Why Believe in God?

Why Believe in God?

    Many of my cousins, nieces, and nephews have friended me on Facebook, so I see snippets of their lives - in many cases stunningly uninteresting, as I'm sure my posts are to them.  But most of them are Christians, and all too often their posts are religious, asking me to pray for someone or praise Jesus for something.  Hundreds of these go by, and usually I just scroll past them with a mild sadness that my relatives - who are very nice people - not only believe this silliness, but want to tell me about it.  But often I feel a compulsion to reply - to point out how absurd their ideas really are.  I usually resist, for I know I won't convince them and will only get the whole family mad at me.
    But I feel sorry for them.  Of course we disagree on many points, but most don't matter.  Blood is thicker even than politics.  But religion is the defining principle of their lives.  They're proud of their beliefs.  They make big life decisions and political choices based on it.  They spend a large percentage of their lives involved in it - going to services, holiday activities, church social events, etc., as well as praying and talking and thinking about it.  Religion dominates their lives and colors and filters their view of the world and their place in it.
    I always come back to the same question: why do they believe in it so strongly?  How can they be so certain of a set of ideas that can never be proven or disproven?  What is the immense motivational force that makes them cling so tenaciously to this particular set of ideas, without an iota of hard evidence?
    And the answer seems so blindingly obvious: they want these beliefs to be true because they make them feel good.  There's a God who watches over you and loves you.  If you're a good person, He'll protect you and keep you safe.  He's even given you instructions that explain everything.  He tells you how to live and how to know what's right and wrong.  And best of all, you won't have to die and will live forever in some kind of perfect paradise with all your lost loved ones.
    What a wonderful thing to believe.  All the terrible things that happen - accidents, disease, war, cruelty, death - it's all part of God's plan.  It seems terrible, but it must be for a good end - to teach us, or to make us stronger, or as some kind of karmic payment for some wonderful result.  Who wouldn't want to believe in that?
   I would want to believe in that.  I don't want bad things to happen to me and mine; I don't want to die; I want to know why there's so much pain and suffering in the world.  But the fact that it would be nice if it were true is totally irrelevant to whether or not it is true.  I'd like to believe unicorns were real and magic existed, too.  I'd love to think that we could travel through time and voyage across the galaxy.  But no one's ever provided evidence for unicorns or magic, and the mathematics of physics say such travel is impossible.  Bummer.  And for me, that's the end of it.  Fun to think about that stuff, but it's just plain not true.
    But for believers, they somehow ignore the fact that the only reason to believe in religion is because it feels good.  My Christian relatives believe Jehovah is the only true God, although they know that if they'd been born in a Muslim country they would believe just as passionately in Allah.  There are thousands of religions in the world today, and no doubt millions more that have gone extinct.  They are mutually exclusive - if one is right, all the others must be wrong.  Believers think every single one of them is mere superstitious nonsense - every one but theirs.  Isn't it much more logical to not make that exception?  Isn't it infinitely more likely that people all over the world are confused about life and afraid of death and they've made up stories to help them face it?  Why believe, as Mark Twain put it, in something you know just ain't so?
    It's not just a philosophical issue.  People are using these myths as a basis for decisions and opinions.  They depend on these beliefs to determine their duties and responsibilities, their morals, their sense of right and wrong.  It determines their relations to other people, other species, and the larger world.  They judge others by their beliefs, and support or oppose those others based solely on those beliefs.  The world is all "us" and "them"; those who agree with our beliefs and those who oppose them.  This is a terribly simplistic and unrealistic view of the world, and an immensely dangerous one.  If we align ourselves with bigots and zealots of our religion and despise the good, kind, moral people of other religions, we are on the wrong side.
    If my Christian relatives are right, there's nothing to worry about - we're all God's children and He will take care of us.  But what if they're wrong?  If they're wrong, all the choices they make throughout their lives, everything they think and do, is based on false information.  To my mind, religion is just too dangerous an idea to believe in.

Witchcraft

I was just watching a TV show, Mysteries at the Museum, which tells the stories of little-known artifacts at museums around America.  The format is very annoying, with the exact same presentation every time and the identical dramatic music and camera pans in every story.  They are introduced by Don Wildman, who seems to add no value whatsoever to the show as the voice-over narrator actually tells the story.  Wildman reappears after each commercial break, trying to look intense and dramatic with little success as he tells us what we just watched two minutes ago.  But the stories are often interesting to an amateur mystery buff, so I record them and watch them when there's nothing better on.

Tonight's episode had a story about a witch's ball, an ornate blown glass ball with a tab to hang it by.  They were used in Colonial times as protection against witches  I had never heard of these things, and I've done quite a bit of reading about witchcraft lately as part of my genealogical research.  I kept stumbling upon a notorious trial and execution for witchcraft of one Goodwife Knapp in Fairfield Connecticut in 1653.  The magistrate, the accuser, and a witness for the defense were all ancestors of mine.  Fascinated, I read several accounts of the case.  As in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a roughly historical play about another witchcraft trial, the accused women seemed to have just been too uppity for their neighbors and they were hanged for it (no witches were burned in America - though one was ironed flat).

So I was very interested in the TV story about the last witch convicted in Virginia.  She was 46-year-old Grace Sherwood of Pungo, Virginia.  When her husband Jim died in 1701, leaving her with a farm and three young sons, she resolved to run the farm herself.  To work in the fields, she wore her husband's trousers.  She also made money on the side as an herbalist and midwife.  She was said to love animals and kept a pet raccoon.  The ideal model of a tough pioneer woman, right?  But apparently she had too much land and she was too pretty, so the neighboring wives accused her of witchcraft and she was brought to trial.  They searched her house and could find no evidence of witchcraft.  But they also found no witch's ball, and who but a witch would have no ball to protect her home?  But they didn't want to judge her hastily for a capital crime.  They wanted proof.

Everyone knew that if a person were tied up and thrown in a river, they would drown.  Only witchcraft could save such an unfortunate.  So they essayed the experiment - they stripped her naked, tied her thumbs to her toes and tied a bag over her head.  They rowed her out into the middle of the river and threw her in.  She floated.  The sheriff rowed over and helpfully tied a 13-pound Bible around her neck, which dragged her to the bottom.  But plucky Grace pulled off a Houdini stunt.  She untied herself underwater, removed the bag, and came to the surface.  Heroine's courage hailed as she survives superstitious nonsense, right?  No, they dragged her to shore and a group of impartial women (the prosecution witnesses and her accuser) examined her naked body minutely.  They found two moles on her private parts, which could only be explained as witch's teats, which she uses to nurse her familiars and stray demons that drop by for a tipple.  Well, with this overwhelming evidence, who wouldn't convict her?

I'll say this for the good people of Princess Anne County.  They didn't hang her - they were civilized people.  Her children were taken away to be raised by strangers, her land was seized by the county, and she was imprisoned for eight years.  She didn't pine and die, though.  Grace was made of sterner stuff.  She survived her prison sentence, fought for years to regain her property, and was at last successful.  She lived there to the age of eighty, a reclusive widow.  The taint of witchcraft hung about her the rest of her life though, and it was said that after she died black cats frequently came to visit her grave.  The townspeople, fearing that her spirit would raise the cats against them, killed every cat in the village.  I am happy to report that Princess Anne County was subsequently overrun with an infestation of rats and mice.

The TV show ended with Wildman looking sententiously into the camera and telling us that 300 years later the Governor of Virginia pardoned her.  And that was that: another tale about those funny Colonial ancestors of ours.

I was struck by the horror of the story.  Here's this brave widow, living on her own on the edge of Indian country, managing a frontier farm, raising three children, healing her neighbors, and taking care of animals.  And these superstitious idiots put this woman through this torture and humiliation, try to kill her, then take away her family, farm, livelihood, and freedom.  So the governor pardoned her posthumously for a crime that never existed.  What about those responsible?  Shouldn't the churches admit their blame?  The Bible says that witches exist and a believer should kill them.  And the churchgoers followed their scriptures and did just that.   Those who believe in the Bible, who claim it is the word of God, implicitly support these kinds of superstitious cruelty and ignorance.

If the Bible is your scripture, your guide to ethics and morality, then you are responsible for what happened to Grace Sherwood and hundreds more like her.

That Government Which Governs Least

"That government is best which governs least," first quoted in the United States Magazine in 1837 and the opening argument of Thoreau's 1849 Civil Disobedience, has been often quoted ever since, usually in arguing against a proposed new power of government.  The Republicans especially have used it against what they see as increasing government interference in our freedoms.

It is important, however, to examine Thoreau's expansion of the thought.  When all the citizens accept responsibility for the society they create, they will not need a government at all.  But Thoreau saw that many people had not evolved to this point - they "were not prepared for it," as he put it.  Until then, government is a necessary evil - an expedient (though he notes that most are inexpedient).  I submit that we still have not reached this Utopian state of society, and we never will.  Until the Singularity occurs and we can all relax into the protective arms of our robotic masters, we will have to govern ourselves as best as we can.  Still, most of us humans - and especially I think Americans - long for a world without so much bureaucracy and so many rules.

What strikes me when I hear this quote or its concept invoked, is that so often it's used on the wrong side of the issue.  Gay marriage is a perfect example.  Opponents say that government (especially the judicial branch in this case) is interfering with traditional marriage and we need laws like DOMA to protect it.  I want to ignore the pros and cons of gay marriage for now (perhaps in a later rant).  But isn't passing laws to give the government the power to tell you who you can and can't marry just such an expansion of government power into our lives, depriving a large proportion of citizens of one of their freedoms?

Abortion bans, another hot-button Conservative issue, continue to pour out of the new Republican Congress.  This is another example of new laws to take away a freedom that Americans have - I can't say enjoyed, but certainly exercised freely - for a half century.

So are prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, costing the Country over a trillion dollars since Nixon declared his War on Drugs.  Nearly 3% of all Americans are either incarcerated, on parole, or in probation.  Taking away a citizen's right to take drugs takes away some of his freedom, and it creates a vast bureaucracy.  Yet many Conservatives support these laws.

In all three of these cases, the actions to be prohibited have no direct effect on the voter.  These laws do not make you safer.  They do nothing to increase your own freedom or advance your pursuit of happiness.  If you disapprove of these actions, don't marry someone of your sex, don't have an abortion, and don't take drugs.  You have that freedom.  But you are not affected in any way if a lesbian couple marries, a woman has an abortion, or somebody gets high (DUI will always remain a required law).  Yet conservative voters consistently vote for more government and less freedom.

Wouldn't it be better to not pass new restrictive laws and repeal those already on the books?  No, we're not yet Thoreau's perfect society that can do away with government.  But can't we let people make their own decisions about their own lives, especially when those decisions do nothing to lessen our own freedoms?  Marriage (gay or otherwise), abortion, and drug use are all complex and serious issues, with huge effects on the lives of those engaging in them.  Many people make terrible mistakes.  People should be thoroughly informed of the pros and cons of each choice, and competent and unbiased advisors should be readily available to help people make those decisions.  Each person's conscience should be their guide.  But get government the hell out of the way.

If you're going to use Thoreau's quotations for your argument, I suggest this one:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.” 

Religion vs Science

Religion vs Science

It is a common meme, especially among those who believe in one or more gods (hereafter referred to as believers) that science "has it in" for religion, that the scientific establishment is actively opposing the religious establishment or its beliefs.  This idea is completely false.  Many scientists are believers and no scientific journal has ever published a paper attacking religion.  No scientist has claimed that he can prove that God exists or does not exist.  God's existence remains completely unverifiable (by either school of thought), and therefore by definition it is not a subject for science.  If you define religion (or just your faith) as a belief in God, then science has no opinion on the matter.

However, if your faith depends on (or even includes) the literal truth of the Bible, Koran, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita or any of the thousands of other allegedly sacred writings (hereafter referred to as the Bible), then science can and does conflict with your religious beliefs.  Again, no scientific paper attacks these beliefs directly.  For example, I have never seen a paper in a peer-reviewed journal that said "Genesis never happened."  Science isn't concerned with the Bible, so it doesn't address it, much less attack it.

Long ago, before the age of science and reason (and even later for Mormons and Moonies), people had no way to understand the world around them.  Everything was inexplicable.  What are the stars, sun, moon, and planets, and why do they move as they do?  What causes thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eruptions, disease, accidents, weather?  Why do bad things (disease, accidents, natural disasters, death, etc.) happen to us?  Why is the world as it is; how did it arise and what will happen to it in the future?  What happens to us after we die?  What is the best way to live?  Do we have free will, or are we helpless bumps on the karmic log?  What rules govern our existence?  These are huge questions, and everyone would like to know the answers.  But how could they possibly be answered?  It seemed impossible for people to ever find out.  And all over the world, people did the only thing they could: they guessed.  They made up answers.

Since it was obvious that people didn't make the world and couldn't create or prevent celestial events and natural disasters, someone else must have - someone immensely more powerful.  If we don't understand life and death and chance and fate, someone else far wiser must.  So people invented gods and myths.  What is thunder, you ask?  Why it's made by Zeus or Jupiter or Thor or any of several hundred other versions of a god who makes thunder.  Why does the moon change phases?  Simple, it's one of the moon gods.  What causes earthquakes?  No problem - a god of the underground is restless.  What happens after we die?  We go to a better place where there are no diseases or accidents and everybody's happy.  Or we come back and have another life.  Or we become one with the gods.  Where did the world come from?  The gods made it.  How should we behave?  The way the gods tell us to.  Every question is answered, nothing left out, no reason to wonder any longer.  It was the perfect (and only available) solution.

And it worked, in every society in the world.  People were happy to have all their questions answered.  They loved their gods and creation myths, and they came to define that culture.  We, and only we, are the chosen people, the ones created by and beloved by (our) god.  We are the ones who obey his laws, and everyone else in the world does not.  The others are wrong - perhaps just mis- or un-informed, but perhaps evil because they don't believe in the true god.  The only downside was that every culture developed its own myths and gods and they were mutually exclusive.  Each god declared that their way was right and all others wrong.  This resulted in uncountable wars and genocides, which continue today.  Still, a small price to pay for the satisfaction and security of knowing the answers to everything.

Then, probably around 1600 BC in Egypt, another method of finding answers was developed.  It started in medicine.  Doctors would try a treatment on an ailing person, then wait to see what effect it had.  If nothing happened or the condition got worse, they would try something else.  Writing was developed about this some time, so we have records of those early experiments.  A few centuries later in Mesopotamia, people began carefully measuring the motions of the heavenly bodies and recording their observations.  They discovered that it wasn't random motions, but repeating patterns.  You didn't need gods and myths to predict eclipses, for instance.

The Greeks codified the new method of learning about the world, and called it science.  Faith was not required.  Someone proposed an explanation for some phenomenon, just as they had always done with religion, but then you tested it with experiments carefully designed to eliminate error.  If you thought you had proved (or disproved) a theory, you told others about it and they repeated the experiment.  If they could not, you did more experiments to see which of you had made the mistake.  When an experiment could be repeated by anyone and they all got the same results, everyone knew that the right answer had been found.  It didn't matter what you believed, what religion you were, what culture or continent or era you inhabited.  If anyone didn't believe it, you could do the experiment with them and prove them wrong.  Any high school class can prove the truth of evolution or the atomic theory or relativity.   It was no longer a guess or an opinion or dogma - it was simply true.

The new method fairly quickly started running up against religious dogma, and the religious establishments, seeing how the irresistible power of logic and reason threatened their holy scriptures, fought long and bitterly to suppress science.  For fifteen hundred years, the Catholic Church held back any advance in knowledge, while Asian, Semitic, and American civilizations quickly surpassed the Europeans in their understanding of the world around us.  When the Enlightenment started to liberate European minds, however, that culture made stunning strides in pushing back the domain of superstition.  Men could make and understand thunder and lightning, calculate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, peer into the distant past and future, and begin to understand our place in the universe.

The answers poured in: no, God didn't make the universe four thousand years ago - it was created 13.8 billion years ago; no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth - it's the other way round; no, supernatural magic doesn't exist - not one example of miracle, extrasensory perception, communicating with the dead, prescience, ghost, or soul has ever been detected in a verifiable setting; no, God didn't make all the animals at once - species are constantly going extinct and changing into other forms.  No, it does not require a creator to create all the complexity and beauty we see all around us.  Every time there was a religious belief or given truth that could be tested, hundreds and thousands of cases, science won every time.  Not once did religion win by proving science wrong.  Religion doesn't work that way.  You believe it because you believe it and it can't be proven right or wrong.  But if your religion makes some statement, and that fact can be tested, religion always loses.  We know, with 100% certainty, that Genesis is wrong.  Those events never occurred, and we can prove it.

In the face of all this new evidence, believers have become divided.  Some cling tenaciously to their beliefs, insisting that their scriptures are the word of God and every word is literally true.  As the evidence continues to mount, this position becomes harder and harder to hold.  It means shoving your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to any argument (or read any book), saying, "No, No!" with no argument to back it up.  Millions of fundamentalists all over the world are doing this right now.  But as knowledge of the world and the obvious effectiveness and correctness of scientific knowledge disseminate through our global culture and technology, surely this irrational backlash will eventually subside.

Other believers simply retract the borders of the realm of religion.  Sure, science is right about cosmology and physics and geology and evolution.  That was a bunch of creation myths those old guys believed in that somehow got into the Bible.  The real story is that God is real, He loves us and listens to our prayers and we'll get to meet Him after we die.  Science can never touch that faith.

In a way they are correct.  No scientist will ever prove that God does not exist or that there is no afterlife.  There is not one iota of evidence for these beliefs, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees so concisely put it.  But science has a remarkable record of being right about the world.  We have spacecraft on other planets and GPS here only because both relativity and quantum mechanics can be written down as mathematical formulae and solved.  If those principles - or any of the knowledge that supports them - were wrong, these things would not be possible.

If you made a table of reasons to believe or not believe in God, 100% of all experiments, physical data, and known facts would be against it.  No experiment has ever confirmed a religious idea.  There is no evidence that prayers work or believers have better lives than non-believers; that miracles occur, now or in the past; or that there is a heaven, hell, or any other kind of afterlife.  On the other side of the ledger, what reasons are there for ignoring 100% of the evidence and believing in a God that can never be proven?  There is only one, and it is so glaringly obvious it constantly astounds me that many believers seem to have never thought of it.  We want to believe.  It feels good to believe that there's a powerful, beneficent being who understands all the strange and terrible things that happen in the world; that loves and values us; that our lives have a larger meaning than just procreating and dying; that we will live again after our deaths and be again among the loved ones we lost.  God has a plan, and he has rules to live by.  We don't have to wonder what's right and wrong, whether what we're doing could have terrible and even fatal results - it's all in the book.  We're not confused and scared and unsure aging adults - we're children, guided and loved and protected by a caring, wise, and all-powerful father.  If you were trying to make up a happy comforting myth, you would make up exactly this one.  And we did.

Of course, there is another powerful reason to believe in a religion.  It's what is taught to us as children.  As we start to learn about the world as infants, we turn to our parents to provide the knowledge.  They teach us so much - how to behave with others, how to avoid getting injured, how to dress and talk and eat.  Most of what we know we learned from them.  And when they teach us their religion, of course we accept that too as truth.  Why should we doubt them, when they have been so reliable in every other way?  So all over the world, children grow up in their parents' religion, and they pass it on to their children.  If you had been born in Iraq, do you really think you would not be Muslim?  No one reasons their way to religion.  The number of people who come to religion as adults or who change religions (other than for a marriage or to avoid discrimination) is vanishingly small.  And where scientific knowledge is readily available and there is freedom of thought, even people raised in a religious upbringing frequently abandon it.

To my mind that's the distinction between atheists and believers.  Some of us want to know what the world is really like and turn to impartial science for our answers.  Knowledge allows us to take an active part in shaping the world - to try to avert climate change for instance, or plagues or mass extinctions or depletion of resources or avoiding a comet impact.  Believers would rather not know the facts because they'd rather feel safe.  They truly believe that what you don't know can't hurt you - one of the silliest and most demonstrably, dangerously incorrect aphorisms ever created.