richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

WHAT'S WRONG WITH RELIGION? 283
whether it is true that I was in Chicago on the night of the crime, I
cannot get away with a philosophical evasion: 'It depends what you
mean by "true".' Nor with an anthropological, relativist plea: 'It is
only in your Western scientific sense of "in" that I was in Chicago.
The Bongolese have a completely different concept of "in", according
to which you are only truly "in" a place if you are an anointed
elder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.' 115
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in
some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody
else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than
when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern
hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports
it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove
it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that.
It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may
well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist
creationist, but this is not because of a rival
fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution
is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my
opponent can't see it - or, more usually, refuses to look at it because
it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think
about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they
influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many
other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful;
how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that
makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution
is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it
would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the
necessary evidence were forthcoming.
It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected
elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was
an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and
taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the
interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every
Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to
listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the
visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely
convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end