richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion
K O O I S O! M O R A I . I H : «• II \ \ K Y VM. <;<M>1>? 227Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper.If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commitrobbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoralperson, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide coursearound you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continueto be a good person even when not under divine surveillance,you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary forus to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do thinkreligion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belongto one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that,should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would allbecome callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity,no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness. Itis widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumablybecause of some remarks he put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov:[Ivanj solemnly observed that there was absolutely no lawof nature to make man love humanity, and that if love didexist and had existed at all in the world up to now, then itwas not by virtue of the natural law, but entirely becauseman believed in his own immortality. He added as anaside that it was precisely that which constituted thenatural law, namely, that once man's faith in his ownimmortality was destroyed, not only would his capacityfor love be exhausted, but so would the vital forces thatsustained life on this earth. And furthermore, nothingwould be immoral then, everything would be permitted,even anthropophagy. And finally, as though all this werenot enough, he declared that for every individual, such asyou and me, for example, who does not believe either inGod or in his own immortality, the natural law is boundimmediately to become the complete opposite of thereligion-based law that preceded it, and that egoism, evenextending to the perpetration of crime, would not only bepermissible but would be recognized as the essential, themost rational, and even the noblest raison d'etre ofthe human condition. 88
228 ' I I i (. O l! 1) K 1 U S I '•)Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view ofhuman nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing -whether by God or by each other - in order to stop us frombehaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believethat I do not need such surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you.On the other hand, just to weaken our confidence, listen to StevenPinker's disillusioning experience of a police strike in Montreal,which he describes in The Blank Slate:As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada duringthe romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin'sanarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if thegovernment ever laid down its arms all hell would breakloose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montrealpolice went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank wasrobbed. By noon most downtown stores had closedbecause of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi driversburned down the garage of a limousine service that competedwith them for airport customers, a rooftop sniperkilled a provincial police officer, rioters broke into severalhotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in hissuburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had beenrobbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires hadbeen set, forty carloads of storefront glass had beenbroken, and three million dollars in property damage hadbeen inflicted, before city authorities had to call in thearmy and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. Thisdecisive empirical test left my politics in tatters . . .Perhaps I, too, am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remaingood when unobserved and unpoliced by God. On the other hand,the majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed inGod. Why didn't the fear of God restrain them when earthly policemenwere temporarily removed from the scene? Wasn't theMontreal strike a pretty good natural experiment to test thehypothesis that belief in God makes us good? Or did the cynic H.L. Mencken get it right when he tartly observed: 'People say
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K O O I S O! M O R A I . I H : «• II \ \ K Y VM. <;<M>1>? 227
Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper.
If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit
robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral
person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course
around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue
to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance,
you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for
us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think
religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong
to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.
It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that,
should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all
become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity,
no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness. It
is widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumably
because of some remarks he put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov:
[Ivanj solemnly observed that there was absolutely no law
of nature to make man love humanity, and that if love did
exist and had existed at all in the world up to now, then it
was not by virtue of the natural law, but entirely because
man believed in his own immortality. He added as an
aside that it was precisely that which constituted the
natural law, namely, that once man's faith in his own
immortality was destroyed, not only would his capacity
for love be exhausted, but so would the vital forces that
sustained life on this earth. And furthermore, nothing
would be immoral then, everything would be permitted,
even anthropophagy. And finally, as though all this were
not enough, he declared that for every individual, such as
you and me, for example, who does not believe either in
God or in his own immortality, the natural law is bound
immediately to become the complete opposite of the
religion-based law that preceded it, and that egoism, even
extending to the perpetration of crime, would not only be
permissible but would be recognized as the essential, the
most rational, and even the noblest raison d'etre of
the human condition. 88
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