Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (20 page)

Morality is about how people treat each other. That’s why the single most sensible moral idea, one that appears in every religious and philosophical system in the world, is “treat others as you would like to be treated.” If I don’t do this — if my natural empathy fails, and I go around doing harm or treating people unfairly, who will hold me accountable?
People,
that’s who. My life will be made much more difficult, and rightly so, by the society in which I live.

When someone tells me that only belief in God prevents people from committing acts of violence, I always wonder — does he really think his
own
belief in God is the only thing that keeps
him
from strangling me on the spot? If we were arguing over God’s existence, this is about the time I stop trying to convince him and slowly back away.

Actually, I think better of him than he does of himself. I don’t think for a minute that too many believers are kept in line only by the idea that they’re being watched by a supernatural being. That can help someone who needs constant babysitting, I guess, but behaving well also makes rational sense. Check out
Chapter 15
where I discuss this topic in greater depth.

Avoiding punishment is just one reason everyone tends to behave more often than not — and it’s one of the lowest reasons at that. But it nicely parallels the religious idea that people behave well to please God and avoid his wrath. In fact, people also behave well to please
each other
and to avoid
each other’s
wrath.

But what all sides tend to miss in this conversation is the simple, demonstrable fact that most people behave morally most of the time, regardless of their religious perspectives. Think about the billions of decent, nonviolent human interactions that occur every day. Yes, there are plenty of moral transgressions as well, but it’s objectively true that a basic, shared moral sense is evident most of the time. Almost everyone seems to agree on what’s right and what’s wrong more often than not — and that includes atheists.

That life arose and evolved by chance

If atheists believed that life arose and evolved by random chance, they’d deserve to be laughed out the door. It simply isn’t credible. But anyone who believes such a thing —
or
who believes there’s a conscious designer behind the curtain — hasn’t caught up with the best of human knowledge.

The evidence points overwhelming to a third option I describe earlier in this chapter — evolution by natural selection. The word “selection” gives away the fact that a
non-random
process is going on, one that naturally favors certain variations over others. Life is thought to have arisen through a process called
abiogenesis,
through which simple inorganic materials, responding to a few physical principles, combined to create the basic building blocks of single-celled organisms.
Add a couple billion years of natural selection, stirring constantly, let cool, and you get the variation we see around us. (For even more detail, flip to the earlier section, “
Solving the complexity problem
.”)

So it bears repeating — atheists think life is pretty amazing and complex, but they don’t believe it happened by chance
or
by intentional design.

That all religion is the same

Some atheists are guilty of putting all religion into the same category. I know a few of these folks myself. One very good reason not to treat all religion all the same is that . . . it’s not all the same.

But most atheists I know have spent enough time around people of different perspectives to know that there’s a massive difference between a snake-handling Pentecostal and a liberal Quaker, not to mention between the Reverend Fred Phelps (whose church pickets funerals with signs reading God Hates Fags) and the Dalai Lama.

Enormous differences even exist within one denomination. A progressive Catholic differs from a conservative Catholic on almost every major political and social issue. These differences matter, and atheists — at least those who pay attention — can and should recognize them instead of painting all religion with a broad brush. Progressive religious believers have much more in common with the nonreligious than they do with fundamentalists, and it’s better to work together against genuinely poisonous beliefs than to push progressive religious believers aside just because we differ on God.

That religion has made no positive contributions

Some atheists also feel that religion has made no positive contributions to the world. Even Bertrand Russell, a pretty levelheaded guy on most days, credits religion only with establishing the calendar, saying he can’t think of any other contributions.

Most atheists, even those who feel religion is a bad influence overall, can usually think of a bit more than the calendar:

Many great artists and composers are inspired by their belief. Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, wrote SDG
(Soli Deo Gloria,
“For the Glory of God alone”) at the end of each of his compositions.

Catholic monks preserved the works of antiquity throughout the Middle Ages as an act of religious devotion.

Quaker activists have been at the forefront of every movement for peace and human rights in the past 200 years.

Hinduism and Jainism have developed principles of nonviolence that have led to the peaceful resolution of countless conflicts, large and small.

Christian church communities worldwide have developed enviable cultures of charitable giving and service to the poor.

Of course, this list is abbreviated, but you get the idea.

Many atheists would raise an objection here, saying these things shouldn’t be credited to religion but to human beings who happened to be religious, and who simply framed their creativity and their values in religious terms. But others feel that religion at its best can indeed serve as a motivator and as inspiration for great things — even though it’s not the only worldview that motivates and inspires.

Answering the Question: Is Science Incompatible with Belief in God?

If I ask whether science and religion are compatible, I’m committing a kind of category error. It isn’t even like comparing apples and oranges — it’s more like apples and math.

Any given religion is a collection of claims, values, and practices. You can think of it as answers to the problem of being human. Science is a method for asking questions. To put it simply, religion is a collection of answers, and science is a way of asking questions. The scientific method results in a body of knowledge, all subject to revision, but the knowledge itself isn’t science.

Here’s a better way to frame the question: Is the scientific method compatible with the religious method of learning about the world? Now it’s apples and apples. If we’re talking about traditional revealed religion, which takes the word of prophets and scriptures as final, the answer is clearly no. You can either declare a revelation infallible or pursue science, but you can’t do both. At the heart of science is the refusal to accept any information as final, infallible, unchangeable. It’s the polar opposite of the religious concept of revealed sacred truth. So the two methods are deeply incompatible.

In 1997, biologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that science and religion can be thought of as “non-overlapping magisteria,” each with its own domain of authority. Science is about the
what
and
how
of the universe, he said, while religion is king in the area of meaning and morality. Everything would be fine, he said, if they’d just stay out of each others’ sandboxes.