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One cannot say he is a man who does notexpose himself. In a time when tranquilwaters predominate, people seek to bridge

differences or serve as courteous mediators, hespeaks as he writes and writes what he thinks.His published works are there to show that:some of them achieving bestseller status.Piergiorgio Odifreddi, mathematician,philosopher and polemicist, has extensiveteaching experience at university level in Italy,in the United States (he currently teaches Logicin the Faculty of Mathematics in Turin). He is astrange kind of provocateur. He does it byexplaining, arguing, and seeking to come asclose as possible to his interlocutor. Even at therisk of coming to blows. This is probably thesource of the success of his books - the fact thathe expounds sharp theses as the starting pointand doesn’t shrink from controversy and, ifneed be, conflict. east met with him at hishome in Turin, in an outlying neighborhood atthe foot of the very famous hill of powerwhere the Agnelli, De Benedetti and all thosewho count for something in this city live.

Professor, is it true that Longanesi is about topublish another of your books with a politicallyincorrect title?Is that what you think? The title is: Why

We Can’t Be Christians. [Perché non possiamoessere cristiani].

Isn’t there also a subtitle?But it is only a parenthesis.

In which you say?And Least of All Catholics.

Precisely. The Episcopal Conference will beenthusiastic about it and Benedetto Croce willturn over in his grave.But no, really no. And then there is not

only Why We Can’t Not Call OurselvesChristians. [Perché non possiamo non dircicristiani] by Croce. Another importantphilosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote a bookcalled Why I Am Not a Christian.

We will see after the book comes out. Rightnow I would like to take up with you the topicto which east dedicated the reports of the lastedition: secularism. But not in general andabstract terms... The point is: what has happe-ned, what were the major changes that in thesecond half of the 20th century led to theoverthrow of a value and a method that by thenseemed to have been absorbed by contempo-rary culture?

Piergiorgio Odifreddi is like the title of one of his books: an impertinent

mathematician. A scholar, populariser, and polemicist, he does not be-

lieve in the God of the religions, but in that of Pythagoras, Spinoza, and

Einstein. And he is convinced that science is, in its own way, as absolu-

tist as Catholicism. He says Pope Ratzinger is giving lay-people a hel-

ping hand. As for terrorism, war and globalization...

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edited by Vittorio BorelliINTERVIEW

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I would first of all see the explosion oftechnology as one of the major factors ofchange, which also has had and has obviousconsequences in terms of ethics. Think aboutwhat the atomic bomb meant in the 1940s.Let’s take as an example Bertold Brecht and hisLife of Galileo, which came out in threedifferent editions. In the first edition, before thewar, Galileo was the symbol of the scientistrebelling against authority in general and ofthe Church in particular; the final edition,which came out after the war, focused insteadon the man who abjured faith and isresponsible for the evils that science hasbrought. The atomic bomb had clearly changedthe way technology was seen. Having said that,I should also emphasize that we are on a roadwith no return: ours is a technological worldand modern ethics should take this intoaccount. Many of the ethical questions we poseare based on this.

You say that “ethics should”. But...?But ideological answers tend to be given toquestions with a scientific or technologicalbase. A case in point is the referendum on

nuclear issues a few years ago or morerecently the referendum on artificialinsemination. In the latter consultation we sawthe entire scientific world on the one hand,with the two Italian Nobel prize winners,Renato Dulbecco and Rita Levi Montalcini,facing on the other hand almost the entireworld of the believers, with cardinal Ruini andPope Ratzinger at their head. Science againstreligion then: a nice conflict! These arecertainly two worlds that are not compatible,even if there are people – especially among theCatholics – who want to demonstrate theopposite. The problem is that the religions –Catholicism in particular – would like to havea monopoly on values while leaving to sciencethe monopoly on facts. This for me isunacceptable: science proceeds bydemonstrations and experiments, whereasreligion, at least our own, is based on dogmas,

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_Multinational companies are the main players in globali-

zation, by which is meant a process of expanding western

production methods across the entire planet. Right, an

image of the war in Iraq.

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pronouncements, sacred texts writtenthousands of years ago and addressingpopulations of illiterate shepherds.

And this makes a modern ethics necessary.Exactly. The field of ethics has to be

thought through again from a secularperspective because the world today is in andof itself secular. In Italy, as everyone knows,about 90 to 95% of the population has beenbaptized, while not more than 30% arepracticing Catholics. But these are numbers,statistics. If we have a qualitative analysis, wediscover that there are almost no trueCatholics left. Catholicism is an impressivesequence of beliefs, dogmatic truths,intertwined the one with the other, none ofwhich can possibly be missing. TheCatholicism that is talked about and talkedabout continuously every day in thenewspaper, the à la carte Catholicism of thepoliticians, of the Buttiglione and Casini, haslittle to do with religion: it is a politicalmovement that seeks to conserve the power ithas acquired. And it still claims the right togive society ethical directives.

When did religion and science begin to sepa-rate?In the 19th century, even if science in that

century was something very different fromwhat we know today. The clear separationoccurred in the 20th century, the century thatsaw the explosion of science. Something ratherdifferent from we cannot not call ourselvesChristians, as Croce said! In fact we cannot notcall ourselves scientific or technological. Andyet there is no philosophy, knowledge, orcultural hinterland to back up modern science.We are technological idiots. We are like thosesavages who hung watches around their necksbecause they did not know how to use them.This is a transitional phase during which weare all looking for a way of thinking thatreflects the contemporary world rather thanthe one in the past and especially not onereflecting the remote past. We continue todefine ourselves in terms of pre-scientificthought in part because science and technologystill have not found their Kant – if we want tocall him that – who will revise the newknowledge. As a result, science and scientistsforge ahead doing their research, while the

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others claim the monopoly of ethics. It seemsobvious to me that we are trapped in a bigcontradiction.

During the past two centuries, there were veryclear places, very obvious places in which todevelop thought. These included not only uni-versities, but also parties and mass move-ments, etc. But today, given globalization andthe fragmentation of knowledge and its tools,given the crisis faced by the great ideologiesand the secularization of the sanctuaries ofknowledge... Today, who can achieve what youwish for, that is, the elaboration of a modernform of ethics? And where?It may just be that I am a mathematician,

and not a mechanic or something like that, butit seems to me that the universities continue tobe the main centres in which thought isdeveloped. I am speaking of universities in thebroad sense to include also the laboratories inwhich research is done. There are centres ofelaboration within industry, but linked touniversities. I am thinking of the Microsoftcampus or the IBM laboratories in the USA,which also have Nobel prize winners working

in them. In fact, a large proportion of scientificthought is produced in these places.

OK. But perhaps there is also a “higher” kno-wledge, a knowledge Gramsci would callhegemonic.If we are talking about knowledge in

general or hegemonic terms, it is not to theuniversities that we should be looking but tothe mass media, the newspapers andtelevisions. This type of knowledge isstructured differently from that in theuniversities. One usually gets into theuniversities by choice. One is (or should be)selected in some way on the basis ofmeritocratic criteria. People are co-opted by themass media, on the other hand, in a fairlycasual way. This is worrisome, because themass media necessarily set a close, simplehorizon. Public opinion formed in this way hasdifficulty reasoning in general terms andforming a greater perspective. Everything isused up in the short term, in petty questions.

It is often these same university professorswho formulate opinions in the mass media.

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Yes, but be careful. Just before thereferendum on artificial insemination, theywere asking why it was that the geneticistBruno Dalla Piccola had become the leader ofthat little group of scientists which opposedit. And then it came out that he was doingresearch on adult stem cells and that,probably, there were very specific interestsfor the position he supported. Interests thatwere not necessarily criminal or illegitimate,but may have been linked to investments in acertain type of research, etc. But what iscertain is that all that had nothing to do withthe scientific community. But then, whywhere the mass media there to sound thebass drum? I believe that it was a sort of“Pontius Pilateism” that makes them treatscience the way they treat politics, weighingopinions of one kind against onesdiametrically opposed to them on a little

scale. A sort of permanent electoral parcondicio (equal condition).

What role does globalization play in the forma-tion of contemporary public opinion?Globalization is a huge world market in

which the West predominates. And since themarket exists when there is disparity, whensomeone gains and someone else loses, I thinkthat globalization brings along a new form ofcolonialism and imperialism, if I can used oldfashioned terms. Along with the goods, theworld gets a simplified ideology which is theone of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and of theAmerican television formats. Not to mentionwhen the worst happens – such as theexportation by force of arms of democraticideals to a country like Iraq.

Excuse me, are you advocating a return tonational borders and States? Certainly not. I am very glad to see

economic borders and customs barriers fall andeverything else and that things are beingopened up to the world. I am only saying thatit should not be a one-way process. We

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_In today’s world, where is knowledge produced? For Odifred-

di, scientific knowledge continues to be born in universities

and in the research centres tied to them. In more general and

hegemonic terms, knowledge comes from the mass media

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continue to be protectionists or liberals as itbenefits us. In fact, we want the borders all tofall on one side and not the other. We haven’tgone very far from the BritishCommonwealth: a great empire on which thesun never set, made up of England and a seriesof countries subordinate to it. The UnitedStates and Europe play the part of the BritishEmpire today and the huge market is the restof the world.

One cannot turn the wheel of history back,Marx said.That’s all we need. I do say that it would

make more sense to re-think the concept of themarket. I mean, if it is really so fundamental toproduce goods that are often useless and sellthem to people who have no need for them?There are 800 million people in the world wholive below the margin of poverty. This seems tobe the real problem to me. The globalization wetalk about now is certainly a very successfulslogan based on the term “global village”, byMcLuhan, and is fine for the circulation ofinformation and knowledge. Our world wouldnot exist without the Internet and CNN. Theglobalization of production, trade andconsumption is another thing.

The input does start in the West, but it sets inmotion a virtuous process in which less deve-loped countries also play a leading role. Justthink of the spectacular growth of China orIndia.In the colonial period, one went to India and

took the raw materials, carried them to theWest to process them, and carried them back.Today, we go to India to draw on intellectualresources – as this country is the world’sbiggest producer of software. Why is this?Obviously because labour costs less there andbecause the young technicians and engineershave been trained in American and Europeanuniversities. I know very well that not all thegood is here while not all the bad is there. It isclear that ours is a world or global system. Thepoint remains, however, that we are not allequal in globalization. In fact, from a certainpoint of view, we have to admit that there aresome poor people who are constantly becomingpoorer and rich people becoming constantlyricher.

Don’t you think that one of the factors thatbrought about the problem of values, ethics

and, conversely, of secularism, was alsoIslamic extremism? And let me add, do youshare the view held by some Western intel-lectuals that there is no distinction betweenextremist Islam on the one hand and modera-te Islam on the other, but that Islam as suchopposes modernity and is thus anti-Western?

Here I fear I am very much out of themainstream. To begin with, it does not look tome like Islam is so very different fromChristianity. From the very beginning, from622 on, Islam certainly proselytized actively –unlike Judaism but exactly like Christianityalways has. Just think about ChristopherColumbus, who planted both the flag and thecross when he first set foot in America. Themilitary conquest of America for economicends went ahead along with the conversion ofthe Indians. The roots of colonialism areessentially there. And the countries thatestablished colonies throughout the world alldid so in the name of Christianity, beginningwith Spain and Portugal. It is therefore tooeasy to get excited about expansionist Islam.

In any case, I do not think that the so-called“rogue States” have expansionist goals today.Not even Osama Bin Laden says he wants toinvade the West. He only wants to drive theAmericans from the Middle East, which issomething different. Today’s Iran on the otherhand, extremist and fundamentalist, was bornas a reaction to the regime of the Shah, whowas at first overthrown by the Iranian peopleand then restored by the United States. Thesame could be said about Libya – which onlyrecently was removed from the list of evilcountries in the world. In fact, the realproblem is Saudi Arabia, where the mostsacred sites of Islam are located. It’s asextremist a regime as Iran, but supported bythe United States. It should be noted that thesuicide bombers who knocked down the twintowers almost all came from Saudi Arabia. Ifthe West decided to withdraw from thatregion, the problem of Islamic fanaticismwould probably resolve itself on its own. Butthis has to do with politics and economics andnot culture, religion or ethics.

Are you referring to petroleum?Of course. There are any number of good

studies about the stores of petroleum whichdemonstrate that demand will soon exceedsupply (some say in 2050, and some as soon as

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2015). And as everyone knows that alternativeenergy sources will not be able by then tocover the lack of petroleum, it is thereforenecessary to control the Middle East closely,making war now on Iraq and tomorrow onwho knows who. The problem is therefore onefacing the West in particular. And it iseconomic and political in nature. Religions havenothing at all to do with it, even if it is clearthat to recruit people to fight on either side,religion and politics have been exploitedrepeatedly throughout history. Confusingcause and effect, the whole blame gets placedon terrorism, and it gets talked about so much,fairly and unfairly, that it loses all meaning.The Americans, to be fair, are not alone indoing this. Putin does it for Chechnya, theIsraelis do it about Palestine, etc. Statingupfront that it is a gruesome exercise to countup the dead and that not all the dead die in thesame way, if we are honest we cannot ignorethat 3,000 people died in the twin towerswhereas 650,000 people have died as a result of

the war in Iraq, according to the Lancet report.This is without counting the 500,000 childrenthat Mrs. Madeleine Albright had admittedwere victims of the previous embargo. Withregard to the conflict between Israel and thePalestinians, the dead in the last Intifadaamount to one Israeli for every fourPalestinians: an imbalance that should makeone think, but which never gets mentioned inthe Western mass media. I fear that terrorism,like Islam, has become a big excuse, a big alibi.

I see you are not afraid of being accused ofanti-Americanism.Because I’m not. I have lived many years in

the United States where I taught at variousuniversities. I have nothing against Americansas such. But I think American politiciansshould ask themselves just why their countryis so hated throughout the world. How canthey expect to be welcome in Nicaragua,Panama, Ecuador, the Philippines, Vietnam, andin all the other countries in which, in the nameof the war on communism, they have lordedover them? Those who sew winds, will harvestthe tempest.

You have also written a lot about religion. Infact religions. What is your opinion about thenew pope? Or better, do you think the Churchtook a step forward or a step back in electingthe theologian Ratzinger as Pope?Backwards or forwards – it depends on

where you are. From my perspective, they tooka step forward in terms of clarity. Wojtyla wasa pope who knew how to use the mass mediawell, who knew how to hide his conservatism –a conservatism, it should be noted, that wasprotected by Ratzinger himself. The theologianRatzinger in turn is a much easier target forlaymen to identify. He reminds me of theAmintore Fanfani of the campaign againstdivorce, the one who went into public squaresto tell Italians, “If you pass the divorce law,your wives will run away with their lovers”. Itis not by chance that lay publicists returned tomake their voices heard after Benedict XVImade his first public appearances. SergioRomano wrote Libera Chiesa in libero Stato (AFree Church in a Free State), Giulio Giorello Dinessuna chiesa. La libertà del laico (Belongingto No Church: The Freedom of the Secularist),Maurizio Ferraris Babbo Natale, Gesù Adulto.In che cosa crede chi crede? (Santa Claus, AdultJesus, What Does the Believer Believe In?),

INTERVIEW

_Benedetto Croce is possibly the greatest Italian contem-

porary philosopher. Among his works is Why We Can’t NotCall Ourselves Christians. Bertrand Russel has tackled

the same topic in Why I Am Not a Christian

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Telmo Pievani Creazione senza Dio (CreationWithout God). And I am about to publishPerché non possiamo essere cristiani (e menoche mai cattolici) (Why We cannot BeChristians (And Least of All Catholics)). Whenyou take beliefs to the extreme, as Ratzingerdoes, you harm the Church and help those whothink about things differently. I read the bookSenza misericordia, published by Kaos edizioni,that collects Sentences by the Holy Officeduring the past 25 years. Some aspects of thesedecisions are horrifying. In some of theminvolving theologians who were out of line, Ifound the same words that had been used inthe condemnation of Galileo. On the otherhand, Ratzinger is part of a more general trend.

Which?Bush the father was head of the CIA. Putin

was head of the KGB. And Ratzinger was headof the Holy Office. I do not think this is just acoincidence. The person who controlsinformation controls power. We are now in aperiod governed by men from the services...

The Church however has various souls. TheCatholic Church also includes Cardinal Martini,Father Enzo Bianchi, the bishop of Terni BrunoForte…Certainly. There are also those who engage

in dialogue. But be careful. Such people aredoing something I consider a little devious.They are trying to separate Christianity fromChrist. They are breaking down doors that areopen saying “God is love”. But the problemChristianity is having is not with God but withChrist. They prefer instead to talk in generalterms, on the grounds that it is easier to findagreement with everyone there. They avoid thekey point which is that of the dogmas andbeliefs that make Catholicism a very specificreligion. In the end, either you are either aCatholic or you are not. In between there isonly room for opportunism.

It is clear why they don’t invite you to appearon their talk shows... Do you agree withGiorello who declares himself “laicista”

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_Islamic fundamentalism, Odifreddi maintains, does not

have its sights on the conquest of the West, but rather on

expelling westerners from the Middle East and, in parti-

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because he does not understand the differencebetween “laico” and “laicista”? [A differencethat does not exist in English and involves thedegree of separation between church andState]I agree with him about certain things but

not about everything. For example, I am not arelativist, and believe it is a lie or at least anerror to say that scientists are. It is possible thatthey declare themselves to be such becausethey are embarrassed to say what they trulybelieve, but in reality we are all absolutists inthe sense that we believe firmly in that whichhas so far been demonstrated. Of course, we allknow that tomorrow new discoveries maybring today’s convictions up to date, but that isin fact the essence of scientific thought. Whenhe developed his theories on quantum physics,Einstein did not demonstrate that Newton hadbeen mistaken before: he merely providedfurther detail and refinements on the subjectwhich Newton had initiated. Our absolutism isthe same as Ratzinger’s, with a singledifference: that our convictions are based ondemonstrations and experiments while his arebased on revelations and dogmas.

In your The Gospel According to Science [IlVangelo secondo la scienza], you write thatBuddhism is the religion closest to the sensi-bility and common sense of contemporaryman.Buddhism is a deconstructionist religion. It

does not believe in God. It does not believe inthe soul. It has no sacred books. It has noprophets, because Buddha was not a prophet.Of course, if you go to see how Buddhism hasbeen interpreted and practised historically,you discover that there are some similaritieswith other religions. But, at least at thetheoretical level, Buddhism is atheistic. JohnPaul II was correct in the interview withVittorio Messori, when he said of the DalaiLama: ‘I know that man! He is not religious.’And he was right, because Buddhism is morea philosophy of life than a religion. And inthis sense it is certainly closer to thecontemporary way of thinking.

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_Rita Levi Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco, the two Italian

Nobel Prize winners for medicine, participated actively in

the referendum on medically assisted reproduction, clashing

with the Catholic Church of Cardinal Camillo Ruini and Pope

Benedict XVI (photo above).

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Who is Odifreddi?

Born in 1950 in Cuneo, Piergiorgio Odifreddi is a mathematicianwho has received great scientific recognition both in Italy andabroad. He has taught in America for many years, at CornellUniversity in particular, but also at MIT in Boston. In Europe, he hasheld teaching positions in Germany, Sweden, and Spain. Hecurrently teaches Logic in the Department of Mathematics at theUniversity of Turin. Among his most famous publications arenumbered: Incontri con menti straordinarie [Meetings WithExtraordinary Minds], edited by Longanesi; Idee per diventarematematico [Ideas on How to Become a Mathematician], Zanichelli;Penna, Pennello e Bacchetta [Pen, Brush and Baton], Laterza; Lascienza espresso [Espresso Science], Einaudi; Il matematicoimpertinente [The Impertinent Mathematician], Longanesi; Lemenzogne di Ulisse [Ulysses’ Lies], Longanesi; Zichicche. Pensieri suuno scienziato a cavallo tra politica e religione, [Zichicchinuggets.Thoughts On a Scientist Caught Between Politics and Religion],Dedalo editore; La matematica del Novecento [The Mathematics ofthe 20th Century], Einaudi; Il computer di Dio [God’s Computer],Raffaello Cortina Editore; Il Vangelo secondo la scienza [The GospelAccording to Science], Einaudi; and finally, the most recent, the onealso cited in this interview, Perché non possiamo essere cristiani (emen che meno cattolici) [Why We Can’t Be Christians (and Least ofAll Catholics)], edited by Longanesi.

_The spiritual leader of Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, and

the celebrated philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza, represent

two models of “high” religious faith that is not tied to fi-

xed and unchangeable dogma, rituals, or rulesO

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Do you believe that there is no possibility of anunderstanding between science and religion?No, no. Even scientists are religious in their

own way. But they believe in a very differentGod: that of Pythagoras and Einstein, whichthen is Baruch Spinoza’s God-Nature. In 1929,Alfred Whited wrote the book Process andReality in which he argued the thesis thatnature is the body of God and that thethoughts of God are the laws of nature.Einstein also said he believed in the God ofSpinoza, which is the Harmony of the Worldor the Music of the Spheres of the ancients, orthe Logos of the stoics. If scientists did notbelieve in what they were doing, one wouldhave to say, paraphrasing St. Paul, that “theirwork would be in vain”. But the religion of thescientists is very high and very immaterial. Thedogmatic religion of the priests, idolatry, makesus angry and we consider it a real curse. If were-read the address the pope delivered atRegensburg to the scientific academy, we seethat he speaks of God as of the Logos – it is likereading Pythagoras, and this means that evenRatzinger understands that if he wants toaddress scientists he cannot speak to themabout the Gospel, but has to do it taking hisinspiration from Pythagoras and the stoics.Evidently even he is aware of the inadequacyof Christianity.

Putting aside science and scientists, don’t youthink that the Church could win back someapproval by carrying out some very symbolicact like abolishing ecclesiastical celibacy,opening the priesthood to women or perhapselecting a black pope?Let’s hope that it won’t do so and that it

continues to dig its own grave. With respect toa black pope, I’m not sure, but let me remindyou that according to the prophecy of Malachia,formulated around 1100, there were supposedto be another 112 popes. By now we have cometo the second to last and the next one –according to the prophecy – should be the last,and take the name Peter II. Now, many thinkthat when the papacy ends the world will end.But I think only the Church will end. Thenperhaps the Italian State will be able to finishthe action it began with Porta Pia, block off theVatican and transform it – like the Chinese didwith the Forbidden City – into a giant museumto take hordes of tourists and explain to themthat here once they kept fables that have sincebeen passed over by history...