How To Be An Agnostic
What he’s saying is that because the answers that science pro-
vides are so compelling, so successful within their own sphere
of competence, it is too easy to forget that and slip into think-
ing that what you have at your disposal is what Daniel Dennett
has called a ‘universal acid.’ Dennett is referring to evolutionary
explanations of ethics, the approach which puts our behaviour
all down to adaptation and the scattering of genes. Thus, the
fi nery of the peacock’s tail is aimed at attracting a mate, and the
fi nery of Shakespeare’s prose follows more or less the same logic
too, as it must have got him the girl. But to conclude thus is
precisely what Atiyah means by giving up your soul, for the soul
is found not in sexual success but in the poetry and fi ne prose.
I simplify, of course, though remarkably not that much.
Consider the way biologists talk about DNA. The four nucleo-
tides of DNA are represented by letters AGCT. They arrange them-
selves in what are called codons. These, in turn, are taken to be
the ‘words’ of the genetic instructions for the cell. Now, clearly
an organism like a human being, consisting of trillions of cells,
is going to be a fantastically complicated product of the DNA
double helix, mixed up with even more subtle intercellular and
environmental factors – to say nothing of the psychosomatic. But
DNA’s descriptive similarity to a code, coupled to a technological
age’s trust in data, inevitably leads to the assumption that DNA
is not only the determining factor in life – the notion captured
in Richard Dawkins’s metaphor ‘the selfi sh gene’ – but is nothing
less than the meaning of life. The loss of soul does not stop there,
for the idea that human beings are merely information- processing
machines is not the only metaphor at play. Remarkably, when
coupled to genetic determinism, DNA comes to look very much
like the immortal soul it seeks to displace: it embodies in nucle-
otides an essence of life that survives the death of the body by
being passed on, incorporeally, from generation to generation.
It is sometimes argued that these metaphors are passive: when
deployed, they are used as analogies, serving to popularise
science, as opposed to informing hard-core research. However,
metaphors are powerful for a reason. Tell yourself a story that