God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (36 page)

If God defines what is good and what is evil, then those who follow God's commands are morally justified to commit similar atrocities.
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History shows
the result: holy wars, burning of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, witch hunts, cultural genocide, brutal conquests of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, ethnic cleansing, slavery, colonialist tyranny, and pogroms against the Jews eventually leading to the Holocaust.
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ATHEIST TERROR

Theists try to counter all this by pointing to the mass-murdering atheists of the twentieth century: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Enver Hoxa, and Kim Jong-Il, as if this somehow justifies the religious mass murders that they can hardly deny.
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Hitler is usually included in the litany, but he was a Catholic. Indeed, the Catholic Church never excommunicated a single Nazi, but in 2010 it excommunicated nun Margaret McBride for allowing an abortion that was necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman suffering from pulmonary hypertension.
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Religion scholar Hector Avalos has studied documents from the Stalin era that only recently became available. He points out that there is no documented statement in which Stalin justified his actions by saying something such as, “I don't believe in God, therefore I am committing violent act
X
.” On the other hand, in all of the examples we saw above of terrorists associated with some religion, you can find direct statements of the form, “God wants
X
, therefore I am committing violent act
Y
.” Avalos says, “We cannot find any direct evidence that Stalin's own personal agenda killed because of atheism.”
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Now you might argue that while Stalin did not kill in the name of atheism, his godlessness failed to provide any restraint on his behavior. But then, neither has godliness provided much restraint to the murderers of history.

Avalos does not deny that Stalin committed many antireligious acts. But the predominant acts of violence committed during the period 1932–39, called the
Great Purge
, or the
Great Terror
, were clearly political in nature. Religion played a minor role. If a church went along, it was left alone. If it objected, it was persecuted along with everybody else who refused to cooperate.

By 1943, in the middle of the war with Hitler, Stalin found it useful
to normalize relations with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and even provided it with state funding. The church had a long history of cooperation with the highly oppressive czarist regimes and so it easily fit back into that mold. There never was any church-state separation in the old Russia, and there wasn't in World War II. The Church has continued its close cooperation with the Russian government today, but the Russian people have not exactly been hastening back to religion in droves.

As for the numbers killed by the twentieth-century mass murderers, Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist and author, has observed:

It's true, of course, that twentieth-century state societies, having developed technologies of mass killing, have broken all records for violent deaths. But this is because they enjoy the advantage of having by far the largest populations of potential victims in human history.
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Of course not all mass murderers commit their horrific acts in the name of God. They are all psychopaths anyway. That is, they have a brain disease. But I don't know of a single mass-murdering atheist who did so in the name of godlessness.

SLAVERY

In any case, the notion that religion is the source of morality is dubious. Consider the example of slavery. That both the New and Old Testaments condone slavery and even regulate its practice is incontrovertible.
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It is often claimed that Christianity provided the moral force in abolishing slavery.
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William Wilberforce (died 1833), a zealous evangelical Christian, is credited as leading the movement to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom. Evangelical Christians also participated in the abolitionist movement in America. On the other hand, during the American Civil War, the rebels led by Confederate president Jefferson Davis (died 1889) used the Bible to justify slavery.

In his 2011 book,
Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship
,
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Avalos shows how the Bible has been used throughout history to maintain and extend slavery and how abolitionists in the nineteenth century found they
could not rely on the Bible as their guide because the proslavery biblical-based arguments were at least as effective. After an exhaustive study of the historical evidence, Avalos concludes:

While some pre-Christian groups had outlawed slavery, Christianity continued it and expanded it worldwide. There were probably far more people enslaved (tens of millions) under Christian empires than in all pre-Christian empires combined….

Aside from unprecedented geopolitical and demographic developments, the major difference between previous eras of Christianity and the period between 1775 and 1900 was the marginalization of the Bible as a sociopolitical authority. That period witnessed the rise of biblical criticism, which undermined the authority and perceived reliability of the Bible in Europe and America. It was in that period that Americans invested their textual authority in a Constitution made by ‘We, the People’ instead of by a deity. Influential abolitionists such as Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Frederick Douglass were part of that shift away from the Bible. Even if they did not all accept the new biblical criticism, they certainly realized the problems that using the Bible posed to abolitionism.
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Clearly, those who make reference to scriptures when they express moral judgments are cherry picking those teachings that they agree with and ignoring those with which they disagree. But if they didn't get those ideas from the Bible, where did they get them?

DOES MORALITY PROVE GOD EXISTS?

Modern religious thinkers have twisted the notion that morality comes from God into one in which God comes from morality. Francis Collins writes, “Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost for God.
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He tells of reading C. S. Lewis as a youth and being “stunned by the logic” of one of Lewis's arguments for the existence of God: “If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself as one of the facts inside the universe…. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be
inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.”
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Collins adds, “Here, hiding in my heart as familiar as anything in daily experience, but now for the first time emerging as a clarifying principle, this Moral Law shone its bright white light into the recesses of my childish atheism.”
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It is hard to see how a highly trained scientist such as Collins could be “stunned” by Lewis's argument. Why couldn't the controlling power of the universe make itself known by “facts inside the universe”? Such an entity is all-powerful, after all. Indeed, the Christianity that Collins embraces asserts many such “facts,” and he mentions them throughout his book.

Perhaps moral law is hiding in the hearts of most people—psychopaths excepted—for natural reasons. However, evolution is not the whole story. As Sam Harris notes:

While the possibilities of human experience must be realized in the brains that evolution has built for us, our brains were not designed with a view to our ultimate fulfillment. Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom and necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness in this century.
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Harris quotes psychologist Steven Pinker as observing, “If conforming to the dictates of evolution were the foundation of subjective well-being, most men would discover no higher calling than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank.”
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Christian apologist William Grassie makes a good point when he says:

We humans increasingly transcend our biological origins. We are not slaves to our genes, nor need our morality be a slave to mere survival and reproduction. Humans are a transcendent species. On one level, we are simply another mammal; on another, we are more like a whole new phylum in the epic of evolution.
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While he is probably thinking of “transcendent” as meaning spiritual or supernatural, the same sentiment would hold if we only viewed humans as perfectly natural organisms who have gone far beyond—transcended—any of the billions of other species with which we share the planet.

If evolution is not the sole source of our moral judgments, then where else did our inner sense of good and evil come from, if not from God? Well, while the behavior of an ant is governed by its genes, mammals developed brains that enabled them to alter their behavior based on experience. The better the brains, the more some kind of moral behavior is evident. Apes, monkeys, dolphins, elephants, and whales all exhibit protomoral behavior: attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, altruism and reciprocal altruism, awareness and response to the social rules of the group.
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But scientist Collins is apparently unaware of these scientific facts. He notes, “In many instances, other species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness.”
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And, as Harris points out, “No other species can match us for…sadistic cruelty.”
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Where, then, did our inner sense of good and evil come from? We learned it. Unfortunately, living among us are psychopathic individuals who did not learn it. They seem, to a greater or lesser extent, to lack any sense of good and evil. They commit the most heinous acts without a pang of conscience. In fact, they get great pleasure from these acts. One estimate is that 1 percent of the population, 3 million people in the United States, are psychopaths.
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However, a psychopath most likely has a brain disease. According to neuroscientist Harris, neuroimaging on both psychopathic and nonpsychopathic subjects has found that the psychopaths exhibit significantly less activity in regions of the brain that generally respond to emotional stimuli.
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THE POSTEVOLUTIONARY PHASE

Let us assume for the sake of argument that humanity has developed a moral instinct that cannot be attributed either to strictly biological evolution or to belief in an afterlife where one's virtue will be rewarded. Consider the following possible natural source. Suppose humanity has entered into a
postevolutionary phase
in its development that is far from complete. The human body and brain have undergone only minor evolutionary changes in the last hundred thousand years. However, by that time our brains had evolved to the point where we could use them to overcome the negative consequences of our biological evolution.

In the last few pages of
The Selfish Gene
, Richard Dawkins says, “We have the power to turn against our creators…. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.”
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D'Souza mocks this notion, calling it “absurd.” He asks how can the “robot vehicles of our selfish genes,” namely us, rebel against our masters. “Can a mechanical car turn against the man with the remote control? Can software revolt against its programmer?”
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Maybe not, at least not until they become sufficiently complex to become intelligent life. Didn't D'Souza see the movie
2001
? As we have noted, no special “spark of life” is needed to inject life into a complex material system. It just has to grow highly complex. This is not widely understood, but we now know enough about what characterizes a living thing, indeed, an intelligent living thing, that we have no reason to believe that a machine cannot be intelligent. And as history shows, modern humans have always exhibited their ability to overthrow tyrants. So, why can't a machine?
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The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These are the major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of
a priori
philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

—George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
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BODY AND SOUL

A
s I have by now often noted, science finds no need to include any nonmaterial entities in describing the world that presents itself to our senses. Still, every religion of which I am aware teaches that the human mind has access to a world beyond matter. Furthermore, many believers claim that since science still does not have a confirmed theory of consciousness, this leaves open the possibility that it never will develop such a theory based on matter alone. In yet another example of the argument from ignorance, they “cannot see” how matter can think.

Apologist Dinesh D'Souza writes, “The progress of evolution on earth shows an unmistakable trajectory from matter to mind.” He asserts that while the mind may have arisen out of matter, it is “manifestly immaterial.” In D'Souza's view, minds have qualities such as thoughts and ideas that are “different from those of material things.” He argues that since humans are made up of perishable matter and yet have the capacity to generate imperishable
ideas, “It is possible that our individual destiny might follow nature's destiny in moving from one type of existence to another.”
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Now, rocks are material, yet they have imperishable attributes such as hardness and color. Will they join us in the afterlife along with our favorite pets?

D'Souza tackles “reductive materialism at its core” by asking whether “the mind can be reduced to the operations of neurons in the brain.”
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He tells us that as humans we experience two kinds of things: the physical and the mental. This suggests that we occupy two separate realms, as in the philosophical doctrine of
dualism
that goes back to René Descartes. If we could prove that dualism is true, then life after death becomes plausible. On the other hand, if matter is all there is, then life after death is highly improbable.

D'Souza admits that philosophers today have largely rejected dualism because they cannot figure out how an immaterial mind could interact with a material brain. He gives the example of a ghost trying to move a wall when it is in the nature of a ghost to go through walls.
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If I might make a silly aside that nevertheless illustrates the point, the behavior of ghosts such as the cartoon Casper can be reconciled with physics. Since Casper is pure spirit, he has no matter. So he can walk through a wall. We can't because the material particles of our bodies collide with the material particles in the wall. Casper has no particles to collide. Now you might ask, if he walks through walls, why doesn't he fall through the floor? You and I don't do so because the force of the floor “pushes up” at us to balance the force of gravity. Again, if Casper has no matter he has no gravity acting on him to make him fall through the floor. But then, how can Casper do anything to a material object? He can't kick a football because he has no particles to collides with those of the football.

There is a real problem for something of pure spirit such as the hypothesized immaterial mind to move material objects. Sure, you can make a model in which spirit has physical powers, but then we need some way to test that model. A model that is untestable is useless. In
chapter 9
we saw how for almost two centuries now researchers have performed laboratory experiments to test for special powers of the mind. Not a single claimed positive result in all that time has stood up to the same scrutiny applied to all extraordinary scientific claims. None have been independently replicated, at least to the
satisfaction of the scientific community. This includes instances of so-called mind over matter, where objects are supposed to be moved by thought alone.

Of course we still do not have a scientific consensus on the nature of mind and consciousness. Today, the leading approach in neuroscience is
functionalism
, in which the mind is what the brain does.
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D'Souza associates the mind, in this view, with the software operating on the brain's hardware. In this mind-as-software model, if the hardware of the brain breaks down, “there is no reason that the software should not be able to find new instantiations.”
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To achieve immortality, we just have to download our minds onto a new computer, an idea that has been discussed by other authors.
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But even if we could download the full contents of our minds to another platform, that platform would have to be made of matter, and it would still not be either perfect or eternal as souls in the Christian heaven.

THE MATERIAL BRAIN

Considerable evidence exists that the phenomena we call mind and consciousness result from natural mechanisms in a purely material brain.
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If we have disembodied souls that are responsible for our thoughts, decisions, dreams, personalities, and emotions, then these should not be affected by drugs. But they are. They should not be affected by disease. But they are. They should not be affected by brain injuries. But they are. As brain function decreases we lose consciousness, as when under full anesthesia. Why would that happen if consciousness arises from an immaterial soul?

Despite what D'Souza says, brain scans today can locate the portions of the brain where different types of thoughts arise, including emotions and religious thoughts. When that particular part of the brain is destroyed by surgery or injury, those thoughts disappear. In fact, different aspects of the mental religious life can be associated with particular functional networks localized within the brain. An analysis by neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health identified the following patterns of brain activation that relate to specific components of religious thought:
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1. Notions of God's involvement and God's anger engage the prefrontal and posterior regions of the brain.
   
2. Doctrinal religious knowledge engages the networks processing abstract semantics.
   
3. Experiential religious knowledge engages networks involving memory and retrieval.
   
4. Adoption of religious belief engages networks providing cognitive-emotional interface.
   

While this does not prove that the soul does not exist, it shows that a disembodied entity is not what is doing the thinking.

Twenty-five-hundred years ago the Greek physician Hippocrates called epilepsy the “sacred disease.” Today it is well known that temporal-lobe epilepsy results in visions that resemble those experienced by religious sages who claimed to talk to God. The study of this phenomenon was pioneered in the 1950s by Canadian neurosurgeon William Penfield.
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In a remarkable book,
Did Man Create God?
physician David Comings discusses a number of Penfield's case reports.
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Since then this has been a subject of considerable study.
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Here's how prominent neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran describes his observations in his 1998 book
Phantoms in the Brain
, written with science writer Sandra Blakeslee:

But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communication with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, “I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I have been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense.” Or, “Finally I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos.”
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Ramachandran comments further,

I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conclusion that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.

It really would be ironic if the great spiritual sages of history who have attracted billions of followers—Buddha, Ezekiel, Saint Paul, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Ellen White—may have all suffered from temporal-lobe epilepsy or another neurological abnormality.
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Not only is religion in the brain, it is a brain dysfunction.

However, apologist William Grassie speaks for many theists when he says, “So what if Mohammad or Saint Paul had temporal-lobe epilepsy? If God wanted to use that mechanism to transmit His revelation, then so be it.”
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But why would he? And why wouldn't he be able to keep his story straight so both would preach the same one true religion?

Physician Andrew Newberg has become famous and controversial for his claims about discovering neurophysical mechanisms for religious and spiritual experiences by using brain imaging on meditating Buddhist monks, praying Franciscan nuns, and other subjects.
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He has been cagey about not interpreting his data as evidence that God is simply a brain phenomenon. In fact, with coauthors Eugene D'Aquili and Vince Rause, he contends that neurological processes have evolved “to allow humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects to all others.”
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However, Newberg and his colleagues can provide no empirical basis for this assertion. As I have already emphasized, if our minds had access to some deeper reality, then that claim could be easily demonstrated by reporting some fact about reality that can be tested scientifically and shown to not have arisen from inside the head alone.

In the 1980s, neuroscientist Michael Persinger claimed that he could stimulate spiritual experiences in a subject by applying a weak magnetic field to the temporal lobes.
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A research group in Sweden failed to confirm this effect.
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Persinger has disputed their findings.
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However, despite considerable media coverage, his results have not been independently confirmed in any published study.

A significant line of research has developed in which much higher magnetic fields than those used by Persinger are seen to have significant mental effects. A technique called
transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS) is now being explored as a possible treatment of psychological disorders.
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TMS operates on
the principle of electromagnetic induction discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by Michael Faraday (died 1867). Faraday demonstrated that a time-varying magnetic field will generate an electric field. Induction is the principle behind electric motors and generators.

By placing an electric coil at a specified location on a subject's head and rapidly changing the current in that coil, the magnetic field thus produced induces an electric field in the brain that affects localized neural activity. The subject experiences little or no discomfort.

Brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide amazingly detailed images of the brain and can locate sources of high brain activity. However, these techniques do not affect any changes in such activity. TMS, on the other hand, can actually interfere with cortical activity, interrupting the task being performed with the introduction of “neural noise.”

TMS so far has been used mainly as an investigative tool in neuroscience for studies of perception, attention, learning, plasticity, language, and awareness. TMS has become one of the major tools of brain research and a promising possible treatment of brain ailments. It is beginning to find applications in the treatment of movement disorders, epilepsy, depression, anxiety disorders, stuttering, and schizophrenia.
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A search with Google Scholar on January 3, 2011, came up with 20,300 papers published on the subject of TMS since 2000.

Again, this can be taken as evidence that the types of human behavior religion attributes to the action of an immaterial soul can be controlled by physical intervention.

Sam Harris provides a nice summary of the situation:

With respect to our current scientific understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been sealed, any naive conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind's obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling, love, remembering life's events, etc., all the while being metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits
obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering from total
aphasia
(loss of language ability) still speak and think fluently? This is rather like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin.
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