It’s not uncommon to hear religious people refer to faith as a source of comfort. In fact, there are numerous studies in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and behavioural psychology which have evidenced how individuals are capable of biasing their reasoning enough to accept a religious concept if they believe it will adequately alleviate their negative emotional state.

I, on the other hand, cannot see the utility in false consolation and find the notion of embracing a supernatural belief system simply for its well-being or anxiety management benefits to be regressive and infantilising. Comfort is unreliable if it cannot be justified epistemically.

Instead, when you don’t have to allocate any mental storage space to or worry about a celestial dictator or imaginary friend in the sky repressing and micromanaging your every move—well, it frees up a lot of time to get to grips with the true nature of one’s existence through a scientific lens.

The story of human existence is not just a tale of biological evolution but a series of fortuitous events—from the cosmic lottery that determined the parameters of the universe to the dice rolls of DNA that define our unique identities. In simple terms, life has been evolving on Earth for close to four billion years. During the first two billion years, there were single-celled entities called prokaryotes. Thanks to a chance collision of a bacterium and an archaean, the eukaryotic cell was born.

Eukaryotes were the key ingredient in making possible multicellular life forms of all varieties. In fact, every living thing big enough to be visible to the naked eye is a direct descendant of the original eukaryotic cell.

It is truly fascinating how evolution is typically an interwoven fabric of coevolutionary loops and twists: our origin story is essentially processes composed of processes.

What’s more, the odds of you being born were so staggeringly low—every single one of your ancestors had to survive countless challenges, reach reproductive age, and find the particular mate to give rise to the next generation of your particular ancestors, while every tiny detail had to align perfectly out of 70 trillion possible combinations of complex genetic variations.

The chances of the exact sperm cell and egg cell meeting to create you with the DNA sequence that encoded you and brought you into existence? Around one in 250 million. Mutations and meiosis crossovers in the DNA of each of your ancestors also had to occur. That needed to happen each time in an unbroken string for millions of generations of your ancestors, going back to well before they were human beings or even hominids of any type.

As Dr A.E. Wilder-Smith notes: ‘When one considers that the entire chemical information needed to construct a human can be compressed into two miniscule reproductive cells (sperm and egg nuclei), one can only be astounded.’ That Wilder-Smith was a young earth creationist does not detract from the genuine wonder of our existence that he so concisely captures.

Other unlikely events necessary for our existence: multicellular life forms had to come into being on Earth, the formation of the stars and galaxies in the Milky Way had to create the environment in which Earth formed, Earth needed to form as a habitable planet with the right ingredients for life, the laws of physics needed to be such that they created the serendipitous density conditions to permit life, and the universe itself had to have come to exist 13.8 billion years ago in a hot, dense Big Bang that made all this possible.

How could one not be grateful? How could one not live in an eternal state of astonishment and bewilderment at one’s very own existence and consciousness?

In addition, the Buddhist concept of ‘interbeing’ demonstrates how we must see ourselves not as isolated, static individuals, but as permeable and interwoven selves within larger selves, including the species self (humanity) and the biospheric self (all life).

For instance, you are not one life form. Your mouth alone contains more than seven hundred distinct kinds of bacteria. Your skin and eyelashes are equally laden with microbes, and your gut houses a similar bevvy of bacterial sidekicks. All in all, the human body possesses trillions of bacterial cells in addition to trillions of human cells: your body is home to many more life forms than the number of people presently living on Earth; more even than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Energised by sunlight, life converts inanimate rock into nutrients, which then pass through plants, herbivores, and carnivores before being decomposed and retired to the inanimate earth, beginning the cycle anew. Our internal metabolisms are intimately interwoven with this earthly metabolism; one result is that many of the atoms in our bodies are replaced several times during our lives.

Owing to all this, each of us is a walking colony of trillions of largely symbiotic life forms—we are akin to a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast ancient river that has been flowing for billions of years.

There is truly so much solace to be found in knowing and understanding the evolutionary processes behind our existence, as well as the interbeing theory, which proves that we are not outside or above nature—but fully enmeshed within it. 

I carry these scientific ideas with me through every moment of every day because they foster an overwhelming sense of gratitude within me. The improbability of any one of us being here is so astronomical that it staggers imagination. Above all else, it invites us to explore the laws of nature and the essence of what it means to be alive. From simple organic molecules to the first replicating cells, the sheer wonder of our existence ought to create a rich appreciation and sense of gratitude for the tapestry of life.

The post From stardust to sentience: How scientific literacy can improve your ability to foster gratitude appeared first on The Freethinker.

For many of us working in science, philosophy, and education (or a combination thereof), ‘intelligent design’ (ID)—the pseudoscientific theory that purports to be an alternative to evolutionary science and which has been unkindly but not unfairly described as ‘creationism in a cheap tuxedo’—has been out of the picture for the better part of the two decades since the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in 2005 ruled that it was not science and thus could not be taught in US high school biology classes. In short, ID was of historical interest but not to be taken seriously.

Recently, however, its champions have been making noise and turning heads. Stephen Meyer, one of the original faces of ID, has been featured on The Joe Rogan Experience and Piers Morgan Uncensored and has even dialogued with Michael Shermer. All of this new publicity has been used by ID advocates to prove that it has never been more relevant. And that is the goal of the movement: to fight for relevance and be taken seriously by academics and those in authority.

Everyone who has ever met Dr Meyer says he is a warm, genuine, nice man. He may be mistaken in his views but is respectful and courteous to those who disagree with him (something that cannot often be said for the movement as a whole). As Meyer’s newest book gave the claims of ID more media attention, this May saw the return of the claim that ID is leading a revolution in biology. On an episode of Justin Brierley’s podcast, Meyer repeated the long-since debunked claim that ID had successfully predicted that junk DNA was not junk at all and argued that this gives further credence to ID’s capabilities as a scientific theory. Listen to the key figures from the Discovery Institute (the ID-promoting think tank which Meyer helped to found) and they will tell you that scientists are leaving evolution behind in droves—and that the honest ones are beginning to catch up with what ID has been saying all along.

If one did not know better—and many podcast listeners and church attendees may not—you would think a scientific revolution was underway à la Thomas Kuhn. But this is far from the case. The halls of biology remain silent on intelligent design. There is nothing to see here at all. The ID revolution is complete fiction.

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, ID was mentioned twice. The first time was during an evolutionary biology lecture when the bacterial flagellum came up in discussion, and our lecturer asked if anyone knew why it had gained political fame (I knew the answer—Kitzmiller v. Dover¹—but only one other student had even heard of ID). The second time was in a genetics class. We were observing what one might call ‘bad design’ and my professor remarked that if nature had a designer, this was a case where they had done a poor job. That was it—in my postgraduate studies, it never came up at all.

In June, I asked a friend of mine, a world-class virologist, if—whether in her student or professional career—ID had ever been mentioned. Perplexed, she said not once. And this is the case with everyone I have ever asked. ID is not leading any revolution, and no scientist or academic I have ever met can ever recall it coming up. It could not be less relevant right now.

But two years ago, in a debate during an episode of Premier Unbelievable? entitled ‘Is Intelligent Design advancing or in retreat?’, the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin claimed that the movement was advancing, gaining new converts, and had never been stronger. He mentioned a conference in Israel on evolutionary genetics that he had attended when marshalling his evidence. My first thought was ‘Why is a geologist attending an evolutionary genetics conference?’ My second thought was that one of my best friends had been there, so I asked him about it. His response was that ID was not mentioned once during the event.

Something is amiss here. The data does not add up. On the one hand, ID proponents claim that biology is about to overthrow Darwinian evolution and that scientists are turning to ID by the truckload. But in science itself, it is very much business as usual, and not a sound about ID is to be heard.

But it is actually worse than that for ID, because in biology an actual revolution is underway. The biological sciences are arguably seeing the greatest boom period since the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s. Consider that since CRISPR-Cas9 burst onto the scene in 2011, genetic engineering has undergone an extraordinary transformation, becoming cheap, easy, and accurate. Even since the Nobel Prize was awarded to Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2019 for discovering this revolutionary gene-editing tool, base and prime editing have made it even more precise.

Then there is cancer immunotherapy, which since 2018 has transformed the landscape of oncological treatment. It may well be the future of all cancer treatment as soon as costs come down, which is inevitable. Meanwhile, molecular biology has been transformed again by AI, with the CASP competition to build systems that accurately predict protein structure from sequence data alone seeing extraordinary success from AI-based entries. AlphaFold brought the accuracy of predictive results in line with experimental data from x-ray crystallography and cryo-EM, and AlphaFold3, along with its competitors, is set to transform the prospects of personalised medicine.

Gene sequencing itself has become quicker, cheaper, and more accessible every year since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. In fact, in 2016, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins sequenced the genome of microorganisms on the International Space Station using a handheld device, showing just how far the field had come. Genomic analysis can now be done cheaply in the field, with a handheld sequencer, on any organism, and the results can be expected back in mere hours.

And what is the word from ID proponents on these extraordinary developments in the landscape of biology? Nothing. The Discovery Institute promises transformational research (yet has no laboratories), boasts predictive science (yet has published none), and claims that science is now looking to design and purposiveness as explanations for biological phenomena instead of leaning on evolution—but seems not even to be aware of what is actually happening in biology during one of its most transformational periods ever.

This is not tremendously surprising, given that a glance at the Discovery Institute’s list of fellows shows that it is full of philosophers and theologians. Even among its scientists, some have published little or nothing. On the whole, ID is dominated by people who have never done a day’s scientific work in their lives. They speak of the ‘scientific community’ but rarely engage with scientists in world-class research. This is, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg, as ID continues to overstate its credentials and overplay its hand.

Do they have a case when they call evolution a theory in crisis? Not in the least. ID proponents could not be more mistaken in articulating evolutionary biology as a science that is rigid and stale. When I was an undergraduate, modern evolutionary biology was described to me as the ‘fastest growing science’ due to the advances in genomics and molecular biology and their associated data revolutions. It is very much a predictive science today, testable and measurable.

Besides, convergent evolution (something ID never talks about) is very much a grand unifying theory in biology, applicable to everything from genetics to medicine at every level. It is still as Theodosius Dobzhansky said over half a century ago: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Dobzhansky himself was a Greek Orthodox Christian, but because he was an evolutionist, ID advocates pay little attention to him. Dobzhansky is just another uncomfortable obstacle passed over in silence by ID proponents.

It is interesting to track those whom ID proponents acknowledge and those that they do not. ID arguments have not changed since the 1990s, no matter how many times they are debunked or how little serious attention they get. This is partly due to the distance between ID and real science, and partly due to ignorance. When proponents discuss ID on any platform, the same names are always trumpeted, as if being read from a script. First, the latest scientist with any publications who has joined their ranks (Günter Bechly will be named dropped a thousand times), then Thomas Nagel, Antony Flew, and anyone else remotely famous who has ever said anything nice about ID in the past 30 years. In doing so, ID advocates reveal that their arguments are empty veneers, utterly lacking in real substance. If the Discovery Institute was actually putting out research, had an active program, or was doing real science, then these appeals to authority would not be necessary.

As someone with a doctorate in philosophy of science, Meyer is certain to know the demarcation criteria which mark the scientific off from the non-scientific. Thus, great pains are taken by ID advocates to talk about active research and publication in journals (even if it is their own in-house journal BIO-Complexity, which they eagerly pitch to outsiders to publish in) while holding conferences and collaborating wherever possible. Falsifiability remains a problem, however. Whenever the latest example of ‘irreducible complexity’ is knocked down like their old favourite the bacterial flagellum was, advocates don’t seem persuaded of the falsehood of ID. Put simply, ID is not scientific.

There is also the matter of picking their battles. There is a reason why Meyer would talk to Michael Shermer: he is not a biologist, and he has a large platform. When asked why serious scientists don’t engage with their ideas, the responses usually boil down to conspiracy theories. ‘They’, the ‘scientific community’, are locked into ‘Neo-Darwinism’, and the powers that be, with their materialist agenda, are controlling science to their own nefarious ends: those masters at the gates control education and are trying to keep their dogmas alive. In reaching for conspiracy, ID evinces the dogmatism it accuses others of holding.

Recently the Discovery Institute opened a brand-new site outside Cambridge. When I discussed this with a biology professor at the university, he laughed and noted that businesses often try and build their sites in the area to benefit from the association with the university and its heritage. Artificially manufacturing illusory respectability by being a ‘Cambridge’ institute is further evidence of what is really going on here. If ID was really leading a revolution in biology, then none of this would be necessary. I have spoken with several religious scientists in Cambridge who are less than thrilled at ID moving into the neighbourhood. For them, it only makes their lives as researchers harder.

The picture is even uglier than this. In Hinxton, near Cambridge, you have the Wellcome Sanger Institute, home of the UK arm of the Human Genome Project. Next door is the European Bioinformatics Institute, home of AlphaFold and the finest of its kind on the planet. Over the motorway is the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology. All of these house dozens of Nobel laureates and pump out thousands of publications in major journals every month. And this is not to mention every other university-affiliated centre in the city, all home to scientists young and old who are changing the world. The Discovery Institute’s new site, rather than giving off an air of world-class credibility, exposes the contrast between ID and real science. Surrounded by giants, ID is revealed to be a pygmy.

To sum up: intelligent design has nothing to say about modern biology, and modern biology is certainly not talking about intelligent design.

1. The bacterial flagellum was cited in the trial as something ‘irreducibly complex’ and therefore in need of the ‘intelligent designer’ hypothesis to be explained. For more on ‘irreducible complexity’ and the bacterial flagellum, see Kenneth Miller’s detailed refutation of this old argument, once a favourite of the ID crowd before it was exposed by Miller during Kitzmiller v. Dover. ︎

Related reading

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

The Highbrow Caveman: Why ‘high’ culture is atavistic, by Charles Foster

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Bad Religious Education, by Siniša Prijić

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post Is ‘intelligent design’ on the cusp of overthrowing evolutionary science? appeared first on The Freethinker.

From Chapter 1: Daisies Tell About Jesus

I remember the smell of the songbook paper, and pushing my little fingers through the tiny communion cup holders on the backs of the burnt orange itchy fabric-covered pews.

I remember selling ‘Bible Times’ pita bread by the pulpit on the church stage during my first church play and whispering the words to ‘Away in a Manger’ into a big colourful mic there one Christmas. I remember folding my hands every night on my knees by my bed and saying sorry for my sins, and the hardcover Bible story collection with the colourful illustrations we kept in the hall linen closet.

I remember how much I loved Jesus.

To me Jesus was a version of my dad. Maybe it’s the same for most Christian girls with kind and present fathers. God was a little scary, but I tried to dismiss that thought fast because he could read my mind.

At first my indoctrination was mostly harmless: Bedtime prayers, brown beard painting of Jesus surrounded by the kiddos, Children’s Church.

I don’t remember the first time I heard the Pastor shout about the love and wrath of God in one breath.

Understanding and accepting God’s anger was as critical as accepting his love. We were shameful and sinful people destined for an afterlife of torture. I was told that my belief and dedication to my relationship with Jesus saved me from this eternal damnation, and in turn, my mission was to urge others to have that faith too.

Being a Christian was normal for me, but not everyone believed in Jesus. That’s why Christians had to spread the Good News. You didn’t want anyone else to end up in the fiery pits of Hell either.

Some Christians might hand out Bibles or witness to their neighbors, but I wanted to go big or go to Hell I guess, because by eight I was preaching to my classmates on the playground and saying I was going to be a missionary in foreign countries.

I imagined myself in these African jungle scenarios, makeshift kitchens with big leaves on the floor, those little kids with bellies bloated from hunger pulling at my skirt while I cooked soup and talked about Jesus. Yes, really.

This to me would be a soul-saving sacrifice as well as the ultimate adventure.

I was born in 1983 into an average White evangelical family that made up a quarter of the country in the nineties, a Protestant family in a small rural community where we mixed with Catholics but had little exposure to religions outside of Christianity.

Protestants are the biggest Christian bloc in the U.S. They split with the Roman Catholic Church and follow the principles of the Reformation, led by German monk and university professor Martin Luther (1483–1546).

The Reformation held that one’s eternal soul could be saved only by personal faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God, rather than via prayers to saints and confessions to priests. 

Consider terms like ‘born again’ (John 3:3) and narratives involving the prayer of salvation (Romans 10:9).

Some Protestants even came to rough it in colonial America, rather than feel like they were under the thumb of the Catholic Church. I’d gotten the notion that the nation was founded on my religion from the way that narrative had been spun for me.

I wasn’t just a mainstream Protestant but a fundamentalist and an evangelical.

A fundamentalist will insist that every word of the Bible is without error, while a mainline Protestant will concede that historical documents are susceptible to fallibility. Fundamentalists interpret scripture literally, complete with its outdated dogmas and Israelite ideology.

Evangelists busy themselves with the relentless recruitment of souls practised by salvation-based brands of Christian faith. Evangelize means ‘convert’.

From Chapter 4: The Evangelical Agenda

Regardless of any neurological factors fortifying my faith, once I grew old enough to reason, doubt, the most dangerous of all sins, crept in. Doubt could land you in Hell before you even opened your mouth or lifted a finger to sin against God or another person.

To a Pentecostal, nothing is to be respected and valued more than unwavering faith. Certainly not education or intelligence or even critical thinking.

You were supposed to ‘trust in God with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding’ (Proverbs 3:5).

Knowledge was dangerous. Look what happened when the first humans dared seek it.

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.

Musician Frank Zappa

I struggled painfully with my faith in youth, but I didn’t let my doubt show, other than scribbling it over and over in my journals.

God, please take away my doubt; please open my eyes! I doubted three times today Jesus; please forgive me! I’m so sorry for doubting!!!

Without faith, Hebrews 11:6 assured me, it was impossible to please God.

Faith was my biggest struggle, the incredible challenge of my life. My lack of it was my gravest, deepest, most mortal sin.

I sought to solidify my salvation with the solidarity of other believers, tried to redeem and revive my soul by striking sin from my life. But I needed a louder voice in my mind, clarifying I wasn’t making it all up. As time went on I needed a more intense, more pronounced reprieve from guilt and a more ecstatic euphoria to wash over me in prayer and worship.

Now a new kind of joy and a whole ecosystem of knowledge has grown from the seed of doubt that was planted in my heart where I could never quite get that mustard seed to grow.

I have ceased to scream at myself in my mind, desperately trying to silence the voice of reason. I have silenced instead the voice of God.

From Chapter 7: Books Besides Bibles

For as far back as I can remember, I have loved books: reading them, writing them, collecting them, quoting them, smelling their sweet paper, smearing their ink with my tears.

I carried books to the playground at recess in elementary [school] and I took my textbooks home to devour poetry, history, and social studies in high school.

From a young age I could appreciate a well-crafted sentence, and I rarely grew bored of a story or a subject if the content was written well.

A vast wealth of literature had been off limits while I wasted countless hours perusing an old religious book instead!

There was time to make up for.

There was no Google to do research about religion when I was living that lie. Aside from, of course, books about other religions maybe, and academic papers perhaps, there wasn’t a lot of accessible literature published that challenged mainstream evangelical ideology. Prominent atheist figures weren’t podcasting yet.

When I began my quest for truth I spent endless hours in books besides Bibles, astonished and appalled at the sheer volume of information about the world I’d been so willing to remain oblivious to.

I kept my mind open, giving the theology I’d been fed and its apologists ample time to refute the new information I was swimming in. Their once compelling, convincing voices couldn’t hold up to the facts and perspectives presented by these historians and biologists.

Definitely one of the greatest perks of breaking free from an oppressive and controlling religion is that no information is off limits.

No books are banned.

Suddenly no fiction was off limits either: Dante, Nabokov, vampires, horror, trashy romance reads with women bursting out of corsets on the covers.

I could read academic material that had been forbidden, finally reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and exploring evolutionary science at last at age 23.

Suddenly I could eagerly accept scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality.

I was late to that table, much as humankind had been, attributing everything to the supernatural before scientific knowledge offered real answers—like we attributed sickness or healing to a god but now origins of ailments are evident because germ theory exists now.

I was born long after science filled in the gaps where gods stood in as placeholders, but like millions of other believers I’d been coerced to cling to them when they should have been discarded.

Like Douglas Adams said, ‘God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones.’ Embracing intellectual honesty at last was exciting!

From Chapter 10: Mind Rape

My child never shed a tear about Hell. She never shut herself in a closet and begged not to be hurt. She never had to feel shame for her own desires or unworthy of love because she had doubts about things that just didn’t make sense. She never had to reconcile in her mind the atrocities committed by someone she was supposed to love even more than she loved me.

At bedtime I tucked her in and told her to have dreams about candy castles and puppies and she never heard the words ‘brimstone’ or ‘gnashing of teeth’.

I love the moments when I speak of my Pentecostal past and she doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

‘Wait, what’s a pew, Mom?’

My heart soars in those moments. She will never be a sinner seeking sanctification. I feel she’s a more rounded individual than I am, more emotionally stable.

I had a lot of anger and anxiety to work through, character traits developed after a youth of servitude under an imaginary authoritarian entity.

I taught my daughter early, about multiple religions. When she was five and six we talked about what animals we would like to come back as, if the reincarnation religions were right.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are “valid,” let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins

Watching my daughter choose for herself, selecting biocentrism as her philosophy long before either of us had a name for it, and rejecting all religion, provided a boost of comfort and confidence that was very healing for me.

Society tends to assume religion is either benign or good for people. It’s a Sunday morning cultural tradition most Christians don’t think too hard about so they don’t have to reconcile their cognitive dissonance.

But while my peers were in Catechism reciting rosaries I was being brainwashed with brimstone by the Assembly of God.

Certain brands of fundamentalist faith that pound the original sin/eternal damnation ideology boast the gravest grievance against religious indoctrination.

A parent or preacher doesn’t even necessarily have to pound Hell into a child’s mind repeatedly to get the intended reaction. One horrifying threat involving a lake of fire can have a profound effect on a developing mind.

Richard Dawkins:

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

I am persuaded that “child abuse” is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like eternal hell.

It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.

I wish I could explain to all those kids in Sunday School that the sensational, scary stories they’re being taught are not real.

There’s no scary God up there, intent on punishing sinners.

No eternal suffering awaits anyone for anything they say or do.

And no, their ‘sins’ did not contribute to the suffering of a nice, loving man.

Related reading

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post Silencing the voice of God: the journey of an evangelical apostate appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘God Himself guided him’, it was said of the famous Swedish taxonomist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). ‘God has given him the greatest insight into natural history, greater than anyone else has enjoyed. God has been with him, wherever he has gone…and made him a great name, as great as those of the greatest men on earth.’ ‘Nobody has been a greater biologist or zoologist’, gushed a contemporary admirer. And when Linnaeus wrote a medical treatise, a reviewer observed that ‘We may justifiably assert that no one who has studied medicine, pharmacy or surgery can do without it; indeed that it cannot be but of use and pleasure to the most learned medical men.’

Linnaeus himself was the anonymous author of these and many other plaudits. He was, simply, an appalling person. Confident that he would never be contradicted, he embellished his field notes, making his journeying sound far more epic than it was. Scrambling up the greasy pole of academic preferment, he lied about his academic collaborations and surrounded himself with sycophants. He lent apparent scientific credibility to racism, declaring that there were different races of Homo sapiens, with fixed attributes. Homo sapiens europaeus, he announced, was inherently ‘governed by laws’, unlike the African subspecies, Homo sapiens afer, which was ‘governed by whim’ and was ‘sly, slow [and] careless’. He was a chauvinist at home, believing his own daughters unworthy of education, and an unabashed nepotist who arranged for his 22-year-old son, who had no degree and no love of botany, to be appointed adjunct professor of botany (on his father’s death, he became a full professor).

He was also wrong: emphatically, repercussively, corrosively wrong about the natural world.

There were, he thought towards the end of his working life, 40,000 species: 20,000 vegetables, 3,000 worms, 12,000 insects, 200 amphibious animals, 2,600 fish, and 200 quadrupeds. It is now estimated that there might be up to a trillion species, and even lower estimates have the number in the millions or hundreds of millions.

For Linnaeus, species were fixed and had been since the time of the Biblical creation. It was sacrilegious to think otherwise. ‘We reckon the number of species as the number of different forms that were created in the beginning. . . . That new species can come to exist in vegetables is disproved by continued generations, propagation, daily observations, and the cotyledons. . .’

Odious, dishonest, bigoted, and mistaken. Yet Linnaeus is the only taxonomist of whom most have heard. His method of denoting species, by reference first to the genus (such as Homo), is ubiquitous. And so is his assumption that nature can and should be corralled into synthetic conceptual structures.

He had an exact contemporary, an almost forgotten Frenchman, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), who shared Linnaeus’ project of producing a comprehensive account of life on earth but shared few of Linnaeus’ vanities, moral failings, or biological errors.

Buffon was contemptuous of self-seekers, calling contemporary glory a ‘vain and deceitful phantom’. He campaigned vigorously against dividing humans into races, let alone ascribing pejorative attributes to each race, and his closest friendship was with a woman he regarded as his muse and his intellectual superior. He was suspicious of systems of classification, acknowledging their usefulness, but realising that nature was in a state of constant change and that no artificial system could do justice to the dazzling complexity of the real wild world. He was robustly critical of Linnaeus. While all systematic approaches to nature were flawed, he wrote, ‘Linnaeus’ method is of all the least sensible and the most monstrous.’ ‘We think that we know more because we have increased the number of symbolic expressions and learned phrases. We pay hardly any attention to the fact that these skills are only the scaffolding of science, and not science itself.’

Since nature was mysterious, liquid, and vast (there were, he suspected, many more than 40,000 species) it could only properly be approached, thought Buffon, with humility and uncertainty. Human presumption must be shed at the laboratory door. He was a true Enlightenment sceptic; no questions were out of bounds. The Enlightenment did not stay that way for long, but while it did, it was glorious, and Buffon adorned it.

James Roberts’ scintillating account of these two lives is an overdue and important attempt to disinter Buffon from the obscurity in which he has long languished. He is not the first writer to try (the most systematic effort is Jacques Roger’s 1997 Buffon: A Life in Natural History), but he is far and away the most successful. Roberts is a sprightly storyteller who wears his considerable learning lightly. The result is a compellingly readable piece of intellectual history; a salutary account of enmeshed personality and ideas, and so of the way that science itself works.

Lionized Linnaeus is the archetype of many modern biologists. It started for him, as for them, with a childhood love of the natural world which soon curdled into ambition—an ambition not to understand, but to force the facts into a set of self-created and self-satisfied categories. It is a very modern story: rigour becomes fundamentalism; a search for the truth becomes a quest for new ways to affirm old orthodoxies; journeying becomes colonialism. ‘Objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names’, wrote Linnaeus. ‘Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.’ Self-reference and self-affirmation, in other words, are what science is all about. 

And the forgotten Buffon is the antitype of many modern biologists. His boyhood wonder never left him; never became sclerosed into a reverence for categories rather than real plants and animals. ‘The true and only science is the knowledge of facts’, he said. Theory, however elegant and revered, must always give way to reality.

Linnaeus was the fifth generation in a line of preachers and was expected to occupy the hereditary pulpit, but at the age of four, hearing his father declaim the incantatory Latin names of plants, he had an epiphany. It made him a botanical obsessive and set biology’s course for the next two hundred years.

For nine miserable years, he was marinated in Latin and Greek at school. He was known by teachers and pupils as the ‘Little Botanist’ (he was never more than five feet tall). He failed to make the grade for the Christian ministry. His teachers told his outraged father that Linnaeus should become a tailor or a shoemaker instead. It is perhaps unfortunate for science that he did not.

His father sought advice. What could be done with his hopeless son? A friend of the family suggested medicine and offered to coach Linnaeus for entry to medical school. It wasn’t as prestigious as preaching, but it was better than shoemaking. Linnaeus duly went (via a false start in Lund) to medical school in Uppsala.

There, in 1729, in a garden, there was a fateful meeting. Professor Olof Celsius, who was trying to write a book about the plants mentioned in the Bible, saw a tiny, ragged student drawing a flower badly. Celsius asked him what the flower was, and the student, who was Linnaeus, responded using a ludicrously difficult term forged by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. It showed that though Linnaeus could not draw, he had spent many hours learning Tournefort’s 698 categories. It was a formidable achievement. Celsius impulsively took Linnaeus under his wing, fostering Linnaeus’ passion for plants and recruiting him to work on the book about Biblical plants.

Celsius proved a loyal and powerful mentor. It was largely due to him that Linnaeus, in 1730, as a second-year student who had never taken a single class in botany, became de facto professor of botany. This astonishing appointment cemented Linnaeus’ confidence in his rapidly gestating system of plant classification, based on the characteristics of plant reproductive organs. It ignited Linnaeus’ belief in himself as a botanical messiah, and he began to see any challenge to him as blasphemous. When he was deposed from his post by a rival, Nils Rosen, and relegated to student status, the furious Linnaeus vowed to kill Rosen—and even carried a sword with him for the purpose.

Dispossessed, Linnaeus went on a collecting expedition to Lapland, collecting not only plants but self-glorifying yarns. ‘A divine could never describe a place of future punishment more horrible than this country, nor could the Styx of the poets exceed it. I may therefore boast of having visited the Stygian territories’, he wrote. Like his four autobiographies, much about Linnaeus was bogus or misconceived. The famous conical Lapp hat in which he is so often pictured was one worn by women. And he was far from the careful scientist of his self-portrait. He was, observes Roberts, temperamentally unsuited for field research: his methodology ‘swung wildly between minutiae and the cursory’. But his energy, though erratic, was real. He collected manically and worked on a scheme for classifying every species. For Linnaeus, writes Roberts, ‘[t]he Maker had long since put away his tools and closed up His workshop’, and of course there had to have been room in Noah’s Ark for all the species. The only problem in identifying the small and limited number of species was their geographical dispersion. Linnaeus was confident that he was up to the job.

He returned to Uppsala, and though his status there was better than it had been, his account of the expedition and the outline of his system of classification failed to impress the scientific establishment.

He stalked peevishly out of Uppsala and became a travelling biological entertainer, dressed in his Laplander costume, beating a shaman’s drum, telling his tall tales of swashbuckling travel, showing his collections of insects, and holding forth on his fast-gestating system of classification. He was plausible, at least in Germany, where the Hamburgische Berichte trumpeted that ‘All that this skilful man thinks and writes is methodical. . . . His diligence, patience and industriousness are extraordinary’. Linnaeus agreed, for he had written the lines himself.

He was shown the Hydra of Hamburg, one of the world’s most valuable zoological curiosities—a seven-headed, sharp-clawed monster which, eighty-seven years before, had mysteriously appeared on a church altar. Its authenticity was unquestioned until Linnaeus, after inspecting it, started to laugh. ‘O Great God’, he said, ‘who never set more than one clear thought in a body which Thou has shaped.’ It was a conclusion, like all his conclusions, driven by theology, and, like many of his conclusions, wrong. What would he have made of the fact that the cognition of cephalopods is partly outsourced to their semi-autonomous tentacles, or to the notion that all organisms are complex ecosystems—humans, for instance, being vats of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, all of which contribute crucially to the entities we call ourselves?

His wanderings took him to the Netherlands, where he was examined in medicine and finally obtained a medical degree. In 1735 he published his Systema Naturae, which gave to the five-fold hierarchy of Kingdoms, Classes, Orders, Families, and Species the meanings used today. He hoped it would be tectonic. It was barely noticed.

Linnaeus returned to Stockholm. To earn a living, he stalked the coffee shops, looking for signs of syphilis and gonorrhoea in the customers, and offering to treat them. It made his fortune and established him in medicine, but he continued to work on his plants, duly became professor of botany, produced a second edition of the Systema and the Philosophia Botanica, a codification of his core tenets, and sent apostles across the world to continue, and hopefully to complete, his project of identifying all the species. The recognition he craved came in part with a Swedish knighthood in 1761. It was followed by a long and bitter decline. He suffered from an autoscopy characterised by visual hallucinations and the conviction that he shared his life with a second version of himself. He forgot his own name. By 1776 he was silent. He died in 1778.

Linnaeus’ great competitor, Buffon, had an undistinguished Burgundian childhood. Enriched by a legacy, he became a carouser and dueller at the University of Angers, finally fleeing the city after wounding an Englishman in a duel. This episode changed him. Reflecting in Dijon, it became clear to him that he did not want the life of the idle, comfortable estate manager the fates seemed to have in store for him. But how could he escape? Help was at hand in the form of the young Duke of Kingston and his travelling companion, Nathan Hickman, a precocious naturalist. Buffon travelled with them in France and Italy for a year and a half. He would never be the same again. He read a treatise on Newton’s calculus, became obsessed with the man, and realised that he, Buffon, had himself worked out one of Newton’s theorems. The discovery transformed him—making him reassess his own ability—and shaped the course of his life.

It was an exciting time to be a thinker. Spinoza, Newton, and Leibniz, who did not slave in tiny impermeable siloes like modern academics, saw the business of science as discovering the truth about the world. The truth was such a majestic and elusive thing that the search had to engage every discipline, invent new disciplines, straddle and confound old categories, and mercilessly discard cherished but superannuated models.

Buffon, infected with this excitement, began to distance himself from his companions and returned to his birthplace, the village of Montbard in Burgundy. There, in the Parc Buffon, he began his life’s work: to understand life. This involved—but unlike Linnaeus’ conception, did not completely consist in—the classification of biological life.

A calling so high, in a temperamental hedonist, demanded a strenuously structured and rather ascetic life. Buffon’s valet woke him at 5 a.m. and was instructed to get him up however reluctant he was, even if, as was once necessary, he had to be doused in ice-cold water. Inward order meant outward order, and so Buffon dressed formally each day: for his work, not his public. After a hairdresser had curled and powdered his hair, Buffon walked to the park and to one of two cells devoted to a type of biological monasticism—each containing only a writing table, a fireplace, and a portrait of his idol, Isaac Newton. He worked from no texts or notes, just his own memory and his immediate thoughts, and took regular walks in the park to clear his head. At nine there was breakfast—a roll and two glasses of wine—and then it was back to work until lunch at two, followed by a nap, a lone walk in the garden, and a return to the cell until exactly seven. He handed his day’s writing to a secretary, who made a fair copy, grafted it into whatever manuscript was on the go, and burned the original pages. Guests typically arrived at seven for wine and conversation, but there was no supper for Buffon, who was in bed promptly at nine.  He kept up this routine for half a century.

‘It is necessary to look at one’s subject for a long time’, he wrote. ‘Then little by little it just opens out and develops. . .’ And it did. In 1749 the first three volumes of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle were published, containing a staggering 417,600 words and written in contemporary French with unusual simplicity and clarity. It was a runaway bestseller and sold out in six weeks. Buffon spent the rest of his life enlarging and refining it. At his death, there were thirty-five volumes—three introductory ones on general subjects, twelve on mammals, nine on birds, five on minerals, and six supplemental volumes on miscellaneous subjects. The book was no mere catalogue. It contained not only detailed anatomical descriptions but also accounts of ecological context and behaviour.

Any book sufficiently ambitious to be worth writing or reading will necessarily be a failure, and in many ways this was. Buffon had hoped to deal with ‘the whole extent of Nature, and the entire Kingdom of Creation’, but despite his gargantuan efforts and flagellant self-discipline he discovered, as do all mortals, that nature defeated him: the book did not deal properly with plants, amphibians, fish, molluscs, or insects.

Yet when he bowed out of life in 1788, his life seemed to many to have been a triumphant success. 20,000 mourners lined the Paris streets. The Gentleman’s Magazine in London described him as one of the ‘four bright lamps’ of France, alongside Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

Linnaeus, who had preceded him into the grave ten years earlier, had a quiet funeral. Most of the few who attended were university colleagues.

Linnaeus and Buffon had competed for decades. It looked as if Buffon had decisively won. But history is capricious. Within five years of his death, Buffon was reviled as a reactionary and an enemy of progress. A raucous, torch-bearing crowd tipped his corpse from the coffin and clamoured to install a plaster bust of Linnaeus in the royal garden Buffon had managed.

Linnaeus’ rigid categories are wholly antithetical both to Darwin’s notions of the fluidity of species and to ecological understandings of the nature of nature. Buffon had written that ‘it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter.’ It sounded presciently Darwinian. It was. When Darwin discovered Buffon, he wrote to Huxley: ‘I have read Buffon—whole pages are laughably like mine. It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words. . .’ ‘To Linnaeus’ mind’, writes Roberts, ‘nature was a noun. . . . To Buffon, nature was a verb, a swirl of constant change.’ Buffon prefigured Darwin and understood the interconnectedness of things. Linnaeus would have denounced Darwin as a heretic and seen claims of ecological entanglement as an affront to the tidy architecture of the Creator.   

Yet Linnaeus is revered and Buffon forgotten. This is very strange. Why is it so?  

Roberts speculates intelligently and plausibly. As he says, the French Revolution is undoubtedly part of the story. Buffon, confident in Paris salons and the Versailles court, was never going to be a darling of the revolutionaries—though his politics were far more egalitarian than Linnaeus’ and his relative secularism should have been more palatable than Linnaeus’ religiosity. Linnaeus’ rigid scheme of classification played well in Great Britain, devoted to its class hierarchies. Imposing an artificial regime onto the world complemented and complimented colonial notions of conquest and control.

Roberts’ explanations, though elegant and ingenious, are insufficient. An anomaly so striking cries out for a more fundamental justification. This can be found, I suggest, in the work of Iain McGilchrist, who in his two gigantic books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021) views the history of the last few thousand years through the lens of the functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres.

To survive and thrive (his thesis goes), we need two wholly different types of attention. One is a narrow, focused attention, contributed to humans by the left hemisphere. The other (which is supposed to be in overall charge) is a wider, more holistic type of attention, based in the right hemisphere. Paying attention properly to the world demands a dialogue between these hemispheres.

The left hemisphere is meant to be the executive, acting on the orders of the right. It is the primary locus of language (which is dangerous, because it can advocate its own views), and in right-handed humans governs the right hand, which seizes and manipulates.

The left hemisphere deals in polarities. It loves black-and-white judgments. It builds and curates pigeon-holes and gets petulant at any suggestion that there is anything inadequate about its filing system. It is highly conservative and hates change.

The right hemisphere knows that nothing can be described except in terms of the nexus of relationships in which it exists, that opposites are often complementary, and that meaning is generally to be read between the lines. It does not confuse the process of understanding with the process of assembling a complete set of data, and it sees that knowledge and wisdom are very different.  

McGilchrist suggests that much of our intellectual, social, and political malaise results from the arrogation by the left hemisphere of the captaincy of the right. The nerdish secretary makes declarations about the web and weave of the cosmos and drafts policy—yet it is dismally unqualified to do so.

This is a perfect explanation for the posthumous fates of Linnaeus and Buffon. Buffon’s work represents a respectful conversation between the hemispheres. He grabbed facts in those long days of intense left hemispherical focus, and the facts were duly passed to the right hemisphere which placed them into a holistic vision of the whole natural world—a world of relationality and flux.

Linnaeus seems never to have moved out of his left hemisphere. He was, and his successors are, pathologically attached to their categories. For him, to categorise was to understand. The names spawned in the left hemisphere were the truth.

The left hemisphere’s conservatism is shown by the desperate and doomed efforts to reconcile Linnean taxonomy with biological realities. Linnaeus’ five taxonomic categories were expanded to twenty-one, and the enlarged scheme is audibly creaking. Viruses, for instance, simply don’t fit. If a model needs to be revised so radically, isn’t it time to trash it and start from the beginning? Darwin showed that the notion of immutable species is nonsense, yet taxonomists still cling to it pathetically.

There is another important twist in the hemispherical story within modern biology. You couldn’t make it up. Neo-Darwinism itself, plainly at odds with traditional taxonomy, has not dealt a death blow to taxonomy. Why? Surely because left hemispheres stick together in diabolical and incoherent solidarity against the right. Neo-Darwinism has become a new, non-negotiable category. A model that is all about fluidity has become itself a mandate for stasis. All biological observations (unless you’re in a taxonomy department) have to be squeezed into it, however uncomfortably. Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy has become as canonical as the canons of taxonomy. Biological science, far from being (as the Enlightenment anticipated it would be) a workshop in which paradigms are gleefully smashed, has become a temple in which paradigms are uncritically worshipped. 

There’s a battle on for biology, a battle raging in the laboratories and lecture rooms of the world: a battle that is really between the left and right hemispheres of the world. It’s a battle for reality against dogma; for freedom against colonialism; for the untameable, mysterious, tangled wild against human vanity and self-reverential theory. It is a battle exemplified well by the epic contest between Linnaeus and Buffon.

*Note that, when you use this link to purchase the book, we earn from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate.

Related reading

The Highbrow Caveman: Why ‘high’ culture is atavistic, by Charles Foster

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction 

Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. One of the world’s best-known philosophers, his work ranges from the nature of consciousness and free will to the evolutionary origins of religion. He is also known as one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.  

His many books include Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Freedom Evolves (2003), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017).  

I recently spoke with Dennett over Zoom to discuss his life, work, and new memoir I’ve Been Thinking, published by Penguin: Allen Lane in October 2023. Below is an edited transcript of the interview along with some audio extracts from our conversation. Where some of the discussion becomes quite technical, links to explanatory resources have been included for reference. 

Interview 

Freethinker: Why did you decide to write a memoir? 

Daniel C. Dennett: In the book, I explain that I have quite a lot to say about how I think and why I think that it is a better way to think than traditional philosophical ways. I have also helped a lot of students along the way, and I have tried to help a larger audience. I have also managed to get the attention of a lot of wonderful thinkers who have helped me and I would like to share the wealth.  

As a philosopher who has made contributions to science, what do you think philosophy can offer science? Especially as there are some scientists who are dismissive of philosophy. 

I think some scientists are dismissive towards philosophy because they are scared of it. But a lot of really good scientists take philosophy seriously and they recognise that you cannot do philosophy-free science. The question is whether you examine your underlying assumptions. The good scientists typically do so and discover that these are not easy questions. The scientists who do not take philosophy seriously generally do pretty well, but they are missing a whole dimension of their life’s work if they do not realise the role that philosophy plays in filling out a larger picture of what reality is and what life is all about. 

In your memoir, you say that it is important to know the history of philosophy because it is the history of very—and still—tempting mistakes. Do you mean, in other words, that philosophy can help us to avoid falling into traps? 

Exactly. I love to point out philosophical mistakes made by those scientists who think philosophy is a throwaway. In the areas of science that I am interested in—the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, the nature of explanation—they often fall into the old traps that philosophers have learned about by falling into those traps themselves. There is no learning without making mistakes, but then you have to learn from your mistakes. 

What do you think is the biggest and most influential philosophical mistake that has ever been made? 

I think I would give the prize to Descartes, and not so much for his [mind-body] dualism as for his rationalism, his idea that he could get his clear and distinct ideas so clear and distinct that it would be like arithmetic or geometry and that he could then do all of science just from first principles in his head and get it right.  

The amazing thing is that Descartes produced, in a prodigious effort, an astonishingly detailed philosophical system in his book Le Monde [first published in full in 1677]—and it is almost all wrong, as we know today! But, my golly, it was a brilliant rational extrapolation from his first principles. It is a mistake without which Newton is hard to imagine. Newton’s Principia (1687) was largely his attempt to undo Descartes’ mistakes. He jumped on Descartes and saw further. I think Descartes failed to appreciate how science is a group activity and how the responsibility for getting it right is distributed. 

In your memoir, you lay out your philosophical ideas quite concisely, and you compare them to Descartes’s system in their coherence—albeit believing that yours are right, unlike his! How would you describe the core of your view? 

As I said in my book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, if I had to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I would give it to Darwin because evolution by natural selection ties everything together. It ties life and physics and cosmology; it ties time and causation and intentionality. All of these things get tied together when you understand how evolution works. And if you do not take evolution seriously and really get into the details, you end up with a factually impoverished perspective on consciousness, on the mind, on epistemology, on the nature of explanation, on physics. It is the great unifying idea. 

I was lucky to realise this when I was a graduate student and I have been turning that crank ever since with gratifying results. 

How does consciousness come about in a Darwinian universe? 

First of all, you have to recognize that consciousness is not a single pearl of wonderfulness. It is a huge amalgam of different talents and powers which are differently shared among life forms. Trees are responsive to many types of information. Are they conscious? It is difficult to tell. What about bacteria, frogs, flies, bees? But the idea that there is just one thing where the light is on or that consciousness sunders the universe into two categories—that is just wrong. And evolution shows why it is wrong.  

In the same way, there are lots of penumbral or edge cases of life. Motor proteins are not alive. Ribosomes are not alive. But life could not exist without them. Once you understand Darwinian gradualism and get away from Cartesian essentialism, then you can begin to see how the pieces fit together without absolutes. There is no absolute distinction between conscious things and non-conscious things, just as there is no absolute distinction between living things and non-living things. We have gradualism in both cases.  

We just have to realise that the Cartesian dream of ‘Euclidifying’, as I have put it, all of science—making it all deductive and rational with necessary and sufficient conditions and bright lines everywhere—does not work for anything else apart from geometry. 

Why are non-naturalistic accounts of consciousness—‘mysterian’ accounts as you call them—still so appealing? 

I have been acquainted with the field for over half a century, but I am still often astonished by the depth of the passion with which people resist a naturalistic view of consciousness. They think it is sort of a moral issue—gosh, if we are just very, very fancy machines made out of machines made out of machines, then life has no meaning! That is a very ill-composed argument, but it scares people. People do not even want you to look at the idea. These essentially dualistic ideas have a sort of religious aura to them—it is the idea of a soul. [See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consciousness for an overview of the debate over the centuries.] 

I love the headline of my interview with the late, great Italian philosopher of science and journalist Giulio Giorello: ‘Sì, abbiamo un’anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot’ – ‘Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots’ [this interview appeared in a 1997 edition of the Corriere della Sera]. And that’s it! If that makes you almost nauseated, then you have a mindset that resists sensible, scientific, naturalistic theories of consciousness.  

Do you think that the naturalistic view of consciousness propounded by you and others has ‘won’ the war of ideas? 

No, we have not won, but the tide is well turned, I think. But then we have these backlashes.

The one that is currently raging is over whether Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness is pseudo-science [see the entry for IIT in the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy for an overview]. I recently signed an open letter alongside a number of researchers, including a lot of the world’s very best on the neuroscience of consciousness, deploring the press’s treatment of IIT as a ‘leading’ theory of consciousness. We said IIT was pseudo-science. That caused a lot of dismay, but I was happy to sign the letter. The philosopher Felipe de Brigard, another signatory, has written a wonderful piece that explains the context of the whole debate. [See also the neuroscientist Anil Seth’s sympathetic view of IIT here.] 

One of the interesting things to me, though, is that some scientists resist IIT for what I think are the wrong reasons. They say that it leads to panpsychism [‘the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’ – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.] because it says that even machines can be a little bit conscious. But I say that machines can be a little bit conscious! That is not panpsychism, it is just saying that consciousness is not that magical pearl. Bacteria are conscious. Stones are not conscious, not even a little bit, so panpsychism is false. It is not even false, it is an empty slogan. But the idea that a very simple reactive thing could have one of the key ingredients of consciousness is not false. It is true. 

It seems that antipathy towards naturalistic theories of consciousness is linked to antipathy towards Darwinism. What do you make of the spate of claims in recent years that Darwinism, or the modern evolutionary synthesis of which Darwinism is the core, is past its sell-by date? 

This is a pendulum swing which has had many, many iterations since Darwin. I think everybody in biology realises that natural selection is key. But many people would like to be revolutionaries. They do not want to just add to the establishment. They want to make some bold stroke that overturns something that has been accepted.  

I understand the desire to be the rebel, to be the pioneer who brings down the establishment. So, we have had wave after wave of people declaring one aspect of Darwinism or another to be overthrown, and, in fact, one aspect of Darwin after another has been replaced by better versions, but still with natural selection at their cores. Adaptationism still reigns.  

Even famous biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin mounted their own ill-considered attack on mainstream Darwinism and pleased many Darwin dreaders in doing so.  But that has all faded, and rightly so. More recently, we have had the rise of epigenetics, and the parts of epigenetics that make good sense and are well-attested have been readily adapted and accepted as extensions of familiar ideas in evolutionary theory. There is nothing revolutionary there.  

The Darwinian skeleton is still there, unbroken. It just keeps getting new wrinkles added as they are discovered.  

The claims that the evolutionary establishment needs to be overthrown remind me of—in fact, they are quite closely related to—the enduring hatred of some people for Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’.

Yes, some people do. But I think that it is one of the best books I have ever read and that it holds up very well. The chapter on memes is one of the most hated parts of it, but the idea of memes is gathering adherents now even if a lot of people do not want to use the word ‘meme’. The idea of cultural evolution as consisting of the natural selection of cultural items that have their own evolutionary fitness, independent of the fitness of their vectors or users—that has finally got a really good foothold, I think. And it is growing. 

As one of the foremost champions of memetics as a field of study, you must be pleased that it is making a comeback, even if under a different name, given that earlier attempts to formalise it never really took off. 

Well, the cutting edge of science is jagged and full of controversy—and full of big egos. There is a lot of pre-emptive misrepresentation and caricature. It takes a while for things to calm down and for people to take a deep breath and let the fog of war dispel. And then they can see that the idea was pretty good, after all.  

You mentioned Stephen Jay Gould. In your memoir, Gould and several others get a ‘rogue’s gallery’ sort of chapter to themselves. How have the people you have disagreed with over the years influenced you? 

Well, notice that some of my rogues are also some of the people that I have learned the most from, because they have been wrong in provocative ways, and it has been my attempts to show what is wrong with their views that have been my springboard in many cases. Take the philosopher Jerry Fodor, for example. As I once said, if I can see farther than others, it is because I have been jumping on Jerry like he is a human trampoline!  

If Jerry had not made his mistakes as vividly as he did, I would not have learned as much. It is the same with John Searle. They both bit a lot of bullets. They are both wrong for very important reasons, but where would I be without them? I would have to invent them! But I do not need to worry about beating a dead horse or a straw man because they have boldly put forward their views with great vigour and, in some cases, even anger. I have tried to respond not with anger but with rebuttal and refutation, which is, in the end, more constructive. 

And what about some of the friends you mention in the book? People like the scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey? 

People like Doug Hofstadter, Nick Humphrey, and Richard Dawkins—three of the smartest people alive! It has been my great privilege and honour to have had them as close friends and people that I can always count on to give me good, tough, serious reactions to whatever I do. I have learned a lot from all of them.  

Nick Humphrey, for example, came to work with me in the mid-1980s and we have been really close friends ever since. I could not count the hours that we have spent debating and discussing our differences. If you look at the history of his work, you will see that he has adjusted his view again and again to get closer to mine, and I have adjusted my view to get closer to him. I accepted a lot of his points. That is how progress happens.  

How do you differentiate between philosophy and science? In your afterword to the 1999 edition of Dawkins’s 1982 book ‘The Extended Phenotype’, for example, you say that that work is both scientific and philosophical. And in your own career, of course, you have mixed science and philosophy quite freely. 

I think the dividing line is administrative at best. Philosophers who do not know any science have both hands tied behind their backs. They are ill-equipped because there is just too much counter-intuitive knowledge that we have gathered in science. That is one of the big differences between philosophy and science. In science, a counter-intuitive result is a wonderful thing. It is a gem, a treasure. If you get a counter-intuitive result and it holds up, you have made a major discovery.  

In philosophy, if something is counter-intuitive, that counts against it, because too many philosophers think that what they are doing is exposing the counter-intuitivity of various views. They think that if something is counter-intuitive, it cannot be right. Well, hang on to your hats, because a lot of counter-intuitive things turn out to be true!   

What you can imagine depends on what you know. If you do not know the science (or what passes as the science of the day because some of that will turn out to be wrong) your philosophy will be impoverished. It is the interaction between the bold and the utterly conservative and established scientific claims that produces progress. That is where the action is. Intuition is not a good guide here. 

We all take for granted now that the earth goes around the sun. That was deeply counter-intuitive at one point. A geocentric universe and a flat world were intuitive once upon a time. 

Darwinism, the idea that such complexity as living, conscious organisms can arise from blind forces, is counter-intuitive, too.  

Yes. My favourite quote about Darwinism comes from one of his 19th-century critics who described it as a ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. Yes, it is a strange inversion of reasoning, but it is the best one ever. 

It strikes me that some of the essential differences between your view and the views of others hark back in some way to Plato and Aristotle—the focus on pure reason and the immaterial and the absolute versus the focus on an empirical examination of the material world. 

Yes, that is true. It is interesting that when I was an undergraduate, I paid much more attention to Plato than to Aristotle. Again, I think that was probably because I thought Plato was more interestingly wrong. It was easier to see what he was wrong about. Philosophers love to find flaws in other philosophers’ work! 

That brings to mind another aspect of your memoir and your way of thinking more generally. You think in very physical, practical terms—thinking tools, intuition pumps, and so on. And you have a long history of farming and sailing and fixing things. How important has this aspect been to your thinking over the years? 

It has been very important. Since I was a little boy, I have been a maker of things and a fixer of things. I have been a would-be inventor, a would-be designer or engineer. If I had not been raised in a family of humanists with a historian father and an English teacher mother, I would probably have become an engineer. And who knows? I might not have been a very good one. But I just love engineering. I always have. I love to make things and fix things and figure out how things work.  

I think that some of the deepest scientific advances of the last 150 years have come from engineers—computers, understanding electricity, and, for that matter, steam engines and printing presses. A lot of the ideas about degrees of freedom and control theory—this is all engineering. 

Since you mention degrees of freedom, whence free will? You are known as a compatibilist, so how do you understand free will in a naturalistic, Darwinian universe? 

I think there is a short answer, which is that the people who think free will cannot exist in a causally deterministic world are confusing causation and control. These are two different things. The past does not control you. It causes you, but it does not control you. There is no feedback between you and the past. If you fire a gun, once the bullet leaves the muzzle, it is no longer in your control. Once your parents have launched you, you are no longer in their control.  

Yes, many of your attitudes, habits, and dispositions are ones you owe to your upbringing and your genes but you are no longer under the control of them. You are a self-controller. There is all the difference in the world between a thing that is a self-controller and a thing that is not. A boulder rolling down a mountainside is caused deterministically to end up where it ends up, but it is not being controlled by anything, while a skier skiing down the slalom trail is also determined in where she ends up, but she is in control. That is a huge and obvious difference. 

What we want is to be self-controllers. That is what free will is: the autonomy of self-control. If you can be a competent self-controller, you have all the free will that is worth wanting, and that is perfectly compatible with determinism. The distinction between things that are in control and things that are out of control never mentions determinism. In fact, deterministic worlds make control easier. If you have to worry about unpredictable quantum interference with your path, you have a bigger control problem.  

I know that you have a long and ongoing dispute with, among others, the biologist and free will determinist Jerry Coyne on this. 

Yes. I have done my best and spent hours trying to show Jerry the light! 

Alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, you were one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’. In your memoir, you say that you were impelled to write your book on religion, ‘Breaking the Spell’, because you were worried about the influence of religious fundamentalism in America—and you say that your worries have been borne out today. In your view, then, we are seeing a resurgence of dangerous fundamentalism? 

We are, yes, and we are seeing it across the world and across religions. I think that we have to recognise that a major part of the cause of this is the anxiety, not to say the terror, of the believers who see their world evaporating in front of their eyes. I warned about that in Breaking the Spell, and I said, ‘Look. We have to be calm. We have to be patient. We have to recognise that people are faced with a terrifying prospect, of their religious traditions evaporating, being abandoned by their children, being swept aside.’ No wonder that many of them are anxious, even to the point of violence.

In Breaking the Spell, I designed a little thought experiment to help those of us who are freethinkers, who are atheists, appreciate what that is like. Imagine if aliens came to America. Not to conquer us—imagine they were nice. They were just learning about us, teaching us about their ways. And then we found that our children were flocking to them and were abandoning musical instruments and poetry and abandoning football and baseball and basketball because these aliens had other pastimes that were more appealing to them. I deliberately chose secular aspects of our country for this experiment. 

Imagine seeing all of these just evaporate. What?! No more football, no more baseball, no more country music, no more rock and roll?! Help, help! It is a terrifying prospect, a world without music—not if I can help it! 

If you can sympathise with this, if you can feel the gut-wrenching anxiety that that would cause in you, then recognise that that is the way many religious people feel, and for good reason. And so we should respect the sorrow and the anger, the sense of loss, that they are going through. It is hard to grow up and shed religion. It has been our nursemaid for millennia. But we can do it. We can grow up. 

Is there a need for another ‘New Atheist’ type of moment, then, given the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and violence in the world? 

I am not sure that we need it. I am not going to give the New Atheists credit for this—though we played our role—but recent work has shown that the number of those with no religion at all has increased massively worldwide. Let’s just calm down and take a deep breath. Comfort those who need comforting. Try to forestall the more violent and radical responses to this and just help ease the world into a more benign kind of religion.  

And religions are doing that, too. Many religions are recognising this comforting role and are downplaying dogma and creed and emphasising community and cooperation and brotherhood and sisterhood. Let’s encourage that. I sometimes find it amusing to tease Richard Dawkins and say to him, think about this evolutionarily: we do not so much want to extinguish religion as get it to evolve into something benign. And it can.  

We need the communities of care, the places where people can go and find love and feel welcome. Don’t count on the state to do that. And don’t count on any institution that is not in some ways like good old-fashioned religion for that, either. The hard thing to figure out is how we can have that form of religion without the deliberate irrationality of most religious doctrine. 

And that is a difference between you and Dawkins. In ‘Breaking the Spell’, you did not expend much energy on the arguments for and against the existence of a deity, whereas Dawkins in ‘The God Delusion’ (2006) was much more focused on that question. 

Yes, but Richard and his foundation also played a major role in creating The Clergy Project, which I helped to found and which is designed to provide counsel and comfort and community for closeted atheist clergy. There are now thousands of clergy in that organisation and Richard and his foundation played a big role in setting it up. Without them, it would not have happened. So, Richard understands what I am saying about the need to provide help and comfort and the role of religion in doing so. 

You mentioned music earlier, which you clearly love as you devoted a long chapter in your memoir to it. So, what for you is the meaning of life without God and without a Cartesian homunculus?

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.  

My theory of meaning is a bubble-up theory, not a trickle-down theory. We start with a meaningless universe with just matter, or just physics, if you like. And with just physics and time and chance (in the form of pseudo-randomness, at least), we get evolution and we get life and this amazingly wonderful blossoming happens, and it does not need to have been bestowed from on high by an even more super-duper thing. It is the super-duper thing. Life: it’s wonderful. 

I completely agree. I have never understood the appeal of religion and mysticism and ‘spooky stuff’ when it comes to meaning and purpose and fulfillment, but there we are. In your memoir, you discuss the thinking tools you have picked up over the years. Which one would you most recommend? 

It might be Rapoport’s rules. The game theorist Anatole Rapoport formulated the rules for how you should conduct any debate. These are the rules to follow if you want constructive disagreement. Each of them is important. 

The first thing you should do is to try to state your opponent’s position so vividly and clearly and fairly that your opponent says they wish they had thought of putting it that way. Now, you may not be able to improve on your opponent, but you should strive for that. You should make it clear by showing, not saying, that you understand where your opponent is coming from.  

Second, mention anything that you have learned from your opponent—anything you have been convinced of, something you had underestimated in their case.

Third, mention anything that you and your opponent agree on that a lot of people do not. 

Only after you have done those three things should you say a word of criticism. If you follow these rules precisely, your opponent will know that you really understand him or her. You have shown that you are smart enough to have learned something from or agree about something with him or her.

What Rapoport’s rules do is counteract what might almost be called the philosopher’s blight: refutation by caricature. Reductio ad absurdum is one of our chief tools, but it encourages people to be unsympathetic nitpickers and to give arguably unfair readings of their opponents. That just starts pointless pissing contests. It should be avoided. 

I know the answer to this question, but have you ever been unfairly read? 

Oh yes! It is an occupational hazard. And the funny thing is that I have gone out of my way to prevent certain misunderstandings, but not far enough, it seems. I devoted a whole chapter of Consciousness Explained to discussing all the different real phenomena of consciousness. And then people say that I am saying that consciousness is not real! No, I say it is perfectly real. It just is not what you think it is. I get tired of saying it but a whole lot of otherwise very intelligent people continue to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no! He is saying that consciousness isn’t real!’  

Well, given what they mean by consciousness—something magical—that is true. I am saying that there is no ‘real magic’. It is all conjuring tricks. I am saying that magic that is real is not magic. Consciousness is real, it is just not magic. 

Do you have any future projects in the works? 

I do have some ideas. I have a lot of writing about free will that has accumulated over the last decade or so and I am thinking of putting that together all in one package. But whether I publish it as a book or just put it online with introductions and unify it, I am not yet sure. But putting it online as a usable anthology in the public domain is a project I would like to do.  

Further reading:

Darwinism, evolution, and memes

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’ – interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

Science, religion, and the ‘New Atheists’

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by A.C. Grayling

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Secular conservatives? If only…, by Jacques Berlinerblau

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the value of heterodoxy, by Matt Johnson

Meaning and morality without religion

What I believe – interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’ – interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell

The post Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett appeared first on The Freethinker.

Update, 26/3/23: Talk now available online here, courtesy of Central London Humanists.

Is Pastafarianism a parody or a religion? What is a ‘religion’ anyway? Can an internet movement originally intended as a joke be used to challenge the status quo of religious privilege in law and society around the world? And what happens when followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster start taking their ‘faith’ seriously?

We have returned to these questions several times in the pages of the Freethinker. Editor Emma Park has also written on similar themes for the New Humanist and podcasted about them for the National Secular society.

On 16 March, Emma will be giving a talk organised by the Central London Humanists to explore these issues further.

Meeting details

Registration: Register on Meetup here.

Date: Thursday 16 March 2023

Time: 6.30pm – 8.30pm, followed by drinks at a nearby bar

Venue: Old Diorama Arts Centre, Regent’s Place, 201 Drummond St, London, NW1 3FE

Cost: £3.00

All profits to the National Literacy Trust.

More about the talk

Emma will look at the origins of the Pastafarian movement, the evolution and distinguishing characteristics of its ‘churches’ around the world, and some of the legal cases to reach the European Court of Human Rights and courts in the US, Australia and Canada.

She will also consider the ways in which the symbols of the movement – colander, pasta crown, pirate hat – have been used in protest in a variety of contexts and in countries from Russia to Austria, from Canada to Australia.

Bibliography of Pastafarianism

What is ‘religion’? Strasbourg and the Pastafarians again, by Frank Cranmer

Religious Privilege 2 : 0 Pastafarians, by Niko Alm

Flying spaghetti monsters, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

The secular religion of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Mienke de Wilde and Paul Cliteur

Judging the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Derk Venema and Niko Alm

Pastafarianism and the meaning of religion, National Secular Society podcast with Derk Venema, Tony Meacham, and Tanya Watkins, Captain of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Australia

Pastafarian Month at the Freethinker

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The post Pastafarianism: Parody or religion? Freethinker talk, now available online appeared first on The Freethinker.