Religion, Faith, Belief and Science $10.00 Payable To DR Romesh Senewiratne WPACAU2S - 534507

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Religion, faith, belief and Science

Dr Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam ©2018
romeshsenewiratne@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/HUBPublications
My knowledge is incomplete and splintered, and I know it. I have long forgotten most of the things I
have done and learned in the past, though scattered remnants remain accessible to my conscious
mind and active recollection. This is the case for everyone, because memory fades, and human
knowledge itself is splintered. The gems of truth are scattered between disciplines and nations, and
there are deep divisions in the academic disciplines devoted to the study of humans and human
health.
My training in medicine was conventional for the 1980s in Australia, and was splintered from the
outset. We studied anatomy and physiology as separate subjects, which were disconnected from our
studies of embryology, histology, biochemistry, sociology, psychology and various specialties of
medicine and surgery. These were supposed to somehow come together when we were confronted
with whole human beings with real problems who sought our medical assistance. We were called
the healing profession, but we did not learn much about health. We did learn an enormous amount,
if splintered, about disease and how to diagnose it. We also learned the rudiments of how to treat
these diseases with drugs, and when surgery was indicated rather than drugs, but we learned very
little about the natural healing mechanisms of the body or what we could do to maximise these
without resorting to drugs or surgery.
Over the past twenty years I have been theorising on the healing mechanisms that were ignored in
my training, but that can be explained in terms of established science. These have been centred on
what might be called the mind-body relationship and a holistic approach to health, but here I
hesitate, because both “mind-body medicine” and “holistic medicine” are often taken to mean
something very different to my own interpretation of these terms.
When I studied medicine there was already widespread criticism of the tendency of doctors to view
patients in terms of diseased body parts rather than whole people. This was reinforced by our
training. When we were first allowed on the medical wards we’d be given a list of patients with
“interesting signs” – examine Mr Smith’s liver, listen to Mrs Brown’s heart (to detect a murmur) or
palpate Mr Green’s enlarged kidneys. It is important that students gain these clinical skills, but it is
easy to lose sight of the human beings who are enduring the many indignities of being in hospital.
This was the opposite of what I, and many other doctors, regard as a holistic approach – approaching
patients (and I will use this dubious term for the moment) as a whole rather than dismembered
parts.
Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

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This tendency to splintering is inherent in the medical system, reflecting a historical division in
Western medicine between surgery and medicine. My degree was termed a bachelor of medicine
and surgery, and from the time of my hospital internship I had the choice of steering towards either
medicine or surgery. If I chose paediatrics, I could become either a paediatrician or a paediatric
surgeon; the two disciplines were necessarily separate. The knowledge and skills required for good
surgery and orthopaedics is very different to the knowledge and skills required to be a good
physician, though both medicine and surgery benefit from what are called “bedside manners”.
When I worked in the hospitals in the 1980s surgeons and orthopaedic surgeons in particular were
notorious for having poor bedside manners, while physicians prided themselves on having good
bedside manners as well as superior “clinical skills”. This was not necessarily the case. Some of the
medical professors had neither knowledge nor clinical skills, but had climbed the ladder in order of
seniority over the years. Some of the surgeons were not only rude to their patients but they were
also dangerously incompetent by today’s standards. I have been assured that the situation has
changed, maybe it has. I think doctors are generally more polite than they used to be in the past,
when the doctor’s gave “orders” which the patients were expected to “comply with” if they were to
be judged “good patients”. Old habits die hard, though, and in some areas of medicine such as
psychiatry, authoritarianism is still the order of the day. This is the opposite of what I mean by
holistic medicine, which is focused on the whole human being – mind, body and (dare I say it?) spirit.
Wikipedia has this to say about Holistic Health:
“The holistic concept in medical practice, which is distinct from the concept in alternative
medicine, upholds that all aspects of people's needs including psychological, physical and
social should be taken into account and seen as a whole. A 2007 study said the concept was
alive and well in general medicine in Sweden.
Some practitioners of holistic medicine use alternative medicine exclusively, though

sometimes holistic treatment can mean simply that a physician takes account of all a
person's circumstances in giving treatment. Sometimes when alternative medicine is mixed
with mainstream medicine the result is called "holistic" medicine, though this is more
commonly termed integrative medicine.
According to the American Holistic Medical Association it is believed that the spiritual
element should also be taken into account when assessing a person's overall well-being.”
Wikipedia the makes the startling claim, from the American Cancer Society website that, “Holistic
health is a diverse field in which many techniques and therapies are used. Practitioners of alternative
approaches may include many methods including colon therapy, metabolic therapy and
orthomolecular medicine.”
There is nothing holistic or scientific about colon therapy, metabolic therapy or orthomolecular
medicine, and most of what is passed off as “holistic” by the plethora of “alternative medicine”
practitioners is not what I mean by holistic. I mean merely that the whole is greater than the parts
that constitute it, when it comes to living organisms and ecosystems, and that reductionism is of
value only when it is integrated to gain a whole picture. Reductionism is vital for science, but so is
holism. This is the case for ecology, and also the case for human biology and psychology. We gain
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much information by looking at the detail down to the molecular and atomic level, but unless this
information is integrated into a whole we cannot hope to understand biology, which is intrinsically
holistic on many levels. Biology is also based on individuals; individual bodies with individual minds
which are subjected to the forces of natural selection and artificial selection, as well as the
interventions of intended healers. Some of these healers are medically trained, others are not. Some
are deluded about their ability to heal. Some are realistic about their limitations. Some do actually
heal. Some heal but only call it treatment or cure rather than healing. When I trained as a doctor it
was not regarded as acceptable to call oneself a healer. This term was reserved for quacks and
religious cranks.
The definition of Holistic Medicine by the Canadian Holistic Medical Association is closer to what I
mean as holistic medicine and reads as follows:
“Holistic medicine is a system of health care which fosters a cooperative relationship among
all those involved, leading towards optimal attainment of the physical, mental emotional,
social and spiritual aspects of health.
It emphasizes the need to look at the whole person, including analysis of physical, nutritional,
environmental, emotional, social, spiritual and lifestyle values. It encompasses all stated
modalities of diagnosis and treatment including drugs and surgery if no safe alternative
exists. Holistic medicine focuses on education and responsibility for personal efforts to
achieve balance and well being.
This Canadian website touches on the confusion I have encountered over the years.
“Other Terms Associated with Holistic Medicine
Alternative Medicine is often used by the general public and some healthcare practitioners
to refer to medical techniques which are not known or accepted by the majority
"conventional" or "allopathic" medical practitioners (usually M.D.'s). Such techniques could
include non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques such as Medical Herbalism,
Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Reiki, and many others. However, the term Alternative Medicine
can also refer to any experimental drug or non-drug technique that is not currently accepted
by "conventional" medical practitioners. As non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques
become popular and accepted by large number of "conventional" practitioners, these
techniques will no longer be considered Alternative Medicine.
Alternative Medicine refers to techniques that are not currently accepted by "conventional"
practitioners, but what is currently accepted is quickly changing. Even the definition of
"conventional practitioners" is quickly changing. Therefore, techniques that are now
considered part of Alternative Medicine will soon be considered part of "conventional"
medicine. The terms Holistic Healing and Holistic Medicine are slightly more stable than
Alternative Medicine and are therefore preferable.
Complementary Medicine is often used by "conventional" medical practitioners to refer to

non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques used as a complement to "conventional"
medical treatments such as drugs and surgery. The term implies that "conventional"
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medicine is used as a primary tool and the non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques are
used as a supplement when needed.
In many cases, properly chosen non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical healing techniques

plus properly chosen lifestyle changes can completely and safely heal both acute and chronic
illnesses. In other cases, "conventional" medicine is only needed in emergencies or when the
safer non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical methods fail. In some cases "conventional" medicine
will be a major part of a Holistic Healing Plan, but in some cases it is not needed at all.”
According to Wikipedia:
“Natural Healing usually refers to the use of non-invasive and non-pharmaceuticals

techniques to help heal the patient. When most people use the term Natural Healing, they
are usually referring to physical healing techniques only.”
What is physical healing?
When I checked on Google the only thing that came up for ‘physical healing’ was the power of
prayer, where the contrast is between physical healing from spiritual healing (whatever that means).
There are also assorted websites talking about Tibetan Buddhism and mind-body techniques for self-
healing. Again they are talking about healing the physical body (as opposed to the mind) and not any
particularly physical treatment, such as physiotherapy or massage.
I am interested in understanding natural healing mechanisms in order to promote natural healing.

By this I mean non-interventional treatments, avoiding the use of drugs or surgery (both of which
carry risks). This seems like sensible clinical medicine – to reassure patients that they will get better
by themselves (or that there is nothing wrong with them – if indeed there is nothing wrong them).
There are many things people can do to speed this process of recovery up, and other things they
may do which slow the recovery down, but even untreated, many maladies are temporary and are
healed by the body in time. It is these healing processes that I am most interested in, with the
related question of what suggestions can be made, in the course of a consultation, to promote,
rather than hinder these natural healing mechanisms.
In my experience there are several difficulties with promoting a non-interventional approach in

medicine. Patients come to their doctors for many reasons. Sometimes it is to check if they are ill in
the first place. What is sometimes called a “check-up”. Sometimes they already know or think they
know what is wrong with them, and have a clear idea what drug or other treatment they are after
(such as a skin cancer removed, or a wound sutured). At other times they present with symptoms of
which they are uncertain, regarding the cause or seriousness of their illness (whether it is, to use a
common phrase, “something to worry about”). This is where sound scientific knowledge and clinical
experience is essential. Experience is necessary to recognise what is normal from what is abnormal,
and the difference between normality and health. What is normal, meaning common or usual, is not
the same as what is healthy. Reassurance without carefully checking for serious disease is
irresponsible and dangerous. On the other hand instilling pessimism and hopelessness, or causing
unnecessary worry are known to be detrimental to short term and long-term health. It is a fine
balance that is necessary and this balance should be based on a sound understanding of human

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biology and psychology in sickness and health. The medical tradition has been, for obvious reasons,
focused on sickness, hoping that identifying and treating sickness with drugs and surgery will lead to
health (taken to mean the absence of illness).
“The benefits of natural medicine have been well documented. We can complement or act as an
alternative to conventional treatments. The essential difference is that natural medicine aim to
stimulate and strengthen the body's immune system. So you fight what ails you, by building your
defences. When required we combine our treatment with counselling, on all levels, helping you to
cope with life and giving you the mental strength to realise your health potential.”
Here is a brief description of the main form of natural medicine we offer:
Treatment modalities provided at Brisbane Holistic Health, three centres of which have opened in
the past 20 years:
ACUPUNCTURE: A 2000 year tradition of the Chinese. We stimulate neural points to treat muscular
pain, and various acute and chronic disorders and diseases.
HOMEOPATHY: A 19th century German orthodox medicine that uses the vaccination principle to
trigger the body's immune system response.
MEDICAL HERBALISM: A treatment that combine traditional herbalism with modern clinical training
and diagnostic skills.
NATUROPATHY: A combination of these and other natural therapies for more holistic treatment.
LIFESTYLE & DIETARY ADVICE: Treatment involving dietary changes to boost immunity, this with
healthy lifestyle planning to create a general well-being.
The main focus of Brisbane Holistic Health is on massage, spas and saunas, catering for the rich, and
seeking “corporate clients”.
Promoting disease and promoting health are opposites. What about promoting “disease awareness”?
When does promoting disease awareness become, in practice, promoting disease? There have been
many examples of doctors telling a patient that they would be dead in six months, but the patient
has been alive years later.

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One event I remember clearly was the death of our dog Smoky, when I was 13.
Charles M Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons made beagles famous around the world, but I got to know a
delightful beagle personally before I was introduced to the world of Snoopy, Linus and Charlie Brown.
When we arrived in Kandy from England in 1968, when I was eight, our first pet was a beagle, a
special breed that was said to be “blue”. My uncle Terence was breeding these hounds as attractive,
friendly pets rather than hunting dogs (they are smaller and have a grey and brown rather than black
and brown coat). We called him Smoky because he was not what could reasonably be defined as
blue. The blue beagle puppy pictured above seems to have blue eyes, but I remember Smoky’s as
being brown.
I loved Smoky as much as I loved any human, when I was a child living in Sri Lanka and attending high
school in the hill town of Kandy. When Smoky was run over by a bus, when I was 13, I cried for hours.
I could not stop sobbing; it was uncontrollable. I just lay on my bed and sobbed for hours. I had
never wept like this before, and I have never wept like it in the four decades since then (despite
many times I have been moved to tears over the years). This was a different level of grief – I was
devastated. Then I got angry. I blamed my new school-friend who had visited me at home to play for
the first time, and whom Smoky had followed down the hill to the main road, where he had been
run over by the bus. I never spoke to him again. Then I blamed the guy in charge of it all – God.
Of course I could have blamed myself; maybe deep inside that was indeed what I was doing, when I
projected my anger against my school-friend. I never thought to blame the bus driver or my dog
Smoky; instead I blamed the poor boy that Smoky followed down the hill. I thought he should have
brought him or led him back, rather than letting him walk onto the main road (which was about 200

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metres down a winding road that led up to our house, along which Smoky did not usually venture). I
didn’t think about the tragedy rationally; I was driven by overwhelming emotion.
As far as I can recall, after sobbing for a few hours I was able to get control of the actual sobbing and
recuperate from the trauma of the sudden loss. In medical school, years later, I learned about
normal phases of grief, including anger and projection. The experience, the most emotionally
devastating event in my life till then, taught me something about what it feels like to lose someone
you love; for to me Smoky was someone not something.
I gathered some consolation from the idea that Smoky was in heaven, since he was clearly an
innocent and good-natured dog. It did not cross my mind that dogs do not have souls; if humans
went to heaven when they died, life in heaven would be empty without dogs, cats, birds and
butterflies. My concept of heaven was of a place much like earth, but without mosquitoes.
I knew about mosquitoes because I had been bitten by them. When we first arrived in Sri Lanka from
England where I was born and spent my early years, every bite would erupt into an itchy blister.
After a few months this stopped, and I stopped reacting to the bites so dramatically, but I developed
an early dislike of these little creatures and absolutely failed to see why God would create such pests.
When I was eleven my mother showed me how to recognise malaria parasites in white blood cells
under the microscope and I learned about the life-cycle of the malaria parasite and how mosquitoes
spread the disease. I was told that malaria causes more illness and death than any other infectious
disease, and that it was only with the use of DDT after the Second World War, that Sri Lanka was
able to largely eradicate malaria. This increased my belief that mosquitoes were evil and they must
therefore be the work of the Devil. I had a clear polarity in my mind between what was good – God
and what was evil – the Devil.
When I was ten I noted in my journal a problem that had been on my mind. Maybe someone had
asked me; maybe I thought of it myself. “Why does God not get rid of the Devil?” I asked my mother,
as well as the school priest, Reverend Nallathamby. They gave rather different answers, which led
me in rather different directions. My mother gave the same answer that she gave to explain the 6
days of creation in the Book of Genesis – one day for God is many years for humans. This was a
curious answer. Did this mean that God hadn’t noticed yet and was talking his time to get rid of evil?
The school padre gave me the standard Protestant apologist answer that “man is given free will”.
This did not answer the puzzling problem of mosquitoes – the evil of mosquitoes is not caused by
man applying his free will in an evil way. What about earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters
– what they call “Acts of God”? Why does God do these horrible acts? Why does God kill nice dogs
like Smoky and spare all the nasty dogs that bite people?
One of the big gaps in my knowledge is the deliberations and arguments of Western philosophers. I
have never read the writings of the men (and few) women who are widely regarded as great, or
influential philosophers. The Internet is helping me gain a bit more understanding of what they’ve
been arguing about over the centuries, and this book is my attempt to reconcile what I believe about
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science, medicine and health with my limited understanding of philosophical discourse and jargon.
Frankly, I can’t understand their verbal arguments at times any more than I can understand quantum
mathematics.
Evolution and the principles of biology and chemistry are complex, but I find them much easier to
understand. This may be because they are essentially mechanistic and it is easy to think in a
mechanistic way. It is a natural way to think about things – effects have causes, and one can logically
ascertain at least some of these causes. I can’t think of anything happening without a cause, and in
this sense I am both a mechanist and a rationalist. It least I am, at this point in time, though it might
change. It might change even while writing this book.
Let me clarify what I mean by mechanist, but first I’d better check what the philosophers define
mechanism as. There’s no better place to start than Wikipedia:
“Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are like complicated
machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other.
Thus, the source of an apparent thing's activities is not the whole itself, but its parts or an
external influence on the parts. The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two
different flavors. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and
ambitions: the first is a global doctrine about nature; the second is a local doctrine about
humans and their minds, which is hotly contested. For clarity, we might distinguish these
two doctrines as universal mechanism and anthropic mechanism.”
Wikipedia continues to say that:
“There is no constant meaning in the history of philosophy for the word Mechanism.
Originally, the term meant that cosmological theory which ascribes the motion and changes
of the world to some external force. In this view material things are purely passive, while
according to the opposite theory (i. e., Dynamism), they possess certain internal sources of
energy which account for the activity of each and for its influence on the course of events;
These meanings, however, soon underwent modification. The question as to whether
motion is an inherent property of bodies, or has been communicated to them by some
external agency, was very often ignored. With a large number of cosmologists the essential
feature of Mechanism is the attempt to reduce all the qualities and activities of bodies to
quantitative realities, i. e. to mass and motion. But a further modification soon followed.
Living bodies, as is well known, present at first sight certain characteristic properties which
have no counterpart in lifeless matter. Mechanism aims to go beyond these appearances. It
seeks to explain all "vital" phenomena as physical and chemical facts; whether or not these
facts are in turn reducible to mass and motion becomes a secondary question, although
Mechanists are generally inclined to favour such reduction. The theory opposed to this
biological mechanism is no longer Dynamism, but Vitalism or Neo-vitalism, which maintains
that vital activities cannot be explained, and never will be explained, by the laws which
govern lifeless matter.”
“One of the first and most famous expositions of universal mechanism is found in the
opening passages of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). What is less frequently
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appreciated is that René Descartes was a staunch mechanist, though today, in Philosophy of
Mind, he is remembered for introducing the mind–body problem in terms of dualism and
physicalism.
“Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically
different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on
the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the
spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other. Nevertheless, his
understanding of biology was thoroughly mechanistic in nature:
"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and
imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as
naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the
arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels." (Descartes, Treatise on Man, p.108)
His scientific work was based on the traditional mechanistic understanding that animals and
humans are completely mechanistic automata. Descartes' dualism was motivated by the
seeming impossibility that mechanical dynamics could yield mental experiences.
—"Mechanism" in Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)
Given this definition I already have doubts as to whether I want to be a mechanist. But is the
Catholic Encyclopedia misrepresenting Descartes and the position of mechanism. What is the
alternative to mechanism – vitalism? Dynamism or neo-vitalism? What do all these isms mean, and
is the only alternative to agree with Descartes that living organisms are “automatons”?
I have read experts on Descartes saying that he is frequently misunderstood. One such
misunderstanding was Descartes famous claim that the pineal organ in the brain was the seat of the
soul – the point at which the soul communicated with the body. I read some years ago that though
he has often been ridiculed for this apparently absurd claim, Descartes was clear that the soul could
not be localised to any one part of the body and suffused the whole person. At the same time I have
read many times that Descartes is to blame for “mind-body dualism” in the West, and that the
Eastern traditions were not marred by such dualism. I cannot read French and cannot be bothered
reading the English translations of Descartes works at this stage, but I have a feeling that the
Catholic Encyclopedia says is not correct to say that that Descartes thought that humans are
“completely mechanistic automata”. If that were the case there would be no function for the
rational soul, which Descartes obviously believed in.
I haven’t read any of Aristotle’s work either (nor of any of the other great Greek philosophers, other
than a smattering of Plato’s Republic) but I gather, again from the Internet that the famous
philosopher theorised that there are three components to the soul – the nutritive, sensitive and
rational souls. Plants have only a nutritive soul, allowing them to grow and reproduce, animals have
a sensitive soul as well, but only humans have a rational soul (as well as a nutritive soul and sensitive
soul). I can see merit in this view, so I might take it as a starting point in my investigation into the
mind, soul, consciousness and healing.

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What is a rational soul and are dogs rational? Are butterflies rational, for that matter? Do butterflies
have souls? What is a soul, exactly?
Beagles were originally bred as hunting hounds, mainly by English gentlemen to hunt rabbits and
foxes. They have been engineered to have a medium size, with long, soft ears, a cute face and
friendly, even disposition to humans (including children) making them popular pets.
Knowledge of breeding animals to develop desired traits was acquired by various cultures in ancient
times, and was further developed in the Middle Ages. There were Siamese cats, and different
Burmese and Tibetan breeds, and Pekingese dogs in China. In the West there was a profusion of dog
breeds, widely different in size, shape and temperament. This was known long before Darwin
developed his theory of evolution of species by natural selection. Evolution of different breeds (with
different appearance) using deliberate or unnatural selection was assumed knowledge.
It is only recently that I have realised the controversy about evolution, science and religion. In
Australia it is not a matter that is discussed much. I had assumed that everyone sensible believed in
the basic tenets of evolution by natural selection. Having watched a number of debates on the
matter and watching with some amusement the antics of the British biologist Richard Dawkins, I
gather that this is not the case. A surprising number of people don’t believe in evolution.
These debates have made me realise that evolution is something I am deeply interested in, but had
assumed was quite compatible with religious beliefs. I myself rejected organized religion when I was
in my teens, but I remained interested in religions and religious traditions. I regarded the holy books
of various religions (none of which I could understand in their native languages) as based on myths
rather than true history. But what is true history? How true are the histories of various nations and
the history of the English nation and the English language? Who wrote – who writes – this history?
Of course there are many versions of history, but in my view there is only one true history – what
actually happened. No recollection or recording made by the few literate men and women of history
is exactly what happened, but with improved technology we are getting closer and closer to
developing methods of recording reality for posterity. The development of photography was one
such achievement, and I am a great fan of the art and science of photography. Photography has
transformed science, from studies of the cosmos to studies of the tiny organelles in cells. Film and
video recording transformed it again.
The Internet is one tool that was devised perhaps more with control and capitalism in mind than
emancipation that has truly revolutionized knowledge. I am a true believer in the benefits of the
Internet, because I remember how difficult self-directed research was before the Age of the Internet.
Though it is often criticised, I am also a big admirer of Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is a great place to
start when investigating a topic, but should never be where you stop if you want to know the truth.

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This is where things get difficult. How do you know if what Wikipedia says is true? That, of course,
depends on the quality of the references, which can be followed easily enough. But how reliable are
the references? That depends on the subject, and I have found wild disparities in how accurate the
Wikipedia entries are in areas in which I have some knowledge. Wikipedia reflects ‘mainstream’
thinking. Fortunately, mainstream thinking in science is mostly reasonable, though mainstream
thinking in politics and religion is not. Mainstream thinking in history depends on whether it is the
mainstream in India, Brazil, Russia, the USA, Canada, Nigeria, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Sri
Lanka or Australia, to some degree, but there are certain historical facts that people around the
world agree on. There are more facts that academics agree on than in the general public, though
there are key differences in historical perspective between historians of different nations.
There is general consensus that Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492 and the
general accounts of Columbus’s voyages as recorded at the time. Likewise there is general consensus
about the arrival of Captain James Cook in what he called Botany Bay in 1770, and that his sailed on
the good ship Endeavour. By 1770 the historical record was quite dependable in some respects, so
we can be confident that the ship’s naturalist was Joseph Banks, who collected biological specimens
to take back to London, where they would be studied at the Natural History Museum and experts at
Cambridge and Oxford. This was the distinctly European way of studying nature. Shoot it or catch it
in a net, kill it as painlessly as possible, and collect its carcass to study in a large room full of other
such carcasses, before dissecting the specimen and examining every part of it carefully under the
microscope. All the great naturalists were collectors who had their own personal collections of
butterflies, fossils, shells, beetles and other treasures. The Victorian fascination with collecting pretty
things extended to pretty insects, especially butterflies and stuffed tropical birds. New Guinea’s
gorgeous birds of paradise and birdwing butterflies were favourites, resulting in subsequent laws to
protect these species. Other favourites were the brightly coloured day-flying moths of Madagascar,
which found their way into glass display cabinets designed for the fashionable walls of Victorian
gentlemen’s homes.
These displays of butterflies fell out of favour with a changing aesthetic and morality about
displaying dead animals as decorations. In Victorian times it was fashionable for naturalists to go big
game hunting along with the other gentlemen and display the heads of wild animals as trophies. I
took a dim view of this, even when I was a child, but I made an exception when it came to my own
trophy collecting. I did not think of it as trophy collecting, and I’m not sure that I do now either. Let
me explain.
This is a famous passage from the pen of Alfred Russell Wallace, who collected butterflies in the
Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and New Guinea, following his voyage to the Amazon contributing to his
independent (from Darwin) development of the theory of evolution by natural selection:
“ I had taken about thirty species of butterflies, more than I had ever captured in a day since
leaving the prolific banks of the Amazon, and among them were many most rare and
beautiful insects, hitherto only known by a few specimens from New Guinea…I had the good
fortune to capture one of the most magnificent insects the world contains, the great bird-
winged butterfly, Ornithoptera poseidon. I trembled in excitement as I saw it coming
majestically towards me, and could hardly believe I had really succeeded in my stroke till I

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had taken it out of the net and was gazing, lost in admiration, at the velvet black and brilliant
green of its wings, seven inches across, its golden body, and crimson breast. It is true that I
had seen similar insects in cabinets at home, but it is quite another thing to capture such
one’s self – to feel it struggling between one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living
beauty, a bright gem shining out amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest.”
I can imagine Wallace’s delight. I felt the same excitement when I caught a rare, beautiful butterfly
as a child. Unlike Wallace I outgrew it, and can see the moral absurdity of waxing lyrical about the
beauty and wonder of a beautiful creature you are about to kill, for no reason other than that it was
unfortunate enough to appeal to your aesthetic sense. Though I see this now as a moral absurdity,
this was indeed my mentality when I collected butterflies, shells and birds, under the impression
that what I was doing was scientific, because it was based on scientific identification and
classification of the animals. At the same time, my collections, and the observations I made when
collecting butterflies, do have some scientific value.
I only saw a TV cartoon of Snoopy after we came to Australia in 1976, when I was fifteen. During the
seven years we lived in Sri Lanka there was no TV, and a restriction on foreign “luxury goods” like
records and books. There were some English books for sale in the few English language bookshops in
Sri Lanka, of which there was only one in Kandy. Kandy, once the capital of the Hill Kingdom, and the
last to stand before Britain conquered the whole of Sri Lanka (the Ceylon) was surrounded by forest-
covered mountains, and others that had been cleared for cultivation. My favourite place in the world
was Udawattekele (which translates from Sinhalese as ‘upper garden forest’), where I was allowed,
from the age of 13, to venture to alone, armed only with my butterfly net and binoculars. Closer to
home, and during our trips around the island, I also took my air-gun. My twin obsessions were
hunting butterflies for my butterfly collection (with my net) and hunting birds for my feather
collection (and attempts at taxidermy). I had started with butterflies when I was eleven (when the
whole family was involved in the hobby) but had become increasingly interested in killing birds and
shooting for the sheer pleasure of hitting and killing the target. I even practiced by shooting
butterflies on the wing, provided I was sure that it was a “common species”. I had no real
comprehension that what was a common species for me in Sri Lanka could be a very rare and
treasured species (or non-existent species) for butterfly collectors in other parts of the world. I
wasn’t much interested in other parts of the world. My obsession was to catch as many different
species as I could, identify them and pin them out. This process had a ritual, which became almost
automatic. I would stalk the butterfly after seeking a likely environment for butterflies, and use
various attack strokes with my net (which I made myself, with the help of my mother). I learned,
through trial and error, different strokes of the net depending on the particular flight patterns of
different families and species, and whether the insect was on the wing, or settled on a leaf or the
ground. Different situations required different approaches, since, as I discovered, butterflies have
good eyesight.

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Adding butterflies to my collection required me to kill them. My father’s friend Joyce, who
introduced the family to butterfly collecting, assured us that “squeezing the thorax of the insect
firmly kills it without much pain”. I assumed this to be the case until I started thinking about it. The
more I hunted butterflies with modified hunter gatherer instincts I observed more and more
evidence that the creatures I was hunting and killing were both sentient and likely to feel pain,
though with enormous differences from our own sentience and experience of physical and mental
pain.
The research my parents were conducting into the fluoride content of drinking water enabled me to
go butterfly hunting all over the island, especially in the northern and eastern dry zones, where we
usually stayed at irrigation bungalows that had been established during colonial times, when the
British had started renovating the ancient irrigation works that had been built under the patronage
of Sri Lankan kings in ancient times. I never learned much about the history of these kings or the
rice-centred civilizations they ruled over, but I did discover, from the personal experience of hunting
bird and butterflies, that the fauna varies according to geography. Some butterflies could only be
found in the northern Jaffna peninsula, where they were common, but not found in the south. Many
more were found in the south and east but not in the south. When we visited Horton Plains, in the
highest mountain range, I collected Red Admirals (Vanessa Atalanta), which are found in in
temperate Europe and North America but whose range extends to the mountains (but only the
mountains and not the coast) of Sri Lanka.
My reference text for identifying butterflies and determining how rare they were, which was my
foolish preoccupation, was The Butterfly Fauna of Ceylon by L.G.O.Woodhouse, the former
Surveyor-General of Ceylon and was published by the Colombo Apothecaries Company. The second
edition of this unique reference text was published in 1949. The Butterfly Fauna of Ceylon records
information about Sri Lankan butterflies caught before 1949, and I noticed, when I was collecting the
insects in the 1970s, that some butterflies that were recorded as “common” were proving to be
elusive. One whose name and appearance in the book caught my imagination was the “Monkey
Puzzle”. This is a photograph of this beautiful butterfly by someone who has adopted a more
humane way of studying butterflies than catching them and suffocating them by squeezing their
thorax.

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Krishna Mohan is a photographer and educator in Moodabidri in the Karnataka State of India who is
leading the way in ethology, though he does not claim such a title. Ethology is a discipline that had
escaped my attention until very recently. I hadn’t even heard the word, or that is the new scientific
discipline that studies “animal behaviour”.
This is his response to one of the interested readers on his photography website:
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ,
ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ (lycaenidae). ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ

ಅಅಅಅಅಅ 40% ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ. ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ. ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ, ಅ
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ.
ಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ 3 ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ.

ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ
ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ.
Its method of alighting is interesting – as soon as it lands, it turns around and waggles its tail
filaments, it also sidesteps for a while – all this is apparently to confuse a predator as to which side is
the head. This is a likely reason that the first naturalists may have named the species the Monkey
Puzzle.
ಅಅಅಅ

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ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ
Learnin the lingo
“Giddai, Howyagoin?” the boy asked me, a few days after I arrived in Australia, and had started year
11 at ‘Churchie’, as I found my new school was fondly called by its students.
I had no idea what he was saying. “What?” I asked.
“Giddai. You know, giddai, giddai…like Hawaii!”
I could see that he thought I was daft, or at best unable to comprehend English. What I could not
understand was Australian, and the uniquely Australian pronunciation of the old-fashioned English
greeting, “Good Day”. If you say “good day” to an Australian they will understand it, but they will
also recognise you as a foreigner. The Australian greeting is “giddai”, not “gidday” or “gooday”.
The appropriate response, if one wishes to be recognised as Australian and not English, is “I’m good”.
The English response is, “I’m well”. There is a difference between being well and being good, which I
have wondered about for many years. Did the Australian language betray its criminal heritage,
where the early colonists were eager to assure their neighbours that they were good, rather than
assure them about the state of their health?
Pissed and Fell Over (PFO) – pissed: English - drunk, American – angry.
Deadly – The concert was deadly
Mob - where are your mob from?
Gins, lubras and picaninnys
Racist placenames in Queensland
In Queensland's Alton Downs, near Rockhampton, people are debating if they should rename Black
Gin Creek Road. White Australians used to call an Aboriginal woman a 'gin', often implying that they

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were used for sexual services by the white men. Another 'Black Gin Creek Road' is near Bambaroo,
60kms north-west of Townsville, Queensland. Nigger Creek near Wondecla, QLD, is yet another
example.
The reason that people so ferociously advocate for keeping these racist beacons of Queensland's
past has a lot to do with the fact that many non-Indigenous Australians do not know what it feels like
to be called a 'gin' or a 'nigger' or a 'coon'.
—Amy McQuire, Aboriginal journalist [22]
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:179979/Amy_Humphreys_Honours_Thesis_2008.pdf
Amy Humphreys wrote in her 2008 social science honours thesis Representation of Aboriginal
Women and their Sexuality that: “colonists who engaged in prolonged personal and sexual
relationships with Aboriginal women were called a ‘gin-jockey’ or ‘combo’ and were
rejected by white society as morally degraded individuals”.
“In the Queensland Figaro in 1883 one contributor remarked that
he:
could, if necessary, tell of, and produce people who know of, hundreds
of instances where white savages have raped young maiden [sic] and
older gins — ay, and boasted of their deeds vain-gloriously (14 April
1883).
“Though asserted in these accounts, rape is not witnessed. Nonetheless it is still used to
highlight sexual exploitation, and more significantly the low status of Aboriginal
women in colonist society, with some according to Evans describing the rape of
Aboriginal women as ‘gin busting’ (1982:15). Aboriginal women’s sexuality was
defined by their sexual interactions with colonists, whose access to the wider colonial
discourse enabled them to construct and enforce their representation of sexual liaisons
with Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women however, had no such chance to represent
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themselves. For Aboriginal women, their sexuality was degraded and debated within a
colonial Christian discourse that claimed perversion whilst enjoying the benefits of
their dispossession and resultant poverty (Evans 1982:7-12).”
Evan, the source referenced in Amy Humphreys’ thesis is Queensland historian Professor Raymond
Evans, author of 1975 ‘And the Nigger shall disappear’… :Aborigines and Europeans in Colonial
Quensland, in
Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland.
1982 ‘Don’t you remember Black Alice Sam Holt? Aboriginal Women in
Queensland History’. In Hecate, 8(2.1):6-21.
Wiktionary: boong
English
Etymology[edit]
First used by soldiers in New Guinea. Suggested sources are
Malay boong (“brother”),[1]
Indonesian dialectal bung (“brother”)
A New Guinea native language
An Aboriginal Australian language.[2]
Previously the word binghi was used widely in similar fashion to the present-day use of the term
Negro for peoples of African ancestry, see titles from this booklist and also writings of Xavier Herbert
(e.g. in Capricornia), for example.
1930-35; < Dyangadi (Australian Aboriginal language of Macleay River valley, E New South Wales)
biŋay elder brother.
Collins dictionary:
binghi (ˈbɪŋɡɪ)
(Australian, offensive, slang) an Aboriginal person

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Noun
boong (plural boongs)
(Australia, slang, dated) A native of New Guinea.
(Australia, slang, very pejorative, ethnic slur) An Australian aboriginal.
Synonyms:
(Asian or dark-skinned person): Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel
(aboriginal): abo, Jacky
1959, Xavier Herbert, Seven Emus, 2003, page 5 — The term boong is originally Malayan, meaning
“brother”, but it doesn't mean anything like that in Australian usage.
From the Urban Dictionary:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Boong
Boong (114 up, 93 down)
Boong is a racist and derogatory word used to describe Aboriginal Australian people.
Contrary to what is already written, 'Boong' is derived from the word 'Boonga-boonga' which is
actually an Eastern Australian Aboriginal word (Eora and Cadigal People for example) that means
arse or bum and was originally used by the Aboriginal people as an insult to the colonisers.
Many Aborignal languages do not have swear words and, in Aboriginal Culture, the arse is the most
disgusting part of the body. The Aborignal People would taunt the europeans and call them Boonga's
(whilst flashing their black arses at them 'Braveheart ' movie style). Once the europeans realised
what they were being called they turned it around and began using the word to describe Aboriginal
People.
This is accurate information which was sourced from my personal lecture notes as well as papers
studied at the Bankstown campus of the University of Western Sydney. Diploma in Indigenous
Community Studies, Issues in Aboirignal Education, Native Title in Australia.

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Examples:
"Hahaha look at these silly white boys, their muskets can't shoot as far as we can throw our spears,
they can't get us!" (Then while baring their arses) "Boonga boonga boonga hahaha!"
"These Gubba's are spreading disease all over the country, nothing but boonga-boonga's!"
by The ONLY educated one July 16, 2009
Boong (1171 up, 599 down – top definition)
1.Native Australian 2.Person with flat, upturned nose. 3.Person used as target practice or human
shield. 4.Dole bludger. 5.Ingestor of methylated spirits, bagged wine and insects. 6.Cave dweller.
7.Person who lives like a bum or is dirty. 8.Semi-evolved being.
Examples:
1.If it weren't for boongs, this country would be richer. 2.Lets throw another boong on the barbie.
by John Barry November 20, 2004
boong (660 up, 296 down)
A defamitory word used against Australian Aboriginals, refering to their race.
Origin:
During the 1950's & 60's people would actualy chase Abiriginals off their propery with 4wd's, & it's
reported that 'boong' is the sound they make when they hit the bull bar.
Example:
Is that all those boongs do? sit in the city & scab cigarettes?
by cheffie0987 September 28, 2005
boong (431 up, 238 down)
derogatory term for a native australian, also known as aboriginal, abo and coon.
reputation of raiding petrol stations as a cheap way of getting high.

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Example:
hey john man, don't sell the metho to that boong, he's just gonna drink it.
by random February 12, 2005
Boong (377 up, 267 down)
a dark colored australian primate with a flat nose and low forehead, normally found in the desert or
redfern.Diet is known to include 2 stroke oil as well as varoius items found in the trash.The word
boong originates from the sound they make when they bounce off your bumper or bonnet
Hell wazza that boong has gone and left a dent in my bonnet
by gook hunter October 29, 2006
1988, The Bulletin, Issues 5617-5625, page 121 — They would doubtless have been amused to learn
that in New Guinea, where the term "boong" originated, it means "brother" and has a kinship with
the Indonesian "bung" and Thursday Island's "binghi".
Let me start with the school I was sent to by my parents, at considerable expense, in the belief that
it was the “best boy’s school in Brisbane”. This was debatable, even at the time, though the school
had a better academic record than it does nowadays. At the time I knew no better and assumed as
the school culture insisted, that it was not just the best school in Brisbane but the best school in
Queensland. No one was grandiose enough to suggest that it was the best school in the world, but
there wasn’t much talk about the rest of the world. There was little talk of the rest of Queensland,
either. Most of the Australian language that I learned at school was about sport and science. I didn’t
talk much about girls when I was at school, in fact I don’t remember talking about them at all,
though they were certainly on my mind.
The main things that were on my mind when I first arrived in Australia, when I was 15, were
butterflies. I had been an obsessive collector of butterflies since I was 10, and had caught about 150
different species from around Sri Lanka, when my parents had taken me on research trips, during
which I added to my growing collection. I was obsessed with catching new species and identifying
them in The Butterfly Fauna of Ceylon and ascertaining, on the basis of what Woodhouse had
written to be the case, how rare or common it was. I wanted to catch the rare ones.
According to the school’s current (28.5.2015) website:

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“Churchie’s rich history and longstanding traditions date back to 1912 when William Perry French
Morris founded the School at Toowong, before establishing it on the present site in East Brisbane in
1918. Canon Morris based the School’s ethos on the patron saint, St Magnus, a Viking Earl known for
his Viking strength of character and his qualities as an educated man with a Christian nature.
The School crest reflects the character of the Viking tradition – the shield and battle axes stand for
Viking courage and the axes are crossed to signify self-sacrifice. Churchie’s core values of scholastic
attainment, personal development, spiritual awareness and community service build on the
characteristics and attributes displayed by St Magnus.
The School’s Viking tradition is reflected in many aspects of school life – rowing boats are named
after Vikings; architecture represents Viking icons; and the School’s mascot, Eric, a Viking effigy
makes regular appearances at sporting events. In early days Canon Morris called on the boys to
‘finish hard’ in all their pursuits and this cry is often called on today. In Canon Morris’s first address
to parents he stated his aim was to ‘train characters as well as minds’. He encouraged boys to take
part in physical activity as well as their studies.
I would have thought that the Vikings are more famous for slaughtering, raping and pillaging others
than self-sacrifice; and it’s hard to see how crossed axes signify self-sacrifice either. I’m not sure that
self-sacrifice is such a good thing, anyway. Isn’t it what all these jihadis think they’re doing when
they strap on suicide bombs and what the Tamil Tigers thought they were doing when they blew
themselves up in the hope of becoming martyrs?
THE AUSTRALIAN OCTOBER 31, 2007 12:00AM:
“Robert Sharwood will be released on November 8 after serving one year of a 33-month sentence
for sexually assaulting and sodomising a boy of 13 in Brisbane 30 years ago.
The Brisbane District Court was told last November that Sharwood, then a 30-year-old priest,
groomed and seduced the boy, picking him up at the bus stop most school days and having oral and
masturbatory sex with him on 300 occasions. Anglican church officials knew of Sharwood's
pedophilia, but despite that knowledge appointed him chaplain at the prestigious Brisbane Anglican
private boys' school Churchie from 1985 until 2002.”
The Anglican church had “counselled” the priest, but allowed him to carry on as a priest and teacher
at Churchie – short for Church of England Grammar School.
Who Invented the Scientific Method?
Martyn Shuttleworth (Freelance writer, British living in Greece)

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The question of who invented the scientific method is extremely difficult to answer, simply because
it is difficult to pin down exactly where it started.
The scientific method evolved over time, with some of history's greatest and most influential minds
adding to and refining the process.
Whilst many point to Aristotle and the Greek philosophers as the prime movers behind the
development of the scientific method, this is too much of a leap.
Whilst the Greeks were the first Western civilization to adopt observation and measurement as part
of learning about the world, there was not enough structure to call it the scientific method.
It is fair to say that Aristotle was the founder of empirical science, but the development of a
scientific process resembling the modern method was developed by Muslim scholars, during the
Golden age of Islam, and refined by the enlightenment scientist-philosophers.
The Muslims and the Scientific Method
Muslim scholars, between the 10th and 14th centuries, were the prime movers behind the
development of the scientific method.
They were the first to use experiment and observation as the basis of science, and many historians
regard science as starting during this period.
Amongst the array of great scholars, al-Haytham (Alhazen 695-1040 AD) is regarded as the architect
of the scientific method. His scientific method involved the following stages:
Observation of the natural world
Stating a definite problem

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Formulating a robust hypothesis
Test the hypothesis through experimentation
Assess and analyze the results
Interpret the data and draw conclusions
Publish the findings
These steps are very similar to the modern scientific method and they became the basis of Western
science during the Renaissance.
Al-Haytham even insisted upon repeatability and the replication of results, and other scholars added
ideas such as peer review and made great leaps in understanding the natural world.
Europe and the Renaissance
The question of who invented the scientific method shifts to Europe as the Renaissance began and
the wisdom of the Greeks and Arabs helped Europe out of the Dark Ages.
Roger Bacon (1214 - 1284) is credited as the first scholar to promote inductive reasoning as part of
the scientific method.
Here, findings from an experiment are generalized to the wider world, a process used by almost all
modern scientists. His version of the Islamic scientific method involved four major steps, which lie at
the root of our modern method.

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Observation
Hypothesis
Experiment
Verification
This process continued with the Enlightenment, with Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) and Descartes
(1596 - 1650). Francis Bacon continued the work of his Renaissance namesake, strengthening the
inductive process. His method became:
Empirical Observations
Systematic Experiments
Analyzing Experimental Evidence
Inductive Reasoning
Bacon's inductive method was a way of relating observations to the universe and natural
phenomena through establishing cause and effect.
Descartes broke away from the model of induction and reasoning and again proposed that
deduction was the only way to learn and understand, harking back to Plato. His method was almost
the reverse of induction:
Establish First Principles
Deductive Reasoning
Interpretation
Mathematical Analysis
Reasoning Cycle - Scientific Research
Descartes believed that the entire universe was a perfect machine and that, if you knew the first
principles, derived from mathematical proofs.

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As an example, he deduced that planets revolved around the sun because they were floating in a
liquid 'ether' filling space!
Newton and the Modern Scientific Method
Any discussion about who invented the scientific method must include Isaac Newton, as the scientist
who refined the process into one that we use today.
He was the first to realise that scientific discovery needed both induction and deduction, a
revolution in the scientific method that took science into the modern age.
After Newton
There were many other great thinkers who refined the scientific method, including Einstein, Russell,
Popper and Feyerabend, amongst a whole host of other great thinkers.
However, it may no longer be correct to talk of the 'scientific method,' rather the 'Physics Method'
or the 'Psychology Method,' because each scientific discipline has started to use its own
methodology and terminology.
However, it is an old quote, but Newton's statement that, 'If I see further, it is only because I stand
upon the shoulder of giants', is very apt when looking at who invented the scientific method.
All of these great thinkers, and many others beside, had a great influence upon determining the
course of modern science as we know it.
So, when you ask 'Who invented the Scientific Method?" the answer is no-one, as the scientific
method is in a state of constant evolution and modification.
Sadly, if you were looking for a simple answer that will fit into the short answer section of a test, you
will not find it here!
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Wikipedia:
The Islamic Golden Age refers to the period in Islam's history during the Middle Ages when much of
the Muslim world was ruled by various caliphates, experiencing a scientific, economic, and cultural
flourishing.[1][2][3] This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the
Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in
Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world sought to translate and gather all the
known world's knowledge into Arabic.[4][5] It is said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid
Caliphate with the Mongol invasions and the Sack of Baghdad in 1258.[6] Several contemporary
scholars, however, place the end of the Islamic Golden Age to be around the 15th to 16th
centuries.[1][2][3]
Starting in the 16th century, the opening of new sea trade routes by Western European powers to
South Asia and the Americas bypassed the Islamic economies, and led to colonial empires, greatly
reducing the Muslim world's prosperity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new
knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.[2] To be termed scientific, a method
of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of
reasoning.[3] The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure
that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation,
measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."[4]
The scientific method is an ongoing process, which usually begins with observations about the
natural world. Human beings are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions about
things they see or hear and often develop ideas (hypotheses) about why things are the way they are.
The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways, including making further
observations about nature. In general, the strongest tests of hypotheses come from carefully
controlled and replicated experiments that gather empirical data. Depending on how well the tests
match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even
rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a general theory may be
developed.[1]

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Scientific Sages and Certainty
I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I have faith in this. I am certain about it. I also
realise that the rising of the sun is something of an illusion. The sun appears to ‘rise’ because of the
rotation of the earth. It rises only relative to my position. While it is rising to me, here in the
Antipodes, it’s setting on the opposite side of the world.
The famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper argued that just because the sun has risen every day
in the past does not mean you can be certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow. His argument
was that one cannot be 100% certain about anything, just closer to the truth, as various falsifiable
alternative hypotheses are disproved by observable, measurable evidence. This is the paradigm of
science I was trained to believe in – that science is what scientists do when they use the “scientific
method”, which constitutes developing and then testing falsifiable hypotheses with “empirical
evidence”. But what do all these terms mean? I must admit I have never really considered them
deeply. I just accepted Popper’s definition of science without even knowing who Karl Popper was, or
why his definition of science was taught to me at medical school.
Karl Popper (1902-1994), was an Austrian philosopher and psychoanalyst, who had a long and
distinguished career at the London School of Economics and University of London, where he played
a key role in shaping what scientists think science is in the West. According to Popper’s definition,
scientific theories must be falsifiable to regard them as ‘scientific’. Thus things, including the rising of
the sun tomorrow, become very likely but never certain. Whether or not we should trust our belief
that the sun will rise tomorrow, and regard it as certain, on the basis of inductive reasoning, was
questioned by Popper.
In Conjectures and Refutations (1963) the philosopher argued that:
“The sun may have risen again after every past day of which we have knowledge, but this
does not entail that it will rise tomorrow. If someone says: 'Ah yes, but we can in fact predict
the precise time at which the sun will rise tomorrow from the established laws of physics, as
applied to conditions as we have them at this moment', we can answer him twice over. First
the fact that the laws of physics have been found to hold good in the past does not logically
entail that they will continue to hold good in the future. Second, the laws of physics are
themselves general statements which are not logically entailed by the observed instances,
however numerous, which are adduced in their support. So this attempt to justify induction
begs the question by taking the validity of induction for granted. The whole of our science
assumes the regularity of nature – assumes that the future will be like the past in all those
respects in which the natural laws are taken to operate – yet there is no way in which this
assumption can be secured. It cannot be established by observation, since we cannot
observe future events. And it cannot be established by logical argument, since from the fact

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that all past futures have resembled past pasts it does not follow that all future futures will
resemble future pasts.“
Good philosophers raise questions that one hasn’t thought of. I had assumed that everyone
accepted that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that this is accepted fact. It is a true, correct belief,
and it is reasonable and wise to have faith that the sun will rise. If one did not believe the sun would
rise it would likely lead to irrational, unreasonable thoughts and actions. It came as a surprise that
Karl Popper, whose sage advice I was trained to respect, argued otherwise.
Liz Williams published a series of articles in the Guardian in 2012 titled “Karl Popper, the enemy of
certainty” in which she explained:
“The search for truth was, Popper considered, the strongest motivation for scientific
discovery. His role was to determine how we can ascribe truth to the claims made by science,
religion and politics…Following on from Hume and the latter’s rejection of induction, Popper
took a stand against an empiricist view of science, endeavouring to show via his rejection of
verificationism, and consequent espousal of falsificationism, how scientific theories
progress”.
The certainty of physicists in the mathematics of Newton had been apparently shaken by empirical
evidence supporting the relativity theories of Einstein. Popper saw a clear difference between the
physical sciences and the pseudo-science of psychology, in how physicists dealt with this new
evidence. Williams opines on Popper’s new perspective, after he became disillusioned with Marxism
and psychoanalysis, both of which he had once considered scientific:
“The scientist should reject theories when they are falsified. For instance, Einstein’s theories
generate hypothetical consequences which, if shown to be false, would falsify the entire
theoretical structure on which they rest. Psychological theories, however, in their attempt to
explain all forms of human behaviour, can continually be shored up by subsidiary
hypotheses. Exceptions can always be found. On a Popperian model, psychology resembles
magical thinking: if an expected result does not manifest, explanations can be found which
explain that failure away, and thus the core theory remains intact. This, Popper considered,
is a weak point – the theory cannot be properly tested if it is inherently unfalsifiable.”
Popper migrated to England immediately after the Second World War (in 1946), after first migrating
from Austria to New Zealand (in 1937), where he had been lecturer in philosophy at the University of
New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society and its
Enemies. His denunciation of Marxism as “pseudoscientific” along with his similar denunciation of
Freudian (and Alderian) psychoanalysis, doubtless contributed to his popularity in Britain and its
Western capitalist allies, such as Australia, where Popper was the only philosopher who was
mentioned during my medical studies. In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to England to
become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Three years later,
in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London.

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While In New Zealand, Popper met the famous Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles, with whom
he speculated on the problem of free will. In 1984 they co-authored The Self and Its Brain: an
argument for interactionism. Free will has been one of the enduring problems of neuroscience,
psychology and philosophy, with some arguing that free will is an illusion, and others insisting on its
importance. I’m not sure what “interactionism” is, other than it postulates mind-body dualism,
where the mind and body are separate, interacting entities. Or something along those lines.
Sir John Eccles was another great scientific mind and acknowledged modern sage, who won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1963 for his role in the discovery of synaptic transmission in the brain.
Eccles had previously thought that all neuronal conduction was electrical, but his research with
Bernard Katz established the fact that acetyl choline (ACh) acts as a neurotransmitter, carrying
signals across synapses, the junctions between outgoing axons and incoming dendrites on nerve
cells (neurons). This discovery was fundamental to the modern development of ‘biological’
psychiatry and neurology.
Rather curiously, Eccles regarded himself and all of us as “spiritual beings”. In a lecture on the Unity
of Conscious Experience in 1965 he ended with the words:
“The primary data upon which I build everything even as a scientist is myself as a conscious
being and ultimately as a spiritual being. By virtue of our brains and the tremendous wealth
of input from sense organs and the muscles that our brains control, we receive from this
world and we give to this world as individuals, but each of us in a sense has a conscious
existence as a spiritual being apart from this world. Let me conclude by stating again that I
believe there is a great unknown mystery in each one of us, in every living person.”
Popper revealed his views on religion only on the condition that his 1969 interview on the subject be
released only after his death. He criticised both organized religion and “some forms of atheism
which are “arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected”. He sensibly argued that “the whole thing
goes back to myths which, though they may have a kernel of truth, are untrue”. “Why then” he asks,
“should the Jewish myth be true and the Indian and Egyptian myths not be true?”
Though I don’t know a lot about him, in my view Popper was a sage and so was Eccles, but even
sages are fallible. According to the ancient Greeks, a sage was a philosopher who attained the
wisdom they sought. In the Greek tradition being a sage was a masculine pursuit, and all the people I
think of as sages are men. It helps if they have long white beards, but beards are not necessary since
I also think of Confucius, Gautama Siddhartha (the Buddha) and the monk Mahanama (the founder
of the Jain religion) as “sages”. I have no idea whether they wore beards, but I think of them as sages,
nevertheless. I think of the famed Islamic physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and the Belgian anatomist
Andreas Vesalius as sages, and Charles Darwin too (who had the added advantage of a long white
beard). I think of sages as wise old men, in other words. Wise, but fallible, old men.
I recently asked my 82-year old mother what she thinks “sages” are – “wise old men” she answered.
This may be where I gained the idea. I asked her why she thought sages were all men, and what wise
old women were called. “Witches, I suppose” was her surprising answer. Surprising because she
doesn’t believe in witches, and surprising because of the insight she showed into how wise women
have been regarded historically. She added the reason that there had been so many more prominent
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male than female intellectuals in history was a reflection of relative educational opportunities for
women, and the fact that women have looked after the wise men and their children, while they
made their names as sages.
I do not think of Jesus of Nazareth or the prophet Mohammed as sages. Jesus because he did not live
long enough to gain the wisdom of years and Mohammed because the “revelations” he had do not
strike me as particularly wise. Another key difference between Jesus and Mohammed is that
Mohammed founded the Muslim religion as a reinterpretation of Christianity, which was already the
official religion of the Roman Empire; this was very different to the essentially pacifist, communalist
teachings of Jesus. Mohammed expanded his empire by personal conquest, the Christian Empires
expanded because of the military conquests of the Roman Empire. I do not think of the Emperor
Constantine as a sage, though some might. I’m not too sure about King Solomon, and am loath to
think of Moses as a sage (though both were said by their followers to be wise and are usually
depicted with beards). Deciding on who and who is not a sage is a subjective decision, deciding on
who, with my subjective, mental retrospectoscope, I personally consider has been notably wise, in
human history. But I confine myself here to wise old men, and most of the wise people I have got to
know well over the years have not been men. They have been women.
As my mother wisely observed, wise women weren’t called sages – they were called “witches”. The
wisdom of the wise women was called “folk wisdom” rather than Scientific Knowledge, which was
argued about by men in male-dominated universities. Witches were treated very differently to sages.
The wise women were wise because they were less inclined to argue than the cantankerous old men,
who wanted to “win debates” like they had when they were younger men. Old men sometimes grow
bitter and hardened, including old men in universities over the centuries. Some of these old men
built empires over which they could rule, pushing their cherished theories with all their
argumentative might. Max Planck famously observed that “science advances one funeral at a time”.
Max Planck was another acknowledged scientific sage, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918,
for his development of quantum theory. Quantum theory revolutionized human understanding of
atomic and subatomic processes, just as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized the
understanding of space and time. Most people would accept that Einstein too was a sage, as well as
a “genius”. Not all sages are regarded as geniuses and many widely acknowledged geniuses did not
live long enough to be regarded as sages. Many geniuses are, in fact, children – who are given the
terms like prodigy or “gifted”. Geniuses are clever, but they are not necessarily wise. But what is
wisdom, and what is its relationship to knowledge?
The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge. Considering all of human
knowledge, scientific knowledge can be regarded only as a part, a small part. There is also historical
knowledge and philosophical knowledge, cultural knowledge and legal knowledge in addition to
religious knowledge and personal (and interpersonal) knowledge. All these types of knowledge have
a bearing on the acquisition of wisdom, which is as elusive for scientists, I suspect, as for anyone else.
I’ve been trying to get my head around philosophical jargon, in order to gain some insights into and
understanding of wisdom. According to Wikipedia, “the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper
(1902 -1994) is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in

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favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be
falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinised by decisive experiments. If the outcome of an
experiment contradicts the theory, one should refrain from ad hoc manoeuvres that evade the
contradiction merely by making it less falsifiable. Popper is also known for his opposition to the
classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first
non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy."
What does this mean? What do “inductivist” and “justificationist” really mean? I assume that
inductivist means someone who uses inductive as opposed to deductive reasoning, but surely there
is room, indeed need, for both types of reasoning in scientific thinking? Both ‘inductivist’ and
‘justificationist’ register with red lines on Microsoft Word spellcheck. I’d never heard of
“justificationism” until I read the Wikipedia entry on Karl Popper. Maybe I, too, am a justificationist?
According to the Live Science website:
Inductive reasoning is the opposite of deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning makes broad
generalizations from specific observations. "In inductive inference, we go from the specific to the
general. We make many observations, discern a pattern, make a generalization, and infer an
explanation or a theory," Wassertheil-Smoller told Live Science. "In science there is a constant
interplay between inductive inference (based on observations) and deductive inference (based on
theory), until we get closer and closer to the 'truth,' which we can only approach but not ascertain
with complete certainty." Dr. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, is a researcher and professor emerita at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Does this mean that complete certainty is never justified?
According to Wikipedia: “the theory of justification is a part of epistemology that attempts to

understand the justification of propositions and beliefs. Epistemologists are concerned with various
epistemic features of belief, which include the ideas of justification, warrant, rationality, and
probability. Of these four terms, the term that has been most widely used and discussed by the early
21st century is "warrant". Loosely speaking, justification is the reason that someone (properly) holds
a belief. When a claim is in doubt, justification can be used to support the claim and reduce or
remove the doubt. Justification can use empiricism (the evidence of the senses), authoritative
testimony (the appeal to criteria and authority), or logical deduction.”
Is belief that the sun will rise tomorrow warranted? Is such a belief rational? Is it just probable or is it
certain? From my unphilosophical perspective, belief that the sun will rise tomorrow (and the day
after that) is very much justified. What’s more, I have faith that it will be so, and believe that this
faith is also justified.
I am also aware that some of the more questionable beliefs I, and many other people, hold are held
on the basis of “authoritative testimony”. Over the years I have questioned this authoritative
testimony and the holy books of medicine, of which there are only two that spring to mind. These
are Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, my father’s professional bible and the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), commonly referred to as the “psychiatrist’s bible”.
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Maybe one could regard Gray’s Anatomy as the anatomist’s bible, though I have never heard it
referred to as such.
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine is not treated as a bible by all physicians, though it is widely
respected as an authoritative textbook. To my father, though, it is the absolute authority on any
matter that it covers. He purchases each new edition, so he can “keep up” with the “progress of
medicine”. It is the reference text he trusts on matters of medicine and health. My father also
regards himself as a Christian, but he has much more faith in “Harrison’s”, as he calls it, than he does
the Christian Bible. I think this relative faith in the collective opinion of American medical professors
is very much warranted. The contents of Harrison’s Internal Medicine may be slanted towards the
interests of the pharmaceutical industry, but they are much more reliable than the writings of any
religion, and more likely to lead to healing than prayer to any god of the present or past. Though
fallible, unlike ancient religious texts Harrison’s Principles of Medicine is updated every couple of
years, and there is clear progress in the knowledge it contains.
The DSM is also updated with new editions, though not as frequently as Harrison’s Principles of
Internal Medicine. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and has been
the standard reference text for the application of labels of “mental disorder” in the USA, Canada and
Australia since the 1950s, when it was first published. Again, it is not intended to be regarded as a
Bible, but it often is. The rival ICD (International Classification of Disease) is not worshipped quite the
way the DSM is in Europe and the UK, since it is produced by the World Health Organization and not
the APA. The APA has many features of a religion, and of a cult. The DSM also updates its
information, but not in the way that Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine does, which modifies
its contents on the basis of new scientific evidence. The notable characteristic of the DSM is that
new editions have more and more disease labels and broader criteria for their application.
By Popper’s definition the DSM and ICD are not scientific. They do not contain falsifiable hypotheses.
In fact, they do not provide hypotheses at all. They present, instead, an open-ended system of
classification based on consensus opinion of psychiatrists, influenced by various lobby groups that
campaign for “changes in classification”. Hence homosexuality stopped being classified as a mental
disorder in the 1973, while the new ‘disorder’ of ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ (ADHD)
was created with the publication of the DSM IV in 1994. Though it has “statistical” in its title, the
DSM does not provide psychiatrists with any numbers, statistical or otherwise. What are presented
are stereotypes of various “disorders”, with additional categories for people who do not satisfy the
“diagnostic criteria”. There is a label for everyone, though psychiatrists use their discretion about
who to apply a label to, or whether to apply a label at all. They are, predictably, less likely to use the
same diagnostic criteria on themselves.
The American physician who edited the first five versions of Harrison’s Principles of Internal
Medicine, Tinsley R Harrison (1900-1975) was another modern sage. The first edition was published
in 1950 and it remains, in its current edition, one of the most widely read and regarded textbooks in
medicine. Harrison was a cardiologist, but his textbook covered all aspects of internal medicine, and
was a monumental work of integrative science. He integrated medical knowledge from various
specialties in one textbook, with a focus on the clinical diagnosis and clinical course of various
diseases, their pathogenesis and associated pathophysiology and treated and untreated prognosis.

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He did this by organizing for experts in the various specialties to write chapters, which he collected
together and edited. The textbook did not cover certain diseases, though. Notably it did not say
much about diseases and illnesses of the mind and what can be done about it. It said nothing about
how the mind influences the body; even the well-known placebo effect is not discussed. Mind-body
dualism is deeply embedded in the medical sciences. Psychiatry deals with the mind, neurology with
the brain. This, it has been said, has resulted in a mindless neurology and a brainless psychiatry.
The great sages of the East had very different perspectives on the mind to the modern scientific
sages of the West. This is seen most famously in the philosophy of the sage Gautama Siddhartha,
who came to be known as the Buddha or “enlightened one”. The Buddha did not talk about the
brain, but he had a lot to say about the mind. He was focused on virtuous thinking and conduct,
analysing these in excruciating detail, in developing a method to alleviate suffering. Suffering, he
theorised, was an inevitable part of life, and could only be permanently eliminated when the long
cycle of reincarnation (samsara) reaches an end (nirvana). The cycle of rebirth, which each individual
has endured since time immemorial, is caused by good and bad karma (merit) which accrues from
previous lives. This was the previous Hindu belief, which the Buddha reinterpreted, removing the
inequities of caste (which was justified by karma in the Hindu tradition) and introducing the concept
of anatman – meaning no-self or no-soul (absence of atman or soul in Sanskrit). The concept of
anatman has been debated ever since, since it seems inconsistent with belief in reincarnation, and is
sometimes interpreted as meaning no unchanging soul or self. The Buddha taught that one can
achieve liberation (moksha) from samsara by ridding oneself of attachment or craving for this or
future lives. It was liberation by extinction. At the same time, the Buddha’s teaching about how to
reduce suffering by “the Noble Eightfold path” (right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood,
effort, mindfulness and concentration), his promotion of the virtues of metta (loving kindness),
karuna (compassion), muditha (rejoicing in the joy of others) and upeksa (equanimity) and
identification of greed, hatred and delusion as vices seems like sound, profound philosophy to me.
According to the Buddha:
Metta embraces all beings
Karuna embraces all those who suffer
Muditha embraces the prosperous
Upekkha embraces the good, bad, loved and unloved, pleasant and unpleasant.
The Buddha didn’t sound as if he was uncertain about things. But then he wasn’t a scientist, he was a
philosopher, and a wise one. He urged, though, that people maintain scepticism about even his
enlightened words, and judge for themselves on the basis of reason and experience. His teachings,
though, have become religious doctrines – the word dharma, meaning both Law and Truth – is used
to refer to what the sage is said to have said. He, as far as I’m aware, did ask his followers to discuss
and debate the dharma, not follow it blindly. There is deep wisdom in Buddhism, part of the wisdom
being that the founder of the religion did not regard himself as infallible, a god or channelling the
word of God.

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I have only mentioned deceased sages so far, but there are many sages and other wise people alive
today. There are probably as many more wise women, young men and children than sages (wise old
men) on the planet, but they are not the ones whose talking heads and hands are most apparent on
the miracle of the Internet. Historically, it is supposedly wise old men who have shaped the
dominant religions, as well as field of philosophy. They have also dominated science.
One modern sage of the Internet Age who looks and sounds very sage indeed is the philosopher
Daniel Dennett, who is blessed with a long white beard and a deep voice, as well as an incisive
intellect. After watching some debates featuring Dennett and watching him in friendly discussion
with like-minded atheists, I took some time off to read a book by the wise man that I bought some
years ago, but hadn’t read. It is titled “Kinds of Minds”, and I read it immediately after I had finished
“The Amazing Hypothesis” by Francis Crick, which again I bought many years ago but had read only
bits of. Both books are about the “problem” of consciousness, which until now I had not thought of
as much as a problem. I didn’t really know what the problem was, let alone why it is called “the hard
problem of consciousness”. Now I do – the hard problem is the question of “how do brains produce
consciousness?”
Crick and Dennett both agree that brains produce minds, but they have very different approaches to
the subject matter, Crick taking a more reductionist, ‘scientific’ approach and Dennett taking a more
philosophical approach. This is to be expected, since Crick calls himself a scientist, while Dennett
calls himself a philosopher. My impression is that Dennett’s arguments are just as scientific as Crick’s,
and considerably more modest (as reflected in the respective titles of their books). Dennett argues
that free will is an illusion, and that consciousness cannot be localised to any part of the brain; he
argues cogently that consciousness exists as a continuum from the simple sentience to the
complexity of human consciousness according to the complexity of brains, which function primarily
as “information processors”. Crick argues, in the postscript of The Amazing Hypothesis, that Free
Will (he uses capitals) does indeed exist, and “is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus”
though “in practice, things are likely to be more complicated”, and “other areas in the front of the
brain may also be involved”. Crick also argues that “it is better to avoid a precise definition of
consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition”. “Until the problem is understood
much better, any attempt at formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or
both”, he explains. The model Crick promotes is based on computer analogies, in which the
individual neurons (nerve cells) provide the circuits through the network of interconnected nerve
fibres (axons and dendrons) forming neural networks. He presents his “astonishing hypothesis” that
the brain produces the mind, as alternative hypothesis to dualism:
“It is difficult for many people to accept that what they see is a symbolic interpretation of
the world- it all seems so like ‘the real thing’. But in fact we have no direct knowledge of
objects in the world. Instead, people often prefer to believe that there is a disembodied soul
that, in some utterly mysterious way, does the actual seeing, helped by the elaborate
apparatus of the brain. Such people are called ‘dualists’ – they believe that matter is one
thing and mind is something completely different. Our Astonishing Hypothesis says, on the
contrary, that this is not the case, that it’s all done by nerve cells.”

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In The Understanding of the Brain (1973), Eccles summarized his philosophical position on the so-
called 'brain-mind problem'. He announced that “he fully accepted the recent philosophical
achievements of Sir Karl Popper with his concept of three worlds. I was a dualist, now I am a trialist!
Cartesian dualism has become unfashionable with many people. They embrace monism in order to
escape the enigma of brain-mind interaction with its perplexing problems. But Sir Karl Popper and I
are interactionists, and what is more, trialist interactionists!” According to Eccles the three worlds
are very easily defined and that in this classification, there is nothing left out: it encompasses
everything that is in existence and in our experience. All can be classified in one or other of the
categories enumerated under Worlds 1, 2 and 3.
World 1, according to Popper comprises “physical objects and states” (inorganic matter and energy,
biology and artefacts such as tools, books, works of art and music); World 2 referred to “states of
consciousness” (perception, thinking, emotions, dispositional intentions, memories, dreams, creative
imagination) and World 3 was “knowledge in the objective sense” (records of intellectual efforts,
philosophical, theological, scientific, historical, literary, artistic, technological and theoretical systems
such as scientific problems and critical arguments).
The idea of trialism hasn’t caught on. Interestingly, trialism is the name given to a political
movement in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century, which may be where Popper got the
word (though not the concept, which was quite different). In 1986 the British philosopher John
Cottingham, an expert on Rene Descartes, tried introducing the idea of trialism again, as an
extension of Descartes dualism (between mind and body) adding the third category of ‘sensation’.
This hasn’t been a successful meme either.
Popper and Eccles three worlds paralleled a more widely accepted division – a political one –
between First, Second and Third Worlds. This made their model even more confusing, since 1st, 2nd
and 3rd worlds mean something very different to their World 1, 2 and 3. Popper and Eccles were
proud sons of the 1st World, which was the Cold War enemy of the 2nd, or Communist World. The 3rd
World produced the raw materials, while the 1st and 2nd Worlds manufactured them into weapons
and sold them back to the 3rd World. While the scientific sages were pontificating on consciousness
and free will, the 1st and 2nd Worlds were fighting proxy wars in 3rd World nations in which the
civilians of the 3rd World were slaughtered with bombs designed with 1st world scientific knowhow
and built in 1st world factories.
The sage who has most consistently and powerfully opposed 1st world and American militarism is
undoubtedly Noam Chomsky, who was also a pioneer in the cognitive revolution, when American
psychologists became interested in the mind again, after abandoning it in favour of measuring
‘behaviour’. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio credits Chomsky with beginning the cognitive
revolution with a 1957 paper; from what I have read elsewhere Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal
Behavior by B F Skinner was a key publication in this “revolution”. Damasio says that the cognitive
revolution led to a resurgence in psychological interest in emotions, which had been neglected since
the 19th century work of Darwin and William James, and the early 20th century work of Freud.
Apparently the Society for Neuroscience, founded in 1971 only had its first symposium on emotions
in 1995 and emotion only “caught on” in the 1990s.

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While it is true that Skinner and the behaviourists had ruled that subjective aspects of emotions
could not be studied scientifically, it is not true that there was no focus on emotions during the
earlier parts of the 19th century, before the supposed revolution when behaviourism was abandoned
in favour of more enlightened “cognitive science”. The anatomist James Papez proposed a neuronal
circuit for emotions (later termed the Papez Circuit) in the 1930s, after observing the effects of
injecting rabies into the brains of cats. There were studies at the time to identify what parts of the
brain were necessary for consciousness and emotional reactions by surgically excising bigger and
bigger chunks of brain from living cats, and sectioning their spinal cords at various levels to observe
their behaviour. Prior to this, the physiologist Walter Cannon developed, after experiments on dogs,
the influential doctrines that the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is involved in
“fight or flight” while the parasympathetic branch is concerned with “rest and digest”. Obviously
fight and flight are emotional responses to anger and fear. Cannon coined the term ‘fight or flight’ in
1915; over the past century it has become one of the most successful memes in physiology.
From what I understand of the scientific method as espoused by Popper, the discipline can only
disprove, or falsify, theories, and not prove them. A falsifiable hypothesis that has not been falsified
yet stands as “the best fit” for the observable facts until it is superseded by a better hypothesis. The
classic example is the “progress” from the mechanistic theories of Newton to Quantum Theory.
Einstein’s theories superseded those of Newton, in the same way that the germ theory of infectious
disease superseded the idea of spontaneous generation (or punishment by God or the work of the
Devil). This is the blurb.
Philosophers seem to love isms. They talk about materialism and rationalism, nihilism,
humanitarianism and functionalism. Popper, who has been described as the “enemy of certainty”
termed his new approach “critical rationalism”. I don’t know what most of the isms mean – this is
something that philosophers presumably debate about. Then there are the religions that are termed
as isms – Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism and others. Buddhism and Confucianism are regarded
by some as religions and others as philosophies, since they do not concern themselves with gods or
the supernatural. Some of the critics of science also speak of scientism – science as a religion. Often
scientific opinions are accepted on faith – faith in the pronouncements and opinions of recognised
experts. Most people base their scientific opinions on what they have been told by others, not on
the basis of their own experimentally tested hypotheses. They have faith in the system to come up
with reasonable hypotheses and test them. How reasonable is this faith?
I am certain about many things. I am certain, for example of the existence of the sun, and of the
earth and the people who inhabit it. It seems curious to me that solipsism ever existed as a school of
philosophy. The idea that I am only certain of my own existence and my own mind is preposterous,
as far as I am concerned. I am just as certain of many other things. I am certain that there is a blue
plate in my kitchen, and that there is a gum tree outside my window (though you may not be, since
from your reasonable perspective I may be mistaken or lying). I can’t see the plate, but I can see the
tree if I look to the right. Even if I’m not looking at the tree I am certain of its existence, and of the

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existence of other trees. In percentage terms, I’d rate my certainty of these things as 100% or close
to 100%. I am also close to 100% certain that my skin is dark because of the secretion of melanin by
melanocytes and that Vitamin D is synthesised from cholesterol (though I base this belief on written
sources that I trust, rather than on any experiments I have done, or could do, myself). Does that
make me a “certaintist”?
Though I am reasonably certain, if not 100% confident, that my skin, eyes and brain contain the
pigment melanin, I am less certain about what melanin is, what its functions are, how and why it
evolved, or its chemical composition. I do have theories about all these things, but I regard them as
hypotheses, rather than beliefs or “knowledge”.
The difference between belief, knowledge and delusional conviction were brought home to me in a
recent phone conversation with an elderly gentleman who rang me to seek my advice about his 41-
year-old daughter, who had been in and out of mental hospitals since her twenties, having initially
becoming psychotic (I was told) after a week-long fast, when she drank only water. She had been
diagnosed with schizophrenia and was on a particularly toxic antipsychotic drug, clozapine. The old
man was convinced his daughter became “psychotic” whenever she smoked even tobacco cigarettes,
and wanted to know what I thought about this. When I questioned him about it he admitted that he
used to go on fasts “for religious reasons” before his daughter did the same. I recognised him to be
suffering from religious delusions himself when he asked me if I thought she might be ingesting a
“cigarette demon” which was “possessing” her.
I tried reasoning with him, after clarifying that he was talking about tailor-made tobacco cigarettes
from a packet, rather than cannabis. He said that this is indeed what he was talking about and that
no one believed him, and that he knew there was no scientific evidence to back what he was saying.
I said, “I realise you believe that the cigarettes are sending her mad, but..” He interrupted me, “I
don’t believe, I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” Convincing this gentleman, over the phone,
that what he thought he saw with his own eyes was not true was not easy. I’m not sure how
successful I was, though I suggested some alternative explanations, such as that it was only when
she got angry enough to defy his rule that she not smoke that she went and got some cigarettes,
which he was interpreting as insanity. He doubted this, and asked me if believed in demonic
possession. It was his daughter who was in the mental hospital and not him – in fact he had
“guardianship” of her, under mental health laws. I gained the impression that the most important
thing this woman needed was to be able to take control of her own life, and gain some
independence from the domination of her father. It may be that she, too was deluded; if so I had
identified a likely source of some of her delusions.
The Not-so-astonishing Hypothesis of Dr Crick
The Astonishing Hypothesis, subtitled the Scientific Search for the Soul was published in 1994, and
was the culmination of Francis Crick’s investigations into the visual system (mainly of monkeys, and
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mainly of the neurons of the cortex) in support of what he regarded as an “astonishing hypothesis” –
that “you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal
identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and
their associated molecules”. Crick then progresses in his reductionist model to the ridiculously
reductionist assertion that “As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it, “You’re nothing but a pack
of neurons”.
Crick says that “this hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be
called astonishing”, hence the title of his book. The title of his book and Crick’s “astonishing
hypothesis” amused many who found nothing surprising, let alone astonishing, about his hypothesis.
It has always been a core assumption of neuroscientists that the mind is produced by the brain and
the behaviour of the cells in it. It is plain wrong to assume that all the brain’s activity is confined to
the neurones (which form a minority of the cells in the nervous system, which are mostly glial cells,
whose function is less well understood). It is also not true that you are only your brain or only your
mind. You are, obviously, your body as well.
Crick’s hypothesis is not, in other words, original. He is restating an old assumption, that the mind is
produced by the brain. I have assumed this to be the case for as long as I can remember. When I
mentioned Dr Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis” to my 80 year-old mother, she said “isn’t the mind
the same thing as the brain?” I was quick to assure her that they were quite different things,
revealing my own dualism. “The brain is a soft organ inside the skull, while the mind is your thoughts
and thinking” I explained. My mother agreed with this separation between mind and brain, and this
has allowed us to continue clearer discussions about both. It is obvious that the brain affects the
mind and the mind affects the brain, but they are not the same. I know I have a mind due to my
subjective experience of it, but I know I have a brain only because science tells me I have one, and I
believe, for many reasons, that this is true. I have seen what I was told was a CT scan of my brain,
but it is possible (though very unlikely) that it was someone else’s scan and not my own. I would
venture to say, on reflection, that I am 100% certain I have a brain, and so does everyone I have met
who has talked to me or that I have seen talking. They also have minds, a fact of which I am certain,
though I’m not certain that they all have souls. I’m not sure that I have a soul either, though it seems
like a nice thing to have, in addition to a mind.
What, I asked my mother, after establishing the difference between mind and brain, is the soul? She
said she hadn’t thought about it. Dr Crick, who died in 2004 aged 88, never discovered what the soul
was either. My mother thinks, though, that when she dies, her soul (whatever that is) will live on,
and be united with God (whatever that is) in heaven (wherever that is). Maybe this belief gives her
comfort, but others believe that they may go to hell and face eternal damnation. Maybe this
possibility is in the back of my mother’s mind but she hasn’t told me about it. It is certainly deeply
rooted in Christian theology.
At the beginning of his introduction to his “astonishing hypothesis” Crick poses a question and
answer, apparently a “Roman Catholic catechism” which reads as follows:
Q: What is the soul?
A: The soul is a living being without a body, having reason and free will.
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How can there be a living being without a body, with or without free will or reason? The science I
studied assumed that all living things have bodies, and it is by their bodies that they are classed as
different species. Some of these species have brains, others do not. I think of consciousness as an
emergent property from organized networks of neurones, and both reasoning and free will to be a
product of consciousness (and therefore activity of the brain, but also activity in the rest of the body).
The brain is part of the body, but there are important unanswered questions about how the brain
affects the rest of the body (and vice versa). These questions are not explored in The Astonishing
Hypothesis, which has little to say about reason or free will, either. It is mainly about scientific
experiments investigating visual perception, using the brains of macaque monkeys.
Apart from its misleading title, I found Crick’s book an interesting read, and I discovered some things
I didn’t know about the primate visual system. I was interested in his theory that consciousness was
the result of reverberating circuits between the cortex and thalamus; this (like the less-than-
astonishing hypothesis itself) is not his own but the theory of the neuroscientist Donald Hebb. This
was Crick’s best explanation for the ‘mind-body problem’, as it’s called, the ‘problem’ of dualism –
the apparent duality of the brain and consciousness.
Crick doesn’t talk about the soul at all, despite claiming to be writing about the scientific search for it.
He doesn’t mention the Greek word for soul – psyche – or its relationship with the disciplines of
psychology and psychiatry, less the big differences of opinion and contradictions in both disciplines
(both of which claim the mantle of being scientific). He doesn’t even discuss language – a
characteristic that is regarded as integral to the Aristotlean idea that humans have a “rational soul”,
while animals only have a “sensitive soul”. Dr Crick doesn’t mention Aristotle at all, or the fact that
the classical Greek philosopher was the first to explicitly define the soul of plants, animals and
humans in the Western tradition, on which Dr Crick’s own science is based. Less surprisingly he
doesn’t mention soul music, or the rapture we experience with many types of music. He doesn’t
mention rapture or ecstasy at all (or any emotional reactions, even those we feel in response to
what we see, though he claims to be starting with the visual system in order to solve the puzzle of
consciousness). Neither does he mention near death experiences, telepathy or any scientific
observations that challenge the assumption that minds can exist only with brains. His model is
reductionist, though he does refer to neural networks. This model is, at best, connectionist. There is
nothing wrong with connectionism, as long as it is done with awareness that the whole may be
greater than the sum of its parts, as far as function is concerned. A holistic perspective is essential in
the neurosciences as it is in science generally.
Crick partly addresses criticisms such as my own at the end of the book:
“Many of my readers might justifiably complain that what has been discussed in this book
has very little to do with the human soul as they understand it. Nothing has been said about
that most human of capabilities – language – nor about how we do mathematics, or problem
solving in general. Even for the visual system I have hardly mentioned visual imagination or
our aesthetic responses to pictures, sculpture, architecture and so on. There is not a word
about the real pleasure we get from interacting with Nature. Topics such as self-awareness,

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religious experiences (which can be real enough, even if the customary explanations of them
are false), to say nothing of falling in love, have been completely ignored. A religious person
might aver that what is most important to him is his relationship with God. What can science
possibly say about that?”
Crick’s justification for these omissions in his model – and it is a model – is that “such criticisms are
perfectly valid at the moment, but making them in this context would show a lack of appreciation of
the methods of science. Koch and I chose to consider the visual system because we felt that, of all
possible choices, it would yield most easily to an experimental attack. The book shows clearly that
while such an attack will not be easy, it does appear to have some chance of success. Our other
assumption was that, once the visual system is fully understood, the more fascinating aspects of the
“soul” will be much easier to study.”
After he published The Astonishing Hypothesis, Dr Crick gave an interview in which he explained his
astonishing hypothesis. This interesting interview is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzs2aAcfOTQ
It is evident that Crick’s model is entirely mechanistic, based on the belief that the brain can best be
likened to a computer, but with vastly greater capacity for parallel processing: “your brain is a
machine that is processing information”. Crick himself went into the neurosciences later in life, after
achieving fame and the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his co-discovery of the DNA molecule. (An
example of the scientific establishment ignoring the contributions of women can be seen in the work
of Rosalind Franklin that led to Watson and Crick’s discoveries).
In the 1990s the neurosciences were booming, according to Crick, though he doesn’t say what all
these neuroscientists are doing. He said that there had been an increase from 1000 to 23,000
neuroscientists; it’s hard to see a corresponding increase in factual knowledge about the brain and
mind. Dr Crick’s research methods give an indication why. The primary method for studying the
mind, in Dr Crick’s paradigm, is to study the effects of electrically stimulating individual neurones
and arrays of neurones in anaesthetised animals. He hoped future the neuroscientists of the future
would continue this line of research using animals with “smooth cortices” like rats and monkeys,
rigged up with an array of hundreds of electrodes, each measuring the activity of an individual nerve
cell, and the development of chemicals that could block various aspects of nerve transmission. These
could be watched, he said, on a TV screen to observe their patterns.
Crick believed that consciousness was the result of “reverberating neural circuits” based on the
theories of the Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb (1904-1985), who is famous for developing
Hebb’s Law that "Neurons that fire together wire together." Actually what Hebb said was more
nuanced: “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes
part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that
A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.” This is now termed “Hebbian learning” and is
considered one factor in the learning process when viewed on a cellular level.
Hebb also studied rats, chimpanzees and humans, during his long career. He began by instituting
behaviour change programs in schools, moving to studying the effects of raising rats in darkness and

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measuring the weights of their brains, before studying the effects of the removal of parts of the
brain in humans, and the psychological effects of sensory deprivation and brainwashing on university
students. The latter became controversial when it was revealed that the sensory deprivation
experiments were secretly funded by the CIA as part of the MK Programs, which involved
neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychologists in Canada and the United Kingdom and USA, in some
of the most respected academic institutions in the world. The MK programs also involved such things
as “psychic driving” under the effects of LSD, as described by Dr Stan Grof, who was himself injected
with LSD and placed under bright strobe lights, while wired to an EEG machine to measure the
electrical patterns on his scalp. Grof had an “out of body experience” which led to his subsequent
career researching and theorising on what he calls “non-ordinary states of consciousness”. Grof
continued studying the effects of LSD after becoming Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland
Psychiatric Center at the University of Maryland in the USA, until LSD research and use were banned.
Hebb said later that, “The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the
problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing.... The chief
impetus, of course, was the dismay at the kind of "confessions" being produced at the Russian
Communist trials. "Brainwashing" was a term that came a little later, applied to Chinese procedures.
We did not know what the Russian procedures were, but it seemed that they were producing some
peculiar changes of attitude. How? One possible factor was perceptual isolation and we
concentrated on that.”
Hebb postulated that consciousness was the result of reverberating circuits in the brain, and that
these circuits are active even when the subject is asleep or unconscious. Crick looked for these
reverberations, but didn’t find them. He explains that “most of the experiments have been done on
animals under anaesthetic, so it’s not surprising we haven’t seen the reverberation”.
Crick cheerfully adopts the attitude of Popper that we can’t be certain about anything. This was
picked up by the interviewer who observes, in response to Crick’s inability to define consciousness
that “Every answer needs to be qualified…there seems to be no simple way to state a simple and
obvious theory about anything”. Crick, famous for his discovery of DNA, answers, “If you ask
anybody in the field to define a gene, they have great difficulty finding a definition. And that’s
because we believe it’s all evolved by natural selection - a lot of molecular gadgetry and so on - you
don’t expect there to be a crisp answer as in Newtonian Mechanics. Biology is very different from
physics in that respect.”
Crick argues that “you have to understand conscious and unconscious processes in the brain before
you get too deeply into free will”, though he does suggest a specific area in the brain that has been
identified to be important in decision-making (the cingulate gyrus) as a possible “seat of the Will”
that fed into the higher, planning levels of the motor system. It seems to me that free will and will
(or volition) are not quite the same. The will may seem free, but be the result of previous learning or
instinct. One can decide something without an accompanying physical action, and one can act
without consciously deciding to move. These decisions and actions are dependent on consciousness,
but Crick doesn’t define consciousness.

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Here Antonio Damasio comes to the rescue. Damasio is mentioned by Crick in his postscript on Free
Will, as having “also arrived at the same idea” that the “seat of the Will had been discovered at or
near the anterior cingulate” after studying a woman with brain damage who had apparently “lost
her Will”. Unlike Crick and others who are evasive about what consciousness is, Damasio is clear
about his definitions, and therefore easier to understand.
In a 2011 TED talk titled “The Quest to Understand Consciousness”, Damasio defined consciousness
as “that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams or go under anaesthesia”. He
explained that “we all woke up this morning with the return of our conscious mind”. This is easier to
handle. It is clear that our consciousness is lost when we are asleep, but that our brains remain
active, especially during dreaming sleep. Our memory is also active when we are asleep, and while
sound asleep our senses still remain subliminally active, in that we can be woken from sleep by loud
sounds, bright lights or being touched on our skin. While we are asleep there is also amazing healing
that occurs routinely. Our fatigue, from hours of wakefulness (and that increases with duration of
wakefulness) disappears during sleep, in a way more profound than conscious relaxation can achieve.
Sleep is vital for physical and mental health. But what is sleep and how does sleep heal?
The TV rarely brings good news. Tonight was different. There is a conference in Sydney encouraging
the reinvigoration of Indigenous languages in Australia and the Pacific Region. The good news is that
at last, there are moves to teach indigenous languages throughout Australia, and that the promotion
of Aboriginal languages has resulted in a dramatic reduction in youth suicide, as well as unexpected
lucidity in people who had been diagnosed with mental illness. They have found that even languages
that had supposedly “died out” a hundred years ago are being spoken again, in everyday
conversation. The bad news is that of 250 known Aboriginal languages, 110 are endangered.
I didn’t learn much about the sun at university, other than that it was by far the commonest cause of
skin cancer, of which melanoma – a cancer of pigmented melanocytes - is the most dangerous.
Melanocytes are so named because they contain the dark pigment melanin, which protects against
damage from the rays of the sun. Queensland, where I studied medicine, is said to be one of the
“melanoma capitals” of the world. The promotion of skin creams to protect against the “harmful
rays of the sun”, which we are told, are called “ultraviolet” (not to be confused with ultra-violent), is
standard public health policy in Australia, despite the fact that the original inhabitants of Australia
have no need for such creams (and neither do I nor my children, and all the other dark-skinned
inhabitants of multicultural Australia). We also learned that sunlight is important for the healthy
development of bones, due to its effect in stimulating vitamin D production in the skin, and that lack
of sunlight causes rickets, characterised by weak bones that bend in children, resulting in bowed legs
and other deformities, which have been known to develop more easily in dark-skinned children
brought up in temperate regions where there is less sunlight.

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How can I be certain that there is such a thing as melanin, or that it is produced by melanocytes, or
that there is such a thing as vitamin D and that it is also produced in the skin under the influence of
radiation from the sun? The answer is that I have faith in science and the scientists who made the
relevant discoveries. But how justifiable is this trust in the scientific endeavour and the scientific
establishment as a whole? Is there a difference in the science of the East and the science of the West,
or is it only the science of the West that constitutes Real Science? Is there such a thing as
“mainstream science” versus “alternative science” or is alternative science an oxymoron? I will
consider these questions later; first I will consider the question “what is belief”? When can belief
reasonably be regarded as certainty, and when can belief be reasonably regarded as knowledge?
Where does probability come into the equation? How true are texts, and how much can various
authorities be trusted, regardless of whether they wear the mantle of scientist or holy man? Is
scientific thinking incompatible with religion, and to what degree has science become a religion?
The Four Horsemen of the non-Apocalypse
The “Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse”, as they have been called – the biologist Richard
Dawkins, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the neuroscientist Sam
Harris and the journalist Christopher Hitchens - have been leading the charge on the side of “rational”
science against “irrational” religion. They maintain that science is self-critical, and scientists are
generally prepared to discard cherished hypotheses when confronted by evidence that disprove
them, while religions preach that blind faith is a virtue in itself. The Four Horsemen of the Non-
Apocalypse are the prophets of the New Atheism, and have many fans. They focus, though, on the
Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I have never heard them mention Buddhism,
Confucianism, Zoroastrianism or Hinduism in their attacks on religious belief and promotion of
atheism (though Hichens and Dawkins imply that no one sensible believes in polytheism any more).
The name itself was not adopted by these prophets but by their legion of fans and is an ironic
moniker based on the Apocalypse and Day of Judgement prophesied in the last book of the Christian
Bible – Revelations.
Hitchens, who died in 2011, used to point out that there is nothing new about atheism, but the
arguments of these intellectuals are, to some extent new (including their arguments against new
theological arguments that have arisen from quantum and cosmological discoveries). Some critics
have accused the New Atheism of being a religion itself, and its proponents of attacking other
religions with a religious zealotry, in proselytising their particular brand of atheism and “scientism”.
Others have pointed out that the leaders of the New Atheism are all male and all white, and provide
a white, male perspective.
The British philosopher John Gray, himself an atheist, wrote in the Guardian in 2008 that:

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“Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much
as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt
that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are
certain that one way of living – their own, suitably embellished – is right for everybody.”
In Gray’s view, “Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, in the long run, the advance of
science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than
a theory based on evidence”.
The famous linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky has criticised the New Atheists as being
“religious fanatics” who believe in the State Religion, rather than the other religions, and there is
some truth in this, when it comes to Christopher Hitchens, who declared himself to be an “anti-
Theist” in addition to an atheist and “adeist”. This terminology, used by Hitchens, differentiated
between deism and theism (though both have the same linguistic roots, meaning God – from which
also the Greek god Zeus is derived). The New Atheists are not all as vehemently anti-religion as
Hichens was. Richard Dawkins has described himself as a “spiritual atheist”, making the distinction
between “spirituality” and “religiosity”. One can be spiritual, in this view without being religious, and
presumably religious without being spiritual, but what do the words religious and spiritual actually
mean? What constitutes a religion? What is a spirit, and what is the difference, if any, between
spirit and soul? Does atheism necessarily infer disbelief in spirit and soul? What can science
contribute to an understanding of spirit, soul and mind (if indeed these are different things)? Does
thinking scientifically and rationally lead inevitably to atheism?
The Four Horsemen of the non-Apocalypse, all true believers in the steady progress of science and
the falseness of religion, argue that religion is not only false, but that it is harmful to society.
Dawkins argues that the falsity of religion is itself harmful, and that his aim is to promote rational
thinking, and the scientific method. He expresses the hope, which he admits may not be realistic,
that humankind will abandon religion in favour of Science.
Dawkins says that, "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in.
Some of us just go one god further." Hitchens uses the same argument – since the dawn of
civilization people have worshipped thousands of gods, which are mutually exclusive. By the laws of
probability, Hitchens argues, the likelihood of ones chosen god being the true god is less that one in
a thousand. Though they win applause from their many fans, these arguments are somewhat flawed;
though the many religious debaters that have challenged the Four Horsemen have had difficulty
identifying some of these flaws because of their own beliefs in the Biblical Word. It is easy to argue
against the morality (and factuality) of the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, pointing to
their support of slavery and the subjugation of women and children alone. It is not so easy to argue
that all religion is harmful, as the New Atheists maintain.
Examples of behaviour and teachings that with a modern understanding of morality we can clearly
recognise as evil, abound in the Old Testament. King Solomon, famed for his supposed wisdom,
advised that to “spare the rod” was to “spoil the child”. The story of Abraham being prepared to
make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac, because the “voice of God” or an “angel of God”
commanded him to do so, and that it demonstrated his “faith” or “belief”. That this is both bad and

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mad is easy to establish on logical and humanitarian grounds, without recourse to science.
Philosophy has more to say about morality than science does. The book of Leviticus has Moses
getting angry that his soldiers had spared the women and children in their genocide of the
Midianites, ordering that the women be killed, and all the male children, but the virgin girls be
spared death, to be used as slaves. This is obviously evil. Science doesn’t enlighten us on these
matters, philosophy may, but the reason more of us know not to beat our children is not because of
science. It is not because of religion either. Maybe it is because of natural human morality.
Dawkins sums up the God of the Old Testament as “the most evil character in fiction”. In The God
Delusion he writes:
“The God of the Old Testament is a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive,
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capricious, malevolent bully.”
Hitchens uses similar terms – cruel, vindictive, murderous, judgemental and genocidal. I have a long
agreed with Hitchens and Dawkins on this assessment of the God of the Old Testament, but I am not
so convinced that religion is at the root of as much evil as they claim. I am also cognisant of what
religion, ritual and even theology have contributed to human civilization. The world would be a
poorer place without the magnificent architecture of cathedrals, temples and mosques and the
various religious festivals that add colour, music and even mystery to human culture. Religious
sculptures can be extremely beautiful, even sublime, and date back to the dawn of human
civilization and long into prehistory. At the same time, there has been much evil done in the name of
religion. The inquisitions of the Catholic Church, the Crusades, and the monstrous behaviour of the
Spanish conquistadores in the Americas are obvious examples. When the Portuguese, enthused with
Catholicism and hatred of idolatry, arrived in India and Sri Lanka in the 1600s, they wasted no time in
reducing to rubble as many Hindu and Buddhist temples as they could. Monstrous brutality was
committed on “heathens” by the Spanish and Portuguese soldiers, justified in the name of spreading
the Word of Jesus.
Having been baptised and confirmed as an Anglican Christian, and even winning the “Christianity
Prize” for many years running at a church school in Sri Lanka I am familiar enough with the contents
of the Old and New Testaments to wonder whether I should choose, as an object of worship,
Yahweh, the jealous and vengeful god of the Jews or Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and
wisdom. Both are mere metaphysical concepts to me, but I believe in many metaphysical concepts,
why not gods and goddesses? As long as I know they are metaphysical concepts and not
supernatural beings. Maybe one can worship Goodness – or God – without any thought of reward.
Can one worship Wisdom, or Truth, or Beauty as metaphysical concepts with or without agency? Is it
reasonable to define what one worships as one’s god (or gods)?
The “four horsemen of atheism”, as they have been called are the British biologist Richard Dawkins,
the British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett and
the American neuroscientist Sam Harris. Their discussion (not debate) on the evils of religion, hosted
by Hitchens his home, has become a classic among their many secular fans.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRLYL1Q9x9g
Hitchens argues that there is nothing new about atheism, and this is true. Atheism has a long
philosophical tradition in both the East and the West. The New Atheists focus only on the atheism of
the West and never mention, for example, the Hindu Cārvāka, a materialistic and atheistic school of
Indian philosophy, that had developed a systematic philosophy by 6th century CE. Cārvākas rejected
metaphysical concepts like reincarnation, afterlife, extracorporeal soul, efficacy of religious rites,
other world (heaven and hell), fate, and accumulation of merit or demerit through the performance
of certain actions. Cārvākas also refused to ascribe supernatural causes to describe natural
phenomena.
The ‘four horsemen of atheism’, pit science against religion, which is argued to be harmful and
ignorant of the facts. Dawkins is rightly concerned about fundamentalist Biblical Creationism being
taught as an ‘alternative theory’ to evolution by natural selection, but extends his criticism to
religion more generally and decries faith as a reason for believing anything. It could be said, though
that he has more faith in science than an objective assessment of this all-too-human endeavour
warrants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50pq71Bmils
Dawkins courted acrimonious debate when he titled his polemic against religion “The God Delusion”.
Needless to say, believers in God were incensed. I was not. I was amused and entertained by his
arguments. They confirmed what I already thought – that man created many gods in their own
image, rather than God creating man in His image. Many years ago I had rejected the idea of a
supreme deity that was masculine in any way. I also agreed with Dawkins that humankind had
progressed – meaning improved – in morality in spite of rather than because of religion.
Hitchens, a British journalist who migrated to the USA, was famous for his arguments in favour of
atheism and against all religion. He was particularly damning of the Judao-Christian tradition and
Islam, but he regarded all gods to be man-made and false. The Christian and Jewish god of the Old
Testament (Yahweh) he saw as tyrannical, cruel and even genocidal, judging by the accounts in the
Bible. He observed that the story of Jesus of Nazareth was an endorsement of vicarious human
sacrifice, something to be condemned. He made the powerful argument that it is better to be good
for humanistic reasons than to avoid hell or be rewarded in a life after death. After publishing God is
Not Great – how religion poisons everything he engaged in a series of debates on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great
Hitchens debating Christian theologist William Lane Craig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRWUAQm2MS4
Craig presents three arguments for the existence of God, which he claims is necessary for any
objective system of morality. These are
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1. The cosmological argument

2. The teleological argument
3. The moral argument
In his 2011 debate with Sam Harris, Craig expanded on these arguments and Harris struggled to
counter them. Few scientists have the combined oratorical and debating skills of William Lane Craig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwhgPjPCpL8
According to Wikipedia’s entry on dialectics, debates are won through a combination of persuading
the opponent; proving one's argument correct; or proving the opponent's argument incorrect. By
such a definition there was no clear (to me) winner of the debate between Sam Harris and William
Lane Craig. Neither convinced his opponent. Though I agreed with much of what Harris said, I did not
think he addressed the specific arguments for the existence of God that were expounded by Craig.
Harris is perhaps limited by his training as a cognitive neuroscientist, rather than a physicist, when it
comes to cosmological arguments.
The cosmological expert among the New Atheists is Lawrence Krauss, who also frequents the debate
circuit in support of the atheist arguments – which are generally regarded as synonymous with
“materialist”. This results in a sharp division between materialism and spiritualism, though Krauss
makes a distinction between spirituality and religion. In this debate Krauss argues in favour of the
proposition that “science refutes God”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0qmr5AYFTg
Krauss and Shermer won the debate, according to the voting of the audience. The vote for the
motion increased from 37% to 50%; the vote against also increased, but only from 34 to 38%
(converts from the 27% that were undecided before the debate).
Hitchens argues against all religion, but celebrates what he calls “the numinous”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkxgrrHbKG0
In the following panel discussion on science, faith and religion at a science festival in the USA, Krauss
is accompanied by the British philosopher Colin McGinn who professes atheism but adds that certain
things are beyond human understanding, the Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno and
Professor Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist who believes both in science and Catholicism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkxgrrHbKG0
Dawkins and Krauss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_TGGBduF_g

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Chomsky and Krauss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml1G919Bts0
One of the Anglican doctrines that had me most confused, as a child, was that of the Trinity. How, I
wondered, could the Father and the Son, as well as the Holy Spirit all be the same being? I was
taught not to believe in ghosts, but here was the school chaplain talking about the “Holy Ghost”. At
this age I was familiar with the comic books of Casper the Friendly Ghost. I knew that ghosts were
imaginary. I learned to disregard them as superstitions, though the existence of ghosts and spirit
entities do not necessarily imply the existence of the supernatural. By the time I was 15, rationality
prevailed, and I grew to regard the miracles of Christianity and all other religions as superstitions. I
don’t believe in miracles, according to Hume’s definition of miracles as requiring the suspension of
the Laws of Nature. Hence I no longer believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth or anyone else;
and I regard myself as having been misinformed that the only true miracles that have ever occurred
were those mentioned in the Bible. I once believed these things, but when I was a child I thought
childish thoughts. These were not childish thoughts that emerged spontaneously from my childish
mind. They were childish thoughts that were implanted into my mind by adults that I loved and
respected. They themselves had the childish thoughts introduced to their impressionable minds by
their parents when they were children. It was called a “good, Christian upbringing”.
Science, too, has become a religion to some. This religion is called the “New Atheism”, and it has its
prophets, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and Christopher
Hitchens. I have sympathy for this new religion, the adherents of which are adamant that they are
not religious at all, and that religion is the enemy of reason.
Noam Chomsky is one of the intellectuals who is on record as calling the ‘New Atheists” (as they
have been dubbed) “religious fanatics”. To be fair, Chomsky also blames “religious fanaticism” of
economists regarding particular economic doctrines. Chomsky alleges that Hitchens is a follower of
the “State Religion” akin to the “religion” that the “market knows best”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt9QCAUPPeY
I also believe that the sun consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, and that the heat of the sun is
caused by a nuclear explosion that has been going on for billions of years, that the sun is one of

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millions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and that this is one of billions of galaxies that I can see only
as stars in the night sky. This is something of a miracle to me, in that I am mystified as to how this
came to be, and how scientists know this, but I have good reasons for believing it. The reason I
believe that what appear to me as stars are actually galaxies, is that I have basic faith in the integrity
of Western science and the Western scientists of the past, and not because I have looked at stars
through a telescope, though I have seen photographs of distant galaxies taken through telescopes.
Though I heard the theory many years ago, until recently I was not so convinced about the Big Bang
Theory. To my sceptical mind it sounded too much like creationism in disguise, and though I
accepted that the distant galaxies showed red shift, indicating that the universe was expanding, I
was not convinced that extrapolating back to a ‘singularity’ 13.8 billion years ago was logical and
reasonable. When scientists were talking about the first seconds of the formation of the universe, I
wasn’t sure that they weren’t deluding themselves. How on Earth could we mere humans presume
to understand the first seconds of the universe?
My scepticism about the Big Bang has largely evaporated after hearing the debates posted on
YouTube of the physicist Lawrence Krauss, who argues that the Big Bang is evidence against the
biblical account of creation, though the Catholic pope did, apparently, claim the theory as evidence
of biblical truth when the Big Bang theory was first proposed. The current Pope Francis has declared
that the Big Bang is fact, but that is not a good reason to believe it to be so. The alternative Steady
State Theory, held by the famous British astronomer Fred Hoyle, was accepted by most physicists in
the 1930s, who were concerned that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Monsignor Georges
Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest; it was thought that he was trying to sneak creationism into
science. It was, in fact, Hoyle who is credited with coining the term Big Bang, intending it pejoratively
and contrasting it with the Steady State Theory, which he favoured. In my ignorance of the evidence
in favour of the Big Bang, and without trying to find out the truth about it, I clung to the discredited
Steady State Theory until I watched Professor Krauss recently. Since reading the Wikipedia entry on
the Big Bang theory my remaining doubts have been resolved.
Krauss is a great educator, and the author of several popular science books including The Physics of
Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. Though I have not read these I have watched several debates,
lectures and discussions on YouTube in which he appears. The debates have centred on the battle
between science and religion, raising the issues of belief and faith. Krauss proudly wears the label of
atheist and scientist, and argues against holding beliefs on the basis of religion or faith, rather than
evidence. He says there is no evidence of a God or gods and uses cosmological arguments, including
the Big Bang (on which he is an expert) to argue against the Biblical account of creation, as told in
the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Christian Old Testament.
I was brought up to identify myself as a Christian, though my ancestors a few generations back were
Hindu and Buddhist, and I rejected all religious belief when I was about 15. I attended Sunday school
when I was a child in England, where we memorised the names of books of the Old Testament by
heart, with the aid of a Haydn melody. My mother taught me the Lord’s Prayer and read Bible stories
to me, but also took me to the magnificent Natural History Museum in London, where I gazed in awe

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at the dinosaur skeletons. She told me that the dinosaurs lived millions of years before humans
evolved, and that they suddenly became extinct millions of years ago. Though a Christian, my
mother fully accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, having studied zoology at University in Ceylon
(now Sri Lanka) in the 1950s.
My mother explained away the six day creation story at the beginning of Genesis by saying that one
day for God might mean millions of years in human time. I didn’t know enough about Genesis to
counter this at the time, and I accepted her explanation. I wondered how Noah fitted all the
different animals in his ark, but didn’t know enough about zoology to realise how ridiculous the
proposition was, and how clearly the current distribution of animals in the world refutes the idea
that they all originated from an ark washed up on Mt Ararat in Turkey only a few thousand years ago.
Obviously he didn’t have any kangaroos hopping on his ark.
It’s funny how otherwise sensible people hang on to such silly ideas in the back of their minds,
without really thinking about them. My now 82-year-old mother, who qualified as a zoologist and
has worked as a medical researcher, only thought seriously about the implausibility of the story of
Noah when I discussed it with her recently. It’s not that she believed it. She neither believed it nor
disbelieved it, though she knew the myth well enough. She admitted that she’d “never really
thought about it”. When I pointed out how the distribution of mammals in the modern world
conclusively disproves the story of Noah’s Ark, she had no problem accepting this. There are others
who are not so easily convinced by evidence and logic. They believe in the story of Noah in every
detail as recorded in the Holy Bible.
I recently watched a YouTube video showing some American atheists visiting the “Creation Museum”
in Kentucky, an American state about which I know little about other than that it produced KFC and
Colonel Sanders, who it is rumoured was connected with the KKK (though this may well be an urban
myth). Kentucky has also brought to the world state-of-the-art dinosaur models, which are depicted
alongside models of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden at the Creation Museum. Children are
predicably impressed by the displays, imprinting in their minds images that reinforce the delusion
that the earth is only 6000 years old, and the ludicrous idea that humans lived at the same time as
dinosaurs. Hopefully this madness will not spread much further than Kentucky and, at most, the
southern states of the USA. The museum cost more than $ 20 million to construct, an indication of
the big money behind the “young earth” lunacy but most of the people in the world – the vast
majority – do not have religious views that conflict so glaringly with the findings of science.
Though I was brought up to believe in Christianity I was also brought up to have faith in Western
science and Western medicine, studying science subjects throughout my school years, before
studying more science at the University of Queensland, where I learned also to call myself a doctor
of medicine. I lost my belief in Christianity when I went through my adolescence, but retained my
faith in Western science, which I called science, but thought of as Science, with a capital S. Likewise I
regarded Western medicine as Medicine with a capital M. I believed in Science and Medicine, with
little insight into what the alternatives were, or much about the history of Science and Medicine.
Science, with a capital S includes western science as a subset. Science is global, not Western, Eastern,
Northern of Southern. Western science is what I studied, and what is commonly understood as being

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“science”, but is only the western component of Science. Likewise Western medicine is a subset of
Medicine (which also includes Eastern and Indigenous medical knowledge). Nobody talks of
southern or northern medicine or science, but they do speak of Western science and medicine, as
opposed to the scientific and medical models of the East, of which there are several distinct
traditions – notably the Islamic, Chinese and Indian systems, each with written traditions hundreds
of years old, and each of which has developed doctrines they have regarded as true, correct, and
scientific. The Islamic, Chinese and Indian scientific models have also yielded different medical
models, with the common aim of improving people’s heath – healing. I learned nothing of these
models when I studied at school and university; in recent years I have spent more time trying to
understand them, and see how they contribute to our collective knowledge about nature (Science)
and health (with an awareness that Medicine is not quite the same as Health, and in fact both
Western and Eastern medical practices often have adverse effects on health – individually and
collectively).
In Russia, these days, there is much talk of “the West”, which is regarded as definitely not including
Russia. Russians regard themselves as belonging to the East in the East-West political divide, which is
also reflected in a scientific divide, which was clearly evident during the Cold War, despite the fact
that the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev gave Science the Periodic Table of Elements, the basis of
all modern chemistry. During the Cold War, “Eastern Bloc” science was regarded with more
scepticism in the West than the “reputable science” that emanated from the English-speaking
universities in the USA, Canada and UK in Australia, despite that it is geographically in the far south-
east. There are obvious historical reasons for this. The result was that though we learned the
Periodic Table, we weren’t told that Mendeleev was Russian, just as we weren’t told that the algebra
and the Arabic numerals we use in “the West” came to Europe from the East – and specifically from
India via the great Islamic civilizations of the Middle Ages. When I studied medicine we learned that
William Harvey, an Englishman, had discovered the heart-lung circulation in the 1600s and Jenner,
also an Englishman, invented vaccination. We weren’t told that these discoveries were made by
Muslim physicians in Persia and Turkey, long before. We learned how the Englishman James
Parkinson had discovered “Parkinson’s Disease” in the 19th century but never heard mention the
name of the great Persian physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) whose texts were at the foundation of all of
Western medicine, when he and other Muslim scholars challenged the doctrines of Galen, the
Greek-Roman physician to the gladiators, whose mistaken ideas about anatomy and physiology had
almost Biblical authority for more than a thousand years in the West.
Ivan Pavlov was one Russian scientist that was mentioned as an innovator in psychology; he would
have been difficult to ignore completely due to his contribution to the favoured school of psychology
at the University of Queensland at the time – behaviourism. The American and British behaviourists
based their work on “operant conditioning” on the “classical studies” of Pavlov in Russia. It is
household knowledge that Pavlov “conditioned” dogs to salivate when a bell is rung – what was
called “classical conditioning”. The Harvard psychologist Skinner continued Pavlov’s tradition in
training pigeons and children, developing educational and child control programs based on “positive
and negative reinforcement” to encourage “desirable behaviour” and discourage “undesirable
behaviours”. It was assumed that it was adults who decided what was desirable or undesirable and
administered the rewards or punishments. Behaviour-modification programs became the rage, and

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they tried, in the East and the West, various ways to program their citizens to be heterosexual (but
not too much so), patriotic and law-abiding. What this meant in practice varied between the
different states that adopted behaviour modification programs. In Western schools, there was a
general improvement in terms of the physical assault of children that was still common when I was a
schoolboy in Sri Lanka in the 1970s. Instead of ritualised assault, the behaviourists favoured “time
out” at a punishment. This was a significant improvement of the “cuts” that were given by cane or
ruler in boy’s schools that were established by the Western Churches throughout the colonized
world.
I remember one teacher, when I was eight, who announced to the class that he had thought of a
way to improve our appalling spelling in English. I had recently started school at Trinity College in
Kandy, the hill capital of Sri Lanka, after migrating from England. English was my first language, so it
wasn’t that much of a problem, but his idea was that for every word we got wrong we would get a
“cut”. This meant holding out our hand, while he hit it with the sharp side of a ruler. This is painful,
but it doesn’t actually cut the skin; the teacher controls the assault such that no laceration occurs. It
is an example of behaviourism without sound humanity, morality or ethics, though his intent was
pure, in that he was just trying to encourage his student to learn correct spelling by punishing
mistakes.
I can’t remember if this teacher actually carried out his threat, but there were several teachers in
Trinity College who just hit students because they were angry; there were also ritual (and
occasionally public) canings. I know this to have been the case in schools throughout the British
Empire, those run by both the state and the church, though the problem of child sexual abuse seems
to be more a feature of Church schools (especially boarding schools) than state schools. Overall, this
has been one of the most striking and welcome changes in the school system in the West – the fact
that children are not beaten into submission. Unfortunately, there are newer, equally cruel ways of
controlling children that have spread from the unholy alliance between drug companies and the
medical profession – labels of “conduct disorder” and “oppositional defiant disorder” for children
who were previously called “juvenile delinquents” and labels like “attention deficit disorder” for
children who were previously labelled as having “minimal brain damage” or “feeble-mindedness”.
I wasn’t assaulted by teachers much when I was at school (I was caned a couple of times) but that
was because I was extremely obedient. I listened attentively in class, even when the teacher was
boring (which was often enough). I raised my hand to ask a question and obeyed the rules the
teacher declared, however unjust they were. I memorised what I was instructed to memorise and
memorised it well enough to win subject prizes in what I took to be Science as well as religion (which
was exclusively Christianity as proclaimed by the Anglican Church – or at least its branch in Sri Lanka).
In science this meant memorising mathematical laws and applying them, though I did not
understand the derivation of most of these laws, and memorising various Laws of Physics, though
again I didn’t understand the derivation of these laws. In religion we studied selected bits of the New
Testament, notably the four Gospels and St Paul’s voyages, described in the Acts of the Apostles. We
were expected to commit to memory the order in which St Paul visited various towns, beginning
with “Antioch in Syria”, but were not expected to know where, exactly Syria is, or its history other
than the fact that St Paul started his voyage there. This is what would be tested in the exam, and I

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learned to study in such a way as to maximise my success in exams. This is not a good way to gain a
holistic perspective of the world or a truly scientific one (which is, I would argue, necessarily holistic).
Dating the Dinosaurs and Deep Time
When I was seven I was given a copy of Burian and Augusta’s classic Prehistoric Animals, a book that
I treasured. This was the antidote to the story of Noah’s Ark, and it made more sense to me, despite
the fact that I struggled to understand the text.
The reason I loved this book so much was the pictures, which are exquisite. In 1963, when it was
published, it was revolutionary. Never before had the landscapes and animals of millions of years
ago, been brought to life so vividly. This is the Czech artist Zdenek Burian’s rendition of the Middle
Devonian landscape, about 400 million years ago:

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In my opinion, Zdenek Burian’s art stands among the greatest human art of all time. It is not just
because of his excellent technique and aesthetic. It is his creative ability, his ability to bring fossils to
life, and to create realistic landscapes according to the scientific facts as they were understood at
the time. This required intimate knowledge of the plants as well as the animals, and the technical
ability to draw and paint them. It required close collaboration with the palaeontologist Josef Augusta
and others. He was a pioneer in art as well as science.
This painting of Diplodocus, from Prehistoric Animals, is one of close to 500 prehistoric images
painted by Burian between the early 1930s and 1981. He was a prolific artist, credited with over
15,000 works.

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Though I accepted, because my books and my mother told me so, that the dinosaurs became extinct
about 60 million years ago, I did not know how palaeontologists came to this conclusion. I didn’t
realise that there was a gradual evolution of understanding of the age of the earth, based on
scientific evidence as it unfolded over two centuries.
When the famous British geologist Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology in 1830 he argued
that the earth was at least 300 million years old. Scientists now estimate the age of the earth as
about 4.5 billion years – more than 10 times older – based on radioisotope dating of the oldest rocks
and meteorites on earth. Lyell’s date of 300 million years suggested the age of the earth was much
older than most of his contemporaries thought in the West (though not as old as was taught by the
doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism in the East).
Lyell proposed that the geological features of the earth (including the various layers of fossils) had
developed gradually by natural (physical) forces that were still at work, over hundreds of millions of
years (gradualism) while the dominant scientific view in the West was that of the French naturalist
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) who thought the earth was only a few million years old at most. Cuvier,
who was also famous for his studies of comparative anatomy, was the first naturalist to establish,
from his studies of the fossil record, the now widely accepted fact of mass extinctions, which he
attributed to catastrophes, such as floods, volcanoes and earthquakes. These extinctions, according
to Cuvier, were followed by creations of new forms of life by God. The flood of the Old Testament
was the most recent of these catastrophic events. There developed a debate between
‘catastrophists’ such as Cuvier and the proponents of ‘uniformitarianism’ also known as ‘gradualism’,
first proposed by James Hutton in the late 18th century and popularised by Lyell in Principles of
Geology. Lyell was a close friend and colleague of Charles Darwin, providing him with a geological
framework for the theory of natural selection, which was also gradualist – evolution, according to
Darwin, occurred slowly and gradually, over millions of years.
The fact that deeper layers of fossils indicate earlier animals – the basis of stratigraphy – was
established by the Danish scientist (and later Catholic bishop) Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) who
introduced the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral
continuity in a 1669 work on the fossilization of organic remains in layers of sediment. Steno
logically surmised that “at the time when any given stratum was being formed, all the matter resting
upon it was fluid, and, therefore, at the time when the lower stratum was being formed, none of the
upper strata existed”. His principle of original horizontality stated that “strata either perpendicular
to the horizon or inclined to the horizon were at one time parallel to the horizon”. Steno’s principle
of lateral continuity stated that sediments initially extend laterally in all directions; his principle of
cross-cutting relationships held that “If a body or discontinuity cuts across a stratum, it must have
formed after that stratum.” Steno's ideas still form the basis of stratigraphy contributing to the
development of James Hutton's theory of infinitely repeating cycles of seabed deposition, uplifting,
erosion, and submersion.
I did not grasp, until I was much older, that the geological eras – the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and
Cenozoic are so named because of the types of animals fossilized in various geological strata, rather
than the absolute ages of the rocks, which were unknown at the time. The Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and
Cenozoic eras comprise the Phanerozoic eon (from 542 million years ago to the present) which is

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named as such because of the fossils in various rock layers (strata). The geology is named according
to the zoology (hence Palaeozoic – ancient life, Mesozoic – middle life and Cenozoic – new life). This
is why different sources have given different dates as to when each era began and ended. Scientists
(or rather naturalists) knew that the trilobites, which were plentiful and diverse before the age of
the dinosaurs, became extinct long before the dinosaurs did because the trilobite fossils were
confined to deeper layers of sedimentary rock. Likewise, they knew that the mastodons, mammoths
and sabre-toothed cats had become extinct more recently, since the dinosaurs were found in deeper
(and thus older) layers of rock. The first fish fossils are found in deeper layers still, and these were
more ancient than the dinosaurs (and other land vertebrates). On this basis they created a
chronological sequence of the zoology of deep time of which they were confident, dividing say the
Mesozoic era into Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and the Cenozoic era into older and
younger periods based on the types of fauna and flora preserved in the fossils, but were not so
confident about the precise lengths of these periods or of the larger eras and eons. This required the
development of radioisotope dating in the 20th century.
There has been refinement and standardization of terminology over the years since then, and many
changes since I was a child and read for the time about the Age of Dinosaurs and the Age of
Mammals. By international convention, the older term Tertiary, referring to the period from 65
million years to 2.5 million years ago, was abandoned in 2004. Instead, the subdivision of the
Cenozoic has been standardized as divided into 3 periods and 7 epochs. The present Holocene epoch
(the most recent epoch of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era) began 12,000 years ago and is
also known as the Age of Man. The fact that it is not called the Age of Woman reflects the history of
both science and religion, as well as the history of philosophy. But I’ll get to that later.
Nowadays the Proterozoic – Phanerozoic boundary is precisely dated at 541 (±1) million years ago.
The Phanerozoic eon encompasses the enormous period of time from 541 million years ago to the
present, but the preceding Proterozoic lasted even longer, from 2,500 to 542 million years ago. It
used to be thought that life began only during the Cambrian period, the first period of the
Phanerozoic eon, but in the last century there have been amazing discoveries of pre-Cambrian fossils,
such as the Ediacara fossil bed in South Australia and the Burgess Shale discoveries in Canada. These
indicate that there was an explosion of life at the end of the Proterozoic eon followed by a
catastrophic mass extinction about 540 million years ago, in which only a few phyla survived. These
surviving phyla have given rise to all the species of animal – vertebrate and invertebrate - on the
planet today.
There was another mass extinction (the P-Tr extinction) about 250 million years ago, at the end of
the Permian period (the last period of Palaeozoic era) in which it is estimated that 95% of all marine
species (including the trilobites) and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species become extinct. It is the
only known mass extinction of insects, and is thought to be the worst extinction event that has
occurred in the history of life. The fossil record suggests that more than 50% of all families and 80%
of all genera became extinct. The cause of this catastrophic extinction is unknown; theories include
meteor impact, environmental change, massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia and sudden release of
methane, by methane-producing microbes, into the ocean. The fact that the extinction occurred is
undisputed.

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The P-Tr extinction marks the beginning of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era, and the beginning
of the age of the dinosaurs, which fascinated me as a child, as it does children around the world
today. When I was a child, the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, which had, by then, been
fairly precisely dated to 65 million years ago, was one of the great unanswered scientific mysteries.
The K-T boundary refers to the geological layer above which no dinosaurs are found. K-T stands for
Cretaceous-Tertiary, the Cretaceous period being the third period of the Mesozoic era (the Age of
the Dinosaurs) and the Tertiary period being the old (and now discarded) name for the first period of
the Cenozoic era, heralding the rise of mammals as the dominant vertebrate species on earth. The K-
T boundary has been radioisotope dated to 66 million years ago. It is estimated that 75% of the plant
and animal species, including the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs, became extinct over a period of a few
million years (though the time frame of extinction is subject to debate).
The discovery of iridium deposits at the K-T boundary in the 1970s by the Nobel-prize winning
physicist Luis Alvarez, may have solved this mystery. In 1980 Alvarez published evidence that he had
discovered a fine layer of iridium, which is abundant in asteroids but rare on earth, in a number of
sites, hypothesising that a large meteorite or comet had impacted with the earth, causing the mass
extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The finding was challenged, as it should be, but subsequent
findings have supported Alvarez’s hypothesis. In the 1990s evidence of a large impact crater called
Chicxulub was found off the coast of Mexico, providing support for the theory. Other researchers
later found that the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous may have occurred
rapidly in geological terms, over thousands of years, rather than millions of years as had previously
been supposed. Others have suggested alternative extinction causes such as increased volcanism,
particularly the massive Deccan Traps eruptions in India that occurred around the same time, and
climate change. However, on March 4, 2010, a panel of 41 scientists agreed that the Chicxulub
asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction.
More recently still, evidence has emerged of another catastrophic extinction only 75,000 years ago,
when most of humanity may have been killed as a consequence of the massive explosion of the Toba
supervolcano in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, following which there may have been a period of
rapid cooling that lasted thousands of years. It was proposed in the 1990s, that the Toba explosion
produced a “genetic bottleneck” in human evolution. This hypothesis is supported by mitochondrial
DNA studies that suggest that today's humans are all descended from a very small population of
between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago. There is recent
evidence that a small human population may have survived the Toba volcano in Jwalapuram,
Southern India. A 2007 paper by Michael Petralgia and others, revealed stone tools found above and
below the layer of 74,000 year-old Toba volcanic dust. The relative precision with which dates of
events such as the Toba explosion can be determined is due to the modern technology of
radioisotope dating.
Radioisotope dating was discovered in the early 1900s. This is a dating technique that uses the rate
of natural radioactive decay of various elements, such as carbon, potassium or uranium in rocks or
organic material. Radiocarbon dating has transformed archaeology, while potassium-argon and

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uranium-lead dating have transformed palaeontology and geology. Measuring the rate of decay of
radioisotopes enabled “absolute” dating rather than relative dating based on stratigraphy, for the
first time. There are several isotopes that can be used, suitable for different time frames. Carbon
dating becomes inaccurate for organic material more than 50,000 years old, but in this case
potassium-argon, uranium-lead, or uranium-thorium dating can be used. Of course these are not
really absolute, in that they have a margin of error, but the degree of confidence with which we can
date the dinosaurs, the oldest rocks on earth and our own human ancestors has dramatically
improved over the past decades. We can be confident that the earth is about 4.5 billion old, based
on radioisotope dating of the oldest meteorites and rocks found so far.
Believing that the dinosaurs existed millions of years ago doesn’t prove the theory of evolution, of
course. It does mean that the world was not created on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, the date
calculated by the Irish bishop James Ussher from a careful study of the Bible in the 17th century.
Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events, concluding that Adam and Eve were driven from
the Garden of Eden on Monday 10 November 4004 BC. The bishop also calculated what he claimed
was the exact date that Noah’s Ark touched down on Mt Ararat.
Though there are some variations in the proposed date, there is a Christian movement in the
southern “Bible belt” of USA that insists, like Ussher, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that
the dinosaurs died out during the flood that killed all the animals except those that Noah saved in
the ark that God commanded him to build. God’s plan was to destroy all of sinful mankind, of which
Noah was the only just man; he and his immediate family were saved from a devastating flood that
killed all the people and animals on the planet except those that Noah had saved. Noah had led
these animals, according to the tale I learned as a child, “two by two” (one male and one female)
into a wooden ark (the dimensions of which he had been given by God). All of humanity is therefore
descended from Noah via his three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth. These fundamentalists, who take
adopt a literal interpretation of Genesis, are known as “young Earth creationists”, who comprise a
segment of the Christian evangelical movement. They run schools where the science curriculum
includes the story of Noah’s ark, not as a curious and obviously incorrect tale, but as a real event in
natural history. The Christian evangelical movement has considerable political clout in the USA and is
actively promoting this nonsense in missions throughout the world, as well as at prayer events more
like rock concerts than the traditional Church services of the Anglican and Catholic churches.
There have been polls suggesting that as many as 40% of Americans think the earth is less than
10,000 years old, though these polls have been questioned, since it seems to depend on how the
questions are worded. Surveys have asked about people’s belief in the age of the earth, and also
about evolution of both humans and other animals. Americans are more prepared to accept
evolution of animals than of humans. The National Center for Science Education in the USA, which
promotes the teaching of evolution, assessed in 2013, in the light of earlier claims that 40% of
Americans believed in a ‘young earth’ that was less than 10,000 years old, that “the hard core of
young-earth creationists represents at most one in ten Americans—maybe about 31 million
people—with another quarter favouring creationism but not necessarily committed to a young earth.
One or two in ten seem firmly committed to evolution, and another third leans heavily toward

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evolution. About a third of the public in the middle are open to evolution, but feel strongly that a
god or gods must have been involved somehow, and wind up in different camps depending how a
given poll is worded.”
It seems that people are more prepared to accept evolution if it doesn’t conflict with their religious
beliefs. If the questions are worded such that they bring into question their belief in God, Americans
in the USA are less likely to say they believe in evolution. They show some reluctance in accepting
that we are descended from apes, and are closely related to chimpanzees, as Charles Darwin
proposed in The Descent of Man, published in 1871. They show even more reluctance to agree that
we are apes, regarding humans as being related to, but fundamentally different from chimpanzees,
bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons (the five other species of ape). The leaders of the
Anglican and Catholic churches began by opposing Darwin’s theory when it was first proposed but
they have accepted it for many years, developing theological arguments that reconciled evolution
with God, to the satisfaction of most of their respective congregations. Even the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, who used to go house to house arguing against evolution, have largely given up on
insisting that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that evolution is a wicked lie dreamed up atheists
like Charles Darwin. The young-Earth creationists have a more entrenched delusion, based on their
rigid adherence to the literal word of the Bible.
Most Christians accept the scientific view that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that
humans evolved in Africa from ancestors we share with chimpanzees. This common ancestor lived
about 6 million years ago in equatorial Africa, where our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees,
bonobos and gorillas are confined to this day. Our early ancestors then migrated to the plains of
Africa, evolving through various species to our present modern Homo sapiens. The fossil evidence of
this evolution, including all the “missing links” one needs to believe in human evolution from
hominid ancestors in Africa, proves beyond doubt that, as Charles Darwin argued 150 years ago, we
all have common ancestors in Africa.
The discovery of various species of Australopithecus in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, beginning with
the discoveries of Louis and Mary Leakey in the 1950s, has indicated some of the early diversity of
hominin evolution, with several species of Australopithecus coexisting in Africa millions of years ago.

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Louis Leakey, though the son of missionaries and a devout Christian, was convinced that Darwin was
right and that humans evolved in Africa. His discoveries and those of his wife Mary and son Richard
proved beyond reasonable doubt that this is the case. The fossil record indicates that some hominins
became extinct, including some species of Australopithecus, as well as, probably, the Homo erectus
populations in China and Indonesia. There is currently scientific consensus, based on DNA evidence,
that all of humanity, including the populations of Asia, Australia and the Americas, are descended
from a population of modern Homo sapiens that left Africa as recently as 100,000 years ago, and
that the earlier Homo erectus populations that had left Africa a million years earlier (and others, like
Homo floresiensis, fossils of which were found in the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, and dated
to 38,000 to 13,000 years ago by carbon dating) became extinct. There is debate about the fate of
Neanderthal Man (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe, some believing that these people were killed
by invading groups of modern Homo sapiens (Cro-Magnon Man), though there is evidence, from
DNA which has been recovered from Neanderthal remains, that there was some interbreeding
between Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens (in Eurasia, where all the Neanderthal remains
have been discovered so far). There is also disagreement about whether Neanderthals should be
regarded as a different subspecies, rather than species, from our own (in which case they are
termed Homo sapiens neanderthalensis rather than Homo neanderthalensis).
We can be confident that one or other species of Australopithecus, confined to the African continent,
evolved into Homo sapiens. This occurred over several million years via Homo erectus and maybe
Homo habilis, though the details are still uncertain, partly because the definition of what constitutes
a species is problematic when it comes to extinct animals (including hominids and hominins). Living
creatures can be defined as separate species if they cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
This is how various butterfly and bird species, which look very similar, are known to be of different
species. When it comes to extinct animals, other criteria need to be used to determine if two fossils
are of the same or different genus or species. There is no clear cut-off point between one species

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and the species it evolves into. A corollary of this is that there was no “first man” or “first woman”.
Our ancestors gradually became human over many, many generations.
When I was a boy, I learned that the famous Peking Man and Java Man fossils, discovered in the 19th
century, belonged to the genus “Pithecanthropus”, rather than our own Homo genus. In
anthropology lectures at university, when I was 17, I learned that these are now classified as Homo
erectus and have been dated to about one million years ago. The details of how these early hominin
fossil discoveries fit together with subsequent discoveries is becoming clearer as dating techniques
improve. This is one of the most dynamic and exciting areas of science, and has been for the past
half century, since the discoveries by the Leakey family in east Africa and the discovery of DNA in the
1950s. The exact lines of descent are still being worked out, aided by modern “DNA archaeology”
and new fossil discoveries.
In The Origin of Species Darwin provided evidence of evolution as well as a theory of how different
species evolve – the theory of natural selection. The evidence, more so than the fossil records, came
from his studies of comparative anatomy and behaviour between various animal species, and
variation within a species. He argued that there is a struggle for life (or struggle for existence),
between “individuals and varieties of the same species” in which the best adapted individuals
survive, passing their particular variations (inherited traits) to the next generation. The key factor
was reproductive success, rather than mere survival. Those individuals that had the most surviving,
reproducing offspring passed on the variations (such as a longer or stouter beak in birds) to
subsequent generations. Speciation occurs when populations became isolated, and different
environmental factors (including predators and plants) determine which variations are selected for
by natural selection. Darwin did not coin the phrase “survival of the fittest” (it was coined by Herbert
Spencer after reading The Origin of Species), but he agreed with it, and used it himself in the 5th
edition of The Origin of Species (published in 1869).
In formulating his theory, Darwin drew on the older theories of the geologist James Hutton and his
own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a physician and naturalist, and author of Zoonomia (published in
1794), which Darwin read and commented on. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) wrote in Zoonomia that
“the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become
improved” and that “the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement
of the history of mankind”. James Hutton (1726-1797) , who developed the theory of
uniformitarianism that was promoted by Lyell in Principles of Geology, had written, in 1794 in
Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge that, “if an organised body is not in the situation and
circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite
variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those
which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on
the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the
present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying
the individuals of their race.”

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Other compelling evidence of evolution comes from the fields of embryology and comparative
biology (botany and zoology). The similarity between various species was the basis of Linnaeus’s
classification according to phylum, order, family and genus, in Systema Naturae (published in 1735,
more than a century before Darwin’s Origin of Species). It is obvious that various cats belong in the
same group, and are more closely related to each other than are various types of monkey. Linnaeus
believed in Biblical creationism as an explanation for the marvellous creatures from all over the
world that he collected and classified, creating the Latin nomenclature of genus and species names
and general framework of taxonomy that we use to this day (and Darwin assumed in developing his
theory of how speciation came about in the 19th century). The definition of species as being unable
to breed together and produce fertile offspring came later, from Alfred Russel Wallace, based on his
studies of Malaysian butterflies Wallace’s studies of butterflies led him to conclusions similar to
those Charles Darwin had arrived at by studying variations in the beaks of birds off the South
American coast decades earlier (in the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin shot fifteen species of what
he called “finches” and studied differences in the length and shape of their bills, concluding that they
must have had a common ancestor from the mainland sometime in the past).
Darwin and Wallace independently developed the theory of evolution by natural selection a century
before the discovery of DNA and genes, which provided a chemical explanation for evolution, and a
mechanism that explains the process by which traits are inherited. DNA could be used to explain
how simple life has given rise to the complexity of multicellular organisms such as ourselves, since all
living organisms (as we understand them) require DNA to code for the proteins that provide the
basic structure of a cell. Long before Darwin it had been established, with the discovery of the
microscope, that all life is composed of cells. Cells are the building blocks of all plants and animals,
including ourselves. This is one of the great discoveries of Western science, and all of Science. DNA is
another and has become a household word (or acronym, if less people know what it means) –
leading it to me misused and misunderstood. The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott recently
declared that fiscal prudence is “in the DNA” of the Liberal Party.
The biological importance of DNA is frequently exaggerated. It is true, of course, that the DNA in our
chromosomes code for the synthesis of proteins and proteins are biologically vital molecules. They
are also responsible for inheritance of various traits and the physical forms (structure) of living
organisms. The physical form and function of cells and collections of cells (in organs and organisms)
is based on the DNA code in a very fundamental way, but there are many other factors that
influence structure and function. The idea that there is “a gene” for this or that disease has
generated many millions for research, most of it wasted, but there are bigger problems than the
wastage of time and money. Genetic studies have a long history of pseudo-science with catastrophic
social and political results, which we will get to soon.
This process of evolution depends on gradual change over enormous periods of time – deep time.
Deep time is measured in millions of years rather than hundreds and thousands. This makes what
seems somewhat miraculous – the gradual development of the wonders of life on the planet –
explainable. According to the British biologist Richard Dawkins the seeming miracle of evolution can
be best explained by the theory of natural selection, as described by Charles Darwin and Alfred
Russell Wallace in the 1850s. I agree with him, and see no reason to call evolution a theory, rather
than a fact. He says this himself, and that it is called a “theory” only for “technical reasons”. He
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points out that this sometimes leads to people thinking that this means it is “only a theory” and
therefore can be taught, in schools alongside the ‘alternative’ theory of ‘intelligent design’ – the old
Christian theological argument that the perfection and wonders of nature imply an Intelligent
Designer or God. Darwin’s theory, according to Dawkins and others, removes the need for any sort
of creator God, whether Yahweh, Allah or Brahma. This has led to a stand-off between “creationists”
and “evolutionists” and public debates as to whether “religion” (creationism) is inconsistent with the
discoveries of “science” (evolution). There are, of course many religious people who believe in
evolution, but it is true that religious belief can get in the way of accepting and understanding
evolutionary biology, if this religious belief is that the earth is only a few thousand years old, or that
humanity originated from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or Noah and his sons.
According to Salman Hameed, who teaches astronomy and religious studies at Hampshire College in
Amherst, Massachusetts, disbelief in evolution is also a problem in Muslim society, though evolution
is taught in the textbooks of most Islamic nations. He has lectured in Pakistan on reconciling
evolution with Islam and is concerned about the rise of creationism in the Muslim world. Hameed is
trying to promote the teaching of evolution in Islamic countries, and is concerned that Richard
Dawkins and other atheists will push Muslims away from evolution. In an interview with New
Scientist he said that “a large portion of people, vast majorities, reject evolution. Compared to the
US, where 40% are comfortable with evolution, in the Muslim countries that would go down to 10,
15, or 20%. In Turkey, one of the more secular Muslim countries, the level is between 22 and
25%.These low acceptance rates are because evolution has not been in the public discourse, so it
depends on what people believe evolution is. Right now, there is a misperception that evolution
equals atheism.”
Hameed says that the Koran itself does not provide a single clear-cut verse that contradicts evolution
and that in the Muslim countries, young Earth creationism is non-existent, but evolution has become
a symbol for Western dominance and a sign of modernity. There is a concern that believing in
evolution leads to atheism. Hameed is concerned that Richard Dawkins is feeding this fear, and
pushing Muslims away from evolution, but that Muslims have a deep faith in science, with a long
scientific tradition of which they are proud. He thinks that convincing Muslims about the facts of
evolution is just a matter of time and good presentation of the evidence, and that existing textbooks
make a good start.
The ancient texts of Hinduism and Buddhism contrast dramatically with the Book of Genesis in their
claims about the age of the cosmos and the Earth. The myths of Hinduism and Buddhism about
yugas and kalpas also contradict science, when it comes to the age of the earth, though not quite as
dramatically as the Book of Genesis and the story of Noah’s ark. These religions speak of epochs of
time, known as yugas, which have occurred in cycles for billions or even trillions of years. The yugas,
which occur in continuous cycles from a golden age known as the satya yuga, when men were taller
and lived longer due to their greater virtuosity to the kali yuga, a dark age, when men were shorter
in height and lifespan, corresponding to their greater evil. According to the Manu smriti (Laws of
Manu), one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length of the satya yuga is 4800
years, the next treta yuga lasts 3600 years, followed by the dvapara yuga for 2400 years and the final
kali yuga, in which the authors believed they lived lasted 1200 years. The beginning of the kali yuga
was dated to the battle of Kurukshetra, the main story of the Mahabharata.
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The supposed life span and height of men during the progression of the yugas, is ridiculous – men of
the satya yuga lived 100,000 years, in the treta yuga they lived 10,000 years, in the dvapara yuga
they lived 1,000 years and in our present kali yuga they live 100 years (with a prediction that they
will, as the burden of sin shortens their height and lifespan, shrink to little dwarfs with a lifespan of
only 30 years, before ascending back through the sequence of yugas to another golden age (satya
yuga, when people will again live for 100,000 years).
According to Hindu tradition, the Manu smriti records the words of Brahma, and that the first man,
Manu, was the creator god’s son. He was created in India, needless to say. Religion is not static
though, and there have been many developments in Hinduism since the Laws of Manu were
composed. Hinduism is a very diverse religion, if indeed it is one. The Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has claimed that Hinduism is a way of life rather than a religion. It includes, for
example, philosophers who deny the existence of gods but still call themselves Hindus.
The Manu Smriti was one of the first Sanskrit texts studied by the European philologists, first
translated into English by Sir William Jones, whose version was published in 1794. Jones considered
Manu's laws to be older than the laws of Solon the mythical lawgiver of Sparta as well as Lycurgus,
the legendary lawgiver of Athens, whose laws he thought may have been adopted from the Manu
smrti, transmitted to them orally rather than in writing. In his book Bible in India (1869), Louis
Jacolliot, a judge and not a scientist, wrote that Manu smriti was the foundation upon which the
Egyptian, the Persian, the Grecian and the Roman codes of law were built and that the influence of
Manu is still felt in Europe. Jacolloit was interested possible Indian origins of western occultism, and
drew comparisons between the legends of Krishna and Christ, concluding that the account in the
Gospels is a myth based on the mythology of ancient India.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who famously declared the death of God,
was also an admirer of the Manu smriti, based on his reading of a translation by Jacolliot, deeming it
"an incomparably spiritual and superior work" to the Christian Bible. Nietzsche also considered the
Hindu caste system promoted in the Laws of Manu to be a good idea. Jacolloit also favoured the
theory of a now submerged continent, in either the Indian or the Pacific Ocean, called Lemuria.
Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophists drew on Jacolliot’s writings to argue for the existence of a
continent called Lemuria that was submerged in a great flood. Blavatsky based her opinions not on
science but on “divine revelation” and selective readings of occult literature to conclude that
Lemuria was home to a “root race” that was 7 feet tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally
undeveloped and spiritually more pure than the following "root races”. This is, to say the least,
bizarre, and modern geological understanding of tectonic plates conclusively disproves the theory of
Lemuria. In ignorance of the geological facts, some Tamil writers such as Devaneya Pavanar have
tried to associate Lemuria with Kumari Kandam, a legendary sunken landmass mentioned in the
Tamil literature, claiming that it was the cradle of civilization.
Kalpa is a Sanskrit word (Hindi: ಅಅಅಅ kalpa) meaning an aeon in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.
The duration of time of a kalpa varies between various Buddhist and Hindu schools of thought. The
sage Gautama Siddhartha (the Buddha) is not known to have given a precise definition of how long a
kalpa lasts but is claimed to have said that if you count the total number of sand particles at the

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depths of the Ganges river, from where it begins to where it ends at the sea, even that number will
be less than the number of passed kalpas.
The Hindu Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the Mahabharata epic, states that a kalpa is a day of
Brahmā, and one day of Brahmā consists of a thousand cycles of four yugas, or ages. The duration of
each of these yugas has hugely increased since the composition of the Manu smriti, with the
interpretation that one year of the demigods was 360 human years. This makes the figures
astronomical, and pushes back the creation of the universe much further back in time than the Big
Bang theory does.
In the 2006 Channel 4 documentary The Root of All Evil? Dawkins confronted one of the leaders of
the Christian evangelical movement in the USA, Pastor Ted Haggard, about the Biblical creation myth
and his disbelief in evolution. This was after one of Haggard’s services, which featured a musical
group armed with electric guitars and drumsticks rather than guns or swords. Though the
documentary doesn’t show much of what was said at the service it’s clear that there were children
running about, jumping around and praising Jesus with their parents. It was rather like a rock
concert, but without the sex or drugs - a benign rock concert for the whole family to praise Jesus.
Rock concerts are attended by fans of rock stars, who are treated as demigods by their fans. These
were Jesus fans, rather than Haggard fans, as far as I could tell. There is no sign that he was trying to
build a cult, though he may well have been trying to make money by ‘Jesus talk’. The whole event
looked silly rather than sinister.
Dawkins begins by sarcastically complimenting Haggard on his “show” which he says must have cost
a lot of money. The pastor smiles and agrees, saying he wanted it to be fun. Dawkins then says that
it reminds him of the Nuremberg rally and the Dr Goebbels would be proud. Haggard ignores this
provocative comparison with the Nazis and says that he doesn’t know anything about Nuremberg
rallies, but others have compared it to a rock concert. This was my first impression too - a rather
nerdy rock concert.
It seems to me that comparing evangelical Christianity with Nazism is rather unfair. Evangelical
Christians may be deluded about the age of the earth, but theirs is a movement obviously more
religious than political, and doesn’t promote hatred or violence (though it may promote the idea
that non-believers are wicked and sinful, hence feeding hatred and violence indirectly) .The Nazis
were a political party, not a religious organization, and were extremely scientific in their methods. In
their policies of mass-murder of psychiatric patients, homosexuals, Jews and Gypsies, the Nazis were
motivated not by religious fervour but by German nationalist fanaticism and the scientific dogmas of
eugenics – they were trying to breed a “superior Aryan race” by eliminating the “undesirables”,
beginning with the inmates of their asylums, and continuing on to kills millions using very scientific,
but cruelly inhumane methods. The Nazi rallies, which Goebbels orchestrated as the propaganda
minister, did have a certain religious flavour, perhaps, in which the Hitler was idol-worshipped, but
the National Socialists justified their evils in the name of science rather than religion.
Eugenics, from the Greek for “good breeding” is a scientific term coined by Francis Galton in the
1880s at Cambridge University in England, and actively propagated around the world. The eugenics
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movement was spearheaded by Galton and Charles Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, who
together founded the “eugenics education society” in 1907. In 1926 the Eugenics Education Society
was renamed the Eugenics Society, and included several literary, political and scientific intellectuals
of the time. The biggest rival to the British Eugenics Society was the American Eugenics Society;
Galton’s ideas of segregation and sterilization of “defectives” led to thousands of “eugenic”
sterilizations in the USA between 1890 and 1910, mainly of boys who had been labelled as “feeble-
minded”. It comes as no surprise that Galton had the support of British academia as a whole, for his
basic theory that the cream of upper-class British society, the most brilliant of whom were
mathematicians in Cambridge, were naturally endowed with “genius” (or intelligence) than the
lower classes of society, and that the lower classes were breeding too fast. They agreed that
something needed to be done to control the disparity in breeding rate between the classes, for the
preservation of the finest aspects of the British race and British civilization. There were intellectuals
who denounced eugenics at the time, for lack of scientific credibility and dubious ethics, but they
were not able to stop the doctrine from taking root in academic and political circles, in Europe
(especially Germany and Scandinavia), the USA, Australia and Canada.
Darwin wrote an appreciative letter to Galton after reading Hereditary Genius. Galton wrote a
grateful reply which is also reproduced here.
Letter from Darwin to Galton.
DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, S.E.
December 23rd
"MY DEAR GALTON,--I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to the Judges), but I must exhale
myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything
more interesting and original--and how well and clearly you put every point! George, who has
finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier
chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter
chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert
of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ
much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important
difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I
look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very
hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style.--Yours
most sincerely,
(Signed) "CH. DARWIN"
This appears in The Letters of Charles Darwin as LETTER 410.

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The idea that some races and classes are genetically superior to others was the keystone of eugenics,
which was developed by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton and promoted by Darwin’s son,
Leonard Darwin from the 1880s onwards. Basing their ideas on what they took to be the latest
scientific and statistical evidence (based on IQ testing), the eugenicists recommended social
programs of segregation, sterilization and prevention of marriage of those deemed to be “feeble-
minded” or “insane”. This was in order to “improve the stock” in Britain, which they feared was
racially degenerating due to the proliferation of the inferior lower classes. The same thinking was
applied globally in terms of the relative merits of different races, resulting in different evils in the
various nations that embraced eugenics doctrines.
There were two sides to eugenics – “positive eugenics” and “negative eugenics”. In positive eugenics
the “good” or “desirable” individuals were given various incentives to have large families. Under the
Nazi regime this was the “ideal Nordic type” with blonde hair and blue eyes (and also tall, healthy
and intelligent, according to Nazi standards) who were regarded as the most superior type of the
Aryan race. The concept of an “Aryan race” was based on a confusion between language and race,
which is still sometimes made today, but was a feature of mainstream scientific thought in the 19th
century. German scholars had confirmed the earlier observation by Dutch and Italian missionaries
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that the Hindu sacred language of Sanskrit had remarkable similarities to European languages – what
are now called Indo-European languages. In the 19th century, German philologists spoke of Indo-
Germanic languages, placing primacy on German over the other, and it is now known, earlier
European languages. The ‘Aryan race’ of the Nazis was a mythical race that spoke the Aryan
languages, the older term for the Indo-European languages. In recent times debate about the Indo-
European languages has continued, including academic debate about the locality in which these
languages first developed, as “proto-Indo-European” or PIE. The most favoured PIE homeland is
presently southern Russia, based on the work of Marija Gimbutas, though others have proposed
Anatolia, while a few scholars such as Conrad Elst argue that the PIE homeland, and the origin of the
Indo-European languages was in India (the Out of India theory).
In 18th and 19th century India, the British colonials and Indologists divided the many languages of
India as being Aryan (north Indian) or Dravidian (south Indian) corresponding to Aryan and Dravidian
races. The Dravidian darker-skinned race comprised those that spoke the Dravidian languages, such
as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam in the southern half of India. The northern Indians were
thought to have a mixture of Aryan and indigenous (Dravidian) blood, but that the uppermost caste
– the Brahmins – were more Aryan and therefore lighter-skinned, and that the skin colour prejudice
so rife in India, stems from this history. This race distinction has been challenged since then, as well
as the colonial claim that the Sanskrit language was introduced to India by invading, white (or lighter
skinned) Aryans who, armed with the superior technology of horses and chariots, conquered and
dominated the less vigorous and technologically advanced Dravidian inhabitants of the subcontinent.
The eugenics policies promoted by Galton and later taken up by Winston Churchill and others, were
focused on “negative” more so than “positive” eugenics. They advocated two primary means of
preventing “defectives” from breeding – imprisonment in labour camps and sterilization. Churchill
favoured irradiation of the gonads with x-rays as an effective means of sterilization, but accepted
that a “small operation” may also be necessary for girls, inquiring into the necessary changes in law
to permit them. He promoted a policy of imprisonment of “mental defectives” for life – perhaps
using the incentive of freedom to encourage the best behaved “feeble-minded” individuals to seek
“voluntary” sterilization. According to Martin Gilbert, writing for The Churchill Centre, in 1911
Churchill spoke to the British House of Commons about the need to introduce compulsory labour
camps for “mental defectives”. The year before, Churchill had argued that were “at least 120,000
feeble minded people at large in our midst” who deserved “all that could be done for them by a
Christian and scientific civilization now that they are in the world”, but who should be “segregated
under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future
generations”.
Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, wrote in 2009 (in a webpage titled Churchill and
Eugenics) that:
“Such detention, as well as sterilization, were at that time the two main ‘cures’ to ‘feeble-
mindedness’. They were put forward by the eugenicists, those who believed in ‘the
possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population by such
means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have

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inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons

presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).”
“Mental defectives” was a collective term for people who were given specific labels of defectiveness
according to the “science” of eugenics developed by Galton and merged with contemporary
psychiatry and neurology in a somewhat uncomfortable alliance. The terms they used to classify
various degrees of intellectual impairment – idiot, imbecile, moron and feeble-minded - have
become common terms of abuse around the world. These terms were initially classes of patients
based on “Intelligence Quotients” or IQs, a concept pioneered by Galton, though he did not invent
the term. Idiots had an IQ of 0-25, imbeciles an IQ of 26-50, morons an IQ of 51-70, and the feeble-
minded were judged as more intelligent that idiots, imbeciles or morons, but also included people
who were judged to be mentally defective on the basis of criminality or insanity.
Some scientists dispute IQ entirely. In The Mismeasure of Man (1996), the Harvard palaeontologist
Stephen Jay Gould criticized IQ tests and argued that they were used for scientific racism. He argued
that “the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification
as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of
worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—
are innately inferior and deserve their status.”(pp. 24–25)
Another dubious claim that has been rather more enduring was that “schizophrenia” is a “genetic
defect”. This was made in Stalinist Russia to justify incarceration and “treatment” of political and
social dissidents in the 1950s, following the Nazi policy of “euthanasia” (good or mercy killing), the
euphemism for mass-murder favoured by the Nazis as a “cure” for mental illness, who were central
to defining what constituted “schizophrenia” (then called dementia praecox) in the first place, with
the work of Professor Emil Kraepelin at the Heidelberg University. The search for a schizophrenia
gene, with many false claims of success, has continued for many decades since then. Likewise there
is a general belief in the West that “alcoholism” is a “genetic disease”, with a total ignorance of the
influence of alcohol advertising, and relative susceptibility to such things as advertising and peer
group pressure.
In 1899 Winston Churchill, who became a fervent supporter of draconian “eugenic” measures, wrote
to his cousin Ivor Guest that, “the improvement of the British breed is my aim in life”. His biographer,
Sir Martin Gilbert, writes:
“Like most of his contemporaries, family and friends, he regarded races as different, racial
characteristics as signs of maturity of a society, and racial purity as endangered not only by
other races but by mental weaknesses in a race. As a young politician in Britain entering
parliament in 1901, Churchill saw what were then known as the ‘feeble-minded’ and the
‘insane’ as a threat to the prosperity, vigour and virility of British society.”
As the years passed, Churchill’s paranoia about the “feeble-minded and insane classes” increased, to
the point that he regarded British racial health a serious and urgent issue. He wrote to Prime
Minister H H Asquith in 1910 that:

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“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes,
coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks,
constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I am convinced
that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate,
unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions,
is a terrible danger to the race.”
Churchill had been impressed by
In recent years Dawkins has tried to resurrect the discredited idea of eugenics, reframing what are
meant by ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ eugenics in a positive light. He argues that sixty years after the
Holocaust, and Hitler’s implementation of what in his madness he called “eugenics”, but was really
pseudoscience, it is time to start discussing the topic again. He has introduced the idea of
“intelligently designing” human children to enhance such things as musicality or athleticism. He
compares “forcing children to have music lessons” with genetically engineering children to be more
musical. Disregarding the historical meaning of the phrase (which led to the genocide of the Nazis
and sterilization programs in the USA, Canada, Europe and elsewhere into the 1970s) Dawkins
redefines “negative eugenics” as the very reasonable practice of aborting foetuses with serious
chromosomal abnormalities (such as Down’s syndrome) which is currently done in many countries
around the world, and has been for many years. This could be extended in what Dawkins classifies as
“negative eugenics” to abort or select (in in vitro fertilization) embryos with known genes for breast
and other cancers, or known genetic abnormalities like Huntington’s Disease.
Nietszche may have admired the caste system espoused by the Manu smriti, but there are plenty of
people who don’t, including myself. The caste system and caste laws are regarded by some as
integral to Hinduism, though this may not be so. In the Manu smriti, believed by some Hindus to be
the divine word of Brahma, there are many things to be criticised on the basis of modern ideas of
morality, especially regarding the treatment of women and the “lower castes”.
Some such comments about women in the Manusmriti have been posted on the website Nirmukta,
in the aim of promoting science, free thought and secular humanism in India. It was compiled by
Hirday Patwari:
1. “Swabhav ev narinam …..” – 2/213. It is the nature of women to seduce men in this world; for that
reason the wise are never unguarded in the company of females.
2. “Avidvam samlam………..” – 2/214. Women, true to their class character, are capable of leading
astray men in this world, not only a fool but even a learned and wise man. Both become slaves of
desire.
3. “Matra swastra ………..” – 2/215. Wise people should avoid sitting alone with one’s mother,
daughter or sister. Since carnal desire is always strong, it can lead to temptation.

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4. “Naudwahay……………..” – 3/8. One should not marry women who has have reddish hair,
redundant parts of the body [such as six fingers], one who is often sick, one without hair or having
excessive hair and one who has red eyes.
5. “Nraksh vraksh ………..” – 3/9. One should not marry women whose names are similar to
constellations, trees, rivers, those from a low caste, mountains, birds, snakes, slaves or those whose
names inspires terror.
6. “Yasto na bhavet ….. …..” – 3/10. Wise men should not marry women who do not have a brother
and whose parents are not socially well known.
7. “Uchayangh…………….” – 3/11. Wise men should marry only women who are free from bodily
defects, with beautiful names, grace/gait like an elephant, moderate hair on the head and body, soft
limbs and small teeth.
8. “Shudr-aiv bharya………” – 3/12.Brahman men can marry Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaish and even
Shudra women but Shudra men can marry only Shudra women.
9. “Na Brahman kshatriya..” – 3/14. Although Brahman, Kshatriya and Vaish men have been allowed
inter-caste marriages, even in distress they should not marry Shudra women.
10. “Heenjati striyam……..” – 3/15. When twice born [dwij=Brahman, Kshatriya and Vaish] men in
their folly marry low caste Shudra women, they are responsible for the degradation of their whole
family. Accordingly, their children adopt all the demerits of the Shudra caste.
11. “Shudram shaynam……” – 3/17. A Brahman who marries a Shudra woman, degrades himself and
his whole family ,becomes morally degenerated , loses Brahman status and his children too attain
status of shudra.
12. “Daiv pitrya………………” – 3/18. The offerings made by such a person at the time of established
rituals are neither accepted by God nor by the departed soul; guests also refuse to have meals with
him and he is bound to go to hell after death.
13. “Chandalash ……………” – 3/240. Food offered and served to Brahman after Shradh ritual should
not be seen by a chandal, a pig, a cock,a dog, and a menstruating women.
14. “Na ashniyat…………….” – 4/43. A Brahman, true defender of his class, should not have his meals
in the company of his wife and even avoid looking at her. Furthermore, he should not look towards
her when she is having her meals or when she sneezes/yawns.
15. “Na ajyanti……………….” – 4/44. A Brahman in order to preserve his energy and intellect, must not
look at women who applies collyrium to her eyes, one who is massaging her nude body or one who
is delivering a child.
16. “Mrshyanti…………….” – 4/217. One should not accept meals from a woman who has extra
marital relations; nor from a family exclusively dominated/managed by women or a family whose 10
days of impurity because of death have not passed.

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17. “Balya va………………….” – 5/150. A female child, young woman or old woman is not supposed to
work independently even at her place of residence.
18. “Balye pitorvashay…….” – 5/151. Girls are supposed to be in the custody of their father when
they are children, women must be under the custody of their husband when married and under the
custody of her son as widows. In no circumstances is she allowed to assert herself independently.
19. “Asheela kamvrto………” – 5/157. Men may be lacking virtue, be sexual perverts, immoral and
devoid of any good qualities, and yet women must constantly worship and serve their husbands.
20. “Na ast strinam………..” – 5/158. Women have no divine right to perform any religious ritual, nor
make vows or observe a fast. Her only duty is to obey and please her husband and she will for that
reason alone be exalted in heaven.
21. “Kamam to………………” – 5/160. At her pleasure [after the death of her husband], let her
emaciate her body by living only on pure flowers, roots of vegetables and fruits. She must not even
mention the name of any other men after her husband has died.
22. “Vyabhacharay…………” – 5/167. Any women violating duty and code of conduct towards her
husband, is disgraced and becomes a patient of leprosy. After death, she enters womb of Jackal.
23. “Kanyam bhajanti……..” – 8/364. In case women enjoy sex with a man from a higher caste, the
act is not punishable. But on the contrary, if women enjoy sex with lower caste men, she is to be
punished and kept in isolation.
24. “Utmam sevmansto…….” – 8/365. In case a man from a lower caste enjoys sex with a woman
from a higher caste, the person in question is to be awarded the death sentence. And if a person
satisfies his carnal desire with women of his own caste, he should be asked to pay compensation to
the women’s faith.
25. “Ya to kanya…………….” – 8/369. In case a woman tears the membrane [hymen] of her Vagina,
she shall instantly have her head shaved or two fingers cut off and made to ride on Donkey.
26. “Bhartaram…………….” – 8/370. In case a women, proud of the greatness of her excellence or her
relatives, violates her duty towards her husband, the King shall arrange to have her thrown before
dogs at a public place.
27. “Pita rakhshati……….” – 9/3. Since women are not capable of living independently, she is to be
kept under the custody of her father as child, under her husband as a woman and under her son as
widow.
28. “Imam hi sarw………..” – 9/6. It is the duty of all husbands to exert total control over their wives.
Even physically weak husbands must strive to control their wives.
29. “Pati bharyam ……….” – 9/8. The husband, after the conception of his wife, becomes the embryo
and is born again of her. This explains why women are called Jaya.

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30. “Panam durjan………” – 9/13. Consuming liquor, association with wicked persons, separation
from her husband, rambling around, sleeping for unreasonable hours and dwelling -are six demerits
of women.
31. “Naita rupam……………” – 9/14. Such women are not loyal and have extra marital relations with
men without consideration for their age.
32. “Poonshchalya…………” – 9/15. Because of their passion for men, immutable temper and natural
heartlessness, they are not loyal to their husbands.
33. “Na asti strinam………” – 9/18. While performing namkarm and jatkarm, Vedic mantras are not to
be recited by women, because women are lacking in strength and knowledge of Vedic texts. Women
are impure and represent falsehood.
34. “Devra…sapinda………” – 9/58. On failure to produce offspring with her husband, she may obtain
offspring by cohabitation with her brother-in-law [devar] or with some other relative [sapinda] on
her in-law’s side.
35. “Vidwayam…………….” – 9/60. He who is appointed to cohabit with a widow shall approach her at
night, be anointed with clarified butter and silently beget one son, but by no means a second one.
36. “Yatha vidy……………..” – 9/70. In accordance with established law, the sister-in-law [bhabhi] must
be clad in white garments; with pure intent her brother-in-law [devar] will cohabitate with her until
she conceives.
37. “Ati kramay……………” – 9/77. Any women who disobey orders of her lethargic, alcoholic and
diseased husband shall be deserted for three months and be deprived of her ornaments.
38. “Vandyashtamay…….” – 9/80. A barren wife may be superseded in the 8th year; she whose
children die may be superseded in the 10th year and she who bears only daughters may be
superseded in the 11th year; but she who is quarrelsome may be superseded without delay.
39. “Trinsha……………….” – 9/93. In case of any problem in performing religious rites, males between
the age of 24 and 30 should marry a female between the age of 8 and 12.
40. “Yambrahmansto…….” – 9/177. In case a Brahman man marries Shudra woman, their son will be
called ‘Parshav’ or ‘Shudra’ because his social existence is like a dead body.

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The Portuguese and Spanish were followed in their attempted conquest of the world for Catholicism,
by the Protestant Dutch and British, along with the Catholic French, who were much less inclined
than their Iberian predecessors towards cutting off heads to save souls. Their conquest began with
trade – Dutch and British trading companies, backed by military force, which gradually wrested
control of the Spanish and Portuguese territories and global maritime trade through the 18th and
19th centuries. This trade was centred trade in African slaves. The transatlantic slave trade of
Africans was justified by the scriptures by the Spanish and Portuguese, who used the same Bible to
justify the mass-murder of the “heathen” native inhabitants of the Americas. The missionaries
followed, converting the survivors and subsequent generations to Roman Catholicism.
Though he objected to corruption in the Catholic Church, such as “indulgences” and paying sums of
money to achieve forgiveness of sins, Martin Luther, the first Protestant, did not protest against the
crime of slavery. When King Henry VIII founded the Church of England in 1534, placing himself and
his descendants at its head, the last thing on his mind was releasing slaves. By the 1690s, the English
were shipping the most slaves from West Africa. They maintained this position during the 18th
century, becoming the biggest shippers of slaves across the Atlantic. By 1783, the triangular route
that took British-made goods to Africa to buy slaves, transported the enslaved to the West Indies,
and then brought slave-grown products such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to Britain, amounted to
80 percent of Great Britain's foreign income. The motive of the British and Dutch was money and
ruthless exploitation of land and resources (including human resources) rather than religion, though
they may have justified slavery from the Old Testament, which also declares that man was created
to “dominate and subdue” nature. Domination and subjugation was certainly the colonial strategy,
along with divide and rule, for which religion was a useful tool. In the first century AD, the Roman
philosopher Lucius Seneca observed that the common man thinks religion is true, the wise that it is
false, and the rulers that it is useful.
Though the Christian Bible may have been used to justify slavery, and appears from some passages
to condone it, there existed slavery in many non-Christian cultures. In fact history suggests that for
hundreds, even thousands, of years it has been common practice that conquered peoples were
subjected to slavery by the victors. There was slavery in Asia and Africa before the Europeans arrived
there, and there was also slavery throughout the Moslem world. It is well known that the Arab
Muslims dominated the trade in African slaves to Asia long before the Portuguese appeared in the
Indian Ocean and began their competition for the spice trade with the Muslims.
It has been pointed out by Christian apologists that the movement to abolish slavery was led by
religious people, and specifically Christians, albeit not from the Anglican or Catholic mainstreams.
William Wilberforce, who led the abolitionist movement in Britain, underwent an evangelical
conversion before he was motivated to campaign for an end to slavery. The Quakers, who also led
the abolitionist movement, were an obscure, if influential, Christian sect, who preached fear
(quaking) in the face of God. They recognised the evils of slavery, when many other religious people
did not. Was it because of their inherent goodness or because of their religiosity that Wilberforce
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Many scientists believe that we have what might be called “religious instincts” – they say we have
evolved to attribute agency to the dramatic features and forces of inanimate nature, giving rise first
to animism and then to organized religion. Maybe this is true, but I’m not so sure that the world will
be a better place if religion is replaced by science and rationality, even if this were possible. I do
think that teaching about evolution in schools, including the time frame of the various geological
ages, the movement of the continents on their respective tectonic plates, which explain everything
from the raising of the Himalaya mountains to the evolution of birds from dinosaur ancestors and
the global distribution of the human race from our origin in Africa, is essential for the children of the
future.
The palaeontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, one of my intellectual heroes and an
internationally recognised authority on evolution, maintained, till his death in 2002 that there was
no necessary conflict between science and religion. He was strongly opposed to the teaching of
“Intelligent Design” (code name for creationism) in schools, because it is nonsense, but he did not
generally criticise religion or religious belief. Gould argued that religion and science are concerned
with different domains.
Those who argue that science and religion are not incompatible might reasonably argue that science
explains the facts of the universe, developing falsifiable theories to explain various observations,
which are then tested by experiment – what is, while religion is concerned with matters of morality
and conduct – what should be, including what should be done (what we should do, individually and
collectively). Science is, in Gould’s view, amoral, just as Nature is. Not immoral, just amoral. It makes
observations, but does not make judgements on what is good and evil. Judging what is good and evil
is very much the premise of religion, but what kinds of rules and judgements do the religions of the
world make, and how good (or evil) are they? Both science and religion make claims to truth – does
this make a collision between them inevitable?
Being wrong and doing wrong

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Dawkins published The God Delusion in 2006, preceded a few months earlier by the Channel 4
television documentary The Root of all Evil? This was broadcast in two halves – The God Delusion
and The Virus of Faith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld4X9NQdnog (The God Delusion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzjYuFhcBKM (The Virus of Faith)
The titles of ‘The God Delusion’ and ‘The Root of all Evil’ are deliberately provocative. Dawkins is
prepared to go where most polite people fear to venture and deliberately confronts religious belief,
which he regards as inconsistent with Science. Science with a capital S. Dawkins has founded a
Foundation for Reason and Science and was the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at
Oxford University. He clearly does not believe that to get along in society on should avoid discussing
religion or politics.
The first of these documentaries, The God Delusion, went to air in the UK in January 2006. Channel 4
said that 2/3 of the responses had been positive. The book The God Delusion was released in
September 2006, and developed the themes of the documentary further. The documentary was
uploaded to YouTube on 5.7.2013 and has had 7,140 views so far (9.5.2015). An overwhelming
majority of 68 likes contrasts with 3 dislikes. This suggests that people generally agree with Dawkins’
views, at least on face value. But 7,140 views is not many in almost two years. Maybe only Dawkins
fans are inclined to view a documentary titled “The Root of All Evil” that is not about money.
The Wikipedia page on the documentary says that Dawkins admitted that the title The Root of All
Evil? was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy. This,
he apparently said on the Jeremy Vine Show on the BBC in 2006, but I have no way of knowing
whether this is true. Apparently the concession was the addition of the question mark, changing it
from a statement to a question.
The provocative title is obviously based on the popular saying that “money is the root of all evil”. The
more biblically-oriented capitalists emphasise the Bible says that it is not money but the “love of
money” that is the root of all evil and not money itself. But Dawkins and Channel 4 provide a polemic
in support of the idea that religion is the root of all evil (and not money or the love of it, which he
does not discuss).
But what do they mean by religion, and what do they mean by evil? What other causes can be
identified for evil other than religion? Is human nature at the root of all evil, or is there also evil in
nature? What about the Devil – is the Devil or Satan the root of all evil, as some religious people
believe? Is belief in the Devil without reference to the supernatural consistent with both science and
atheism, or when we reject the existence of God is it assumed that we also reject the existence of
the Devil, the personification of evil? What, perhaps more importantly, are the roles of such things
as nationalism, territorialism, authoritarianism, sexism, acquisitiveness, politics, racism and
intolerance in causing evil? There is also the problem of the evils created by scientists – chemical
weapons, land-mines, multi-barrel rocket-launchers, AK 47s and other weapons, including nuclear

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bombs. Bombs may be used by religious fanatics, but they are manufactured using scientific
knowledge.
In the introduction of The Root of All Evil? Dawkins begins ominously, with what he regards as the
consummate evil in the world as he saw it in 2006:
“There are would-be murderers all around the world who want to kill you, me and
themselves because they are motivated by what they think is the highest ideal. Of course,
politics are important – Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford, but as we wake
up to this huge challenge to our civilized values, don’t let’s forget the elephant in the room,
an elephant called religion.”
Dawkins is warning about the dangers of suicide bombers, who he implies are mostly male and
motivated by religious faith. His target for criticism is faith in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the
Abrahamic Religions, that all venerate what the Christians call the Old Testament. My limited
understanding is that in Judaism a variant of the Old Testament is venerated as the Torah, which is
only some of the corpus of Jewish religious literature. The Jews do not recognise Jesus as a prophet
or messiah, while Islam accepts Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet. Some schools of Islam also believe in
the Second Coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse, while the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. In
Islam, from what little I understand of the religion, some of the Old Testament stories are accepted,
including the importance of the Old Testament prophets like Moses and Abraham and the six-day
creation, but there is considerable diversity and divergence of thought in Islamic scholarship about
such things.
Dawkins admits that politics is important to understand the “would be murderers” that he imagines
are plotting evil suicide-bombings all over the world. He says they want to kill “you, me and
themselves”, This may be true in his case, given his public attacks on their faith, but I’m confident
that it is not the case for myself. If I went around saying people wanted to kill me but I didn’t know
who they are I would probably, given my circumstances, be locked back up in a mental hospital. He
mentions the politics of Iraq, Palestine and Bradford, but doesn’t explore them, nor is there much
depth in his analysis of the problem of suicide bombers, who are not, by any means, responsible for
most of the murders that occur in the world today. Most murderers kill others and not themselves.
Many of the murders are called “military operations”, including many of the murders in Iraq and
Palestine.
If one looks more carefully at the current threat of militant Islam in the Middle East, Africa and Asia,
one finds the USA and the West arming and training of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight a
proxy war against the atheist, communist Russians in the 1980s, giving rise to the Taliban. One finds
the arming of the secular regime of Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons and
support, by the USA and West, of Hussein and number of other dictators around the world in the
1970s and 1980s. Palestine and Iraq have long and complex histories, including the crusades and the
centuries-old struggle for control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land of the Bible. More recently,
European colonization and dominance, both cultural and political, and the colonial wars, culminating
in the First and Second World Wars, have fed Islamic militancy as well as nationalism in the
previously colonized world. Islamic militancy has many complexities and a long history. So does

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Christian militancy and Jewish militancy. There have been plenty of militant Buddhists and Hindus in
history, too, though Dawkins focuses only on the Abrahamic religions.
It is a common and accurate perception, influenced by the media, but confirmed by statistics and the
actual statements of suicide bombers, that Islamic fundamentalism and extremism have been
responsible for most of the suicide bombings in the world since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE)
in Sri Lanka in May 2009. At the time that Dawkins and Channel 4 made this documentary it’s hard to
see how the LTTE’s female suicide bombers, who were not motivated by belief in God or heaven to
strap on ‘suicide vests’ and blow up both military and civilian targets, escaped the attention of
Channel 4 and Professor Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens, who also uses the example of suicide
bombers as an argument against all religion, corrected himself in later debates, when he made
reference to the Tigers use of suicide bombers as an exception to his pronouncements against Islam
and, more broadly, religion.
According to Dawkins:
“The suicide bomber is convinced that in killing for his God, he will be fast-tracked to a
special martyr’s heaven. This isn’t just a problem of Islam. In this program I want to examine
that dangerous thing that is common to Judaism and Christianity as well, the process of non-
thinking called faith.”
He then states his position clearly:
“I am a scientist, and I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief.”
During their militant campaign for a separate state for Sri Lankan Tamils, which they called Tamil
Eelam, the organization known as the “Tamil Tigers” were a specific military and political entity
formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE. The political ideology of the LTTE
was ostensibly secular and Marxist, and they drew inspiration from the “liberation struggle” of
Cuban Marxists. This was their ideology as espoused by the self-declared “political strategist and
theoretician” of the LTTE, Anton Balasingham, who spent his later years orchestrating the
international political machinery of the LTTE from London, together with his wife Adele, who, when
the husband and wife team were still in Sri Lanka, led the Women’s Wing of the Tigers.
There is YouTube footage of Adele Balasingham handing out vials of cyanide to young women, who
were Tamil recruits for the LTTE, but all the supporters of the LTTE, including Adele Balasingham
were not Tamil (though all of the actual fighters were). These young women were expected to
commit suicide by swallowing the cyanide if they got caught. It is a scientific discovery that the
ingestion of cyanide is fatal at a certain dose and it was a scientific calculation that allowed the LTTE
to know what dose to give these women (most of whom were still girls). The guns that they carried
and killed with were invented and refined into ever-more murderous models through the genius of
science. The suicide vests that were pioneered by the Tigers were also contributions from Western
science and technology.
At the same time, the LTTE cynically used religion and religious, as well as non-religious Tamil
cultural traditions to further their political and military agenda. Self-sacrifice is integral to the Hindu
religion, martyrdom as a direct route to Heaven is a feature of the Christian and Muslim religions.
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The LTTE created a cult around its military leader, Vellupillai Prabakaran, who was hero-worshipped,
but the concept of martyrdom was promoted more for nationalistic reasons – which were politically
secular. The suicide squad was given the self-identity of Black Tigers, and before they went on their
suicide mission they would be honoured by a dinner with the leader. Those who died in the cause
were commemorated in rituals that calculatingly drew on both Hinduism and Christianity. For
example, Prabakaran was insistent that the dead “cadres” as they were called, were buried in the
Christian tradition rather than cremated in the Hindu tradition, so that he could impress Western
visitors with the determination and sacrifice of the “freedom fighters” as evidenced by the
cemeteries full of white crosses. The Australian paediatrician, John Whitehall, who trained the LTTE
medicos after the 2004 Asian tsunami, says that he was very impressed by these cemeteries. He was
supposed to be.
The LTTE welcomed any religion to kill and be killed in the interests of winning the war for “self-
determination” of the Tamils of Tamil Eelam. The state they aimed to create was secular, rather than
religious, but there was to be supremacy of two languages – Tamil and English, rather than Sinhalese,
which was seen as the language of the enemy. Sinhalese was also the language of the majority of the
population of Sri Lanka, and this was one of the roots of the evil that ensued, but not the root of “all”
the evil of the war. There were many factors, some political, some social, some linguistic. All the
killing and maiming was done with weapons, developed through Western science, though much
damage was also done through words and propaganda, which were used to raise money for the war
effort on both sides. Though portrayed as an “ethnic war” between the Sinhalese and Tamils, there
were many factors that fed into the equation. Religion was one of them, in that the state religion of
Sri Lanka is Buddhism and the large majority of Sinhalese are Buddhist, with a small minority of
Catholic and Protestant Christians. The Tamils are mostly Hindu, also with a minority of Catholic and
Protestant Christians. Most of the members of the Sri Lankan army were Sinhalese and Buddhist,
while most of the Tigers were Hindu or Christian, adding a religious dimension to the conflict.
Language, though, is not the root of all evil any more than religion is. There is no “root of all evil”.
Evil has many causes, many roots. The challenge is to identify them, including the evils of certain
religious doctrines – but also the evils of certain scientific doctrines, political doctrines, economic
doctrines and philosophical doctrines. One of the roots of evil is dogma and dogmatism, but there
are scientific dogmas and well as religious, political and social dogmas. It seems sensible and mature
to look for the evil in one’s own belief system before attacking the beliefs of others, and to make a
clear distinction between the two different meanings of what it is to be wrong. Wrong can mean
incorrect, it can also mean evil or wicked. This is the important difference between mad and bad,
between delusion and crime. We all agree that crime is wrong (though we may differ on what
constitutes a crime). Delusions are also wrong, in that they are not true and correct beliefs, but they
are not wrong in a moral sense.
There is an important difference between being wrong and doing wrong. Being wrong means that
you are mistaken, and this can be corrected. There is no moral condemnation of people being wrong,
and though they might resist admitting it to themselves or others, being wrong about things is not
evil or sinful. Doing wrong is a different matter. To do wrong is to sin and all sins are evil or wicked,
according to the shared religious traditions of East and West. Some sins, like murder, rape and

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stealing are condemned by all religions except those that truly worship evil (and there are such
religions, though with fortunately few adherents).
The regime of Adolf Hitler is almost universally regarded as evil. The exception is the neo-Nazis who
continue to hero-worship Hitler and the Nazi regime, who are mostly in the West – the UK and
Europe, and North America (the USA and Canada). I personally regard Hitler as one of most evil men
in history and regard the Nazis with revulsion, but not because of Hitler’s supposed “paganism” and
interest in Theosophy. I don’t care if Hitler was a vegetarian and cared about animals, nor if he truly
loved Eva Braun; what matters to me is the genocide that he presided over.
The undoubted evil of Hitler has been used by both sides of the argument for and against religion.
The atheists claim that Hitler was a Catholic, the Catholics claim that he was an atheist or pagan. The
Nazi’s used a swastika – an ancient Indian sacred symbol – rather the cross for their flags (though
the swastika has a cross as its integral design). The atheists also argue that the Catholic Church
celebrated Hitler’s birthday, while their opponents argue back that it was under duress, and that
Catholic priests tried to save many Jews. I don’t expect to resolve these arguments, but I think we
can all agree that Hitler was evil and so was the entire Nazi apparatus. In the 1940s, while this
apparatus grew in power and danger, and started killing the inmates of its mental asylums in
anticipation of the Holocaust, the Germans led the world not in religion but in science. After the war
it was Nazi scientists who were recruited by the Americans under Operation Paperclip, not German
theologians.
The Holocaust was not caused by the isolated, deranged mind of an individual. The Nazi apparatus
was a highly organized, professional killing machine guided by the best scientific minds in the
business and the latest technology. German science was rivalled only by that of Japan, Britain, Russia
and the USA, not necessarily in that order. It was German drug company Bayer that gave the world
heroin, which was marketed as a non-addictive way of treating opium addiction. It was Germany
that led the world in the neurosciences – the study of the brain, which advanced in leaps and bounds
when they started killing mental patients and collecting their brains, to section, stain and study
under the microscope. The University of Heidelberg had the biggest collection of brains, not in
academia, but in formaline. It was medical doctors, trained by psychiatrists, who decided, during the
notorious Aktion T4 program, which mental patients were ‘curable’ or ‘incurable’. The German
psychiatrist Professor Emil Kraepelin, who first described “dementia praecox” (later named
schizophrenia) and “manic depression” in the late 1890s, at the Heidelberg University was
internationally recognised as an expert in classifying some people as mad, with the assumption that
the system (represented by himself) was sane. A few years after Kraepelin died, these same criteria
were used to decide whether to send people to the gas chamber (another scientific achievement of
the Germans). The Nazi psychiatrist Karl Schneider orchestrated the killing of mental patients and
collected their brains for the university’s collection. It was all very scientific.
The other motivation for the evils of Nazism was the creation of an Aryan super-race. This was a
scientific aim, based on a nationalistic German interpretation of anthropology and history, but
rationalised by the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest as interpreted by Darwin’s cousin, Francis
Galton at Cambridge University in England. This was the doctrine of eugenics, which Galton hoped
would become the “religion of the future” when he promoted it from the 1880s till his death in 1911.

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Eugenics means ‘good breeding’, from the Greek eu – meaning good and genos - meaning race,
stock or kin. The enthusiasts of eugenics hoped that the most superior classes and individuals of
their various nations should be encouraged to have large families, while the most inferior classes
and individuals should be sterilized, segregated and prevented from contributing their “blood” or
“inheritance” to the next generation. This was based on their understanding of Darwin’s
evolutionary theory, as applied to human society.
There is an inherent assumption here that science is good – scientific status for a theory or
hypothesis is something to be desired. This is the result of the status of science – which is based on
its credibility, which in turn is based on its marvellous achievements in various scientific disciplines.
Its credibility is based on its history and the technological wonders that have transformed human
society - the motor car, airplane, radio and TV, vaccines, knee and hip replacements, insulin and
penicillin (and a range of valuable drugs) not to mention the miracle of the computer. To a man
living in the Stone Age, or even the Middle Ages, these achievements would indeed be miraculous.
Dawkins has extended his debunking of religion to the debunking of what he regards as
“pseudoscience”, including the modern guru of Ayurveda, Dr Deepak Chopra. There is a lot to
criticise in Deepak Chopra’s science, including his interpretations of the Ayurvedic concepts of vata,
pitta and dosha “types” with corresponding herbal supplements, but Dawkins focused on his claims
about “Quantum Healing”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsH1U7zSp7k
Deepak Chopra says that “Quantum Healing” is “the theory that a shift in consciousness causes a
shift in biology”. This cannot be denied, but what does that have to with physics quantum theory? At
first, Chopra says that this is just a “metaphor”, but then he does on to try and justify his use of the
term. Dawkins isn’t interested in trying to understand him, his agenda is to discredit Chopra as
preaching pseudoscience – what another debater more rudely called “woo-woo” – scientific-
sounding words and phrases that do not make sense on deeper consideration.
Deepak Chopra got a more sympathetic hearing from Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist who
has been writing about his theories about "Morphogenic Fields” and “Morphic Resonance”, which he
argues supports the idea that minds can exist independent of brains. Chopra has control of the
interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1CcOQnG0uM
Reductionism and mechanistic frameworks don’t work, according to Chopra.

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Another application of Popper’s paradigm is in the double-blind trials for various drugs, which has
evolved into so-called “evidence-based medicine”. The fact that drug trials are systematically biased
in favour of the drug companies, partly due to conscious but mostly due to unconscious factors has
increasingly become apparent. We all know that the drug companies are corrupt and that the drug
companies drive medical research, education and clinical practice. A young psychiatry registrar told
me recently that “we all know that drug company corruption is rampant”. He also admitted that the
drug companies “drive” medicine – but completely failed to introspectively perceive the influence of
this corruption on his own thinking about medicine.
Popper defined what is and is not a scientific theory on the basis of whether it can be falsified. A
hypothesis or theory that cannot be falsified is not scientific, in his view. He argued that for this
reason contemporary Marxism and also Freudian psychoanalysis did not qualify as science. His
scepticism towards the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis arose after initially studying under Alfred
Adler, who developed psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Adler was the first major figure to break
away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory,
which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an
individuum. Freud declared Adler's ideas too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the
Psychoanalytical Society (which Freud led) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to
dissent.
There have been many reasonable allegations that Freud’s methods were not scientific, nor were his
conclusions scientifically valid. There is no scientific evidence of the id, ego and superego, of the
Oedipus and Elektra complexes, and some of his more fanciful ideas. Others like ego defence
mechanisms, the pleasure principle and the role of the unconscious have been widely accepted by
many who don’t believe in his declarations about “penis envy” or “anal fixation”.
Homo sapiens was named in 1758 by Linnaeus.
Scientists have made progress in their quest to understand why some people have light skin and
others have dark skin. I have basic belief in this science, but also some awareness of the mistakes
accepted scientific experts have made in the past. The inventor of zoological taxonomy, Baron Carl
Von Linne scientifically known as Carolus Linneaus (1707-1778), the Swedish biologist and physician
who invented the modern system of classification of living creatures and invented the system of
Latin names that we use to this day, classified humans of the 17th century as belonging to several
species, based on his understanding of science. Skin colour was the primary criterion he used in
classifying humans as belonging to different species, each in a respective continent.
The 1735 classification of Carolus Linnaeus, inventor of zoological taxonomy, divided the human race
Homo Sapiens into continental varieties of Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer, each
associated with a different humour: sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic respectively.
Homo Sapiens Europaeus was described as active, acute, and adventurous whereas Homo Sapiens
Africanus was crafty, lazy, and careless.

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Linnaeus subdivided the human species into four varieties based on continent and skin colour:
"Europæus albus" (white European), "Americanus rubescens" (red American), "Asiaticus fuscus"
(brown Asian) and "Africanus Niger" (black African). In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae he
further detailed stereotypical characteristics for each variety, based on the concept of the four
temperaments from classical antiquity, and changed the description of Asians' skin tone to "luridus"
(yellow). Additionally, Linnaeus created a wastebasket taxon "monstrosus" for "wild and monstrous
humans, unknown groups, and more or less abnormal people”.
The Americanus: red, choleric, righteous; black, straight, thick hair; stubborn, zealous, free; painting
himself with red lines, and regulated by customs.[21]
The Europeanus: white, sanguine, browny; with abundant, long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute,
inventive; covered with close vestments; and regulated by customs.[22]
The Asiaticus: yellow, melancholic, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; severe, haughty, greedy; covered with
loose clothing; and regulated by opinions.[23]
The Afer or Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips;
females without shame; mammary glands give milk abundantly; crafty, sly, careless; anoints himself
with grease; and regulated by will.[24]
The German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840), Professor of Medicine and Director of
the Museum of Natural History at Gottingen, included descriptions of sixty human skulls collected
from around the world to justify his view, which was regarded as scientific at the time (and is
certainly more scientific than the view that we are of different species), that humans were one
species but of different races, the defining characteristic being difference in skin colour. Blumenbach
classified us belonging to either the Caucasian or white race, the Mongolian or yellow race, including
all East Asians and some Central Asians, the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asian and
Pacific Islanders, the Ethiopian or black race, including sub-Saharan Africans or the American or red
race, including American Indians.
Charles Darwin sided with those who regarded the different races as having a common ancestor, and
that we all belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. He only came out publicly with his theories
about the evolution of humans from primate ancestors in 1871, with The Descent of Man, having
published the revolutionary On the Origin of Species twelve years earlier in 1859. It did not take as
long for Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton to come out with Hereditary Genius, which was published in
1869, two years before On the Origin of Species. Galton went on to found the Society for Eugenics
with Charles Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, which Galton envisaged as “the religion of the
future”, where human breeding is based on the rational science that allowed us to breed superior
breeds of horses or dogs. The superior races and classes would be encouraged to have large families
and the inferior – or undesirable – classes and races would be prevented from breeding. He also
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popularised the idea of “miscegenation” – pollution of blood lines. This was behind the policies of
racial segregation, as well as the idea that “primitive races” such as Australia’s Aborigines and Sri
Lanka’s Veddhas, were “naturally” destined to die out, and that nothing could be done to stop this.
In Hereditary Genius Galton, who pioneered the idea of IQ tests and statistical analyses of these,
argued that his research at Cambridge established that the African Black was, on average, two
“grades” below the White Caucasian in what he described as “civic worth”, which he equated with
“genius” or intelligence. His methodology pretended to be scientific and mathematical, though it
was criticised at the time (and has been since) as being neither. For example, he calculated “civic
worth” on the number of famous people and high-status professionals born into upper versus lower
classes, to conclude that upper class families are naturally endowed with genius. Differences in
educational opportunities, hereditary monarchies and aristocracies, nepotism and the other obvious
reasons for people becoming famous in European history or prominent in British society of the day
(both were included without discrimination between the two categories) were not considered in
Galton’s mathematical analyses of “civic worth”. It so happened that his own family was such a
family, liberally endowed with famous men, though this doesn’t disprove the possibility that some
aspects of intelligence are indeed hereditary. Musicality, for example, or ability with numbers or
languages. Galton does not discuss such things – his conclusion, based on his experiences in Africa is
that the “African Blacks” have a “slavish instinct” and “naturally fall into the ways of slavery”. He
formed this opinion after making the less than scientific observation that porters who were
employed to carry the loads, when he tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Lake Nyasa from the Western
Coast, regarded him their “owner”. Maybe the history of Europeans in Africa had something to do
with it.
Galton categorised British society according to the earnings of the male breadwinners to conclude
that the upper classes were genetically superior to the lower classes, but that there was a growing
danger of the superior, educated classes being out-bred by the inferior, less intelligent lower classes.
He used bell curves to illustrate his points, indeed his arguments were based on the application of
statistical bell curves. The same way as bell curves describe the variation in height in a society,
Galton argued, so does intelligence, as indicated by the IQ tests he devised and his evaluation of
history. He argued that there is, according to statistical probability, the occasional Black who reaches
a prominent position by virtue of his genius, such as Toussaint Louverture, who led the Haitian
Revolution of 1791.
Race is also a scientific concept credited to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French
pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ lwi ləklɛʁ kɔ̃t də byfɔ̃]; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French
naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedic author.
Buffon and Johann Blumenbach were believers in monogenism, the concept that all races have a
single origin. They also believed in the "Degeneration theory" of racial origins. They both said that
Adam and Eve were Caucasian and that other races came about by degeneration from
environmental factors, such as the sun and poor diet. They believed that the degeneration could be
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reversed if proper environmental control was taken, and that all contemporary forms of man could
revert to the original Caucasian race.[11]
Buffon and Blumenbach claimed that pigmentation arose because of the heat of the tropical sun.
They suggested cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos. They thought the Chinese
relatively fair skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns and
were protected from environmental factors. Buffon said that food and the mode of living could
make races degenerate and distinguish them from the original Caucasian race.[11]
Buffon believed humanity was only 6000 years old (the time since Adam). Believing in monogenism,
Buffon thought that skin colour could change in a single lifetime, depending on the conditions of
climate and diet.[12]
Buffon was an advocate of the Asia hypothesis; in his Histoire Naturelle, he argued that man's
birthplace must be in a high temperate zone. As he believed good climate conditions would breed
healthy humans, he hypothesized that the most logical place to look for the first humans' existence
would be in Asia and around the Caspian Sea region.
some of which have led humanity astray in the past, including those of Darwin, which directly led to
both Social Darwinism and the doctrines of eugenics, formulated by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton
in direct response to the Origin of Species. Galton applied Darwin’s theory, as he understood it, to
“scientifically” and “statistically” justify his conclusion that the African Black was, on average, “two
grades” less intelligent than the “White race” or Caucasians, whilst being “grade”
In 2014 Pope Francis announced that evolution and the big bang theory are in fact real, and one
should not gather from the Book of Genesis that God is a “magician with a magic wand.”
I do not believe in the supernatural or any of the Biblical miracles, nor any of the alleged miracles
from other religious traditions. I don’t believe in supernatural miracles; I do believe in natural
miracles.
The sun goes up in the sky as the morning progresses and performs various natural miracles as it
moves through the sky. Flowers open and leaves imperceptibly grow, birds start to sing and then
grow quiet, flocks of migratory birds and butterflies continue their journeys and, in the deep layers
of the skin of human beings that are exposed to its rays, melanocytes produce the brown pigment
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melanin and other cells produce vitamin D from cholesterol. I believe, as a result of my medical
training that Vitamin D is necessary for the healthy growth of bones, and that deficiency of this
vitamin causes the childhood disease of rickets, that causes bones to weaken and deform. I also
believe, on the basis of what I regard as a sensible hypothesis I read some years ago, that it is the
need to produce vitamin D that is most likely the evolutionary cause of light and dark skin, although
folic acid may have something to do with it, as has been recently hypothesised. I also believe in the
whole miracle of evolution by natural selection.
As I said, I do not regard these facts as miracles in the religious sense of the word. They are, though,
marvellous and awe-inspiring, they are numinous. They are also scientifically explainable, using what
science already knows.
as I think all things can be, though this might require a broadening of the definition of science
beyond the influential philosopher Karl Popper’s stringent definition of what science is. Popper
defined scientific theories by falsifiability – if a theory cannot be falsified, it is not truly scientific. At
the same time, we cannot be absolutely certain about anything – just less doubtful.
Popper’s definition has a certain elegance to it, and was taught to me as fact when I studied
medicine in the 1980s but it is not how most people, including scientists and doctors, think in
practice. Much of what we believe, we believe on the basis of faith – faith in Science and faith in
Medicine. This involves faith in the integrity of other scientists and the integrity of the institutions
that conduct science. How justifiable is this faith, this belief in Science? How justified is it in Medicine?
How much of medicine is science and how much is the art of healing? What is the relationship
between medicine and health, and where does science come into it? What is the nature of the
relationships between religion and health, religion and medicine and religion and science?
To understand the relationship between science and religion we might consider the science of
healing, since all religions profess to heal and have ancient texts about what health is and how
health can be achieved. In the Western tradition healing has been dominated by medical doctors
and Christian priests. The doctors healed through science and the priests healed through prayer. The
doctors did a far better job of healing, and together with nurses, became accepted as the “healing
professions”. Later clinical psychologists, physiotherapists and other “allied health professionals”
claimed the mantle of “healing professions”. The credibility of the medical system is based on its
claims to scientific truth and validity as well as its results. Prayer too can be judged by its results,
despite the fact that it makes no claim to be scientific.
An American study published in 2008 of over 1,600 patients undergoing heart surgery showed that
prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart
surgery. This study showed that patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of
post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms. The researchers suggested that this was
perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, with the patients feeling under pressure to
get well, and becoming more stressed as a result of this.

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Over the years my faith in the integrity of Western science has taken something of a beating, and in
some areas my faith has been lost. This is a good thing, I think. In some areas I believed on the basis
of faith rather than evidence. I had faith in Medicine, based on the false assumption that Medicine is
a branch of science and that what I had learnt at university and in my hospital training was “scientific
medicine”. Science, from the Latin scientio means “knowledge”, and I assumed that what was in the
textbooks and came out of the mouths of professors was “true knowledge”. I was aware that
mistakes had been made by scientists and doctors in the past, but I assumed that the fundamentals
of what I learned in physics, chemistry, anatomy, pharmacology, physiology and biology were factual.
I also had a deep faith in the institutions that promulgated this knowledge – universities, especially
those in Australia (where I studied), the UK (where I was born) and the USA (where most of my
textbooks came from).
During the years I worked as a family doctor I grew increasingly disillusioned with the medical
system for a number of reasons. One was the role of the pharmaceutical industry – “big pharma” as
it is sometimes called – in shaping what medical students and doctors learn. This has a predictable
effect on what they prescribe when they are treating patients – meaning which drug they choose,
from a range of drugs marketed under various labels. Sometimes the same drug is marketed under
two brand names by the same drug company to give the consumer an illusion of choice. Treating the
public is a massive profit-driven industry, driven by demand for “treatment services”, of which there
are many alternatives.
The dominant treatment services are based on western medical science – orthodox drug and surgery
oriented medicine based on a disease model. Much of the medical students training is concerned
with how to diagnose various diseases. This is based on history and examination, followed by
appropriate investigations to arrive (by logical reasoning) at the most likely diagnosis (disease label)
along with less likely possibilities (differential diagnosis). Once a provisional diagnosis has been made,
this may be confirmed by various investigations (such as scans or blood tests) or the patient may be
treated entirely based on the “clinical examination”. This is the style of medicine that I learned at the
University of Queensland in the 1980s, and my father learned at Cambridge University in the 1950s.
The fundamental style of western medicine have not changed, but there has been an increasing
focus, since the 1950s, of “social and preventive medicine”. In preventive medicine, the ostensible
objective is to prevent illness before it develops, which can be done through “screening tests” for
various disease markers, and promotion of healthy thinking and activities. Lending itself to
corruption and abuse, preventive medicine also promotes the ingestion of drugs, not for the
treatment of illness but for its prevention. This means giving drugs to people who are, at the present
moment, perfectly well, based on statistical evidence that the drug, for example, lowers cholesterol
or blood pressure.
There are good scientific reasons for treating high blood pressure and LDL cholesterol, based on
convincing evidence that both promote atherosclerosis (‘hardening of the arteries’) which in turn
leads to ischaemic heart disease, stroke and kidney failure. The pathogenesis of ischaemic heart
disease, stroke and kidney failure are amongst the areas of medicine about which much is known,
and many scientific studies have been done. They have also provided a bonanza for drug companies
and advertisers who used fear of cholesterol to market everything from “low cholesterol potato
chips” to statin drugs (one of the biggest components of the pharmaceutical budget).
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I was working as a family doctor (GP) in Melbourne, when the first statin drugs were released. Prior
to these drugs there were unpleasant drinks that were supposed to lower the cholesterol, but it was
only with the release of the statins in the 1990s, that it became a central drug in cardiology. Studies
have shown that the statins, by raising the ratio of “good” (HDL) to “bad” (LDL) cholesterol, reduce
the recurrence rate after heart attacks. They have not been shown to reduce stroke, peripheral
vascular disease or ischaemic kidney disease, which are also thought to be caused by atherosclerosis
(which is macroscopically visible as blockages of arteries).
The difference between LDL and HDL cholesterol was ignored (though known) in the interests of
marketing. While I was testing and monitoring the HDL/LDL ratio in my patients with angina and
heart disease in the 1990s, there were still drug company reps and ads referring to cholesterol as if it
is some sort of poison, and urging people to have simple screening tests to measure their “total
cholesterol”. This was bad science and frightened people unnecessarily (perhaps increasing their
rate of atherosclerosis), since the total cholesterol includes both cardio-toxic and cardio-protective
types (LDL or low density lipoprotein and HDL or high density lipoprotein respectively).
The known fact that cholesterol is a vital and essential molecule in human physiology was pushed
from consciousness, outside that of biochemists and endocrinologists who knew that this ubiquitous
molecule is an essential component of cell walls, and the precursor to all the steroid hormones as
well as vitamin D. Instead the public came to believe that cholesterol is bad and statins are good.
That is, until people started becoming sick with muscle pains, diabetes and the other problems that
can be caused by statins. There were also reports that the statins could cause decline in cognitive
function.
The physical sciences and the social sciences.
There were some areas in which I was less confident about the sources I was learning from, as far as
their scientific merits were concerned. These were psychology, sociology and psychiatry. I only did a
couple of semesters of anthropology and found only the first one – when we learned about
Australopithecus, Homo erectus and Homo habilis fossil discoveries in Africa – of interest. The rest of
the “humanities” was, to my increasingly materialist, rationalist way of thinking, too vague and
imprecise. There was much jargon, but the terms were poorly defined, there was little convincing
evidence with numerous rival theories and every study pointed out “how little we know”. This
attitude is sometimes genuine scientific humility, were every statement and conclusion is
appropriately qualified. At other times it is used to justify further research grants, or to avoid
actually saying anything clearly. This was, after all, the Age of Behaviorism.
Though what has been retrospectively called the Cognitive Revolution had begun two decades
earlier in the same nations that gave us behaviourism, here in the Antipodes, I learned, in 1978, that
“psychology is defined as the behavior of organisms” and that psychology is both “scientific” and
“curious”. It is certainly curious, and one of the curious things about behaviourism is how they
ignored the importance of mind and thinking when they “scientifically” studied the psyche. I did not
gain an understanding of the psyche from my prescribed psychology textbook, because this textbook
was Psychology and Life by Stanford University’s Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is best known for the
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
This famous (or notorious) experiment was conducted from 14 to 20, August, 1971. It was funded by
the US Navy and Marine Corps and was conducted in a “mock prison” which was constructed in the
basement of the Stanford psychology building. Zimbardo advertised for students who were
interested in being paid $15 a day to participate in the research into “prison life”. They selected 24
young men, who were thought to be psychologically well balanced, dividing them (how randomly
one can’t tell) into 12 guards and 12 prisoners. Zimbardo himself took the role of “superintendent”.
The prisoners were forced to stay in the basement prison for the week, while the guards were
allowed to go home after an 8-hour shift. Over the duration of the experiment, the guards, who had
been instructed to psychologically but not physically abuse the prisoners, became increasingly
tyrannical and cruel as the experiment progressed, devising what can only be described as evil ways
of humiliating and demeaning their fellow students who had been assigned the role of “prisoner”.
Original video footage of the experiments can be found on YouTube, as well as many interviews
where Zimbardo refers to his seminal research into the nature of evil.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was bad science, in that it was immoral. This immorality was
apparent from the outset, but only one of Zimbardo’s co-researchers objected to it (resulting in the
experiment being ceased a day early). The conclusions Zimbardo reached were also flawed, as
subsequent research has shown, and the US military, which funded the research, appears to have
learned nothing from the well-known experiment other than to refine its psychological torture
techniques. How to torture effectively is what Zimbardo was clearly studying in the first place,
though he claimed to be testing (and successfully refuting) a scientific hypothesis (that inherent
personality traits of individual soldiers and guards are the main cause of the abuse of prisoners,
rather than social factors, such as the power of the system, and assigned roles). Zimbardo’s
interpretation of the experiment was that prisoners and guards “internalized” their identities as
prisoners and guards respectively, the prisoners becoming submissive and passive, and the guards
becoming increasingly sadistic and cruel. One problem, both ethically and scientifically, was the
instruction he gave the 12 guards the day before the experiment began:
“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you
can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system,
you, me, and they’ll have no privacy. We’re going to take away their individuality in various
ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation
we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
Another problem is that he armed the guards – with wooden batons. The prisoners did not know
that Zimbardo had instructed to inflict only psychological and not physical harm on the prisoners.
Where, though, is the line between what is psychological and what is physical, and is it not obvious
that threats of violence, backed by weapons and locked doors, can create submission? It was said,
long before Zimbardo studied the matter, that power corrupts. He himself referred to the
experiment as being to do with power and powerlessness.
Is knowledge power, or does power come from locked doors, batons and reflecting sunglasses? This
experiment does tell us something about power, and how it was misunderstood by Zimbardo and

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the many social psychologists who drew dubious conclusions about the relationship between power
and evil from the Stanford Prison Experiment and Zimbardo’s interpretation of it.
It doesn’t help that Professor Zimbardo has long sported a little goatee beard, that makes him look
rather like the stereotypical image of Satan. There are more sympathetic photos of him, but I rather
like this one.
Naming something is not explaining it, identifying is not either.
Western science and Science
Douglas Nakashima and Marie Roué have made a clear distinction between Western science and
“traditional knowledge”, which they equated with “Indigenous knowledge”. In 2002 they explained,
in the Encyclopaedia of Global Environmental Change that “Western science favours analytical and
reductionist methods as opposed to the more intuitive and holistic view often found in traditional
knowledge. Western science is positivist and materialist in contrast to traditional knowledge, which
is spiritual and does not make distinctions between empirical and sacred. Western science is
objective and quantitative as opposed to traditional knowledge, which is mainly subjective and
qualitative. Western science is based on an academic and literate transmission, while traditional
knowledge is often passed on orally from one generation to the next by the elders. Western science
isolates its objects of study from their vital context by putting them in simplified and controllable
experimental environments—which also means that scientists separate themselves from nature, the
object of their studies;-by contrast, traditional knowledge always depends on its context and
particular local conditions.”

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The Western medical model is not the only scientific model that claims to be able to heal. There are
also rival Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Indian Ayurvedic models that compete for
customers in Australia and the West, as in India and China. In addition, there are various Western
healing methods that claim scientific validity but are regarded, for various reasons as “alternative” or
“complementary” medicine – naturopathy, chiropractic, homeopathy and herbalism, for example. A
few Western-trained doctors like Deepak Chopra have attempted a fusion between Vedic and
Western science, but there are serious problems with this enterprise. I discovered this when I tried
to integrate Eastern and Western health models twenty years ago.
When I was working as a GP in Melbourne in the 1990s, I was once consulted by a young woman
who had visited an acupuncturist for a sprained wrist. She had been told, after an examination of her
tongue and pulse, that she had “warm Chi affecting the spleen” and “cold Chi affecting her kidneys”.
She had also been told that she needed to take a concoction of herbs to correct the “moistness” in
her liver. The lady was insistent that I do some blood tests to “check” her liver, kidneys and spleen. I
took a careful history and examined her, finding no signs of kidney or liver disease, nor evidence of
enlargement of her spleen, and tried to explain to her that what Chinese medicine means by “liver”,
“kidney” and “spleen” is not really the same as what these organs mean to Western doctors. She
wanted the blood tests anyway, so I ordered performed a biochemical screen – checking her
electrolytes, liver function tests and blood count. They were all, as I expected them to be, normal.
This event prompted me to look more closely at the theoretical basis of Traditional Chinese
Medicine (TCM) to see if the core concepts of Yin and Yang, chi and meridians can be understood in
terms of the fundamental Western scientific medical disciplines of anatomy and physiology. The
meridians are channels through which the chi (which I interpreted as energy of some sort) flowed.
The meridians, which determine acupuncture points, do not correspond to either the nervous
system or circulatory system in anatomy or function, and they have to be added on rather than
integrated with Western science.

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The concepts of Yin and Yang are also integral to Chinese Medicine. Yin (black with the white spot in
the symbol) is the feminine and Yang (white with the black spot) is the masculine, which has obvious
correspondence with Western science. One could regard the female hormones, like oestrogen, as
Yin and the masculine hormones like testosterone as Yang, as well as other distinctly feminine and
masculine aspects of anatomy, physiology and psychology. This is not what yin and yang mean in
Chinese medicine, science and philosophy, however.
Wikipedia explains that “In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (also, yin-yang or yin yang) describes
how apparently opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and
interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one
another. Many tangible dualities (such as light and dark, fire and water, and male and female) are
thought of as physical manifestations of the duality symbolized by yin and yang. This duality lies at
the origins of many branches of classical Chinese science and philosophy, as well as being a primary
guideline of traditional Chinese medicine.”
Chris Kressler, armed with a Master of Science but not a medical degree claims to be practicing
“integrative and functional medicine”, and has his own website that announces:
“Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health,
Paleo nutrition, and functional and integrative medicine.”
Kressler assures his readers that acupuncture does work, and provides purely scientific explanations
for why it works. Scientific, meaning Western scientific. The fact that the Chinese meridian system
does not correspond to the nervous system, does not stop some Kressler from claiming that
acupuncture works through its effects on the nervous system and stimulation of pain receptors in
the skin. This he says restores homeostasis, increases blood flow to the area, and causes the release
of pain-killing hormones (endorphins) from the brain. This theory is scientific and also satisfies Carl
Popper’s criterion that a scientific theory be falsifiable. The theory that acupuncture works because
of the release of endorphins can be tested and measured, supporting or disproving the theory.
Kressler gives no evidence that he is basing his claims on such studies, or whether this is mere
speculation.
In his posting on how he thinks acupuncture works Kressler makes reference to “purists” who object
to these efforts to explain acupuncture in Western scientific terms, thinking that it takes the magic
out of acupuncture. Kressler claims that equating chi (qi) with energy is incorrect, and that the
original meaning of qi was air – which he equates with oxygen. He writes: “When the terms qi
(oxygen), mai (vessel) and jie (neurovascular node) are properly translated, it becomes clear that
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there is no disagreement between ancient Chinese medical theory and contemporary principles of
anatomy and physiology. Chinese medicine is not a metaphysical, energy medicine but instead a
“flesh and bones” medicine concerned with the proper flow of oxygen and blood through the
vascular system.”
Kressler is a big admirer of Chinese Medicine and claims that the Chinese knew much more about
anatomy and physiology than the West, with a tradition of anatomical dissection dating back over
2000 years. He says that the ancient Chinese identified and weighed all the internal organs, and
knew that the heart pumps blood around the body long before scientists in the West. This discovery,
Kressler claims, was made by the Chinese more than 2000 years ago “but only discovered in western
medicine in the early 16th century”.
Presumably, Kressler is referring to the famous discovery of the heart-lung circulation by the British
physician William Harvey (1578-1657). Harvey described in detail how the left side of heart pumps
blood to the body, after receiving oxygenated blood from the lungs and that the blood is pumped to
the lungs from the right side of the heart via the pulmonary artery. He also described in detail how
the oxygenated blood from the left side is distributed through arteries, beginning with the aorta, to
the head and brain, and to the rest of the body. The ancient Chinese knew nothing of these things,
though they may well have known that the heart is the organ pumps blood. So did, we can be
confident, did the ancient Greeks, since this was the reason that Aristotle proposed that that the
soul resides in the heart in the 3rd century BC. This curious idea arose from his quite reasonable, but
incorrect, view that thought is carried in the blood. He obviously knew that the heart was the organ
that pumped the blood.
Kressler makes the rather startling claim that Chinese medicine was used by emperors and the royal
courts to help them live into their 90s and stay fertile into their 80s at a time when the average life
expectancy in the west was 30 years. Men do remain fertile into their 80s, and since recorded
history some individuals have lived into their 90s. There has never been a time in recorded history
when life expectancy in the West was 30, and besides, average life expectancy does not indicate the
length of life of the longest-living individuals. Besides, if one is going to take 2000-year-old texts
seriously one might also conclude that the medicine of the ancient Jews enabled the patriarch
Abraham to live hundreds of years.
Contradicting himself in his claim that TCM is a continuous tradition for 2,500 years, Kressler says
that the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor’s Book of Internal Medicine) is written in a dialect of
Chinese that hadn’t been in common use in China for more than a thousand years and that you
could show it to a modern Chinese person and they wouldn’t be able to read it.

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The first westerner to attempt a translation of the Huangdi Neijing, according to Kressler, was a
Dutch physician named Willem ten Rhijne who worked for the Dutch East India Company in Japan
from 1683-1685. He apparently reported clinical success by Chinese and Japanese practitioners in
treating a wide range of disorders, including pain, internal organ problems, emotional disorders and
infectious diseases prevalent at the time. Kressler says that Ten Rhijne accurately translated the
Chinese character for qi as “air”, not energy, in his reports to the Dutch government.
The translation that became the source for all of the textbooks used in western schools of Chinese
medicine, says Kressler, was done by a man named Georges Soulie de Morant, a French bank clerk
who lived in China from 1901 to 1917. Enamoured with Chinese culture and philosophy, he became
interested in Chinese medicine and attempting to translate the Huangdi Neijing, in spite of the fact
that he had no medical training nor any training in ancient Chinese language.
Kressler writes:
“It was a huge undertaking for a French bank clerk to translate a 2,000 year old medical text
written in an extinct Chinese dialect into a modern romance language (French). Under the
circumstances, de Morant did well in many respects. But he made some huge mistakes that
had serious consequences for how Chinese medicine has been interpreted in the west.”
Far from being a scientific document, the Huangdi Neijing is mystical in its explanation of the laws of
diagnosis:
The laws of diagnosis [are as follows]:

As a rule, it is at dawn,
before yin qi has begun its movement,
before yang qi is dispersed,

before beverages and food have been consumed,
before the conduit vessels are filled to abundance,
when the [contents of the] network vessels are balanced,
before the qi and blood move in disorder,
that, hence, one can diagnose an abnormal [movement in the] vessels.
Squeeze the vessels, whether [their movement] is excited or quiet, and observe the essence-
brilliance.
Investigate the five complexions.
Observe
whether the five depots have a surplus or an insufficiency,
whether the six palaces are strong or weak, and
whether the physical appearance is marked by abundance or decays.
All this is brought together to reach a conclusion [enabling one] to differentiate

between [the patient's] death and survival.”

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The ancient Chinese obviously knew about vessels and blood, but what are the “five depots” and the
“six palaces”?
The Hungarian Sinologist Imre Galambos argues, in reference to the Huangdi Neijing and its
influence, that while in the modern, “scientific” West it is customary to think that the newer a thing
is the better, in traditional Chinese thought this appears to be just the opposite; a new thing could
be justified and accepted if one could prove that it has been already mentioned and thought of in
ancient times. As a result of this traditionalistic approach, medicine in China has been regarded as a
body of knowledge which has undergone very little, if any, changes through the span of history.
Other patients wondered if I knew which foods they should eat to correct their doshas, after reading
Deepak Chopra’s books, expounding the importance of understanding whether you are of the vata,
pitta or kapha “physiological types”. I had a more open mind about Indian and Chinese medicine
than most of my colleagues, and believed that acupuncture worked, though I didn’t understand how.
I even referred a few patients to acupuncturists, with mixed results. I also had mixed results from my
referrals to medical specialists, psychologists and physiotherapists. I never referred anyone to a
herbalist or naturopath and, as I do today, believed that homeopathy is pure placebo.
In 1995 a friend gave me a copy of Book of the Hopi, about the myths of the Hopi Indian tribe in the
USA. It was written in 1963 by Frank Waters, and became popular with the New Age movement. In
this book Waters draws a comparison between the “scientific” model of the Hopi and that of the
Hindus, in their ideas of energy centres along the axis, known in the Hindu tradition by the Sanskrit
word chakra. I was particularly interested in Waters’ association of the brow chakra with the pineal
organ, a small organ in the centre of the brain that Descartes had argued, back in the 17th century,
was the seat of the soul.
This was my starting point in trying to integrate the Western science in which I was trained with the
Eastern models of India and China. I first considered the concept that we have energy centres or
nodes along our vertebral axis, and the possibility that, for example, our speech is related to the
health of our thyroid. There is a possible association – when the thyroid is underactive, speech is
slower. When it is over-active metabolism and activity, perhaps including speech, are increased. The
same cannot be said for the parathyroid glands, which are also in the throat, embedded in the lobes
of the thyroid gland. The parathyroids are involved in calcium metabolism, secreting the parathyroid
hormone to regulate blood levels of calcium. Calcium has a range of cellular functions, and is
essential for both muscle contraction and nerve conduction. Underactivity and overactivity of the
parathyroids affects the bones but do not affect speech. Likewise, most of the activity of the thyroids
has little to do with speech, and less to do with hearing, which is also said to be controlled by the
throat chakra.
According to Wikipedia “the Vishuddha chakra is located in the neck and the throat. Due to its
association with hearing, it is related to the ears, and due to its association with speaking, it is
associated with the mouth. Vishuddha is often associated with the thyroid gland in the human
endocrine system.” Adding the parathyroids to the activity of the Vishuddha chakra allows one to

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link the chakra also with the muscles and nerves. But what does this mean in practice, and how does
it help us to promote health?
The first chakra I considered deeply was the brow chakra – known as Ajna (Sanskrit: ಅಅಅಅಅ)
chakra. The ajna chakra is associated with the “third eye of Shiva” in Hindu cosmology and
iconography. The third eye is represented in the spot drawn on the forehead of Hindu women,
which in Tamil culture is called a “pottu”. The British missionaries banned Tamil girls from wearing
pottus because of the customs pagan implications. The Third Eye, in addition to being possessed by
Shiva, was also the eye for perceiving truth. Depictions of the Buddha traditionally include the Third
Eye, though pottus are not worn by Buddhists.
The association between the pineal and the third eye is not as ancient as I assumed for many years.
It is, I have since read, the product of the fertile imagination of Helena Blavatsky, author of the
Secret Doctrine and guiding light of the Theosophical Society. As far as I can tell the ancient Indians
did not know anything about the internal structure of the brain, and neither did the Chinese. Though
the pineal is placed at the centre of the meridian system in modern Chinese medicine, that is
because the main meridian runs through the midline. The ancient Chinese and Chinese in the middle
ages knew as little about the structure and function of the brain as their contemporaries in India and
Europe.
The traditional Chinese and Indian models of medicine are linked to their respective cosmologies in a
way that western medicine is not linked with Western cosmology. In fact western medicine has
nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Bang, planetary movements or movements of the sun and
moon. Western medicine ignores the wind and largely ignored the climate till it discovered
“Seasonal Affective Disorder” with the marketable acronym of SAD. Not so traditional Indian and
Chinese models. Vata, which refers to the element of wind and the wind god in Hinduism also finds
expression as the vata dosha, interpreted by Chopra as a “physiological type”. In Chinese medicine
Yin and Yang refer to the feminine and masculine respectively, but also to the moon (yin) and sun
(yang). There are 365 acupuncture points because of the number of days in the year, while the Five
Elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) are integral to the Chinese model in the same way that
the Four Elements (fire, earth, air and water) were integral to Medieval European and Islamic
models of health. The four elements of the ancient Greeks gave rise to the humoral theory which
held that health is regulated by the flow of ‘humours’ – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm.
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The first people to note the existence and propose the importance of the pineal were the ancient
Greeks. Herophilus (325-280 BC) according to the writings of Galen (130-220 AD) thought that the
pineal was a valve regulating the flow of “spiritus” between the ventricles of the brain. Galen himself
though the pineal was a gland. The French philosopher, scientist and mathematician Descartes
(1596-1650) probably drew on the ideas of Herophilus when he proposed that the pineal was the
seat of the soul – the point at which the soul communicated with the brain.
Descartes also proposed that that pineal was connected to the eyes, as this famous drawing shows:
During the centuries after Descartes the pineal was gradually relegated to obscurity. From being the
proposed seat of the soul, it came to be regarded as a primitive vestige of the reptilian brain, with no
function in humans. This view was confirmed by the fact that the pineal calcifies with age – these
calcifications were given the evocative name of “brain sand”.
In 1957 edition of Arthur Ham’s Histology has a photograph of a microscopic section of the pineal
parenchyma and the explanation that:
“The pineal body of mammals is the vestige of the median eye which was probably a
functioning organ in certain amphibian and reptiles that are now extinct. Like other vestigial
organs in man, it tends to reach its greatest development relatively early in life and
thereafter to degenerate. One evidence of the latter process is the formation of calcified
bodies of a laminated appearance in the organ. These constitute what is called brain sand.”
(p.746)
When I say that everything can be explained by science, this is a statement of faith in the future.
There are many things that cannot currently be explained by science and maybe there are things
that can’t be. The famous zoologist Steven Jay Gould, whose books shaped my understanding of
evolution more than any other influence, argued that science and religion are different domains.
They ask different questions, and there is no necessary conflict between religion and science.
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Professor Richard Dawkins has a very different view. He believes that “there is a profound
contradiction between science and religious belief”.
Dawkins argues, “Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt questing with logic,
evidence and reason to draw conclusions. Faith, by sharp contrast, demands a positive suspension of
critical faculties. Science proceeds by setting up hypotheses, ideas or models, and then attempts to
disprove them. So a scientist is constantly asking questions, being sceptical. Religion is about turning
untested belief into unshakable truth, through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
In the same documentary in which he makes these statements about science and religion, Dawkins
tells an anecdote about how science ideally progresses:
“I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly

professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for a
number of years. And one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and
utterly disproved our old man’s hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand
and said, “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years”. And
we clapped our hands raw.”
This anecdote actually suggests that scientists, like any other person, do not accept their mistakes
readily. Otherwise there would have been no reason to clap their hands raw. In fact the history of
science suggests a battle of egos, reflected in the hierarchies of the scientific and medical
establishments. And then there is the question of money. Who pays the piper calls the tune. This is
the case with medical research as well as scientific research more widely.
Christopher Hitchens was the author of God Is Not Great[9] and was named among the "Top 100
Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine. In addition Hitchens served on the
advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America. In 2010 Hitchens published his memoir Hitch-22
(a nickname provided by close personal friend Salman Rushdie, whom Hitchens always supported
during and following The Satanic Verses controversy).[10] Shortly after its publication, Hitchens was
diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which led to his death in December 2011.[11] Before his death,
Hitchens published a collection of essays and articles in his book Arguably;[12] a short edition
Mortality[13] was published posthumously in 2012. These publications and numerous public
appearances provided Hitchens with a platform to remain an astute atheist during his illness, even
speaking specifically on the culture of deathbed conversions and condemning attempts to convert
the terminally ill, which he opposed as "bad taste".[14][15]
Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea[16] and Breaking the Spell[17] and many others,
has also been a vocal supporter of The Clergy Project,[18] an organization which provides support
for clergy in the US who no longer believe in God, and cannot fully participate in their communities
any longer.[19]
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My cosmology has no need of the supernatural, though much is unexplained, and some may be
unexplainable. Even less is provable by empirical science. My cosmology has room for God, not as a
supernatural deity, but as an abstract term for Good or goodness. I am convinced that we made
gods in our image rather than the Biblical idea that “He made us in his image”. Goodness is obviously
not male or female, however the creation of the universe was good (not just from our perspective as
humans, but certainly that). By this definition, one cannot speak of God doing something, only
whether something done was God. Therein lies the problem with my simple suggestion that God is
goodness. The God of many religions, in fact all religions, do things. They have agency. They are
supernatural and I don’t think anything is above Nature.
Over the past few weeks I have been catching up with debates about religion, science and belief,
after reading two books I have had for some years – The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick and
Kind of Minds by Daniel Dennett. Links to the video debates on the subject can be found later in this
essay, along with commentary.
Another YouTube clip of Francis Crick was recorded shortly before he died and is titled “History of
Neuroscience: Francis Crick” (it is the history of Crick’s work and not a general history of
neuroscience). It is published on Youtube by the Society for Neuroscience, that boasts only one
other interview in its “History of Neuroscience” series – an interview from 2001 with the psychiatrist
Eric Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize for his questionable work with schizophrenia and dopamine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXGZ3euhq4g (Francis Crick)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH9Cc-YyYt8 (Eric Kandel, interview from 2001)
The Koch that Crick speaks of is Christof Koch, who collaborated with him in his studies of the
monkey visual system. Koch can be seen in this YouTube discussion:
Adenosine receptors – what are they?

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Distribution of adenosine receptors in the postmortem human brain: an extended autoradiographic

study.
P Svenningsson
P Svenningsson
H Hall
H Hall
G Sedvall
G Sedvall
Bertil B Fredholm
Bertil B Fredholm
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Synapse (Impact Factor: 2.43). 01/1998; 27(4):322-35. DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1098-

2396(199712)27:4<322::AID-SYN6>3.0.CO;2-E
Source: PubMed
ABSTRACT Whole-hemisphere sections from six subjects were used in a quantitative

autoradiographic study to characterize and to investigate the distribution of adenosine receptors,
using [3H]DPCPX, [3H]CGS 21680, and [3H]SCH 58261 as radioligands. [3H]DPCPX-binding showed
the pharmacology expected for adenosine A1 receptors and is therefore taken to mirror adenosine
A1 receptors. Adenosine A1 receptors were widely distributed, with the highest densities in the
stratum radiatum/pyramidale of the hippocampal region CA1. Adenosine A1 receptors were
nonhomogeneously distributed in nucleus caudatus, globus pallidus, and cortical areas: In the
cingulate and frontal cortex the deep layers showed the highest labeling, while in the occipital,
parietal, temporal, and insular cortex it was highest in the superficial layers. In addition, we found
very high levels of adenosine A1 receptors in structures known to be important for cholinergic
transmission, especially the septal nuclei. The Bmax values and KD values for [3H]DPCPX-binding in
stratum radiatum/pyramidale of CA1 and the superficial layer of insular cortex were 598 and 430
fmol/mg gray matter and 9.9 and 14.2 nM, respectively. [3H]CGS 21680-binding was multiphasic, but
showed the pharmacology expected for adenosine A2A receptors and was taken to represent them.
Adenosine A2A receptors were abundant in putamen, nucleus caudatus, nucleus accumbens, and
globus pallidus pars lateralis. Specific [3H]CGS 21680-binding was also found in certain thalamic
nuclei and throughout the cerebral cortex. The adenosine A2A receptor antagonist radioligand
[3H]SCH 58261 was also found to label these extrastriatal structures. Thus, adenosine A2A receptors
seem to be more widely distributed in the human brain than previously recognized.

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Religion, faith, belief and Science

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Wikipedia has this to say about Holistic Health:

Some practitioners of holistic medicine use alternative medicine exclusively, though

“Other Terms Associated with Holistic Medicine

Complementary Medicine is often used by "conventional" medical practitioners to refer to

In many cases, properly chosen non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical healing techniques

“Natural Healing usually refers to the use of non-invasive and non-pharmaceuticals

What is physical healing?

I am interested in understanding natural healing mechanisms in order to promote natural healing.

In my experience there are several difficulties with promoting a non-interventional approach in

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Here is a brief description of the main form of natural medicine we offer:

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Wikipedia continues to say that:

—"Mechanism" in Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ (lycaenidae). ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ

ಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅ 3 ಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ ಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅಅ.

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Learnin the lingo

I had no idea what he was saying. “What?” I asked.

“Giddai. You know, giddai, giddai…like Hawaii!”

Deadly – The concert was deadly

Mob - where are your mob from?

Gins, lubras and picaninnys

Racist placenames in Queensland

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

—Amy McQuire, Aboriginal journalist [22]

rejected by white society as morally degraded individuals”.

“In the Queensland Figaro in 1883 one contributor remarked that

Aboriginal women as ‘gin busting’ (1982:15). Aboriginal women’s sexuality was

their dispossession and resultant poverty (Evans 1982:7-12).”

Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland.

Queensland History’. In Hecate, 8(2.1):6-21.

First used by soldiers in New Guinea. Suggested sources are

Malay boong (“brother”),[1]

Indonesian dialectal bung (“brother”)

A New Guinea native language

An Aboriginal Australian language.[2]

(Australian, offensive, slang) an Aboriginal person

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

boong (plural boongs)

(Australia, slang, dated) A native of New Guinea.

(Australia, slang, very pejorative, ethnic slur) An Australian aboriginal.

(Asian or dark-skinned person): Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel

(aboriginal): abo, Jacky

From the Urban Dictionary:

Boong (114 up, 93 down)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

by The ONLY educated one July 16, 2009

Boong (1171 up, 599 down – top definition)

by John Barry November 20, 2004

boong (660 up, 296 down)

A defamitory word used against Australian Aboriginals, refering to their race.

by cheffie0987 September 28, 2005

boong (431 up, 238 down)

reputation of raiding petrol stations as a cheap way of getting high.

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

by random February 12, 2005