As in any other field, spiritual intuitions are amenable to inter-subjective consensus, and refutation. Just as mathematicians can enjoy mutually intelligible dialogue on abstract ideas (though they will not always agree about what is intuitively "obvious"), just as athletes can communicate effectively about the pleasures of sport, mystics can consensually elucidate the data of their sphere. Thus, genuine mysticism can be "objective"-in the only normative sense of this word that is worth retaining-in that it need not be contaminated by dogma.21 As a phenomenon to be studied, spiritual experience is no more refractory than dreams, emotions, perceptual illusions, or, indeed, thoughts themselves.22
A strange future awaits us: mind-reading machines, genuine virtual reality, neural implants, and increasingly refined drugs may all have implications for our view of ourselves and of our spiritual possibilities. We have entered an era when our very humanness, in genetic terms, is no longer a necessary condition of our existence. The fusion of human and machine intelligence is also a serious possibility. What will such changes in the conventional boundaries between self and world mean for us ? Do they have any relevance for a spirituality that is rooted in the recognition of the non-duality of consciousness?
It seems to me that the nature of consciousness will trump all these developments. Whatever experience awaits us-either with the help of technology or after death-experience itself is a matter of consciousness and its content. Discover that consciousness inherently transcends its contents, discover that it already enjoys the well-being that the self would otherwise seek, and you have transcended the logic of experience. No doubt experience will always have the potential to change us, but it appears these changes will still be a matter of what we can be conscious of in the next moment, not of what consciousness is in itself.23
Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism).24 Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance.
A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.
Epilogue
My goal in writing this book has been to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture. Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world (both spiritual and mundane), our religions have seized upon ancient taboos and pre-scientific fancies as though they held ultimate metaphysical significance. Books that embrace the narrowest spectrum of political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding-books that, by their antiquity alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom with respect to the present-are still dogmatically thrust upon us as the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content merely to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion, and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come. These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life, they have only one terminus in this one-a future of ignorance and slaughter.
We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and threatened by religious violence. What is it about us, and specifically about our discourse with one another, that keeps these astonishing bits of evil loose in our world? We have seen that education and wealth are insufficient guarantors of rationality. Indeed, even in the West, educated men and women still cling to the blood-soaked heirlooms of a previous age. Mitigating this problem is not merely a matter of reining in a minority of religious extremists; it is a matter of finding approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make no appeal to faith, and broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.
Of course, one senses that the problem is simply hopeless. What could possibly cause billions of human beings to reconsider their religious beliefs? And yet, it is obvious that an utter revolution in our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if parents and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of every child. Our doubts about the feasibility of such a project should be tempered by an understanding of its necessity, for there is no reason whatsoever to think that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely.
Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.
This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes-like blasphemy-and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.
The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.
If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.
Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should win any points in our discourse for deluding himself. The litmus test for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know how the world
is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open to new evidence. We should take comfort in the fact that people tend to conform themselves to this principle whenever they are obliged to. This will remain a problem for religion. The very hands that prop up our faith will be the ones to shake it.
It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture-and even our biology itself-remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now-or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs-but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes-biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual-that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically-with a genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings-without presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant. Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions must, in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on neither front has our conversation with one another reached an end. There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call "spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.
Afterword
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both-and mixes explosively with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. "All is changed, changed utterly."-Richard Dawkins
It has been nearly a year since The End of Faith was first published in the United States. In response, I have received a continuous correspondence from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing everything from ecstatic support to nearly homicidal condemnation. Many thousands of people have apparently read the book, and millions more have heard its contents discussed in the media. In response, letters and e-mails have come to me from scientists and physicians at every stage of their careers, from soldiers fighting in Iraq, from Christian ministers who have lost their faith (and from those who haven't), from Muslims who agree with my general disparagement of their religion, and from others who would have me meet them at a local mosque so that I might better learn the will of God. I have also heard from hundreds of embattled freethinkers living in "red state" America. Judging from this last group of correspondents, the American heartland is fast becoming as blinkered as the wilds of Afghanistan. It may be too much to hope that the efforts of reasonable people will yet turn the tide.
According to several recent polls,22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching children about the biological fact of evolution. Believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma. More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States-in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72 percent believe in angels. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
Having seen my argument against faith discussed, attacked, celebrated, and misconstrued in blogs and book reviews throughout the world, I would like to take the occasion of its release in paperback as an opportunity to respond to the most common criticisms and misconceptions. These are by no means straw-man arguments; these are what real people (and the occasional book reviewer) believe to be devastating retorts to my basic thesis:
1. Yes, religion occasionally causes violence, but the greatest crimes of the twentieth century were perpetrated by atheists. Godlessness - as witnessed by the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-Il - is the most dangerous condition of all.
This is one of the most common criticisms I encounter. It is also the most depressing, as I anticipate and answer it early in the book (p. 79). While some of the most despicable political movements in human history have been explicitly irreligious, they were not especially rational. The public pronouncements of these regimes have been mere litanies of delusion-about race, economics, national identity, the march of history, or the moral dangers of intellectual-ism. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, my argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself-of which every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
As I
argue throughout the book, certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. In fact, respect for evidence and rational argument is what makes peaceful cooperation possible. As human beings, we live in a perpetual choice between conversation and violence; what, apart from a fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
2. We need faith to do almost anything. It is absurd to think that we could ever do without it.
One e-mail I received on this subject began: "I like your writing style but you are an idiot." Fair enough. My correspondent then went on to point out, as many have, that each of us has to get out of bed in the morning and live his life, and we do this in a context of uncertainty, and in the context of terrible certainties, like the certainty of death. This positive disposition, this willingness to set a course in life without any assurance that things will go one's way, is occasionally called "faith." Thus, one may prop up a disconsolate friend with the words "have faith in yourself." Such words are almost never facetious, even on the forked tongue of an atheist. Let me state for the record that I see nothing wrong with this kind of "faith."
But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be rather remarkable if a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led inevitably to ludicrous convictions about the divine origin of certain books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of homosexuals, and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an outlook, and the next thing you know architects and engineers may start flying planes into buildings.
As I do my best to spell out over the course of the book, religious faith is the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without sufficient evidence. When the evidence for a religious proposition is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, people invoke faith. Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (e.g., "the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," "We prayed, and our daughter's cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. People of faith naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning whenever they possibly can. Faith is simply the license they give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.