Science cannot figure out if God exists or not--true, but does it matter?

"Science cannot figure out if God exists or not."

This is literally true but misses how the progression of our understanding of the natural world has gradually occupied space once occupied by supernatural explanations.

What's left is ethics. Religious people dislike atheists so much in part due to the fear that without a deity's carrot (heaven) and stick (hell), humans wouldn't behave, and chaos would ensue.

Or that, at best, we'd wind up with the tribal morality summarized by the Arab saying "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my neighbor. Me, and my neighbor against the stranger."

This arena--the biology of good and evil--has been my particular interest for many decades. There's actually a fascinating book about it that I hope Jackie reads someday: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology.

Sociobiologists aren't saying they've found the Ten Commandments coded in our DNA. Just that we're designed to care for others--at least others who are related to us, others in our gene pool (perceived as our tribe). The great contribution of Christianity was in expanding the notion of "our tribe" to all peoples everywhere.

To put it another way, morality has an amoral basis--the gene pool's need to grow and prosper--with moral results: marriage, good citizenship, the Golden Rule, rule of laws, not men--and the willingness to defend all that, even with deadly force (if all peaceful alternatives have failed).

Religion articulates, shapes, and reifies natural impulses. Science can tell you where those impulses come from. It can't deal with the "supernatural" but it can tell you where the notion that there is a "supernatural" came from.

I have no desire to replace religion with nothing. I want humanity to live by moral codes. But across the rich world in particular, the moral codes of religions are gradually being supplanted by secular moral codes. This has already happened in much of Western Europe, and is expanding in America, though still by a small minority.

The advantage of moral codes based on nature is that nature is the firmest foundation. The disadvantage is that it's harder to explain to the average person. I can say that, living in a very secular neck of the woods--Silicon Valley--I don't see the nonreligious people I know stealing from orphans and cheating on their mates any more than do the religious people I know (and I know many of these as well, via my spouse).

The nonreligious people I know don't picket churches with placards saying "Don't Believe!" They just go about their business, never thinking about religion one way or another. It's simply irrelevant to them.

Judging religions from a public policy angle

I wrote the following entry for a thread on Amazon.com's Relgion forum:

Religion is a cognitive framework overlaying universal human tribality. Its validity isn't in its theology but in how well it maps to those universal human needs and to current exigencies.

I'm a lot less interested in each faith's doctinal particulars than in how its adherents behave.

"By their works ye shall know them."

For example, Mormon prayer is supposed to have you asking God for advice, not for special favors. And not even advice per se. In your prayer you tell God of something you're dealing with--along with what you propose to do about it. It you put in that work, then God, hopefully, will give you a wordless feeling as to whether you're barking up the right tree or if you need to go back to the drawing board, then ask God again when you have a new proposal.

Now even though I don't believe in any God, I find this approach to prayer kind of ideal--it encourages personal initiative and resonsibility. Which is good for society.

I notice most of the religious people in Amazon's Religion forum seem to focus on doctrine to the exclusion of actual practice, and the atheists and empiricists to critique different doctrines.

So let me encourage both sides to talk more about doctrine insofar as it shows up in pracitce. Because your doctrine is your own business, but your practice impinges on the rest of us.         

The GOP's Lie du Jour: no God in Demo Platform

We should expect a shocking new revelation about those terrible Democrats pretty much daily from now through the election.

Yesterday's shocking revelation was that the word "God" doesn't appear in the Democratic Party platform. As proof that this went against the Founding Fathers' zeitgeist, they presented the Constitution--oops, no God there anywhere--so they presented the Declaration of Independence as our "founding document."

Oops again. The word "God" never appears there either. But what does appear is language that clearly refers to God--"endowed by our Creator."

So it appears that I'm splitting hairs to make a point, since the absence of the word "God" is actually irrelevant, since the reference to religious faith is there.

Well. So are the Republicans, because the Democratic Platform did include language talking about "faith" which clearly referred to God.

And so here again, for the umpty-zillionith time, the Republicans say something that is technically not a lie, but which is in fact a knowing, bald-faced lie--because the substance of the Republicans' charge is false.

If you care about substance, you will agree that this is yet another proof that the Republican Party has chosen lying as its main vehicle to advance its fortunes.

The Democrats are, as a whole, more secular than the Republicans, as a whole. Before the takeover of the Republican Party by erstwhile Southern White Democrats in the 1970s, there actually were many Republicans who were either nonreligious or whose religion wasn't the fervent Bible-thumping flavor of religion that now characterizes the Republican majority. Now they're either Independents or conservative Democrats.

But while Democrats are less fervent than today's Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats still profess to believe in God, and their party's platform reflected their faith--their calmer faith that doesn't say "You're going to Hell if you aren't not just a Christian but my kind of Christian."

In that sense many Republican Christians resemble Muslim Salafists, who say the same thing about hundreds of millions of their fellow Muslims that Fundamentalist Christians say of their fellow non-Fundamentalist Christians.

Also, this latest Republican lie also shows the Republicans' preference for symbols over reality. They never ask whether their own platform embodies Christ's instructions to us about what we should do with this life--in which case the Democratic Platform is far more Christlike than the Republicans' "I've got mine Jack you're on your own" platform.

But for the Republican Party, symbol trumps substance. Goes hand in hand with lying trumping actual policy discussion.

A religious thought problem

Suppose God Almighty showed up in low orbit, gigantic and undeniable, and spoke such that everyone alive heard His voice in their heads in their language, and He said:

"Guys, I just thought I'd drop by and clear up a few things. There is such a thing as good and evil, and for what it's worth I think you should do good and avoid evil. But when I organized the Universe I didn't put in a heaven. When you die, that's it. You're gone. I'm eternal--you're not. No heaven, no hell, no punishment, no reward.

"Now there is a hell, so to speak, in the span of your lives. Haven't you noticed that bad guys are never happy?  That's the elegance of my design. As is the heaven of a life well spent.

"Sorry if this requires some revision in your various Good Books, but that's the way it goes. I'll check back in a billion of your years and see how things are going. 'Bye."

----------------

So--what do you think would happen then? Knowing that heavenly reward/punishment was off the table, what would religious people do?

1 Theologian vs. 3 Athiests + big Greek Chorus commenting

New York Times columnist Stanley Fish reviewed three popular atheist manifestos recently, and in doing so he got pretty prolix. Still, he inspired hundreds of comments, including mine. And both the books and the review and the comments dwelt at length on the question of the social benefits of religion, or lack thereof. This was my response:

So many words. Look, folks: suppose all religions were really swell, and every believer were equally swell. And suppose all atheists were irredeemably evil, and all nonreligious organizations such as the Communist party were all evil too.

Or assume the exact reverse. It doesn't make a bit of difference to the question "Is there a God" whether believing makes you swell or fell.

Even atheists get trapped in the endless noodling of literate Ptolomies like Fish. Because the only rational answer to the question "Is there a God" is "Huh? What was that last word?"

All definitions of God and arguments to support those definitions are tautologies. The word "God" is completely meaningless from any scientific/rational context. You can't deny the existence of something whose existence can't be meaningfully described. So it's impossible to be an atheist, really. The term "atheist" was invented by religious people to describe "those who deny the existence of God." It's a propaganda term like "miscegenation." You can't deny the existence of things that aren't definable/describable. Nothing to deny.

Hope clouds observation. We're born. We live. We die. Deal with it. Life can still be deeply meaningful once you realize that it's up to us to create meaning. Stop looking for it and start doing it.

Q. "What does the dyslexic agnostic insomniace do?"

A. "He lies awake all night wondering if there's a Dog."