The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da

TWENTY-FOUR



* * *



NOT COLLECTING STAMPS





Although it is widely held that faith can move mountains, it has not reliably been seen doing so. Yes, of course it’s a metaphor – a powerful one, and a valid one. People have done, and will continue to do, amazing things because of their beliefs. But the main things that move mountains significantly are subducting tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Oh, and rain and cold, given long enough.

There is no denying the power that faith has over human beings, and the sometimes remarkable acts that it can motivate, but it really is a curious way for Homo sapiens to behave. It requires acceptance of a rather strange mixture of moral precepts and the supernatural. There is no direct objective evidence for many beliefs that are central to the world’s great religions – but there are innumerable reports of miraculous events, holy people, longstanding authority and rituals that may go back thousands of years. Religions are grounded in deep culture, inculcating the present generation’s values in the next. And they are often desirable values, don’t get us wrong.

However, there is an evident danger if you ground your morality in authority and ineffable deities. What is moral simply becomes what is prescribed. God is good – but this can lead to the concept that anything can be deemed good if you can convince people that God so wills. Such as cutting off the head of an infidel, or blowing women and children to smithereens in order to get yourself into Heaven – typical tactics of Roundworld’s own over-zealous zealots. With a few exceptions of that kind, largely to do with who counts as a genuine person, most of the world’s religions have their prized moral values in common. However, they are little more than the standard default values of most human societies. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t like done to you. Nearly all of us can sign up to these values, be we Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jedi Knights … even agnostics and atheists. It is not necessary to invoke a god to provide ‘authority’ for them. They are the common currency of humanity.

That leaves the supernatural elements for us to disagree about, and that’s where the real trouble starts. Those elements matter, because they endow a religion with its cultural significance. Anyone can sign up to ‘don’t kill people’, but only we Righteously Reformed Rincewindian Roundworldists genuinely believe that the entire universe is a foot across and sits on a shelf in Unseen University.

Prove us wrong.

We’re sitting in the audience, and there’s a debate in progress on the stage. The protagonist is very sure of his position, has good clear pictures, and is very clear about his story. His antagonist is different. She is rather unsure; her pictures are sketches and cartoons, and she is altogether more tentative.

Which do we tend to believe?

It mostly depends on who we are.

There are some who like certainty; they like to know just where they are. They tend to get their knowledge, their beliefs, from authoritative sources: the Bible, the Quran, textbooks, or the practices of their professions. They know that those who disagree with them are at least wrong, and sometimes evil. It’s certainly more than sinful for politicians to change their position on almost any topic. They simply can’t understand why someone can’t see the Truth when it’s presented to them, or that someone can’t appreciate the clarity of their assertions or the power of their arguments.

Over the years we have found, somewhat to our surprise, that many scientists are also like this. In private, they often acknowledge that there are difficulties with the current state-of-the-art theories in their subject area. They may even accept that some key features might have to be changed as more evidence comes in. But their public face is one of complete certainty. There are biologists who know that the most important feature of any organism is its DNA, and that virtually everything about living creatures is explained by their genes. There are physicists who know that the universe is made up of these particles, with these constants and mechanisms. They know that, ultimately, everything in the world reduces to fundamental physics. We can see that engineers can very easily adopt this position about their subject; after all, it is almost entirely man-made: gears, engines, oscilloscopes, MRI machines, LEDs, cyclotrons … But electrons? Quantum waves? W and Z particles? The Higgs boson?

Others are suspicious of such certainty, tending to say ‘I don’t know’ quite a lot, and are unsure about lots of things. Their beliefs have come from a medley of sources, many of them quite unreliable; they tend to change their minds, even about quite important issues.

Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon initially takes us back to the times when people didn’t have access to information of any reliable kind. But like so many New-Agers today, they took ‘information’ from astrology, from myths, from gossip, from folklore – because there wasn’t anywhere else to get it. Extelligence, the information outside heads, was then very disorganised; but primitive religions were an exception. They were often extensively organised, with lots of gods and goddesses, a cosmology or three, ceremonies and rituals.

Religions, in fact, were the most organised ways to run your life. As time passed, some kind of natural selection among religions went on, so that the ones that survived, the ones that gained adherents, became more effective for gaining even more. The Ten Commandments was a very good set, ensuring that there were less social problems even if most were ‘More honor’d in the breach than the observance’. ‘Eat rotting meat’ would have been a bad one. ‘Love your neighbour’ was remarkably good (initially in Judaism, then in Christianity), then spreading through the next 1500 years, according to a suggestion in Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature about the universal decline of human violence.

Now that extelligence has become better organised, with such things as internet search engines to help us navigate through overwhelming quantities of information, we can look back and see the beginnings of rationality among the Egyptians and the Greeks; then to some extent among the Romans and the Hebrews; then the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Rationality, and the beginnings of science, Bacon and Descartes, began to take over from theology as a way to run life, at least for a few people – those who wrote the tracts, anyway. From steam-power and canals and trains, via the industrial revolution, this led to the modern world.

However, religions remained as a backdrop to the play. Priests were always there to give their blessings, or to curse advances in rationality. Galileo, persecuted by the Church for his belief that the Earth went round the Sun, stands for thousands of such episodes. The Catholic Church has recently admitted it was in the wrong on that occasion, though rather grudgingly, and with growing ambivalence. But what about all the others, minor and major?

Among Western people, a solid proportion are now basically rational in their approach to life and its problems, but about 30% run their lives in strict accordance with religious tenets of one kind or another. Nothing like that many regularly attend churches or synagogues, but most Muslims go to mosques. The majority don’t give the way they should live a lot of thought; they run their daily lives as a matter of habit, conditioned by whim … Is that really too pessimistic a statement? How many people get home from work, turn the television on and their minds off?

Mobile phones and the internet are helping, but the attitude to these is often closer to religion than rational: they are seen as supernatural, worked by demons, perhaps. You know what we mean, if you come from the era before mobile phones: they’re miraculous. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote: ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This was the main theme of The Science of Discworld, especially in Benford’s alternative form ‘Technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced’.

Many Cambodians, especially those in the hill tribes, are animists. They believe that spirits are everywhere: in the water, the trees, the clouds. They have shamans, tribal ‘doctors’. In 2011, Ian gained an interesting insight into shamans when visiting a Cambodian village. A child was ill, and the shaman was performing a ceremony to expel bad spirits and restore her health. The interesting part was that the tribe had sent her to a conventional doctor the day before, who had put her on a course of antibiotics. Naturally, the shaman had to ratify this with the right ceremony, thereby making it possible to take the credit. The villagers presumably saw little difference between the antibiotics and the ritual – but someone in the tribe, perhaps the headman or one of his two wives, had the sense to try both. Human- and universe-centred thinking in an unholy alliance.

The world’s major religions dismiss animism on the grounds that belief in several gods – polytheism – is ridiculous. The intelligent way to go is monotheism, belief in one god. (Or, in the case of Unitarianism, belief in at most one god.) But is monotheism the great step forward that is so unquestioningly assumed?

It has a definite attraction: unification. It assigns all of the universe’s puzzling features to a single cause. Belief in one god is less off-putting than belief in dozens. It’s even consistent with Occam’s razor.

If you want to invoke Thomas Aquinas’s ontological argument for the existence of God, in his Summa Theologica, monotheism is unavoidable. There, he invites us to consider ‘the greatest conceivable being’. If it did not exist, then there would have to be a greater conceivable being: one that did exist. That surely is greater than a non-existent greatest being. So God exists, QED. Moreover, He is unique: you can’t have two greatest beings. Each would have to be greater than the other.

Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide independent proof that such an entity exists.

The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is larger. QED. Except, 1 is clearly not the largest whole number. For instance, 2 is bigger.

Oops.

What’s wrong? The proof assumes that there is a largest whole number. If it exists, everything else is correct, and it has to be 1. But since that makes no sense, the proof must be wrong, and that implies that it doesn’t exist.

So, in order to use the ontological argument to infer the existence of the greatest conceivable being, we must first establish that such a being exists, without simply referring to the definition. So what the argument proves is ‘If God exists, then God exists’.

Congratulations.

At any rate, whatever advantages monotheism may possess, being a consequence of the ontological argument is not one of them.

Monotheism’s supposed great triumph, unification, may actually be its greatest flaw. Assigning all puzzling phenomena to the same causes is a standard philosophical error, the equation of unknowns. Asimov put it this way: if you don’t understand UFOs, telepathy or ghosts, then UFOs must be piloted by telepathic ghosts. This way of thinking invents a label and attaches it to all mysteries, closing them off in the same way. It claims the same cause for all of them, which robs that cause of any explanatory force.

If you are a Cambodian animist, believing in a spirit for every natural phenomenon, you are aware that different phenomena may have different explanations. What explains water is not the same as what explains a tree. This can be a starting point for finding out more. But if you are a monotheist, offering the same explanation of everything you don’t understand – whatever it is, and equally applicable even if it were totally different – then you are just closing down lines of enquiry, advancing the same facile answer to every mystery.

How many people, in today’s scientific and technical world, have beliefs that are consonant with the kind of world they live in? How many understand about microwave ovens, why aeroplanes can stay up, about how electricity is distributed to houses (and don’t expect electricity from unconnected sockets in their wall), and how milk comes from cows, not from supermarkets? What proportion of people do we need to be rational, to keep civilisation running? More to the point, these days: how many people does it take – gangsters or terrorists, bigots or zealots – to break down the workings of a civilised society? And why should (some) religions foster that kind of terrorism, aiming to do just that? It may just be extremists, but there are clearly belief systems that encourage such extremism.

There’s an answer, but we would be happier if it were wrong. People live their lives, and are acquainted with all kinds of events, but for most people it’s a small world. In an African tribe, there may be fasts and festivals, intimate relationships with about twenty people, mostly relatives, and a nodding acquaintance with about another hundred; just like Orthodox Jews in Golders Green, or Muslims in Bradford. Workmates, hobbyists, football supporters, pub acquaintances and friends can bring the total up to about 150. Humans seem to be able to remember about 200 faces, at most.

In consequence, the lives of all these folk are nearly all parochial, much as life is portrayed in TV soaps. The events that happen to them are mostly small. Births, marriages and deaths are rare, coronations much rarer. It is not surprising that religions, bringing order into that narrow kind of life, setting it in a much bigger frame, are popular. They provide prayer, hymns and sermons to make such lives feel more meaningful. They promise bigger things: gods, angels and life after death. Tabloid newspapers’ obsession with celebrities, people everyone has seen on TV, similarly gives ordinary lives some glamour.

But there is another, darker side. Religions that preach damnation, or that predict an imminent end of everything in some kind of cataclysm, will also be attractive because what they are concerned with is imminent, now, tomorrow, happening to me and to the people I know. Relatives and friends will be damned, or caught up in the cataclysm. We must save them! Whether they want it or not.

Religion is human-centred. Though it pretends to be universe-centred, that universe is the tiny one created by their god, whether it be Odin or Jehovah or Brahma. Like the universe of Star Trek, it’s minuscule compared to the real thing. It is a human-sized village with its own headman, blown up to cosmic proportions but not greatly changed.

Astrology, like many other ‘personal’ new-age philosophies, picks up on the same attraction: what matters is what happens to me. Such lifestyles don’t even pay religious dues (maintaining the church roof, the vicar’s salary, hush-money to erstwhile children assaulted by priests or celebrities). They are belief systems that pretend to knowledge of the future, my future – convincingly enough to have caught more than one American president – while taking no responsibility for the accuracy of those predictions. Religions whose compass includes heaven-or-damnation contrive equally to promise and threaten without any guarantee of a blissful, or terrible, afterlife. But it’s an afterlife for me that’s at stake; deeply personal, not a bit universal. No guarantee is needed if you have faith.

Contrast that with the scientific stance. It’s surprisingly difficult to find science that matters, to me, that isn’t embodied in technology. The numbers are meaningless; even that important Sun is about 150 million kilometres away; solar storms may disrupt electronics, but not (mostly) my electronics. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way, billions of galaxies each like our own – but what does that do for me? There are hundreds of chemicals in our foodstuffs, hundreds of kinds of plant – mostly weeds, whose particulars are not necessary for nearly everyone – in our forests and meadows. There are millions of transistors in a computer, a mobile phone or a television. But I don’t need to know about that to operate them; just turn them on, play games on the computer, watch EastEnders on telly. Watch nature programmes, watch science programmes. Don’t get involved, as there’s nothing there that seems to affect me directly. It’s all universe-related, not people-related; it’s Benford’s contrast again.

A story about Jack is relevant here. When he was about fourteen, he was breeding tropical fish to accumulate money for going to university. His father had been killed dumping ammunition after the end of World War II, and his mother was earning about £2 a week as a machinist: not enough to pay rent (she had only a half-pension). Jack found a mated pair of angelfish, very rare at that time, and bought them for £50. That was a lot of money: he had about £75 in the bank, from breeding other fish. Within a week, one angelfish had died. He then bought another one, for £15.

His grandfather, with whom they were living, said (and he remembers this very vividly, especially his grandfather’s ‘study’: one corner of the living room with piles of newspapers): ‘This is where we tell if you are a queen bee or a wasp.’ His grandfather didn’t know much biology, and Jack remembered that un-biological aspect of the remark all these years. But his grandfather did know the distinction between having global concerns or only immediate concerns, and that’s the distinction he was making.

The angelfish bred, and Jack sold the first brood for £50; they bred again six weeks later, and again and again. He made a lot of money from them. The important distinction stayed with him: he became a scientist. He gave up on becoming a rabbi, which his father had intended for himself, an intention that fell on Jack’s shoulders, being the only boy. He could perhaps have taken on a pet shop, but that was not to his taste. Without understanding his grandfather’s distinction – he only understood it, to his shame, when writing this chapter – he was a queen bee with global concerns, not a wasp concerned only with human-centred things.

One irony of the story: Jack had thought that the fish that had died was a male, and replaced it with what he thought was another male. It turned out that both were females; the one he’d thought was female, which survived, was actually male. Even if you are a queen bee, you still need a bit of luck. Now, it becomes clear that Jack’s grandfather was asking whether Jack was human-centred or universe-centred: an Omnian fundamentalist, or a wizard.

Is a science-versus-religion argument going on now? Like there was, after Darwin published The Origin of Species? To read the newspapers, you could easily think that scientists are up in arms, trying to destroy religions.

Without doubt, there is a desperate anti-Darwinism prejudice in the middle states of the USA, in Indonesia, and in a few other countries. This seems to have its origin in politics rather than anti-rationality, since many of its proponents, such as those promoting the hypothesis of intelligent design, claim to be putting forward a rational, scientific criticism of Darwinism. The political aim in the USA is to get round the constitutional separation of church and state, by putting religion into the schools wrapped in science’s clothing. (That’s not solely our view: it’s what Judge John Jones concluded when presiding over Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, when he ruled that the teaching of intelligent design in school science classes was unconstitutional.) The methodology is to present an anti-Darwin stance in schools, perhaps in order to deny ‘naturalism’, the belief that nature can work perfectly well without gods. Alvin Plantinga and Dennett discuss this point in Science and Religion; Are They Compatible? This is yet another example of Benford’s distinction. Believers in, and promoters of, an intelligent designer want a human-centred system of the world. They want evolution to be guided. They have completely missed Darwin’s point, that a creator is unnecessary: natural selection can produce the same results without there being any human-type design.

This anti-Darwin prejudice, this wish for a human kind of design in evolution, must be distinguished from all those places in the world that haven’t yet emerged from a medieval dependence on religion in people’s daily lives, and where evolution isn’t ‘believed in’. And it must also be distinguished from an unthinking commitment to religion, hence disbelief in evolution – or in science in general – in the lives of most people even in scientific/technological societies today.

Dennett and Thomson explain the commitment to religion very well. It is irrational and faith-based, but for many people it seems almost to be a necessary part of being human. It provides a sense of identity and a shared culture. Part of the reason is that most religions have, in the course of their evolution, changed to become more and more adapted, more appropriate to the creatures they’re serving. All of their organisation, and most of their practices, have been developed better to serve their practitioners. Those that didn’t do so well have been lost to history. Few people now believe in Odin or Osiris.

Modern religions, with their beliefs in gods or at least in the supernatural, have all achieved congregations that seem happy with the hierarchy of senior people who determine the letters of the faith. This complicity between congregants and the hierarchy makes the belief system almost irrelevant, even though it seems to the congregants to be central. The joint activities, the singing and the praying, the individual commitments in common, give the congregants a warm feeling of belonging. From outside, each of these faiths seems a beautiful harmony, the odd spat over homosexuals or female bishops aside. It’s not surprising that rationality can’t edge its way in.

For decades, psychologists have been making scientific studies of religious belief; not with a view to proving or disproving the existence of any particular flavour of deity, but trying to find out what goes on inside the minds of believers. Some have concluded that belief in the supernatural is a more or less inevitable consequence of evolutionary survival value (an ironic finding, if true), because it knits human cultures together. Only recently has it occurred to a few psychologists that perhaps the thought processes of atheists also need to be investigated, since such people form a fairly large group that seems to be immune to these supposed evolutionary pressures. Comparing believers with non-believers is likely to shed more light on both.

Even if religion and other kinds of belief in the supernatural really are natural consequences of humanity’s past history, built into our thought processes by evolution, there is no compulsion to continue to think that way. Our sporadic tendency towards violence, especially against each other, can also be explained in similar terms, but there seems to be a widespread (and sensible) view that this does not excuse violent behaviour. A true human being should be able to override such innate urges by an act of will. The same can be said of belief in the supernatural: by exercising our intelligence we can train ourselves to disbelieve claims for which there is no clear evidence. Of course, believers think that there is evidence – certainly enough to convince them – but it tends to be obscure and heavily dependent on interpretation.

An instructive example of the influence of religious belief on rational judgement occurred in 2012 when Sanal Edamaruku, founder of Rationalist International and President of the Indian Rationalist Association, was invited to examine a miracle. What follows is based on an interview with Edamaruku published in New Scientist, and we report what was alleged there.fn1

The miracle occurred at a Catholic church in Mumbai, where water was dripping spontaneously from the feet of a statue of Christ on the cross. This event was interpreted as a sign from God – a holy miracle – and flocks of believers collected and drank the water, apparently thinking that it was holy water that would cure all manner of illnesses. A television station asked Edamaruku to comment, and consonant with his position, he rejected the claim of a miracle. Since his view was at that moment purely a matter of opinion, the TV company challenged him to provide scientific proof, which of course required visiting the church and taking a look.

The church authorities gave their approval. It didn’t take long to find the cause of the ‘miracle’. A drainage channel from a washroom passed beneath the cross’s concrete plinth. A quick look at the drain revealed that it was blocked. The walls behind the cross, and the wooden cross itself, were soaking up drainage water through capillary action. Some of the water was emerging through a nail hole and running down over the statue’s feet. Edamaruku took photographs to document the cause.

Point made, you will imagine. Well, yes – but. Edamaruku had long been a thorn in the side of religious groups, and his finding caused them some embarrassment. They could have used System 2 thinking to investigate the likely causes of dripping water, or just called a plumber like most sensible people would have done when they found water dripping from places where water ought not to be. Instead, they made a System 1 judgement and plumped for a supernatural explanation. But it’s not a great idea to have people drinking dilute sewage, even if they do imagine it’s a miracle cure. The discovery probably saved the church a great deal of potential trouble, even if it debunked the miracle.

So what was the response?

The church itself did nothing. But according to Edamaruku, people from two lay Catholic associations filed charges against him under section 295A of India’s penal code, which dates to 1860 and forbids ‘deliberately hurting religious feelings and attempting malicious acts intended to outrage the religious sentiments of any class or community’. Edamaruku has said that he is willing to appear in court, where he is convinced the case will be thrown out – but unfortunately the law has a nasty sting in its tail. Anyone accused can be jailed, perhaps for many months, before the case comes to trial. So, as we write, Edamaruku has fled to Finland, and the Rationalist Association has set up an online petition calling for the complaints to be dropped.

Christian theologians have long worried about the paradox of silentio dei, the silence of God: if God exists, why does He not speak? An omnipotent, omnipresent being should have no difficulty in making His existence evident, in undeniable ways. Lined up alongside this strange absence are other problems of human existence: why a caring God permits diseases and natural disasters, for example. Theology being what it is, innumerable answers have been proposed.

There’s a Jewish joke about this. (There’s a Jewish joke about everything.) Three rabbis are arguing a point in theology. Two claim it was first made by Rabbi ben Avraham; the third claims it was Rabbi ben Yitzchak. ‘Look, I know it was him! I studied this for my thesis!’ But the others still disagree. Eventually, in desperation, the third rabbi says, ‘I know, let’s ask God!’ So the three of them pray, and suddenly the sky splits open and God leans out, looks down, and says, ‘He is right. It was Rabbi ben Yitzchak.’

After a stunned pause, the first rabbi says: ‘Well, now it’s two against two.’

Upon reflection, the joke works because we know it wouldn’t be like that. God could solve the problem of disbelief by writing his name across the sky in letters of fire a kilometre high. But for obscure theological reasons, an omnipotent being apparently declines to exercise that particular power. The only possibility that theologians have not contemplated is that God is silent because He doesn’t exist. On that particular issue all religious factions agree – and they don’t accept that explanation.

So, if you were to take a vote, there would be a clear majority verdict: God does exist. Atheists are a definite minority. However, even if you think that questions about the universe can be decided democratically, you have to ask the question sensibly. Religious people are happy to align themselves with all of the other religions in the world when it comes to those dreadful atheists – infidels, literally people without faith. But as soon as you start to examine what different religions, or different sects within a given religion, or even different believers within the same sect, actually believe, common cause gives way to bedlam. The Church of England, for example, is currently split into factions over the issue of women bishops, and is perilously close to splitting into two different sects. And the Church of England itself originated in a split from the Church of Rome. There are thousands of different Christian denominations, let alone other faiths.

In this debate, we have no desire to argue for either position. We’d rather there were no bishops at all – men or women – though being realists we don’t expect that to happen. What intrigues us is that good – indeed, devout and committed – Christians, people on both sides of the argument, have examined their innermost hearts, prayed to their God and been answered with a clear vision of God’s wishes. There can be no doubt that that is what they sincerely believe. But, curiously, God’s wishes turn out to be that (a) Women bishops should be allowed, and (b) They shouldn’t. Indeed, God’s wishes are remarkably similar to what those of the individuals concerned have been all along, before they consulted their deity on the matter.

From within that debate, if it can be dignified with the word, it is clear to all that one side is right and the other is wrong; one has correctly divined God’s wishes, the other is deluded. Problem: which is which? From outside, we are observing an interesting experimental test of the efficacy of prayer, indeed of the existence of the kind of deity in which the Church of England believes, indeed the general concept of a belief system. Silentio dei is not the difficulty: God has indeed spoken to both sides – or so they genuinely believe. But He has spoken with a forked tongue. From outside, if He existed in a form consistent with the beliefs of the Church of England, then surely He would have told everyone the same thing.

So this particular religion fails a definitive experimental test, one inadvertently set up by the believers themselves. In science, that would be a good reason to reject the hypothesis.

Worldwide, religious believers outnumber atheists, even if we exclude people who nominally belong to a religion but don’t practise it. However, across the board, the world’s religions find it virtually impossible to agree on the supernatural features of their belief systems. They often seem to agree on fundamentals such as a god – but which god? Each religion, each sect, has a god that – it tells us – demands a different set of rituals, a different form of worship, different prayers. Each is in the minority, so at most one can be correct. But they all appeal to the same reasoning: faith. Since their own beliefs disagree, faith clearly doesn’t hack it. Thus the apparent majority turns out to be smoke and mirrors.

The writer and comedian Ricky Gervaisfn2 made a similar point more pithily in 2010:

The dictionary definition of God is ‘a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe’. Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6000 years ago, historians have catalogued over 3,700 supernatural beings, of which 2,870 can be considered deities. So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say ‘Oh, which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra …?’ If they say, ‘Just God. I only believe in the one God,’ I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869.

Ultimately, religious beliefs are based not on objective evidence, but on faith. Religions are belief systems, and many proclaim this as an advantage: faith is a test, set by God. If you don’t agree with them, you’ve failed. Many religionists – and a proportion of postmodernists – have claimed that science is also a belief system; in effect, just an alternative religion. Not so. They have failed to understand the key difference between science and belief: in science, the highest points are given to those who disprove the tenets of the alleged faith, especially its central tenets. In science there is no continuing central dogma, such a strong characteristic of religions. Indeed, that is what defines any particular religion: its central creed. Rationality, or indeed science, continually matches ideas against each other – and for science, to the extent that it’s possible, against events in the real world – and is prepared to change its stance according to the way they do or do not agree. For religions, in contrast, events in the real world are held up to the dogma. If they match, they are accepted; if they don’t, they are either ignored or declared to be evil, needing to be destroyed.

Science can’t disprove religious beliefs. Nothing can. That’s the problem. It’s like trying to prove that our universe does not sit on a shelf in Unseen University, a region of the multiverse that is forever inaccessible to us. But the inability of science to disprove religious beliefs in the supernatural does not make it a belief system, even if it may sometimes lead people not to believe in the supernatural. When presented with extraordinary hypotheses, disbelief is not the opposite of belief. It is the default, neutral stance: ‘I’m not interested in playing this game, it makes no sense.’

Many religious people try to reject atheism by portraying it as merely another form of belief, with the natural position being what they call agnosticism. They then interpret that stance as the view that the chances of God existing are about 50-50. So by being neutral, you are already halfway towards agreeing with them. This is nonsense. As Christopher Hitchens has said: if we are asked to accept a proposition without evidence, we are also entitled to dismiss it without evidence.

The default is to disbelieve. An atheist is not someone who believes that God doesn’t exist. It is someone who doesn’t believe that God does exist. If you think those are the same, ponder this statement by the comedian Penn Jillette: ‘Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.’

fn1 One minute with Sanal Edamaruku, New Scientist (30 June 2012) 27. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku.

fn2 http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist