Sat 31 Oct 2009
Garry Dobbins, a philosophical rabble-rouser who is my friend and colleague at Stevens, and I debated the question above on October 21 in front of a couple dozen students and a handful of faculty. I was raised Catholic but have been an agnostic since I was 12 or, except for brief periods of weakness. So I took the skeptical position, offering reasons why people don’t need God or associated ideas, like heaven. For those poor souls who couldn’t make the event, here are 10 reasons not to believe:
1. 9/11. Israel versus Palestine. Pakistan versus India. The US versus the Taliban Sri Lanka. Northern Ireland. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Jihads. I.e., religious wars. Too many people have killed and been killed in the name of God. Religion causes more conflict than it quells.
2. Childhood cancer. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. If God is all-powerful and loves us, why do bad things happen to totally innocent people? This is the problem of evil. No theology has ever answered this question adequately. The philosopher of religion Huston Smith calls the problem of evil “the shoal on which all theologies founder.”
3. Santa Claus. Grown-ups smile at childrens’ belief in Santa Claus, who tallies up our niceness and naughtiness and rewards us accordingly. But a just God who sends us to heaven or hell depending on how we behave is no more plausible than Santa Claus.
4. Religious morality is a contradiction in terms. The Bible’s commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” refers only to Israelites killing other Israelites. People outside of the tribe are fair game. In other words, there is one set of moral rules for members of your group and another set for outsiders. (My friend Susan Schept, who attended my debate with Garry, objects strongly to this interpretation, which I’ve borrowed from other scholars.)
5. “The scandal of particularity.” This is a theological term for the notion that God gives some people special treatment. He parts the Red Sea for Moses and his people and lets the Egyptians drown. The idea that God plays favorites, which fuels so much religious intolerance and bloodshed, is one of the worst ideas that humans have ever invented.
6. Heaven can wait. Forever. Heaven is a fantasy that our ancestors invented to console themselves because life was often so awful. Belief in an afterlife distracts from living as well as we can in this life. It also motivates religious fanatics to do really dumb things, like flying a jumbo jet into a skyscraper.
7. The Man in the Moon. Scientists have compiled evidence that our intuitions of God stem from our innate tendency toward anthropomorphism, toward imputing human attributes to non-human things. Just as we discern the man in the moon, so we see God in clouds, shrouds, and all of nature.
8. We don’t need God to be good! Some believers claim that without religion we’d descend into savagery. But natural selection has embedded capacities for kindness and fairness in all primates, including humans. These moral instincts–plus our reason, which helps us see the wisdom of the golden rule–are all we need to get along with each other.
9. Shakespeare beats the Bible. The arts can help us appreciate the mystery of existence without all the ideological baggage and mumbo jumbo that comes with religion. Read Hamlet rather than Genesis, go to a museum, not a church.
10. Save yourself! Just as heaven distracts us from making this life better, so does the notion of a savior or messiah who will supposedly save us. It’s time for us to grow up and accept responsibility for saving ourselves.
October 31st, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I’d like to see the ten reasons for believing. As for your list, right on. I would add that it’s irrational to think anything survives nirvana(annilahation) of the body. How can people think something like a soul, with personality traits still intact, survive death. We see all time those who suffer from a neurogenerative disease gradually lose mental faculties. There’s a certain type of density not to make that connection. No body=no mind= no soul.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
I agree that you should’ve included the ten reasons for believing, or at least a link to them. I quote/paraphrase Uncle Al who posts here regularly, “Christ died for our sins. If we don’t sin, he died in vain. Get to it.” To me, religion (most) is a study in premeditated maladaptation of the core belief structures. Mohammed clearly and unequivocally stated the Koran’s words were(are) to be taken allegorically, period. How can anyone extrapolate the bulging busload of virgins promised to young Jihadists? Where do the fresh virgins arise from, and where do the used ones go? As for Catholics (from a former ‘reluctant’ altar boy), I refer to theonion.com where, during the height of the perve-priest scandal, served up one of my favorite headlines: Catholic Youth Still Seducing Clergy in Record Numbers. Still, consider the pestered priest, typically pubescent at the start of the seminary, and subsequently forced to listen to juicy sins in confession every week! I have often thought the veiled confessional portal was placed to keep the sinners from seeing the true face of religion, or worse. Enter Irish films like the Butcher Boy and Fellini’s numerous cinematic slaps at the folly of the church, the Papacy, the filial hierarchy… ad naseum. As far as anyone really knows, Christ spent quite a bit of time in India at various ashrams, smoked a lot of shish, ate shrooms and returned to Israel where he was simply way cooler and smarter than the morons of that era, hence God. Even Horgan has previously aspired to omnipotence, albeit lacking any potency since it was contrived through pharmacology, and not real. The genuine shame of the age of enlightenment is our failure to recognise that Aldous Huxley was right on regarding Heaven and Hell–mankind needs big doses of the good stuff, the Moksha medicine– if ever we can evolve from the shell game of our puny selves and find true spirit and joy on earth. Enthusiasm essentially means the will of God (Latin or Greek, I tink). Human ego creates barriers to brotherhood and squashes enthusiasm,
leaving behind the inherent need for mankind to ingest mind altering goodies. There is more than one way to heaven on earth. Get to it.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:12 am
The top ten reasons for believing in God:
1. Peace: when everyone eventually has the same set of peaceful fundamental values, there will be no war. (Religious wars and violence are part of the process of achieving peace. This process is not new: Jesus was crucified at the insistence of the Jewish High Priest. Events like 9/11 also caused human losses, but they also focussed Western eyes on the suffering and evil of the Taliban and other evil dictatorships, which were then fought.)
2. John: “Childhood cancer. Tsunamis. Earthquakes.” All these natural risks strike individuals randomly, unlike evil dictatorial regimes doing ethnic cleansing. Believing in God and prayer is what a lot of people do when the chips do down. It provides hope and thus comfort in times where science can’t. John: “If God is all-powerful and loves us, why do bad things happen to totally innocent people?” If God was truly all-powerful, there would be no “free will”. God’s policy towards evil is like the U.S. Government’s policy towards Hitler during the 30s: send messengers but don’t interfere. God sent Jesus with a message, instead of curtailing the freedom of choice.
3. John: “a just God who sends us to heaven or hell depending on how we behave is no more plausible than Santa Claus.” Scientifically, it’s easier to falsify the hypothesis of Santa Claus delivering presents on Christmas Eve than God delivering an afterlife. Hence, you’re claim is wrong, and God is a worthy hypothesis.
4. John: “there is one set of moral rules for members of your group and another set for outsiders”. This occurs only if there are different groups. The ultimate aim of all religion is for everyone to develop and share a non-conflicting set of ethical, peaceful values.
5. John: “the notion that God gives some people special treatment.” This notion contradicts the fact that God provides freedom by allowing us some choice in life, instead of curtailing all choice to prevent any possibility of evil. Some people have more luck than others, and as noted in Matthew 25:29, the rich often get richer and the poor get poorer. You get more interest paid if you have more money saved. There is no special treatment by God, just by society.
6. John: “Belief in an afterlife distracts from living as well as we can in this life. It also motivates religious fanatics to do really dumb things, like flying a jumbo jet into a skyscraper.” The opposite is more generally true: the belief in an afterlife, far from distracting the living, provides comfort and hope to those on the deathbed. No promise of a great afterlife would motivate a sane human being to commit a crime like 9/11; on the contrary, a sane human being would see that such wanton murder leads to eternal hell.
7. John: “Just as we discern the man in the moon, so we see God in clouds, shrouds, and all of nature.” That God is omnipresent has strong scientific evidence that you fail to mention for some reason. All electrons ever observed have the same charge, rest mass, magnetic moment, etc. If there was not an omnipresent God, how could fundamental interactions be described so precisely by universal gauge symmetries in particle physics?
8. John: “natural selection has embedded capacities for kindness and fairness in all primates, including humans.” God is a synonymous with “natural selection”.
9. John: “The arts can help us appreciate the mystery of existence without all the ideological baggage and mumbo jumbo that comes with religion.” You haven’t proved this, so it’s just a belief you are asserting, like religious belief. The Church of John Horgan will substitute Shakespeare for the Bible, in the religious belief that plays like Hamlet are better than Genesis. Good for you, John! But please recognise that you aren’t getting rid of religion per se, you are just modifying the details of religion by incorporating modern arts in place of those that Moses incorporated.
10. John: “It’s time for us to grow up and accept responsibility for saving ourselves.” Well said! That is what the Bible actually means to most Americans, John:
“Here is a statistic that does matter: 75 per cent of Americans believe the Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves. That is, three out of four Americans believe that this notion, at the core of American politics and culture and which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, appears in Holy Scripture.”
- http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/the-christian-paradox/2006/04/13/1144521447730.html
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:21 am
I have been what many would term a Christian right-winger for maybe 30 years. My take on the Bible is that all of it is true and some of it really happened.
The Judeo-Christian Bible arose in the first flush of humans discovering writing. For the most part ancient oral traditions were then set down. Many Hebrew stories, like the Genesis account, were borrowed from even older Persian sources. The flight out of Egypt by the Hebrews is an entirely plausible story, particularly the parts about how the Hebrew tribes had to become regimented, had to accept just one commander, and had to become sufficiently fanatic to face death bravely, all of which would be needed for them to conquer and seize territory sufficient to create their own homeland. Even then, the Hebrews were not powerful enough to seize the really valuable coastal areas.
What I am saying is that this is social history, often written by “prophets” who were the malcontented agitators and champion second-guessers of their day.
All the same, considerable social wisdom arises from all this travail. We get a picture that everything happens for a reason, but that even God can be disappointed in how things turn out, implying that even God has opposition in earthly matters.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I’m with larry – where’s the video of this debate? Although he (larry) is a little limited in his conception of what a ’soul’ might be…
Best response to the idea of reincarnation: Yeah, so this is what you were waiting for in your last life. Deal with it.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Prostitution: You got it, you sell it, you still got it. Religion: You got promises, you sell shares, hodie mihi, cras tibi. Post-mortem escrow is ridiculous.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/religion.htm
Can God make a collection plate so vast that even He cannot fill it? Sure! ALL OF THEM. In the whole of human history across the entire planet not one deity has volunteered Novocain. It is a telling omission. Hindus have 36 crores of gods – 360 million deities. How is India doing?
November 5th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I don’t know about that Mr. Onion. The soul, no matter how you dress it up, is a pipe dream. 100% certain? No. 99.9 % yes. The most esoteric traditions maintain that Atman is nonpersonal. That’s NON. Most people don’t want or believe in that kind of a soul.