In The God Delusion, University of Oxford biologist and anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins argues that religion has exerted a harmful influence on human society since its inception and that we ought to abandon it in favor of science. He illustrates this argument by demonstrating that:
The claim that God exists is a hypothesis, just like any other (we’ll call it the “God Hypothesis” in this summary). Since it is logically impossible to prove a negative, one can never be certain that God isn’t real. But that does not mean that we can’t reasonably assess the likelihood of the God Hypothesis.
Because, of course, we do not treat all hypotheses as being equally likely or plausible. The Tooth Fairy is also a hypothesis about how money appears under children’s pillows in the morning after they place a baby tooth under them at night. But because we have more rational and likely explanations for the appearance of the money under the pillow, we can confidently assign a very low probability to the Tooth Fairy Hypothesis.
The God Hypothesis is a perfectly legitimate one for science to study, evaluate, and, ultimately, reject, if the evidence in support of it is found to be lacking.
Most arguments for God’s existence postulate a supreme designer. Proponents of this belief are called creationists. Creationists believe that the universe we observe is the handiwork of an intelligent designer who consciously and knowingly created everything, from the movement of galaxies throughout the universe to the orbit of electrons within an atom.
For creationists, an intelligent God is the ultimate and simple explanation for everything. But this is where the “simple” theistic position begins to fall apart. If all things can be said to have their root cause in an intelligent God, then one must raise the obvious question—what is the root cause of God? Who designed the designer? You can postulate an infinite regression of the physical universe that terminates with God. But if you cannot explain the existence of God in the first place, the argument collapses.
The Bible was written and compiled by several different authors, writing centuries after the events they purported to describe. As such, it is riddled with inconsistencies and is not considered a reliable historical account by scholars. For example, the Bible is unclear about whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth. That the Bible is unable to even get the facts straight on where the supposed son of God was born argues strongly against relying upon it as a historical source, and as “proof” of God’s existence.
Natural selection offers a far more logical, testable, and likely explanation for why the world is the way it is. Before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, intelligent design seemed to offer a much stronger explanation for the complexity we observe in the natural world. It was impossible to imagine that the variety and intricacy of the universe could have come about by any means other than through the conscious will of a supremely intelligent deity.
But Darwin and natural selection solved this great mystery. Natural selection states that certain small genetic mutations in individual living organisms give them a slightly greater chance of survival than their peers. Because those organisms best suited for survival are more likely to survive, they therefore have a greater likelihood of passing on their own genes to their offspring. Over time, traits that are advantageous for survival get passed on; those that aren’t die out.
Environmental change over the course of billions of years complements the evolutionary process, as plants and animals evolve through natural selection to become better suited to their environment. From simple, single-celled organisms arise primates like human beings capable of abstract and concrete thought.
Even though we’ve seen that the factual claims made by theism are highly unlikely to be true, we cannot ignore the fact that religion itself has existed and continues to exist, across all societies and all periods of time.
If we don’t accept the truth of religious claims, we have to account for religion’s existence by means of natural selection, evolutionary psychology, and cultural transmission, instead of divine received wisdom.
Belief in religion seems to be an extraordinarily disadvantageous trait that ought to have died out very early on in the evolution of humans. It compels individuals and societies to expend enormous resources on elaborate buildings, ritual sacrifices, and the maintenance of a priestly caste that does little to ensure the practical, day-to-day survival of either the individual or the group. How, then, did religion arise and evolve despite these drawbacks?
The origins of religion begin to make sense if we consider religion as a by-product of other instincts and cognitive traits that do confer a significant advantage in natural selection.
Religion might represent a massive misfiring of an instinct that’s usually useful: namely, the behavior pattern of child obedience to adult authority figures. With regard to natural selection, children obeying community elders makes perfect sense. In early human societies, children who adhered to adult commands such as, “Don’t go swimming in that river with the fast-moving rapids,” or “Stay out of that section of the woods where bears are known to prowl” would naturally have had a far greater chance of survival than those that didn’t.
But this unquestioning obedience would also make children vulnerable to the authoritative claims of religion. If you are hardwired to blindly adhere to all adult rules and regulations, there is every reason to accept the claims of religious leaders who tell you which gods to pray to and which rituals to perform.
Culture, like genetic material, can also pass down over time. The basic unit of culture is the meme. A meme is some element of culture (like architecture, cuisine, or religion) that can be transmitted from generation to generation.
We can treat memes as somewhat analogous to genes. Those memes that are “good” at survival get passed on; those that aren’t don’t survive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the memes are advantageous to human survival; it simply means that the memes themselves are successful at being copied and passed down with comparatively few “transcription” errors along the way.
Some common religious memes that have survived and successfully replicated include belief in an afterlife, the eternal rewards that await martyrs, and the idea that non-believers must be punished or killed.
Aside from its likely falsehood, religion is also flawed because it’s not the source of human morality. To be sure, religious people certainly claim that Darwinism cannot account for the existence of altruism, kindness, or empathy. But, in fact, kindness and altruism have perfectly rational Darwinian roots.
The individual human trait of selfishness is not advantageous in natural selection. In fact, the drive for gene survival provides a powerful incentive for individuals to behave altruistically toward those in their kin group, with whom they share a genetic link. After all, taking care of your children and ensuring that they grow up strong and healthy enough to have children of their own is the best way to ensure the survival of your own genes. It is easy to see why natural selection would favor kin altruism as a replicating behavior through generations.
The reciprocity reflex is also a powerful evolutionary mechanism. We are hardwired to repay favors, even from strangers. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense because it increases everyone’s chances of survival. The reciprocity reflex causes the other members of the group to help you if you have helped them, creating networks of mutual obligation and support.
Because morality can be explained by natural selection, we don’t need religion to account for it. In fact, religion promotes abhorrent values that are totally at odds with modern morality.
Take the Old Testament, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, Islam), in which we are taught to celebrate:
Almost no one today, even the most pious believer in the Bible, thinks that collective punishment, gang-rape, incest, child murder, slavery, or genocide are practices worth emulating. Most religious people concede that we shouldn’t take everything in religious texts literally.
But if even the self-proclaimed faithful are going to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they like and which parts they don’t like, they are implicitly acknowledging that the Bible isn’t a universal standard for morality; obviously, they’re using some other, non-biblical standard.
They, like non-religious people, are using the common standards of modern morality that are in place in most advanced 21st-century societies. Whether we consciously acknowledge these values or not, the overwhelming majority of people in modern societies accept notions such as representative democracy, freedom of speech, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, religious toleration, and equal rights for women and minorities. But these values exist in spite of religion, not because of it.
Religion is one of the great sources of in-group loyalty, but also hatred and fear of the other. Because religion teaches people that they have access to a divine truth, it inevitably breeds intolerance toward those who don’t share the same beliefs. After all, those who don’t share your faith—the “other”—are enemies of God and his holy word.
The Israeli psychologist George Tamarin found that 66 percent of Israeli schoolchildren, most of whom were raised with the stories of the Old Testament, expressed support for Joshua’s aforementioned war crimes against the citizens of Jericho—war crimes that included wholesale slaughter and the selling of children into sexual slavery. They did so on the grounds that the people of Jericho were of a different religion than Joshua’s Israelites and that the slaughter was necessary to prevent God’s chosen people from assimilating with non-believers.
Because it teaches people to suspend their faculties of critical thinking and see themselves as having a direct connection to the will of the almighty, faith can encourage normal people to commit heinous and otherwise indefensible acts against others, all in the name of God— for example, an anti-abortion fanatic murdering a doctor in the name of rescuing innocent “babies” or the 9/11 hijackers killing nearly 3,000 people because they believed that they would be divinely rewarded in the afterlife. Religion teaches the perpetrators of such acts that their crimes are justified, even moral.
Because religion by definition is incapable of providing evidence for its claims, society must end the practice of granting automatic respect or deference to religion. Justifying some hateful action or belief on the grounds of “I believe it” or “It’s my faith” should be accorded no more respect than someone’s political opinions or their support for a particular sports team.
What function is religion supposed to perform? Which needs does it purportedly fulfill? Proponents of religion claim that, at its best, religion provides human beings with:
As we’ve already discussed, the first two claims are patently false. Now, we're going to explore why the final one is likewise invalid.
The claim that religion provides consolation or makes people happier or more secure is dubious at best. Social science research offers no conclusive evidence that atheists are any less happy or fulfilled than people of faith.
We know this anecdotally too. Religious Christians, for example, claim to believe in an afterlife, in which they will be rewarded with joy and bliss for eternity as they are reunited with their deceased loved ones. If they truly believed this, then they wouldn’t fear their own deaths or mourn the passing of friends and family. Instead, they would be excited about death and their coming ascension into paradise. But of course, this is not how religious people behave or think in practice. They despair of their own deaths and grieve the loss of others just as much as anyone. This would seem to indicate that even the devout don’t truly believe in life after death: that they know intuitively that once they die, they are truly gone forever.
Atheists, for their part, can have a more healthy and affirming attitude toward both life and death because they don’t have to reconcile the rational part of their minds with a belief in God or an afterlife. Atheists are free to accept the idea that there was a period of time stretching from the beginning of the universe to the moment of their birth when they did not exist—and that death merely represents the resumption of that state of non-existence.
Not believing in an immortal soul or an afterlife opens your eyes to the truth that your existence is the very briefest flicker of a candle in the vast history of the universe. Your non-existence is the natural and normal state of affairs. You just happen to be living through a fleeting exception. Knowing that, life can be as joyous or as sad as you choose to make it.
Our brains and sensory organs evolved in such a way as to limit what we can grasp intuitively. But there’s so much more out there in the universe. To take one example, our visual world only represents a tiny sliver of the light spectrum. Beyond the tiny band of visible light, the universe is awash in electromagnetic waves, from X-rays to radio waves to gamma rays. We would never know they were there if we relied solely on our senses.
But there is an extraordinary tool that enables us to truly grapple with the mysteries and complexities of the universe—science. Science enables us to understand the phenomena around us in all their wonder and beauty, from the mind-bending behavior of subatomic particles in quantum theory to the infinite density of black holes to the nature of matter and existence itself. Far from being drab and uninspiring, science uplifts us and expands our intellectual horizons in ways that religion never could.
Ultimately, religion limits the possibilities of human thought and action. You’ll always be constrained by a God who knows more than you and can control every aspect of your life and beyond into eternity. Nothing exists that he doesn’t allow; nothing can be conceived of that he hasn’t already designed. Meanwhile, science removes these limitations from the human mind, and opens us up to a universe without constraints. Quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, and particle physics provide insights that are far more enriching to the human spirit than simple stories about a creator deity and his rather unsavory band of prophets.
It’s time to free ourselves from the primitive shackles of religion and embrace our true potential as humans.
Religion has been central to nearly every human society in history. It is difficult for many people to imagine a world without a supreme deity.
But what if faith in God represents a great error? What would be the possibilities for human advancement if we were to shed our religious faith and embrace reason and science as the ultimate arbiters of truth and justice?
In The God Delusion, University of Oxford biologist and anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins argues that religion has exerted a harmful influence on human society since its inception and that we ought to abandon it in favor of science. In this summary, we’ll explore:
Before we discuss the reasons why religion is harmful and should be abandoned, we first need to explore two topics. First, we’ll discuss what the claims of theists (and atheists) actually are. Then, we’ll discuss why it’s appropriate to evaluate and challenge the claims of religion. Religious people often claim that their faith is under unique threat of persecution. Therefore, in their eyes, any criticism, mockery, or even the mere expression of skepticism regarding anyone’s religious beliefs constitutes an act of bigotry.
In this chapter, we’ll cover:
Prior to delving deeper into our discussion of God and religion, we should clarify some terms. When we say “religion,” we are referring to the belief in a supernatural being who created the universe and who has the power to intervene in human affairs.
This supernatural being—we will refer to it as “God” from here on, for simplicity’s sake—can be prayed to, petitioned, and even called upon to punish one’s enemies. This form of religion, which postulates the existence of an intelligent and omnipotent creator, is known as theism.
The particular form of theism we’ll be discussing in this summary is monotheism, the belief in one supreme God. While polytheism (a belief in multiple gods) does exist, the vast majority of people in the West are far more familiar with the three major monotheistic or Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Defenders of traditional religion often like to make the claim that celebrated historical figures in philosophy, politics, and science were committed monotheists. However, these claims are nearly always exaggerated, if not outright false.
For example, many of the American Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, were not monotheists at all. Rather, they were deists, believing that, while God did indeed create the universe, he played no role in the management or governance of its day-to-day affairs. These men were deeply anti-clerical in their writings and railed against the ignorance, superstition, and prejudice that they viewed as the natural byproducts of religion.
And while some scientific luminaries like Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and Albert Einstein used the word “God” in their writings (which have been subsequently cherry-picked and decontextualized by religious writers to provide “proof” that these figures were religious), they were almost certainly not using it in the monotheistic sense, but rather, pantheistically: as a metaphor for the totality of the universe.
Now that we have an understanding of monotheism, we have to define its opposite number—atheism. An atheist is someone who assigns an extremely low probability to God’s existence and lives their life on the assumption that he does not exist.
Atheists reject the idea of an intelligent creator on the grounds that the only process that can produce beings capable of such conscious creation is evolution by natural selection (which we’ll explore in greater detail later in the summary).
Since it is logically impossible to prove a negative, one can never be certain that God isn’t real. But that does not mean that we can’t reasonably assess the likelihood of his existence.
Proponents of God’s existence say that we should simply accept their account of how the universe came to be and the divine forces that govern it on faith, without question or evaluation. But why should we not apply the same rigorous testing and analysis to the question of God’s existence (we’ll refer to it as the God Hypothesis for the remainder of the summary) that would to any other assertion of fact? After all, the God Hypothesis is merely a hypothesis like any other.
And, of course, not all hypotheses are created equal. We use likelihood and probability to evaluate the truth of the claims put forward by any hypothesis. For example, the Tooth Fairy Hypothesis is a hypothesis about how money appears under children’s pillows in the morning after they place a baby tooth under them at night. No one can ever definitively “prove” the non-existence of the Tooth Fairy. But because we have more rational and more likely explanations for the appearance of the money under the pillow (namely, that parents are placing it there while their children are asleep), we can confidently assign a very low probability to the Tooth Fairy Hypothesis.
Agnostics, who claim to be on the fence about the existence of God, wrongly conflate absolute proof with likelihood. Even learned people working in advanced scientific fields, like the late American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, hold to the agnostic position that science is simply incapable of rendering any judgment at all on the question of God’s existence.
But this claim rings hollow. The theistic account purports the existence of a God who consciously created the world and can bend the very laws of physics on the request of a believer through the mechanism of prayer. Christianity alone puts forward virgin birth, the transformation of water into wine, and the resurrection of the dead as material claims about the world.
A universe in which such things were possible would be vastly different from the one we observe. It would throw all known scientific findings into question. Therefore, the God Hypothesis is a perfectly legitimate one for science to study, evaluate, and, ultimately, reject, if the evidence is found to be lacking. It deserves to be tested just like any other hypothesis.
Moreover, the burden of proof does not rest on those who question the God Hypothesis. The burden is, rather, on the theists to provide evidence for their positive claims. And, happily for the atheists, there is little evidence to support the claims made by religion.
For example, in one double-blind study conducted in the United Kingdom, researchers found that hospital patients who were prayed for did not experience health outcomes any better than those who weren’t prayed for—if anything, they fared a bit worse. While this one study cannot disprove God’s existence, it certainly casts doubts upon the efficacy of prayer, which is a core claim of monotheistic faith.
Now that we’ve seen that the God Hypothesis ought to be judged on its merits like any other hypothesis, we should turn our attention to actually evaluating the truth of the claims it puts forward.
Think about why faith and belief command such automatic deference—and why maybe they shouldn't.
What are your most passionately held beliefs? Describe them in a few sentences (they don’t have to be religious in nature).
Do you have evidence for these beliefs, or do you simply take them on faith? Explain your answer in a few sentences.
How would you feel if someone were to challenge these beliefs or present evidence to you that they were false? Do you think you’d be open-minded hearing someone question them? Explain why or why not.
Do you think that faith deserves automatic respect or deference from society? Explain why or why not.
In the last chapter, we talked about the extraordinary claims made by religion, all of which would have a significant impact on the world if they were true. In this chapter, we will evaluate the likelihood of the theistic position we explored in the last chapter. Specifically, we’ll:
Most arguments for God’s existence postulate a supreme designer, similar to the figure we discussed in the previous chapter. Proponents of this belief are called creationists.
Creationists believe that the universe we observe is the handiwork of an intelligent designer who consciously and knowingly created everything, from the movement of galaxies throughout the universe to the orbit of electrons within an atom. For creationists, an intelligent God is the ultimate and simple explanation for everything.
The medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, argued that all things must have a primary cause and that the mere existence of physical things proved the existence of God. He reasoned that there must have been a time before physical things existed. But that meant that a non-physical force must have, at some point, brought the physical world into existence. For Aquinas, that force could only have been God.
But this is where the “simple” theistic position begins to fall apart. If all things can be said to have their root cause in an intelligent God, then one must raise the obvious question—what is the root cause of God? Who designed the designer?
This is the fundamental flaw at the heart of most theistic arguments. You can postulate an infinite regression of the physical universe that terminates with God. But if you can’t explain the existence of God in the first place, the argument collapses.
Not all theist arguments are based in creationism—although they are all just as flawed and weak as those that are. Let’s look at some of the most famous arguments that theologians have put forward and examine why they fail to achieve their objective.
There is a class of theological arguments known as a priori arguments. These arguments exist independently of observation and are formulated entirely through abstract thought experiments.
The most famous a priori argument for God is known as the ontological argument, first promulgated by the English monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, who lived primarily in the 11th century.
The basic premise of the argument is as follows:
The basic weakness of this argument (as was pointed out by 18th-century philosophers like Immanuel Kant and David Hume) is that it proceeds from false premises. The argument falls apart if one does not accept the idea of a perfect God in the first place. And, indeed, atheists do not accept this starting premise. Likewise, the ontological argument suffers from the logical fallacy known as begging the question—in which the premise of an argument already assumes the truth of its conclusion.
Beyond these weaknesses, there is no reason to accept the other pillar of the argument: that an existing God is by definition greater than a non-existent God. By inverting Anselm’s slippery logic, you could argue that a non-existent being is greater than an existing one. A God who overcame the handicap of non-existence to create the universe is surely a greater being than one who created the universe while existing!
Another argument often advanced by theists is the argument from beauty. This states that the most sublime works of human creation, like the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare or the symphonies of Beethoven, are so exquisitely beautiful that they could not have been created by mortal humans. Instead, they could only be products of some divine spark within humans, planted by God.
This is barely an argument at all, as it does not even offer any logic or proof in support of its conclusions. Why does Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 require the existence of a deity? Art can be appreciated and celebrated by the religious and non-religious alike; one does not need to accept the premise of a higher power in order to be moved by great artistic works.
This even includes religious art, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. An avowed atheist can be struck by the beauty of this work without believing in God. Much European art, in fact, is religious (specifically Christian) in nature, because the Church was the primary patron of the visual arts for most of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Artists like Michelangelo had no choice but to create religious works because they were commissioned to do so by the religious authorities. Left to their own devices, they may well have created secular works of equal greatness.
We often hear of people experiencing religious visions or witnessing miracles. For example, religious people often claim to have heard God speaking to them or to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. Before we can accept that these events are miracles—which would be a phenomenally rare occurrence—we must first rule out other explanations that are more likely. The only way we could accept an account of a religious vision or miracle is if rejecting it would be even more implausible than accepting it.
As it happens, there are multiple more plausible explanations for these so-called miracles. First, the human brain is hardwired to recognize human faces and hear human voices, even where they do not exist. This is most likely an inheritance from evolution. Natural selection would have made it advantageous to be able to quickly identify a potential intruder, even if most of the time this instinct would have generated false negatives (we will cover natural selection in greater detail later in the chapter).
Hallucinations, mass delusions, and simple human error might be rare phenomena—but they are much less rare than direct interventions by God in the physical world. The only reason that we treat hallucinations differently than claims of epiphany is that most people don’t experience genuine auditory or visual hallucinations, but most people do accept the core claims of theistic religion. Religion simply has the numbers on its side.
Many religious people employ the circular logic of appealing to the Bible itself for proof of God’s existence. The Bible is divinely authored, according to this argument, and it says that God exists and regularly intervenes in human affairs. Therefore, there is incontrovertible proof of his existence.
Of course, non-believers don’t accept that the Bible is divinely authored or inspired, so this argument also assumes facts not in evidence. Moreover, the Bible was written and compiled by several different authors, writing centuries after the events they purported to describe.
Thus, the Bible is riddled with inconsistencies and scholars don’t consider it a reliable historical account. For example, the Bible is unclear about whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth. That the Bible is unable to even get the facts straight on where the supposed son of God was born argues strongly against relying upon it as a historical source.
Lastly, Pascal’s wager, proposed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, isn’t an argument that seeks to prove God’s existence, but it does try to make the case that an individual ought to believe in God. The argument goes:
According to Pascal’s wager, there is no cosmic upside to being an atheist; but there is potentially an enormous downside. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to believe in God.
However, this thought experiment fails to make an airtight case for belief in God. You can’t be forced to believe something; you either believe it or you don’t. The only thing Pascal’s wager could compel is false belief, pretending to accept the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God. But wouldn’t this all-seeing, all-knowing deity see through your ruse? Might he then be inclined to punish you further for your attempts to deceive him?
What’s more, how do you know if the God you happen to believe in is the one that really exists? By picking the “wrong” God, you might have damned yourself just as much as by believing in no God at all.
Based upon the serious flaws in these arguments, we can see that the God Hypothesis is flimsy at best. But people of faith persist in their belief nevertheless. One common argument that they often put forward is the argument from complexity or improbability.
They start by observing the intricate details of the natural universe, from the movement of the planets within the solar system to the workings of cells within the human body. Given the sheer complexity and detail of the observable world, they conclude that an intelligent designer is the only possible explanation. What are the odds that all we see around us is the product of chance? According to this view, the world being the result of simple luck is as likely as an entire Boeing 747 being assembled from a single gust of wind.
But the problem with this argument is that it presents a false choice. The choice is not between design and luck. It’s between design and natural selection. And natural selection offers a far more logical and likely explanation for why the world is the way it is.
Before Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, intelligent design seemed to offer a much stronger explanation for the complexity we observe in the natural world. It made sense that our world was the product of design by an unfathomably complex maker.
An analogy could be made to a complex human stonemason making a relatively simple stone wall. But it had never been shown to work in the other direction—no stone wall had ever made a stonemason. In other words, it was impossible to imagine something complex arising from something simple.
But Darwin and natural selection solved this great mystery and dealt a blow to the creationist account of the universe from which it has never been able to recover. Natural selection states that certain small genetic mutations in individual living organisms give them a slightly greater chance of survival than their peers. Because those organisms best suited for survival are more likely to survive, they have a greater likelihood of passing on their own genes to their offspring. Over time, traits that are advantageous for survival get passed on; those that aren’t die out.
Environmental change over the course of billions of years complements the evolutionary process, as plants and animals evolve through natural selection to become better suited to their environment. From simple, single-celled organisms arise primates like human beings capable of abstract and concrete thought. And the process of evolution is ongoing. Millions of years from now, Earth’s organisms—including humans—will look radically different from how they do today.
Because natural selection represents such a threat to their system of belief, theists have been trying to discredit Darwin’s ideas since the 19th century. Here, we’ll explore some of the theist arguments against natural selection and show how they derive from an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of how natural selection actually works.
Theists often mischaracterize natural selection as implausible because they misunderstand it (or willfully choose to not understand it). They caricature natural selection as claiming that evolution was a straightforward process that made the current state of the world inevitable. In many ways, their picture of natural selection treats the evolutionary process as a direct substitute for God.
But of course, this is not how natural selection works. Natural selection does not posit that evolution proceeded quickly on a linear course to arrive at exactly the state we observe today, nor does it claim that every facet of the natural world we see was inevitable. Natural selection is a cumulative process full of twists and turns, dead ends, and failed species along the way.
Slight changes in genetic mutations or in the natural environment at some point along the way would have drastically altered the process of evolution. We have abundant evidence in the fossil record of how and when today’s species evolved into the forms by which we know them today, including early versions of animals that died out along the evolutionary journey.
It is true that the totality of the world as we observe it today is a great improbability. But that is only because the natural world is the product of countless individual steps along the evolutionary process, each one of which was only slightly improbable. Creationists misleadingly try to focus attention on the improbability of the end product, rather than the much greater probability of each iterative step along the way.
They point to gaps in the evolutionary record as “proof” that the whole theory of natural selection ought to be scrapped. For example, they might point out that a fossil hasn’t yet been discovered that can be linked to human ancestors for a particular period of evolutionary history. But this is simply cherry-picking the evidence to support a predetermined conclusion. The evidence in favor of evolution by natural selection is overwhelming, and specific gaps in the state of our knowledge do not disprove the fundamental soundness of the theory. And even if they did, it is a complete non-sequitur to then conclude that the only alternative is an intelligent God.
Creationists also put a great deal of energy into looking for evidence of irreducible complexity in the evolutionary record. Something of irreducible complexity would be an organ or feature that could not have come about by natural selection, because it could not exist in anything other than its “finished” form. Anything less than the final, complex form wouldn’t function correctly.
Because natural selection is a gradual process that involves many iterative changes over time, it could not produce something of irreducible complexity. The discovery of such an organ would indeed be a serious blow to the theory of natural selection. Thankfully for the theory, however, nothing has been found that would meet the criteria for being irreducibly complex.
Even something as seemingly complex as the human eye is made up of constituent parts that evolved over time into their present form. We know this because we see organisms living today that have organs that contain constituent elements of the human eye—but nevertheless fall short of being a full eye. In fact, the flatworm has something very close to half a human eye. It can detect light, but it cannot see an image. Certain mollusks, meanwhile, have a “pinhole” eye that can detect images, albeit blurry and distorted ones, far inferior to those detected by the human eye.
While these are not the equal of the human eye, they are vastly better than no eye at all—and they show that even an eye can exist in simplified or partial form, just as natural selection predicts that it would.
Even if one accepts the theory of natural selection, it does not explain how the process started. How did life begin in the first place? Religious people claim that God must have at least started life in the universe, even if some of them might concede that evolution by natural selection is the means by which it arrived at the forms we observe today.
But science has a better explanation, known as the anthropic principle. It states simply that our planet, and by extension our universe, must have the right properties for intelligent life to develop—like water, the right temperature conditions, and a stable orbit and gravitational field—because we are here and able to make observations about it.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the anthropic principle and the origins of our universe, read our summary of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.)
The anthropic principle provides a useful framework to think about the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe.
Astronomy conservatively estimates that there are around one billion billion planets in the universe. Even if you put the odds of intelligent life emerging on any given planet at one in a billion, this would still yield one billion planets capable of sustaining such life. We are not accustomed to accepting events with a one-in-a-billion probability of happening, because they never happen in the course of day-to-day human experience.
But we are also not used to dealing with the sheer scale of the universe, which makes such events likely to happen at least somewhere. If we accept the anthropic principle, then we just happen to be on one of the lucky few planets that can support beings like us, living in a universe with the right mix of fundamental constants to create such planets.
Indeed, our existence as intelligent beings is highly unlikely. But we must measure the unlikelihood of our existence in the universe against the God Hypothesis, which posits a supreme being carefully setting precisely the right conditions in the universe to support intelligent life.
The existence of a deity capable of precisely calibrating the conditions of the universe so as to support the survival of intelligent life is surely even less likely than the existence of those conditions themselves. Moreover, God is not a “simple” explanation for the existence of intelligent life, despite what theists claim.
If the God Hypothesis were true, the deity it posits would be mind-bogglingly complex, capable of controlling the movement of every subatomic particle in the universe. This once again raises the inevitable question—by what mechanism could such a complex being arise? Who designed the supreme designer?
In the last chapter, we established that evolution by natural selection is a far better explanation than creationism for the complexity we observe in the world. Even though we’ve seen that the factual claims made by theism are highly unlikely to be true, we cannot ignore the fact that religion itself has existed and continues to exist, across all societies and all periods of time.
If we don’t accept the truth of religious claims, we have to account for religion’s existence by means of natural selection, evolutionary psychology, and cultural transmission, instead of divine received wisdom. In this chapter, we’ll explore the origins of religion and its survival into the present by looking at:
If we accept natural selection, then we must place religion itself in a Darwinian framework. But from a purely Darwinian perspective, a belief in religion seems to be an extraordinarily disadvantageous trait that ought to have died out very early on in the evolution of humans.
After all, it compels individuals and societies to expend enormous resources on elaborate buildings, ritual sacrifices, and the maintenance of a priestly caste that does little to ensure the practical, day-to-day survival of either the individual or the group. It also encourages other practices that are disadvantageous to the passing on of one’s genes, including religious war, martyrdom, and celibacy.
And still, religion has survived and indeed thrived, despite what appear to be its significant handicaps. Is there something we’re missing? Does religion confer some evolutionary advantage upon those who believe in it?
Religious people often claim that religion provides them with a sense of hope or comfort. A belief in the power of prayer, for example, might provide someone with a greater sense of control over the events in their lives. They are never powerless, because they can always appeal to God to intervene on their behalf. Similarly, a belief in the afterlife might make the grief and despair of losing a loved one more manageable, as the bereaved person can take comfort knowing that they will be reunited with their loved one in heaven.
Holding such comforting beliefs might hypothetically make religious people less likely to succumb to stress-related maladies. If religious faith did indeed have this effect, it would confer an evolutionary advantage, as people of faith would have a greater likelihood of passing on their genes. Unfortunately for theists, the evidence for the health benefits of religious faith is weak; after controlling for other variables, religious people don’t demonstrate any better health outcomes than non-religious people.
Religion might still work like a placebo, in which a dummy medication succeeds in producing positive health effects because the unaware patient believes they are taking a real drug. The placebo effect is very real and well-documented, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. However, it’s arguably far too small a phenomenon to explain the sheer ubiquity and power of religion. Religion is one of the most dominant forces in all of human history. It has to have arisen from something greater than the placebo effect.
Likewise, we also can’t ignore the fact that religion also causes stress, often by threatening eternal damnation and torture if you don’t unquestioningly accept its claims. This would make religion an evolutionary disadvantage, as people of faith would be more likely to suffer from stress-related conditions and have a lower likelihood of passing on their genes.
While religious devotion might be disadvantageous to an individual—for example, because it causes emotional distress and often demands costly material sacrifices such as tithes and offerings to the priesthood—it could conceivably be advantageous to a group. Common belief in the same God (or gods) is a powerful way to foster in-group solidarity and altruism (we’ll explore the origins of altruism in the next chapter). People within a tribe or confederation will be more likely to aid one another if they are members of the same religious faith. This, in turn, will make the survival of the group more likely and enable the transmission of religious belief as an advantageous Darwinian trait.
However, this theory of the origin of religion through the mechanism of group selection runs into trouble when we consider the problem of free riders. One tribe, tightly knit by its shared devotion to a religious faith that emphasizes war and the slaughter of heathens, might indeed have a strong military (and thus, evolutionary) advantage over a rival tribe with no religion at all.
But a non-believing individual within that warlike tribe would benefit from hanging back in battle and letting his co-religionists engage in the slaughter instead. This free rider would have an advantage at the game of natural selection, because he would have all the advantages of being in the religious tribe (getting to subjugate and expropriate a rival tribe) with fewer of the disadvantages (getting killed because of religious zealotry).
Such a free rider would stand a better chance of passing on his genes to his offspring. Owing to their evolutionary advantage, those descended from non-believers would come to outnumber the progeny of the faithful.
If religion directly confers few concrete evolutionary advantages, why have humans always been so vulnerable to its false claims? The picture becomes clearer if we consider religion as a by-product of other instincts and cognitive traits that do confer a significant advantage in natural selection. If we look at it this way, religion represents a massive misfiring of an instinct that’s usually useful.
Religion could have emerged as a misfiring of the generally advantageous fixed-action behavior pattern of child obedience to adult authority figures. With regard to natural selection, children obeying community elders makes perfect sense. In early human societies, children who adhered to adult commands such as, “Don’t go swimming in that river with the fast-moving rapids,” or “Stay out of that section of the woods where bears are known to prowl” would naturally have had a far greater chance of survival than those that didn’t. These obedient children would have a greater chance of growing up to have children of their own, to whom they would pass on their obedient genes.
But this unquestioning obedience would also make children vulnerable to the authoritative claims of religion. If you are hardwired to blindly adhere to all adult rules and regulations, there is every reason to accept the claims of religious leaders who tell you which gods to pray to and which rituals to perform.
These children grow up and pass on their propensity for religion to the next generation. Of course, the specific content of the religion will vary from place to place and evolve over time, depending upon the natural environment and the broader social structure of the community. But the basic mechanism of transmission would remain the same.
Religion may also represent a misfiring or by-product of the natural tendency toward teleology and intentionality.
Teleology is the belief that there is a purpose for everything we observe in the natural world. Child psychologists observe that children appear to have a natural tendency toward teleology, believing that trees exist to give animals shelter from the rain or that the ocean exists so fish can have a place to swim.
Teleology gives us a shortcut to understanding how things work. It is easier to comprehend complex phenomena like the workings of the human lung if we conceive of them as purpose-driven (in the case of the lung, its purpose is to pump oxygen throughout the body). Closely related to teleology is intentionality, the belief that the things we observe in the world are the products of conscious agents with a specific intention. This likewise would have been a useful trait for survival (it would be advantageous, after all, to assume that a hungry lion intends to eat you).
But it is a short leap from teleology and intentionality to religious belief, and the idea that God controls everything in the physical and spiritual world.
The misfiring concept is easier to understand if we use a metaphor from the insect world. It is a commonly observed phenomenon that moths will sometimes fly directly into an open flame, burning themselves to death in the process. If we’re looking at it from a strictly evolutionary perspective, this makes no sense. Why would an animal concerned with survival and producing offspring do something so self-destructive and irrational?
The reason is that moths usually rely on sources of natural light like the stars and the moon to guide their way back home after a night of foraging and feeding. Moths survive by flying into the path of light. This behavior with respect to light is a fixed-action pattern: Upon presentation of a certain stimulus (light), the moth instinctively engages in a behavior (flying toward it), because throughout almost their entire evolutionary history, this behavior is what maximized their chances of survival and producing offspring.
But with the relatively recent arrival of humans and their control of fire, the fixed-action pattern became scrambled. The stimulus appeared to be the same, but the corresponding behavior came at a deadly price. Thus, the act of suicide-by-flame is in fact an unintended by-product of an evolutionary instinct that is nearly always advantageous to the moth.
(Shortform note: To learn more about fixed-action patterns and how they influence human behavior as well as that of animals, read our summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.)
Religion may also have persisted over time through memes and cultural transmission. Culture, like genetic material, can pass down over time. The basic unit of culture is the meme. A meme is some element of culture (like architecture, cuisine, or religion) that can be transmitted from generation to generation.
As with genetic natural selection, cultural transmission involves the replication of memes across generations. But, inevitably, slight “mutations” or imperfect copies occur along the way. We can observe this in the real world by playing simple children’s games like Telephone. A child whispers a sentence or phrase into the ear of another child, and tells her to pass it on to the next child, who passes it along to the next one, and so on until the final player says aloud the message she received. Often, the final message is vastly different from the original. “Suzie lives down the lane” becomes something like “Lucy loves to play games.”
We can treat memes as somewhat analogous to genes. Those memes that are “good” at survival get passed on; those that aren’t don’t survive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the memes are advantageous to human survival; it simply means that the memes themselves are successful at being copied and passed down with comparatively few transcription errors along the way.
One factor that might aid in the survival of a meme is the presence of other memes. This also has its parallel in genes. A plant-eating gene wouldn’t last long in a meat-eating gene pool. Similarly, a snow-god meme wouldn’t last long in a hot climate, within a culture dominated by belief in a sun god.
Evolutionary anthropologists believe that cultural transmission might be a better mechanism than natural selection to explain ubiquitous but highly varied features of human culture, like religion. This is because the process of natural selection is slow, taking place over millions of years. Meanwhile, the evolution and diversification of human culture has taken place in a comparatively short few millennia. In that time, we have seen remarkable variety in language, material culture, and, of course, religious practice. Natural selection through genes could never produce this much variety this quickly.
We can bring this analysis to bear on the transmission of religious ideas from generation to generation. In certain conditions and in the presence of certain other memes, various aspects of religious belief and practice might simply be better at replicating themselves over time. Some ideas flourish better in different cultural contexts than others.
Some common religious memes that have survived and successfully replicated include belief in an afterlife, the eternal rewards that await martyrs, and that non-believers must be punished or killed. This might explain why particular religions developed and evolved where and when they did.
The phenomenon of cargo cults offers a fascinating insight into how quickly organized religions can spring up and evolve within certain cultural contexts.
During World War Two, Allied forces set up bases on remote islands in Melanesia, often recruiting local islanders to work in and around the military encampments. The pre-industrial natives of these islands had seldom had contact with the outside world and had certainly never seen the wondrous technology the newcomers brought, including canned food, telephones, radios, tanks, and aircraft.
The sudden abundance of these once-unimaginable goods drastically changed the standard of living for the islanders. Having no experience with this technology, they believed the cargo to have been brought to them through some sort of divine mechanism. The islanders mistook the routine phone calls and shipment orders they saw the white soldiers engaging in as some sort of religious ritual that brought the magical cargo.
When the war ended and the soldiers left, charismatic leaders on the island of Tanna in modern-day Vanuatu prophesied that an American soldier named John Frum would return one day with new shipments of cargo, at the time of the apocalypse. To bring the vision to life, cult adherents to this day perform the “rituals” that they believe will bring the cargo back. These include the construction of phones, radios, and even life-sized airplanes, landing strips, and control towers out of bamboo, which they believe will return the bounty of cargo to the island.
The John Frum cult is important because it represents the evolution, within modern times, of a religious tradition based on a messianic figure. One cannot help but compare a figure like John Frum to Jesus Christ—a mysterious charismatic figure who may or may not have existed, claimed to work divine miracles, and promised a glorious bounty upon his return. If nothing else, the cargo cults show how little it takes to start a religion complete with rituals, a priesthood, and an established dogma—clearly the human psyche is hardwired for religion.
So far, we’ve talked mostly about why the claims put forward by religion are unlikely to be true, and why religion’s existence and persistence can be explained through rational processes of evolutionary psychology and cultural transmission. But even if the claims made by religion are unsubstantiated and its origins have nothing to do with the revelation of divine truth, doesn’t it still serve a valuable purpose as the foundation for morality? Would we be capable of kindness and empathy without God?
In this chapter, we’ll make the case that morality and religion are wholly separate, exploring:
Religious people claim that Darwinism cannot account for the existence of altruism, kindness, or empathy. They argue that the theory of natural selection threatens to undermine the very foundations of human morality. Darwinism, they claim, is purely about the survival of the fittest, and an organism concerned solely with its own survival cannot care about the health and wellbeing of others. They see the fact that humans do feel empathy and compassion as a glaring contradiction that Darwinism can’t explain.
But this view is based on a misunderstanding and gross caricature of Darwinist principles. Darwinism does not postulate a selfish “kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” view of human history. In fact, kindness and altruism have perfectly rational Darwinian roots.
Genes seek to maximize their chances of survival across generations. In that sense, genes are “selfish.” But this does not mean that the human trait of selfishness is itself advantageous in natural selection. In fact, the drive for gene survival provides a powerful incentive for individuals to behave altruistically toward those in their kin group, with whom they share a genetic link.
After all, taking care of your children and ensuring that they grow up strong and healthy enough to have children of their own is one of the best ways to ensure the survival of your own genes. It is easy to see then why natural selection would favor kin altruism as a replicating behavior through generations. And sure enough, kin altruism—caring for those with whom one shares a genetic link—is widely seen not just in humans, but throughout the animal kingdom.
But even if natural selection can adequately explain kin altruism, creationists ask, what accounts for the kindness and empathy we display toward people we’re not related to? Surely this must be the product of some divine spark within ourselves?
Natural selection, once again, can account for our natural feelings of empathy. Here, the primary evolutionary mechanism is the reciprocity reflex. This tells us to repay others when they do something for us. We do this all the time without even realizing it. When a friend treats you to lunch, you make sure you pick up the check the next time you go out; when your neighbors invite you to a party, you invite them the next time you’re hosting an event.
We are hardwired to repay favors, even from strangers. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense because it increases everyone’s chances of survival. The reciprocity reflex causes the other members of the group to help you if you have helped them, creating networks of mutual obligation.
We are so programmed for altruism that we extend it even to people who are unlikely to ever “repay” us for our kind actions. It’s why we are moved by images of war orphans, stateless refugees, or even homeless people we encounter on the street. Their survival has nothing to do with us, can secure us no advantage, and yet the sight of their suffering triggers intense feelings within us.
Reciprocity is key to the social glue that holds societies together. Especially in early human societies, which would have been small, tight-knit bands of mostly kin, it would be advantageous to cultivate a reputation as being trustworthy and reciprocal. Likewise, it would have been disadvantageous to cultivate a reputation as a selfish free rider—because no one would be willing to help you in your time of need.
(Shortform note: Want to learn more about the reciprocity reflex? Read our summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.)
This dynamic would have been enhanced by a key distinguishing feature of human societies—language. In particular, gossip, the sharing of social information about others, would have allowed someone’s reputation as either a generous member of the community or an unscrupulous free rider to spread quickly.
This sharing of social information was likely an important element in contributing to group survival for early humans, enabling scarce resources to be shared more efficiently and potential threats to be identified more easily.
Further, it reinforced positive social norms by making our ancestors aware of the misdeeds of people outside the immediate kin group whom they may not have personally known—bolstering both altruism and the reciprocity reflex by ensuring that selfish people didn’t receive cooperation, while altruistic people did.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the role of gossip in fostering early human language, read our summary of Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.)
As we mentioned, early kin-based human communities would have strongly favored genetic tendencies toward altruism on the basis of both kin survival and reciprocity. We are thus bred to be altruistic and moral.
It’s important to note that this does not make the love and compassion we feel toward our fellow human beings any less real or genuine. It simply provides a coherent explanation for why we think and behave as we do. Understanding Darwinism intellectually does not make anyone love their family and friends less, despite what creationists might claim.
Indeed, our modern displays of love and affection might simply be misfirings of our normal evolutionary impulses, just as we saw with religion itself in the previous chapter. For example, the desire for sex comes from a clear Darwinian impulse—to create offspring to pass along your genes. But we still experience lust and desire when there is no chance of procreation—as in same-sex relationships or when a heterosexual couple is using birth control. Sexual desire still exists independently of the original evolutionary impulses that explain it.
Clearly then, we don’t need God to explain our morality. In fact, the American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has noted that many of the behaviors we would traditionally associate with immorality, such as violent crime, are more prevalent in religious communities than secular ones.
For example, of the 25 most dangerous cities in America (by violent crime), 76 percent are in “red” states, with large numbers of conservative Christian residents. Similarly, we see far higher rates of abortion and teen pregnancy in the “Bible Belt” region of the Southern United States than we do in the rest of the country.
Furthermore, evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser’s research shows that when atheists and religious people are presented with a series of hypothetical moral dilemmas, there is zero measurable difference between the moral intuition of the two groups.
Moreover, there is something problematic about the claim, often advanced by religious people, that they behave in moral and upstanding ways only because God compels them to. This is not morality; it’s just fear of punishment and ingratiation to a powerful higher being. By claiming religion as the sole basis for their moral behavior, people of faith are in effect saying that they would kill, rape, and steal if they didn’t live in fear of God’s punishment.
One final moral claim advanced by the religious community is that religion provides absolute moral standards. Religion, they argue, is the only force capable of telling human beings what is good and what is evil in all cases.
Without the absolute and universal moral clarity of religion, they claim, each individual would be free to decide for themselves what is and is not moral. Anything could be justified under such a flimsy moral framework. But is this really true? But does religion truly have a monopoly on absolute moral standards?
The 18th-century German moral philosopher Immanuel Kant would have likely disagreed. He put forward a theory of morality that could operate without God. Kant’s categorical imperative argues that individual moral principles should be judged on the basis of whether or not they would make sense as universal principles.
For example, if you cheat on a test because it’s inconvenient and burdensome for you to get good results by studying, would you then be in favor of a universal law that justifies cheating in all situations where working hard is inconvenient? Is a world in which people did this as a matter of routine a world in which you’d like to live? If your answer is no, then you must judge your own conduct as immoral under the categorical imperative.
Kant’s categorical imperative provides a moral standard that exists entirely outside of religion—it does not require the existence of God, nor the acceptance of a holy text. It demonstrates that morality can exist wholly without reference to religion.
Far from providing the basis for our morality, religion actually does the very opposite. In reality, religious texts promote abhorrent values that are totally at odds with modern morality.
Take the Old Testament—considered a holy text in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that celebrates:
Although the figure of Jesus Christ in the New Testament is far more gentle and benevolent than the domineering bully God of the Old Testament, the later text still has its share of barbarism. The gruesome story of Jesus’s crucifixion and martyrdom on behalf of our collective sins is incredibly psychologically damaging to the billions of people around the world who have been forced to learn it. It instills in the believer a lifetime of guilt and self-hatred, knowing that the only Son of God died on the cross because of your wickedness and sinfulness (even if the crucifixion happened nearly two millennia before you were born).
Almost no one today, even the most pious believer in the Bible, thinks that collective punishment, gang-rape, incest, child murder, slavery, or genocide are practices worth emulating. Most religious people concede that we shouldn’t take everything in it literally.
But if even the self-proclaimed faithful are going to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they like and which parts they don’t like, they are implicitly acknowledging that the Bible isn’t a universal standard for morality; obviously, they’re using some other, non-biblical standard.
What standard are they using? They, like non-religious people, are using the common standards of modern morality that are in place in most advanced 21st-century societies. Whether we consciously acknowledge these values or not, the overwhelming majority of people in modern societies accept ideas like representative democracy, freedom of speech, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, religious toleration, and equal rights for women and minorities. But these values exist in spite of religion, not because of it.
So how do moral values change over time? It often begins with forward-thinking leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi, who use the power of their moral vision and clarity to open people’s minds to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Their ideas spread through word of mouth, amplified by modern communications technology like the telegraph, telephone, and, today, the internet. Beyond the advocacy of moral leaders, advances in science, technology, and broader access to education help us achieve a more inclusive definition of humanity.
It’s why we no longer believe that people of different faiths should be stoned to death or why people of different races are biologically inferior and must be sterilized. The process of learning and discovery teaches us that what unites us as humans is much stronger than what divides us.
Examine the foundations of your moral standards.
In a few sentences, describe where you believe your morals come from.
Have you ever questioned whether these morals made sense or whether the source was credible? Explain why or why not.
Is there anything (some event in your life, new evidence coming to light) that you believe would cause you to seriously rethink your basic ideas of right and wrong? Explain your answer in a few sentences.
In the last chapter, we talked about how most of modern society has moved away from the moral values extolled in holy texts like the Bible and the Quran. Whether they acknowledge it or not, most people have accepted modern, secular liberal values.
But there are still many people all around the world who explicitly do ground their morals in religion—and often a narrow, literalist interpretation of their religion at that—with brutal consequences. In this chapter, we’ll explore how faith poisons rational minds and endangers society, looking at:
The essence of faith is belief without evidence. Even if incontrovertible evidence that the Bible was a fraud or that God did not exist was presented to them, a person of faith would be unmoved. This blind faith is tragic, as it forestalls any possibility of truly engaging with the world and exercising your powers of critical thinking.
And even though the overwhelming majority of people of faith are nonviolent and would never think of forcefully imposing their beliefs on others, their faith itself is a source of great malevolence. Once you’ve accepted the idea that you don’t need proof to back up your beliefs and that faith can act as your guide, you can justify nearly anything in the name of that faith. By encouraging faith, all forms of religion provide fertile breeding grounds for dangerous extremism.
Because religion teaches people that they have access to a divine truth that can never be questioned, it inevitably breeds intolerance toward those who don’t share the same beliefs. After all, those who don’t share your faith are enemies of God and his holy word.
Religion is one of the great sources of in-group loyalty, but also hatred and fear of the other. The Israeli psychologist George Tamarin found that 66 percent of Israeli schoolchildren, most of whom were raised with the stories of the Old Testament, expressed support for Joshua’s slaughter and enslavement of the people of Jericho.
The children who defended these actions did so overwhelmingly on religious grounds, claiming that it was justified because the victims were heathens and unbelievers. Interestingly, when Tamarin presented the facts of the case but changed the context so that it was a Chinese general committing war atrocities, the numbers reversed; only 7 percent approved of the action.
The intolerance bred by religion can escalate into violence, which, according to some theists, is justified—even moral. Whether it’s an anti-abortion fanatic murdering a doctor in the name of rescuing innocent “babies” or the 9/11 hijackers killing nearly 3,000 people because they believed that they would be divinely rewarded in the afterlife, religion has a unique power to justify that which would otherwise be indefensible.
It’s important to note that those who commit acts of religiously inspired violence are not “evil” or “psychopaths” (however malevolent their deeds might be). To write them off this way is to absolve religion of any responsibility for the poisoning effect it has on the human mind.
A quick exploration of just a few of the injustices perpetrated by religious extremists shows how dangerous faith can be.
In 1994, the anti-abortion extremist Reverend Paul Hill shot abortion doctor John Britton and his bodyguard to death in Florida, outside Britton’s clinic.
Hill bragged about his crime to authorities, claiming that his act of cold-blooded murder was divinely justified because it was done to protect the lives of the innocent unborn. Leaving aside the question of whether an embryo, which is incapable of feeling pain and has nothing remotely like consciousness, is “human” or not, it is beyond doubt that the two murdered men were human beings. Hill’s supposed scruples regarding the sanctity of life evidently did not apply to his victims.
Even as he was led to the execution chamber after being sentenced to death, Hill remained gleefully unrepentant for his crime and delighted in the possibility of becoming a martyr for the “pro-life” cause.
Religious extremists, whether they are the fundamentalist Christians of the West (particularly in the United States) or the jihadists of the Muslim world, are well-known for their hatred of behavior that they deem aberrant or contrary to their interpretation of the holy word. American Dominionists and Reconstructionists actually favor establishing a theocracy in the United States, in which the barbaric practices and beliefs of the Old Testament would be enforced by the state.
These extremists reserve particular hatred and intolerance for homosexuality. Of course, homosexuality is no crime at all (although it was still technically considered to be one even in a supposedly enlightened country like Great Britain until 1967). The private sexual behavior of consenting adults ought to be of no concern to anyone but the individuals themselves.
In the United States, the so-called “American Taliban” (so named because of their theocratic similarities with the actual Taliban in Afghanistan) foments vicious hatred against the LGBT community. Prominent figures in the American fundamentalist Christian community like former presidential candidate Pat Robertson and the Reverend Jerry Falwell claim that homosexuality is an abomination against God and that HIV/AIDS was sent as divine punishment to rid the world of LGBT people. Robertson even went so far as to attribute 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and its destruction of New Orleans to LGBT comedian (and New Orleans native) Ellen DeGeneres hosting the Emmys.
In 2006, a Danish newspaper published some cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed—an act that is prohibited in Islam. Two Muslim clerics in Egypt publicized the cartoons, claiming that they were indicative of a deep hatred for Islam, both in Denmark and the West as a whole. Their actions set off widespread rioting and mayhem across much of the Muslim world, from Pakistan to Libya. In the course of the rioting, Christians were murdered with machetes in Nigeria, and nine people were killed when the Italian embassy was stormed in Libya.
The senseless violence was bad enough, but what may have been even worse was the reaction by the supposedly liberal press in the Western world. Many in the elite media refused to reprint the “offending” cartoons, out of fear of provoking the mob. Journalists sacrificed the principle of freedom of the press on the altar of appeasing violent religious mania.
Further, many editorials appeared in British and American papers arguing that the original Danish cartoons were deeply insensitive to Muslim people around the world—and that while the violence was regrettable, the outrage was certainly understandable. This reaction among elite commentators in the secular West is a textbook example of how respect for religion is placed above all other concerns, even free speech and public safety.
Religious people might counter with the argument that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were atheists and they committed the greatest humanitarian crimes in history. While Stalin most likely was an atheist, Hitler almost certainly wasn’t. Hitler openly declared himself to be a Catholic in multiple speeches, invoked the supposed killing of Christ by the Jews as a rationale for his murderous antisemitism. He also expressed a belief in divine Providence throughout his life. Indeed, Hitler’s more modern, racialized antisemitism drew upon a long history in Christian Europe of reviling the Jews for being “Christ-killers.”
But even if both men could be proven decisively to have been atheists, it wouldn’t matter. Their crimes were not motivated by atheism. Stalin’s murderous career was driven by his interpretation of Marxist-Leninist ideology; Hitler’s by racist eugenics, combined with extreme nationalism and militarism. If anything, both dictators built quasi-religious cults of personality that elevated each of them to the status of near-gods in their respective countries.
The lesson is clear—while individual atheists may indeed commit horrific crimes, it is not their atheism itself that compels them. What is needed for otherwise normal people to commit evil is religion.
Another of religion’s dangers is the negative effect it has on children. Raising children in a tradition of faith constitutes an act of abuse in and of itself. Some of the most tragic victims of faith are the young children who are taught from the moment of birth by their parents, clergy, and community to unquestioningly accept a belief in God. This forced suspension of critical thinking stunts a child’s intellectual capacity and usually sets her up for a lifetime of guilt, shame, and fear.
To take the example of Catholicism, young children are taught that if they eat meat on Friday, masturbate, or curse their parents, God will sentence them to an eternity of damnation in Hell.
Two thousand years of Christian tradition have portrayed Hell as an unimaginably horrifying place, where you are continually burned alive, forced to eat molten sulfur, and personally tortured by the Devil himself.
American evangelical pastors like Ted Haggard and Keenan Roberts even take children on tours of so-called “Hell Houses,” in which they are shown live, simulated scenes of torture designed to mimic the horrors that await them in Hell if they engage in sins such as homosexuality or blasphemy.
That Hell (like everything else religion claims) is almost certainly fictitious can be of little comfort to the psychologically vulnerable and suggestible children who are taught to believe that they might one day be forced to spend eternity there. Being forced to believe in something so ghastly at such a young age leaves permanent, crippling psychological scars—even for those adults who’ve left behind the faith of their childhood.
When the religious community isn’t inflicting psychological trauma on children, they’re inflicting physical harm.
Female genital mutilation, practiced within certain Muslim communities (although it is by no means exclusive to Islam), entails the forcible removal of the clitoral glans and/or clitoral hood from adolescent girls. It is extremely painful and can lead to lifelong health complications for the victims—when the procedure doesn’t kill them outright.
Female genital mutilation is designed to keep women “pure” and prevent them from being able to experience any pleasure during sexual intercourse. The practice is a direct product of religious ideas regarding the role and position of women in society.
We must stop indoctrinating children in the idea that faith is a virtue. Teaching children to unquestioningly obey authority and accept received wisdom without evidence hobbles their ability to think critically and robs them of the joys of intellectual discovery.
Children can’t choose their religion any more than they can choose their political affiliation, because they do not have a full grasp of the facts. It makes as much sense to say “She’s a Catholic child” or “She’s a Jewish child” as it does to say, “She’s a communist child” or “She’s a fascist child.”
Instead, we ought to say, “She’s a child of Christian parents,” making it clear that the choice of religion is something that only a competent adult, fully aware of the facts, can make. Filling children’s minds with superstition and fear of divine punishment, all while giving them no say in the matter, is a form of child abuse, little different than punching or kicking them.
A final reason why religion is dangerous is that society grants it a level of respect and deference that it doesn’t grant to any other system of belief. To criticize any aspect of a religion’s liturgy, dogma, or practices is looked upon as prejudicial, bigoted, and mean-spirited.
Even those who profess to be atheists will unflinchingly chastise others for critiquing religion, claiming that doing so is hurtful and needlessly antagonistic toward people of faith. This unquestioned respect that one must pay towards religion is never applied to other fields, like politics.
There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to mock or critique religion just as we would a political ideology like communism or a discredited scientific theory like geocentrism (the belief that the sun and stars revolve around the Earth).
Society must end the practice of granting automatic respect or deference to religion. We would never defend something as barbarous and dehumanizing as female genital mutilation if it was being done in the name of some secular ideology like communism or democratic socialism. However, when cruelty wraps itself in the cloak of religion, secular society chooses to turn a blind eye.
Religion’s privileged status provides real-world, material benefits for people of faith that are routinely denied to others. For example, it was nearly impossible to avoid military service if one was drafted into the Vietnam War. Even if you were a conscientious objector, with a deeply held moral objection to the war, you would likely face criminal punishment if you failed to report after you’d been drafted.
But this was not so for religious objectors. If you could claim, for example, that your Quaker faith prohibited you from participation in armed conflict, the draft board was almost certain to allow you to avoid service. There is no moral difference between the two objectors, except that one is couched in religion and the other isn’t.
Even if religion is false and provides a justification for immoral behavior, we still can’t deny the fact that religion has been a ubiquitous feature of nearly every human society. If religion has always been with us, doesn’t that say something? Is there perhaps some essential element of the human condition that needs to believe in something without evidence?
In this final chapter, we’ll examine this claim by exploring:
What function is religion supposed to perform? Which needs does it purportedly fulfill? Proponents of religion claim that, at its best, religion provides human beings with:
As we’ve already discussed, the first two claims are patently false. Now, we're going to explore why the final one is likewise invalid.
The claim that religion makes people happier or more secure is dubious at best. Social science research offers no conclusive evidence that atheists are any less happy or fulfilled than people of faith. We know this anecdotally too. Religious Christians, for example, believe in an afterlife, in which they will be rewarded with joy and bliss for eternity as they are reunited with their deceased loved ones (unless, of course, they believe they’re going to Hell).
If Christians truly believed this, then they wouldn’t fear their own deaths or mourn the passing of friends and family. Instead, they would be excited about death and their coming ascension into paradise. But of course, this is not how religious people behave or think in practice. They despair of their own death and grieve the loss of others just as much as anyone. This would seem to indicate that even the devout don’t truly believe in life after death, that they know intuitively that once they die, they and their loved ones are truly gone forever.
Atheists, for their part, can have a more healthy and affirming attitude toward both life and death because they don’t have to reconcile the rational part of their minds with a belief in God or an afterlife. Atheists are free to accept the idea that there was a period of time stretching from the beginning of the universe to the moment of their birth when they did not exist—and that death merely represents the resumption of that state of non-existence.
Not believing in an immortal soul or an afterlife opens your eyes to the truth that your existence is the very briefest flicker of a candle in the vast history of the universe. Your non-existence is the natural and normal state of affairs. You just happen to be living through a fleeting exception.
Knowing that, life can be as joyous or as sad as you choose to make it. By freeing themselves from theological baggage, atheists can embrace their full potential and be empowered in the knowledge that they shape their experiences in life—not some tyrannical, omnipotent celestial master. Theists are permanently denied this life-affirming gift.
(Shortform note: Want to hear an opposing perspective? Read our summary of The Case for Christ.).
But doesn’t religion inspire us in some way? Doesn’t it open our eyes to the beauty of our universe and invite us to contemplate the mysteries of existence? This claim also seems dubious when you stack it up against what science offers to the human intellect.
Our brains and sensory organs evolved in such a way as to limit what we can grasp intuitively. We evolved to be able to hunt game, live in relatively small settled communities, trade with neighbors, and grow food. You don’t need a full working order of the universe on either the micro or the macro level to survive as a human.
As such, we “see” only the things we need to see in order to get through ordinary life (or what ordinary life was for our hominid ancestors). But there’s so much more out there in the universe. To take one example, our visual world only represents a tiny sliver of the light spectrum. Beyond the tiny band of visible light, the universe is awash in electromagnetic waves, from X-rays to radio waves to gamma rays. We would never know they were there if we relied solely on our senses.
But there is an extraordinary tool that enables us to truly grapple with the mysteries and complexities of the universe—science. Science enables us to understand the phenomena around us in all their wonder and beauty, from the mind-bending behavior of subatomic particles in quantum theory to the infinite density of black holes to the nature of matter and existence itself. Far from being drab and uninspiring, science uplifts us and expands our intellectual horizons in ways that religion never could.
Ultimately, religion limits the possibilities of human thought and action. You’ll always be constrained by a God who knows more than you and can control every aspect of your life and beyond into eternity. Nothing exists that he doesn’t allow; nothing can be conceived of that he hasn’t already designed.
Meanwhile, science opens us up to a universe without limitations. Quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, and particle physics provide insights that are far more enriching to the human spirit than simple stories about a creator deity and his rather unsavory band of prophets.
It’s time to free ourselves from the primitive shackles of religion and embrace our true potential as humans.
Explore the main takeaways from The God Delusion.
Do you think science is capable of answering the question of whether or not God exists? Explain why or why not.
Do you think religion has been a force for good or for evil in the world? Expand upon your answer in a few sentences.
Do you think the world would be better off without religion? Explain why or why not.