Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only
of English speaking professional philosophers are theists.
otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the
same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences,
majority of philosophers or scientists think. But such facts might cause
believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few
the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was
ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change
souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing. Still, despite the view
beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?
they are genomes in environments. The near universal appeal of
and practices, and science increasingly confirms this view. There is a
selection. So what survival and reproductive roles might religious
Today there are two basic explanations offered. One
adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage. For example religion
helped groups survive. The other explanation claims that religious
beliefs and practices arose as byproducts of other adaptive traits. For
example, intelligence is an adaptation that aids survival. Yet it also
existence of other minds. Thus the idea of hidden Gods explaining
natural events was born.
environmental explanations. It is self-evident from the fact that
that birthplace strongly influences religious belief. This suggests that
people’s religious beliefs are, in large part, accidents of birth.
parents. There are also social factors effecting religious belief. For
There is also a strong
correlation between
religious belief and various measures of social dysfunction including
homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality,
sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births, abortions, corruption,
income inequality and more. While no causal relationship has been
established, a United Nations list of the 20
best countries to
live in shows the least religious nations generally at the top. Only in
the United States, which was ranked as the 13th best country to live
in, is religious belief strong relative to other countries. Moreover,
virtually all the countries with comparatively little religious belief
ranked high on the list of best countries, while the majority of
countries with strong religious belief ranked
low. While
correlation does not equal causation, the evidence should give pause to
religion’s defenders. There are good reasons to doubt that religious
belief makes people’s lives go better, and good reasons to believe that
they make their lives go worse.
Despite all this most people still
accept some religious claims. But this fact doesn’t give us much reason
to accept religious claims. People believe many weird things that are
completely irrational—astrology, fortunetelling, alien abductions,
telekinesis and mind reading—and reject claims supported by an
overwhelming body of evidence—biological evolution for example. More
than
three times as
many Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than in biological
evolution, although few theologians take the former seriously, while no
serious
biologist rejects the latter!
Consider too that
scientists don’t take surveys of the public to determine whether
relativity or evolutionary theory are true; their truth is assured by
the evidence as well as by resulting technologies—global positioning and
flu vaccines work. With the wonders of science every day attesting to
its truth, why do many prefer superstition and pseudo science? The
simplest answer is that people believe what they want to, what they find
comforting, not what the evidence supports: In general, people don’t
want to know; they want to
believe. This best summarizes why people tend to believe.
Why, then, do some highly educated people believe religious claims?
First,
smart persons are good at defending ideas that they originally believed
for non-smart reasons. They want to believe something, say for
emotional reasons, and they then become adept at defending those
beliefs. No rational person would say there is more evidence for
creation science than biological evolution, but the former satisfies
some psychological need for many that the latter does not. How else to
explain the hubris of the philosopher or theologian who knows little of
biology or physics yet denies the findings of those sciences? It is
arrogant of those with no scientific credentials and no experience in
the field or laboratory, to reject the hard-earned knowledge of the
science. Still they do it. (I knew a professional philosopher who
doubted both evolution and climate science but believed he could prove
that the Christian God must take a Trinitarian form! Surely something
emotional had short-circuited his rational faculties.)
Second,
the proclamations of educated believers are not always to be taken at
face value. Many don’t believe religious claims but think them useful.
They fear that in their absence others will lose a basis for hope,
morality or meaning. These educated believers may believe that ordinary
folks can’t handle the truth. They may feel it heartless to tell parents
of a dying child that their little one doesn’t go to a better place.
They may want to give bread to the masses, like Dostoevsky’s Grand
Inquisitor.
Our sophisticated believers may be
manipulating, using religion as a mechanism of social control, as Gibbon
noted long ago: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the
Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the
philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
Consider the so-called religiosity of many contemporary politicians,
whose actions belie the claim that they really believe the precepts of
the religions to which they supposedly ascribe. Individuals may also
profess belief because it is socially unacceptable not to; they don’t
want to be out of the mainstream or fear they will not be reelected or
loved if they profess otherwise. So-called believers may not believe the
truth of their claims; instead they may think that others are better
off or more easily controlled if those others believe. Or perhaps they
may just want to be socially accepted.
Third, when
sophisticated thinkers claim to be religious, they often have something
in mind unlike what the general populace believes. They may be process
theologians who argue that god is not omnipotent, contains the world,
and changes. They may identify god as an anti-entropic force pervading
the universe leading it to higher levels of organization. They may be
pantheists,
panentheists,
or death-of-god theologians. Yet these sophisticated varieties of
religious belief bear little resemblance to popular religion. The masses
would be astonished to discover how far such beliefs deviate from their
theism.
But we shouldn’t be deceived. Although there are many
educated religious believers, including some philosophers and
scientists, religious belief
declines with educational attainment, particularly with scientific education. Studies also show that religious belief
declines among those with higher IQs. Hawking, Dennett and Dawkins are not outliers, and neither is Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.
Or
consider this anecdotal evidence. Among the intelligentsia it is common
and widespread to find individuals who lost childhood religious beliefs
as their education in philosophy and the sciences advanced. By
contrast, it is almost unheard of to find disbelievers in youth who came
to belief as their education progressed. This asymmetry is significant;
advancing education is detrimental to religious belief. This suggest
another part of the explanation for religious belief—scientific
illiteracy.
If we combine reasonable explanations of the origin of
religious beliefs and the small amount of belief among the
intelligentsia with the problematic nature of beliefs in gods, souls,
afterlives or supernatural phenomena generally, we can conclude that
(supernatural) religious beliefs are probably false. And we should
remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to
demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that
there are
. Believers are not justified in affirming their
belief on the basis of another’s inability to conclusively refute them,
any more than a believer in invisible elephants can command my assent on
the basis of my not being able to “disprove” the existence of the
aforementioned elephants. If the believer can’t provide evidence for a
god’s existence, then I have no reason to believe in gods.
In
response to the difficulties with providing reasons to believe in things
unseen, combined with the various explanations of belief, you might
turn to faith. It is easy to believe something without good reasons if
you are determined to do so—like the queen in “Alice and Wonderland” who
“sometimes … believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast.” But there are problems with this approach. First, if you
defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion,
however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a
political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal
right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification
only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If
someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we
should conclude that they simply don’t care about what’s true. We
shouldn’t conclude that their beliefs are true because they are
fervently held.
Another problem is that fideism—basing one’s
beliefs exclusively on faith—makes belief arbitrary, leaving no way to
distinguish one religious belief from another. Fideism allows no reason
to favor your preferred beliefs or superstitions over others. If I must
accept your beliefs without evidence, then you must accept mine, no
matter what absurdity I believe in. But is belief without reason and
evidence worthy of rational beings? Doesn’t it perpetuate the cycle of
superstition and ignorance that has historically enslaved us? I agree
with W.K. Clifford. “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to
believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Why? Because your beliefs
affect other people, and your false beliefs may harm them.
The
counter to Clifford’s evidentialism has been captured by thinkers like
Blaise Pascal, William James, and Miguel de Unamuno. Pascal’s famous
dictum expresses: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing
of.” William James claimed that reason can’t resolve all issues and so
we are sometimes justified believing ideas that work for us. Unamuno
searched for answers to existential questions, counseling us to abandon
rationalism and embrace faith. Such proposals are probably the best the
religious can muster, but if reason can’t resolve our questions then
agnosticism, not faith, is required.
Besides, faith without reason
doesn’t satisfy most of us, hence our willingness to seek reasons to
believe. If those reasons are not convincing, if you conclude that
religious beliefs are untrue, then religious answers to life’s questions
are worthless. You might comfort yourself by believing that little
green dogs in the sky care for you but this is just nonsense, as are any
answers attached to such nonsense. Religion may help us in the way that
whisky helps a drunk, but we don’t want to go through life drunk. If
religious beliefs are just vulgar superstitions, then we are basing our
lives on delusions. And who would want to do that?
Why is all this
important? Because human beings need their childhood to end; they need
to face life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and its love,
its war and its peace. They need to make the world better. No one else
will.
(Credit: Wikimedia)