So I was already familiar with and (I’m afraid) accepting the view that you couldn’t apply the logic of physics to religion that they were dealing with different types of “truth.” (I now think this is baloney, but to continue ...) What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretive and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn’t stand up to it. So I became an Agnostic. And I thought and thought and thought. But I just did not have enough to go on, so I didn’t really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: You allude to your Atheism in your speech to your fans (“... that was one of the few times I actually believed in god”). Is your Atheism common knowledge among your fans, friends, and coworkers? Are many people in your circle of friends and co-workers Atheists as well?
DNA: This is a slightly puzzling question to me, and I think there is a cultural difference involved. In England there is no big deal about being an Atheist. There’s just a slight twinge of discomfort about people strongly expressing a particular point of view when maybe a detached wishy-washiness might be felt to be more appropriate—hence a preference for Agnosticism over Atheism. And making the move from Agnosticism to Atheism takes, I think, much more commitment to intellectual effort than most people are ready to put in. But there’s no big deal about it. A number of the people I know and meet are scientists, and in those circles Atheism is the norm. I would guess that most people I know otherwise are Agnostics, and quite a few are Atheists. If I was to try and look amongst my friends, family, and colleagues for people who believed there was a god I’d probably be looking amongst the older and (to be perfectly frank) less well-educated ones. There are one or two exceptions. (I nearly put, by habit, “honorable exceptions,” but I don’t really think that.)
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: How often have fans, friends, or co-workers tried to “save” you from Atheism?
DNA: Absolutely never. We just don’t have that kind of fundamentalism in England. Well, maybe that’s not absolutely true. But (and I’m going to be horribly arrogant here) I guess I just tend not to come across such people, just as I tend not to come across people who watch daytime soaps or read the National Enquirer. And how do you usually respond? I wouldn’t bother.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?
DNA: Not even remotely. It’s an inconceivable idea.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: There are quite a few lighthearted references to god and religion in your books (“... two thousand years after some guy got nailed to a tree”). How has your Atheism influenced your writing? Where (in which characters or situations) are your personal religious thoughts most accurately reflected?
DNA: I am fascinated by religion. (That’s a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: What message would you like to send to your Atheist fans?
DNA: Hello! How are you?
It’s quicker, easier, and involves less licking.
Predicting the Future
Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.
Oddly, the industry that is the primary engine of this incredible pace of change—the computer industry—turns out to be rather bad at predicting the future itself. There are two thing in particular that it failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet, which, in an astonishingly short time, has become what the computer industry is now all about; the other was the fact that the century would end.
So, as we stand on the brink of a new millennium, peering up at the shiny cliff face of change that confronts us, like Kubrick apes gibbering in front of the great black monolith, how can we possibly hope to guess what’s to come? Molecular computers, quantum computers—what can we dare to say about them? We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we wrong about ... well, for a voluminous list of the things have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.
It’s a compendium of authoritative predictions made in the past that turned out to be wonderfully wrong, usually almost immediately. You know the kind of thing. Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, said on October 17, 1929, that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Then there was the Decca record executive who said of the Beatles in 1962, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out,” and so on. Ah, here’s another one: “Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn’t drool on stage,” said The Wall Street Journal, in 1995. It’s a very fat book you can read happily in the loo for hours.
The odd thing is that we don’t get any better at it. We smile indulgently when we hear that Lord Kelvin said in 1897, “Radio has no future.” But it’s more surprising to discover that Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” Even Bill Gates, who specifically set out to prove him completely and utterly wrong, famously said that he couldn’t conceive of anybody needing more than 640k of memory in their computers. Try running Word in even twenty times that.