50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (46 page)

Some people say believing in their god is natural and therefore
their god must be real. But how "natural" is religious belief really? If
by "natural" they mean belief that a god exists is a standard component of a healthy human being, then one would think it would blossom
on its own and require little upkeep or encouragement. This is not
what we see, however, as significant time and energy is required to
instruct a person on which god to believe in and how to properly worship that god. This is why Hindu parents must instruct their children
that many gods are real and Muslim parents must instruct their children that only one god is real. One would think that if belief were natural, placed in us by a god, then it should come a little more easily.
Consider how much money and labor the world's religions spend
recruiting and maintaining their members. Many religious organizations employ tactics that to some nonbelievers, at least, seem transparently devious. Speaking for the gods, religious leaders promise elaborate rewards to followers such as financial success in this life and
access to heaven. Many religions also use fear as a motivator to keep
people believing. The threat of hell or an unfortunate reincarnation, for
example, are not taken lightly by many hundreds of millions of
believers today. If belief in a god is natural, then why is there a need
for prophets and preachers to continually push the lure of pleasure and
the fear of punishment? Why is there this need to constantly sell
belief? Shouldn't any valid religion that is derived from a real god be
able to sell itself? If Jesus is really a god and Christianity is both true
and natural, then why the need for missionaries, Gideon Bibles in
hotel rooms, gospel rock concerts, and twenty-four-hour Christian TV channels? If Islam is true and it is natural for all humans to believe in
Allah, then why hasn't Islam won over the world yet? It has been
around for more than a thousand years and 80 percent of the world's
population still does not believe it.

Imagine if there was only one religion instead of the many thousands that humans have claimed to be true at one time or another over
the last one hundred thousand years. If this were the case, if the vast
majority of people on Earth only believed in one specific god and no
one had ever claimed the existence of any other gods in history, then
the "belief is natural" claim would be more intriguing. It would, after
all, be difficult to explain how people in North America, Europe,
South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and all the islands of the world
came up with the same unique god. Seeing Pakistanis and Icelanders,
Mexicans, and Fijians all performing the exact same rituals and
praying to the same god, despite relative isolation over the last several
thousand years, would be compelling to say the least. But this is not
the world we see. Humans have never been united in belief at any time
in history. Never. Our species has never agreed on who the gods are or
how to worship them. And this disharmony is not a case of splitting
hairs. We are talking absolutely irreconcilable differences here.
Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, will never see to eye-to-eye with
Hindus unless one of them jettisons virtually all of their core beliefs.

More trouble for the "belief is natural" justification is the existence of so many nonbelievers. Even if we omit all people who live in
oppressive societies with government-encouraged atheism, we end up
with a large number of people who freely opt not to believe in gods.
These people, grouped together as nonbelievers, nonreligous, atheists,
agnostics, brights, and free thinkers, come from diverse places and
diverse backgrounds. But they all came to the same conclusion: that
there is no justification for belief in any of the gods proposed by religions. Estimates for the number of free people who live without belief
range from five hundred to seven hundred fifty million (Cambridge
Companion 2007, 61). This is a huge number. So big, in fact, that it
represents the fourth-largest block of people in the world, behind only Christians (2.1 billion), Muslims (1.3 billion), and Hindus (900 million). This probably surprises many people because nonbelievers tend
to fly under the radar. They are not united in the way religious people
are so they don't get the attention their numbers would suggest they
deserve. There is also the factor of "closet atheists," those who choose
to keep their atheism a secret because they fear persecution or rejection from family, friends, schoolmates, colleagues, or bosses. Judging
by the numbers, most believers probably have an atheist for a
coworker, friend, or family member.

In the United States, for example, there are about as many nonreligious citizens as there are African Americans or gays. But those two
groups, despite their own acceptance problems, have more political
clout and receive more media attention than nonreligious Americans
do. Furthermore, nonreligious Americans outnumber ethnic Jews and
Mormons but, again, have such a lower profile that few people are
aware of it.

An interesting investigation is ongoing about the possible natural
roots of religion in the human mind and DNA. Some researchers think
that we may be biologically "hardwired" for religion. They suggest
that our brains are structured in a way that makes religious belief not
only possible but virtually inevitable, no matter how much it may contradict reason. If this turns out to be true, there are two ways to look at
it. Nonbelievers might latch onto it as a natural explanation for the
otherwise difficult-to-explain popularity of religion. But believers can
point to it as evidence that their gods are real. Our brains are built to
believe in a god because our creator wanted us to believe in him or her,
they will say. Of course believers will need to explain why their real
god programmed the human species in such a way that leads so many
people to believe in the "wrong" gods.

Religious belief might have had a functional value somewhere
along the line in our evolutionary past and therefore might have been
selected for. Maybe tribes that believed in gods were more unified and
able to organize themselves better than tribes that did not. Maybe
belief encouraged more communication, which led to faster cultural and technological development. Maybe tribes who fought for imagined gods fought harder than tribes who lacked that motivation. There
are many possibilities that could explain how we ended up being a
species that naturally believes in gods, if that is what we are.

Sociologist Phil Zuckerman doesn't buy the "belief is natural"
idea. He points to the large number of nonbelievers in the world and
asks how belief can be a standard component of the modern human
when as many as seven hundred fifty million people don't believe.
Zuckerman writes in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism:

With between 500 million and 750 million nontheists living on this
planet today, any suggestion that belief in God is natural, inborn, or
a result of how our brains are wired becomes difficult to sustain.
Second, innate/neural theories of belief in God cannot explain the
dramatically different rates of belief among similar countries. Consider Britain (31%-44% atheist) compared with Ireland (4%-5%
atheist), the Czech Republic (54%-61%) compared with Poland
(3%-6% atheist), and South Korea (30%-52% atheist) compared
with the Philippines (less than 1% atheist). It is simply unsustainable
to argue that these glaring differences in rates of atheism among
these nations is due to different biological, neurological or other
such brain-related properties. Rather, the differences are better
explained by taking into account historical, cultural, economic,
political and sociological factors. (Zuckerman 2006)

So, is belief in a god an instinctive impulse that most people can't
resist? Is it a cultural phenomenon that only survives because it is
taught to each succeeding generation? Are we hardwired to see gods
in the sky and hear their voices, whether they exist or not? Is belief in
gods as much a part of being human as language and music? The
answer, of course, is that we don't know. Maybe there is a religion
gene that drives most of us to believe in gods. But while this is a fascinating question, one well worth seeking an answer to, it is not likely
to prove that gods are real. At most a belief gene will only demonstrate
that our species has the innate tendency to believe. So what? Remember, we seem to have an innate tendency to imagine monsters,
too, but that does not mean Godzilla is real.

The fact that there is no agreement among the world's believersand never has been-tells us that the popularity of belief offers no help
to claims of a particular god's existence. Competing and contradictory
claims for thousands of gods by billions of people throughout history
only says one thing: we are capable of believing just about anything.

Martin, Michael, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. An excellent collection of articles
and essays on nonbelief.

Zuckerman, Phil. "Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns." In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, 47-65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

The hour of judgment is nigh ...

-Koran, 54:1

The end of all things is at hand.

-1 Peter 4:7

Religion was the creation of fear. Knowledge
destroys fear. Without fear, religion can't survive.

-Michael Moorcock

by did I bother to write this book? Why are you bothering
to read it? After all, the world is going to end soon. So,
shouldn't we both do more important things with our time, like
praying or digging a backyard bunker? Why not just crawl back into
bed and await the apocalypse? After all, believers of numerous religions keep saying that obvious signs of the end are all around us.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, poverty, war, terrorism, and even
decadent Hollywood are all proof of the fast-approaching end.

Then again, maybe we shouldn't worry too much about the end of
the world. Maybe we would all be better off if we live life under the
assumption that the world won't end anytime soon. After all, countless
believers have been wrong 100 percent of the time so far. Predicting
the end has been a standard component of so many religions for so
long that it's time to ask: When will it be enough? When can we agree that these claims of a god ending the world as we know it are not
worth listening to anymore? People who claim this stuff never have
good evidence or sensible arguments and, most important, they are
always wrong. Why should we listen to the current round of warnings
when believers have been crying wolf since the Bronze Age and probably long before? Of course, such reckless optimism for world's
immediate future puts me at odds with hundreds of millions of
believers who are convinced that a horrible-yet somehow wonderful-destruction is imminent.

Not only do many believers anticipate the end of the world as we
know it, but they are happy about it. Some people actually think it will
be great when blood runs in the streets and the skies are ablaze from
nuclear explosions because it will mean that their god is fulfilling the
master plan. I suspect they look forward to having a big "I told you so!"
moment, too. Many believers have no idea how creepy and deranged all
of this sounds to an atheist. I, for example, tend to think that mass death
and destruction are bad things. So it's tough for me to understand how
so many believers of various religions can get all giddy over an event in
which billions of people will die agonizing deaths. But somehow they
do. This stuff really excites them. If you doubt it, visit the popular Rapture Ready Web site, and be sure to check out the daily rundown of the
world's worst news. Every natural disaster, every war, and every report
of a disease outbreak in the developing world is considered exciting evidence in support of their god's fast-approaching day of reckoning. The
site also includes a "Rapture Index" that claims to gauge how close we
are to the return of Jesus. It is based on subjective numbers that are
assigned to measure the level of activity in a variety of categories,
including: false Christs, Satanism, financial unrest, earthquakes, and the
Antichrist. The numbers are added up and tracked, making this a sort of
Dow Jones Industrial Average for people who are heavily invested in the
supernatural world. Too bad this Web site wasn't around when the Black
Death killed more than a third of Europe's population seven hundred
years ago or when Hitler was on the march in 1940. The Rapture Index
would have gone through the roof.

The primary message of the Rapture Ready site is that you do not
want to miss out on the rapture, an early departure for the approved
believers. All nonbelievers and "wrong" believers who are left behind
will be in for some tough times with plenty of nuclear war, diseases,
riots, famine, and anarchy to cope with. An article on the Rapture
Ready Web site called "Scary Scary Stuff' offers the following comment: "The Bible doesn't say exactly what percent of the world's population will perish, but it's clear from Scripture that the death rate will
be very high. If you add up the judgments described in the Book of
Revelation, at least two-thirds of the population will be wiped out"
(Rapture Ready, 2007). How nice.