Believing in God is Immoral

It’s frequently argued that unless a person believes in God, they can’t or won’t be moral. If the threat of divine punishment and the promise of heavenly reward are removed, humans, sensing that no one is minding the shop, will rape, pillage, plunder and otherwise misbehave with wild abandon. Alternately, many people think that moral prescriptions cannot arise from purely natural sources—if we are only fancy, evolved monkeys, if we are nothing but physical creatures, then there can be nothing governing us except the law of the jungle. So many people think that only by believing in God will we be restrained enough to be moral.

We need to turn that argument around completely. Not only is it possible to be a moral person without a belief in God, there are some very good reasons for thinking that in many cases believing in God is itself actually immoral.

In general, isn’t it a bad thing to believe a claim that :

1. you know is false,
2. contributes to the confusion or false beliefs of others,
   
3. encourages supernatural, spooky, non-critical, fuzzy-headed thinking,
   
4. fosters fear and anxiety.
5. creates complacence about social problems, social policy, and the future of humanity on this planet.
   
6. undermines the advancement of science
7. contributes to the stagnation of human progress.
8. encourages a historically outdated, over-simplified worldview.
9. stalls our progress in dealing with new, complicated and important moral issues
   
10. has no good evidence in its favor.
    
11. encourages cultural and ethnic strife.
12. gives people false hopes.
13. is self-deluding.
14. fosters fear, confusion, and fuzzy, magical thinking in children.
    
15. fosters false beliefs in children.
16. impedes children’s acquisition of our most important, modern advancements in knowledge.
17. is a case of akrasia:
    

The ancient Greek concept of akrasia is acting against one’s better judgment or having a weakness of will. Consider the heroin junky, or the smoker who is trying to quit, or the alcoholic. In their clearer moments, they can see what's wrong with their lives. They know that quitting is the sensible thing to do. But those needs creep up, the rationalizations start gaining traction, rational thought lapses, and he finds himself with a hypodermic or a cigarette in his hand. The psychological, emotional, and physical desires are too strong, and the intellectual habits, the fortitude of will, and his resolve are too weak.

Isn’t it true that one does something blameworthy or bad if one succumbs to believe those things that we want to believe when we know full well that the belief is undermined by the evidence. If out of a weakness of will, you allow yourself to believe something because of your emotional, psychological, or social needs, but not because you see good reasons in the form of evidence for it, aren’t you letting yourself down? You are letting all of us down. You are condoning believing in that way, you are lowering the bar for yourself and for everyone else, you are acknowledging that you cannot or you will not submit your beliefs to the arbitration of reason.

And isn’t it also true that your belief in God fits many, most, or all of these conditions? The problem for those with the religious urge is that culturally we have widely endorsed sloppy, indulgent, irrational thinking, especially when it comes to religion. There's a church on every corner trying to draw them in. And we've all elevated the abdication of reason in matters of God to a noble virtue instead of rejecting it for the dangerous and demeaning practice that it is. Most people, when they are being clear headed and thoughtful, know that there are no good evidence in favor of theism, and there is a lot of evidence contradicting it. But, many people want there to be a God. They hope that he's listening to their prayers. They don't think they could face life without him.

So they permit themselves to "believe in" God in the "hope" sense of "believe." ("I believe that my husband will make it home safely from Iraq.") But we don't usually distinguish carefully between that sense of "believe" and the "I believe because the evidence indicates that it is true" sense of believe. (NASA says, "We believe that there is no water on the moon.") And the comforting, hoping kind of belief settles in naturally. Then we find ourselves surrounded by like minded people who feel the need to believe(h). No one is comfortable acknowledging their weaknesses, and no one wants to attribute flagrant irrationality to themselves. So in time, hoping beliefs slip into a stronger kind of belief. We talk ourselves into thinking that it really is true that God exists. We hear others acknowledging our belief and our needs. And they encourage us to be strong, to have faith, to sustain that belief. We rationalize, we blur, and we feel more and more strongly that this thing that we want to believe really isn't just a hope, it's correct, it's the truth.

What originated as something that we knew wasn't true but we hoped was true anyway exploits a weakness of the will and becomes a belief that we think is true and that we think there's good evidence for. The drug works its way into the crevasses of your reason. You find a way to get what you want and placate your reason: you believe because you hope it is true, and you enslave your reason to making it seem like it’s a legitimate claim to the truth.

What we need is a twelve step program for God beliefs and religiousness.

"Hi, I'm Matt and I've been clean since 1982."

We Don't Have the Right Dataset to Make the Design Argument

Here are some more ideas about design that follow from the previous post.

What sort of physically manifest, empirically observable features of objects in the universe would allow us to infer that 1) those objects must have been created from nothing, and 2) the creator of those objects must have been outside and superior to natural law itself? The objects themselves cannot tell us either of those conclusions. That is to say, the design argument to the conclusion that an omni-being with power and existence beyond physical matter is underdetermined. The strongest conclusion we could possibly derive from the existence of orderly, complicated, artifact-like objects in the world, is that there may have been some creator within the context of matter and physical laws who was responsible.


In order to make the sort of analogous reasoning the design argument requires, we would need to be in this sort of extraordinary position. We would need to be witness to the origins of a large number of universes, some ex nihilo and some not, and some with physical laws and some without. Then we might be in a position to say that in the vast majority of cases, when we find a universe like X, with features A, B, and C, then that universe was created by an omni-being from nothing and that being instantiated those natural laws from a state with no natural laws. Then if it was true that the universe we currently inhabit possesses features A, B, and C, whatever they are, we could reasonably draw an inference to the strong God conclusion.


Being privy to no cases of creation ex nihilo and no cases of the creation of natural laws or of universes, the design argument is grossly underdetermined by the evidence.

God is Not a Watchmaker

The design argument, particularly when it is based on an analogy between orderly objects that we know have been designed (like watches) to the design of the universe that also exhibits order, is subject to a fatal flaw. The familiar argument asserts that in cases where we find an artifact that has orderly parts, smaller parts and machines contributing to the function of larger machines, and other organizational features, we are thoroughly justified inferring that the object was designed with a purpose in mind and that it had a designer. The structure of a watch found on the beach makes it obvious that it had a watchmaker. The universe exhibits similar features, so we are justified in inferring that it had a designer.


The fatal flaw in this argument is that its advocates typically fail to see just how profoundly different the creation of a universe is from every other case of purposeful design we have ever encountered. We know of countless cases of watchmakers making watches, carpenters designing and building houses, and electrical engineers building computer chips. In every one of these cases, two things are true that are not true in the case of God's creating the universe: a) the laws of nature are in place and they make the act of creation possible for the carpenter or the watchmaker, and b) matter exists and the human creator manipulates it into a new form.


Consider a). The carpenter or the watchmaker creates within the context of natural law. It is the regular, predictable behavior of matter according to the laws of physics that makes it possible for the watchmaker to employ steel, or glass towards his ends. The natural properties of wood, steel, and concrete facilitate the carpenter's choice of materials and the sort of design he conceives of and enacts. Were it not for the physics of nails, hammers, and wood, the carpenter would not be able to create anything. In fact, we have NO examples, NO experience, perhaps even no coherent conception of creation that is outside the laws of nature.


God's alleged act of creation of the universe includes creating the laws of nature. He could have made it so that the speed of light was faster, or slower. He could have made it so there was no light. He could have made matter have more fundamental constituents, or fewer. He could have made no matter at all. An omnipotent being is not constrained by physical law; omnipotence includes the capacity to instantiate any set of physical laws that themselves are logically consistent. Here is the first element of the profound disanalogy in design arguments. God's act of creation, if we can call that an act in any coherent sense, if it includes the choice, design, and creation of the laws of nature, is utterly unlike any act of design we have any experience of because all of our creations occur within the context of natural law and those natural laws makes those acts possible. An act of creation that instantiates a complete set of physical laws that govern matter from a state where there are no laws of nature is nothing like our manipulations of matter into different forms within the laws of nature.


It is difficult if not impossible to know what such an act would be like. One can't use matter to create physical laws. God can't employ a hammer and nails, or a watchmakers tools to bring it about that reality itself has order and structure.


Consider b). Every act of creation that we have ever engaged in, and perhaps that we can even conceive, takes existing matter and changes its arrangement. Iron is smelted from ore and made into steel that is used to build a skyscraper. A tree is milled into lumber that is cut and fashioned into furniture. Chemical elements are combined into different combinations to make compounds. God's act of creation of the universe is said to be ex nihilo, that is, from nothing. There was an empty state and God somehow brought it from that state into being occupied by matter through some mysterious exertion of his will. Again, we have no examples, no experience, no analogies, perhaps even no conception of how such a thing could be possible.


The design argument is only as strong as the analogy upon which it is based. It will only succeed if what the watchmaker does with the watch is analogous to what God did with the universe. The more features in the universe and in the alleged act of its creation that we can find that resemble those features of the ordinary, familiar cases of design and creation like the watchmaker's, the stronger the analogy. If the argument is going to work, and its authors do not cheat with presumptions about God's existence, it will move backwards from the object to a conclusion about the object's origins. The intent of the argument is that without any presuppositions about the existence of God, or God's intentions, or the act of creation, we can examine the object in question (the universe) closely, and infer that it must have had a designer from the presence of obvious, empirical features in it.


But whatever passing and superficial similarities there might be between watches and the universe, the profound differences between manipulating existing, lawfully behaving matter into another form and an act that a) creates the laws of nature themselves, and b) brings matter into being from a state of nothingness completely undercuts the argument by analogy. What a watchmaker is to a watch is nothing like what God would be to the universe. So the argument fails.

What Would be Evidence for Life After Death?

If possible, the doubter needs to be prepared to outline what sort of evidence would convince them, at least hypothetically. If no possible set of events or body of evidence would change their mind, then they are being dogmatic and irrational.

There is no plausible or convincing evidence, as far as I can see, that a person's mind or consciousness or spirit or soul can exist unless their brain and nervous are in minimal working order. And all the indicators suggest that when the brain goes, so does the soul.

But what sort of evidence could support the claim that a person's soul or mind exists without their body? Do near death experiences count? When someone has a very close, scary brush with death and has an overwhelming, life changing experience as a result, could that show that we exist beyond this material plane? If someone is unconscious on the operating table and has a powerful, vivid experience of floating up a lighted tunnel towards long lost loved ones or to Jesus or whatever, could that show that the mind doesn't need the brain to exist?

I think the answer to these two questions, as posed, is no and no. The human brain is capable of remarkable things. We have accumulated examples of brain disorders, drug trips, altered states and a host of other cases where a functioning but disrupted brain produces incredible visions, hallucinations, experiences, and feelings. And we have accumulated lots and lots of examples where even though someone feels like they are floating, or sees a tunnel (you can get this sensation just by standing up too fast) or has some other delusion and they are clearly, and demonstrably wrong. When you stand up too fast and your field of vision shrinks to a tunnel, clearly there is no tunnel and you are not floating up it. So we have lots and lots of examples of altered brain states that produce experiences that are mistaken. Therefore, it is just not enough for someone to report having had an extraordinary, unusual, or even life changing altered state of consciousness. Those happen all the time to just about everybody, and they aren't real.

The brainless mind defender needs to show more. Here's one example of the sort of evidence that would help make the case. Many people have claimed to have had life-after-death experiences, or out-of-body experiences. The problem is that brains are clearly capable of producing these experiences and they aren't real. But if we could establish that someone had their experience, saw the lights and the tunnel, floated up to meet Jesus, or otherwise had their profound encounter with God during the same time that we had every reason to think that their brain was not functioning well enough to possibly produce those experiences, then we'd have some important, significant evidence. If someone's heart or breathing stops on the operating table I don't think that is enough. Your consciousness is only indirectly dependent upon the functioning of your heart. I watched a magician on tv the other night hold his breath for over 7 minutes underwater. And he was clearly conscious, thinking, and having experiences. The oxygenated blood in a person's system is enough to sustain brain activity for quite a while.

Let's suppose that Smith's heart and breathing stop while he's on the operating table. Furthermore, suppose Smith is resuscitated later and he tells an elaborate life after death, or out of body story.

We would need to establish a couple of things. First, we would need to establish, and this would take a lot of sophisticated and sensitive medical monitoring, that say from 10:05 until 10:23, that Smith's brain had either ceased functioning altogether, or enough of its functions had ceased to prevent hallucinations, dreams, visions, and conscious feelings. Second, we would need to have some plausible indicators that the experiences that Smith had subjectively occurred sometime during that 18 minutes when his brain was out of commission. How would we show that? This is a hard one. If Smith was conscious and lucid and didn't appear to be having any hallucinations until 10:05, and then he wakes up at 10:23 and immediately reports having his out of body experience, that would be suggestive. If Smith was unconscious but had a relatively high functioning brain from 9:30 until 10:04, we can't just take Smith's word for it that the experience he had occurred between 10:05 and 10:23. How would he know? Did he have a vision of an accurate clock too? Would it help if he insisted that his experience went on for days and days? No, because subjective time just doesn't match up with objective time.
In fact, I think it is exceedingly rare that anyone who is suffering this kind of trauma will have an on/off episode where they go from being fully conscious and having a functioning brain to being unconscious and having a completely shut down brain. The other problem is that if so much of the brain has shut down so completely that it rules out the possibility of hallucinations and visions, I suspect that the damage is irreversible. Hearts and lungs shut down briefly and people can be revived. But brain's can't just be shut off and started back up. If there is enough damage to the brain that the oxygenated blood that is in the system can't keep it going, or the rest of the systems cannot support the brain's functions, then I think that brain will never come back to normal function. Smith won't be telling any stories.

But maybe it could happen with the right kinds of circumstances, or with advances in medical technology. But the challenge for the "souls can exist without the brain" thesis is to find a real case where we can say that some experiences were occurring and they couldn't have been the faulty product of an altered or damaged brain.

He Has No Brain, So God Doesn't Exist

By every indication we have, immaterial souls, brainless minds, or entities that occupy some ethereal afterlife do not exist. The widespread belief that humans have an immortal soul that survives the death of the body is utterly unfounded. A body of neuroscience research that grows every day has given us an increasingly fine grained understanding of the neural architecture of the brain that is responsible for producing our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our goals, our plans, and our consciousness. A mountain of evidence indicates that brain damage produces mind damage. And that the destruction of the brain causes the destruction of the mind. That is to say that everything that has been traditionally associated with the immortal soul is dependent upon the brain to exist. So when the brain dies, the soul goes with it.

God is thought to be a person. He has plans, desires, goals, and emotions. He acts, he creates, he loves, and he commands. He reacts to our behaviors. He is alleged to form personal relationships with people through prayer and meditation. He communicates to them through signs and indicators. Sometimes people claim to have heard his voice, felt him exert his will, or even to have encountered him directly.

So by the most common characterizations, God has a consciousness. By my account above, to have a mind is to have a soul. Minds and souls are different terms for the same thing. So God can be said, by common accounts, to have a mind or to have a soul. His soul, they say, filled with love for us, his creation.

God is thought to be immaterial. While God has contact with the material world, he is not in it.

Or alternately, God doesn’t have a brain. But if God is alleged to be a person, and being a person requires having a mind. But having a mind requires a brain, and God doesn’t have a brain.

Therefore, God does not exist.

The most likely responses to this argument will be something like these: First, “Isn’t it possible that God is not a person?” Second, “Isn’t it possible that God does have a brain? Maybe it’s something bigger than we have ever encountered, or it’s someplace we have never seen or been?”

Perhaps. These might be possible. But possibilities do not render a belief reasonable. It is possible there is a million dollars in my bank account. But it would be flagrantly irrational of me to conclude that there is a million dollars there because it is possible. What we need to see is some evidence, any real indicator that such a thing is true. And until that evidence is in hand, we are justified in concluding that that suggestion is as preposterous as it sounds.

Does the Theist Have a Moral Advantage Over the Atheist?

One of the most common comments on atheism is people expressing confusion or consternation about the possibility of an atheist's being moral. It is usually thought that if one thinks there is no God, then there is nothing to restrain you from doing whatever sort of horrible acts you might want to do--there's no one who is going to punish you in the end. This objection to atheism has been dealt with thoroughly and clearly again and again. See Kai Nielsen, Michael Martin, Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Peter Singer, and Sam Harris, to name a few.

But here's another important consideration: The view that morality emanates from God is called Divine Command Theory. The criticism of atheism above presumes that on our own, we cannot determine what is right or wrong--only God can determine that, so we must obey his commandments.

Suppose you can figure out exactly what things God has determined to be good and which ones are evil. That alone is a daunting task given that so many billions of people on the planet can't seem to come to any kind of consensus about what that is. And typically people cherry pick the commandments that appeal to them while ignoring all the ones that are not so charming. For example, people like to cite the 10 Commandments as a obvious, clear statement of morality. "Honoring your father and mother," sounds like a great idea. The punishment for failing to obey this commandment is to be put to death. That's also the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain, and for coveting your neighbor's goods, and all the other commandments. So, if we were to do what the Bible commands us to do, we need to put every person who has ever disrespected their father or mother, or who has slipped and said, "God dammit," to death.

First, it's clear that people who think that the Bible contains clear, obvious moral commandments probably aren't serious, or haven't actually read it, or they are just picking the commandments that suit them. Second, I don't care if God commanded it, executing someone for being disrespectful or using the word "God," in a rude way is positively barbaric, not the pinnacle of moral virtue.

Back to the original problem. Suppose we can figure out what God's commandments are (we can't seem to.) Now the most that any person who considers the texts is that the book says that God commanded them. It doesn't follow that God did command them, or that there is a God, or that we should do everything that a book says we should because it insists that God issued the commandments. There are thousands of religious documents all over the world that contain stories about spiritual leaders, some even claiming to be God, that issue commandments that you are currently ignoring. You don't think that the commandments of Zoroastrianism are binding, do you?

Now even if God said it and the book you choose to adhere to accurately relays that commandment, it doesn't follow from that alone that one should do it or even that it is good. You have to make your own moral choice, on criteria of your choosing, about whether or not it is a good thing to follow that commandment. You have to figure out which features of the commandment are relevant to deciding whether or not it is a good commandment to follow, one that you ought to obey. But the choice, the moral responsibility for deciding to act according to those commandments instead of some others still falls squarely on your shoulders, not God's. You have to figure out, on the basis of other facts than just that God commanded it, that doing X is a good thing. The second order choice, "Is it a good thing or a bad thing to do what God commands?" is still entirely up to you. That is, even if there is a God (there isn't) who gives us clear commands (he doesn't), acting on them is my choice. And it is my fault if I pick the wrong commandments, and it is to my credit if I choose the right ones. Complete, 100% moral responsibility falls entirely on the person who makes the choice, in every case. People are fond of saying that morality can only come from God and that only God is capable of recognizing what is right and wrong. But deciding to do what you take God to command is itself a moral choice that only you can decide. The theist might respond, "But I am not deciding what is right or wrong. Only God can do that. I just do what God commands." What that means is that you have made the decision to do what God commands instead of something else, and that decision it unavoidably moral because the rule you are deciding to follow are commandments about what is moral.

Notice that when someone says that they bombed the abortion clinic because God told them to do it, or to fly planes into a building, we don't immediately let them off the hook simply because they claim to have divine authorization. We expect them and everyone else to make moral choices about which principles deserve to be followed, whether you think they came from God or not. It is never enough to foist the moral responsibility for one's actions onto God, because you cannot divest yourself of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility cannot be separate from any human free choice.

So the theist who thinks that the atheist is amoral and directionless just hasn't reflected on the basic moral challenge for all of humanity. What all of do is entirely up to us. If you decide that since God commands X, Y, and Z, you ought to do them, you aren't absolved or moral responsibility for those acts. You decided that doing what God commands is good, and you deciding that doing X, Y, and Z instead of something else was a good thing. So the atheist and the theist are in the same boat for figuring out which principles are morally acceptable ones to live by and why.

Is Religious Education Child Abuse?

Human babies born today are more or less the same neurologically and biologically as human babies born ten of thousand years ago. We tend to think of humans from the past as more primitive than us, less capable of advanced thinking, less smart. But humans haven't evolved significantly in that regard in millennia. The scale required to really see noticeable changes in structures like brains in that regard is millions of years, not thousands. So it's not that a human born ten thousand years ago was less neurologically advanced than us--they weren't dumber. They just had access to less of the knowledge of the world that we had.

So really the only difference between a baby born today and one born ten thousand years ago is what you put into them. If you give them a first rate education that capitalizes on all the most recent advances of science and history, if you feed them well, if you nurture them in all the ways that we now know through science are the best for them, then you maximize their potential in the era of human history that they happened into.

But in our culture, a very strong presumption in favor of the parents' rights to control their child's upbringing has developed. It is so strong, that we let them teach the children anything they want, take them anywhere they want, and in effect indoctrinate them in any way they see fit. The parents' treatment of the child has to reach extremes before we will intervene. If there is outright physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, we legally intervene.

But consider educational child abuse. If we take a medieval or ancient worldview that makes simplistic and demonstratively false claims about the world, and if we teach that child that that is the truth, we rob them of thousands of years of important advances in science, physics, biology, history, and medicine. Consider the large percentage of the population who still believes that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Consider how many people don't understand the rudiments of the scientific method. Consider the $40 billion or so that Americans spend on alternative, unproven medical treatments. The majority of Americans believe in ghosts, psychic powers, communication with the dead, and other paranormal phenomena. Every time a parent passes some of that to a child, the child has lost the opportunity to find out the truth, she's less equipped to deal with the real world as we know it, and her life will be filled with more ignorance, fear, and superstition. And she goes on to propagate those ideas, miring all of us in the past.

If we inculcate child with a simplistic set of moral principles from an ancient culture, we leave them ill equipped to deal with the radically different social, technological, medical, and psychological issues that face us now when we have to make responsible moral decisions. Consider the Ten Commandments that are so often touted as the pinnacle of moral guidance. It's naïve to think that we can resolve complicated new moral dilemmas like the morally acceptable use of stem cells to cure disease, or end of life euthanasia, or other medical decisions that are made complicated by 21st century advances in technology with a handful of aphorisms from the 2nd century. You will not find any clear answers to moral questions about in vitro fertilization, or fetal genetic testing in the Bible. But you will find some thoughtful guidance and relevant information in the works of moral philosophers, researchers, and analysts in the 21st century.

When parents impart a religious worldview that is 1,000 years old, or 2,000 years old to their children that ignores what humanity has learned about the universe, about history, about human psychology, about medicine, and everything else, they do a grievous harm to that child. The point would be obvious if a parent decided to only teach their child addition, but refused to let them learn multiplication, algebra, and calculus. And if a parent told their child that the food in the grocery store nourishes because it is inhabited by friendly benevolent spirits that help the body from the inside, we'd also be scandalized. If a parent told their child that everything that people think about history is a myth--there was no American revolution, there was no discovery of electricity, there was no World War I and II--but instead, all of the humans on the planet were put here last week by magical fairies, it would be obvious that the parent is not fit and the child's interests are not being served. So how is giving a child a religious education any different?

The So-Called Right to Believe: Confusing Hoping with Justified Believing

Sometimes people use the word "belief" in a peculiar way. They use it to mean something like "hope" or "principle they live by" or "fundamental outlook." So they say, "I believe my husband will be home safely from Iraq by Christmas," or "I have to keep believing that I will pull through this terminal illness," or "I believe that everything happens for a reason." Or, most importantly, "I believe and have faith that there is a God." One of the interesting things about this usage of belief is that you have good reasons not to believe it. To watch the news, it doesn't seem like anyone is coming home from Iraq soon. Or the prognosis for the disease is bad. Or you are trying to hold on to hope that everything happens for a reason because some inexplicably bad things just happened to you and you can't see what good could come of them. The other interesting thing is that we praise and encourage people to "believe" this way. We reward people for standing up for their principles, and we have reverence for unshakeable faith. And a third interesting thing is that these "beliefs" are ones that we stubbornly hold onto no matter what. In fact, we consider it a sign of weakness of will and defeat if someone relents and gives one of these up.

I have a simple response: we shouldn't have any such "beliefs." Hope is fine. And it's not that I want someone to despair about the possibility of her husband coming home from Iraq. But the problem comes when we equivocate from this sense of belief to the regular sense of belief. You can and should hope for lots of things. But calling that a belief doesn't entitle you to treat it like an ordinary belief that is supported by the evidence and that plays a role as support for other beliefs. You don't get to actually think of it as true by calling it a belief. This is an idea you actually have good reasons not to believe. Calling it a belief doesn't entitle you to recommend that other people should believe it. And it doesn't entitle you to have that belief be immune from any kind of critical scrutiny or denial from the rest of us. And it doesn't sanction that belief to play a vital role in your other social, moral, personal, and spiritual convictions, especially when what you think about all of these things has such a significant impact on the rest of us.

"Oh, but I have a right to believe what I choose," lots of people say. "I am entitled to my opinion," is the standard response. What exactly does that mean? For one thing, you don't really think it is true. If somebody told you that a principle they live by--one of their fundamental beliefs--is that whites are superior to blacks, you would not be inclined to say they have a right to believe that. People can and do believe a lot of things, and many of them are patently and obviously false. Calling it a "belief" and invoking some mysterious right to it (where is the part about freedom of beliefs in the Constitution?) doesn't render it true or reasonable or well-supported by the evidence. In fact, you probably think that a person has a duty not to believe something as inflammatory and hurtful as the racial superiority claim unless they could show that they have met the highest standards of evidence. So why is it with religious beliefs we have reversed this and the religious believer doesn't have to offer any evidential support whatsoever? We can't simply take it on faith that blacks are inferior, or that women are not as smart as men, or that homosexuals are pedophiles. So why do we give people a free pass when they take it on faith that there is a God and that God told them to do all sorts of things?

We can make sense of "rights" talk about things like freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, a right to vote, a right to legal representation, a right to be treated as an autonomous moral agent. One interesting thing about all of these rights is that other people can do things that will impair or deprive you of the right. You might get physically prevented from voting--and we want to make sure that doesn't happen. You might be prevented from assembling--and we want to make sure you are able to do so. You could be deprived of a fair trial, and so on. But what could anyone do to make you stop believing something? I can talk to you. I can argue with you. I can try to persuade you that what you believe is mistaken. There can be nothing morally wrong with any of these. If I kidnap you, threaten you, or brainwash you to change your beliefs, then clearly I have violated your rights. But it's not your right to believe whatever you want. It's your basic freedoms to be unencumbered. But arguing with you, making a case against something you believe, or showing you evidence that makes it clear that what you believe is mistaken are not things you have a right to protected from. You do not have a right to not hear me claim that something is false when you think it is true. I do not have a duty to refrain from speaking my mind when you believe something that is unreasonable. (And the same goes if I am the one being unreasonable.) You do not have right to be protected from anything that might change your mind. So I really can't make any sense of the claim that you have a right to believe what you choose. Even if people have the right, that doesn't give anyone the right not to be criticized, corrected, argued with, or refuted by the evidence. And it doesn't give you the right to continue to believe something that is patently false when you know better and all the evidence is against you.

Proving the Negative

Here's a recent Powerpoint presentation on proving the negative: there is no God.

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mccormickm/SantaGod.ppt

The short version:

1. There are lots of negative existential claims that we believe reasonably and that we have evidence for: there is no Santa, there are no unicorns, there is no Bigfoot, aliens don't make crop circles, dinosaurs don't exist, etc.

2. God has all the relevant features that makes it reasonable to believe that those things don't exist.

3. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist.

Treating Religious Affiliation as Ethnicity

We have a tendency to frequently treat someone's religious affiliation as a sort of ethnic origin. We say that they are from a Christian family or a Jewish family. Particularly when we identify children as one or the other, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, we are treating their religious affiliation as something inherited. They got it from their parents, like they got their blue eyes, or Italian ancestry. Someone says, "I was raised Catholic," or "My family is Baptist," and these claims could easily be substituted with claims like "I am from an Irish family," or "My father is Persian." And we tend to think of the resulting connection to that religion as something they are stuck with; it's in their blood. People will often offer explanations of religious beliefs by saying that so and so was "raised Anglican," as if their upbringing inflicted or caused them to be a certain way, and nothing can change that now.

The problem with thinking of religion this way is that we get fundamentally confused about what a person's freedoms are and what their responsibilities to the rest of society are. People can't help what ethnicity they are. And that's part of the reason that we think it is unfair to criticize them or discriminate against them because they are Italian, or Persian, or Kurdish. That was the point behind the civil rights movement. African Americans were being discriminated against for something that 1) made no difference at all, and 2) they couldn't help; their skin color.

And we often get mixed up about religion in just this way. We are concerned to have respect and tolerance for other people's religious views, just like we try to have respect and tolerance for their ethnic and cultural origins. People talk and act like they have a right to possess whatever religious views they want, and that they shouldn't be criticized, or discriminated against on the basis of them. And criticism of a person's religion has become almost as taboo in our culture as making an off color racial remark to them. We would no more say something like, "Catholics are nut jobs, they think that the wine and crackers literally turn into flesh and blood," than we would make a crack about blacks and watermelon.

But it's a serious mistake to treat religion this way. For one thing, people aren't just bestowed with a religion and that's the end of it. They have a choice. They don't have to be Catholic, or Muslim, or Pentecostal. They can change their minds. And by treating people's religious affiliation with so much reverence and political correctness, we've effectively given them a blank check to form whatever crazy ideas they want, and pursue those ideas, foster them in each other, encourage their kids to believe them, and pass them on to the next generation. And they can demand--because freedom of religion is a right after all--that no one say anything critical about it because that would be intolerant and bigoted. People will say, "I have a right to my opinion," and "Well, that's just the way I was raised," as if they ends all rational inquiry into the matter. Can you imagine a serial killer saying (truthfully), "Well, I was just raised so that from time to time you went out, picked up a stranger, and brutally murdered them."

But then as long as religious believers have a free pass from any kind of critical scrutiny, they, like all of us, are prone to get crazier and crazier. There are currently millions and millions of Americans who think that Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus is coming very, very soon. And they are going to vote on the basis of those religious views, they are going to get on the school board, they are going to teach in the classroom, they are going to make moral decisions, they are going to get married, they are going to fight wars, they are going to blow themselves up on a bus crowded with school children, and so on, all based on what their religion told them.

Religious institutions and religious beliefs are pernicious and warp into ever more dangerous forms in a way that skin color does not. Certainly we should be tolerant of people when they look different. We should always be tolerant of the free and open exchange of ideas. That was the point of freedom of speech, after all. We all need to be able to get those ideas, including the radical, unorthodox, and anti-establishment ones, out there. And we need to have an open, intelligent, critical discussion about them to sort them out. But that's the irony. For the sake of freedom of religion, we have made it possible for people be protected from the open exchange of ideas that might keep them in check. We've given them a pass to secret themselves away and cultivate the most outrageous worldviews. And we have allowed them to inject those ideas back into the society all while bypassing the most important part--the critical vetting. So they get to tell their kids that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, that angels exist, and that the wine and crackers turn into flesh and blood. And they also tell their kids that they have an absolute right to their religious beliefs. And the cycle starts over again.

Miracles Prove That There Is No God

Suppose that the miracle claims are true, and that Jesus, for example, did perform all of the miraculous feats that he is credited with. Typically, these miracles are taken as indicators that an omni-God exists. Here's the problem. Consider for a moment what sort of acts an omni-God would engage in. Being all powerful, all knowing, and all good, this sort of being will not act lightly. He would not make mistakes, he would not perform an act that did not accomplish exactly what he desires, in exactly the way he desires, and in the best possible manner. He wouldn't be unclear about the outcomes of his actions in any way. So if an omni-God were to act in the world, that action would be a perfect, flawless manifestation of that being's power, knowledge, and goodness.

Now consider some of the miraculous acts that are commonly attributed to God: Jesus is said to have walked on water, healed the sick, and resurrected the dead; Mohammed is said to have split the moon, and to have transcended directly into heaven, and so on.

This challenge has been put to theists concerning God's omnipotence: is God capable of acting in a way that would limit himself, such as by making himself not God, or making someone else God, or creating a challenge that he can't meet (like creating a stone that he cannot lift)? If he is, then there will be something he cannot do as a result of his action. If he is not capable of performing these kinds of actions, then, again, there is something he cannot do. So either way, God's power is limited and he is not omnipotent.

Theists like Aquinas and Plantinga have responded by pointing out that being omnipotent is having the power to do anything that is logically possible, or that does not involve a logical contradiction. All of these acts, they argue, are contradictory in some way. So these are impossible acts, and it is therefore no limitation on God's power to accept that he cannot do them. Thus it is widely accepted that the paradox associated with omnipotence conceived as the power to do anything is solved by understanding omnipotence as the power to do anything logically possible.

Now consider the purported miracles of Jesus and Mohammed above. Those acts were all minor, insignificant acts with regard to what an omni-God could do. That is, God is capable of doing far more than healing someone who is sick, or splitting the moon. He is alleged to have created the universe from nothing, after all. So it would appear that in those acts and all the purported miracles in history, God is acting far below his capacity. But it has been argued and widely accepted that an omni God wouldn't act in self-limiting ways. Doesn't that include acting in ways that are vastly beneath one's capacity? If I have a goal that I want to achieve, and I have means at my disposal to achieve it, it wouldn't make sense for me to only employ some of my abilities in a limited fashion to achieve that goal. I might act in a less than optimal way, applying some but not all of my knowledge, or some but not all of my power, if I don't understand all the relevant facts about the situation--I mistakenly think that the guy behind me in a marathon is too tired to catch me, so I don't push as hard as I could, but he's faking and he beats me, for instance. Or I lose the race simply because I don't have as much endurance as the next guy. Or I lose the race because I don't have the mental fortitude. But God won't have those limits in power, knowledge, or desire.

So it's hard to see why an omni God would act in such tiny ways. But it is easy to see why some lesser being, who is not God, might act in such ways. These miracles are the sorts of things that Vegas magicians would engage in. They are intended to impress by being flashy, provocative, and attention grabbing. These acts are localized, not universal the way an omni-God would act. These miracles are only seen by a handful of people (compared to the number of people that an omni-God could reach). These miracles leaves all sorts of doubts open and questions unanswered. In short, nothing about these acts suggest the infinite knowledge, power, and goodness of an omni-God. And everything about them suggests that someone of limited knowledge, questionable goals, and partial goodness like us was responsible. So it looks like that miracles, even if they were to happen, are actually evidence against the existence of God. The only sort of being that would perform such superficial party tricks is one who is limited in knowledge, power, and goodness.

So contrary to what most people seem to think, even if miracles do occur, the most they would show is that whatever is responsible for them it is not God.

What Would Make the Atheist Happy?

The problem of evil atheist has a problem.* If they are going to argue that the evidence makes it clear that no God exists, then they must be prepared to enumerate the sorts of evidence that would make it clear that God does exist. If they will not, that is, if no possible set of circumstances would constitute convincing evidence from their perspective, then they are just as guilty of dogmatism as the theists they criticize who would not relent in their belief in God in the face of any evidence.

So either there is no possible state of affairs that they would find convincing (irrational dogmatism) or there is some state of affairs that they would find convincing.

What could that state look like? Maybe they are demanding that God intervene and prevent some horrendous evils like the Holocaust or the Thailand tsunami. But the thoughtful atheist shouldn't be convinced by what appear to be miracles, even if there is good evidence to think that they have happened, because miracles are not good evidence for attributing the three omni properties to God. God's meddling in the course of things in some cases and not others raises more problems than it solves. If he stopped those evils, then why not all the others? Wouldn't a good God stop all of them? If he has all power, knowledge, and goodness, then he could have done something about the other cases of gratuitous suffering in the world. But he didn't. The atheist shouldn't be satisfied by just a few interventions. Those wouldn't make the problem of evil on the whole go away, and they would create more doubt. A God who would prevent a few but not others would appear to be fickle, unreliable, flighty, or inattentive. A single miracle, however great, would not prima facie be convincing evidence for an omni God. Such a God would not appear to have the 3 omni traits from making a statue bleed from the eyes, or healing a sick person, or walking on water. Those are minor party tricks, not the grandiose acts of an infinite omni being who would have a full plan for how all events and all evil in the universe should unfold. At most, a few interventions like that might be indicators that there is some being who has enough power, knowledge, and goodness to lead it to do those acts. But those indicators would be too meager to entail omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. So the atheist shouldn't be satisfied by some miracles that prevent some isolated evils. (And the theist should be careful about trying to employ a few minor miracles to prove the existence of an omni God.)

What about more comprehensive intervention? Would the atheist be satisfied by a world where there were no superfluous evils and it was clear from our perspective that there are no superfluous evils? Maybe. But theists like Hick have plausibly argued that there could be no real moral actions in such a world. In the world where everyone gets what they deserve, people's first motivation becomes avoiding punishment and earning rewards. Those motives cannot be the ground of morally worthy actions.

The atheists in that world could complain that this is not a God who cares about our moral and spiritual development. This God gives us no freedom. This God gives us no autonomy or opportunities to learn and grow. This God is a petty tyrant who isn't really concerned with our best interests. This is a God who cares about nothing more than mindless obedience. He punishes every transgression and rewards every positive act. He treats no better than dogs. How is that loving? And why would a being who knows all and has the power to do anything build us, knowing what we would do, and then punish us for those transgressions. In what sense would we be deserving of reward or punishment after being set up with little or no choice like that? Surely the being who would do this to us is not an omni God.

Another option is a world where it appears from our perspective that there are superfluous evils. And from the arguments above, an omni God might have good reasons for creating the world to appear that way. But again, in such a world, the atheist has grounds to complain. "Look at all these superfluous evils," they complain, "surely an omni God would not tolerate the existence of these. The only reasonable conclusion is that there can be no such being.

So it is beginning to look like there really is no state of affairs that would satisfy the problem of evil atheist that there is a 3-omni God. And if that is so, then when they invoke the existence of evil as evidence that there is no God, they aren't really offering an argument in favor of their position based on a posteriori evidence. It looks like no matter what the evidence was, they'd make the same case. And that means that the argument and the evidence don't really matter to them. So is the problem of evil atheist being irrational and dogmatic?

* A problem of evil atheist is someone who thinks that the existence of evil in the world provides us with reasonable grounds to conclude that no omni-God exists.

Religious Memes and Rational Autonomy

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that some evolutionary story about a powerful disposition towards religiousness in humans is right. That is to say that there are features of our cognitive constitution that arose in our evolutionary history that made us prone to seek out sweeping metaphysical answers to our ultimate questions, or disposed us to derive satisfaction from religious explanations of the world, or some other biological grounding that is responsible for the powerful appeal of religion. What’s interesting and inflammatory about these theories is that they are charging that we don’t believe in God because it is true and because we possess good, justifying reasons that support the belief. Rather we are caused to believe by some aspects of our neurobiology.

Dawkins argues that evolution selected for human offspring who would respect, believe, and revere wisdom imparted to them by their parents. Listening to advice about how to get by in a world you know very little about from someone who has become an expert has obvious survival advantages. This advantageous tendency to accept guidance from them also makes us poor at distinguishing between sense and nonsense. So once religious ideas get a hold in culture, parents pass them along with all of the other things they think are true, and the kids readily take them as truth. So they can’t discriminate between the usefulness of “Avoid the bend of the river with crocodiles,” from “Sacrifice your best livestock to insure an abundant harvest from the gods.”

Dennett argues that evolution equipped us with a hyperactive agency detector. Having strong dispositions to attribute beliefs, desires, and intentionality to the other creatures we encounter gives us a powerful model for predicting their behavior and saving our own skins. And there are many other intriguing hypotheses being debated.

Now consider some of the reproductive and mutative behavior of religious ideas or memes. A “holy” text, when a group of people acquire one, provides a fertile breeding ground for the proliferation of ideas, theories, constructs, and theses about God’s goals, plans, desires, instructions, and nature. So people read, and reread, and discuss, and debate, and preach, and sermonize, and analyze the document again and again. They scour it for details for answers to life’s most challenging questions. And a successful religious text in the history of human religious exploration will be one that is conducive to these aims. Religious documents, whatever their source, that are not well suited to addressing people’s emotional, psychological, and social needs will not fare well in their hosts. Fewer people will be drawn to their creeds. So these less fit texts must adapt or die out (lose adherents.) Zoroastrianism, for example, is on the verge of extinction.

Most holy documents we have now within established religions have undergone this process of winnowing, adapting, and mutating for centuries. One kind of text that succeeds is metaphorical, vague, suggestive, and mysterious. In the rereading and the debating and the endless generation of new interpretations of the text, some bodies of religious doctrine, or some religious cultures will be more fit to get traction in the minds of the people who host them. In the telling and retelling of religious customs, and rereading of the texts, and the memories of people trying to recall a prayer or point of doctrine from childhood, the bodies of religious custom evolve. They reproduce with different features than their progenitors. Errors in recollection are introduced. The environment changes; the needs and interests of religious people change over time. So doctrine evolves.

Over time, some religious cultures, or meme patterns, prove to be more fit than others. Some have a broader appeal, serve more people’s interests, or manage to propagate themselves (evangelism, and religious encouragements to have lots of kids) better than others. And there are different ways to develop evolutionary fitness in meme space—some religious movements spread rapidly like a fashion trend, picking up new members like a French fashion designer becomes all the rage for a season. Others acquire their ground in our lives slowly and steadily, fortifying their place in the culture, in history, and in society like the Catholic church.

Now if humans have a built in evolutionary disposition towards religiousness, what would that be like from our perspective? What would it feel like to have that part of your nature helping to steer your actions? Would it be like the insatiable craving of addiction that a heroin addict goes through? Would it feel like the thrill of winning to a gambler? Would it feel like the careening vertigo of a fresh, infatuating love affair?

No doubt, many religious people have these sorts of feelings about worship and their participation in religion. Most likely, these kinds of powerful feelings are rare. Most people’s feelings about their religion are not like these feelings most of the time.

I don’t know if I have an answer to the question of how I would be able to tell in myself whether it is reason that justifies my belief, or it is my neurobiology that causes me to believe. Sometimes I can tell that I am cranky with someone because I haven’t had any coffee to drink and not because they did anything wrong. Other times, they haven’t done anything wrong, and I haven’t had enough coffee, but I convince myself that they are to blame. So I am not the best judge about the genesis of my beliefs. The fact that there seem to me to be good reasons to support it is not enough. It often seems that way, even when the belief is utterly unjustified.

A number of facts encourage us to take the idea that religious beliefs spring from our biology seriously.

Religion is ubiquitous. In the United States, there are 300 million people. The vast majority of them consider themselves to be religious. Less than 3% of the population describe themselves as non-believers. Worldwide, religious adherents are in the strong majority in almost every country. And those billions of people devote their lives to religion, they spend enormous amounts of money on it, they sacrifice themselves to it, they are celibate for it, they abandon their families for it, they kill for it, they build cathedrals and temples that take centuries to complete for it, they overthrow governments for it, they commit genocide for it, and so on. It is perhaps the single, biggest, most influential, most important, persistent phenomena in all of human history.

It seems highly unlikely that anything could loom that large in human lives and human history and not find some sympathy in the cognitive constitution that was built by natural selection in us.

So if that is at least partly responsible for your religiousness, how should you approach it or feel about it? Evolution doesn’t invalidate the satisfaction or the value of religion in people’s lives. Quite the contrary, the hypothesis under consideration here is that evolution is what makes religion so appealing and so gratifying to us. But if there is something about our natures that pulls us towards religion, we have just cause to be cautious. That means we may not be able to reason as clearly about it. We may be prone to rationalize. It might make us more likely to work harder to find justifications for it and less willing to consider alternatives. It might make us more dangerous, less cautious, more dedicated, more sympathetic, less free regarding it.

If our cognitive constitution made us predisposed to have certain types of beliefs, then that that disposition is a direct obstacle to our being rational about them. And that is serious cause for concern, particularly since we wouldn’t treat that belief as if it is irrational. Quite the contrary, it would probably seem to us that we were being perfectly rational. Just like a lack of coffee makes me irritable, but I blame the imagined social slights on my coworker. And we’d continue to tell others and ourselves that we are believing because it is true and because we have good reasons for believing it. So if natural selection hypothesis about religion is right, then we are wired to be irrational but not know we are being irrational about a set of beliefs that affect our moral views, our political views, our social behaviors, what we teach our kids, which wars we choose to fight, which people we decide to tolerate and which ones we decide to kill.

So we need to know, maybe more than we need anything else, whether or not this is true about us, and we need to take measures to control it.

What the religious meme hypothesis makes clear is that there will likely by ideas out there (not just religious ones) that will exploit features of our cognitive constitutions and that threaten to undermine our rationality, our safety, and our futures. Religious memes are potentially the most important and potentially dangerous ideas like this in human history.

You Don't Really Believe In Miracles

Should We Take the Miracle Stories in the Bible Seriously?

Many people have made a "Historical Case for Jesus" argument for the historical authenticity of the stories we now have about Jesus. They will typically make these points. Note: Making the case on their behalf takes a few paragraphs.

There were multiple eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, not just a few isolated people. Thousands of people are purported in the Gospels to have witnessed his healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the hungry. Furthermore, when Jesus was crucified, he wasn't buried in secret. The tomb was widely known and accessed. If it contained his corpse, then a story about his resurrection would have been very difficult to fake. A number of people found the tomb empty. On several different occasions, different groups of people are purported to have experienced Jesus resurrected from the dead.

The witnesses are not a homogeneous group of religious zealots. They are from diverse backgrounds, with different educations, and social standings. They were not a strange, fringe group.

It is highly unlikely that the witnesses had any ulterior motives. The witnesses stood to gain nothing from retelling what they had seen. In fact, they stood to lose a great deal. Early Christians were socially ostracized for their beliefs, persecuted, and even killed. The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to. Such an even would have been outlandish to them, yet they still believed. They were so convinced that they gave up their jobs, their wealth, and their families to become Christians.

The people surrounding the eyewitnesses believed them and were impressed enough to convert. The passion and conviction of the original believers was so profound that it conquered the doubts of all those around them. A whole religious movement that has lasted for thousands of years and spread to millions of people has sprung from the eyewitness accounts.

Many of the events of the New Testament have been historically corroborated. Archaeologists, historians, and other scholars have been able to find a great deal of independent evidence that confirms many of the historical claims such as the reign of Herod, the destruction of the temple, the growth of the early church.

The Gospels focus on a real, historical person. They are not comparable in their age to a book of mythology about Paul Bunyan, or fairy tales. They present their account as a factual record of the events in history, not as allegory, or fiction.

Furthermore, the Jewish tradition of transmitting history accurately and reliably was highly developed and successful.

Once we consider all of these factors, the believers argue, it would seem that no other hypothesis can explain all the elements of the story of Jesus as well.

But this is all nonsense--we have bodies of evidence for alleged miracles all around us today that far exceed all of these factors and it is perfectly obvious that no miracles occurred to all of us, even ardent religious believers.

You're Already and Atheist and a Skeptic about Miracles

Right now, we can now find thousands or even millions of people making fraudulent, mistaken, or deceptive miracle claims on a daily basis. People claim to see a pattern resembling the Virgin Mary in the water stains on a bridge in Chicago. Someone cuts open a watermelon and sees the word for "Allah" represented in the patterns of pulp inside. A man in Ontario burns his TV dinner and finds an image of Jesus in the burn marks of his fish stick. Another family finds a twisted pretzel in their bag that they say looks like Mary and Jesus. Televangelists "perform miracles" at will at every meeting. Closer inspection reveals that they are always lying, cheating, or mistaken.

Televangelist Pat Robertson, who has hundreds of thousands of regular viewers, claims that his prayers to God steered hurricanes away from the Virginia Beach, Virginia headquarters of his company. He also claims to have steered Hurricane Gloria in 1985 and Hurricane Felix in 1995, and Hurricane Isabel in 2003. In 2005, he began a prayer project for vacancies on the Supreme Court--he was frustrated with the "radical" views of the current judges. He claims that these prayers resulted in the resignation of Sandra Day O'Connor. Conveniently, Robertson doesn't publicize the numerous cases where he prayed for some outcome and nothing happened.

Frequently in India, millions of the faithful rush to Hindu temples to see statues of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha and others drink milk. Huge crowds form as people hold spoonfuls of milk up to the trunk of the statues and watch milk disappear. The phenomena is widely accepted as a miracle. Scientists examined the case and concluded that the milk was being siphoned down the surface of the statue in a thin film that wasn't easily visible. As more people made offerings, pools of milk formed at the base of the statues. The Press Trust of India wrote, "the phenomenon of idols "drinking" milk could be explained scientifically by the theory of capillary action or the movement of liquids within spaces of porous surfaces due to surface tension, adhesion and cohesion." Typically, believers deny that there could any explanation besides the miraculous one. Similar stories appear from time to time in the west surrounding statues of the Virgin Mary. Different types of porous stones that are used to make the statues have the capacity to absorb and wick a great deal of fluid.

People feel miracles in their hearts while they are watching TV, as they pray, when the go to church, or when they think about a loved one. But it only takes a little distance and objectivity to see that they are often enthusiastic, gullible, or mistaken. Millions of people fall under the influence of cults and dedicate their entire lives to outlandish, demonstrably false creeds and obviously false miracle claims. And notice that these people come from diverse backgrounds, they have varying levels of education, and come from different social groups. No one is immune the allure of miracle stories. In the case of cults, it's obvious that when people have such a passionate, and powerful conviction that makes their claims even more unreasonable to accept. Passion, and unreflective commitment makes it more difficult for someone to analyze claims that need clear, objective consideration. In general, people's passion and commitment to beliefs should not itself be seen as evidence that they are true.

The important fact to note is that on the whole, we, even the most pious among us, do not take any of these claims seriously. Even most Christians who believe, do not accept most of these claims. Even if you find some of the claims above to be plausible, there are still many more claims about miraculous events every day that you would discount than you would accept. You know that people are prone to exaggerate, they like to tell exciting stories, they are easily influenced, and they are eager to have their cherished beliefs corroborated. You already take the vast majority of such claims with a grain of salt. You aren't rushing off to Bangladesh or Mecca to convert at the feet of some statue that absorbs fluid. You'll even laugh to discover that someone found a burn mark on a sour cream and onion potato chip that looks like Jesus and they thought it meant something. You are already a skeptic about the majority of miracles because you know that the other natural explanations are much more likely almost every case you have ever encountered. And to make the case stronger, whenever a disinterested, objective third party has checked, none of these miraculous claims has ever turned out to be true.

So we are surrounded by thousands of miracle testimony cases on a daily basis that we do not think are real. These purported miracles make several things clear. First, people have a powerful disposition to assert and believe in miracles. Once you start looking, they are everywhere. Second, it not just like this now; history is full of similar cases. And in the past, say in the Middle East, 2,000 years ago, before so many important advancements in science and before so many mysteries had been explained, people's propensity to believe in miracles would have been even stronger. For them, the possibility that some supernatural forces were at work in the world causing things to happen that couldn't be explained otherwise would be common sense. Even more of the people around them would have believed in such events. There were no scientists with alternative natural explanations. People they knew and trusted believed in supernatural interventions and influences in the world. Their culture, their books, their stories, their conversations, their lives would have contained thousands of references that would have made the reality of God's hand acting in the world as obvious to them as the existence of radio waves are to you. For them, gossip, hearsay, and anecdotal evidence, as well as superstitions, mysteries, and supernatural forces would have been the norm. Their threshold for accepting a miraculous story would have been much lower than ours. For them, that would have been perfectly reasonable.

But now, you know a lot more about the way the world works than they do. And what would have been common sense to them is not for you. In the Middle Ages, they thought it was common sense that demon possession caused the flu, and that children born on Wednesdays will have a life of misery, after all. So now, given that you are surrounded by patently false miracle stories that you do not take seriously at all, and given that people would have been much more prone to believe and promote such stories in the past, how likely is it that miracle stories from 2,000 years ago from a culture that was immersed in superstition, supernaturalism, and ignorance are true? Or put another way, you don't think it is reasonable to believe all the obviously over the top miracle claims right in front of you now, so why would you believe some from centuries ago when people didn't have the benefit of the knowledge of the world that you have?

Can Atheists Be Moral?

So people will say this pretty often in response to the prospect of atheists or atheism, "If there's no God, then what will keep people in line morally? What possible reason could they have for being moral?"

I'm never quite sure what this is supposed to show. Suppose that you don't believe in God, and suppose further that you grant this cryptic and strange point completely. What would that lead us to? Believing is unreasonable, as I see it, but then I look around at everyone else and myself and I realize that unless they believe in God we will all turn into stark raving, axe wielding maniacs. So even though it is not reasonable to believe in God, failing to believe will produce horrible moral consequences. So should I believe in that case? What exactly would that be like? I just think about it, and decide that even though believing in God is a silly, childish fairy tale, I need to believe anyway or else I will lose my moral compass and do all sorts of things that are morally horrible. It won't be enough for me to just act like I believe, because I know, better than anyone, what I actually believe. No, what's needed by this hypothesis is for me to really come to believe, when I currently don't. But currently I don't believe, and I should also point out that not believing is not filling me with outrageous urges to do horrible things. And I should also point out that some countries in northern Europe have nonbeliever rates as high as 55% or 60%, and the last time I checked the news, people aren't murdering, raping, child molesting psychotics there. In fact, their rates for lots of the most serious violent crimes are actually lower than they are for more religious countries. But back to the hypothesis: contrary to people's often saying that they "have a right to believe whatever they want to," and saying things like, "I am free to believe whatever I want to," I can't, and you can't, just decide to believe something that you don't believe now as a matter of willing it. Go on, try it: look at the plain, white wall of your office or bedroom and will yourself to believe that is it painted with red and yellow spots, or will yourself to believe that George W. Bush is not currently the president of the United States, or even harder, will yourself to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. You can't do it. So even if it is true that people lose their moral compass and do horrible things if they don't believe in God (they don't), what exactly could you do about it? I suppose you'd have to try to find a way to trick yourself into believing, and all because you are worried that without belief in God you're going to become a moral reprobate. But if you are an atheist, and you are worrying about the possibility that you are going to become immoral, then evidently your sense of morality is working just fine. Or at least it is working well enough for you to worry about the possibility that you might become a moral monster. So it looks like its just incoherent to suggest that atheists are less able to distinguish right and wrong from other people.
Ironically, the comment, "without God, people won't be moral," reveals an juvenile, shallow, and painfully underdeveloped sense of morality. The reason my dog doesn't pee on the carpet is because she's afraid of getting scolded or punished, and the reason she'll bark on command is that she wants treats. If you think that the primary reason people refrain from immoral acts is the threat of punishment, and the reason that they do good things is that they want to be rewarded, you're view of humanity is that they are little better than animals who have nor intrinsic motivation to do the right thing other than avoiding a spanking (hell) or getting the ultimate jerky treat (heaven). And that's an impoverished, insulting, and childish view of humanity given that our reasons for being good or for being bad are typically so much more complicated and interesting. Maybe you're recognizing the animal in yourself and feeling like the only thing that keeps you in line is the threat of punishment or the promise of reward. That would make sense for lots of preachers, priests, and sermonizers who have so much zeal for condemning their flock for their indiscretions--I often suspect that the red faced, spitting, shouting enthusiasm they have for berating us for our misdeeds is just misdirected anger at themselves for their own animal temptations and acts.