A brief history of Jonathan Miller.

AS HE APPROACHES his seventy-third birthday on July 21, British intellectual and Renaissance man Jonathan Miller continues to enjoy an uncommonly varied career. Born to a psychiatrist father and a novelist mother, he went on to study science and medicine at Cambridge and elsewhere. But he also helped write and produce Beyond the Fringe, a comedy stage revue that played in London and on Broadway in the early 1960s, serving as a precursor to the comedy of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. He then worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation and, in the 1970s, without knowing how to read music, began producing and directing operas. Yet early in that same decade he held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College London and, in 1985, was a research fellow in neuropsychology at Sussex University. "[he 1980s further saw Miller produce, direct, and write for the BBC and emerge as one of the world's leading opera directors. On May 4, 2007, Miller appeared on the Public Broadcasting System series Bill Moyers Journal. This served to kick off the PBS airing of a controversial documentary, A Brief History of Disbelief, which Miller had written and narrated for the BBC in 2004, and which led to his appointment as president of the Rationalist Association in 2006. I interviewed him in New York City on April 4, 2007.

The Humanist: Your three-part public television documentary, A Brief History of Disbelief, when originally released in Great Britain by the BBC, was entitled Atheism: a Rough History of Disbelief Do you regard yourself as an atheist?

Jonathan Miller: Let me say right at the outset that I've always been very reluctant to use the word "atheist," not because I'm embarrassed or ashamed of it but I think that this view scarcely deserves a title. No one has a special name for not believing in witches--I'm not an "a-hexist"--and I don't have a word for not believing in ghosts or anything of that sort. So the idea of there being a special name for what I've never had--which is a belief in God--seems to me to be odd, to say the least.

Still, my attitude toward the notion of a supernatural being is identical to that of those who do call themselves atheists, though I hold this view without any sort of vehemence or enthusiasm or evangelical drive. In that sense I'm rather unlike Richard Dawkins, for example, who is a zealous proselytizer for atheism. And I think one of the reasons for the difference is autobiographical--that he is what I call a "born-again atheist:" he started his life as a Christian, was a Christian until he was about sixteen, then read Charles Darwin and, as a result, became an atheist. I come from a Jewish family but was never brought up with any sort of Jewish practices at all. And I don't even know what being a Jew is--I'm a Jew for anti-Semites and that's really all. So I'm what I would call a "cradle atheist" insofar as I am an atheist.

The Humanist: How did this outlook affect you when you were young?

Miller: As a young man I don't think I ever really addressed myself to the problem of the existence of God--it didn't seem to me to be an issue at all. I only began to think about it when I heard so many other people talking about God and affirming the existence of him, her, it, or whatever it was. Therefore I began to think about my arguments against such a proposal. But until I was sixteen or seventeen, and perhaps even later, I don't think it ever crossed my mind.

The Humanist: Once it crossed your mind, did you ever become open about it? Did you talk to others about your nonbelief?

Miller: I don't think more than occasionally. If I was talking to boys who attended Christian services, I found myself asking about what it was that they believed in. But then I never gave it a second thought, really, because it seemed to me so patently absurd that I didn't even want to carry on the conversation.

The Humanist: So would you say that you didn't suffer any kind of discrimination because of your views?

Miller: I think you have to realize the very pronounced difference between England, or indeed between Europe, and the United States. I get the impression that, until very recently, Americans have had to be cautious about coming out in the open and saying they are atheists or disbelievers. At no point was I in any way embarrassed or ashamed or inconvenienced or disabled because of my views. It isn't an issue in England--and certainly hasn't been for probably the last thirty years.

This is in contrast to the, admittedly for me, very occasional problem of being Jewish. I think that in England there is a sort of subterranean current of upper middle class anti-Semitism, so that I would always feel some sort of caution when it came to talking about being Jewish.

The Humanist: Much of what we're taking about here assumes we both understand each other when we use such terms as belief, disbelief, atheism, God, and so on. But let's dig a little into this. Speaking philosophically, is theism false or is it incoherent?

Miller: I frequently invoke Thomas Hobbes in this respect. It isn't that the idea of God is wrong, in the way that one might say it's wrong to claim that water at ten thousand feet boils at this or that degree centigrade. That's something one can prove experimentally. Rather, it's that most of the claims or assertions that are made in religion seem to me logically incoherent. They don't make sense. For example, it isn't wrong to say you don't know for certain that there isn't a circular rectangle--because you haven't been up to the very highest mountaintops where, in fact, the conditions are extremely favorable to the existence of such geometrical anomalies. Rather, it just doesn't make any sense to talk about circular rectangles. It's built into the logic and definitions of circles and rectangles that they can't be one and the other.

The Humanist: When you first offered the BBC Atheism: a Rough History of Disbelief did you meet with any significant resistance?

Miller: Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, very much as broadcasting in the United States, has been increasingly dumbed down. So the only resistance we met wasn't because there was anxiety about the specific subject matter but because it actually had subject matter.

The Humanist: After the documentary first aired in the United Kingdom, what was the reaction? Did it cause a sensation? Was there a lot of public discussion afterwards?

Miller: No. I think it was approved of. And then I think it was left alone. There may have been people who said, "Oh, wouldn't you know it? He would be bound to be one of those--a disbeliever." But I never heard about anything like a sensation or controversy at all.

The Humanist: How about when you offered the program to public television in the United States--did you meet with resistance then?

Miller: Well that's interesting. We never did offer it because we had the impression it would be a waste of time to even pitch it. And although we said, "Wouldn't it be nice to have it shown in the United States?" we took it for granted that it would be inconceivable it would be accepted. And, in fact, I'd forgotten about it until I was told that Bill Moyers had actually pushed for it, and others had pushed for it. Then I was told, to my surprise, that it was actually going to be done.

But I became less surprised in the light of all sorts of information which came my way to the effect that somehow the atmosphere had changed in the United States. People were discussing disbelief; Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, was a bestseller; and there was a long article in Newsweek about disbelief. But I never originally thought there was even the remotest possibility of the program being broadcast here, mild though it is.

The Humanist: What do you anticipate will be the response in the United States, particularly in light of the opposing factors of the political clout of the religious right on the one hand and, on the other, the declaration by Publishers Weekly that for the week of March 12, 2007, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation were the country's top two bestselling hardcover books on religion?

Miller: Judging by how well the Dawkins and Harris books have sold, I think the reaction will be an increasing sense of relief on the part of the, previously unacknowledged, large minority of unbelievers who have never come out in the open, who will suddenly say, "Well, things are getting easier now." I'm certain that amongst the evangelical religious right it will be regarded as "typically European." They'll say, "One of the reasons why we don't like Europe is that disbelief prevails in that corrupt, secular part of the world."

I sometimes wonder whether it will compromise the ease with which I get a work visa here and whether I have to stand at immigration with some guy saying, "I see here that you express disbelief. Would you like to elaborate on that before we let you in?"

The Humanist: Ha ha. You do a good American accent! Your producer and director, Richard Denton, said in a September 2004 interview with BBC Four that one thing he would have liked to explore in the program, but didn't, was "the absence of the atheistic point of view in the modern political world." He was specifically referring to the fact that there is a "difference between not having religion in your politics and actually having atheism in your politics." Do you share his interest in this topic as an important area for further inquiry?

Miller: Not really. I take it for granted that any aspect of belief or disbelief really ought to have no part to play in politics whatsoever. I think that, with the exception of Tony Blair--who must have been the first prime minister we've had to explicitly express his commitment to religion, and for it somehow to be seen as part of his politics--it just doesn't come into English politics at all. And even religious people, except for perhaps the extreme and zealously religious, find it rather objectionable for someone to talk about religion as part of political discourse. It would almost he as rude to talk about how often a week you have sex with your wife.

The Humanist: In A Brief History of Disbelief you argue that it was philosophy, not science, which was the first to effectively undermine theism. But isn't it the case that the atheists of the past could only negate, could only say that the god idea didn't answer anything? Weren't they still without a viable alternative explanation to a god or gods as the source of all things until Charles Darwin offered a new scientific narrative to replace the older mythic ones?

Miller: No, I don't think it was Darwin who actually provided the clinching argument. And I think that the clinching arguments have nothing really to do with science at all. They are, in fact, philosophical. As I've said, it isn't that the claims made for the existence of a god are scientifically implausible; it's that they're logically incoherent.

The Humanist: Yes, but many people will next ask, "So how did everything get here?" And isn't this what Darwin provided?

Miller: No, because Darwin isn't talking about how everything got here, he's only talking about the gradual development of biological complexity. He isn't talking about how the cosmos got here; he's talking about this comparatively late arrival in the universe of organic life and its capacity to sophisticate under the pressure of natural selection, given the existence of unsolicited variations upon which selection exerts its effect. He made no remarks about the origin of the world or the origin of the cosmos at all.

The Humanist: Just the origin of species.

Miller: So with Darwin we're dealing only with a comparatively narrow segment of the problem of what there is. Now, of course, we're all faced with the problem of what there is, and we become increasingly more sophisticated about the physics of origins. But it may be that the religious have got hold of the wrong end of the stick because they misunderstand the notions of both time and space. They think that over the huge distances of time and space there must be, nevertheless, origins and ends. And I think it's becoming increasingly apparent, as our mathematics becomes more sophisticated, that once you get into the area of gigantic dimensions, the notion of "the beginning"--followed by things like "Thursday" and "Sunday," and February followed by March--doesn't make any sense. So to talk about origins as if there was an infinitely remote starting point is to misunderstand the nature of both time and space.

And I think that long before science got a grip on this you have Greek philosophers, four or five hundred years before Christ, perfectly happy to accept the idea of things being permanently there. Therefore they didn't have to think about something as if it were decided that there should be something. And those who did conclude that there must be some entity that decided there must be something, failed to ask, "What decided there had to be something which decided something? What was there before the decider got going?" They didn't seem to be puzzled by that.

The Humanist: I'd like to mention that you're not only a physician by training and experience but you're also a neurologist. Do you find that neurology offers us any useful insights as to the cause of religious belief and the forms it tends to take?

Miller: No, I don't think that neurology is in the least bit helpful in that way. There are people who are saying there must be a neural, religious module--that by using CAT scans or MRIs we could actually identify a center or a module that seems to be responsible for it. I just don't think it works in that way; we aren't a mosaic of modules, one of which includes the tendency to be religious.

I think evolutionary psychology is sometimes helpful, that it's part and parcel of the way we get on with one another. I think that beliefs, if you go back to a philosopher like Gilbert Ryle, aren't states of mind, on the whole, but are dispositions to do things. And the dispositions to undergo and undertake and participate in religious or other rituals are simply expressions of our collaborative character, which often requires symbolic images through which to dramatize our collaborativeness.

And some of those symbols aren't clearly practical--they may have a bearing upon practical outcomes but they aren't themselves practical. For example, you go to what we used to call primitive societies: preliterate tribal societies, and they cook and they hunt and they plant and they garden and do all sorts of things almost invariably to the accompaniment of ritual activities, whose connection to the outcome--favorable or unfavorable--isn't clearly apparent. It's quite obvious that those rituals are what we would call "religious."

Now, I don't think that anyone would give up hunting in favor of the rituals which accompany hunting, in that the rituals are what bring about the death of the animal that they wish to eat. Ritualistic and religious though they might be about their hunting, these people would always sharpen a spear and hurl it at the running animal. They wouldn't go down on their knees and wish the animal to stop running; they would always stop it running if they could by a mechanical device. But they might, in what they think, ensure the success of their practicality by accompanying it with things which don't seem to have practicality built into them. These fit together in some way: they dramatize and give significance to practical life.

The Humanist: How does any of this relate to Sigmund Freud's view that religion is a "thought disorder"--something you address in A Brief History of Disbelief?

Miller: I think Freud was rather naive about that. I don't think it's a thought disorder; I think it's a characteristic idiom of human thought. I think it's condescending and anthropologically simpleminded to see it as a disorder from which we're getting better, from which we're recovering. I think you have to take into consideration the anthropological circumstances in which this or that system of rituals exists, and the conscious beliefs associated with these ritual systems. We must ask what this life is like in that it tends to be associated with rituals of this particular sort--even assertions of a particular sort.

I don't think that Freud was enough of an anthropologist. But then he was born before anthropology made its practical appearance. Most anthropology was conducted, as it was by Freud, from comfortable armchairs in European capitals, receiving information from district officers and missionaries who were out in the wild. But once people actually went and sat with these guys, and raised tents out in the bush, we began to see that religion of primitive culture was something other that what we thought it was. It wasn't just simple-minded people doing bad science because they weren't sophisticated enough to do good science. Early anthropology misunderstood and misinterpreted the nature of the enterprise.

The Humanist: What would you say is the future of disbelief in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in the world?

Miller: I think one would be very rash to make predictions about the progressive disappearance of religion and its replacement by disbelief. I suspect that, humans being the way they are and being the political creatures they are, religious rituals and structures and institutions will continue to exist notwithstanding the fact that disbelief, now free from persecution, will be much more out in the open. I don't think it's something that will eliminate the religious--there are all sorts of reasons why religion survives and flourishes, and why it often has regrettable associations with political power. I don't think there's a single tendency that religion will eventually prove to be a primitive state of mind that will be replaced by something which is much more sophisticated. That would be anthropological naivete.

Fred Edwords is director of communications for the American Humanist Association.