to denounce their own grandmothers as witches.Preston acknowledges that much evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but argues that violence
is hardly unique among Christians (or among religious people generally); it's a human problem, not a
religious one. His view has been influenced by the moral philosopher John Kekes, who writes:
The malevolent, selfish, cruel, fanatical motives we find in ourselves and the excessive rage,
jealousy, or ambition we discover ourselves exhibiting are ... unpleasant surprises.... We can blame
the world, gods, conspirators, or civilization for causing disasters and injustices ... but for the
undeserved harm we cause, our own destructiveness is to be blamed.RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• What were the causes of the witch trials?
• What purpose did the people who put the witches on trial believe they were serving?
• Why had witch trials all but ended by the mid-eighteenth century?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• To what extent has Christianity been a force for harm? To what extent has it been a force for good? On
balance, has Christianity done more harm than good? What about secular ideologies?
• Would the world be better off if Christianity ceased to exist?
• Which claim better explains what we read in the first quote above, Dawkins's or Kekes's?
- THE SENSE THAT THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE
A number of times Greg and Preston discuss whether it means anything that most people sense the
presence of a spiritual world apart from, yet related to, this world (see pages 137-46). More than twenty
years after the publication of his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin continued to think about this question,
writing to a friend that he could "never make up [his] mind how far an inward conviction that there must
be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence."
Some who believe that this world is all there is recognize that this outlook can lead to pessimism. As
the philosopher Jacques Monod wrote in the early 1970s, "The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last
knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged by chance."
Others, such as Cambridge University evolutionary paleobiologist Simon Conway-Morris, see the
persistence of the feeling that there is "something more" as evidence that theology points people to
something real. "The heart of the problem," Conway-Morris writes,
is to explain how it might be that we, a product of evolution, possess an overwhelming sense of
purpose and moral identity yet arose by processes that were seemingly without meaning. . . . Given
that evolution has produced sentient species with a sense of purpose, it is reasonable to take the
claims of theology seriously.