God: The Failed Hypothesis (27 page)

Christians like to pride themselves on their “family values” and their desire for peace in the world. No doubt, most are devoted to their families and are upright members of society. But they fail to remember that Jesus said: “Do not think that I have come to send peace on earth: I have not come to send peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:34-37, Revised Standard Version).

The history of Christendom abounds with violence sanctioned by the Church and thereby defined as divinely inspired “good.” This divine inspiration is not limited to scripture but continually available to the specially anointed. Pope Urban II (d. 1099) assured the medieval knights of the Crusades that the killing of infidels was not a sin. And this did not apply just to Muslims in the Holy Land. The Cathar faith in southern France, which was apparently based on the notion of dual gods that appeared earlier in Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism
²⁰
, was brutally suppressed in the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century. When the besieged Cathar city of Beziers fell in 1209, sol-diers reportedly asked their papal adviser how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel among the captives. He recommended:

“Kill them all. God will know his own.” Nearly twenty thousand were slaughtered—many first blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, or used for target practice
²¹
.

Incidentally, until recently the term
crusade
was used to refer to a Christian holy war, the equivalent of the Islamic
jihad.
Lloyd George’s book of speeches given during his stint as British prime minister during the First World War was called
The Great Crusade.

General Dwight Eisenhower’s memoir of the Second World War was called
Crusade in Europe.
The term
crusade
only fell into disuse recently, when shortly after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush used it to refer to the war on terrorism and was warned off by his advisers because of its negative connotation for Muslims
²²
. Of course, the Muslim terrorists themselves felt they were obeying God’s command to engage in jihad.

The Qur’an is as bloodthirsty as the Old Testament.

Numerous references can be found for the horrible fate that awaits nonbelievers. However, it is Allah himself who generally metes out that punishment: “Lo! Those who disbelieve Our revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment. Lo! Allah is ever Mighty, Wise” (Qur’an 4:56). Muslims are enjoined to kill infidels wherever they find them, but only those who initiate hostilities: Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors. Do not fight wars of aggression. And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers. (Qur’an 2:190-193)

Of course, in every religion there are a few fanatics who follow to the letter what they regard as God’s will:

• Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, was an extremely religious Jew who stated in court, “Everything I did, I did for God
²³
.”

• Paul Hill, who murdered abortion provider Dr. John Britton in Florida in 1994, made the following statement just before his execution in 2003: “I feel very honored that they are most likely going to kill me for what I did. I’m certainly, to be quite honest, I’m expecting a great reward in heaven for my obedience
²⁴
.”

• Mohammed Bouyeri, the Muslim extremist who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, declared in his trial, “What moved me to do what I did was purely my faith.

…I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet
²⁵
.”

But, thankfully, they are the exception. Furthermore, each of these fanatics would be hard-pressed to demonstrate where exactly in their scriptures were they commanded to commit their dreadful acts.

Of course, no one of conscience today would think it moral to kill everyone captured in battle, saving only the virgin girls for their pleasure. Few modern Christians take the commands of the Bible literally. While they claim to appeal to scriptures and the teachings of the great founders and leaders of their faiths, they pick and choose what to follow—guided by some personal inner light. And this is the same inner light that guides nonbelievers.

An Inner Light

If God does not define what is good, who does? How are theists supposed to decide what is good?

Most do not go so far as to say that they hear it directly from God. While they claim to appeal to scriptures and the teachings of the great founders and leaders of their faiths, they pick and choose what to follow—guided by some personal inner light.

A good example is the Catholic community in the United States. Shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the
New York Times
reported:

The roughly 65 million Catholics in the United States no longer have as distinctive an identity as they did a generation ago, and as they assimilated more thoroughly into American society, their views on social and moral issues came to mirror those of other Americans.

“Catholics as a whole occupy the mainstream of American life, when 50 or 60 years ago, they were on the periphery of society,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio and an expert on religion and politics. As a result, the Vatican’s teachings on a number of subjects, including contraception, the ordination of women, and homosexuality, are out of step with the beliefs and lifestyles of most American Catholics. But the Americans mostly find a way to stay in their faith by adhering to values most important to them and quietly ignoring those they disagree with
²⁶
.

The Bible is not clear on what may be killed and what may not be. It does not explicitly sanction or forbid the killing of a fetus or stem cell. And, it certainly sanctions the killing of enemies, specifically those who do not worship Yahweh.

In all these cases, believers clearly read the Bible to find support for moral principles that they have already developed from some other source.

Christians draw Jesus Christ in their own image. As philosopher George Smith explains, “Because of the theological obligation to endorse the precepts of Jesus, Christian theologians have a strong tendency to read their own moral conviction into the ethics of Jesus.

Jesus is made to say what theologians think he
should
have said
²⁷
.”

Philosopher Walter Kaufmann agrees, “Most Christians gerrymander the Gospels and carve an idealized self-portrait out of the texts: Pierre van Passen’s Jesus is a socialist, Fosdick’s is a liberal, while the ethic of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Jesus agrees, not surprisingly, with Niebuhr’s own
²⁸
.” As George Bernard Shaw commented, “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says.

He is always convinced that it says what he means
²⁹
.”

Every time a theologian reinterprets Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, he further reinforces my crucial point: we humans decide what is good by standards lying outside the scriptures.

Believers are guided by their consciences in deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, just as are nonbelievers. The basic notions of good and evil that we all share—believers and nonbelievers—are, for the most part, common and universal.

Psychological tests indicate that there are no significant differences in the moral sense between atheists and theists
³⁰
.

In short, the empirical facts indicate that most humans are moral animals whose sense of right and wrong conflicts with many of the teachings of the great monotheistic religions. We can safely conclude they did not originate at that source.

Natural Morality

If human morals and values do not arise out of divine command, then where do they come from? They come from our common humanity. They can be properly called humanistic
³¹
.

A considerable literature exists on the natural (biological, cultural, evolutionary) origins of morality
³²
. Darwin saw the evolutionary advantage of cooperation and altruism. Modern thinkers have elaborated on this observation, showing in detail how our moral sense can have arisen naturally during the development of modern humanity.

We can even see signs of moral, or protomoral behavior in animals. Vampire bats share food. Apes and monkeys comfort members of their group who are upset and work together to get food. Dolphins push sick members of a pod to the surface to get air. Whales will put themselves in harm’s way to help a wounded member of their group. Elephants try their best to save injured members of their families
³³
.

In these examples we glimpse the beginnings of the morality that advanced to higher levels with human evolution. You may call animal morality instinctive, built into the genes of animals by biological evolution. But when we include cultural evolution as well, we have a plausible mechanism for the development of human morality—by Darwinian selection.

It seems likely that this is where we humans have learned our sense of right and wrong. We have taught it to ourselves.

The Moral Argument

Since Thomas Aquinas, theologians have claimed that the very fact that humans have a moral conscience can be taken as evidence for the existence of God:

There must be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness and every other perfection: and this we call God.

—Thomas Aquinas
³⁴

Contemporary Christian apologist William Lane Craig puts it this way, “If we can in some measure be good, then it follows that God exists
³⁵
.”

However, I have turned that argument on its head. The very fact that humans have a common moral conscience can be taken as evidence against the existence of God.

As we have seen from an examination of the empirical evidence, God cannot be the source of commonly accepted human morals and values. If he were, then we would expect to see evidence in the superior moral behavior of believers compared to nonbelievers. Even if you deny that any discrepancy exists between the behavior of believers and what is taught in their scriptures, the empirical fact that nonbelievers show themselves to be no less virtuous provides strong evidence that morals and values come from humanity itself. Observable human and societal behaviors look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.

Notes

¹
Phillip E. Johnson,
Darwin on Trial
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991).

²
According to a March 5, 1997, letter to Rod Swift from Denise Golumbaski, research analyst, Federal Bureau of Prisons, online at
http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm
(accessed February 5, 2006).

³
Ruth Miller, Larry S. Miller, and Mary R. Langenbrunner, “Religiosity and Child Sexual Abuse: A Risk Factor Assessment,”
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse
6, no. 4 (1997): 14-34.

⁴
Michael Franklin and Marian Hetherly, “How Fundamentalism Affects Society,”
Humanist
57 (September/October 1997): 25.

⁵
Ronald J. Sider, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience,”

fn
Christianity Today
11, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 8,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2005/001/3.8.html
(accessed March 22, 2005).

⁶
Solomon Asch,
Social Psychology
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952), pp. 378-79.

⁷
Theodore Schick Jr., “Is Morality a Matter of Taste? Why Professional Ethicists Think That Morality Is
Not
Purely Subjective,”
Free Inquiry
18, no. 4 (1998): 32-34.

⁸
For other historical statements of the Golden Rule, see Michael Shermer,
The Science of Good & Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
(New York: Times Books, 2004), p. 23.

⁹
Thanks to Eleanor Binnings for providing these quotations.

¹⁰
Joseph McCabe,
The Sources of Morality of the Gospels
(London: Watts and Co., 1914), p. 209, as quoted in George Smith,
Atheism: The Case Against God
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 317.

¹¹
Richard Carrier, “The Real Ten Commandments,” Internet Infidels Library (2000),
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/carrier2.html
(accessed August 14, 2005).

¹²
The text of the Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King, online at
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html
(accessed April 3, 2005). Commentaries by Charles F. Home (1915) and the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
entry, 11th ed. (1910), written by Claude Hermann Walter Johns, also can be found at this site.

¹³
Carrier, “The Real Ten Commandments.”

¹⁴
Richard Furman, “Exposition of the View of the Baptists Relative to the Colored Population of the United States to the Governor of South Carolina 1822,” transcribed by T. Lloyd Benson from the original text in the South Carolina Baptist Historical Collection, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. Available at
http://alpha.furman.edu/~benson/docs/rcd-fmnl.htm
(accessed December 1, 2004), p. 6.