Dec. 13, 2006
On Sunday morning, I listened to what the promo spinners at CBC radio described as a "bristling conversation" between Sunday Edition host, Michael Enright, and British philosopher, Roger Scruton. The latter was also billed on the CBC website as "the most controversial but best read philosopher in England."
Now a bristling conversation with Michael Enright is something like a boxing match with an erudite Jain. Anyway, during the course of the conversation, Scruton commented that Richard Dawkins' (and most freethinkers') opinion that religions cause most of the violence in the world is in error because the root of the violence is the inherent evil in human beings. Scruton went further to criticize Dawkins because atheists rely on science to arrive at answers. He commented that science is often wrong and to base one's philosophy on it was prone to error as well. As I see it, when religion and science are compared as methods for discovering truth or solutions to problems, religion comes in a distant second.
Science is self-correcting. If a scientist or even a generation of scientists gets it wrong, other scientists are not inhibited from correcting the error by arbitrary rules. That is why the Ptolemaic concept of the solar system gave way to the Copernican one; why Einstein was not uncomfortable enhancing Newton's law of gravity or why Stephen Hawking is not afraid to say that we are no closer to a unified theory than we were twenty years ago when he predicted we would have that answer in twenty years ("Yes, I still think that my estimate of twenty years is accurate -- starting today.").
A while ago, I was writing a presentation intended to introduce humanism to university students, and decided by way of spicing things up a little to suggest that Lucy, as the first hominid, was also the first humanist. The idea was that she was one of the first to discover that co-operation worked better than competition when one is smaller than most of her enemies and equipped with claws and teeth that are woefully inadequate in a showdown with any of the predators of her day.
When I went to verify the time of her existence, I discovered that scientists had decided that she was not the earliest of our kind and had awarded that distinction to Orrorin Tugenensis, who lived about 6.8 million years ago. In the words of the paleoanthropologists who were making this correction, the family tree of hominids is "a lot bushier than we thought."
None of these scientists felt the need to grovel or resort to politically correct nudging to make the correction. They just fulfilled the need to provide evidence and added the new information, placing the sun where it belongs, calculating how gravity works in the presence of massive solar bodies, restating the time lines of discovery and adjusting Lucy to her appropriate place in the record books. No one was required to do penance or undergo any corrective treatment in front of some scientific court.
Religion, on the other hand does not tolerate these corrections to errors. We all know that both the Bible and the Quran contain language that incites violence against those who disagree with the prescriptions of truth held therein.
While current moderate religious leaders go to great lengths to deny that these prescriptions are intended to incite violence, they do not expunge them from either work. The Book of Leviticus is still a part of the Bible for Christians even though they eschew its violent responses.
A week or two ago, a local Muslim leader stood before the World Religion Conference and declared that those Muslims who interpreted the Koran to mean that infidels should die at the hands of swordsmen were just wrong in their interpretation. He preferred to argue that the phrases did not mean what the other Muslims said they did. I think psychologists call this denial.
In 327 CE or thereabouts, a group of Roman Church clergy gathered and decided with a fair degree of arbitrariness which books should remain in the Bible and which should not. No one since then has had the temerity to make further changes.
In teaching Macbeth, I drew attention to an editor's comments that the lines "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death" (5.5.24-25), are a reference to the lines from the King James' version of the Bible, "For dust thou art and dust unto dust shalt thou return." How could this be, I enquired when Macbeth was first produced a few years before the 1610 publication of that Bible?
My students were not so amazed by this question as by the revelation that the Bible was open to interpretation and translation. I must admit that I tweaked their beliefs further by pointing out that Psalm 46, translated by Ben Johnson, a friend of Shakespeare's, for that publication in 1610, Shakespeare's 46th year, has as its 46th word, "shake," and as its 46th from last word, "spear."
In my students' religious world, the Bible had been immutable and their concept was that it was unchangeable. This is the downfall of religion. Rather than correcting its errors, it would rather sweep them under the rug. Why do Christians continue to cling to books like Leviticus when they decline to stone non-believers like me?
Certainly as humanists, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels either. We must remember that the principles of humanism are ideals toward which we should work. I doubt very much if many humanists succeed in following those principles to the letter.
Further, in reading the likes of Bertrand Russell, we must keep our minds active and note that, while he presents strong arguments for the need for knowledge and love as a basis for humanist philosophy, he does not do an adequate job of making "action" mandatory.
Russell would likely dispute this criticism were he still alive, but he would not resent polite challenges to his comments. That is simply because, although he was a philosopher, he accepted the benefits of self-correction and open debate. The first step to finding our way to the truth is to admit that we can mislead ourselves and to take measures to prevent this from happening or to correct our course when it does.
I'd rather have the ability to admit I'm wrong, thank you. This does not mean that I intend to do so lightly, but certainly, in the face of solid evidence, I'd rather learn than spurn.
Doug Thomas is an English teacher and novelist, an agnostic member of KWCGH, and a Canadian nationalist fanatic who has written a Humanist version of O Canada in both official languages. His novel, The Bloody Boy, is available through Keltoi Publishing.
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