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.

Can those who do good in order to reap a heavenly reward be called "moral" ?

Ideological Christians often claim that atheists can't be trusted because they have no reason to be moral.

This is a common trope. It's one of the arguments they use to justify the fact that no avowed atheist can get elected to national office across most of the country, and certainly not the presidency.

But morality evolved, along with the more obvious physical aspect of our being. A well-written book describes how this probably came about: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. He also wrote a book on how God evolved, so to speak: The Evolution of God (Back Bay Readers' Pick).

Actually it's easy to describe atheistic morality.

First, it's the only morality that's actually moral. Religious people are working for a reward. How is that moral? They're just playing the game. Do this and that and you get heaven as a reward. How is this different from paying kids to get good grades? It's entirely extrinsic. Selfish.

So-called atheists realize that this life is all there is, so they find it infinitely precious. They also realize that if they're wicked they can't be happy, because of the heuristics built into the human mind--heuristics that we can't eliminate. Lots of people do evil, of course--including innumerable people who claim they do that evil in the name of God. But in my long life I've never met anyone who was happy who also mistreated others. Such people, regardless of their riches (if any) live in a private hell, utterly isolated.

So I tell religious people--prove to me that you're moral, because on the face of it just looks as though your acts of charity are nothing more than looking out for #1.

With the added kicker that people who are focused on the "next life" that they imagine they'll have often give this life short shrift.

That's how you get Catholics placidly propagating, even when the world now holds at least five times as many people as it can carry without environmental degradation--i.e. making the world less and less able to carry future generations. Especially since some of that degradation is permanent, including the mass extinction now going on and the collapse of porous aquifers worldwide.

So along the lines of the path to Hell being lined with good intentions, even religious people who do have actual love for others in their hearts and not just the smug self-satisfaction of the Pharisees are destroying the Earth with their "kindness."

It's not the so-called atheists who have to defend their claims to goodness. Quite the opposite.