God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (39 page)

Let me challenge each of D'Souza's points and show why they are, in fact, liabilities:

Liabilities of belief in an afterlife

1. The idea that you will live forever gives a false sense of a glorious self that leads to extreme self-centeredness in this life. Furthermore, you may live in constant fear that any sin you might have committed will condemn you to an eternity of suffering in hell. Knowing you are not going to live forever restores a true sense of your place in the scheme of things and you don't have to worry about hell.
   
2. If you don't believe in an afterlife you will find more meaning and purpose in this world and live your life to the fullest since it is the only life you have.
   
3. As we have seen, morality comes from human intelligence and has nothing to do with belief or nonbelief in God or an afterlife. You may not take action to seek justice in this life if you assume it will be provided in the next. You may not exercise your own best judgment in matters, instead allowing yourself to be controlled by others who claim sacred authority.
   
4. As described above and in
   chapter 9
   , there is no convincing clinical evidence that religious belief improves health, and there is some indication that it has harmful effects.
   

Simply put, no basis exists for the claim often made by believers that religion is necessary for a person to live a healthy, happy, and moral life. Religion blinds, deafens, and numbs us to the reality around us, and though this may temporarily soothe our anxieties, like drugs or alcohol, there is a painful price to be paid down the road for such cowardly denial and self-defeating
ignorance. Not only can we be both well and good without God, we can be better.

Twenty-five-hundred years ago the Buddha showed how to cope with the existence of suffering and death in the world. The individual must find a way to eliminate his or her ego, to cease being self-absorbed, and to realize that he or she is not the center of the universe. The problem is, this process is very difficult because we all have a consciousness that separates us from every other human in the world. Yet there can be no other way. The fact is that each of us will die, and all the evidence points to our consciousness ceasing upon death. Year by year, science extends human lifetimes, but it will never provide immortality. All we can do is accept that fact and learn to live with it.

SUMMARY OF CONFLICTS

At this point, let me summarize the conflicts discussed in previous pages, pointing out specifically why the worldviews and methods of science and religion are fundamentally incompatible.

The Nature of Reality

All religions, even Buddhism, teach that a reality exists that goes beyond—that transcends—the material world that presents itself to our senses and scientific instruments, one that we can access by extrasensory means. While science is willing to consider any evidence that comes along, so far none has appeared that requires any immaterial entity be added to the models that describe observations. Likewise, no information obtained by extrasensory means has ever been objectively verified.

In this regard, it is often claimed that science has nothing to say about the supernatural. But this is wrong. If the supernatural exists and has effects on the material world, then those effects are subject to scientific study.

The Origin of the Universe

Fundamental to most religions is the notion of divine creation. At one time it seemed impossible that the universe came into existence naturally. Christians saw the success of the big-bang model as a further confirmation of the biblical creation story. At least it seemed to prove that the universe had a beginning and it followed, by their reasoning, that the cause of that beginning could only be a Creator God.

However, modern cosmology has considerably dampened this hope. It has shown that the big bang need not have been the beginning of space and time and that the universe could be eternal, or at least that theological claims that an eternal universe is mathematically impossible can be shown to be false. It now seems possible, or even likely, that our universe is just one of an unlimited number of other universes. Several plausible scenarios for the natural origin of our universe have been published by reputable scholars. This is sufficient to refute any claim that a miraculous origin is required.

As with all scientific claims, these conclusions are provisional. While they do not directly conflict with the existence of a creator, science sees no need for one while religion cannot do without one.

Fine-Tuning

Theologians argue that the parameters of physics are so delicately balanced that any slight changes in their values and life would not have been possible. Therefore, a creator must have fine-tuned these parameters so that we, and our form of life, would evolve.

This claim can be refuted on several fronts. The most popular explanation among most physicists and cosmologists is that many universes exist and we just happen to live in the one suited for us.

However, even if only our universe exists, adequate explanations within existing knowledge can be found for the values of the most crucial parameters. Others can be shown to have ranges that make some form of life probable.

The Argument from Design

For centuries thinkers have argued that the observed order we see around us is evidence for divine design in the universe. However, the character Philo in David Hume's
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
, published in 1779, enumerated many flaws in the argument.
²⁵
Quite simply, the universe does not look as if it were designed by a perfect, benevolent God. It is too imperfect, too filled with evil and suffering.

Today's intelligent design movement argues that complex structures require an architect and builder, and that natural processes cannot generate new information. They assert a law of conservation of information that is provably wrong. Information is the equivalent to negative entropy, and entropy is not conserved. Furthermore, the generation of complex systems from simpler systems can be seen in many physical situations, such as the phase transitions that go naturally from gas to liquid to solid in the absence of external energy.

Evolution

Life on Earth is the prime example of natural complexity. Darwinian evolution showed how in the billions of years of Earth's history, all existing species evolved from simpler forms by a process of chance mutation and natural selection. Evolution demonstrates how simplicity can lead naturally to complexity, although it does not require it.

More than 50 percent of Americans say explicitly that they do not believe in evolution. While fundamentalist Protestants in America have refused to accept evolution because of its gross conflict with the Bible, Catholics and more moderate Protestants have claimed they acknowledge evolution and say they see no conflict with their faith. However, surveys indicate that virtually no Christians accept the theory of evolution as understood by modern biology. They insist that evolution is still God-guided, while God plays no role in the conventional Darwinian theory. The mechanism of evolution is precisely
unguided
variation plus natural selection, which explains the observed complexity and variety of life and the clear absence of beneficent purpose—or, indeed, any purpose.

Attempts to teach creationism in public schools in America under the guise of “creation science” or “intelligent design” have been ruled in federal courts to be a violation of the United States Constitution since they have a clear motivation to promote religion. However, 17 percent of high school biology teachers do not cover evolution and 60 percent spend less than five hours on a subject that is the foundation of modern biology. Here the negative impact of religion on science could not be more evident.

Quantum Consciousness and a Holistic Universe

Since the 1970s, New Age gurus and promoters of psychic phenomena have been making the claim that quantum mechanics implies that human consciousness can affect reality, not just here and now but every place in space and every time in the past and future. This implies that the universe is one unified whole with the human mind tuned into a “cosmic consciousness.”

This incredible notion is not supported by either empirical evidence or by the actual quantum theory itself as it is understood by experts.

The theistic claim that modern physics has undermined materialism and points toward a holistic universe is also not borne out by the facts. The standard model of particles and forces, which is based on relativity and quantum mechanics, is fully materialist and reductionist.

Reductionism and Emergence

From the time of the Greek atomists through Newtonian physics to the current standard model of particles and forces, physics has been reductionist—reducing everything to the sum of its parts. The physical world is hierarchical, going from elementary particles to atoms to molecules and so on up to mind, to human societies, and on further to the cosmos. At each level new principles are discovered that generally cannot be derived from particle physics. These new principles are said to “emerge” from the levels below.

In this process, however, the common wisdom is that the “causal arrow” still points upward from the lowest level of particles. Theologians and some scientists, however, have conjectured that another causal arrow points down
so that the emergent principles can affect the behavior of lower-level entities. They then envisage God as the ultimate emergent principle acting down on the world of matter and mind.

However, the examples they give are trivial, such as a piston in a cylinder of gas moving the atoms of the gas. The atoms in the piston are simply moving the atoms of the gas by particle collisions in fully reductionist fashion. It can be shown that some emergent principles, such as those of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and chaos theory, can in fact be derived from particle physics. It's particles all the way up as well as down.

Information Theology

After the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, the machine or clockwork became the popular metaphor for the universe, running deterministically according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics. After the quantum revolution and the uncertainty principle undermined determinism, many authors declared the “end of materialism,” illogically conflating matter and machinery. With the advent of computers, the world as a computer, in particular, a quantum computer, has become the new metaphor for nature.

Some authors have proposed that the real stuff a computer runs on is not matter but information. Theologians have jumped on the antimatter bandwagon, but its collision with the matter in the standard model is not producing much light. Even quantum computers are still composed of matter, and a universal quantum computer made of elementary particles turns out to provide a useful metaphor for how the complex universe we live in naturally evolved 13.7 billion years from an original patch of chaos having minimal information.

The Material Mind

Belief in a disembodied soul is basic to virtually all religious faith. This soul is usually associated with the mind. Evidence for the existence of some immaterial element in humans is claimed from religious experiences, especially near-death experiences (NDEs). The data have been examined carefully and found to have plausible natural explanations.

Paranormal or psychic phenomena, which might also indicate special powers of the mind that go beyond matter, have been investigated for the better part of two centuries without a single positive claim being independently replicated.

Neuroscience has demonstrated that much of what previously was thought to be the product of an immaterial component of mind has a material basis in the brain. Quantum mechanics plays no special role in the brain. A material explanation of consciousness has not yet achieved consensus but promising models have been proposed and are being tested.

Free Will, Morality, and Justice

It is commonly assumed that if the mind is a purely material phenomenon, then humans have no free will. Of course this wreaks havoc with the elemental religious doctrine of sin and atonement. Nevertheless, a kind of free will can be conceived since our individual decisions are still based on the experiences of a lifetime, which are uniquely our own.

Those who believe in God assume without question that he is the source of morality and that society would be wicked, depraved, corrupt, and debauched if they did not have God enforcing their righteousness. This totally disagrees with the observed fact that the overwhelming majority of nonbelievers are not wicked, depraved, corrupt, or debauched while a nonnegligible minority of believers are.

We all can see that the world is not a just place, with the wicked often prospering while the good suffer. If one believes in ultimate justice, then such justice can only come about in an afterlife. Unfortunately, we have no reason to believe in ultimate justice other than our own pious wishes.

The natural origins of morality are currently a major area of study, and a considerable literature on this subject already exists. While many authors propose evolutionary models, good reasons lead us to believe that human biology is now in a postevolutionary stage in which we are able to use our intellects to develop codes of behavior that maximize everyone's well-being. That we have not yet done so completely can be laid at the feet of religion and its insistence on ancient moral codes developed in primitive societies. They may have served a purpose once; they surely do not now.

Modern Theology

While the great bulk of religious believers still hold to traditional notions of God as the ruler of the universe, modern theologians are seeking different models for God that are more consistent with scientific results in evolution, cosmology, and archeology as well as with other philosophical and theological advances.