Dan Brown ramps up anti-religion rhetoric: ‘our planet would be absolutely fine without religion’
“Will God survive science?” asks Dan Brown, the author of the blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code” and other thrillers during a recent interview.
“All the gods of our past have fallen. So the question now is: Are we naive to think the gods of today won’t suffer the same fate?” In another interview he confesses: “This time, I’ve asked: ‘Will God survive science?'”
Brown has angered the faithful over the years, but tells CBS correspondent Tony Dokoupil “Absolutely not,” when asked “Do you consider yourself anti-Catholic or anti-religion?” Brown replied “Absolutely not.”
Dokoupil followed up. “Would that be a better planet?” Brown responded, “I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel that we’re evolving in that direction.”
Brown is promoting his new novel, “Origin,” already a chart-topper on Amazon.com, and for Brown fans a familiar blend of travelogue, history, conspiracies and whodunit, with asides on everything from the poetry of William Blake to the rise and fall of fascism in Spain.
The story centers on protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, is in Spain and back in danger. A former student, Edmond Kirsch, has been assassinated just as he’s ready to unveil a scientific-technological breakthrough that he promises will bring about the downfall of Western religion and revolutionize how people think of life and death. Langdon, with the help of a prince’s wayward lover and a voice of artificial intelligence named Winston, attempts to find out what Kirsch had planned.
“The Da Vinci Code” outraged church officials and scholars with such suggestions as Jesus and Mary married and had children. Brown acknowledged that the controversy led him to avoid larger religious questions in his follow-up novel, “The Lost Symbol,” but his skepticism remains.
On the clergy’s response to Brown: “(They) would fall into three categories: Those that essentially say, ‘We’re going to have to agree to disagree.’ Those who would say, ‘Hey, this is actually a really interesting dialogue. It’s making me think about religion in a new and exciting way. Thank you.’ And those who essentially say, ‘We can’t be friends anymore.’ You know what — those are outliers. The primary reaction I get, from atheists to the deeply devout, is that the dialogue is critical.”
Brent Bozell attacked Brown’s work in a new article titled “A Rerun of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ kook.”
Brown opens himself to more attacks, taking on fake news and Trump: “… it’s all around us. It affected the election in my country. It affects all of us. What has happened is that news is entertainment because now every single person with a cellphone is a broadcast news station. You can videotape anything and can distribute it to the world. There is no curator for the World Wide Web. People say whatever they want.”
Climate change becomes a topic: “Let me rewind and say that we live in an era where there are congressmen in my country who declare that the world is 6,000 years old and the fossil record was put there to test our faith; that Adam and Eve literally populated all the races of the world. To my way of thinking, this is an absolute untruth. A quantifiable untruth. But because it’s a religious idea, that banner of religion provides a certain immunity from having to endure rational scrutiny. Climate change, because it’s not a religious idea, politicians are allowed to say all sorts of different things. They’re allowed to question it and nobody says: “Wait a minute, that’s my religious belief.”
