God: The Failed Hypothesis (33 page)

Most have existed in many forms, both religious and secular:

Moses in the bulrushes; the ugly duckling; Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. Don’t all young people feel that they may have greatness in them—and why shouldn’t they? David and Goliath; Jack the Giant Killer; Odysseus and the Cyclops. We all need the courage to never give up, to call on our ingenuity and initiative against the giants we face.

Beauty and inspiration can arise from secular sources. Certainly much great art and literature is secular in nature. Religion hardly comes up in Shakespeare, the greatest poet of the English language. Often romantic love is the inspiration for great poetry, as when Romeo calls up to Juliet from her garden at sunrise, Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, That is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she
³²
.

Many people think of science as cold and impersonal. Scientists have tried to counter that by pointing to the beauty and majesty of nature and the great pleasure and inspiration that science brings to its practitioners. In his 1980 hit public television series,
Cosmos,
astronomer Carl Sagan extolled the grandeur of the universe, life, and the human brain. In his book
Pale Blue Dot,
Sagan asks, “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths
³³
.”

In his 1998 book,
Unweaving the Rainbow,
Richard Dawkins carried on in the Sagan tradition: “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is fragile
³⁴
.”

Dawkins takes his title from a poem by John Keats:

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—

Unweave a rainbow
³⁵
… Keats felt that Newton had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors
³⁶
. Dawkins disagrees, pointing out how the unweaving of the rainbow—the separation of its components into different wavelengths—adds to rather than detracts from its beauty and poetry. The threads of the rainbow have been rewoven into the beautiful tapestry of modern physical and biological science. From the spectral threads of visible light, a model of the atomic structure of matter has been woven. From the spectral threads of x-rays reflected off the atoms of biological matter, a model of the structure of the key to life,
DNA
, has been woven.

From the spectral threads of light from stars and galaxies, and more recently that of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a model of the structure of the universe has been woven.

Dawkins expresses the fulfillment of being a scientist:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color and bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born?

Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it
³⁷
?

Dawkins wishes he had written the following quatrain by William Blake, saying the meaning and inspiration would have been very different from that of the mystical Blake, To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour
³⁸
.

Of course, most people value the benefits of science. Everywhere you go these days you see people talking on their mobile phones. They don’t have to pass a course in the theory of electromagnetic waves before using them. But they also miss the exquisite pleasure of writing down the four beautiful equations of electromagnetism, called
Maxwell’s equations,
and deriving from them other equations that describe the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a vacuum that move at exactly the speed of light.

Nevertheless, our mobile phone user can still obtain ample inspiration and pleasure in art, music, literature, and the more mundane but equally important events of everyday life—family, work, and recreation. At least science helps make this possible by freeing humans from the need to spend all their time on simple survival. Unfortunately we still live in a world where this freedom is not yet enjoyed by all.

So, even though science is a valuable tool available to most of humanity, only a tiny few find it a source of inspiration and even fewer a source of comfort. Religion, on the other hand, is supposed to provide comfort for all. However, religious comfort is not all that it is cracked up to be. In a recent study, psychologists found that highly religious Protestants exhibit more symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder than the less religious or nonreligious
³⁹
. The promise of life after death carries with it the dread that the afterworld will be spent elsewhere than in the bosom of God. Everyone is a sinner, and even the most cloistered nun lives with the nagging worry that she might not be forgiven for that occasional impious thought that slips into her head between endless recitations of the Hail Mary. Likewise, the believer in rein-carnation might sometimes worry about living his next life as a rodent. The Muslim suicide bomber has been led to believe that he is guaranteed paradise by his murderous action. On the other hand, the atheist has the comfort of no fears for an afterlife and lacks any compulsion to blow himself up.

No doubt a temporary feeling of peace of mind can be achieved during prayer or meditation. This results from an emptying of the mind of other thoughts, especially thoughts of self.

Of all the world’s religions, Buddhism provides the clearest understanding of the process, although every indication is that the mechanism is purely physical
⁴⁰
. Enlightenment can only be obtained when the individual is able to eliminate all the desires of self. Nirvana is not heaven. Nirvana is nothingness.

However, I am not quite ready for nothingness. I am willing to trade nirvana for the joy and anguish of life for at least a few more years.

Notes

¹
Voltaire,
Candide, ou l’Optimisme,
first published in 1759.

²
See, for example, Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2006).

³
Justin L. Barrett,
Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).

⁴
V S. Ramachandran, “God and the Temporal Lobes of the Brain,” Talk at the conference Human Selves and Transcendental Experiences: A Dialogue of Science and Religion, San Diego, California, January 31, 1998; Matthew Alper,
The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God
(Brooklyn, NY: Rogue Press, 2001); Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili,
Why God Won’t Go Away
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Pascal Boyer,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 2001); Donald M. Broom,
The Evolution of Morality and Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

⁵
Dean H. Hamer,
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
(New York: Doubleday, 2004).

⁶
Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books. 2004); “Is God an Accident?”
Atlantic
296, no. 5 (December 2005): 105-12.

⁷
Boyer,
Religion Explained.

⁸
Stewart Elliott Guthrie,
Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
(New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

⁹
Nicholas D. Kristof, “God and Evolution,” op-ed,
New York Times,
February 12, 2005, p. 17.

¹⁰
Chris Mooney,
The Republican War on Science
(New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005).

¹¹
Peter Singer,
The President of God and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush
(New York: Dutton, 2004), p. 208.

¹²
As quoted in Kimberly Blaker, ed. ,
The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America
(New Boston, MI: New Boston Books, 2003), p. 13.

¹³
Antonin Scalia, “God’s Justice and Ours,” First
Things
123 (May 2002): 17-21. Online at
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html
(accessed March 15, 2005).

¹⁴
Ibid.

¹⁵
See, for example, James A. Haught,
Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990).

¹⁶
Sam Harris,
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York: Norton, 2004), p. 26.

¹⁷
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer,
Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Quran
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), p. 146.

¹⁸
Gregory S. Paul, “The Great Scandal: Christianity’s Role in the Rise of the Nazis,”
Free Inquiry
23, no. 4 (October/November 2003): 20-29; 24, no. 1 (December 2003/January 2004): 28-34.

¹⁹
Ibid, pp. 103-104.

²⁰
Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
vol. 1, chap. 2.

²¹
Don Monkerud, “Faith No More,”
In These Times
27, no. 9 (March 10, 2003). Online at
http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=105_0_2_0_C
(accessed February 19, 2005).

²²
Blaker,
The Fundamentals of Extremism.

²³
For further discussion of this point, see Harris,
The End of Faith;
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

²⁴
In this section I have relied heavily on Erik J. Wielenberg,
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe
(Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

²⁵
William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life without God.” Online at
http://www.hisdefense.org/audio/wc_audio.html
(accessed March 9, 2004).

²⁶
Wielenberg,
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe,
p. 30.

²⁷
Thomas Nagel,
Mortal Questions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 11.

²⁸
Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics,
trans. Martin Ostwald (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 8. See also Wielenberg,
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe,
pp. 24-25.

²⁹
Singer,
How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-interest
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 195.

³⁰
Kai Nielsen,
Ethics without God,
rev. ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), pp. 227-28.

³¹
Judaism does not have the strong emphasis, indeed obsession, with eternal life found in Christianity and Islam.

³²
Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet.

³³
Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot
(London: Headliner, 1995).

³⁴
Richard Dawkins,
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
(Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. x.

³⁵
John Keats, “Lamia” (1820).

³⁶
Dawkins,
Unweaving the Rainbow,
p. 39.

³⁷
Ibid, p. 6.

³⁸
William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (c. 1803).

³⁹
Jonathan S. Abramowitz, Brett J. Deacon, Carol M. Woods, and David F. Tolin, “Association between Protestant Religiosity and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms and Cognitions,”
Depression and Anxiety
20 (2004): 70-76.

⁴⁰
Antonie Lutz, Lawrence L. Greischar, Nancy B. Rawlings, Mathew Ricard, and Richard J. Davidson, “Long-term Meditators Self-induce High-amplitude Gamma Synchrony during Mental Practice,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
101, no. 46 (2004): 16369-73.

Abramowitz, Jonathan S., Brett J. Deacon, Carol M. Woods, and David F. Tolin. “Association between Protestant Religiosity and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms and Cognitions.”
Depression and Anxiety
20 (2004): 70-76.

Acocella, Joan. “Holy Smoke; What Were the Crusades Really About?”
New Yorker,
December 13, 2004.

Adami, Christoph
Introduction to Artificial Life.
New York: Springer, 1998.

Adami, Christoph, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier. “Evolution of Biological Complexity.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
97 (2000): 4463-68.

Aguire, Anthony. “The Cold Big-Bang Cosmology as a Counter-example to Several Anthropic Arguments.”
Physical Review
D64 (2001): 083508.