Grayling - To Set Prometheus Free

First published in 2009 by Oberon Books Ltd.

This electronic edition first published in 2012

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Copyright A C Grayling, 2009

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PB ISBN: 978-1-84002-962-8

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-360-0

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I N 2007 I published a short book called Against All Gods: Six Polemics Against Religion and an Essay on Kindness. The essays in that book were deliberately short and robustly expressed; they were polemical contributions to the debate quarrel would be a better word about religion galvanised by the attack on the World Trade Centers twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, carried out on 11 September 2001 by a group of men expressly in the name of their religion, Islam, which they claimed to provide justification for the act. They were celebrated by many in the Islamic world for what they did. Those atrocities the indiscriminate mass murder of several thousand people going about their daily lives were neither the cause nor the beginning of the quarrel, but they kicked it into a new and very much higher gear; and people who beforehand had kept silent about, or anyway muted in, their critical opinion of religion and its effect on the world, now felt impelled to speak out, and to do so without mincing words.

The essays in Against All Gods are examples of that new mood, though I had been writing for years beforehand in much the same critical vein about the need for a greater secularism. I stand by everything said in Against All Gods, and even by its tone: frank speaking about religion is needful now, because quieter methods of abating its negative influence have manifestly failed. Frank speaking is not the same thing as burning at the stake, which is what votaries of religion used to do to their critics in earlier times: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris might tongue-lash the faithful, but if they had lived a few centuries ago and ventured the same opinions, they would have received far more than hard words in return. It is a thought that often recurs when apologists of religion complain that the views of the so-called new atheists, or the manner of their statement, have offended them; I reflect that if the clock were turned back enough, some of these same folk might be gathering faggots for kindling even as they complained. And alas, that is what still happens in parts of the world where the grip of religion remains oppressive and too often dangerous to the lives and well-being of many.

The brevity of the essays in Against All Gods served a purpose. Correspondents and others have asked for a fuller and more detailed statement of the case against religion: I offer it in the essays collected here. My thanks go to the editors of the books and journals in which some of these essays first appeared, and to the work and personal communications of friends and colleagues in the community of those working in defence of a rational and evidence-based view of the world: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and the Reason Project, Roger Bingham and the Beyond Belief series, Daniel Dennett, Harry Kroto, Lawrence Krauss, Jerry Coyne, P. Z. Myers, Steven Pinker, and others.

The essays which had their origin elsewhere are Why I do not subscribe to religious beliefs and Why Bertrand Russell was not religious. The ancestor of the first was commissioned by Russell Blackford and Udo Schklenk for their excellent and compelling volume 50 Voices of Disbelief (Wiley Blackwell 2009) and the second was commissioned by Nick Trakakis and Graham Oppy for the fifth volume of their monumental History of the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press 2009). Scientists confront Intelligent Design and Creationism and The war of the books were responses to publications, and the latter had multiple origins in New Humanist magazine.

W HERE ARE WE in human history? Are we close to the end of mankinds story, either because we are in the process of making our world uninhabitable, or because the wars and conflicts that perennially wrack us will escalate to a catastrophe? Or are we at the beginning of history, just starting to have the means through technology and its promise for education, health, communication, global cooperation which will help us become wise enough at last to live in peace, so that we can devote our pooled energies and resources wholly to progressive endeavours?

The answer to both questions is Yes and there is no contradiction in saying so. We might be close to the end of humanitys history because of environmental damage or because conflict could get out of hand or more likely both, because each makes the other worse. But if we survive climate change and a rash of nuclear wars, we will find that we are still at an early stage of human development, an immature stage, barely adolescent, only just at the beginning of scientific understanding of the world, still wedded to infantile beliefs and practices that are holding us back and causing or exacerbating the harms that threaten our existence.

The chief of these divisive, regressive obstacles is superstition, not least in its organised form as religion. It is not possible to underestimate the drag on human history that religion represents, standing in the way of progress towards individual liberation, the gathering and application of scientific knowledge, the development of open and pluralistic societies, and the adoption of a humane morality which is tolerant, generous, inclusive and just, and in which it is the fact of being human rather than the ethnicity, gender or sexuality of individuals that determines how they treat each other.

Of course religion is not the only problem confronting mankind economic and other forms of injustice loom large among those problems too but it is a very major one, and in recent years it has returned to being more open and active in its resistance to the modern world. We see creationists in America opposing science and science education, Anglicans refusing to countenance gay relationships, Catholics opposing important medical research, ultra-orthodox Jews provocatively building settlements on Palestinian land, Hindus beating Muslims to death, fundamentalist Muslims repressing women, reacting with infantile violence to criticism of Islams sacred texts and prophets, and in some of its extremer reaches encouraging indiscriminate mass murder through terrorism. This just skims the surface of an utterly unacceptable situation, in which large portions of mankind remain in some degree of thrall to myths dating from an ignorant and illiterate past.