Review of Ibn Warraq's Leaving Islam

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out
by Ibn Warraq
Prometheus Books, 2003, 471. pp.
Reviewed by Ophelia Benson

Growing up in Pakistan, Ibn Warraq ‘learned to read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it – a common experience for thousands of Muslim children.’ [1] He discarded religious dogmas as soon as he was able to think for himself, and that would have been that, had it not been for ‘the Rushdie affair and the rise of Islam.’ [2] The two events galvanized him into writing Why I Am Not a Muslim in 1995. Leaving Islam is a collection of testimonies from ‘apostates’ of Islam. Apostasy – the leaving of Islam – is a crime potentially punishable by death in many parts of the Muslim world.

In his introductory chapter, Ibn Warraq reproduces a pronouncement on apostasy in Islam from ‘the ultra-conservative Tehran daily Kayhan International’ in 1986. It includes this observation.

The antiapostasy punishments of Islam are proper laws to rescue mankind from falling into the cesspool of treason, betrayal, and disloyalty and to remind the human being of his ideological commitments. A committed man should not violate his promise and vow, especially his promise to God. (p. 32.)

A more wrong-headed idea is difficult to imagine. To define changing one’s mind about any particular set of ideas and truth claims as treason, betrayal, and disloyalty is to forbid thinking itself. Making the human being’s ideological commitments a permanent, irrevocable matter of loyalty is to impose ossification, dogmatism, conformity, and plain mindless stubbornness on an entire society, or, worse, an entire global ‘community of believers.’

This idea, and the dogmatism and simplistic binary thinking (us-them, believers-unbelievers, halal-haram, Dar al-Islam-Dar al-Harb) that issues from it, unsurprisingly make up one of the recurring themes of the book. Witness after witness tells of frustration – in childhood, adolescence, adulthood – at being told not to doubt, not to ask questions, not even to think. In chapter 15 Abul Kasem of Bangladesh says of his childhood attendance at the Eid prayer:

I did not understand a single word of what the imam was saying or why the people were doing their body movements. When I asked my dad any question he used to tell me to keep quiet and that Allah will punish those kids who ask too many questions. Thus, I was introduced to the fear from the very beginning of my childhood. (p. 181.)

The individual accounts are many and various, but particular themes recur: the status and treatment of women; the hatred of outsiders, non-Muslims, ‘unbelievers’; the vainglorious exclusivism (only Muslims are perfect, only Muslims are going to heaven); the memorisation of the Koran without understanding it; the shock of reading it in translation and understanding it at last; dogmatism and intellectual narrowness; violence and coercion.

It’s painful reading, for the most part. There is often a sense of relief at escape and freedom, but only after a suffocating sense of claustrophobia leading up to the escape, along with an inevitable sense of distress about the many who must feel the same claustrophobia but will never be able to escape. The reader gasps for air in a closed world filled with hatred, force, and boasting. One doesn’t want to think that, one would much rather think that ‘normal’ Islam is relatively free and benevolent and only political Islam is coercive and dogmatic – but when reading these experiences of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and Iranians, that hope is hard to sustain.

That’s not to say that there is no such thing at all. Taner Edis, for instance, grew up in Istanbul without religion himself and with very mild versions around him.

Few of our relatives and family friends were visibly religious, and when so, they seemed very liberal about it … Most others in our circle were nominal, unobservant Muslims. They believed in God and that the Koran was in some way a divine message giving a good moral foundation, but they didn’t read the scriptures or care about doctrine.

But Edis (half-American half-Turkish, a physicist at a Midwestern US university, author of the excellent The Ghost in the Universe and The Illusion of Harmony) notes that things are different now, and he is not optimistic about the trend. Nor is Ali Sina of Iran, who had a similar upbringing.

[T]he majority of Muslims who have some education believe that Islam is a humanistic religion that respects human rights, that elevates women and protects their status. Most Muslims still believe that Islam means ‘peace.’ (pp 137-8)

Ali Sina shared such beliefs, but he read the Koran, and he now considers them a dream.

Azam Kamguian, editor of the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend Women's Rights in the Middle East, also grew up in Iran; her father was ‘relatively open-minded’ but her mother indoctrinated the children. There was one bit of luck however.

We had a big study with all kinds of books, including science and other nonfiction as well as fiction. That room was an important part of my world, a part that helped save me from the harm of religion, from the harm of Islam and superstition. (p. 213)

It didn’t save her favourite brother though. He had been interested in music, cinema, and reading books; he was learning to play a musical instrument and was one of the top students in physics and maths in Iran.

All of a sudden he started to read the Koran … My brother also began to take part in activities harassing and intimidating Bahais. Gradually, I became familiar with one of the ugly faces of Islam. (p. 214.)

The sense of stifling entrapment, uniformity, drabness, of the blotting out of all the rich possibilities of life in exchange for dogma, obedience, and submission, can seem intolerably bleak. Samia Labidi of Tunisia, who grew up ‘in a comparatively tolerant milieu, which only paid lip service to Islam’, found herself in such a trap. She was introduced to Islamism by an older sister’s husband when she was eleven, and at first she embraced it with enthusiasm. But then it began to close in.

I had to say good-bye to outings for pleasure, to the beach in a swimming costume, to my friends who refused to follow me in my religious activities, to mini-skirts, to bursts of laughter, in short, to all the pleasures of life. I resembled a shadow more than a living being worthy of the human condition. I saw my sisters around me sinking one after another into the madness of this interpretation, purely human and masculine, of the so-called divine texts. (p. 323.)

Islam failed to answer her questions – and it kept on closing in.

I felt more and more chained up and crushed by the dogma that interfered in the smallest detail of one’s daily life. My mind was sterilized gradually, unable to have access to freedom of thought, to myself … Uniformity did not suit me. The ordinary did not resemble me. Everyone had to dress, talk, and behave in the same manner, like a herd of animals. Monotony invaded space and became burdensome, and my life was devoid of all originality. (p. 324.)

That was especially true for women.

Women continued to be treated like incapable beings who need to be systematically under the guardianship of a close male relative in order to move, to exist, or even to breathe. I realized gradually that the promises of equal rights and duties they dazzled us with were but bait that lured us into a premeditated trap that closed over us immediately. (p. 324.)

The exclusivism and exceptionalism are another kind of bait and also a trap, as the account of Syed Kamran Mirza of Bangladesh indicates.

I was proud and happy to be a born Muslim, since I learned from mullahs, learned men, and my elders that Islam is the ultimate truth and best religion in the whole world. The Koran is the infallible words of Allah, who loves only the religion of Islam, and all other religions are simply bad, people of other religions are all kafirs and destined to go to hell. Muslims are impeccable human beings, and Allah loves only Muslims. Only we, the Muslims, are supposed to go to heaven and nobody else can enter the gate of heaven. (p. 240.)

A cheerful sort of belief on the surface, until one thinks seriously about all those other people destined to go to hell, and about the dangers of thinking that ‘people of other religions are all kafirs and destined to go to hell.’ Faisal Muhammad of Pakistan was interested in Sufism for a time but then he realised his Sufi master, despite his pretensions of being a scholar and a mystic, was a fanatic and a bigot.

Whenever he talked about the Hindus who had lived in Lahore before 1947, he forgot his message of human love and the fanatic in him would take over. During unguarded moments he would acknowledge that many Hindus and Sikhs were good people, but whenever I directly probed the subject he would give the standard version of all Hindus being kafirs and therefore killing them or turning them out of Lahore was all right. (p. 226.)

Syed Kamran Mirza was told the same thing.

[D]uring the partition (1947), there was a Hindu-Muslim riot in our area and many Hindus were killed because they were a very tiny minority in that area of densely populated Muslims … [L]ater I learned from the seniors that Hindus are kafirs and bad people, so they have to die. (p. 240.)

Anwar Shaikh and his friends were also told that murdering non-Muslims was an act of jihad. One August day in 1947 he saw a train pull in from East Punjab which was full of the mutilated bodies of Muslim men, women, and children. He went home to pray and then he took up a club and a knife, and went out in search of non-Muslims. He found two Sikhs, a father and son.

The father was perhaps not more than fifty, perhaps younger, and his young son. I killed both of them … I encountered another Sikh at Darabi Road and I killed him too. Often memories of those terrible days haunt my mind; I feel ashamed and many times I have shed tears of remorse. If it had not been for my fanaticism, engendered by the Islamic traditions, these people might have been alive even today. (p. 286.)

Abul Kasem was taught the same lesson in his school days.

I witnessed the slaughter of a dear friend of mine (along with his entire family) in Chandpur, Bangladesh … But more shocking was that many Muslims were actually happy about that slaughter … It was also declared by some Muslim clerics that killing of non-Muslims is an act of jihad and therefore anyone participating in jihad will be rewarded with heaven. (pp. 182-3.)

He describes his experience of the Pakistan army attack on what was then East Pakistan in 1971, especially an attack on university residential halls on the night of March 25: gunfire, explosions, shattering windows, hiding under his bed all night, and at 3 in the morning watching a tank firing on a slum next to the halls. ‘As the slum-dwellers came out to escape the fire, the Pakistani Islamic soldiers started shooting them with a machine gun.’ [p. 184-5.]

Kasem went to Thailand in 1973 to do postgraduate studies in engineering. There were many Pakistani as well as Bangladeshi students there, and they discussed what had happened in Bangladesh in 1971. The Pakistani students dismissed most of the claims of the Bangladeshis – the numbers killed were exaggerated, there were no rapes at all, not one.

Now, the interesting point was that whenever the atrocities of the Pakistani Islamic army were mentioned to them, they were all adamant that we (the Bengalis) were to be blamed for that. Why? Simply, because we were not good Muslims. How? If we were good Muslims, we would not have voted for the Awami League … Therefore, they opined that the genocide was not really a genocide! It was getting rid of the non-Muslims. After all, the non-Muslims were not really human beings. (p. 195.)

All religions of course carry within them this tendency to hate the other (yes, even Buddhism), and during Partition Hindus slaughtered Muslims as eagerly as Muslims slaughtered Hindus. The riots in Gujarat in 2002 were a case of Hindus raping and murdering Muslims, with the complicity and even encouragement of the state and national governments. [4] Furthermore, in the nature of the case the writers of a book about leaving Islam will not be writing as fans of it. Nevertheless the repeated accounts of the very broad prevalence of this at best insular and at worst genocidal way of thinking do carry some weight.

There are moments of humour though. Shoaib Nasir of Pakistan was a rebellious child when it came to what he calls ‘Muhammad’s ideology.’

My mother always asked me to carry Muhammad’s book above my head respectfully. I always carried it above my head when I was in sight. Once I neared the cabinet, I would put the book on the floor and step on it before I put it in the assigned place. (p. 252.)

A book of this kind is necessary for Islam in particular because other religions no longer make leaving a capital crime. Critics of Islam and ‘apostates’ are subject to fatwas and death threats, prison and murder, in many parts of the world. It is necessary to record that it is at least possible, if not always safe, to leave Islam.

Republished from: http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=133

The Good Life

What can we say about the good life for human beings? Over the centuries, philosophers and religious thinkers have spun out their theories. Plato’s Socrates holds that life is a preparation for death and that what we do now has eternal significance. The good life is one of knowledge, self-discipline and justice in the soul. Nietzsche holds that the good life is one that we affirm by living fully and with gusto, but with a sense of the tragic dimension of human life. His test is to get us to ask ourselves if we can willingly embrace the thought that our lives will repeat themselves forever in every detail, the famous Eternal Return of the Same. Another popular and ancient view is that we ought to eat, drink and be merry, because death awaits us all. Yet another is the dour religious view that the world, for all its pleasures, is a sink of iniquities. It is really a place where our faith will be tested and those who fail can look forward to eternal suffering. The good life is submission to the Divine Will.

Can we settle on a single definition of the Good Life for human beings? The differences between individuals and cultures, between aptitudes and shaped desires make this very unlikely. Life is short, and perhaps the goal is illusory. So let’s grant that there are various ideas and explore them through a contrast between a generally ‘other worldly’ approach to the good life, and a generally ‘this worldly’ approach. What we think about these things have practical consequences in our lives.

One ‘other worldly’ approach explores the idea that it is through being embodied that people are put into a world of suffering and deprivation. Plato, for example, tells us that the body is an impediment to knowledge and that the soul is superior to the body and ought to rule over it. The Good Life is really lived in Heaven, not on this earth, so the ‘good life’ on earth will be merely the least unworthy life, as seen from the perspective of Heaven. The pain and suffering you have now will no longer afflict you there. Now we see but through a glass darkly; in Heaven we will see the face of God. These are strong ideas and have had a terrific impact on the human psyche over the last two thousand years or so.

Taken to extremity, the ‘other worldly’ approach shows its disdain for the mortal body and all its frailties. Ascetics show us just how far the ‘spirit’ can overcome the inclinations of the body. At the same time, the ego is to be suppressed. Our mortal sin is the sin of pride. The self must be put away, and this is shown in altruism and self-sacrificing behavior. We ought to lose our selves in service to others. As far as possible, we ought to live in the world but not be part of it. There are higher things than this paltry, insecure and fearful life that we live on earth, a world of sin and evil. Forget this world; it is going to the Devil. What matters is your eternal soul. Think of the end, and the end is nigh.

Now consider a ‘this worldly’ approach to the good life. As I imagine it, we are to celebrate life on earth and not deplore it. The evils of the world can be combated. It is wrong to turn away from the world even if it is ultimately ‘unreal’. We have a duty to make the only world we know a better place for all of us to live. Furthermore, it is not a crime to have a body. We did not sin by being born, because, like all animals, we are born through entirely natural processes. Like the other animals we will die entirely natural deaths, and that will be an end of our individual existences. Like the flowers in the field, we are born and we die. There is no future immortality and no supernatural End, Telos or Purpose for which we exist, and whose accomplishment gives our lives Meaning with a capital ‘M’.

So what are the ingredients of a good life from this perspective? Obviously, it is not a simple matter. A number have been proposed, but the basics are the necessaries of continuing life: food, drink, shelter, clothing and community. These are the minimum conditions of the good life. They may also turn out to be sufficient. However, for our complex world, there are, perhaps, other ingredients that play an important role, like a sense of physical safety and social security, of access to healthcare and education, of freedom from financial insecurity and corrupt business practices, of freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure, of just laws, of freedom to participate in the political process, to express one’s views, and to chart the course of one’s own life within the rule of law. It seems also that most humans need satisfying human relationships, the ability to serve others, have love and sex in their lives, perhaps children to raise, and eventually the opportunity to die with as much dignity as possible in such an inherently undignified process.

I will conclude by emphasizing the crucial difference between the two main approaches: between living with belief in the supernatural or living without it. Our relation to the world changes profoundly whether or not we think there is anything ‘behind’ the natural world as we discover it with our reason and our senses. It colors our idea of the good life for human beings, how we think a fully human life ought to be conceived and lived. This is a profound choice that everyone makes in the heart of her or his own being, and it is an unavoidable choice to make once we become aware of the alternatives.

Republished from: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=379

Those fanatical atheists

by Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen

It's popular these days to equate those who question God with the worst kind of zealots, but it's not fair

Yesterday was one major religion's holy day. Today is another's. Tomorrow is a third's. So I thought this is an opportune moment to say I think all three of these faiths -- these mighty institutions, these esteemed philosophies, these ancient and honoured traditions -- are ridiculous quackery. Parted seas. Walking corpses. Nocturnal visits to Heaven. For goodness sake, people, the talking wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more plausible.

In the past, I've tried to avoid talking about religion in such sharp terms. It's not that I fear giving offence (which would be something of a limitation in my line of work). Rather, I know, as all humans do, that it's scary knowing you're going to die. And if belief in angels on high eases the existential fears of some, I won't begrudge them. Whatever gets you through the night, as a long-haired prophet once said.

But a series of books doing quite well on bestseller lists -- by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and, soon, Christopher Hitchens -- argues it's time to be a lot less deferential to faith, and I have to say I find it hard to disagree. After all, we live in a time when blowing children to bits is an increasingly popular form of worship, the most powerful man on earth thinks he's got a hotline to God, and much of the electorate who gave that man his power would never consider replacing him with someone who does not believe the son of a carpenter who died 2,000 years ago sits in heaven advising presidents, fixing football games, and waiting for the day he will return to the Earth to brutally murder all unbelievers and erect a worldwide dictatorship.

Private, quiet faith is one thing. But when the guy holding the launch codes believes the end of the world could come any day and that's a good thing, those who believe lives are limited to one per customer have a problem.

Those making this case have been dubbed the "new atheists." They have also been called fanatics who are dogmatic, zealous and intolerant of other views -- the mirror image of religious extremists. As one English university dean said in the Guardian, Richard Dawkins is "just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs in the Tube."

Less Olympian thinkers have portrayed strident atheists as hacking away at the bonds of morality, which must inevitably lead to various forms of depravity ranging from the sexual to the genocidal.

Don't you know Stalin was an atheist? That's the way it goes. First you read Richard Dawkins. Then you have an abortion. Then you're putting a fresh coat of paint on the Gulag.

This frames the debate in a pleasingly symmetrical way. Over on that side are the insane religious fanatics who fly jets into skyscrapers and march around with signs saying "God Hates Fags." Over there are fanatical atheists. Between the two extremes are sensible moderates who take the Goldilocks approach to faith and reason. Not too hot. Not too cold. Lukewarm, please, keep it lukewarm.

The appeal is obvious. "All things to moderation," the Greeks sensibly advised, and this looks perfectly moderate. Whether it can withstand a little scrutiny is another matter.

The first problem for the moderate believer comes from those who like their faith hot. You've agreed God exists and that He mucks about in the world. You've agreed this book contains His holy commandments. So how do you respond when the mad religious zealot says, "hey, here on page 23, it says we should slice open unbelievers and use their guts for garters. And over here on page 75, it says we should bury homosexuals up to their necks and stuff olives up their noses. If God exists and these are his holy commandments, then shouldn't we get serious about the gutting and stuffing?"

One response is to make like a Philadelphia lawyer and spin plain words ("and yea, the Lord saith, the nose of the sodomite shall be stuffed with olives ...") until they don't say what they plainly say. But the more common response is to simply pretend the garters-and-olives passages don't exist and prattle on about how God is merciful and loving.

This is neither faithful nor reasonable. Still, as a practical matter, it will do in times of religious quiescence. But with religious zealotry in the ascendant, this non-answer is not going to keep the ranks of the nutters from swelling. And that's dangerous to us all.

Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That's it. That's the whole, crazy, fanatical package.

When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don't, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon.

And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic on par with faith-saturated madmen who sacrifice children to an invisible spirit.

This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims ("John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper") and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important ("Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" being a notorious example).

So isn't it odd that when claims are made about matters as important as the nature of existence and our place in it we suddenly drop all expectation of proof and we respect those who make and believe claims without the slightest evidence? Why is it perfectly reasonable to roll my eyes when someone makes the bald assertion that Ringo was the greatest Beatle but it is "fundamentalist" and "fanatical" to say that, absent evidence, it is absurd to believe Muhammad was not lying or hallucinating when he claimed to have long chats with God?

Of course I realize that by asking this question I may be contributing to mass depravity and a crisis of civilization. But I thought I'd risk it. That's just the kind of fanatic I am.

It should also be obvious from this that the supposed link between Dawkinsian atheism and Stalinist butchery is pure nonsense. Yes, Stalin did not believe in God. But he believed in History, Marxism, Leninism and all sorts of Hegelian mumbo-jumbo for which he had not the slightest evidence.

He was not a religious man, but he most certainly was a man of faith.

Reposted from:
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/columnists/story.html?id=62d4e647-9088-47dc-8a46-6397e3a6e30d

The Ethics of Hell

A Designer Universe?

by Steven Weinberg

Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin
Winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics.

I have been asked to comment on whether the universe shows signs of having been designed. I don't see how it's possible to talk about this without having at least some vague idea of what a designer would be like. Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic, without any laws or regularities at all, could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot.

The question that seems to me to be worth answering, and perhaps not impossible to answer, is whether the universe shows signs of having been designed by a deity more or less like those of traditional monotheistic religions—not necessarily a figure from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but at least some sort of personality, some intelligence, who created the universe and has some special concern with life, in particular with human life. I expect that this is not the idea of a designer held by many here. You may tell me that you are thinking of something much more abstract, some cosmic spirit of order and harmony, as Einstein did. You are certainly free to think that way, but then I don't know why you use words like 'designer' or 'God,' except perhaps as a form of protective coloration.

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.

There do not seem to be any exceptions to this natural order, any miracles. I have the impression that these days most theologians are embarrassed by talk of miracles, but the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories—the burning bush, the empty tomb, an angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed—and some of these faiths teach that miracles continue at the present day. The evidence for all these miracles seems to me to be considerably weaker than the evidence for cold fusion, and I don't believe in cold fusion. Above all, today we understand that even human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years of breeding and eating.

I'd guess that if we were to see the hand of the designer anywhere, it would be in the fundamental principles, the final laws of nature, the book of rules that govern all natural phenomena. We don't know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life. There is no life force. As Richard Feynman has said, when you look at the universe and understand its laws, 'the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.'

True, when quantum mechanics was new, some physicists thought that it put humans back into the picture, because the principles of quantum mechanics tell us how to calculate the probabilities of various results that might be found by a human observer. But, starting with the work of Hugh Everett forty years ago, the tendency of physicists who think deeply about these things has been to reformulate quantum mechanics in an entirely objective way, with observers treated just like everything else. I don't know if this program has been completely successful yet, but I think it will be.

I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question 'why?' Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.

But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by 'God' or 'design,' if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question 'why?' A religion may assert that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain why this should be so.

In this respect, it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative probabilities or other logical absurdities. When you combine quantum mechanics with relativity you increase its logical fragility. You find that unless you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense, like effects preceding causes, or infinite probabilities. Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort.

Now, it doesn't settle the matter for me to say that we cannot see the hand of a designer in what we know about the fundamental principles of science. It might be that, although these principles do not refer explicitly to life, much less human life, they are nevertheless craftily designed to bring it about.

Some physicists have argued that certain constants of nature have values that seem to have been mysteriously fine-tuned to just the values that allow for the possibility of life, in a way that could only be explained by the intervention of a designer with some special concern for life. I am not impressed with these supposed instances of fine-tuning. For instance, one of the most frequently quoted examples of fine-tuning has to do with a property of the nucleus of the carbon atom. The matter left over from the first few minutes of the universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium, with virtually none of the heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that seem to be necessary for life. The heavy elements that we find on earth were built up hundreds of millions of years later in a first generation of stars, and then spewed out into the interstellar gas out of which our solar system eventually formed.

The first step in the sequence of nuclear reactions that created the heavy elements in early stars is usually the formation of a carbon nucleus out of three helium nuclei. There is a negligible chance of producing a carbon nucleus in its normal state (the state of lowest energy) in collisions of three helium nuclei, but it would be possible to produce appreciable amounts of carbon in stars if the carbon nucleus could exist in a radioactive state with an energy roughly 7 million electron volts (MeV) above the energy of the normal state, matching the energy of three helium nuclei, but (for reasons I'll come to presently) not more than 7.7 MeV above the normal state.

This radioactive state of a carbon nucleus could be easily formed in stars from three helium nuclei. After that, there would be no problem in producing ordinary carbon; the carbon nucleus in its radioactive state would spontaneously emit light and turn into carbon in its normal nonradioactive state, the state found on earth. The critical point in producing carbon is the existence of a radioactive state that can be produced in collisions of three helium nuclei.

In fact, the carbon nucleus is known experimentally to have just such a radioactive state, with an energy 7.65 MeV above the normal state. At first sight this may seem like a pretty close call; the energy of this radioactive state of carbon misses being too high to allow the formation of carbon (and hence of us) by only 0.05 MeV, which is less than one percent of 7.65 MeV. It may appear that the constants of nature on which the properties of all nuclei depend have been carefully fine-tuned to make life possible.

Looked at more closely, the fine-tuning of the constants of nature here does not seem so fine. We have to consider the reason why the formation of carbon in stars requires the existence of a radioactive state of carbon with an energy not more than 7.7 MeV above the energy of the normal state. The reason is that the carbon nuclei in this state are actually formed in a two-step process: first, two helium nuclei combine to form the unstable nucleus of a beryllium isotope, beryllium 8, which occasionally, before it falls apart, captures another helium nucleus, forming a carbon nucleus in its radioactive state, which then decays into normal carbon. The total energy of the beryllium 8 nucleus and a helium nucleus at rest is 7.4 MeV above the energy of the normal state of the carbon nucleus; so if the energy of the radioactive state of carbon were more than 7.7 MeV it could only be formed in a collision of a helium nucleus and a beryllium 8 nucleus if the energy of motion of these two nuclei were at least 0.3 MeV—an energy which is extremely unlikely at the temperatures found in stars.

Thus the crucial thing that affects the production of carbon in stars is not the 7.65 MeV energy of the radioactive state of carbon above its normal state, but the 0.25 MeV energy of the radioactive state, an unstable composite of a beryllium 8 nucleus and a helium nucleus, above the energy of those nuclei at rest. This energy misses being too high for the production of carbon by a fractional amount of 0.05 MeV/0.25 MeV, or 20 percent, which is not such a close call after all.

This conclusion about the lessons to be learned from carbon synthesis is somewhat controversial. In any case, there is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known as the cosmological constant. It could have any value, but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large, and could be positive or negative. If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If large and negative the cosmological constant would act as an attractive force increasing with distance, a force that would almost immediately reverse the expansion of the universe and cause it to recollapse, leaving no time for the evolution of life. In fact, astronomical observations show that the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would have been guessed from first principles.

It is still too early to tell whether there is some fundamental principle that can explain why the cosmological constant must be this small. But even if there is no such principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the possibility of an explanation of why the measured values of the cosmological constant and other physical constants are favorable for the appearance of intelligent life. According to the 'chaotic inflation' theories of André Linde and others, the expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the big bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental constants.

In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and many fewer where life is possible. You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question. If any theory of this general type turns out to be correct, then to conclude that the constants of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent designer would be like saying, 'Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on earth, where there's water and air and the surface gravity and temperature are so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto?' Where else in the solar system other than on earth could we have evolved?

Reasoning like this is called 'anthropic.' Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in which some constants take different values, then the anthropic explanation of why in our world they take values favorable for life is just common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you would expect from this sort of argument: it is just about small enough so that it does not interfere much with the formation of galaxies. But we don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question; we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory of gravitation than we do now.

It would be evidence for a benevolent designer if life were better than could be expected on other grounds. To judge this, we should keep in mind that a certain capacity for pleasure would readily have evolved through natural selection, as an incentive to animals who need to eat and breed in order to pass on their genes. It may not be likely that natural selection on any one planet would produce animals who are fortunate enough to have the leisure and the ability to do science and think abstractly, but our sample of what is produced by evolution is very biased, by the fact that it is only in these fortunate cases that there is anyone thinking about cosmic design. Astronomers call this a selection effect.

The universe is very large, and perhaps infinite, so it should be no surprise that, among the enormous number of planets that may support only unintelligent life and the still vaster number that cannot support life at all, there is some tiny fraction on which there are living beings who are capable of thinking about the universe, as we are doing here. A journalist who has been assigned to interview lottery winners may come to feel that some special providence has been at work on their behalf, but he should keep in mind the much larger number of lottery players whom he is not interviewing because they haven't won anything. Thus, to judge whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent designer, we have not only to ask whether life is better than would be expected in any case from what we know about natural selection, but we need also to take into account the bias introduced by the fact that it is we who are thinking about the problem.

This is a question that you all will have to answer for yourselves. Being a physicist is no help with questions like this, so I have to speak from my own experience. My life has been remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile of human happiness, but even so, I have seen a mother die painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.

The prevalence of evil and misery has always bothered those who believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God. Sometimes God is excused by pointing to the need for free will. Milton gives God this argument in Paradise Lost:

I formed them free, and free they must remain
Till they enthral themselves: I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained
Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall.

It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?

The issues that I have been asked to address here will seem to many to be terribly old-fashioned. The 'argument from design' made by the English theologian William Paley is not on most peoples' minds these days. The prestige of religion seems today to derive from what people take to be its moral influence, rather than from what they may think has been its success in accounting for what we see in nature. Conversely, I have to admit that, although I really don't believe in a cosmic designer, the reason that I am taking the trouble to argue about it is that I think that on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

This is much too big a question to be settled here. On one side, I could point out endless examples of the harm done by religious enthusiasm, through a long history of pogroms, crusades, and jihads. In our own century it was a Muslim zealot who killed Sadat, a Jewish zealot who killed Rabin, and a Hindu zealot who killed Gandhi. No one would say that Hitler was a Christian zealot, but it is hard to imagine Nazism taking the form it did without the foundation provided by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. On the other side, many admirers of religion would set countless examples of the good done by religion. For instance, in his recent book Imagined Worlds, the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson has emphasized the role of religious belief in the suppression of slavery. I'd like to comment briefly on this point, not to try to prove anything with one example but just to illustrate what I think about the moral influence of religion.

It is certainly true that the campaign against slavery and the slave trade was greatly strengthened by devout Christians, including the Evangelical layman William Wilberforce in England and the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in America. But Christianity, like other great world religions, lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries, and slavery was endorsed in the New Testament. So what was different for anti-slavery Christians like Wilberforce and Channing? There had been no discovery of new sacred scriptures, and neither Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have received any supernatural revelations. Rather, the eighteenth century had seen a widespread increase in rationality and humanitarianism that led others—for instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—also to oppose slavery, on grounds having nothing to do with religion. Lord Mansfield, the author of the decision in Somersett's Case, which ended slavery in England (though not its colonies), was no more than conventionally religious, and his decision did not mention religious arguments. Although Wilberforce was the instigator of the campaign against the slave trade in the 1790s, this movement had essential support from many in Parliament like Fox and Pitt, who were not known for their piety. As far as I can tell, the moral tone of religion benefited more from the spirit of the times than the spirit of the times benefited from religion.

Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of slavery than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

Reposted from http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm

Saudi OKs Killing "Immoral" TV Execs

Decree Says Permissible To Kill Satellite TV Network Owners Over Immoral Content

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 12, 2008

Saudi Arabia's top judiciary official has issued a religious decree saying it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks that broadcast immoral content.

The 79-year-old Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan said Thursday that satellite channels cause the "deviance of thousands of people."

Many of the most popular Arab satellite networks - which include channels showing music videos often denounced as obscene by Muslim conservatives - are owned by Saudi princes and well-connected Saudi businessmen. Al-Lihedan did not specify any particular channels.

Al-Lihedan is chief of the kingdom's highest tribunal, the Supreme Judiciary Council. Saudi Arabia's judiciary is made up of Islamic clerics whose decrees, or fatwas, on everyday issues are widely respected. Their fatwas do not have the weight of law. In the courts, cleric-judges rule according to Islamic law, but interpretations can vary.

Al-Lihedan was answering listeners' questions during the daily "Light in the Path" radio program in which he and others make rulings on what is permissible under Islamic law.

One caller asked about Islam's view of the owners of satellite TV channels that show "bad programs" during Ramadan.

"I want to advise the owners of these channels, who broadcast calls for such indecency and impudence ... and I warn them of the consequences," he said.

"What does the owner of these networks think, when he provides seduction, obscenity and vulgarity?" he said.

"Those calling for corrupt beliefs, certainly it's permissible to kill them," he said. "Those calling for sedition, those who are able to prevent it but don't, it is permissible to kill them."

Among the most viewed Arabic satellite networks is Rotana, which airs movies and music videos. It is owned by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a billionaire businessman and member of the royal family whom Forbes ranks as the world's 13th richest person.

Other questions in the radio show tackled personal issues. Al-Lihedan advised one man, for example, that by kissing his wife during the day he broke his fast during the holy month of Ramadan, when having sex, eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited from sunrise to sunset. He told the man he should make up for it with an extra day of fasting.

Al-Lihedan sparked controversy in the past by issuing a decree that Saudis can join jihadists to fight U.S. troops in Iraq.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/12/world/main4443857.shtml

What does a free society require of believers and non-believers alike?

Religious diversity won't work without reasserting the liberal essentials. But let's not confuse secularism with atheism

Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian

A great debate of our time concerns how people with different religions, ethnicities and values can live together as full citizens of free societies. Here's the common thread that runs through half-a-dozen news stories every day. Yesterday, for example: a schoolteacher arrested and charged in Sudan for allowing children to call a teddy bear Muhammad; the poor, ethnically mixed housing estates around Paris going up in smoke again; Israel-Palestine peace talks, with their implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere; a Jewish school in London criticised for insisting that for a child to qualify for admission the applicant's mother had to be born Jewish; angry scenes in Oxford as a student debating society offers a platform to a Holocaust denier.
A large part of this debate is about the position of Muslims in Europe, but it's important to remember that the issues are much wider. Recently, discussion of Muslims in Europe has crystallised around a few personalities, including some views attributed to me. Such a personalisation of the issues helps to dramatise them, but it also risks disappearing down obscure polemical back alleys of the "who did or did not say what about whom" variety. It's probably more useful to put personalities aside for the moment and restate some of the basics of the secular liberal position that I propose. Obviously I can't spell this out in a single column - that needs a book - but here are just a few of the bare bones.

Muslims start from Islam. Liberals start from liberalism. I'm a liberal, so I start from liberalism - not in the parody version propagated by the American right, but liberalism properly understood as a quest for the greatest possible measure of individual human freedom, compatible with the freedom of others. I believe that, faced with the challenges of growing diversity, we, the citizens, need to agree and spell out more clearly the essentials of a free society. A charter of citizens' rights and duties, as proposed by Gordon Brown, would be one way to take this forward.

Among the essentials is freedom of expression, which has been eroded to an alarming degree, both by death threats from extremists and by misconceived pre-emptive appeasement on the part of the state and private bodies. Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to offend; not the duty, but the right. We must, in particular, be free to say what we like about historical figures, be they Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Churchill, Hitler or Gandhi (and then let our claims be tested against the evidence). We may not agree with what controversialists say about these figures but we must defend to the death their right to say it. There should, for obvious reasons, be limits to what we are free to say about living people, but these limits must be very tightly drawn.
Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women. Among the essentials is also freedom of religion. Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion. In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes. This - and apostasy in particular - is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere. But what exactly do we mean by that? To say "Enlightenment values" begs the question, "which Enlightenment"? The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion? (I deliberately simplify a complex history.) A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist - correctly, in my view - that there is no God? Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square? (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States' first amendment tradition to the former.) I'm more of a Lockean myself, but I don't think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of "which Enlightenment"? Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life. Today's debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two. Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: "Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God." Believers must be free to argue back: "You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe." But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society. The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

That distinction would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were in fact incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society. I feel this is what quite a few participants in the current debate, both atheist and Christian, really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly. Yet the thought keeps peeping through, for example in the formula "Islam is incompatible with democracy". But as a non-Muslim I can only agree with the author Edward Mortimer who, in his book Faith and Power, concluded that there is no single, unchanging Islam, "there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do". What Muslims say and do in the name of Islam has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today. Yes, of course, there is the Qur'an and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretations.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday's Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur'anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports "the vital principle of freedom of speech", what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? If a Christian supports the rule of law, as we understand it in a 21st-century secular liberal state, we don't cry: "But your Old Testament says 'life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth'!" Unless, of course, an atheist agenda - to show that religion is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense - trumps the secular liberal agenda, which is to find the ways in which people with different beliefs can live together peacefully in freedom.

Well, I have run out of space, and I have barely begun. There is so much else that needs saying. All comments are welcome and let's continue this vital conversation

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2218663,00.html