Whatever we make of the hard problem of consciousness, positing an immaterial soul is of no help at all. For one thing, it tries to solve a mystery with an even bigger mystery. For another, it falsely predicts the existence of paranormal phenomena. Most damningly, a divinely granted consciousness does not meet the design specs for a locus of just deserts. Why would God have endowed a mobster with the ability to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, or a sexual predator with carnal pleasure? (If it’s to plant temptations for them to prove their morality by resisting, why should their victims be collateral damage?) Why would a merciful God be dissatisfied with robbing years of life from a cancer patient and add the gratuitous punishment of agonizing pain? Like the phenomena of physics, the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves.
* * *
And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the middlemen. If they don’t, we should not take their dictates seriously. After all, thoughtful people can give reasons why they don’t kill, rape, or torture other than fear of eternal hellfire, and they would not suddenly become rapists and contract killers if they had reason to believe that God’s back was turned or if he told them it was OK.
Theistic moralists reply that the God of scripture, unlike the capricious deities of Greek mythology, is by his very nature incapable of issuing immoral commandments. But anyone who is familiar with scripture knows that this is not so. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. All this was par for the course for Bronze and Iron Age civilizations. Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.
The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false.45 It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.
Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral. Invisible gods can command people to slay heretics, infidels, and apostates. And an immaterial soul is unmoved by the earthly incentives that impel us to get along. Contestants over a material resource are usually better off if they split it than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal—indeed, it may be a small price to pay for an eternal reward in paradise.
Many historians have pointed out that religious wars are long and bloody, and bloody wars are often prolonged by religious conviction.46 Matthew White, the necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.47 (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)50 Defenders of theism retort that irreligious wars and atrocities, motivated by the secular ideology of communism and by ordinary conquest, have killed even more people. Talk about relativism! It is peculiar to grade religion on this curve: if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero. And obviously atheism is not a moral system in the first place. It’s just the absence of supernatural belief, like an unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu. The moral alternative to theism is humanism.
* * *
Few sophisticated people today profess a belief in heaven and hell, the literal truth of the Bible, or a God who flouts the laws of physics. But many intellectuals have reacted with fury to the “New Atheism” popularized in a quartet of bestsellers published between 2004 and 2007 by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.51 Their reaction has been called “I’m-an-atheist-but,” “belief-in-belief,” “accommodationism,” and (in Coyne’s coinage) “faitheism.” It overlaps with the hostility to science within the Second Culture, presumably because of a shared sympathy to hermeneutic over analytical and empirical methodologies, and a reluctance to acknowledge that dweeby scientists and secular philosophers might be right about the fundamental questions of existence. Though atheism—the absence of a belief in God—is compatible with a wide range of humanistic and antihumanistic beliefs, the New Atheists are avowedly humanistic, so any flaws in their worldview might carry over to humanism more generally.
According to the faitheists, the New Atheists are too shrill and militant, and just as annoying as the fundamentalists they criticize. (In an XKCD webcomic, a character responds, “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”)52 Ordinary people will never be disabused of their religious beliefs, they say, and perhaps they should not be, because healthy societies need religion as a bulwark against selfishness and meaningless consumerism. Religious institutions supply that need by promoting charity, community, social responsibility, rites of passage, and guidance on existential questions that can never be provided by science. Anyway, most people treat religious doctrine allegorically rather than literally, and they find meaning and wisdom in an overarching sense of spirituality, grace, and divine order.53 Let’s look at these claims.
An ironic inspiration for faitheism is research on the psychological origins of supernatural belief, including the cognitive habits of overattributing design and agency to natural phenomena, and emotional feelings of solidarity within communities of faith.54 The most natural interpretation of these findings is that they undermine religious beliefs by showing how they are figments of our neurobiological makeup. But the research has also been interpreted as showing that human nature requires religion in the same way that it requires food, sex, and companionship, so it’s futile to imagine no religion. But this interpretation is dubious.55 Not e
very feature of human nature is a homeostatic drive that must be regularly slaked. Yes, people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions that lead to supernatural beliefs, and they certainly need to belong to a community. Over the course of history, institutions have arisen that offer packages of customs that encourage those illusions and cater to those needs. That does not imply that people need the complete packages, any more than the existence of sexual desire implies that people need Playboy clubs. As societies become more educated and secure, the components of the legacy religious institutions can be unbundled. The art, rituals, iconography, and communal warmth that many people enjoy can continue to be provided by liberalized religions, without the supernatural dogma or Iron Age morality.
That implies that religions should not be condemned or praised across the board but considered according to the logic of Euthyphro. If there are justifiable reasons behind particular activities, those activities should be encouraged, but the movements should not be given a pass just because they are religious. Among the positive contributions of religions at particular times and places are education, charity, medical care, counseling, conflict resolution, and other social services (though in the developed world these efforts are dwarfed by their secular counterparts; no religion could have decimated hunger, disease, illiteracy, war, homicide, or poverty on the scales we saw in part II). Religious organizations can also provide a sense of communal solidarity and mutual support, together with art, ritual, and architecture of great beauty and historical resonance, thanks to their millennia-long head start. I partake of these myself, with much enjoyment.
If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case. It’s long been known that churchgoers are happier and more charitable than stay-at-homes, but Robert Putnam and his fellow political scientist David Campbell have found that these blessings have nothing to do with beliefs in God, creation, heaven, or hell.56 An atheist who has been pulled into a congregation by an observant spouse is as charitable as the faithful among the flock, whereas a fervent believer who prays alone is not particularly charitable. At the same time, communality and civic virtue can be fostered by membership in secular service communities such as the Shriners (with their children’s hospitals and burn units), Rotary International (which is helping to end polio), and Lions Club (which combats blindness)—even, according to Putnam and Campbell’s research, a bowling league.
Just as religious institutions deserve praise when they pursue humanistic ends, they should not be shielded from criticism when they obstruct those ends. Examples include the withholding of medical care from sick children in faith-healing sects, the opposition to humane assisted dying, the corruption of science education in schools, the suppression of touchy biomedical research such as on stem cells, and obstruction of lifesaving public health policies such as contraception, condoms, and vaccination against HPV.57 Nor should religions be granted a presumption of a higher moral purpose. Faitheists who have hoped that the moralistic fervor of Evangelical Christianity might be channeled into movements for social improvement have repeatedly gotten burned. In the early 2000s, a bipartisan coalition of environmentalists hoped to make common cause with Evangelicals on climate change under rubrics like Creation Care and Faith-Based Environmentalism. But Evangelical churches are an anchor faction of the Republican Party, which adopted a strategy of absolute noncooperation with the Obama administration. Political tribalism carried the day, and the Evangelicals fell into line, opting for radical libertarianism over stewardship of the Creation.58
Similarly, in 2016 there was a brief hope that the Christian virtues of humility, temperance, forgiveness, propriety, chivalry, thrift, and compassion toward the weak would turn Evangelicals against a casino developer who was vainglorious, sybaritic, vindictive, lewd, misogynistic, ostentatiously wealthy, and contemptuous of the people he called “losers.” But no: Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic.59 In large part he earned their votes by promising to repeal a law which prohibits tax-exempt charities (including churches) from engaging in political activism.60 Christian virtue was trumped by political muscle.
* * *
If the factual tenets of religion can no longer be taken seriously, and its ethical tenets depend entirely on whether they can be justified by secular morality, what about its claims to wisdom on the great questions of existence? A favorite talking point of faitheists is that only religion can speak to the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Science will never be adequate to address the great existential questions of life, death, love, loneliness, loss, honor, cosmic justice, and metaphysical hope.
This is the kind of statement that Dennett (quoting a young child) calls a “deepity”: it has a patina of profundity, but as soon as one thinks about what it means, it turns out to be nonsense. To begin with, the alternative to “religion” as a source of meaning is not “science.” No one ever suggested that we look to ichthyology or nephrology for enlightenment on how to live, but rather to the entire fabric of human knowledge, reason, and humanistic values, of which science is a part. It’s true that the fabric contains important strands that originated in religion, such as the language and allegories of the Bible and the writings of sages, scholars, and rabbis. But today it is dominated by secular content, including debates on ethics originating in Greek and Enlightenment philosophy, and renderings of love, loss, and loneliness in the works of Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, the 19th-century novelists, and other great artists and essayists. Judged by universal standards, many of the religious contributions to life’s great questions turn out to be not deep and timeless but shallow and archaic, such as a conception of “justice” that includes punishing blasphemers, or a conception of “love” that adjures a woman to obey her husband. As we have seen, any conception of life and death that depends on the existence of an immaterial soul is factually dubious and morally dangerous. And since cosmic justice and metaphysical hope (as opposed to human justice and worldly hope) do not exist, then it’s not meaningful to seek them; it’s pointless. The claim that people should seek deeper meaning in supernatural beliefs has little to recommend it.
What about a more abstract sense of “spirituality”? If it consists in gratitude for one’s existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy. But “spirituality” is often taken to mean something more: the conviction that the universe is somehow personal, that everything happens for a reason, that meaning is to be found in the happenstances of life. In the final episode of her landmark show, Oprah Winfrey spoke for millions when she avowed, “I understand the manifestation of grace and God, so I know there are no coincidences. There are none. Only divine order here.”61
This sense of spirituality is considered in a video sketch by the comedienne Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:
NYE: The Universe. For centuries, humankind has strived to understand this vast expanse of energy, gas, and dust. In recent years, a stunning breakthrough has been made in our concept of what the universe is for.
[Zoom to the Earth’s surface, and then to a yogurt shop in which two young women are chatting.]
FIRST WOMAN: So, I was texting while I was driving? And I ended up taking a wrong turn that took me directly past a vitamin shop? And I was just like, this is totally the universe telling me I should be taking calcium.
NYE: Scientists once believed the universe was a chaotic collection of matter. We now know the universe is essentially a force sending cosmic guidance to women in their 20s.
r /> [Zoom to a gym with Schumer and a friend on exercycles.]
SCHUMER: So you know how I’ve been fucking my married boss for like six months? Well, I was starting to get really worried he was never going to leave his wife. But then yesterday in yoga, the girl in front of me was wearing a shirt that just said, “Chill.” And I was just like, this is so the universe telling me, “Girl, just, like, keep fucking your married boss!”62
A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.
* * *
Arguments aside, is the need to believe pushing back against secular humanism? Believers, faitheists, and resenters of science and progress are gloating about an apparent return of religion all over the world. But as we shall see, the rebound is an illusion: the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.