17.2.07

Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion

I oppose fundamentalist religion because it is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless eager minds.

By Richard Dawkins


Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired a reputation for pugnacity toward religion. Colleagues who agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement. Why are you so hostile? What is actually wrong with religion? Does it really do so much harm that we should actively fight against it? Why not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal energy and ley lines? Isn't it all just harmless nonsense?

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: "Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?" I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common.

Holy Books vs. Evidence

Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.

Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning, and even more especially those infected with "cultural relativism," may raise a tiresome red herring at this point a scientist’s belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. I have dealt with this elsewhere, and will only briefly repeat myself here. All of us believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on.

*******

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 artifact, 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 of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said--with passion--"My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal--unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

Fundamentalist Religion Saps the Intellect

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect. The saddest example I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. It is no accident that Bryan College is named after William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor of the science teacher John Scopes in the Dayton "Monkey Trial" of 1923. Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been "Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.
I find that terribly sad; but whereas the Golgi Apparatus moved me to tears of admiration and exultation, the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic--pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life’s happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. All he had to do was toss out the bible. Or interpret it symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did the fundamentalist thing and tossed out evidence and reason, along with all his dreams and hopes.
Perhaps uniquely among fundamentalists, Kurt Wise is honest--devastatingly, painfully, shockingly honest. Give him the Templeton Prize; he might be the first really sincere recipient. Wise brings to the surface what is secretly going on underneath, in the minds of fundamentalists generally, when they encounter scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

The Doublethink of Religious Faith

Poor Kurt Wise reminds me more of Winston Smith in ‘1984’--struggling desperately to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says it does. Winston, however, was being tortured. Wise’s doublethink comes not from the imperative of physical torture but from the imperative--apparently just as undeniable to some people--of religious faith: arguably a form of mental torture. I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.

Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.





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"eating planet": 0015.#links

"eating planet": 0015.#links

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13.2.07

oops!!!!



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Lost In space Themes.



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kallisti

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fantastic



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4.2.07

LEGION BLITZKRIEGK



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SCIFI MUSIC




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THE THEME



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STAR TREK vs STAR WARS


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ΣΤΟΛΑΣ ΒΕΓΚΑΣ!!!


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ΟΙ ΚΑΗΜΕΝΟΙ ΜΕ ΤΑ ΚΟΚΚΙΝΑ



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ΣΚΥΛΙΣΙΑ ΜΕΡΑ!!


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2.2.07

SCI-FI MIX!!!



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may the lol be with you!!



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2...1.....0....shit!




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interesting !!!

toomanytribbles: i've got faith

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Current Human Clinical Applications Using Adult Stem Cells


David T. Scadden, MD

Stem cell therapies are a reality in the clinic today, however, the diseases they are used to treat are limited to very specific types of disorders. Some who oppose embryonic stem cell research have provided a list of 69 conditions putatively treated by adult stem cells. The implicit message is that adult stem cell therapies are sufficient and that scientists underemphasize the power of adult stem cells in order to justify embryonic stem cell research. This proposition is profoundly cynical about the motivation of scientists and because of its use to inform the public, is a claim that deserves careful scrutiny.

What are the diseases where adult stem cell therapies have been shown to be beneficial in responsibly conducted clinical trials? The range of diseases is still extremely restricted, largely limited to blood disorders and specific cancers. Inherited disorders of the blood and immune system and acquired loss of bone marrow function can be cured with stem cell transplantation.

In cancer, intensive use of chemotherapy or radiation destroys normal bone marrow along with tumor cells and replacement of blood forming stem cells can be lifesaving. Most of the cancers for which this approach is successful are childhood tumors or blood cell-derived cancers in adults (leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma). Despite breast cancer being among the list of conditions currently treated by adult stem cells, it is not a disease where stem cell transplantation has conclusively been shown to be of use.

Another type of adult stem cell, the mesenchymal stem cell, has entered the scene as a developing therapy. This cell type can become muscle, bone, cartilage or fat and has some ability to modify immune function in certain experimental models. It has therefore become a cell of intense interest for treating musculoskeletal abnormalities, cardiac disease and some abnormalities of immunity (such as graft-versus-host disease after bone marrow transplant). There are ongoing studies to test the role of this cell type, some of which have been quite encouraging. However, mesenchymal stem cell therapy has not yet been shown to have a clear- cut advantage over existing therapies, is not considered a standard of care for any condition and does not have regulatory approval for the routine treatment of any disease. Some specific uses of these cells may eventually emerge, however it is incorrect to state that it is a current clinical therapy in any context other than a clinical research study.

Beyond those stated above, diseases that are listed as “current clinical applications” of adult stem cells include a broad range of problems from spinal cord injury to Parkinson’s disease to coronary artery disease. While it is true that adult stem cells have been tested in these and other desperate situations, it is not true that the results have been compelling enough to consider stem cells a current therapy. Reports of success are generally anecdotal and often without appropriate control groups. These reports may be helpful for encouraging further, more in-depth research, but they should not be regarded as definitive evidence of current therapy. To imply such is misleading and may be hurtful to patients and ultimately to the goal shared by those on both sides of this debate: to define the most effective ways to reverse debilitating disease.

Adult stem cell therapies are powerful, but they are not as wide-ranging as claimed. They have a narrow record of disease types for which the therapy is extremely valuable, a success story that is enormously encouraging evidence for stem cell research leading to methods of positively affecting people’s lives. It took approximately 25 years between discovery and routine clinical application of adult stem cell therapy. It is not known how long it will take for embryonic stem cells to become a useful therapy or whether they will ever directly do so. However, it would be unwise to ignore the potential for either adult or embryonic stem cells to result in a meaningful new approach. Adult and embryonic stem cells are complementary subjects of research and studying them side by side offers the greatest potential to rapidly generate new therapies.

Posted August 14, 2006


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