The Radical Atheist

You may be familiar with Douglas Adams. He’s the author of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” and several other great books. After he died a few years ago of a sudden heart attack his friends put together a book called “The Salmon of Doubt” from some of his unpublished writings. It’s something from that book that I thought would be fun to write about.

Adams called himself “a radical atheist.” He was raised a Christian and converted to atheism via his study of religion, science and logic and ultimately evolution.

A speech that he gave in 1998 at Cambridge University appears in ‘The Salmon of Doubt’. In it he presents his ideas about how religion was born, how it lives and its possible fate. What follows is my attempt to summarize those ideas. A later blog will include an evaluation of them.

We begin with early man who finds himself in a world conducive to the fulfillment of his needs and upon which he finds himself able to exert his influence to provide further for himself. He observes that his world provides for him his food, shelter, material for his tools and material upon which he can apply the power of his tools.

In time, having originated much himself, the clever early man ponders naturally upon his and his world’s origins. He is the possessor of a highly evolved brain and with it is able to study his surroundings and derive from his studies a complex understanding. The information available to him suggests a pattern of creation. He, a being of complexity, creates things of somewhat lesser complexity. Expertly applying the pattern, the man concludes that a being of greater complexity than himself must be his and his world’s creator. Further, having observed that his world is adapted so well to him, he concludes that the creator must have created the world for him.

As time passes, man’s descendants find themselves possessors of greater abundances of information about their world. As they do, the trustees of their ancestor's conclusions discover that they are unable to apply some of the pieces of incoming information to those conclusions. Unfortunately, their natures prevent them from adjusting. Certain conclusions are declared sacred, undefinable and unapproachable. Ultimately, it becomes forbidden to contradict certain traditions. Fortunately, information continues to flow in and in time begins to weigh so heavily against the traditions that they begin to falter.

There are three main perspective altering discoveries that lead to the downfall of the constraining traditions. The first is that the world lies in an obscure corner of the vast and startlingly empty universe. The second is that the world is made of particles existing in their own startlingly unpredictable and again empty space. Not only were the great and small shown to be lonely and oblivious of man, but they were shown to contain elements entirely hostile to him: Vacuum, radiation, and huge earth impacts - bacteria, viruses and nuclear detonations.

The third is that life itself, previously so astonishingly unexplainable and convincingly Devine is, in fact, marvelously explainable. The first and second were the results of tools which allowed man to see in ways previously impossible. Telescopes molded and verified theories of space and time as microscopes molded and verified theories of the very small. The third is remarkably similar - computers molded and verified theories of life. In much the same way that man was unable to see into the great and small unaided, man was unable to see into the extremely slow processes of the development of life unaided. Computers have not only made possible the modeling of such processes, but have themselves provided an example of them in the simplicity of zeros and ones evolving into extremely complex computations, visualizations and data storage and access.

It seems that man’s early application of a theory of top-down creation - high complexity to low complexity - has been turned on its head in favor of a proven bottom-up actuality – low complexity to high complexity. Not only was man's world not created for him, but in fact evolved with him.