positiveatheism.org
"...Kurtz: It was struck down in Arkansas.
Asimov: Fortunately! But wherever the law exists, school teachers must teach creationism if they mention evolution. This is a dreadful precedent. In the United States a state can say: "This is scientific. This is what you must teach in science." Whereas in many nations that have had an established church -- nations we may have looked upon as backward -- they nevertheless understood that within the subsystem of science it is science that decides what is scientific. It is scientists who make the decision. It is in the scientific marketplace that ideas win or lose. If they want to teach religion, they can teach it outside of science, and they can say that all of science is wicked and atheistic. But to force their way into science and to dictate what scientists must declare science to be destroys the meaning of all of science. It is an absolutely impossible situation and scientists should not permit it without a fight to the very end.
Kurtz: I fully share your concern. What about religion itself? Should religion be a subject for free inquiry? Should examination of the Bible be openly discussed in American society?
Asimov: I don't see why not. I think nothing is sacred, at least in a country that considers itself intellectually free. We can study the political process all we want. We can examine the reasoning behind communism, fascism, and Nazism. We can consider the Ku Klux Klan and what they believe. There is nothing that we should not be able to examine.
Kurtz: And your examination of the Bible indicates that it is contradicted in many places by modern science?
Asimov: Yes. Now this does not automatically mean that science is correct and the Bible is wrong, although I think it is. People should examine it. One thing we cannot do is to say without examination that the Bible is right.
Kurtz: Isaac, how would you describe your own position? Agnostic, atheist, rationalist, humanist?
Asimov: I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
Kurtz: But the burden of proof is on the person who claims God exists. You don't believe in Santa Claus, but you can't disprove his existence. The burden of proof is upon those who maintain the claim.
Asimov: Yes. In any case, I am an atheist.
Kurtz: You have no doubt reflected a good deal on this. Can people live without the God myth, without religion? You don't need it presumably. Does man need it?
Asimov: Well, individual human beings may. There's a certain comfort, I suppose, in thinking that you will be with all of your loved ones again after death, that death is not the end, that you'll live again in some kind of never-never land with great happiness. Maybe some people even get a great deal of comfort out of knowing that all the people they they don't like are going to go straight to hell. These are all comforts. Personally, they don't comfort me. I'm not interested in having anyone suffer eternally in hell, because I don't believe that any crime is so nearly infinite in magnitude as to deserve infinite punishment. I feel that I couldn't bring myself to condemn anyone to eternal punishment. I am opposed to punishment.
Kurtz: The height of wickedness, is it not?
Asimov: Yes. I feel if I can't do it, then God, who presumably is a much more noble being than I am, could certainly not do it. Furthermore, I can't help but believe that eternal happiness would eventually be boring. I cannot grasp the notion of eternal anything. My own way of thinking is that after death there is nothingness. Nothingness is the only thing that I think is worth accepting.
Kurtz: Do you think that one can lead a moral life, that life is meaningful, and that one can be just and noble without a belief in God?
Asimov: Well, as easily as with a belief in God. I don't feel that people who believe in God will automatically be noble, but neither do I think they will automatically be wicked. I don't think those who don't believe in God will be automatically noble or automatically wicked either. I think this is a choice for every human being, and frankly I think that perhaps if you don't believe in God this puts a greater strain on you, in the sense that you have to live up to your own feelings of ethics. But, if you do believe in God, you also believe in forgiveness. There is no one to forgive me.
Kurtz: No escape hatch.
Asimov: That's right. If I do something wrong, I have to face myself and I may not be able to figure out a way of forgiving myself. But, if you believe in God, there are usually rituals whereby you may express contrition and be forgiven, and so on. So it seems to me that many people can feel free to sin and repent afterward. I don't. In my way of life, there may be repentance but it doesn't make up for the sin.
Kurtz: Of course a lot of people who are humanists say that, if ethics is based upon either fear of God or love of God and his punishment and reward, then one is not really ethical, that ethics must grow out of human experience.
Asimov: Well, I said the same thing in an argument about what I called the Reagan doctrine. Early in what I already consider his disastrous administration, Reagan said that one couldn't believe anything the Soviets said because they didn't believe in God. In my view, maybe you can't believe anything the Soviets say, but not for that reason. If you are ethical only because you believe in God, you are buying your ticket to heaven or trying to tear up your ticket to hell. In either case, you are just being a shrewd profiteer, nothing else. The idea of being ethical is to be ethical for no reason except that that is the way to be if you want the world to run smoothly. I think that people who say virtue is its own reward or honesty is the best policy have the right idea. |
