50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (45 page)

There's more. Some believers point to Jupiter's suspiciously convenient placement. With its immense gravity, our solar system's
biggest planet has served as a sort of protective vacuum cleaner by
sucking up or diverting many giant meteors and asteroids that might
otherwise have hit us. Finally, believers ask us to simply look around
the universe. Earth is a unique, warm, and watery outpost of life in
cold, silent space. "It is obvious," say believers, "that my god made
this planet exactly the way it is for us."

This line of reasoning seems to make perfect sense and it feels like
a convincing argument, if not outright proof, for a god's existence. But
it only works if one knows nothing about life on Earth. If the millions
of species currently alive had popped into existence exactly as we find
them today, then, yes, it would be justified to suspect that this planet
is just way too perfect of a match for their needs to be anything other
than a god's creation. However, evolution does a very good job of explaining why we find oxygen-breathing animals living on a planet
with lots of oxygen. It explains why sun-dependent plants are living
on a sunny planet. And it explains why creatures with fins and gills are
swimming around on a planet that has lots of water. The interaction
between this planet's environment and the life on it, over billions of
years, has resulted in a workable fit-although a less-than-perfect fit,
as an extinction rate of more than 98 percent shows.

Believers who gravitate toward this idea of the earth being a precision-crafted utopia for humans are making a completely understandable mistake given what they probably don't know about nature.
Through no fault of their own, most people are never taught very
much about evolution in school. So, it is to be expected that they
wouldn't immediately understand how we ended up with needs and
abilities that match the environment and the resources around us. Take
away that four billion years of evolution and the only logical answer
is that this planet must have been custom-made for people, ferns, and
ants. But we can't ignore or deny those four billion years of evolution.
They really happened. Life really did evolve, regardless of what TV
preachers and the Taliban say. One cannot understand life on Earth
without understanding evolution. It's as simple as that.

To say our planet was designed, created, and fine-tuned just so that
we could live on it gets it precisely backward. What we have is life
that has been fine-tuned to live on Earth. And it was evolution that did
the tuning. Yes, we are fortunate that the earth does not have an atmosphere like Saturn's or follow the orbital course of Venus. If it did we
could not function. We could not survive. But that's okay because we
would never be. "We" would have either evolved to be something very
different or we simply would not have existed at all. Given our current
physical makeup, we need a planet with gravity like Earth's, an atmosphere like Earth's, and natural resources like Earth's. Why? The
reason we have these requirements is because we are the current
embodiment of evolutionary history on Earth (along with several million other species alive today). We fit on this world because we
evolved on this world.

The book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the
Universe (Ward and Brownlee 2003) probably makes the best argument for our planet being a unique nest for intelligent life. Ward and
Brownlee admit that there is a good chance that simple microbial life
is common throughout the universe but they believe complex intelligent life is probably only found on Earth. This sounds suspiciously
like pre-Copernicus thinking to me. It's as if they are saying that while
the earth may not be the center of the universe, humans are the center
of life in the universe. It seems like yet another effort, either conscious
or subconscious, to reassure us that we are something special and
important in a big, dark, and scary universe. I am not suggesting that
the authors necessarily meant for there to be a subtle pro-god message
in their book but many believers certainly have gobbled up their words
to use as ammunition for the claim that their god made the earth just
for us. The two authors support their case for a unique earth by citing
numerous challenges life had to overcome in order to produce a highly
intelligent species. They certainly are correct about this. It has been
tough going for life here and it's still tough going considering the high
extinction rate. But Ward and Brownlee overreach when they suggest
that we know enough about the possible varieties of life in the universe to impose limitations on it. I have in my personal library, for
example, a four-and-a-half-pound book called The Variety of Life by
Colin Tudge. This hefty 685-page survey of life is impressive but it
only scratches the surface. An estimated ten to one hundred million
species are alive on Earth today. But we just reached the milestone of
identifying the one-millionth species in 2007. Space exploration aside,
scientists discover strange new life-forms right here at home all the
time. For example, some rock-eating microbes have been found that
don't need sunlight or oxygen to live. It seems to me that we have a
lot more to learn about life here on Earth before we can justify limiting
the potential for life-including intelligent life-everywhere in the
universe.

It is misleading to list factors that enabled intelligent life to rise on
Earth, as some believers do, and then declare it impossible for such complex circumstances to ever occur on another planet in just the
same way. Of course it is unlikely or impossible if you are looking for
a repeat of exactly what happened here. Even with billions of chances
for earthlike conditions to be found on other planets throughout the
universe, it is virtually impossible that life would evolve in the same
way it has here. There are too many factors, too many possible tangents. Those who say that intelligent life is unlikely to exist anywhere
other than earth reveal what I think of as an expanded version of ethnocentrism (bias for one's culture). In this case people are showing
bias for humankind. How can anyone reasonably suggest that intelligent life must be similar to us and live in conditions similar to our
planet in order to exist? So far, we only know about life on one planet,
the earth, and we don't even know everything about that. We cannot
assume that intelligent life elsewhere requires a planet with a certain
amount of water, the right amount of hydrogen, a specific level of
heat, and a limited amount of radiation. At this very early point in our
exploration of space and with only the example of our own planet's
life to study so far, there is no good reason to argue that intelligent life
must be rare in the universe. There are billions of planets, billions of
years to play with, and we have no direct knowledge of what extraterrestrial life may be like if it does exist. We cannot apply the specific
success story of one species on one planet to the entire universe and
use it to determine that we must be alone because intelligent life is just
too fickle and demanding. Who knows? Intelligent life in a neighboring star system might require a strong and steady dose of gamma
radiation in order to live. Water might be poison for the intelligent life
over in the next galaxy. We can't eliminate possibilities yet. The most
sensible position, therefore, is that at this time we do not know if Earth
is a unique home to intelligent life or not. It is simply too early to draw
conclusions. Imagine how much more we will know about the universe a thousand years from now. Maybe we really are special and
maybe our world really is the unique creation of a god, but we have a
lot of work to do before arriving at that profound conclusion.

The claim that the earth was made for us reminds me of a bizarre presentation I once saw on a religious television program. "Behold,
the atheist's nightmare!" declared believer Ray Comfort, a host of the
show. Comfort explained that the banana was perfectly designed to
suit human needs and therefore had to have been made by his god for
our use. The banana's easy-peel skin and curved structure that fits so
well into the human hand proves it was intelligently designed for us,
he said.

But hold on, just because something may be a good fit is no reason
to necessarily conclude that it was magically created with that purpose
in mind. This applies to both planets and bananas. The earth may be a
good fit for much of the life on it today but this is not a reason to
believe it was created by a god. We need something more than a comfortable fit to prove that, especially when we have an alternative
explanation that is supported by strong evidence.

Has Comfort considered a scientific explanation? Maybe the primate hand evolved to grip tree branches and the result was a hand that
is complex, flexible, and able to grip many different objects effectively. The human hand is able to grip a rattlesnake quite well too. Did
Comfort's god design them for us to hold, too? Comfort, a creationist,
sees the banana the same way he sees the earth. He thinks that they
both were made by a god for our use. I think we evolved to live on the
earth and our hands evolved to grip many things, including bananas.
The problem for Comfort is that there is no evidence to support his
claim of a magical creation for either the earth or the banana. Evidence
for my claim, however, can be seen in thousands of museums and laboratories around the world.

I wish I had a TV show like Comfort because where I live we have
the atheists' secret weapon lying around on the ground everywhere. I
would love to stare into the camera lens, dramatically raise my glorious coconut high in the air like King Arthur's Excalibur, and say:
"Behold, the believer's worst nightmare!" I could explain to my audience that the coconut, a popular human food, clearly was designed by
unintelligent and indifferent evolution with absolutely no sympathy
for the limitations of the human hand. I could smugly challenge believers to try opening coconuts with their bare hands. Yes, if Ray
Comfort's banana proves a god is real, then my coconut proves evolution is real.

The earth is a wonderful planet that provides an ideal home for us.
(Except for the frequent earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods,
and plagues of course.) But we still know so little about the universe
at this time that we must hold off on judgments as to whether intelligent life only rose on Earth. If it turns out it did, then we may consider
ourselves fortunate indeed. But it still wouldn't be enough to conclude
that a god was behind our existence. Unusual things do happen. Rare
events are not impossible events. Believers, more than anyone, should
agree with that.

Darling, David. Life Everywhere. New York: Basic Books, 2001. This is a
fascinating survey of what Darling calls "the maverick science of astrobiology." It presents a convincing rebuttal to the Rare Earth hypothesis
that claims intelligent life is probably an Earth-only phenomenon.

Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. An outstanding
journey through time and a fun way to learn about evolution and life on
Earth.

Tudge, Colin. The Variety of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ward, Peter, and Donald Brownlee. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is
Uncommon in the Universe. New York: Springer, 2003.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

-Socrates

any believers point to the popularity of belief in gods itself
as proof that gods are real. Look at humankind, look at history, they say. Take note of how many people believe. Probably every
society that has ever existed has had at least some people who believed
in a god. Obviously this means there must be something to it. Belief
could not be so common and so enduring if gods were not real, say
believers. Or could it?

This is another common justification for belief that seems to make
sense until it collides with a few facts. Yes, belief in gods has been
around a long time and remains popular today. But this does not support any one particular religion's claims. If anything, the historic and
global breakdown of who believes what strongly suggests that gods
are not real. The existence of so many diverse religions is primarily a
reason to suspect that humans have a strong inclination and talent for
inventing gods.

Virtually all past and present religions do not complement or support one another. There is no common god among all the religions of
the past or present. The only similarity is the belief in something or
someone who is supernatural. These thousands of very different reli gions contradict each other so thoroughly that they cancel out each
other's credibility. For example, ancient Romans believing in Neptune
two thousand years ago do not provide support for Mormons today
who believe that Joseph Smith had a conversation with an angel in the
1800s. How does the traditional religion of the Hopi people provide
ammunition to modern Christians who seek to prove that Jesus is a
god? A fondness for religions proves nothing about whether or not the
objects of so much belief and worship exist.