i didn't write this, but it captures some thoughts that i had never been able to articulate before. in the extended entry is a letter by richard dawkins to his 10-year old daughter that explains what he calls the good and bad reasons for believing. i could have simply linked or bookmarked, but at least for the moment i wanted to make sure i had a copy of this should it ever go away. i suspect what i found was a copy as well since mr. dawkins does not have an official webpage of his own, so i don't feel particularly guilty and the little reading i have now done on mr. dawkins makes me believe he would be ok with sharing these words.
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important
to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do
we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in
the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away?
And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those
stars, the sun?
The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually
seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts
have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is
round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright
twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful
ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing
( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.
Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always
lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the
murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather
together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular
suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is
evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but
it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a
detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise
that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world
and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called
a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If
that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a
prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that
a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find
himself back where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles,
he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives
him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to
himself: If she has measles I ought to see...... Then he runs through the
list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? );
hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly
way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the
child has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood
tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer
and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to
move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and
warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called
"tradition," "authority," and "revelation."
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion
with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been
brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as
Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the
microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What
they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned
out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs
of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence
either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims
believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be
right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper,
and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each
other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want
to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition
means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on.
Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often
start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally,
like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down
over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special.
People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing
over the centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made
up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you
make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries
doesn't make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other
branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist
churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the
Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds
of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things
from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that
they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they
believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different
traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary,
the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily
in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die
like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike
Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition
that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says
nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in
the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't
invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just
made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But,
over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it
seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many
generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously.
It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very
recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more
true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after
Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another
way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing
in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because
you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church,
the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right
just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important
people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in
this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs
in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told
that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean
is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was
it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of
the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true.
There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe
everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people
say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the
number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly
as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars,
caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves
and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes,
seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.
Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like
"authority." But actually, it is much better than authority, because the
people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look
carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But
not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about
Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation."
If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared
into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him.
He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought,
all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious
people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true,
even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling
"revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of
religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things
that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd
probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose
I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence.
I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty
cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling"
on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You
need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they
turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have
opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only
way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart
has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence
that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings
deep inside, otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like
"My wife loves me." But this is a bad argument.
There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the
day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little
titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling,
like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to
back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice,
little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes
people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not
based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong.
There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves
them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are
ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise
you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas
that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'"
about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason
for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time
doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence.
Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not
worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way.
I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals
are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place
in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the
plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while
lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals,
too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other
people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we
buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim''
through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water,
people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as
the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things
to learn. Like language.
You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak
the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people
sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England,
Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is
more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In
order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to
learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their
own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper,
an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional
information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents
to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information.
And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional
information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional
information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have
to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything
the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what
the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible.
But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop
the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do
they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children.
So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely
untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place -
it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god
or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus
never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine
turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence.
Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told
to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young
enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were
told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different
things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they
are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics
believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians,
Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced
that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things
for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin
speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right language
to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their
own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are
true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant
Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because
you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something
that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that
people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that
people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And,
next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them:
"What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good
answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they
say.
Your loving
Daddy