The End of Faith

The End of Faith

THE young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his
overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pock- ets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and
rat poison.

The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat
beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple
at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a
model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in
a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing.
The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space
underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun
gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a
button he destroys himself, the cou- ple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The
nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the
surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.

The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although sad- dened to have lost a son,
they feel tremendous pride at his accom- plishment. They know that he has gone to heaven
and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eter-
nity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration
and honor the young man's parents by giving them gifts of food and money.

These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the

young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his
behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high
intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he
have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of
this sort, and hundreds like them.1 Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easyyou-could-almost-bet-your-life-on- it easyto
guess the young man's religion?2

A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a
scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs
define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emo-
tional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience
would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:

1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred
million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manip-

ulating your thoughts.

These are mere wordsuntil you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very
apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent
behavior.

There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the
world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at
the pages of any newspa- per, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings
from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It
seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it
was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with
words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the
universe has written a book. We have the misfor- tune of having many such books on hand,
each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves
into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they acceptrather than on
the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism.
Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of
which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of
fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of
unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched,
here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious
tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, danger- ously
incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believesreally believesthat certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot
tolerate the possi- bility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandish-
ments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance
in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, how- ever, because criticizing
a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject,
liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply
beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the
afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or
history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along
with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions
is invariably discounted. His motives must have been politi- cal, economic, or entirely
personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is
always, and everywhere, exonerated.

But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in
the art of war have finally rendered our

religious differencesand hence our religious beliefsantithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our
neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of
Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the
faithful for millennia because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our
credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they
will unmake our world.

A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas sug- gests that such conceptual
revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for
over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist
today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsi- bility in our society
Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence.

What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong
question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alterna- tive” to alchemy; it was a wholesale
exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.3 We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to
miss the point.

OF COURSE, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific
spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while
others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in
other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes
of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a
terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has
learned to respect

the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious
toleranceborn of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he
wants about Godis one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's
inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an
essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational
criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally:
(1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith
(e.g., strong communities, ethi- cal behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had
elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in
the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser naturesforces like greed, hatred, and fearfor which religious
beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths
seem to have granted us perfect immu- nity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public
discourse.

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the
equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably
sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized
brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of
others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and
await their adherents even now. Mus- lims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view
of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of
other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally
uncontaminated by evidence.

And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck,
Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be
long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe
cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a

working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition
that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his
reason and eat it too. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only
because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to
think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the
veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a “loving concordat” between faith and reason
would be perfectly delusional.4

This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme,
are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and
spiritual needs that are now addressedhowever obliquely and at a terrible price by
mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere under- standing of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred
dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose
of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions Jesus
was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of Godfor us to do this.

The Myth of “Moderation” in Religion

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God
requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertainedas
the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of
cross- pollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doc- trines of modern
religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the
scrap heap of mythology mil- lennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief
in the lit- eral existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon
his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.

According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and
inerrant word of the Creator of the universe.5 Another 48 percent believe that it is the “inspired” word of the samestill inerrant,
though certain of its passages must be inter- preted symbolically before their truth can
be brought to light. Only 17 percent of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his
infinite wisdom, is likely to have authored this textor, for that matter, to have created
the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46 percent of Americans take a
literalist view of creation (40 percent believe that God has guided creation over the
course of millions of years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500
years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly
230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal
consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of
Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing
that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it
that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about
the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it
means to be a religious “moderate” in the twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith
are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests
of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here:
societies appear to become considerably less produc- tive whenever large numbers of people
stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first
thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws
its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many
of God's utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is
further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its
entirety and consequently have no idea just how