"atheism had finally emerged in France." "But it was more or less confined to the educated and the privileged." "there was as yet no open expression of plebeian doubt. atheism would begin to infiltrate in the lives of the ordinary people and the once obedient piety of the working class would undergo a radical transformation." "So how did that happen?" "ATHEISM" "A Rough History of Disbelief" " III - The Final Hour the Baron d'Holbach wrote a book that was so openly atheistic and so provocative that the French authorities not content with banning it had it publicly burned by the official executioner" "It is only by dispelling the clouds and the phantoms of religion reason and morality" "The Baron d'Holbach is widely referred to the Newton of the atheists" "His book "The System of Nature is often accepted as the first openly and avowedly atheist work in European scholarship" "And yet he wasn't as quite as bold as that suggest" "After all the book was published under an assumed name was not yet quite a safe idea" "the intellectual elite didn't even go as far as that" "They were not atheists exactly but deists. but they were perfectly happy to to reconstruct Christianity and to reduce the deity to a distant first cause." "And to be on the safe side what the intellectual aristocrats did was not to talk about it in front of the servants" "Religion was too intricately bound up to the fabric of political authority and social hierarchy." "In fact it was an essential ingredient in the maintenance of the privileged life which the elite themselves enjoyed" "To undermine the religious faith of the masses would be politically dangerous and perhaps socially suicidal." "And yet this situation could not and indeed it did not last. a more popular and some would say more subversive form of skepticism began to appear. the argumentative deism of lower middle class publicist such as Thomas Paine" "set the stage for a more radical form of religious skepticism." "One which in England at least was to find itself in unremitting conflict with the political and legal establishment." "Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind tyranny in religion is the worst" "Every the other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in but this attempts to stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity" "it is no exaggeration to say that Thomas Paine was one of the more influential thinkers that England has ever produced his deism was profoundly different from that of the privileged classes in which the deism had originally been born." "he was a self taught philosopher who had not benefited from an an university education." "The revolutionary impact of his ideas has been studied by the Cambridge historian Simon Schaffer" "What I think is so striking and that a lot of of the relatively elite intellectual response to the appearance of plebeian unbelief in cheap print is not so much that these are false arguments but that they are dangerous arguments" "Since it is agreed on all hands that knowledge is power giving power and giving the power of materialism and naturalism to large sectors of the laboring classes was judged to be very dangerous. who argue that there is no rational argument for the existence of God" "that you don't have to ground morality on faith in God's existence but that it would be socially fatal for every body to know that" "There is a sense that there has always been a social heft that there are ideas that are safe to contemplate but not safe to publish or to make publicly available set up to terrify to enslave mankind and to monopolize power and profit." "It is not all together surprising that the first and most enthusiastic people to embrace Thomas Paine were the dissatisfied colonist in North America." "Paine's eloquent advocacy of independence proved to be inspirational" "And it was he who the first coined the phrase that dignified their revolutionary ambitions." "The United States of America." "Paine abandoned his English home went to live in America." "And the first rare editions of some of his first most influential early books works can be found in this New England museum" "It's interesting when you look at this addressed to the inhabitants of America. when he is addressing himself problems of society" "There are already expressions of the principles which" "which stimulate him to criticize the authority of the Church. is but a necessary evil" "Now that distinction really applies to what he later says about the authority of the Church. and encourages people to to develop their own rationality their own moral sensibilities and their natural ability to interact morally with one another" "Contrary to what the monarchical and indeed ecclesiastical authorities taught that the man would become wicked and return to his animal nature." "and murder for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man." "And the Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." "Here he was... But he is expressing what all man have in common" "Which is much more interesting." "the more horrid cruelties" "The greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called religion." "As soon as the Americans had succeeded in establishing their independence they were eager to show their gratitude to the English radical who had helped to inspire them. the estate on which the original house over there once stood was commandeered by the State of New York" "and taken from somebody who had been a loyalist to the British during the war of independence." "it was given to Thomas Paine in recognition of his services to the American revolution." "Tom Paine did not immediately take up residence in this house" "For not content with inspiring the American revolution and helping to write Declaration of Independence who would soon tear down that country's monarchy" "Paine left the United States traveled to Paris" "He was welcomed and extraordinarily elected to the revolutionary national assembly" "The french revolutionaries closed down churches across the whole country" "And the bishop of Paris was forced to declare himself a charlatan" "And yet the revolution was not strictly speaking atheist insisted on the existence of some kind of supreme being" "One "fete" or festival was dedicated to this Supreme being." "But it was questionable how seriously this was taken when you hear stories that it was a Paris prostitute who was crowned the Goddess of Reason here in the deconsecrated church now call the "Pantheon." "Paine may have supported the revolution but since he was opposed to the execution of the French king he was imprisoned and only narrowly escaped the guillotine" "And there was no welcome for such a skeptical revolutionary in England" "So he returned to America to the farm he had been given from that grateful nation" "his religious skepticism was now something of an embarrassment to many Americans" "And he died unmourned and more or less ignored in New York in 1809" "When you stand here along side the busy traffic in this in this dauntingly affluent suburb of New York city" "It is quite difficult to believe that this modest bronze tablet marks what was once the burial ground of one of the most emblematic heroes of the American revolution." "Less than two years after the death of Paine the English radical William Cobbett exhumed his body and took it back to England" "But the British government refused to build a memorial to Tom Paine." "And unbelievably at some point the body was simply lost." "Thomas Paine needs no monument made of hands" "He has erected a monument in the heart of all lovers of the liberty" "Tom Paine has no tomb" "His body lies somewhere in an unmarked grave" "Given the impact of the ideas of Paine in America and in France it is hardly surprising that radical deism and the atheism gained a dangerous reputation." "Paine was by now known amongst a growing number of political radicals as "The Immortal Tom Paine." "the Rights Of Man had been published in pamphlet form for the readership of the masses" "And by the time of his death one million five hundred thousand copies copies had been sold" "His rhetoric had helped to inspire revolution in America and France." "So the English authorities were doubly on their guard" "Paine's skeptical and radical ideas were now taking hold in England where still only three percent of the population had the right of vote." "more than fifty thousand ordinary men and women came here to Saint Peter Square in Manchester." "They came to hear speeches calling for parliamentary reform" "And in response the authorities sent in the cavalry with sabers." "In the process 11 people were killed and over four hundred injured" "This Peterloo Massacre revealed the extent to which The English authorities were prepared to go to defend a status quo that itself depended upon the support of a Christian establishment." "a witness to the massacre was the atheist Richard Carlile." "Carlile had already come into conflict with the establishment by publishing and distributing the Thomas Paine's pamphlets" "The fact is that Richard Carlile would be one of an apostolic succession of atheist radicals committed to the interest of the working class who would over the next hundred years helped to create a new political philosophy." "the government realized that radicalism and atheism went hand in hand" "And they were determined to to fight them both." "Richard Carlile was actually imprisoned publishing an atheistic and politically subversive journal called "The Republican." "His crime blasphemous and seditious libel" "His journal carried on under the editorship of his wife" "But she was also imprisoned." "but she was also imprisoned" "Indeed 150 people were imprisoned for publishing and selling "The Republican." "And between them they served a total of 200 hundred years in jail" "one of the The Republican's most distinguished contributors who had been sent down from Oxford for writing a pamphlet called the "Necessity of Atheism what reason should we have for fearing him? Why should we have doubts concerning our future? Why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? why erect temples to Him?" "Oxford university was unfortunately not prepared to see Shelley's work as a promising philosophical treatise" "Perhaps he was born just a fraction too early to be able to attend an university where his opinions might not have been so out of place. to the University College in London. after being I graduated in Natural Sciences" "at Cambridge in 1956." "I think that one of the reasons was the fact that the medical school and that meant that I could follow up with some of the things that had interested me as a student in Cambridge." "But I was also drawn by the fact that it was a secular institution." "the place was known almost from it's foundation as the godless institution of Gower Street" "This was because when this college it was deliberately created in order to allow students of all religious denominations or perhaps none to study and to graduate." "Until the initiative that founded University College London it was impossible to enter to any British university if you were not a communicating member of the Church Of England" "Jews nonconformists and obviously the non believers." "What you see in this box are the mortal remains of someone who is perhaps the most memorable person responsible for this philanthropic initiative who on his death strangely insisted that his medical colleagues publicly dissected his body" "although the head of this effigy is just a wax work now the original head is kept in deep freeze elsewhere" "The founder's bones still exist under the clothes that you can see here" "Now the fact that someone other than an executed criminal indicates Bentham's sublime indifference to the notion of resurrection his disbelief in immortality and his commitment to the utterly material basis of reality." "Nevertheless." "Bentham did recognize the need for some sort of of secular alternative that would guarantee the moral stability of society" "And for him the answer was the utilitarianism." "The greatest happiness for the greatest number" "Now eloquent though her argument were it was difficult to see in it a practical program of social action of the sort that the political radicals like Carlile were looking for." "And when the philosophical principles were eventually recruited to the service they took a much more subversive and revolutionary turn which would dominate the political agenda of the whole world for the next hundred years." "The very idea of a secular and moral philosophy not to mention a social order based on it was inevitably in conflict with the Christian establishment" "the Christians were about to be disconcerted by a completely unexpected threat to the foundations of their belief" "Although it took some time for the the Church to reconcile itself and incidentally Galileo was not officially apologized to until 1984 the spacial layout of the universe was now an established fact science was about to embarrass Christian dogma once again" "Wherever the earth was said to be situated in the universe the religious belief was it was created by God as described in Genesis." "In six days." "And this idea was still at the foundation of Christian and Jewish faith" "The fact is that there were academics and theologians who had spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the earth on the basis of the biblical accounts of it James Usher has come to the startlingly precise conclusion" "that the Earth had been created in 4004 B.C." "on October 22." "apparently" "What God had been doing that morning is still open to conjectures." "But the rapidly developing science of geology in the hands of men such as Buckland" "Hutton and above all Charles' Lyell was about to subvert the idea that the Earth was created as recently as as theologians had previously maintained" "According to the newly emerging version of geological history the Earth had existed for many million of years and this was one of the basic presuppositions upon which Charles Darwin would eventually raise the theory of the evolution." "There is a strange sense of paradox as you walk around this rather impressive estate and realise that this was the house in which the the "Origin of Species" was written from the British upper middle class establishment was a gentleman" "with an unquestionable social pedigree" "And yet his book was one which would upon which a great deal of English social life was based" "The point is that Darwin's work would call into question" "God's role as the creator of nature." "undermine the authority social and political establishment" "And what he finally published in 1859 the social establishment." "on it's head" "By formulating a theory that explained the origin of species" "Darwin was inevitably challenging the idea that God himself was the origin of everything" "it was a devastating and as the American philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out a dangerous idea." "At the beginning of your book you refer to this wonderful schoolboy notion of a universal acid which no receptacle can contain" "And you made a comparison with that and Darwinian theory" "Now I wonder if you would like to explain in what respect was the idea of Darwin dangerous?" "Oh I think that we had an idea... humankind has had an idea for as long as there have been people and that is it takes a big fancy thing to make a simpler thing" "You will never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith" "You will never see a pot making a potter." "It always is the other way around" "Big fancy things making simpler things" "And along came Darwin and he had the audacity to propose a complete inversion of that idea" "The purport of Darwin's theory was in order to build a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it because it turned everything upside down in way" "It suggested that we could have a bottom up theory of creative genius rather than a top down rather than a trickle down theory which depended on an intelligent artificer" "The basic idea is so simple that you have variation if there are some are going to be better than others and the ones that are better than others are going to have more kids than the less favored ones and the offspring are going to resemble their parents" "And most of the skepticism over the century plus that we had since Darwin proposed this idea has been along the lines of" "Well there is just too much work to be done by such a simple process" "But the newly discovered billion of years in the earth's history gave plenty of time for Darwin's slow evolutionary process to work" "And believers in God simply had to accept that they might have a problem" "Darwin's discovery of natural selection is the first time that a scientific idea subverts one of the principle arguments in favor of God because it dispenses with the idea of design because wherever you observe life although it's efficiency is undoubtedly startling" "the developments are sort of gimcrack they are improvised they are put together without a view to an outcome" "In fact if you come to think of it the word improvise is rather unfortunate and misleading because it makes it look as if something is blundering its way towards a conclusion" "Whereas nothing is blundering its way towards anything" "There is no mentality at work here" "There is no conscious object in view for example of getting bits and pieces of the jaw of ancient reptiles into the inner ear of modern mammals bones which enable them to hear is not one that took place because something foresaw" "that those bones might come in handy as a hearing device" "Hearing simply emerged as an unintended consequence of the unsolicited variation" "the material basis of heredity was still obscure" "And the origin of the variations or novelties upon which natural selection worked remained utterly mysterious" "The biologist Richard Dawkins has written a great length about genetics and has committed much of his academic career to answering the questions that arise from Darwin's theory" "Something has to explain the novelties themselves" "Well the novelties themselves of course are genetic variations which ultimately come from mutations and more proximately come from sexual recombination." "There is nothing very inventive or ingenious about those novelties" "I mean they are random and they mostly are deleterious most mutations are bad" "So you really need to focus on natural selection as the positive side" "And it is only natural selection what it produces living things which have the illusion of design The illusion does not come from the novelty." "What was it about that early novelty before it culminated in something as useful as a feather." "Where could natural selection get its purchase upon something which was no more than a pimple" "There cannot have been intermediate stages which were not beneficial" "There is no room in natural selection for that sort of foresight argument that says" "Well if we persist for the next million years and it will start becoming useful there has got to be a selection pressure all the way" "There isn't a process as it were going on in the cell saying" "Look be patient" " Never." "It is going to be a feather believe me" Yes" "It doesn't happen like that" "There has got to be a series of advantages all the way in the feather" "If you can't think of one then that is your problem not not natural selection's problem." "Natural selection..." "I suppose that is a sort of a matter of faith on my part given the theory is so coherent and so powerful" "Richard Dawkins faith in in natural selection is bolstered by the fact that as Darwin noticed the painful details hardly support the idea of a benevolent designer" "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have created Ichneumonidae (parasitic wasps) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." "or that God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice." "Darwin's own religious faith had slowly ebb away over the years but that was due as much to the death of his daughter as to to his scientific ideas" "But for a variety of reasons not least of which was the fact that his wife was still deeply religious and he himself of course realize the theological implications of his own theory" "Darwin resisted publication of his work for almost twenty years submitted a work with almost exactly the same scientific conclusion that Darwin was pushed into publication." "the reaction was dramatic." "Is it from his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that he claimed his descent from a monkey ?" "There is a metaphysical part of nature" "The man that denies this may sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since written records began" "For understandable reasons the established church was appalled by the theory of evolution because' it denied the very idea of an inaugural creation in which all natural forms have been established from the outset" "As far as the clergy was concerned what was even more shocking was the idea that man was included in this process and what as a mere descendent of apes he had lost his curious spiritual priority" "Man was no longer the star of this cosmic event." "When you consider the relative ease with which had been able to reconcile their belief it is not altogether surprising that with the exception of ignorant and stupid fundamentalists for which the Darwinism is a blasphemy and still are religious people willing and able to" "to accommodate the now undeniable Darwinian proposal" "But the point is that the religious now had to visualize the architecture of living beings in an altogether new way" "One in which God could no longer be represented as a ever present pedantic designer" "But while the religious view of God was growing more attenuated those who took a radical and skeptical view were feeling more and more confident." "The leadership of the skeptical and radical reformist was now undertaken by George Jacob Holyoake." "In his journal "The Reasoner he coined a new word to describe a belief system based upon reason and science." "he call it secularism." "Well by the middle of the nineteenth there were more than forty secular societies in Great Britain" "Holyoake's journal was selling more than five thousand copies a week" "Secularism was hugely popular throughout the nineteenth century and the National Secular Society still exists in the 21st century here in Conway Hall in London." "the leadership of the secular society fell to Charles Bradlaugh a radical MP famous for being expelled from Parliament and briefly locked in the Tower of London for his failure as an atheist to swear on the Bible his oath of allegiance" "Bradlaugh secured the right which we still enjoy to every man and woman in this country to affirm an oath rather than having to swear on the Bible." "one might have been forgiven for thinking that disbelief would soon triumph and that the religion would soon fade away and die that God was dead." "So why should faith survive ?" "But by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th there emerges a man who claim to understand the origins of the religion of all religions" "Sigmund Freud." "Although Freud was by no means the first thinker to try and explain the psychological origins of religion his account is perhaps the most systematic attempt to represent faith as something fundamental to early human development he was more explicitly aware of it than I am Freud never really identified himself with the religion itself" "and as a student of science he became increasingly suspicious of religion as a whole" "And with the development of what became psychoanalytic theory he began to recognize that the belief in God as to say in some sort of supernatural agency to which the human beings were answerable was the inevitable result of the the infant's helplessness" "and his relationship to the apparently all powerful figure of the father" "This is what he said about it in his book called "The future of an illusion." "The rest of our inquiry is made easier because this" "God creator is openly called Father." "The psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us that the God of each of them is nothing other than an exalted father" "Therefore he saw religion as an illusion." "and although he describes this as a wish fulfillment it is quite difficult to see it entirely in that light since the figure created by the infant imagination had punitive as well as benevolent characteristics" "However Freud explained that apparent contradiction it is quite clear that he saw religion as false and profoundly unhelpful" "Religious teachings are neurotic relics." "And the time has probably come for replacing them with the result of the rational operation of the intellect." "Freud's theory disconcerted the conventionally religious." "But the social implications of his theory were trivial in comparison with the politically programmatic atheism that emerged in the most radical of the ideologies that have been developing over the hundred years since Tom Paine." "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress the heart of a heartless world just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation" "It is the opium of the people" "The demand to give up the illusion is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions" "Now whatever Freud thought about the infantile who had been influenced It was an article of faith that the opium of religion would have no place in the forth coming political millennium." "They were determined to establish an illusion free zone and in Soviet Russia indeed they established what was for all intent and purposes the first fundamentally atheist state" "The paradox is that a revolution which was designed to usher in a new golden era for humanity imprisoned and annihilated even more victims than Christianity at its most excessive" "So it is hardly surprising that atheism has stained by its association" "By the end of the 20th century disbelief had been much more widespread than ever" "there is no doubt that some of the appalling social catastrophes of the last 100 years has seriously undermined faith in a benevolent God" "cruelty' and misfortunes have always been sighted as reasons for doubt." "But the inescapable publicity which these excesses now receive in the mass media represents an unprecedented problem for the pious" "In fact as we enter the 21st century for many people the questions of belief and disbelief seem scarcely worth considering" "This brings me back to the very first person I talked to in this series" "Colin McGinn." "Nobody spends their time trying to prove to others that the Greek Gods don't exist you just decide that they don't and that is the end of the story for you" "Therefore I like to distinguish between atheism and anti-theism" "Anti-theism is opposition to the theism." "I am an anti-theist because I believe religion is harmful." "I am not only just an atheist whose my only values are I don't agree with it" "I am actively opposed to it which is the healthy state of mind where you have put all that behind you" "But we can't do that yet because there are a lot of religions in the world and lots of bad results of it but to me the ideal society would be one in which the question of religion didn't arise for people and if it did" "it wasn't a heavy question for them" "They would say to each other: somebody believed that there was this God and he did this... others didn't and they did TV programmes about why they didn't what a funny debate that was you know"." "This would be a post-theist society where this wasn't an issue" "It is quite hard to imagine what the world would be like without religion" "For the simple reason that in one form or another it has been with us for so long" "And although the number of disbelievers is now larger than than anyone could have imagined as little as a hundred years ago religion still permeates social life" "And in some parts of the world and it is more consolidated and more oppressive than ever" "And for those like myself and there are literally millions of us for whom there is no religion we still live in a world in which and it is difficult to be unaware of its existence." "For obvious reasons it is some of the more fanatical developments which get me most worked up" "The wilder excesses of the Christian creationism to be found in some parts of the Muslim world" "But I am also rattled by some of the more complacent assumptions that my godlessness implies some sort of lack of seriousness on my part" "That people like me have failed to recognized the existence of the soul and above all of its immortality.'" "Well to be quite frank I find this somewhat impudent" "The fact that I entertain no prospect whatsoever it doesn't mean that I am indifferent to the fact I like everyone else must die." "As I get older" "I become more closely if vicariously acquainted with death and disease I find myself opening the obituary pages of the newspapers with increasing apprehension." "But all the same I don't find myself wondering relatives or colleagues now are" "Because as far as I'm concern they are nowhere" "They have simply perhaps not quite so simply ceased to be" "Then what about my own death my own ceasing to be" "Well naturally I think about it because I am much nearer to it now than I was" "I think about how it will be for example?" "But still I don't think about it in terms of:" "Will I after all I have committed myself to by waking up somewhere else and finding that there is something after all" "And will my face be red" "The thought of death is constantly there" "I know that it is unlikely now that I will see my grandchildren get married or that I will even see or know my great grandchildren" "I have to loosen my hold of the future." "What's more I maybe in a situation where death can't come too quickly weak and disabled" "I want to be able reach for the bell and to say:" "This is where I get off" "I don't find it difficult to imagine not existing." "I don't think about it at all really" "What I am frighten of is perhaps that near death there might be certain experiences associated with it which are painful and frightening and from which one cannot escape for the moment" "It's not the fear of death but of the mental states that sometimes exist when things are falling to bits" "I am not looking forward to that" "But I am encouraged by the fact that there are perfectly ordinary people who confront their forthcoming extinction with graceful equanimity without having to fall back on unintelligible hopes for a future state" "When I visited Gloria at St Christopher's hospice in London she was quite happy to talk about of her lack of faith." "She only asked that we did not show her face" "From which I alone could see that she approached her death with unexpected calm" "Were you religious as a girl?" "I suppose I did you know Sunday school" "And the regular so and so sort of you know" "Looking at choir boys" "That is not religion that is flirting" "But do you think that when you die no." "How can I explain?" "But you don't foresee that you Gloria will somehow continue to exist?" " No." "no." "Do you regret that?" "because..." "I have something" "I have something else" "I want to be... alive again even if it is for that bare second" "But not alive again after death?" " No." "No." "You mean alive just at that moment of death?" " Yes.' Yes.'" "What would that sudden terminal aliveness consist of?" "Would you be a young girl again briefly?" "Yes.'" "Yes.'" "I would be..." "I would be young again..." "And I would be... all the things..." "I wanted to be and..." "And in that sudden brief instant I have come to." "And then..." " that is all there is to it." " And then it would be over?" " Yes.'" " So you are looking for a sort of... yes.'" "Yes but I don't know whether I should find it." " I think you are a very brave lady I think it is wonderful." " Thanks." " Thank you very much indeed." "Thank you" " Ok." " It is very very good talking to you really." " Thank you. so do I." "In spite of what the pious still prefer to believe there is now an impressively large number of people prepared to contemplate their own mortality." "previously supplied by the religion." "to some extent we all owe that to the pioneering efforts of the early greek philosophers not to mention the often embattled thinkers of the Renaissance and the enlightenment and even to the social and political radicals of the last hundred years" "Even if we don't explicitly recognize that pedigree many of us now live in secular world in which the various arguments for believing a God or Gods seem to have evaporated." "one of the most significant arguments was the apparent presence of intelligent design" "But we have also seen" "Darwin's theory of evolution effectively annihilated what was perhaps the most dramatic evidence in favor of an efficient intelligence and intention" "What this has done in effect is to continue the process of painting religion into an increasing small corner of reality which was once seen as the antecedent cause of all things a biological phenomenon." "Far from being the initiator of things" "We are now beginning to recognize that intelligence is a relatively late arrival in the universe were visualized as the products of intelligent design" "It has become increasingly likely that intelligence itself inconceivable without the existence of a brain." "which the faithful fondly visualize will I am sure shortly be explained as the autonomous product of local brain work I must admit that there is one aspect of our own mentality for which it is still difficult as yet to foresee what type of explanation" "would even be relevant" "I am referring of course to consciousness" "The point is although I have no reason to believe that my consciousness is implemented by anything other than my brain" "I remain convinced that there is something impenetrably mysterious about the relationship between brains and thoughts." "And you can understand therefore why it is so hard to imagine let alone to tolerate the idea that the death of the brain necessarily leads to the end of the personal self" "And this of course is the trump card with which religion has consistently played" "I think there must be some extent to which belief or disbelief is a purely temperamental affair human beings have always sorted themselves out into those who those who visualize the universe in material terms and those who see it animated throughout" "by a supernatural intelligence" "I think it is a mistake to see a straightforward relationship between the recent retreat of religious faith and the concomitant advance of scientific knowledge" "a relatively small minority of the increasing number of disbelievers has any acquaintance with modern science at all there is a significant number of extremely accomplished and knowledgeable scientists who retain a strong religious belief not withstanding" "I do suspect that the albeit partially distributed disbelief in the modern world has something to do with science" "But perhaps it is more to do with what modern science has provided security and comfort although the general public is largely unacquainted with the theoretical basis of the amenities which they now so carelessly enjoy" "The environment which science has created is so comfortable and so nonthreatening that supernatural considerations has understandably weakened and faded" "The consolations and assurances that were once provided by the Church now seem strangely anachronistic and unnecessary." "So where am I at the beginning of a century the end of which I certainly won't live to see posthumously or otherwise" "As I have said at the outset" "I am reluctant to use the word "atheist to describe my own unshakable disbelief afraid or even embarrassed but simply because it seem so self evidently true to me that there is no God and giving that conviction a special title" "somehow dignifies what it denies we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghost or witches that doesn't mean that I that it was scarcely worth bothering with a series of this length there is a long history of atrocity committed in name of the religion" "and an equally long history of truly heroic opposition" "So in a sense this series is well a tribute to those who have won for me and many others the right to stand up and to be counted" "But nowadays there is another and I think more important reason religion has undergone a politically dangerous form of revival" "Islam has undergone widespread though by no means universal mutation" "And the non muslim west is seriously threatened for the foreseeable future by swarms of these lethal mutants there is now an untouched Kabul who have established a morbid and I think rather unhelpful liaison with the Israeli establishment" "An alliance that only exacerbates to be seen in Islam" "I think it is increasingly important a completely ineffectual resistance."