www.valleyskeptic.com/dawkins.html
Religion's misguided missiles Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster Richard Dawkins A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple balli stic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could no t zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far aw ay as Boston. Co mputer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's sm art missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Tr ade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but th ey are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. In the second world war, before electronics became cheap and miniature, t he psychologist BF Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US a uthorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are ch eaper and lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feat s in Skinner's boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really could guide a missile to a distinctive landma rk at the southern end of Manhattan island. It just keeps on pecking at those two tall rect angles on the screen, from time to time a food reward drops out of the d ispenser, and this goes on until... Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance systems, but the re's no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And no such missile lar ge enough to do much damage could penetrate US air space without being i ntercepted. What is needed is a missile that is not recognised for what it is until too late. Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous markings of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel . But how do you smuggle on board the necessary gu idance system? You can hardly expect the pilots to surrender the left-ha nd seat to a pigeon or a computer. How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons? Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not signifi cantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. Humans have a proven track record in taking overn planes by t he use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers. The natural assumption that the hijacker ultimately values his own life t oo, and will act rationally to preserve it, leads air crews and ground s taff to make calculated decisions that would not work with guidance modu les lacking a sense of self-preservation. If your plane is being hijacke d by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants t o go on living, there is room for bargaining. A rational pilot complies with the hijacker's wishes, gets the plane down on the ground, has hot f ood sent in for the passengers and leaves the negotiations to people tra ined to negotiate. The problem with the human guidance system is precisely this. Unlike the pigeon version, it knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction. Could we develop a biological guidance system with the com pliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man's resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly? What we need, in a nutshell, is a h uman who doesn't mind being blown up. Even terminal ca ncer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming . Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? Nobody is that stupid, but how about this - it's a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we sucker them into believing that they are going to c ome to life again afterwards? Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasti ng fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the sort of young men w e need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72 virgin brid es, guaranteed eager and exclusive. Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattracti ve to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 p rivate virgins in the next. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make t he big lie sound plausible when it comes. As l uck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system o f mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round u p a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons. That is the exact opposite o f my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by deep grief and f ierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room t hat everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and s pecifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don' t mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but dev aluing one's own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that deat h is not the end. If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life hig hly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, jus t as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other ext reme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are conv inced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe , it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribul ations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicro us and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that na ive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions? There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophis ticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government , organisation, or priesthood, it is very very cheap. Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalisi ng of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certa inly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understa nd where that courage came from. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of science, Univ ersity of Oxford, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Unweaving the Rainbow.
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