ‘There’s Probably No God’ poster campaign in the UK. The book contains contributions from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre, Jenny Colgan, David Baddiel, Simon Singh, AC Grayling, Brian Cox and Richard Herring. In addition, the full book advance and all royalties go to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust.

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

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Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Although not specifically about humanism or atheism, Goldacre’s passionate and often hilarious book provides a valuable lesson in how we need to uphold rigid standards in science. He first takes aim at the lunatic fringe – homeopathy, miracle vitamins and the like – showing how they exploit dubious, ‘sciency’ language to give spurious credibility to their claims while hypocritically condemning science whenever it shows them to be fraudulent, which is often. Then he goes on to attack two more mainstream menaces – Big Pharma and bad journalists. Basically, it’s all about truth and honesty, and how there’s very little room for either in medicine once money enters the picture. Essential reading.

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

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The Rough Guide to Evolution by Mark Pallen

A very accessible overview of what is rightly claimed as the biggest idea mankind has ever had. The importance of the theory of evolution by natural selection – both to science and to our understanding of ourselves – is such that you simply can’t have too many books about it. This heavily illustrated summary covers: the origins of the idea and the theory’s own evolution; a brief romp through the entire history of life on this planet; and an examination of the impact that the theory has had on science, society, art, history and even religion. And excellent companion to the Dawkins book above (though I would buy the Dawkins first).

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

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God’s Problem by Bart D Ehrman

Well, okay, maybe a book about suffering isn’t all that Christmas-y. And this originally came out last year (the paperback was published in 2009, though). The thing is, Ehrman is such a good writer, and what he has to say is so important, that I wanted one of his books in this list. And I’ve just finished reading this one. It’s quite a personal book because Christianity’s inability to deal adequately with the question, ‘if god is good, why is there suffering?’ was among the chief reasons Ehrman, a former fundamentalist, lost his faith. He goes through the list of answers that believers lean on in an attempt to answer this question – such as: good comes out of evil; suffering is the result of free will (the most popular and the most easily demolished excuse); god likes testing us; and so on. And he shows just how feeble these responses truly are. In the end, though, I found reading the book a positive experience. The message I took away is a humanist one: there will always be suffering – it’s up to us, as compassionate human beings, to do what we can about it.

 Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

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* Update (17/11/2009): I’ve just been contacted by AC Grayling’s publishers who point out that his latest book is about to hit the bookshelves. To Set Prometheus Free, published by Oberon Books (ISBN:978184002962) is subtitled ‘Religion, reason and humanity’. It is a collection of essays dealing with the need for more secularism in society. In effect, it builds on Against All Gods: Six Polemics Against Religion and an Essay on Kindness, published by Oberon in 2007. You can probably infer the gist of the book from the chapters: Where are we in history?; Why I do not subscribe to religious beliefs; Why Bertrand Russell was not religious; Scientists confront Intelligent Design and Creationism; The War of the Books; The Good Life. Meanwhile, the book is available for pre-order from Amazon.

 Amazon.co.uk

Spirituality is religion’s last-ditch defence, the final redoute of superstition. Let me explain.

Currently in the UK, around one million people attend Anglican church services on Sundays. That’s about 2% of the population. A recent study by Christian Research, part of the Bible Society, has suggested that, by 2050, this will decline to around a tenth of that figure. The response of the church has been to say that people are celebrating their religion in different ways – at home, for example, or at car boot sales (seriously).

Even if one accepts that excuse, there’s another conculusion that flows from it – one the church authorities probably would not like to acknowledge. And it’s that the figures then clearly show a decline in organised religion, or in any kind of religion if one defines the latter as adherence to specific creeds, philosophies or dogma.

That isn’t news. Religion proper has lost its grip in all modern, advanced societies (with, perhaps, the freakish exception of the USA). Even Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of the UK, confessed that he had had to mask the degree of his religious belief for fear of being regarded “a nutter”.

While it is often said that around three-quarters of the UK population (precise figures vary) are ‘Christian’, we know this to be a cultural rather than spritiual phenomenon, much like non-believers being cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. This is the proportion of the population that ticks the box marked ‘Christian’ out of habit, or because of a lack of a viable alternative. Similarly, people continue to have children christened because it is one of those social events that you do. (There are many members of my extended family who were so baptised, or had their children baptised, even though there isn’t a believer among the lot of them. Luckily, that doesn’t include me.)

So, being religious is increasingly regarded as an aberration. But this decline in religion has left behind a residue.

It’s not uncommon for someone who does not adhere to any specific religious mythology to say that they are, nevertheless ‘spiritual’. What exactly does this mean?

Even those who know me, who understand that I am an atheist, a humanist, and rationalist, sometimes ask me how I nurture the spiritual side of my nature. They are surprised, sometimes offended, when I explain that I don’t have one.
Spirituality is the human flaw that leads to religion. It is a weakness. It is the metaphorical throwing up of hands and saying, “I don’t understand, therefore it must be mysterious”.

Not everything can be explained. The fantastic and ever-expanding body of knowledge that is science – mankind’s richest treasure – is and always will be partial. This is why people become scientists. They are explorers venturing into the unknown, expanding our understanding, shining light where there was darkness. And yet there will always be elements of our existence and the universe around us that will remain beyond our comprehension.

There are many reasons for this. The universe is a staggeringly complex place. No body of knowledge, however large, could possibly match this complexity. And mankind has evolved to fill a niche in this universe: our minds and our senses are designed to function within this niche. They are specialised for a tiny subset of the phenomena the universe has to offer. For example, unaided, we cannot see things that are minutely small. We cannot perceive the passage of time on a geological scale. There may be many natural processes that we are not equipped to notice, let alone explain. And there may be phenomena we will simply never encounter.

The challenge is, what do we do about this?

We already know one response: it is to say that whatever is beyond our comprehension must be the work of supernatural forces. This isn’t just feeble, it’s dishonest and arrogant.

It’s intellectually dishonest because, at the same time as saying that we don’t know, we are inventing an explanation. Ascribing phenomena to the gods is a process of saying that we do know, that it works like this. By resorting to spirituality, we are saying that we have an answer for everything – a profoundly arrogant act for a lowly mammal that has existed for so short a time.

At the same time, this approach abandons all the disciplines that underscore rational philosophies. So it’s feeble because we’re saying “this is too hard, let’s just make something up”. Explaining the universe through science and mathematics is hard. It requires intelligence, intellectual rigour and training. It demands hard work and a constant struggle to expand the concepts, laws and techniques that enable this understanding. Above all, it requires the honesty to say, “We don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know”.

We are mere mammals. There is no good reason to suppose that we could know everything. To think otherwise is an anthropocentric conceit.

Actually, some among the religious also admit these gaps in our knowledge. They say that such things are only for god to know. This sounds like humility but is, in fact, the opposite. What it’s saying is: “It’s not my fault I don’t know. Neither I nor my philosophy is at fault here: because this is something that cannot be known.” That’s like a Victorian proclaiming “heavier-than-air flight is impossible because I cannot do it”. It is hubris.

As we know, science, in the few hundred years in which it has been established, has rapidly and repeatedly chipped away at the ignorance of the faithful. It has provided explanation and understanding for much that was in the dark pool of ignorance from which religion draws. To surrender to god in this way is a response that looks less and less tenable every day.

Resorting to a spiritual explanation is to give up trying. It is as though people reach a limit to their comprehension and beyond it simply scrawl “here be dragons”. Scientists, on the other hand, reach that precipice and use it as a vantage point from which to gaze longingly into the void thinking “what sense can we make of this?”.

I can understand how this happens. Some people are afraid of the idea that there are things we cannot explain. Others prefer the trite mythologies of faith to the intellectual challenges of science – it’s an easier option. I guess some just like the stories.

This is why I say that spirituality is a weakness. It is, indeed, the basic mechanism upon which religions are built.

As organised religions lose their grip, some people still cling to more nebulous forms of spirituality – not because it contains any inherent truth or performs any valuable function, but simply because it is comforting in a complex, mysterious and threatening world. And so, as the more formalised faiths crumble, it is not surprising that their place may be taken by imported or home-grown mysticisms of various shades of woolliness and silliness.

Humankind has no destiny. We are the result of an incalculable sequence of accidents and random events. In the words of a cynical song from the World War One trenches (sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne), “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here”. But if one was to set us a goal, the achievement of which would be reasonable cause for pride, it would be the final eradication of the weakness that is spirituality and the summoning of the honesty to say that we can’t explain everything.

Watford Area Humanists are attempting to have Darwin Day – 12th February – made a Bank Holiday in the UK (that’s a national holiday for you foreigners).

The day marks Darwin’s birthday. But in addition to celebrating the man, the Humanists feel we should also celebrate his achievement – arguably the greatest advance in knowledge that humans have achieved. (Okay, so physicists might have a different take on this, but it’s certainly up there with the greats like relatively and quantum theory.)

The group has created a petition on the UK Government’s ‘No.10′ website. So add your voice to this call for reason. Go to: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Darwins-day/

No doubt some crusty old businessmen (and religious nutjobs dishonestly disguising their agenda under the mask of business concerns) will moan that the last thing the UK economy needs is another ‘wasted’ day when no work is done. But there’s a simple solution to this: get rid of one of the many religion-based Bank Holidays. Hardly anyone can remember what they’re about anyway. And why is modern society still celebrating, en masse, the fanciful notions of a minority? If we’re all going the celebrate together, let’s celebrate something that really means something and affects us all.

The four votes on aspects of the Embryology Bill in the UK presented an opportunity for the religiously blinkered to put narrow-minded dogma before compassion and scientific progress. They were soundly and properly trounced.

It’s always good to see reason prevail. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill represents the most important development in fertility law in the past 20 years.

The UK, being largely free of the religiously inspired shackles that hamper scientific progress in other countries (including the US) is already a world leader in areas like stem cell research. This is important science: advances in embryology offer the possibility of cures for crippling and fatal diseases.

But not everyone is happy about this. The Roman Catholic church, for example, did its best to cripple this bill. It lobbied hard, placing enough pressure on the Government to force a free vote, so that Catholic members of Parliament could do their best to impose that church’s prejudices on the whole population of the UK.

There were four key issues:

• The use of hybrid or ‘admix’ embryos. This is where the nuclei of human cells are inserted into the egg of an animal, treated so that no characteristics of the animal remain. The resulting embryos are kept for only 14 days, in order to harvest stem cells.
• Tissue typing of embryos so that parents can choose to give birth to a ‘saviour sibling’. This would happen where a current child has a disease that could be alleviated or cured by having a sibling with the right tissue type.
• The removal of the need for a father when considering the eligibility of applicants for IVF treatment. This paves the way for lesbian couples and single women to receive the treatment.
• The reduction of the limit for abortions from the current 24 weeks to 20 weeks.

Each of these issues attracted an amendment attempting to ban the process or (in the case of abortions) lower the limit. All four amendments were defeated by very healthy margins.

In most cases, those opposed to the processes or treatments presented their case based on junk science or dubious statistics. It was painfully clear, however, that the motivation for the amendments was not built on evidence or reason but on religious prejudice.

In the case of hybrid embryos there was much gibberish talked about ‘Frankenstein’ babies and the creation of freaks. Yet these embryos would never be viable and are, in any case, destroyed after two weeks.

People argued that the creation of ‘saviour siblings’ is wrong. They talked about bringing a child into the world purely to provide ‘spare parts’ for an existing child. This argument is just as cretinous. It suggests that arms or livers might be harvested, which is pure nonsense. The saviour sibling provides bone marrow and other cells. And any idea that the saviour sibling might not be loved equally by his or her parents is clearly wrong: if anything, they are likely to love it even more for its role in saving the life of the older child.

The opposition to the changes in the IVF law centred around the idea that it would somehow marginalise men. I noticed that this argument was mostly put forward by men. It ties in with that tired old idea that a family is not complete without a father. That would be more convincing if all fathers were perfect. The truth is that, regardless of whether IVF is involved, many children are raised very successfully without one parent or the other. So this amendment was inspired by notions of the family that belong in the Victorian age, not in the 21st Century. And I think there was an unhealthy dose of faith-based homophobia in there too.

Abortion is a more emotive subject and one where the desire of a religious minority to impose its views on the whole of society was most clearly evident. The 24 week limit was set in 1990, based on the best scientific evidence about the viability of the fetus up to that point. Nothing has changed. No new evidence has come to light. Yet there were two attempts to push the limit back – first to 20 weeks and, when that failed, to 22 weeks. That failed too.

Some MPs wanted the limit reduced to 12 weeks, which is where it stands in some (mostly Catholic) countries, such as Spain. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at 12 weeks.

The statistics make for interesting reading, though. In the UK, some 55% of abortions are carried out at under 9 weeks. This type of abortion usually involves nothing more than an injection. The fetus is reabsorbed by the body. (So much for its being a fully fledged human life. Could you have a clearer illustration of the fact that it is nothing more than a bunch of cells?) A very high percentage of pregnancies also spontaneously abort within this period, too – often without the woman ever knowing she was pregnant. That, too, doesn’t sit very well with the religious viewpoint and is a fact largely avoided by the anti-choice faithful.

A further third of abortions are carried out in the 9-12 week range. That means that 89% of abortions happen at 12 weeks or less anyway. In fact, only 1.5% of abortions happen in the 20-24 week band. And the vast majority of these are carried out for reasons of health complications or problems with the fetus.

So the ‘moral’ objection that so many proclaim is nothing of the sort. It is simply an attempt by a self-righteous few to impose their irrational, superstitious and medieval ideas on the whole of society. That’s arrogant and, given that they wrapped their arguments in pseudo-science and bad statistics, deeply dishonest.

Fortunately, rationality prevailed. So did compassion for those whose suffering may be relieved and whose lives may be saved by the science that will result from this bill.

A measure of mankind’s progress is not simply how long we’ve been on this planet, but how far we have come intellectually in that time. The advance of science offers us one scale by which to judge ourselves.

Most smart people have already given up on the BC and AD calendar designations. Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE) are considered less religiously chauvinist. However, as useful as they are for simple dates, they give no idea of the quality of a culture or society – of its progress towards reason or its grasp of knowledge.

The advent of true science, however, is a valuable watershed for determining when a culture emerged from the darkness of superstition, when it fully embraced the intellectual potential of our species. Dating a culture by reference to the number of years before and after its adoption of scientific rigour allows us to have an intuitive grasp of its maturity.

After all, think about how we often express our feelings about a particular time and place. “Oh, back then people still believed in [insert irrational nonsense of your choice]” or “yeah, but they thought [some risible superstition here]“.

This is not one scale applicable equally everywhere. The point where one era switches to the other varies not just from place to place, but from group to group within a society. After all, some people still believe in silly ideas like sin, heaven and talking snakes. In fact, there will be no clear change – in many places the two scales will run side by side, with the pre-science part diminishing as scientific thought gains ground.

Nevertheless, all that is truly valuable to us in terms of knowledge can be found on the plus side of the graph marked After Science, or AS (as a mnemonic, think “AS it really is”). Everything else, of course, is BS.

Scientific materialism is often condemned by religious believers as being reductionist, as though perceiving the essential truth of something were a bad thing. But does it justify this pejorative abuse of the term?

What do people of a scientific inclination see when they look at the world? They see the complex bonding of elements. They see the intricate play of physical forces. They see the comprehensible strangeness of the quantum realm, the staggering immensity of the universe, the eternal truth of natural laws, the sublime irrationality of pi.

Our accumulated scientific wisdom is vast – so huge, in fact, that no-one today can simply be a ‘scientist’, not even just a physicist, chemist, biologist. To have any chance of fully comprehending and utilising any branch of science means specialising.

But this enormous treasury of knowledge is not enough for scientists. They want more. Every true scientist is driven by what he or she does not know. The existence of science as a discipline is an acknowledgment of our ignorance, but also our desire to leave that condition. It is an assertion that ignorance is undesirable, a form of failure, a primitive state that we, as evolved life forms, should leave behind. All true knowledge is valuable, even if we can’t put it to use immediately. Talking about the curiosity that motivates mathematicians, E C Titchmarsh said:

It can be of no practical use to know that pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

Scientists are explorers, constantly expanding our horizons. So how can a discipline that is almost incomprehensibly vast and complex, and to which we are adding every day, be reductionist? Such an accusation is oxymoronic at best. In fact, you can probably drop the ‘oxy’.

What does the believer comprehend while gazing on the magnificence of nature, with all its complexity?

God did it.

This, surely, is the ultimate in reductionist thinking. As an explanation for the world and all it contains, it is disappointingly banal, feeble, simple-minded, crude, unimaginative. Frankly, it’s a bit silly.

The faithful complain when rationalists ‘explain away’ the mysteries of the spiritual realm – when they provide logical, supportable, real-world mechanisms by which apparent visions or miracles come about. But these explanations are made possible by that accumulated wisdom, acquired painstakingly by innumerable explorers after truth, collected and refined over centuries. Even the simplest assertion in science is built on a sophisticated foundation of knowledge that was hard won and required vast effort.

In this sense, no rational explanation of a supernatural phenomenon is ever ‘simple’, however easy our fund of knowledge has made it. Flying from Paris to New York is simple. All you do is sit on a plane for several hours. What could be easier? But start thinking about the effort and knowledge required to build a flying machine, jet engines, the seat-back video, and you will understand that there is nothing simple about it.

On the other hand, the believer would ‘explain away’ the miraculous (and even those things that scientists already understand) with nothing more than “it’s god’s will” or worse, “we can never understand this. It’s not for us to know”.

The so-called ‘mystery’ of religion is nothing more than glorified ignorance. Can anyone explain the benefit of not knowing something?

If you enjoy the experience of standing in awe and wonder at the magnificence of the universe, try learning some science. There is nothing so splendid as the complex truth of nature.

Pope Benedict XVI has had to cancel a visit to Rome’s leading university over suggestions that he approved of the church’s treatment of Galileo. The truth, as always, is somewhat murkier, but perhaps it’s just as well. Popes and science are not a good mix.

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The ‘intelligent design’ trial in Dover, Pennsylvania was a landmark case. It established that ID is just a dishonest re-badging of creationism and has no place in a science class. It was an important victory for rationalism, commonsense and science.The video above is the 2006 BBC Horizon programme on the case and the underlying issues.I would also strongly recommend ‘40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania’ by Matthew Chapman – a personal, often funny, scrupulously fair and sensitive account of the trial and the people involved.