Given that many religious people think that the life they will have after death will be so much better than the life they have now, this raises the problem of why they don’t simply commit suicide or why they seek medical treatment for illnesses instead of seeing life-threatening diseases as signs that god want them to join him in heaven. To explain this paradox, religious people have sought to find moral prohibitions against death wishes and suicide.
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One of the oddest arguments made to atheists is that if they do not believe that the universe has a meaning, then they need to explain why they don’t immediately commit suicide. Usually I can understand the arguments of religious people even if I don’t agree with them but this one truly baffles me. It strikes me as a weird idea that simply because we and the universe are not part of a grand cosmic plan, our lives are not worth living. This argument is often presented along with Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus because Camus poses this issue: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The question of whether there is meaning in the universe is trickier to deal with than the question of the existence of god since meaning is not anything tangible. Since it is usually associated with a god’s plan, the existence of god is a more basic question and eliminating god usually eliminates an externally imposed meaning. But some try to establish the existence of god backwards by arguing that we can infer meaning from the way that the universe is structured and therefore there must be an entity that created this meaning. The fine-tuning and anthropic principle arguments are attempts at this backwards attempt to argue for god’s existence.

What is becoming increasingly clear from all the research in cosmology and biology is that the universe has all the indications that it has no underlying purpose or design or meaning but is evolving according to natural laws in which chance and contingency also plays a role, just as it does for the evolution of life. The universe just is and we just are. As physicist Steven Weinberg says, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it becomes pointless”, later clarifying his words by saying, “I did not mean that science teaches us that the universe is pointless, but rather that the universe itself suggests no point” (quoted in Has Science Found God? by Victor Stenger, p. 333). Richard Dawkins’s conclusion is that “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” (Scientific American, November 1995, p. 85) Some religious people have seized upon Dawkins’s words (which were purely an inference based on empirical observations on the nature of the universe) to suggest that he is some kind of depressed nihilist, when all the evidence suggests that Dawkins really enjoys life. What they are doing is projecting on to him their own fears about what the lack of an externally imposed meaning would mean to them.

All the evidence points to the conclusion that the universe and life do not exhibit any sign that everything is part of any grand plan. Rather than bemoan this fact, we have to come to terms with it and not indulge in pointless wishful thinking, trying to will into existence that which is not. Otherwise we will be like Peter Pan, the title character in J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s story, urging children to clap to show they believe in fairies in order to save the life of Tinker Bell. Life is not a fairy tale. Wishing and hoping and praying cannot bring into existence what is not there.

The appeal of a cosmic plan as a way to give one’s life meaning eludes me. What would such a plan imply, exactly? Does it mean that my life has been mapped out already, that one is merely a puppet manipulated by hidden strings, just going through the motions of life? Religious people counter this by arguing that god has given us free will but it is hard to reconcile that with a pre-existing plan. If I have genuine free will, why can’t I mess up god’s plan by doing something that was not part of the plan?

The question of whether each one of us thinks that our lives have meaning is a distinct one from whether the universe provides us with that meaning. Atheists think that the universe by itself does not provide us with meaning but it does not follow that they think that life is not worth living or that their own lives are pointless. As James Watson, co-discover with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA, said in response to the question of what he thought we are put in this world for, “Well I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating having a good lunch.” (The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, p. 100.)

Watson’s response that the anticipation of lunch gives his life purpose might be flip but it is true. There are plenty of things that we look forward to and are worth living for. Whatever our lot in life, we get pleasure from many things: the company of our family and friends, food, books, nature, and all the other things that we look forward to experiencing. The list of things which one can look forward to is endless. I for one eagerly anticipate learning new things and science is always opening up new frontiers of knowledge. There are new telescopes being built and satellites being put into orbit and new experiments being done. I am hoping that I will live long enough to learn at least some of what they discover. I also look forward to positive political changes such as the reduction of was and global poverty and disease and greater access to health care and education.

Atheists know that we have to create our own plan, for ourselves and, in conjunction with others, for the world. People, working together, can create a better world for all or choose to destroy it. Our fate is in our hands. If the goal of trying to create a better world does not inspire you and give your life meaning, then I doubt that religion will do any better. In fact, as I will argue in the next post, the absence of some external cosmically imposed meaning, rather than being depressing, is extraordinarily life affirming and exhilarating.

POST SCRIPT: How to attract more young people to church

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'God Smacked

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I predict that it is only a matter of time before churches introduce scantily-clad cheerleaders to further liven things up.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the face of science advancing its frontiers of knowledge, religious believers have had difficulty clinging on to the idea that there are still Deep Mysteries for which the only solution is god. The two most recent favorites are the origin of our universe and the very beginning of life. In the series of posts on the Big Bang, we have seen that when it comes to the origins of our universe, while we have by no means answered all the questions fully, it is clear that there is nothing about it that causes scientists to throw up their hands in bafflement and proclaim that some mysterious supernatural processes are at work. There already exist perfectly natural alternatives to divine creation.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the previous post, I criticized an essay by theologian David B. Hart who took the new/unapologetic atheists to task for not being as sophisticated as the grand old philosophers like Nietzsche, saying that we were attacking low-level straw gods and not engaging at the highest level of philosophical sophistication. But when the dust settles, what does Hart actually believe? As is usually the case with sophisticated theologians, this turns out to be extraordinarily hard to pin down, but what we can say is that what they believe in is nothing that the average religious believer would recognize as god.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It is clear that the sustained attacks on religion by the new/unapologetic atheists are having an effect, with apologists scrambling to find ways to respond. One tack they take is to not engage directly with the arguments but simply to disparage them by saying that the arguments of the new/unapologetic atheists are not new, that they were made a long time ago. This is correct. One can find strong criticisms of religious beliefs going back thousands of years and what we atheists say nowadays is not fundamentally different, because there have been no new arguments in favor of god either. What is new about the new atheists is the emphasis.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Recently I have been highlighting the absurd overreactions of religious people to what they perceive as lack of proper deference to their sensibilities. To them I say that they should learn to deal with it the way all the rest of us have to deal with others who exercise their rights of free speech to say things that we strongly disagree with. If religious people are offended by any TV show or song or book or film, they should simply not watch or listen or read. They, and other religious groups, have absolutely no right to try and prevent others from saying what they want to about religion. There should be no restrictions on speech in the public sphere, other than statements that create a clear and present danger.

Author Philip Pullman had the perfect response to people who get offended. He has just published a novel that gives an alternative account of how the Jesus legend arose. In his version of the story, Mary actually gave birth to twins: Jesus, who was a good man who initially thought he was the son of god but towards the end of his life realized that he was not and that there was probably no god either; and Christ, a weak and shallow person who, along with a mysterious stranger, orchestrated the events that led to the legend of Jesus that Christians now believe. The title of the book is The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. (You can read a review of the book here.)

At a reading and book signing, someone complained about how the title was offensive to Christians, saying “Now Mr. Pullman, the title of the novel seems to an ordinary Christian to be offensive. To call the son of god a scoundrel is an awful thing to say.”

Pullman’s reply is excellent. Watch:

For those who cannot watch or would like to know the exact words used by Pullman, I have transcribed it:

“Yes, it was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it, they don’t have to like it. And if you read it and dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me. You can complain about it. You can write to the publisher. You can write to the papers. You can write your own book. You can do all those things but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published or sold or bought or read. And that’s all I have to say on that subject.”

The private sphere can have expectations of certain norms of speech and behavior because in such situations it is often difficult for people to leave or avoid hearing or seeing things without creating awkwardness and drawing attention to oneself. It would be rude, for example, to invite someone into our homes and make fun of their beliefs. And most of the time people conform to such unspoken norms and things move along smoothly. But at the same time, those same norms should not be used to shut down discussions of legitimate questions just because people dislike them. The problem arises when people either want to restrict speech in the public sphere or do not make the distinction between the public and private sphere and apply the norms of behavior in one sphere to the other.

The absurd sensitivities of religious people need to be combated because undue respect for their beliefs leads to them doing the most appalling things in the name of protecting the honor of their religion and god. The problem is that once you concede that religious beliefs have any kind of preferred status, you immediately open the door to people thinking that they can decide what other people can say or do concerning their beliefs. For example, in Poland simply offending someone’s religious sensibilities can get you fined and even imprisoned. A pop star who merely said that she found it far easier to believe in dinosaurs than the Bible, adding “it is hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes” has so offended the Catholic Church that she is now facing two years in prison.

This is why widespread blasphemy is good and even necessary. It serves to remind religious people that religion has take its lumps just like any other beliefs. The more we tiptoe around religious beliefs, the more we encourage a sense of entitlement among religious people.

POST SCRIPT: Pope Song

Tim Minchin, whose terrific beat poem Storm (scroll down) making fun of new-age anti-science blather went viral, has a new song aimed at the pope and the Catholic Church.

Be warned that he uses strong language to make a point about the absurdity of people who seem to get more offended by mere words than by the terrible acts committed by priests and the cover-up of those acts by the church hierarchy. The tune is so catchy that you may find yourself singing it.

If people are offended by the song and video and want to do something about it, I suggest that they go back and read Phillip Pullman’s words above as to their options.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I have no problem with religious people wearing funny clothes and taking part in funny rituals and practicing all kinds of funny customs in the private sphere. It’s a free world (at least parts of it) and people have a right to practice their religion in any way that they see fit, and what consenting adults do is none of my business, though I fully reserve the right to be amused by such things and to point out the absurdities. Just as they have the right to practice their religion, others have the right to be make fun of them for doing so. But what is absolutely unconscionable is when these people impose their beliefs (religious or otherwise) on children.

Take for example, the practice of circumcision in Judaism and Islam. This strikes me as weird and indefensible. There has been an understandable outcry against the practice of female circumcision (dropping the euphemism and calling it by the more accurate term ‘female genital mutilation’) but it surprises me that there has been nothing similar against male circumcision. Why isn’t it called male genital mutilation? If adults want to circumcise themselves they should be allowed do so, just as we allow body piercing and tattoos and the like. But subjecting an infant to such things is simply wrong and it is only because it is a practice that is protected by long standing religious tradition that we do not say anything. Imagine if there had been no circumcision at all and some group came along today and said that they wanted to cut off the foreskin of their newborn male infants. Child protection agencies would be on them in a flash and their children would likely be taken away to protect them from potential abuse. But because it is done under the name of religions that have been around for a long time, it is given a pass.

It is like tattoos. We do not prohibit the practice of adults getting tattoos. But what if a new religion was started that required tattoos as a mark of faith and new born babies were given tattoos as a symbolic gesture of their parents’ commitment to having the child grow up in that religion? Would we, or should we, allow the practice? Shouldn’t the government step in and protect the rights of the most defenseless members of its community?

To me the issue is one of protecting the bodily integrity of a child that cannot give informed consent to mutilation. In Sri Lankan and other societies, female infants have their ears pierced and earrings inserted soon after birth and this practice is considered quite harmless and acceptable. But I refused to let this be done to my own daughters when they were infants (to the surprise of relatives who wondered why I was opposing a long-standing and unquestioned tradition) because I felt that since this was their body, this was a decision that they should make for themselves when they reached an age when they could make an informed choice. (When they were older, one of my daughters chose to have her ears pierced and the other declined.)

It is bad enough that religious people indoctrinate children’s minds with foolish ideas when they are at an impressionable age so that they find it hard to let go when they become adults. But some people go to such an extreme that they are willing to put the lives and health of children in danger. The number of such tragic cases is overwhelming and reading about them breaks your heart.

For example, we have the case of a child who died after receiving only homeopathic treatment. Another Wisconsin girl died because her father prayed for her instead of taking her to a doctor for a form of diabetes that could have been easily treated. Another boy died of a ruptured appendix while his parents prayed. In another case, children starved because their mother, who did not try to get a job or money in any way, said that they had to wait for god to provide. (This idea that god will take care of things resulted in the death of a man who injured his knee but could not afford to get it treated because he had no health insurance. So he simply sat in his recliner and prayed for healing for eight months.)

A member of a Christian religious cult starved her child to death on the instructions of her cult leader who claimed the child was a demon because he did not say ‘amen’ after meals. Prosecutors struck a deal with the mother in which she pleaded guilty and received a 20-year sentence but it will be reviewed if the child is resurrected from the dead. One hopes the prosecutors were only humoring the obviously deranged mother in order to get a guilty plea and do not really believe that there is any chance that the child will come back from the dead. The cult leader and two other members were found guilty of second-degree murder and child abuse and can face up to 60 years in jail at their sentencing in May.

A Haredi woman in Israel was arrested because she was starving her child and the members of her religious community rose up in protest and got her released.

There were apparently moves to cover Christian Science prayer treatments in the health care bill but fortunately it seems to have been stripped from the final bill that was signed into law.

The trouble with religion is that it encourages people to think that (1) their god is all-powerful and (2) that he will take care of those who faithfully worship him. Should we be surprised that some people (especially the more devout believers) take this message seriously and think that god will solve all their problems? One should not judge such people too harshly, though their acts are undoubtedly criminally stupid and they should be prosecuted in order to deter others from following their example. They are simply ignorant and gullible.

The people who are really culpable are the religious leaders and educated and sophisticated religious people who know better. They should be denouncing the idea that god will heal people. They know that god is not going to heal their own children and know enough to take advantage of modern science and medicine for themselves and their families when the need arises. But while not believing it themselves, they cynically endorse and propagate this message of a loving god who will look after the physical needs of his followers.

It is at the feet of these ‘moderate’ religionists that the ultimate blame for the suffering and deaths of these children should be placed.

POST SCRIPT: Children’s guide to religion

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I am not one who reveres the ‘founding fathers’ of America, the architects of its independence. They were all-too-human and had their faults, such as their tolerance of slavery, their denial of equal rights to women, and their desire to preserve the privileges and property rights of the well-to-do landowning classes. But even with those caveats, one has to gratefully acknowledge that the constitution they created, despite its serious flaws, was way ahead of its time in its incorporation of ideas that address the question of how to create a functioning republican democracy and balance the needs of free people with an orderly government. And the Bill of Rights surely must rank as the jewel in that crown.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I was at a conference recently and during one session a sign-up sheet was passed around. When it came to my row, the woman seated next to me gave me her business card and asked me to fill in her name and information on the sheet. I noted her long skirt and the fact that it was a Saturday and realized that she must be an observant Jew and that it was prohibited for her to ‘work’ on such a day and writing was presumably deemed to be work, something she confirmed to me later when we chatted at the end of the proceedings. I did as she requested, all the while silently marveling that a highly educated person would voluntarily conform to such absurd rules by an obviously petty god who has way too much time on his hands if he worries about things like this.
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