Does Facing the Serpent Lead to Redemption? | Richard Dawkins

Let’s concentrate on the resurrection for a moment. Now, unfortunately, see this is part of the problem. Part of the problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that’s taken by the mythological tends to circle and wander. Like, it doesn't because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives; that's why it's often encoded in image, for example, or in drama. It's not the same tack as a purely propositional and logical argument. So it's more difficult to make.

But let me tell you a story that I believe bears on the resurrection. You tell me what you think about it, because I don’t—this is a very difficult story to account for. It's going to take me about five minutes because it’s complicated, but there's no way around it, I don’t think.

So there’s a strange scene in the gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he’s lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert, there can be no hope for the redemption of mankind. Okay? This is a very strange thing for someone to say. So you need to know what the story of the bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies. I think we can understand it psychologically. I really do believe this.

And so, the concordance of that story, which was generated millennia before, with Christ’s utterance is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together, especially given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship.

So, let me detail it. There’s a scene in Exodus, in the Exodus story, where the Israelites are doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact that they’re lost, and bemoaning the loss of their privileges under the Pharaoh, and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership, and just generally being followers of Cain, let’s say.

And God, the cruel God that you refer to, decides to send among his suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them, which seems a little over the top, you might say. But in response to that, I would say there’s no situation so terrible that some damn fool can’t make it infinitely worse. And so, that’s what happens to the Israelites.

So they’re being bitten by these poisonous snakes, and the leaders of the people who’ve wandered from God go to Moses, and they say, “Look, we know you’ve got a pipeline to God, and you know there’s a lot of snakes, and they’re doing a lot of biting, and maybe you could just ask him to, you know, call off the serpents.”

And so, Moses, who’s not very happy with the Israelites either, decides that he’ll go talk to God. And God says something very strange. He doesn’t say, “To hell with the Israelites; more snakes is what they need.” And he doesn’t say, “Well, I produced the snakes, so I’ll get rid of them.” He says something very, very peculiar.

He says, “Have the Israelites gathered together all their bronze and make a giant stake and put a serpent on it—a bronze serpent—which is the symbol of healing, by the way, that even the Greeks use. That is a very old symbol, very widespread; it's still used by physicians today.”

And then he says, “Put it up where the Israelites can see it, and if they go look at it, then the serpent's poison won’t harm them.” And I read that, and I thought that’s exactly what psychotherapists discovered as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as curative.

That’s the pharmacon: a little of the poison that hurts you cures you. It's the same principle that's used for vaccines, by the way. So what we saw in psychotherapy is that if you get people to voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them, so to speak, that hurt their life, that frighten them, and disgust them, they become braver and more well-adapted.

It isn’t that they become less afraid, because that’s been very carefully tested. It’s that they learn, by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fled from, that there’s more to them than they think, and that that generalizes across situations.

And it’s the same mechanism that underlies learning as such, because children, when they learn, put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster, and that’s where they advance. And so what God tells the Israelites, essentially, in this dramatic endeavor is that it's better for them to face the terrors that confront them than to be shielded from the terrors, or for them to hide from them.

That they’ll be better people if they face what’s right in front of them, even if it’s poisonous. And so it’s like, “Okay, that’s pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable.” And then that symbol is used, for example, by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such.

But then there’s this additional weird twist, which is Christ identifies with that bronze serpent. You think, “Okay, that’s a very peculiar thing for anyone to do. What exactly does that mean?” Well, so then you might say, “Well, what’s the most poisonous thing that you could possibly face?” If you dramatize the idea of poison itself, if you wanted people to face what was worst so that they could become strongest, the answer to that is the most unjust possible painful death and the ultimate confrontation with malevolence.

And that’s what’s dramatized in the passion story. Now, does that redeem everyone? Maybe, maybe. Maybe the idea is that if we were courageous enough to look death in the face unflinchingly, and if we spent our time putting our finger on the source of evil itself, it would vitalize us to a degree that would be unimaginable.

Now, as a biologist, you know you could think about this too, because I don’t remember who the philosopher said it; I think it was Whitehead, but that might be wrong: “We let our ideas die instead of us.” Right?

So human beings have evolved so that we can undergo these deaths of our own ideas, and the rejuvenation that emerges in consequence of that. That seems to be something like evolution towards what? Towards the process of sacrificial logos as the thing that redeems human beings.

And that makes us biologically unique too, because we can die in ideation and imagination instead of dying in actuality. Does that fundamentally redeem us? Does that deliver us from death and evil? Maybe! Like the job isn’t done, obviously.

Rich, the story that we've just heard—the Old Testament bronze serpent—it’s rhyming with the New Testament, uh, Christ depicting himself as that bronze serpent. I think, from Jordan, if I may, as Richard suggests, um, from what I’ve heard you say before on this same story, there’s something about that harmony between that New Testament Jesus and that Old Testament story which is so profound and so impressive that it’s difficult to imagine it having sort of naive human authorship.

What do you make of that story and of that assertion?

“Well, it doesn’t impress me. I mean, I don’t understand why you would say that. I don’t think Jordan actually said it had divine inspiration; maybe he did. Um, not divine inspiration necessarily, but more than, just as I say, naive human authorship—not like someone just sat down and wrote. At a minimum, it's a staggeringly brilliant literary move, especially given the fact that that relationship hasn’t been explicated before.

Do you think, for example, if you were looking in Scripture for something which would identify this as a god-given text, maybe you, as a scientist, would look for some scientific information? It might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that. But do you think Jordan actually thinks—?”

“Yeah, we can perhaps get on to that. But do you think that a literary brilliance of a similar kind, or, or a similar intensity—that if the Bible is not a scientific text, you might be looking for something—some scientific fact which it couldn’t have otherwise known—is it possible that some kind of genius moral move or literary move could also?”

“That... this is this is something more impressive.”

“You more or less ask me whether what would impress me, and I’m a naive literalist. And so I would say, ‘If any prophet had said something like, “The world is just one object rotating around the sun,” something like that. They never do. I mean, it’s always there, some kind of moral lesson, which leaves me cold.’”

“Why is it that there is no—I mean they say that God meets you, you’re at right—and there are some people who just care about scientific truth. That’s what they know; that’s their profession. Why is there not anything in the Bible for them?”

“Oh, I think the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community is a remarkable and scientifically valid hypothesis. I think that it’s precisely akin to the, uh, what would you say, to the process of cortical maturation. I think they’re the same thing, because as we mature, we move farther away from the immediate gratification of our self-centered emotional and motivational needs to an ethos of care that brings our future self into the picture and a wider and wider array of other people.

And I think that’s associated with cortical maturation. In fact, I think the purpose of the cortex—the purpose of the cortex—is to bring the dynamics of the shortsighted underlying motivational and emotional systems into the kind of harmony that allows for communal existence and the protection of the future at the same time that the present is, what would you say, cared for and attended to.

That there’s a kind of harmony there; there’s also a pattern there. It’s not arbitrary at all, and I think we know this biologically is that the number of ways, and I think we already alluded to this, the number of ways that a society can organize itself so that each individual can harmonize their own future with the present and do that simultaneously with many other people—that’s a very limited universe of possibilities there.”