Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart
Page 17
Let’s apply Hume’s procedure to the miracle in the book of Joshua when the sun is said to have stood still for one day while the Amorites were conquered by Israel.10 In deciding whether to believe such an account, we should compare the evidence in favor of such a belief with the evidence against it.
The evidence against the biblical story is its inconsistency with Newtonian physics, which does not allow for the sun to stand still. Newton’s laws have been substantiated by countless observations and tests. The evidence for a belief in the biblical story is, of course, that the Israelites testified to having seen the sun stand still. We need to compare the two forms of evidence and determine which would be the greater miracle—that the witnesses were deceived or that the laws of nature were suspended.
Since humankind is fallible and is often deceived, it seems more probable that the witnesses were somehow mistaken than that the laws of nature were invalidated.
The credibility of witnesses to ancient biblical miracles is further undermined by the limited knowledge these witnesses possessed to understand what they might have been observing. To believe in biblical miracles on account of human testimony is to believe in the credibility of a people who lived in an age when the sun was still thought to orbit the Earth and there was no significant knowledge about chemistry, electricity, optics, or medicine.
To cast even more skepticism on these witnesses, even the people in the Bible who testified to some of the miracles were not completely convinced by what they supposedly saw. The Egyptian pharaoh needed to see ten miracles to be convinced. The Israelites, after being led through the miraculous splitting of the Red Sea, still were not convinced enough to refrain from worshiping the golden calf. If these miracles offer such clear evidence for a belief in God, why were they not sufficient to convince the very people who witnessed them to become believers?
Finally, there is the issue of the intermediary, the author of the text itself. It’s possible that no such testimony was ever made by the Israelites because the story itself was entirely fabricated by the author—not necessarily to deceive but as a teaching fiction, a common practice of the time.
Thankfully the progression of knowledge, science, and education over the last five thousand years has led to a precipitous decline in the number of alleged accounts of the spectacular type of miracles found in the Bible. What some people class as “miracles” today, such as a terminally ill patient surviving a disease or infertile couples becoming parents, tend to be descriptions of outlier occurrences with extremely low probability that nonetheless occur rather than fantastic revelations by God that defy nature.
These outlier events push the limits of our understanding of nature, but they do not offer any credible evidence for any God. Applying the principle of favoring simplicity (Ockham’s razor) to these events, we should pick the explanation that is the simplest and contradicts existing knowledge the least. Believing that a supernatural realm exists is a far more complex explanation than believing that these events are statistical outliers or that our own scientific understanding of disease or fertility has limits.
In summary, the very limited and often questionable evidence of eyewitness accounts of God or miracles provides a very weak justification for a belief in God. When compared against the standards of evidence used to support scientific beliefs—which include concepts such as empirical observations; repeatability; and double-blind, randomized studies—the evidence for God is not at all compelling. It is for this reason that so many religious believers do not cite miracles as a justification for their belief. Rather, they say they believe in God out of faith. God is an assumption, not a deduction.
Psychological Comforts of Believing in God
Some proponents for a belief in God argue that there is a psychological benefit to faith. They argue that a belief in God provides us with comfort and hope. In times of hardship and sorrow, God can give people a way to cope with the suffering in the world and with difficult realities such as death. A belief in God, it is said, motivates us to be moral and creates more manageable societies. Religion just feels good.
The Judeo-Christian religions portray a God who is a father figure who will look out for you and protect you from the cruelty and injustices of the world. Another analogy used in the Bible is God as a shepherd looking out for the safety of his flock. “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”11
We can distill these pro-God arguments into two types:
Belief in God is comforting.
Belief in God is useful for creating harmonious, productive societies.
If we try to cast these arguments in the most favorable light possible within the framework of our non-commandments, we get:
Since a belief in God provides us with happiness, we can choose to believe in God for the happiness it will provide.
Belief in God is a tool used to promote ethics and harmony in a society.
We will address each of these two arguments.
Can one choose to believe something one knows to be untrue? Let’s say you have one hundred dollars in your bank account. It would be much more comforting for you if you had ten thousand dollars in your account instead. That would allow you to worry less about making ends meet and paying your rent. Could you decide to believe that you actually had ten thousand dollars in your account rather than one hundred?
This is not the way our brains function. Our rational brains can’t willfully deceive themselves into ignoring information we know to reflect reality. There’s a major difference between hope and belief. Hope is the desire for the world to be a certain way. Belief is one’s best assessment of the way the world is. So it would be quite reasonable for you to hope that you will one day have a larger bank balance. But it would be quite unreasonable for you to try to pay for an item at the store with money you know you don’t have.
To quote philosopher Sam Harris: “Beliefs are intrinsically epistemic. They purport to represent the world as it is.”12 Harris makes the point that we are slaves to evidence and live under the lash of historical opinion. “Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.”13 We do not have the ability to choose to believe in a false God, even if such a belief would provide us with additional comforts in life. If we could shape our beliefs based on the comforts they might yield, why would we not believe that each of us is God? Surely being God would be more comforting than needing to be saved by God.
Proponents of this position muddle arguments. They talk of the benefits a belief in God might provide without asking if such a belief is valid in the first place.
A rational mind cannot trick itself into believing something that does not reflect the reality of the world unless the person hasn’t made an effort to discern that reality—something even rational people do at times. In that case, no trick is required. Beliefs are simply inserted into a space left empty by a lack of effort. But as you quickly learn when you try to spend that money you don’t have, it’s always better to operate with as accurate a picture of reality as possible. And even though we can never prove with certainty that God does not exist, we can achieve a high level of confidence on the question.
As discussed in chapter 4, belief in a God is highly irrational because it is playing the “religious lottery” and because there is no evidence to support the existence of such a deity. So regardless of one’s hopes for such a supreme being to exist, or for such a being to have qualities and powers that would be comforting, the rational mind cannot help but accept that there is no evidence for such a perspective.
A stronger form of this pro-God argument is that human minds are psychologically incapable of dealing with the notion of death, the randomness of tragedies that might befall us, or the cruelty of human suffering. The only way to deal with these stark realities is to invent a psychological construct that allows us to pretend we are immune.
Again, a mind that is thinking rationa
lly will not engage in such willful, self-inflicted deception. Moreover, such thinking ignores the reality that there are many, many happy atheists (such as ourselves) living pleasurable, meaningful, and joyous lives every day without any such belief in God.
The second major reason for promoting the belief in God for psychological reasons is the claim that such a belief benefits society because it leads to a happier, more ethical, and more harmonious population. Plato made a similar argument in The Republic. After describing his version of an ideal society, he offers his belief that the rulers of such a society must tell “noble falsehoods” to the common people to ensure harmony and to keep them in line. So too do some proponents of God argue that a belief in God is necessary for the greater good of society.
There are several weaknesses to this argument. First, there are numerous historical cases where religion has led to terrible barbarism and cruelty in the world—the Crusades, the Inquisitions, Islamic jihads, the list goes on and on. It seems that a belief in God can just as easily be used to channel hate, anger, and murder as to channel love and compassion.
The converse argument—that the least religious countries in the world are consistently the happiest, most stable societies—is yet another challenge to the assumption that societal happiness and belief in God are highly correlated.
Supporting information for our position comes from the Legatum Institute, a London-based policy advocacy organization that publishes an annual index of “net happiness”14 using traditional economic indicators as well as measurements of well-being and life satisfaction. The Gallup Organization’s annual look at the stated importance of religion in the lives of people in various countries also shows that countries with extremely low religiosity dominate the top ten in societal happiness. In Norway, the consistent front-runner in happiness, 80 percent of the residents say religion is not important in their lives.15 Sweden and Denmark, currently fourth and sixth in happiness, are also both above 80 percent. Not one of the ten happiest countries has a population in which more than a third of the people say religion is important in their lives.
Another problem with the “noble falsehood” argument is the consequences of false hope. Giving someone false hope is fundamentally about lying to a person. That can turn out to be quite cruel if the person ultimately discovers that he or she has been deceived. Some health clinics have at times claimed their expensive treatments might cure cancer, for example, but when hopes are dashed, the results are often public controversy and legal actions.16
False hope can lead to unintended consequences, which can harm people just us much as they are intended to help them. A young family faced with an emergency medical situation for their infant might believe it is more important to take their child to a church to be baptized instead of to a hospital to be saved.17
Ultimately, the idea that a belief in God is a “noble falsehood” is deeply condescending and paternalistic. It has a hidden supposition that religious leaders know what is best for the common masses, who cannot be trusted to deal with real knowledge or to make decisions and choices for themselves.
The truth is that we can be trusted with real knowledge and are capable of making our own choices about how to use the information we acquire to inform our decisions. Even more than that, we are better served by a realistic appraisal of reality than by fantasy, no matter how comforting, and should strive to see that reality as clearly as possible. When the English philosopher Francis Bacon said “knowledge is power,”18 he meant quite literally that knowledge of reality empowers us in a way comforting fantasy never could.
Appendix B
Our Ten Non-commandments
Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century
I.
The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.
II.
We can perceive the world only through our human senses.
III.
We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.
IV.
All truth is proportional to the evidence.
V.
There is no God.
VI.
We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.
VII.
There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.
VIII.
We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.
IX.
We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.
X.
All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.
Justifications and Evidence to Accompany Our Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century
Here is a condensed set of justifications for our Ten Non-commandments—the “nutshell” assumptions and methodology that underlie each conclusion. Each numeral signifies the corresponding non-commandment:
I.
We assume the world is real because, in practice, we all conduct our lives as if the world is not purely a mental construction.
II.
We assume that our five senses are our best chance to accurately perceive reality, because no other reliable sources have been discovered to gather information about the world.
III.
We assume that we can trust in language and thought because without them we would have no means of communicating about the world.
IV.
Truth is proportional to the evidence because our observations, coupled with the scientific method, are good at predicting future events.
V.
There is insufficient evidence for a belief in God. Believing in any particular god is playing the “religious lottery.”
VI.
We believe that we seek things that make us happy because introspection about our thoughts and desires, and observations of others, are consistent with this perspective.
VII.
There is insufficient evidence for objective moral truth. On reflection, our views of right and wrong are inextricably linked to what sort of people we want to be, our past experiences, and the cultural norms of the times.
VIII.
We observe that people we consider more moral tend to derive more happiness from making other people happy.
IX.
Ethical societies benefit everyone because it is easier to live a happier life when you are surrounded by other people who value cooperation and take pleasure in your happiness. This is a mutually beneficial relationship.
X.
Beliefs are subject to revision because the more experiences you have in life, the more data you have to draw on, and the more likely you are to formulate accurate conclusions.
Appendix C
Theorem of Belief
This appendix summarizes the propositions presented in the book in a structured, simplified outline. The intent is to clearly articulate the links between various ideas and the flow of arguments used throughout the text.
Including such transparency and a clearly articulated logic structure is rare in philosop
hical books of this nature because it is exceptionally difficult to do. But we believe that it is an invaluable step in constructing a ground-up system of belief and has kept us intellectually honest. We hope it will help you recognize the underlying rational structure of this book and the care that has gone into formulating it. We also hope that others wiser than us will read through it, find errors or make suggestions, and collectively help us advance our understanding of how we might best formulate accurate beliefs.
What Can I Believe?
•
If
a belief can only be justified by another belief
(P1)
then
starting beliefs cannot be justified
(P2)
To make starting beliefs nonarbitrary
i) we can call starting beliefs starting assumptions, and
(P3)
ii) starting assumptions can be validated by system-testing once our system has been put in place
(P4)