Nov 3 JDN 2460618

In this and following posts I will be extensively criticizing religion and religious accounts of morality. Religious authorities have asserted a monopoly for themselves on moral knowledge; as a result most people seem to agree with statements like Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The majority of people around the world—including the United States, but not including most other First World countries—believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Yet little could be further from the truth.

First, I must deal with the fact that in American culture, it is widely considered taboo to criticize religion. A level of criticism which would be unremarkable in other fields of discourse is viewed as “shrill”, “arrogant”, “strident”, “harsh”, and “offensive”.

For instance, I believe the following:

The Republican Party is overall harmful.

Most of Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is clearly false.

Did you find that offensive? I presume not! I’m sure many people would disagree with me on these things, but hardly anyone would seriously argue that I am being aggressive or intentionally provocative.

Indeed, if I chose less controversial examples, people would find my words positively charitable:

The Nazi Party is overall harmful.

Most of Mao Tse Tung’s The Little Red Book is clearly false.

Now, compare some other beliefs I have, also about ideologies and books:

Islam is overall harmful.

Most of the Bible is clearly false.

Suddenly, I’m being “strident”; I’m being an “angry atheist”, “intolerant” of religious believers—yet I’m using the same words! I must conclude that the objection of atheist “intolerance” comes not because my criticisms are genuinely harsh, but simply because they are criticisms of religion. We have been taught that criticizing religion is evil, regardless of whether the criticisms are valid. Once beliefs are wrapped in the shield of “religion”, they become invulnerable.

If I’d said that Muslim people are inherently evil, or that people who believe in the Bible are mentally defective, I can see why people would be offended. But I’m not saying that. On the contrary, I think the vast majority of religious people are good, reasonable, well-intentioned people who are honestly mistaken. There are some extremely intelligent theists in the world, and I do not dismiss their intelligence; I merely contend that they are mistaken about this issue. I don’t think religious people are evil or stupid or crazy; I just think they are wrong. I respect religious people as intelligent beings; that’s why I am trying to use reason to persuade them. I wouldn’t try to reason with a rock or even a tiger.

I will in future posts show that religion is false and morally harmful. But of course in order to do that, I must first explain what I mean by religion; while we use the word every day, we are far from consistent about what we mean.

There’s one meaning of “religion” that often is put forth by its defenders, on which “religion” seems to mean only “moral values”, or else “a sense of mystery and awe before the universe”. Einstein often spoke this way, which is why people who quote him out of context often get the impression that he is defending Judaism or Christianity:

I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

But in the original context, a very different picture emerges:

Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Here, “religion” comes to mean little more than “moral values” or “aspiration toward truth”. In my own lexicon Einstein’s words would become “Fact without value is lame; value without fact is blind.” (I would add: both are the domain of science.)

Einstein did not believe in a personal deity of any kind. He was moved to awe by the mystery and grandeur of the universe, and motivated by moral duties to do good and seek truth. If that’s what you mean by “religion”, then of course I am entirely in favor of it. But that is not what most people mean by “religion”.

A much better meaning of the word “religion” is something like “cultural community of believers”; this is what we mean when we say that Catholicism is a religion or that Shi’a Islam is a religion. This is essentially the definition I will be using. But there is a problem with this meaning, because it doesn’t specify what constitutes a believer.

May any shared belief suffice? Then the Democratic Party is a “religion”, because it is a community of people with shared beliefs. Indeed, the scientific community is a “religion”. This sort of definition is so broad that it loses all usefulness.

So in order for “religion” to be a really meaningful concept, we must specify just what sort of beliefs qualify as religious rather than secular. Here I offer my definition; I have tried to be as charitable to religion as possible while remaining accurate in what I am criticizing.

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that is based upon one or more of the following concepts:

• Super-human beings: sentient beings that are much more powerful and long-lived than humans are.
• Afterlife: a continued existence for human conscious experience that persists after death.
• Prayer: a system of ritual behaviors that are expected to influence the outcome of phenomena through the mediation of something other than human action or laws of nature.

Note that I have specifically excluded from the definition claims that the super-human beings are “supernatural” or “magical”. Though many people, even religious people, would include these concepts, I do not, because I don’t think that the words supernatural and magical carry any well-defined meaning. Is “supernatural” what doesn’t follow the laws of nature? Well, do we mean the laws as we know them, or the laws as they are? It makes a big difference: The laws of nature as we know them have changed as science advances. 100 years ago, atoms were beyond our understanding; 200 years ago, electricity was beyond our understanding; 500 years ago, ballistics was beyond our understanding as well. The laws of nature as they are, on the other hand, are by definition the laws that everything in the universe must follow—hence, “supernatural” would be a funny way of saying “non-existent”.

I think ultimately “supernatural” and “magical” are just weird ways of saying “what I don’t understand”; but if that’s all they are, they clearly aren’t helpful. Today’s magic is tomorrow’s science. If Clarke’s Third Law is right that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then what’s the point of being magic? It’s just technology we don’t understand! In fact I prefer the reformulation of Clarke’s Law by Mark Stanley: Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it. To an ape, a spear is magical; to a hunter-gatherer, a rifle is magical; and to us today, creating planets from dust and living a million years are magical. But that could very well change someday.

Similarly, I have excluded the hyperboles “omnipotent” and “omniscient”, because they are widely considered by philosophers to be outright incoherent, and in no cases are they actually believed. If you believed that God knows everything, then you would have to believe that God knows how to prove the statement “This statement is unprovable” (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), and that God knows everything he doesn’t know. If you believed that God could do anything, you would have to believe that God can put four sides on a triangle, that God can heal the sick while leaving them sick, and that God can make a rock so big he can’t lift it. Even if you restrict God’s powers to what is logically coherent, you are still left trying to explain why he didn’t create a world of perfect happiness and peace to begin with, or how he can know the future if there is any randomness in the world at all. Furthermore, my definition is meant to include beings like Zeus and Thor, which were sincerely believed to be divine by millions of people for hundreds of years. Zeus is clearly neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but he is a lot more powerful and long-lived than we are; he’s not very benevolent, but nonetheless people called him God. (In fact, the Latin word for God, deus and the proper name Zeus are linguistically cognate. Zeus was thought to define or epitomize what it means to be God.) My definition is also meant to include non-divine super-humans like spirits and leprechauns, which similarly have been believed by many people for many centuries. The definition I have used is about as broad as I could make it without including things that obviously and uncontroversially exist, like “sentient beings other than humans” (animals?) or “forces beyond human power and comprehension” (gravity?) or “energy that animates life and permeates all things” (electricity?).

I have also excluded from my definition of “religion” anything that is obviously false or bad, like “believing things with no evidence”, “denying scientific facts”, “assenting to logical contradictions”, “hating those who disagree with them”, or “blaming natural disasters on people’s moral failings”. In fact, these are characteristic features of nearly all religions, and most religious people do them often; recall that 40% of Americans think that human beings were created by God less than 10,000 years ago, and note also that while the number has fallen over the decades, still 40% would not elect an atheist President, despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Science is atheist or agnostic. In the US, 32% of people believe in ghosts and 21% believe in witches. Views like “When people die they become ghosts”, “evolution is a lie” and “Earthquakes are caused by sexual immorality” are really quite mainstream in modern society. But criticism of religion is always countered by claims that we “New Atheists” (we are certainly not new, for Seneca and Epicurus would have qualified) lack philosophical sophistication, or focus too much on the obviously bad or ridiculous ideas.

Furthermore, note that I have formulated the definition of religion as a disjunction, not a conjunction; you must have at least one of these features, but need not have all of them. This is so that I can include in my criticism beliefs like Buddhism, which often does not involve prayer or super-human beings, but except in its most rarefied forms (which really aren’t recognizably religious!) invariably involves concepts of afterlife, and also New Age beliefs, which often do not involve afterlife or super-human beings but fit my definition of prayer—wearing a rabbit’s foot is a prayer, as is using a Ouiji board. It is incumbent upon me to show that all three are false, not merely that one of them is false. Of course, if you believe all three, then even if I only succeed in discrediting any of them, that is enough to show you are mistaken.

Finally, note that what I have just defined is a philosophy that, at least in principle, could be true. We can imagine a world in which there are super-human beings who control our fates; we can imagine a world in which consciousness persists after death; we can imagine a world where entreating to such super-human beings is a good way to get things done. On this definition, religion isn’t incoherent, it’s just incorrect. My point is not that these things are impossible—it is that they are not true.

And that is precisely what I intend to show in upcoming posts.