By JEFF SCHWEITZER - RICHARDDAWKINS.NET
Added: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:37:41 UTC - An RDFRS Original

Author Oliver Thomas answered his headline question, “Why Religion” in the August 9, 2010, issue of USA Today with three justifications. All three are deeply flawed, revealing the soft white underbelly of religion’s foundation. He claims that:

1) religion makes us want to live; 2) religion makes it easier to be decent; and 3) religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning.

He goes on to present three questions that “are not amenable to the scientific method” but that somehow reveal the value of religion: Why are we here? What does it all mean? How should we then live?

The foundational premise of these assertions and questions is fundamentally wrong. The first claim is perhaps the most egregiously absurd. Like millions of others, I reject religion completely and absolutely, but love life and want to live mine fully. Concerning the second claim, we know that morality and decency are not derived from religion, and Thomas himself admits this later in his article (also, see here). The third claim we will disprove in a moment.

As to his three questions, I could ask with equal validity, “Why is the sky purple?” The question cannot be answered because the premise of the query is flawed; asking why something is so does not make it so. Every question Thomas poses rests on the unquestioned but false idea that life has purpose and meaning. We are told we only need to discover what that meaning might be, and only by answering that question can we determine how we should live our lives. This logic is the worst tautology: we posit that life might have meaning, then go about searching for that meaning, and in the act of searching create the unexamined assumption that life has meaning! We assume the answer in asking the question, which makes no sense. By posing the question we’ve created a false premise; we have made the sky purple by asking why the sky is that color.

We can however avoid these logical inconsistencies by answering the question, “Why religion?” without invoking religion as the answer.

We start by noting that Thomas unwittingly negates his own thesis about why we have religion. Unrelated to his three questions or three justifications, Thomas summarizes the conclusions from Viktor Frankl’s research into Nazi death camps, from which Frankl concludes that there are two basic types of people: decent ones and indecent ones (some being stronger in their disposition than others). That division does not fall between people with religion and those without, thereby undermining any claim that religion is a contributory component of decency. Thomas says explicitly that “not all religion is good.” Since we have good people without religion and evil people with religion, on what basis would Thomas conclude that “religion makes it easier to be decent”? Thomas tries to get around this problem by quoting Albert Schweitzer, who said that good religion is always “life affirming.” So we come to yet another curious appeal to believe that religion is good because good religion is life affirming, rather than to consider the question of why religion is not bad because bad religion is not life affirming.

Fortunately we need not rely on Thomas to refute his arguments. Paleontologists now widely accept the idea that our ancestors believed in an afterlife as long as 300,000 years ago. Ritualistic burial, which first appeared among Neanderthals somewhere in that time frame, is a hallmark of early religion. Burial ceremonies indicate a sophisticated concept of mortality, or at least an attempt to understand the implications of death. A real possibility exists that religion, that is, some concept of an afterlife, predates true language as one of humanity’s earliest inventions.

The rise of some belief in an afterlife early in human history is not at all surprising. As a matter of survival, we are programmed to fear death, but perhaps unlike other animals, we have the cruel burden of contemplating this fear. Religion is one way we cope with our knowledge that death is inevitable. Religion diminishes the hurt of death’s certainty and permanence, and the pain of losing a loved one with the promise of reuniting in another life. Death is unavoidable; death raises obvious and disturbing questions. Even a primitive mind would demand some answers: What happens to my mate when she dies? Where does she go? What will happen to me? Will I see her again when I die?

Death is not, however, the only disturbing unknown. What is that big fireball in the sky? Why does the sky fire leave us to the cold dark, only to return again and again? What are those bright dots in the sky that I see when the fireball abandons me? Why does water sometimes fall from the sky? The world is one big mystery, desperately crying out for answers.

We can reasonably conjecture that religion was born from fear of these unknowns so incomprehensible to a primitive mind, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one’s fate in the face of an uncertain world. If so, the first ideas of religion arose not from any awe of nature’s wonder and order that would imply an invisible intelligent designer, but rather from concerns for the events and hardships of everyday life and how the vastness of nature affected daily existence. To cope with disease, death, starvation, cold, injury and pain, our early ancestors must have fervently worked to solicit the aid of greater powers, hoping deeply that they could somehow control their destiny with divine aid. As they still do today, hope and fear combined powerfully in a frightening world of mysteries to stimulate comforting fantasies and myths about nature’s cruel plans.

The human brain is extraordinarily adept at posing questions, but simply abhors the concept of leaving any unanswered. We are unable to accept “I don’t know,” because we cannot turn off our instinct to see patterns and to discern a cause for every effect. We demand that there be a pattern, that there be cause and effect, even when none exists. So we make up answers when we don’t know. We develop elaborate creation myths, sun gods, rain gods, war gods, and gods of the ocean. We believe we can communicate with our gods and influence their behavior, because by doing so we gain some control, impose some order, on the chaotic mysteries of the world. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world. Religion was our first attempt at physics and astronomy.

But fear of the unknown, fear of mortality, and hopes for controlling and understanding nature’s course do not represent the only foundation on which religion stands. Another is social cohesion. We are social animals, gregarious by nature. Cooperation is what makes the human animal — a weak, slow and vulnerable creature — a powerful force on earth. But cooperation becomes more difficult with increasing numbers. Some means of maintaining social order is necessary. Early societies soon learned that rules of behavior imposed in the form of rituals enabled large groups of people to live in close proximity. Rituals create norms against which people can readily judge the behavior of others in diverse social settings. Any deviation from the norm is easily spotted and can be quickly addressed. In this way, order can be maintained. Notice that modern-day teenagers express their rugged individualism by dressing identically. Any non-conforming outlier would be easy to spot. Religion offered, and offers still, an obvious means of enforcing societal rules by promising a joyous afterlife for conformers, or eternal punishment for those who misbehave. Religion is used as a bribe to induce good manners. Finally, religion was eventually transformed into an important source of raw political power, divorced from any role more benign. If religion is used as a tool to control individual behavior, someone needs to develop those rules and ensure their enforcement. Who better to act as behavior police than religious elders, shamans, or high priests? What better way is there to manipulate and bend people to your will than by making up the rules by which they must live? With that influence over the daily lives of every citizen comes power traditionally reserved for city-states and empires, with all the normal trappings, including armies, treasuries and palaces.

So, why religion? Human weakness and gullibility. The master of all major faiths is the compelling quintet of fear of death, the need to explain away the unknowns of nature’s mystery, hopes for controlling one’s destiny, a desire for social cohesion, and the corrupting allure of power. Nowhere in that equation is the assumption that life has purpose and meaning. Instead, the religion we created demands that life have purpose, one that can be found only through faith, as a means of self-justification, and since we believe in our own creation we do not question the conclusion.

We thankfully have another way to see the world. While often overlooked, the most important and fundamental consequence of evolution is that life can have no design, purpose or inherent meaning. The uncaring mechanism of natural selection precludes any possibility of design, and with no design the idea of purpose becomes redundant. The notion is unfortunately not yet widely accepted outside of academia, but any questions concerning the meaning of life become inconsequential in light of the compelling lessons from evolution. In a world with no design and no purpose, there can be no questions about meaning. The question “why” simply is not valid when the answer sought involves higher purpose. One can ask why the Earth rotates counterclockwise when viewed from above, looking down at the North Pole. The answer involves the history of rotating gases that eventually coalesced to form the planet. That explanation provides an answer to ‘why’ as a matter of history rather than as one implying purpose. Asking ‘why’ in search of something beyond history, as in what purpose did god have in making the earth rotate west to east, is meaningless in a world with no design. Just the act of posing the question “why” implies the presence of purpose, so in the absence of purpose the question vanishes.

While authors such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould have written elegantly and convincingly about lessons from life’s history, contemplating the lack of meaning is too dangerous and fearful for most people in the context of today’s religious teachings. But Dawkins’s “blind pitiless indifference” need not be frightening when viewed as an opportunity to understand the wonder of life in all of its diverse glory shed of any pretense. Embracing pitiless indifference removes the blinding shackles of false hope and empty promises of religion, and creates in its place an opportunity to see the world with clear eyes and to define ourselves meaningfully on the solid ground of natural history. Only when we can define ourselves honestly can we develop and adopt a legitimate and meaningful code of ethics for our species. Only when free from fables and fallacies can we create our own meaning and purpose as a rightful consequence of our humanness. This answer to “how should we live” is neither a gift from above nor an immutable law of nature waiting to be discovered, but one derived from and informed by our natural place in the biosphere.

Embracing blind pitiless indifference does not mean accepting an uncaring mechanistic world devoid of warmth and fellowship. By releasing our tenacious white-knuckled grip on the futile hope for design, purpose and meaning we become free to move beyond the cold reality of a random world. We can create a new and deeper sense of self and community based on our biology and our evolution as rational social creatures. A newly trained skydiver cannot feel the pleasure of free flying if he clings stubbornly to the airplane. Similarly, we must first let go of false hopes and myths about divine purpose before we can enjoy the fruits of our freedom from myth.

Asking why we are here (implying purpose and not history) has no more validity than asking why a pair of dice rolled eight the first time and six the next. There is no why. The dice rolled those numbers as a consequence of probability with no guiding hand pushing toward a particular outcome. We are those dice, as is every living thing on Earth. Our existence, like that of bacteria, wasps and roses, is a consequence of probability, with no need to invoke anything other than genetics, probability, and natural selection.

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. If so we will no longer bother searching for meaning and purpose as a divine mandate but will work to define our own by appealing to our inherent good derived from our sociality and evolutionary history. Some day.

TAGGED: BEHAVIOR, RELIGION