Morality without a God

by David Roffey

"… consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway … Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances." Angela Carter

The Preface to Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion, says: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down." On the face of it, a deeply unlikely ambition, and not one that is borne out by the quality of the writing. Along the way, however, it does raise some important questions about the nature of morality, and the relationship of morality to religion.

Let's start with Dawkins' tome …

The God Delusion

Since time immemorial, people have been ascribing what they don't understand to gods and magical beings. This is still the essential argument of many deists, most notably the Intelligent Design / Creationists: "it's too complicated to be explained, therefore a God must have done it". Richard Dawkins, it seems, has had enough of writing popular science texts that attack this idea by explaining the complicated, and has moved on to attack the basic premise.

Dawkins is careful to define the God he is attacking: "a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us." (p.31) and: "in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation." (p.18). Examples: Yahweh, Christ, Allah, but not Buddha or Confucious.

So, we are not here discussing an Einsteinian or Spinozan amorphous belief in (eg) a god or force who designed the universe but has taken no actions in it for several billion years once it was set up or sneezed out of the Great Green Arkleseizure * (busy with some other project?). "To adapt Alice's comment on her sister's book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers. Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'." (p.60)

Failure to understand this distinction as it is intended renders, for example, the New Scientist review of the book meaningless, as well as many other criticisms of it from those who say they do not recognise the God they believe in as the one under attack – simultaneously not recognising that the God they believe in is not the same one that their church, temple or mosque believes in, either.

Second definition: Delusion: "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence" (MS Word dictionary). Dawkins notes with interest that the illustrative quotation for "delusion" in the Penguin English Dictionary is "Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself" (Phillip E Johnson).

Now, clearly any follower of any religion believes that theirs is the only true and valid view. However, there is a wide range of views about what to do about the infidels who don't believe (or, worse, believe in something else). I have a vivid memory of a service led by the saintly Rev Dr Ann Wansbrough which began with a welcome that included the words: "My God loves you whether you believe in him or not." Like everyone else, I also have many vivid memories of news of incidents perpetrated by those who think in more violent terms on how you treat unbelievers. Dawkins' motivation for attacking religion, rather than just ignoring it, is essentially because of the growing prevalence of the fundamentalist and intolerant view amongst followers of many religions (but most particularly in the three Abrahamic faiths). Anyone who has seen Andrew Denton's low-key masterpiece God on my side has seen some good examples. (NB, keep watching to the end of the credits for the best question of the whole film.)

Dawkins has the traditional fun with the myriad contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible story, and the unlikelihood that anyone could live their life following God's word as set out in it without being banged up for life:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a mysogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." (p.31)

Knockabout stuff, but not really up to the task of persuading the deluded that Dawkins has set himself. A confirmed deist who took on the penance of reading the whole thing will have no difficulty brushing off the rational (after all, faith in the irrational is how they got where they are to start with). They might give up on page 253, just after St Paul is described by Dawkins (with every justification, admittedly) as "barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant".

Which would be a shame, because they'd miss some of the more important questions on the next few pages, as Dawkins raises questions of just what exactly is the morality we can get from religious teachings, and where they can lead us. A few recent debates elsewhere on Webdiary might be illuminated by the discussion of Israeli schoolchildren's reactions to and learnings from the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho (pp.255-7) [NB – worth reading the whole paper by John Hartung from which Dawkins' discussion is drawn.]

Choosing which of God's Rules to follow

The key point raised is this: clearly, good Christians don't get all of their moral teaching from the Bible, or, more accurately, don't get their moral teaching from all of the Bible – they pick and choose amongst God's word for the principles they feel comfortable with, and discard the ones they don't. Faced with the injunction to " utterly destroy all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword" (and keep the gold for the Treasury), most of us have second thoughts, and those that don't tend to end up on trial, as do those Muslims who follow up on the equally lurid odd passages of the Koran.

We all interpret and choose amongst the moralities set out around us, and the evidence is that the choices that atheists and religious people make when faced with moral dilemmas are very similar (pp.222-6). So, Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov was almost certainly wrong, and without god, not everything is permitted, and not only because "conscience is that inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking" (HL Mencken).

As one of Dawkins' chapter titles asks: why are we good? He provides a good summary of the evolutionary reasons why individuals might be altruistic, generous or 'moral' towards each other: kinship, reciprocation, reputation-building, and advertising ourselves as good breeding mates. Once we started banging the rocks together with a purpose, thoughtful humans have selected towards these characteristics (though not completely – see Capitalism's Moral Bastards). People who care are just more likely to successfully pass on their genes. We don't need that 'someone who may be looking' to be some omniscient and personified surveillance system with a penchant for smiting or torturing for eternity those who transgress.

On the other side, as we've already aired here, those who do want to do almightily awful things to their fellow human beings (and the rest of the denizens of the planet), can find plenty of justification in the weirder outreaches of their holy books.

As Dawkins sees it (and I agree), the big problem with religion is not so much in the detail of the Jericho's and the '72 virgins', but in the absolutism of the handing down of knowledge, and the aversion to discovery (not to mention the whole Armageddon movement and its view of all the fire, flood and disaster as being preliminaries to final days – and thus not only unavoidable / unpreventable, but to be welcomed).

The question is, now that we're applying intelligence as well as instinct and evolution to our morality, just how do we choose the rules we follow from among those set out by our peers, our parents, or our favourite prophet?

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As it happens, while I was reading The God Delusion, I was also reading another book covering this ground from a very different direction: Values, Ethics and Society: Exton Land [an alter ego of writer LE Modesitt Jr (LE = Leland Exton)] **

"What is ‘ethical’ or moral? A general definition is that actions that conform to a ‘right set of principles’ are ethical. Such a definition begs the question: Whose principles? On what are those principles based? Do those principles arise from reasoned development by rational scholars? Or from ‘divine’ inspiration? Does it matter, so long as they inspire moral and ethical behaviour? ... In practice, with or without a deity, every action is permitted unless human social structures preclude it. Yet, on what principles are those social structures based? Ethics and morality?

Theocracies and other societies using religious motives, or pretexts, have undertaken genocide, torture, and war. Ideologues without the backing of formal religious doctrine or established theocratic organizations have done the same. The obvious conclusion is that ‘moral’ values must be ethical in and of themselves, and not through religious or secular authority or rationalized logic. This leads to the critical questions: How can one define what is ethical without resorting to authority, religious doctrine, or societal expediency? And whom will any society trust to make such a judgment, particularly one not based on authority, doctrine, or expediency?"

Setting out some principles

On the face of it, the definition of ethical looks pretty straightforward. It is relatively easy to set out a "new ten commandments" that fit most people's ideas of ethics and morality – Dawkins references some of these – and they will have a substantial overlap with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount – which is one of only three incidents in the story of Jesus that are agreed upon by all the Gospel writers (the others being the baptism and the passion week story). The problem is that atheists are no more likely to actually act on those principles in their day-to-day life than Christians are. If you think I'm being harsh, try looking for the frequency of application of a few examples, say (not at all at random): "Agree with thine adversary quickly" or "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" or "Judge not, that ye be not judged".

The Golden Rule ("do as you would be done by") would tend to come first, followed by "(strive to) do no harm". Of the original Ten (though actually there is not agreement amongst the sects on what the original Ten are), we can fairly easily accept the injunctions against murder, theft and perjury, while wondering how it came that coveting your neighbours' stuff got to be more worth mentioning than, say, rape or child abuse, and not getting too distracted by the thought that at least some sects have used "honour thy father and mother" as justification for forms of the latter.

"To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife 'or anything that is his' might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand 'don't even think about it' is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.": (Christopher Hitchens, in Slate)

Dawkins, with a modern sensibility, argues for "do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of race, sex or (as far as possible) species", "do not indoctrinate your children" and "view the future on timescale longer than your own". (pp.263-5)

However, this only takes us so far along the route. The principles may be clear, but how do we actually operationalise them in our individual lives and police them in society's rules – and how much do we respect other society's/people's different rules.

"Traditionally, one of the fundamental questions behind every considered attempt to define ethical behaviour has been whether there is an absolute standard of morality or whether ethics can be defined only in terms of an individual and the culture in which that individual lives.

Both universal absolutism and cultural relativism are in themselves unethical. Not only is the application of universal absolutism impractical, but it can be unethical, because the universe is so complex that there are bound to be conflicts between standards in actual application, unless, of course, the standards are so vague that they convey only general sentiments.

‘Be kind to one another’ is good general guidance, but it does not qualify as an ethical standard because the range of interpretation of the meaning of ‘kind’ is so broad as to allow individuals incredible discretion. That does not even take into account the problems when society must deal with unethical or violent individuals.": 'Exton Land'

Interpreting the rules

It isn't only the definition of 'kind' that has been a problem. The other big problem in "be kind to one another" has traditionally been the circumscription of 'one another' to a severely reduced subset of humanity. Dawkins points out that the original Ten Commandments' "thou shalt not kill" only applied to other Jews – killing non-Jews didn't count (and in the case of Jericho and numerous other examples was at God's command). For most of history, 'one another' also didn't include any females, or at least not to the same extent – recall that Lot proved his status as the only man worth saving in Sodom by offering his daughters up for gang rape in place of the angels he was sheltering.

The modern response to these dilemmas sometimes seems to be ever more detailed definition of exactly what is or isn't forbidden / punishable / suable for, with piles of precedent and litigation to hone the edges of liability and guilt. Almost makes you want to hark back to the false certainties of doing what the AllFather tells you…

"The Judeo-Christian concept of ‘original sin’ as defined in basic Christian theology was and remains an extremely useful tool for social indoctrination, because (1) it provides a reason for evil while also allowing people to accept that evil is not the fault of the given individual; (2) supplies a rationale for why people need to be taught ethics and manners; and (3) still requires that people adhere to an acceptable moral code.

Only a small minority of human beings have a strong predilection toward either ‘morality’ or ‘immorality’. This has historically posed a problem for any civil society based on purely secular rule because (1) society in the end is based on some form of self-restraint; and (2) the impetus to require self-discipline and to learn greater awareness of what is evil and unacceptable lacks the religious underpinnings present in a theocracy or a society with a strong theocratic presence. Likewise, history has also demonstrated most clearly that the majority of individuals are uncomfortable in accepting a moral code that is not based on the ‘revelation’ of a divine being, because in matters of personal ethics, each believes his or her ethics are superior to any not of ‘divine’ origin.

As transparently fallacious as this widely accepted personal belief may be, equally transparent and fallacious – and even more widely accepted – are the ethical and moral systems accepted as created by divinities – and merely revealed to the prophets of each deity for dissemination to the ‘faithful’. Throughout history, this has been a useful but transparent fiction because the ‘divine’ origin of moral codes obviates the need for deciding between various human codes. Humans being humans, however, the conflict then escalates into a struggle over whose god or whose interpretation of god is superior, rather than focussing on the values of the codes themselves.": 'Exton Land'

Focusing on our values

It really is becoming very important that we try to focus on the values of the codes (and our society) themselves. We have let our society drift for the last fifty years or so along a path where the values of the individual and the market have been allowed progressively to dominate: where the central dogma is that there is no dogma – there is always another way of looking at things - that all voices deserve a hearing, that all points of view have something of value to offer.

"There is indeed an ethical absolute for any situation in which an individual may find himself or herself, but each of these absolutes exists only for that individual and that time and situation. This individual ‘absolutism’ is not the same thing as cultural relativism, because cultures can be, and often have been, totally unethical and immoral, even by their own professed standards. That a practice or standard is culturally accepted does not make it ethical. There have been cultures that thought themselves moral that practiced slavery, undertook genocide, committed infanticide, and enforced unequal rights based on gender or sexual orientation.

The principle practical problems with individual absolutism are that, first, one cannot implement a workable societal moral code on that basis, and, second, that any individual can claim unethical behaviours to be moral in a particular situation, which, given human nature, would soon result in endless self-justification for the most unethical and immoral acts. That said, the practical problems do not invalidate absolute individual morality, only its societal application …

In practice, what is necessary for a society is a secular legal structure that affirms basic ethical principles (eg, one should not kill, or injure others; one should not steal or deceive, etc), and that also provides a structured forum, such as courts, in which an accused has an unbiased opportunity to show that, under the circumstances, his behaviour was as moral as the situation allowed. Such a societal structure works, however, as demonstrated by history, only when the majority of individuals in the society are willing to sacrifice potential self-interest for the value of justice, and such societies have seldom existed for long, because most individuals eventually place immediate personal gain above long-term societal preservation.

The faster and more widely this ‘gospel of greed’ is adopted, the more quickly a society loses any ethical foundation – and the more rapidly it sows the seeds of its own destruction.": 'Exton Land'

The reaction to blatant wrongdoing that contravenes our basic values can be reduced to "well, that's the only way you can do business over there". If the only values we all submit to are the values of the market, then 'a fair go' doesn't get a market value, nor do the rest of the 'Australian Values' the Commonwealth is about to spend a small fortune on in our schools. (Hands up who can name them? - to save you, they are: Fair Go; Care and Compassion; Understanding, Tolerance and Inclusion; Integrity; Doing Your Best; Freedom; Respect; Responsibility - and doesn't our Federal Government stand up for all of these every day as an example to our kids.)

Letting market value determine the rules

"What happens to ethics and morality when economics reigns unchecked – when the negative externalities of not following an ethical course are not included in the marketplace? Laissez-faire economic systems simply assume that everything has a price, and that, if left alone, supply and demand will balance at an optimum price. As a general rule, it works fairly well. Or it does so long as there is an independent moral system underlying it.

Assume everything has a price. Does that mean that ethical behaviour also has a price? And that, if it is scarce, it becomes harder and harder for the average citizen to purchase?

Look at history, How many societies were there where ethical behaviour in trade and government were not the norm, but where bribery was necessary merely to ensure that both merchants and functionaries did their jobs? Then, in the worst cases, whether or not the job was done depended not on ethics, but on market power, on who could pay the highest price. In some societies, that was obvious. In others, that aspect of the market economy is far from obvious. They have an elected government, and everyone can vote. And they have a seemingly open legal system. But that system is based on the assumption that an adversarial system will provide the truth and justice. At times, it does, but only when both advocates are of close to equal ability and when the issues are relatively simple. Most times, the court ends up deciding for the party with the most resources, unless the case happens to be one that is truly egregious. The same thing happens with legislative bodies, because once large nation-states developed and modern communications emerged, the number of citizens represented by each legislator grew so large that only those candidates with the resources to purchase those communications services could reach the citizens. So, in the end, both the laws and their interpretation become commodities purchased by the highest bidders.": 'Exton Land'

How far are we down the road to a society where market power overrules democracy always and everywhere? I'm fascinated by how the Right are divided over this question: while some will protest that all is best in this best of all possible worlds, and our version of democracy is so strong and pure that it must be exported to the rest of the world (at gunpoint, if necessary), there is another faction that may have gotten quieter about the 'greed is good' philosophy since Wall Street, but basically believes it still.

The latter view is often mixed up with some simplistic interpretation of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', and views such as this:

"The rich ... divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants." Adam Smith (1759), The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: A. Millar, 1790. Part IV. Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation in paragraph IV.I.10

This earlier 'invisible hand', which predates the more famous one in the later Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), exposes the habitual misapplication of the term, because The Theory of Moral Sentiments is imbued throughout by the unstated assumption that the aforementioned rich operate in a society with a shared set of values ('moral sentiments') based on pervasive agreements on ethics and morality that our society has largely left behind (or reserved for a small and compartmentalised segment of life).

A 'crisis of faith'?

There is some (mostly anecdotal) evidence that the general run of our society is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the direction we are taking. Whether this unease or malaise is going to translate into action is far from clear.

"A societal crisis of faith occurs when the values that produced a particular incarnation of a society no longer correspond to the values held by the individuals and organisations holding economic, political, and social power in that society. Paradoxically, these value changes seem to occur first on a social level. In reality the changes are already far advanced by the time they appear, because in most societies social standing and mobility lag behind economic and political power. Those with economic power seldom wish to flaunt values at variance with social norms, and those in the political arena prefer a protective coloration that in fact straddles the perceived range of values, while ostensibly preferring the most popular of values …

Although all stable societies rest firmly on a consensus of values, invariably the individuals in those societies prefer not to discuss those values, except in glittering generalities, not because they are unimportant, but because they are so important that to discuss them seriously might open them to question and interpretation. Thus, the very protections of a society’s values preclude any wide-scale and public re-evaluation of those values and any recognition of a potential crisis of values.": 'Exton Land'

The need for a new consensus

We are coming to a period where the challenges to society are going to require actions that need a radical change to the fundamental ethics we hold so deeply that we haven't hardly questioned them at all. Only a short while ago, our Prime Minister got away almost unquestioned with the theory that we couldn't possibly consider doing anything about the future of the planet if it was going to potentially cost Australian jobs: even now the rhetoric is still (qua the Stern review) that saving the planet is only on the agenda because it might not cost any jobs after all.

We need a new consensus on morality and ethics. Coming full circle to where we started, I don't think we can look to religion to get us there, because although there are many wonderful and moral people in all major religions, large factions of the religious hold to various versions of either "let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth", or "these are the latter days, fire and flood, and there is nothing we can do to stop it" – this last being a direct quote from conversation with a famous Australian of evangelical bent.

Where are we going to get our consensus? Everywhere, I guess. David Curry's boy gets his worldview at least in part from The Lion King. Probably a better place to start than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which in the film version at least was so heavily into the Church Militant and smiting that I ended up cheering for the Witch. I, in my turn, have taken much of my text from the sidebars of a novel.

However we get there, the process must be at least as moral and ethical as the result.

"From the beginning of human history, there has always been a debate over the ethics of ends and the ethics of means. Can a good and ethical solution result from the use of unethical or immoral means? Does the end justify the means? Virtually all ethicists would agree that, of course, it does not, because, first, actions should be ethical in and of themselves, and, second, because corrupt means almost invariably result in corrupting the ends."

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Notes

* "The Jatravartid People of Viltvodle Six firmly believe that the entire universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called The Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief." The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Dawkins' book is dedicated to Douglas Adams.

** 'Exton Land's writings are scattered through the section and chapter headings of Modesitt's books: all of the quotes above come from The Ethos Effect. As David Brin noted in the speech cited in the text, science fiction is one of the places where human creativity can explore the big questions without getting bogged down in the specifics of history and particular hard cases.

Margo :".... I've only started thinking (oops) about this sprituality thing, and getting out of mind stuff is pretty hard for the likes of me. But there's something in it, I reckon."

I'm currently listening to ABC Radio National's "All in the Mind" ... might help you in your quest ... and anyone else for that matter ... Below is the transcript

Breaking the Spell: Daniel Dennett on religion

As the world wages war over geographical, religious and historical turf - a growing number of big note scientists want religious faith put under the microscope. Uber-philosopher of mind and popular provocateur, Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is one of them. He joins Natasha Mitchell to discuss his latest controversial offering, Breaking the Spell. Be provoked...
First Broadcast 29 July 2006

Transcript

Hello, Natasha Mitchell joining you for your weekly fix of matters of the mind ... here on ABC Radio National Summer. Well, as the world battles over ideological and geographical turf, today putting religious belief under scientific scrutiny.

My guest is perhaps the world's most popular philosopher of mind and a great provocateur, as you'll hear. Daniel Dennett's best sellers include Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Consciousness Explained and, just out, is Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has generated some whopping feuds this year. He thinks some religions are evolving in toxic ways and that science shouldn't be shy about investigating why. So let's join him then in his cosy office at Tufts University in Boston. where this self-described godless philosopher co-heads the Centre for Cognitive Studies.

Natasha Mitchell: As you suggest, you want to see religion and religious belief reverse-engineered in a sense. You're trying to unravel religion as a natural phenomenon - what do you mean by that?

Daniel Dennett: It's not a supernatural phenomenon, it evolved. There was a time not so long ago biologically when there wasn't any religion. There's only one species that has religion, it's not as old as language, probably somewhat older than agriculture, but that makes it a really young phenomenon and if we understand how it's changed and why, and why it has the varieties it has, we'll be in a better position to plan for the future.

Natasha Mitchell: What do you make of the sociologist Emile Durkheim's quote and here it is: 'He who does not bring to the study of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it. He is like a blind man trying to talk about colour'. Are you that man?

Daniel Dennett: The idea that it takes one to know one, only those who are religious can study religion, is just transparent nonsense. We don't see musicians saying 'if you don't have a great musical ear you mustn't study music because you'll never understand it'. We don't say, 'If you can't be a great artist then you can't study art'. I think that is all hogwash. Sure, you have to overcome the differences, you have to work extra hard. But actually that in itself pays off. I think that the sorts of 'emperors new clothes' questions that somebody will ask who is an outsider are often the best questions. When I hear that line, and it's very common...

Natasha Mitchell: It is very common because science, traditionally, has kept away from religion and I'm interested in your thoughts about Stephen Jay Gould for example, the late, great evolutionary biologist. He saw a place for both religion and science, but he was pretty emphatic about the two sticking to their own domains. And he kind of called for a mutual humility.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, well that was a brave ecumenical campaign by Steve, it didn't work, almost nobody liked what he proposed because he said these two domains, these two magisteria - he gave science all factual questions and then he left values and the meaning of life to religion. Very few religious people I think are prepared to cede all factual issues; the creation of the Earth and whether Jesus was mortal or immortal and all of those questions, they are not ready to let science settle those. And, at the same time, there are also plenty of people who are not religious, who are not going to grant to religion the authority to settle the issues of values and meanings. Certainly I'm not going to do that.

Natasha Mitchell: You know, nevertheless though, when science has attempted to scrutinise religious belief it can be really dodgy science sometimes. I mean there have been some really poorly controlled studies on, say, the impact of prayer on health. It's not always the best tango that science and religion plays...

Daniel Dennett: No, in fact if I were a devious sort of person and had been hired to design the most impenetrable shield I could dream up to put between science and religion so that scientists would just keep their hands off religion, I think I couldn't improve on what was in fact erected. Which was a gauzy curtain of sanctity which repels the best scientists but encourages some second-raters to go in there and do third-rate science and that just drives the other scientists away. You don't want to spend your time dealing with second-rate, third-rate stuff and so you turn to other fields. We shouldn't fly blind into the 21st century, we should get a good grip on this, and that means asking the tough questions and making sure that the answers we get aren't just plausible and reassuring but are true.

Natasha Mitchell: What sorts of tough questions?

Daniel Dennett: Does religion make people better morally? Does it, in fact, encourage more honesty, less violence, more sympathy, more charity? All the things they say. They have an inspiring litany of dos and don'ts, the presumption is that the people that are god-fearing and that are church-going are morally better as a result. Is there any evidence that that's true? I don't know of any yet. It's interesting that the divorce rate for instance is actually higher among born-again Christians than it is among, say, atheists.

Of course divorce isn't a sin but when one sees family values being a code word for religious fealty it does strike an interesting note.

Natasha Mitchell: Dan Dennett, what do you make of scientific attempts, for example, to look for the neural correlates of religious belief—and these studies have enormous popular appeal; the search for the god spot in the human brain.

Daniel Dennett: It's of course premature in one sense but I don't have any quarrel with that, I mean sometimes you get lucky. But I think that first of all finding a place in the brain would tell us almost nothing because there's a place in the brain for everything. You know there's a Jennifer Anniston spot and there's a hamburger spot in my brain and in yours. Anything you know anything about, anything you have any bunch of beliefs about, there's got to be something in your brain that's holding those.

Localisation, if we could really establish it, would be fascinating and there could be, not so much a god spot as a religious style of brain. There could be a feature of the way some brains work which makes some people more religious than others.

Natasha Mitchell: And some people are even proposing that others are more genetically likely to be religious than others.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, and in my book I present one of the most interesting hypotheses and that is that there's variation in the human gene pool for, in effect, susceptibility to ritual and particularly the hypnotic ritual. That some people are much more hypnotisable than others, that's been known for a long time. And it's not clear why that should be the case. Well one possibility is that back in the early days of folk religion when schamanic healing was quite ubiquitous, they'd found the potions, they'd found the local herbs that were therapeutic, but they'd also found the rituals that enhanced the effects. It eased the pain of childbirth; anything that was somewhat psychosomatic or anxiety-linked could be really cured by hypnosis. Back in those days that was the only medicine going, so if you weren't hypnotisable, you didn't have any health insurance. It could have been a huge selective pressure and could explain why we see variation today.

Natasha Mitchell: Just thinking about this and the evolution of the human mind as religion evolved as well, I'm interested in your argument that the human mind is in a sense a 'fiction-generating contraption' and this weaves into your story about the origin of religion too.

Daniel Dennett: Oh yes. There's an instinct that we share with just about all mammals and that is when something puzzling or startling happens, if it makes a loud noise, or suddenly something jumps out of the picture, we do a startle and we respond and it's not just a looking around, it's a 'who's there - did I hear a voice, oh my god was that tree talking to me? Could it be a talking tree?' Each time we obsess it's another repetition in the mind.

Natasha Mitchell: But some of them, the talking tree becomes a cult.

Daniel Dennett: Pretty soon the whole town and even the ones that are sceptical say ah, there's no such thing as a talking tree, but every time they say it they make another copy of that idea, and pretty soon the idea of the talking tree is everywhere. Whether it's fiction or fact, it gains a foothold in that culture and every culture that we look at has a whole menagerie of invisible agents - gods, and imps, and leprechauns, and goblins, and fairies, and sprites of every kind.

Natasha Mitchell: That account for the things that we can't explain in our waking world?

Daniel Dennett: Or actually a lot of them don't account for anything and they are also in some ways more interesting because it's not that we posit these in order to explain things, it's that we dream them up in our anxiety or fascination and then they just sort of get a hold on us and get passed on. Those are the ancestors of the gods.

Natasha Mitchell: You're talking about ideas that in a sense become fertilised in our minds and in communities. But many people who relate to spirituality, have a spirituality, will talk about a feeling that is beyond an idea. It's a feeling of something other than the material.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, I think so. It's remarkably hard for most people to articulate that feeling and so we have the term 'spirituality' or 'spiritual sense' which many people see as really quite distinct and independent from any organised religion, any creed, any doctrine at all. It's a sense of awe, a sense of humility in the face of the majesty of a great, wonderful universe that we're living in. For most of the people in the world, their sense of spirituality is articulated through whatever religion they grow up in. If they're the children of Muslims that's how it will be clothed.

Natasha Mitchell: The crowds who gather to worship at the base of the western wall in Jerusalem and have for two millennia. Can science offer a lens of sorts on why rituals like this draw and sustain so many? Uber philosopher Daniel Dennett thinks so, with his new book Breaking the Spell. He's my guest on All in the Mind. Natasha Mitchell with you on ABC Radio National, coming to you also on Radio Australia and perhaps your trusty mp3 player.

Dan isn't alone among the world's big names in science. Last year Richard Dawkins, Frances Collins, Lewis Wolpert...and our very own Robyn Williams... to name but a few...also published their own tomes on the nature of belief in this post-9/11 world of ours. Dawkins, it seems, is going in boots and all with his book due out soon, The God Delusion.

Dan, I want to come to the question of the infamous meme - let's bring the meme into the argument here, the meme is not a gene, let's remind people what a meme is and give it your best shot; the argument for memes and religion.

Daniel Dennett: Well we've already been talking about them without using the word. Those ideas that make copies of themselves in your mind and then get copied to other brains where they make more copies. Those are memes. Richard Dawkins the British biologist coined the term about 30 years ago.

Natasha Mitchell: And it's hard to imagine, isn't it, that The Selfish Gene, the book that he wrote in the 70s, is 30 years old; we just celebrated it on the Science Show recently.

Daniel Dennett: And in that book, to illustrate the power of Darwinian processes, the power of evolutionary processes, he drew attention to the fact that nowhere does it say that evolution has to be restricted to protein and to DNA; that anywhere you have a few features present you should get an evolutionary process. You should have a large population with variation, there should be dissent with modification, that is, there should be copying, replication, and there should be competition. And he pointed out that this was true in human culture too. That once we had language in human culture we had, in effect, a new kind of thing which he called a meme and words are in fact in one way, the best and most obvious example of memes.

What are words? What are they made of? What are they? They replicate, go extinct, they have histories. If we look at languages, if we look at the Romance languages; how they have evolved from Latin, picking up words from other languages along the way. There are a few that have been coined by individuals but most of the words have no author. Well the same thing has happened in the world of culture, we've had unconscious selection of ideas, we've had conscious, deliberate selection of ideas as in science or in the design of a political system. And then we even have, really, memetic engineering, we have people who take themselves to be professional...

Natasha Mitchell: Culture manipulators.

Daniel Dennett: Professional designers of ideas, advertisers for instance. They are trying to design a jingle that you can't get out of your head, that you'll spread, and spread and spread.

Natasha Mitchell: Well, you think religion is in fact 'clustering of domesticated wild memes', those wild memes being the early folk beliefs of previous eras.

Daniel Dennett: Now I think the original folk religions were like folk songs and like words. They survive on their own hook, they don't need stewards, they don't need guardians, they don't need protectors. Wild memes, spray-can graffiti and things like that - silly fads and fashions. Then there's the memes that are domesticated, that we really work hard to protect and to pass on, the multiplication table, calculus, chemistry, history.

Natasha Mitchell: The aesthetic of the church, the rituals, the hymns.

Daniel Dennett: Absolutely, and there's been a tremendous effort over thousands of years to think very carefully about the design of the texts, the rituals, the beliefs, the themes, the songs, the architectures of religions. And that's all really domesticated unlike the early wild religions. They just blossomed and took care of themselves.

Natasha Mitchell: I just wonder whether this is little more than speculation. What you're calling for here is scientific inquiry into religious belief and religion and many would argue that the idea of memes is a seductive idea. Others would say pseudo scientific wordplay, Dan Dennett - this is no more scientific than religion.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, memetics has not been turned into a science yet and it may not be turned into a science. Except insofar as we come to understand that if you're going to do a scientific study of culture you have to keep the space open for cultural themes to change without being changed deliberately by anybody.

Natasha Mitchell: Well this is interesting because as a Darwinist yourself and a great espouser of natural evolution by natural selection, you're one of many who are seeking an evolutionary explanation for religious belief. How did it come to be and why does it exist, and does it benefit us biologically as well as morally? One idea that one of the evolutionary biologists out there has suggested is that religion in a sense was a form of what's called group selection. The kind of equivalent for us as big brained, linguistic beasts of fish coming together in schools; birds flocking.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, David Sloan Wilson, a fine evolutionary biologist in New York has been a champion for years of the idea of group selection. But group selection...

Natasha Mitchell: Controversial, we might add.

Daniel Dennett: It's very controversial and part of the trouble is that there are different phenomena. You mentioned herding and flocking, the schooling of fish, that's actually not a group selection phenomenon because there's a perfectly good individual level selection explanation of why it benefits individuals to come into these groups. And so we don't need to talk about the specific mechanism of group selection, which is where it doesn't directly benefit individuals, it benefits groups and it's the groups that are the vehicles of selection.

And that's a very radical idea and in one sense we know it's possible; we are the products of group selection because we're multi-cellular and our cells get along very well and they, in effect, sacrifice their own interests to the interests of the whole organism. They are analogous in this regard to sterile worker ants and worker bees that are never going to have offspring. Now with that background David Sloane Wilson very boldly has argued religions are best explained as a genuine group selection phenomenon.

Natasha Mitchell: The idea here though is that we all cluster together in communities of religious belief, shared religious belief, so that...

Daniel Dennett: And that's undeniable.

Natasha Mitchell: So that we may propagate as a species, together we derive benefit.

Daniel Dennett: Careful, careful. Who's deriving the benefit?

Natasha Mitchell: The argument according to group selection would be that the group is deriving the benefit.

Daniel Dennett: Are we talking about the number of offspring they have, or is it simply the persistence of the group and the growth of a single group over time? Those are very different phenomena. What I argue is that it's not for the benefit of the group, it's for the benefit of the ideas.

Natasha Mitchell: At an intuitive level other people argue, well of course being part of a religious community benefits me biologically, it helps me survive, it helps me reproduce. It encourages me to cooperate with a group beyond my immediate genetic family, or it helps me feel comforted and allays the fear of death.

Daniel Dennett: I think the fact that religion's opened up the bottleneck and permitted people to trust people who weren't close kin is in fact a very good idea and almost certainly true. That, of course, is a historical claim and we may no longer need religion to play that role. In the early days of human society when agriculture was getting underway and people were coming into larger groups than they ever had before, the problem of mutual suspicion, which for instance we see between bands of chimpanzees, say, or gorillas, the problem of xenophobia must have been severe. And the idea of a religious community where we're all brothers and sisters, artificial kin, was almost certainly a hugely important stepping stone toward creating civilisation.

Natasha Mitchell: And yet it's also been responsible partly for destroying civilisations. I mean religion brings people together; it also brings people to battle.

Daniel Dennett: With no known exceptions the cost of internal trust, efficiency and loyalty is external distrust. That the us against them is not an optional feature, if there is some way to preserve the loyalties and the tremendous benefits of internal trust without paying the cost of the ferocious xenophobia, then that would be just what we want to do. But we don't know how to do that.

Natasha Mitchell: You think that it's not just the believers who are responsible for propagating religions, we're all involved in propagating the memes. That the belief in belief is key here too.

Daniel Dennett: Yes. This is a feature of organised religion. It doesn't exist in folk religions at all and this is the belief that belief in God is a good thing. It may be, it may not, but the belief that belief in God is a good thing is very widespread. In the United States you cannot be elected to national office or even to state office, you can't be a senator, you can't be a congressman and not profess a belief in God. We know that a lot of those senators and congressmen, they are not religious really. They don't really believe in God, they're atheists, they're agnostics.

Natasha Mitchell: That's not the American way I'm afraid.

Daniel Dennett: They cannot admit it and this is the phenomenon of belief in belief. To me one of the fascinating things that grew out of my own research for this book was that I did a lot of informal, not scientific, but confidential interviews with people who were deeply religious.

Natasha Mitchell: It must have been challenging for you as an atheist?

Daniel Dennett: It was wonderful, none of them had ever participated in quite such conversations as these; very candid, completely confidential. And one of the most amazing things that emerged from them again and again and again, these people took this as an opportunity to tell me 'Oh, I didn't believe a word of it', but they thought it was so important and it structured their whole lives. They are devoting their lives to their churches or their synagogues; no, they don't believe that stuff, but they believe in belief.

Natasha Mitchell: That's very interesting. The book Breaking the Spell, and the spell really isn't breaking the spell of religion per se.

Daniel Dennett: It's breaking the spell of belief in belief. It is breaking the spell of hyper-respect and sanctity which says one mustn't probe into these matters too closely.

Natasha Mitchell: But people, and this is where your book has really divided people. The deep naturalists love it, it speaks to their beliefs if you like. The members of the religious community are distressed by it because they suggest that you're being narrow and naïve about religion. I mean there's a whole, many-centuries discourse unravelling the nature of belief.

Daniel Dennett: Some of the spokespeople of the religious community say that but I find my mail runs very differently. There are those intellectual spokespeople, academic spokespeople for religion who are devoting their lives to very sophisticated theological investigations which I pay no attention to in the book. Why? Because nobody else pays any attention, they're not part of the worldwide phenomenon. There can't be 100,000 people in the whole word who really care about those theological disputes.

Natasha Mitchell: Why should people care more about a deep scientific as distinct from theological investigation of religion, then?

Daniel Dennett: Well because a scientific investigation would get at what actually moves all those people, which is not academic theology.

Natasha Mitchell: Well here's one of your critics, here's what one of them say. He's the literary editor of the New Republic, you'd know the review well, it was very scathing in The New York Times. 'Dennett is unable to imagine a fact about us that is not a biological fact. His book is riddled with translations of emotions and ideas into evo-psycho babble'. Now evolutionary psycho babble is out there, there's no doubt about that.

Daniel Dennett: There certainly is. His attack was remarkable for its ferocity and for its transparency. This was clearly somebody who was very eager to protect the spell that I was trying to break. The standard way of addressing religion. Now indeed a lot of religious people have been upset at the tone and...

Natasha Mitchell: Well, arrogance is what they'd say.

Daniel Dennett: Yes. They are calling it arrogance because they are so used to a sort of hyper-false humility, and I'm not giving hyper respect, but in fact, I'm not being arrogant. I am, all along, saying 'Let's find the answers to these questions' and actually I think they're the ones that have been arrogant in the past, they've been colossally arrogant. They are so self-righteous so many of them. They think they know the truth, the truth is written in the book, whichever book is their book, and they don't have to study it. That's arrogance and that arrogance is completely out of place in a scientific investigation.

Natasha Mitchell: And the interesting thing about science here is that it might try and get at the truth but it's often as mystified as not. And I guess also science - we can't assume that it's always a simplifying sort of process, it can make things much more muddy.

Daniel Dennett: Absolutely. When scientists are baffled they say so and then they try to get unbaffled, they don't celebrate their bafflement. That is a fundamental difference between religious attitudes and scientific attitudes. Yes, science is up to its neck in mysteries and puzzles of every sort and it can confess to ignorance, and incomprehension of all sorts of phenomena. That's a genuine confession. Now let's get down to work and let's try to see if we can't come to understand this. And we never, in the scientific community, celebrate incomprehension as a good thing. That's a standard trope in religious communities.

Natasha Mitchell: Your father, also Daniel Dennett I gather, was a historian of Islam and I just wonder how you reflect on the differences between your investigation of religion as a public intellectual and a philosopher of mind, a cognitive scientist, and his own investigation of Islam?

Daniel Dennett: Well he was a historian, a real scholar of Arabic and its culture and its dialects and the history of Islam. There's a tremendous storehouse of wonderful research done by people with his sort of training and background. And it is lying there awaiting the scientific community - what we need to do is take that treasure trove and mine it with new questions and then go out and do more research and really get a grip on how our species has civilised itself through religion, what it has turned religions into and what it is turning them into now.

Natasha Mitchell: What are your concerns now?

Daniel Dennett: My concerns are that we are on the brink of theocracy in some countries. And I think we need to protect those nations that are not theocratic, where they are secular democracies. I think we know that theocracy is a bad thing, that it has never led to the flourishing of freedom; it has tended to be oppressive, blighted science. They have stifled invention and discovery and oppressed people. When I see my own country lurching towards theocracy I think OK, time to drop what I'm doing and try to pitch in to make sure that people appreciate just how important it is not to do that.

Margo: Hi Simon, and thanks.

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