The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (32 page)

Most religions make a vigorous claim that they are superior to all others, yet no objective evidence is ever produced. A reality-based, error correction function within any god virus would quickly cause its demise. Error correction in science makes it stronger. The more errors we find, the better we can create hypotheses to test new ideas.

Science can also assess at many different levels. For example, it can describe the act of throwing a ball by describing the hand motion. But it could also describe the action by characterizing it at the bone, nerve, muscle tissue or molecular level. It can also be seen from the intention level, “I threw the ball for my dog to fetch.” At each level, there is the possibility of refining the description and testing our hypothesis. Do muscle cells work in a certain way? Do dogs actually fetch a ball? Do bones support throwing balls? In contrast, how does one test religion at the god, angel, Jesus or prophet Mohammed level?

Every scientific description is false at some level. Take, for example, physics. Newtonian physics is a useful way to describe the world but does not work well at the atomic level. Quantum physics does better at understanding subatomic structures and behavior. Newtonian physics is testable. When experiments demonstrated that it performed poorly at the atomic level, people like Albert Einstein and Max Planck found new ways to describe the physical universe outside of Newtonian physics. In this fashion, science corrected errors in physics. The corrections have stood the test for over one hundred years.

Many a scientist has had to give up a pet theory when the evidence simply did not support it. You can go to scientific meetings and observe passionate debates on subjects, but 10 years from now the passion will be gone as new evidence weighs in on one theory more than another. In anthropology, the debate on the out-of-Africa vs. multi-regional theories
raged for 20 years over where
Homo sapiens
originated. One school claimed the species came from several different regions, mingling and cross mating from many different populations of earlier groups. Another school claimed that
Homo sapiens
originated only in Africa and fanned out from there around 60,000 years ago, supplanting all previous populations and probably not cross breeding with them. Today with high-resolution genetic information, the debate is rapidly resolving. As a result, many who were passionate about multi-regional theory are rapidly moving to the out-of-Africa position.
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Once resolved, a new set of questions will arise for which new theories will be developed, with more passionate debate.

When have you seen that kind of shift in any religious group? When was the last time a Baptist congregation studied the documentation, evidence and experimentation and decided that Islam is more correct than Christianity and then proceeded to become Muslims? The beauty of science is that people actually change their minds based on new evidence.

Has any study been done on why religions never seem to announce, “Amputee, through his faith, grew a new leg.” In 1858, after the so-called “Apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirous,” people started going to Lourdes, France, to get healed from diseases. Today, most of those diseases can be cured with a visit or two to the local doctor. Yet the myth of Lourdes continues, with thousands of people spending millions of dollars in the hope of healing. Oral Roberts built an entire career and university on this premise. Promise healing and thousands will come. No evidence exists that he did any better than your local doctor could with a placebo pill. No amputees grew new limbs under Oral Roberts’ supervision.
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If religion had an error correction
method, Oral Roberts would not have been any more successful than our alien abducted fellow who wanted to teach us how to live 150 years.
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Science Daily,
New Research Confirms 'Out of Africa' Theory of Human Evolution
[article on-line] (10 May 2007, accessed 23 November 2008); available from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070509161829.htm
; Internet.

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For some good questions and discussion, see Why Won't God Heal Amputees,
Is God Real, or is he imaginary
[article on-line] (accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com/
; Internet.

At every turn in the last 500 years, religion has had to back down in the face of science. The net effect is that some viruses started trying to incorporate the idea of science (not science itself) into their self-descriptions. One of the crudest examples is the Church of Christ Scientists. There is nothing “scientific” about Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science religion, first established in the 1870s. There is nothing testable in her assertions about how god heals and protects from disease, yet she chose to use the word “scientist” in the name of her virus. She and her followers rejected the germ theory of disease as strongly as some fundamentalists reject the theory of evolution.

A more sophisticated approach comes from Scientology and the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. The notion that people are primarily spiritual beings living through many lives is not testable but has appeal for many. Intelligent design advocates are fond of using scientific language to justify their view that an invisible hand is present in guiding human evolution. How do you test that idea?

The cargo cults of the South Pacific are great examples of god viruses trying to emulate obviously successful concepts. U.S. cargo planes brought war materiel and supplies to the islands during WWII, things the natives had never seen. Desiring to get this wonderful cargo, the natives incorporated symbols and rituals to attract the planes to their island and bring the goods. These religions took on a life of their own despite clear evidence that building towers and airfields did not bring airplanes. Decades after the war, the cargo cults still thrived on some islands.

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Oral Roberts downplayed the miracle healing idea toward the end of his career. His son took over as president of Oral Roberts University in 1993 and was forced out by a financial scandal in 2007.

With the successes of science in areas from medicine to physics, archaeology to psychology, many religions have tried to incorporate the façade of science in hopes of attracting the benefits to their particular virus. Many biblical archeology institutes purport to use scientific methods to prove the accuracy of the Bible. Many other organizations and individuals claim to use the tools of science to prove gods, miracles, intelligent design and much more.

These groups invoke the name of science without the critical error correction required of good science such as peer review and replicable methodology. This can be seen in the quasi-scientific approach many biblical scholars take to archeology. While religious institutions sponsor biblical archeology, you rarely see any of that research contradict their particular virus. Much is made of archeology when it confirms biblical accounts; nothing is said of the many findings that flatly contradict those accounts. The total lack of evidence for the story of Israelite slavery in Egypt and escape to Palestine is one example.

Here is the mission statement of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute (BASE):

BASE exists to reaffirm the Bible … Using the Bible and other historic sources, coupled with scholarly research supported by archaeological evidence, BASE endeavors to dispel the notion that the Bible is a collection of fables and legend.
⁶

No error correction in that mission statement, yet the organization purports to use scientific methods to prove the Bible. Using the scientific method would preclude the foregone conclusion that the Bible is correct and not fable or legend. We would have to examine the evidence to make that determination. Just as the cargo cults adopted the practice of making airstrips to attract cargo, religionists adopt fake science to give themselves legitimacy. What would the BASE institute do if it came across evidence that the lost tribes of Israel migrated to the Americas? Would it repent and convert to Mormonism? How would it deal with archaeological evidence that Jesus was married? Would the institute publish evidence that some Old Testament ideas came from Babylon, not from Moses? In all likelihood, such
evidence would get hidden or destroyed as surely as the Taliban blew up the Banyan Buddhas. God viruses do a poor job of imitating science.

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BASE Institute,
Official Web Site for the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute
[web site on-line] (accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://www.baseinstitute.org/
; Internet.

As non-theists, we can challenge the use of quasi-science in the service of religion. When we see religion commandeering the language of science to justify its ends, we can challenge the assumptions. When we hear a biblical archaeologist making claims about the relationship of a find to something in the Bible, we should question the scholarship and science that would make such a leap of logic. When someone wants to teach intelligent design in the classroom, we can ask if his research has been peer reviewed. In what scientific journals does the invisible hand of a god appear? We don’t have to simply stand by and allow the methods of science to be used for the virus.

Most god viruses throughout history have opposed science to some degree. From the burning and banning of science books to the burning and banning of scientists, the church has all too often seen science as a threat. Galileo was sanctioned and put under house arrest for the later part of his life because of his claim, among others, that Jupiter had orbiting moons. Copernicus’ book was banned by the church for asserting that the sun was the center of the solar system. God viruses have consistently resisted and continue to resist advancements in medical science, astronomy, biology, geology, genetics and evolution. The Catholic Church only rehabilitated Galileo in 1992 – 359 years after his condemnation. Many a protestant preacher who has never read Charles Darwin has condemned evolution from the pulpit. The Anglican Church vilified Darwin in the 1800s and didn’t make an official apology until 2008.
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What drives the god virus to oppose science? A key strategy of most religions is fear. Throughout history, most people have believed, to some degree, that disease is a consequence of sin, Satan or some god. To avoid or cure disease, they reasoned that the gods must be appeased. People pay the priest to pray. People give money to the church when they recover from an illness. They cross themselves when entering a diseased person’s home or wear a crucifix to protect them from contagion. The virus places the cause and
prevention of disease within the divine. Yet, there is nothing more personal than disease in your own body. The virus takes advantage of this to make the connection between your sin, the god and disease in your body.

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“Anglican clergyman: Church owes Darwin an apology,”
USA Today
, 15 September 2008.

Science interferes with this link. Science reveals the cause and prevention within biology. The god does not cause your disease as retribution for sin. Germs, viruses, parasites and environmental hazards cause the disease. Once a person learns that germs caused her particular disease, the link between a god and disease is weakened. Instead of paying the priest, she pays the doctor. Each medical discovery has the potential to weaken the critical god-fear-disease link. Instead of fearing a god, people learn to fear germs and viruses. Instead of crossing themselves, they wash their hands.

The source of fear in religion is not easily understood or manipulated. How do you get a god to heal you? How do you ward off the devil during the plague? In science, the more you know about the germ or virus, the better you can prevent or treat it. In religion, knowing about a god does nothing to prevent or treat the plague or flu. Have faith in the healing power of the god has been the mantra for centuries. Along comes science, and does more in a few decades than all the priests in history. The gods simply cannot be manipulated as easily as germs and viruses. This is a huge threat to any god virus. Today, even the most religious are likely to pray AND take the antibiotic.

Science strikes at another aspect of the virus – the god as a personal being. Most religionists believe their god is in some way personally connected to them. “Jesus, my personal savior” means I have a powerful ally in my corner. I can call upon my personal savior for help and assistance. I can ask for the laws of nature to be suspended in my favor. I can see miracles all around me. When I pray and get healthy, when my child is healed, when my spouse recovers from a deadly illness, I see the hand of the personal savior. Of course, all of this occurs in the context of modern medical treatments. Only the most infected would say that medical treatment had nothing to do with the recovery, but by claiming a role for the virus in healing, the virus can maintain the fear link. “Because you believed, and called upon the Lord, you were healed.” Medicine only played a minor role. The implication is that if you had not believed and called upon the lord, you might have died.