Copyright 2014 by Dan Dana

 

D  R  A  F  T

 

The Reason Revolution

Atheism, Secular Humanism, and the Collapse of Religion

 

Publisher's review:

 

This short book, only 8,000 finely crafted words, is destined to be one of the most cited and influential modern treatises on atheism and secular humanism. It focuses squarely on the inherent irrationality of religion, and reveals the utter irreconcilability of science and religion. Offering several "reconciliation theories" to persons of faith, it forces every reader to make a choice.

 

Contents

 

 

Note on sources:  This manuscript was not prepared as an academic paper citing original sources. Readers who question any scientific assertions made here may verify those assertions by Google or other research tools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preface

 

The intent of this short volume is to shine a bright light on the inherent irrationality of religion, and to bring into sharp relief the contrast between science-derived knowledge and the purported "knowledge" claimed by the faithful to be derived from holy books and other supernatural sources. In so doing, it is not my intent to disparage individual persons of faith, whom I do not hold personally responsible for the harm done by institutionalized religion.

 

A Christian minister who reviewed a draft of this manuscript commented that some of my language was insulting to the faithful. Further, he rightly cautioned that religious readers who feel personally attacked will naturally react defensively and therefore reject any potential fresh insights about their faith they may have otherwise gained. I have revised the text to minimize that unintended consequence, but I fear my imprecise laser of light will nevertheless inflict some collateral damage.

 

That would be unfortunate since an important segment of the readership of this book is indeed the faithful. The aim of The Reason Revolution will not be served if its message simply bounces around the secular echo chamber where there will be little dispute. Correspondingly, people of faith who wish to expand their understanding of the natural world are not well served by remaining in the echo chamber of their religion where existential challenges to their basic doctrine are seldom heard.

 

So, I apologize in advance to those readers who may feel denigrated by my words. Despite that twinge, I request that you bravely read on, recognizing that my quarrel is not with you personally, but with religion as a societal phenomenon, and especially with governments that infuse religion into policy. Thank you for joining me in this friendly intellectual contest—a competition of ideas.

 

Dear reader, just as sports competitors can respect each other as persons, I hope that you and I can stay in the "game" to its conclusion, that you read to the end of this short book, resisting the impulse to withdraw in pique.

 

The Reason Revolution in historical context

 

A quiet revolution is underway. We hear no gunfire. No armies are engaged in battle. No violent overthrow of political regimes is occurring. This is a peaceful evolution, a slow-motion, although accelerating, transformation of a world order that has been in place for over 2,000 years.

 

Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed were the revolutionary leaders who established the current monotheistic world order, supplanting the theologically fragmented era of Neolithic, Egyptian, and Greek religions. The three primary Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), combined with the South Asian (Dharmic) and East Asian (Taoist) faiths, comprise a supernaturalist bloc of belief systems that has held sway up to the present, but is beginning to lose its grip on the hearts and minds of people.

 

By definition, supernaturalists contend that there exist forces beyond scientific understanding of the laws of nature. The Reason Revolution is occurring as the supernaturalist bloc gradually yields to atheistic naturalism. The advancement and dissemination of knowledge gained through science is the engine of this revolution.

 

Although Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, and other cultures must be credited with earlier scientific contributions, Galileo (1564-1642) is widely considered the "Father of Modern Science." His dispute with Pope Urban in 1616 about whether Earth is the stationary center of the universe (heliocentrism was considered heresy) was the first skirmish of the Reason Revolution. (Galileo wrote privately to his friend and fellow astronomer, Johannes Kepler, "I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd"—a rude commentary, but an understandable sentiment even today.)

 

So, the Reason Revolution has been underway about 400 years. Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Hawking are prominent among the many scientists who have contributed to our understanding of the natural universe and its earthly inhabitants. Gradually, religious authorities have been forced to concede truth to science, as described in the "Reasons for skepticism" [hyperlink to target] section below. (The Catholic Church discontinued its prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism in 1758, but not until 1992 did it officially vindicate Galileo—Papal fallibility is a hard thing to admit!)

 

The pace of the revolution has quickened in recent decades. Astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996), the great popularizer of science, laid a foundation for later authors to publish popular books and other media that explicitly refute religious orthodoxy. In today's more accepting atmosphere, atheists are coming out of the closet in droves. Supernaturalism is crumbling as the "god of the gap" [hyperlink to target] (explained below) shrinks. A global 2012 poll reports that 59% of the world's population is religious, and 36% is not religious, with a 9 percent decrease in religious belief from 2005. The trend is clear.

 

The Reason Revolution has no formal leaders, no central planning, no headquarters, no founding documents, and no funding. It is an organic movement whose participants envision a better, more humanitarian, world without religion. As our numbers and our proportional representation increase, and as the supernaturalist theology of religionists arcs toward irrelevance, reason will overtake faith. It is only a matter of time.

 

Questioning belief

 

Do you "believe" (that is, accept as factually correct) any proposition for which there is a complete absence of evidence-based proof—the kind of proof that does not rely on testimonials, anecdotal reports, eye-witness accounts, and other non-empirical and non-testable assertions? If you believe in a "higher power" or expect to experience consciousness after your physical death, then you hold beliefs based solely on unverifiable assumptions at best, and empty superstitions at worst.

 

Of course, it is each person's rightful choice to have faith in supernatural beings and an afterlife, a choice usually based on tradition, teachings of religious authorities, or the "word" of a deity as contained in a "holy book" written by pre-science mystics who lived hundreds or thousands of years in the past. But as science has produced evidence-based knowledge of the natural world over the past 400 years, at a pace that has accelerated rapidly in recent decades, belief in the supernatural becomes increasingly tenuous.

 

As Carl Sagan famously said, there is "not a shred of evidence" to support the basic tenets of religion, namely the existence of deities or of an afterlife. Even most devout believers acknowledge that the existence of their god(s) cannot be proven and that it therefore must be accepted on faith. Most thoughtful, open-minded believers recognize that some skepticism is warranted.

 

Admittedly, my philosophical bias is toward the view that empirical science is the only valid approach to factual knowledge. Certainly, personally meaningful subjective experiences stimulated by art, music, dreams, meditation, visions, drug-induced altered states of consciousness, certain forms of mental illness, anomalous "mystical" events, and "spiritual revelations" can produce seemingly profound insights into the nature of reality. However, such insights are idiosyncratic, are not objective, and do not apply universally—"true for me" does not mean "true for all." The proven, verified, replicated results of scientific research are, indeed, true for all—even for those who deny their factual validity.

 

This book presents science-based reasons for rejecting religious belief, proposes secular humanism as a positive alternative worldview, discusses political implications of atheism, and offers hopeful predictions about how the world may look once religion collapses.

 

Reasons for skepticism

 

Let us examine nine reasons for skepticism, all of which are derived from scientific discovery, not from wishful speculations about the supernatural. As you read with an open mind, question how the following science-based considerations can be reconciled with religious faith. (Several “reconciliation theories” for bridging the growing chasm between science and religion will be offered later for your critique.)

 

  1. Of the many existing religions, which is the true one? According to the Pew Research Center (2012), Christianity has 2.2 billion adherents, Islam 1.6 billion, and Hinduism 1.1 billion. Further, there are at least ten other contemporary religions that claim between one million and 500 million believers. The differences among those religions are not insignificant—some are polytheistic and some believe in reincarnation rather than a conscious afterlife. So it can hardly be claimed that "we all worship the same god." How certain can you be that you happened to be born into the society in which the dominant religion (or your parents' religion) is the one that believes in the one true god?

 

Or, perhaps an extinct religion was the "true" one? According to Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, humans have invented over 100,000 religions, most of which have become extinct, having no current adherents. The most familiar extinct religion in the Western context is "Greek mythology." Citizens of the Greek empire were intelligent, literate, and sophisticated. They worshipped Zeus, Apollo, and other gods, and were no doubt as certain of the truth of their beliefs as modern Christians and Muslims are of theirs. If we now think of the Greek religion as quaint and baseless, how might Earth's inhabitants 1000 years hence regard the religions of today, for which there is no more evidence than there is for the gods of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians? If it seems obvious to us that Apollo does not exist, how does it not seem equally obvious that the Christian god does not exist? The evidence for each is equally nil.

 

Everyone is an atheist. Christians don't believe in Zeus. Muslims don't believe in Thor. Hindus don't believe in the Christian god. How do you know you believe in the right god? If you are certain in your belief, how do you explain the fact that most people in the world are as certain as you, yet believe in different gods from yours? As author Stephen Roberts put it, "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do."

 

  1. Our insignificant place in the universe. Our sun is an unremarkable star among 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is an unremarkable galaxy among 100 billion known galaxies. Also, astronomers know that many, if not most, stars have planetary systems. Astronomers recently estimated that there are one trillion planets in the Milky Way alone, 30 billion of which may be Earth-like (that is, having liquid water) on which some forms of life may have evolved.

 

Doing the math, 30 billion times 100 billion is the number of potential life-hosting planets in the universe—a number so unimaginably large there is no name for it. The use of astronomical spectroscopy has determined that the same chemical and physical laws apply throughout the universe. Therefore, it is probable that among that vast number, many Earth-like planets exist that host life forms that evolved through similar processes as those on our home planet—although there is no reason to think that life forms elsewhere bear any visual resemblance to humans. Furthermore, an increasing number of cosmologists accept that our universe may be only one of perhaps an infinite number of universes in the "multiverse" —a scale defies human imagination.

 

Regarding time, our universe burst into existence about 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang, the moment that spacetime began (at least in our home universe). Humans and our closest modern primate cousins (chimpanzees) diverged from our common ancestor about five million years ago. Therefore, we humans have existed for only 0.000036% of the time our universe has existed.

 

Astronomers also know that our sun will exhaust its nuclear fuel and become an enlarged "red giant" star, enveloping and vaporizing the Earth, in about five billion years. Even assuming that Earth's environment remains hospitable to humans and our descendant species until the bloating sun incinerates its close-in planets (extremely unlikely, since catastrophic events such as solar megaflares, major asteroid strikes, and mass extinctions happen every several million years), humans will have existed only 0.0014% of the maximum possible time period.

 

How plausible is it that a creator made all this cosmic machinery solely for the benefit of our Earth-bound species, which exists for barely an instant of time and in a nearly infinitesimal spot in the multiverse? How can human grandiosity and delusions of self-importance be so out of sync with the actual dimensions of space and time?

 

  1. The fact of evolution.  Evolution is a "theory" in the same sense that gravity is a theory—it is no longer a disputable opinion. All contemporary species of plants and animals, including our own, have arrived at their current state by a process of natural selection, resulting in an amazing diversity of living organisms. Geneticists have determined that modern humans share common ancestry with every other living creature on Earth—not only with primates, but with all mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, and fungi. The "last universal common ancestor" (called LUCA in scientific literature) lived about 3.7 billion years ago. Evolution takes time—more time than can be easily imagined.

 

There was not a particular generation in which the parent was an animal and the offspring was a human. The fuzzy boundary between pre-human and human is at least tens of thousands of years wide. If, as Christians and others believe, humans have a "soul" that distinguishes us from non-humans and that survives our physical death, at what point in time did the deity-creator install that soul? Or, do mosquitoes and frogs and mushrooms also have everlasting souls?

 

  1. The accidental human population.  This includes  Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Moses, Buddha, and all other founders of religions. The most recent common ancestor of all humans living today, called the "concestor," lived before modern religions appeared.

 

Consider that the number of direct ancestors of every human living today, spanning 30 generations or about 1,000 years, totals over one billion people—a number greater than the world population at that time. So, it is a mathematical necessity that many of our direct ancestors who lived 1,000 years ago are in our individual lineage through more than one pedigree.

 

The first of several migrations out of Africa, where Homo sapiens originated, occurred about 1.8 million years ago. Those migrants then populated the remaining landmasses on the Earth (reaching the Americas only as recently as 17,000 years ago). Our concestor may have lived just prior to that first out-of-Africa migration, or she may have lived much more recently—some near-extinctions of humans have occurred, including one caused by a supervolcano eruption about 70,000 years ago in modern-day Indonesia that resulted in a decline in world human population to about 10,000 individuals. In any case, our concestor lived long before contemporary religions were founded.

 

Now, join me in a thought experiment: Imagine the act of sexual intercourse that resulted in the birth of our concestor. The sperm cell that first reached and fertilized our concestor's mother's egg had 40 million to 1.2 billion competitors—other sperm that were produced at that moment, all swimming vigorously through her fallopian tube toward the awaiting egg.

 

Next, imagine the consequences if a different sperm had happened to reach the egg first. If so, our concestor would have been a different person (a genetic sibling), and would have had different offspring (just as your siblings' children are different people from your own children). Consequently, no individual in her descendant lineage would have existed, which includes you and me and every other person who has lived during the past tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The world would now be populated by an entirely different set of people. An entirely different human history would have taken place. All the great and notable people who fill our history books would not have existed—a world-full of other individuals, no doubt including many great and notable people, would have existed instead. Those other people would have performed a different set of momentous deeds, resulting in an entirely different world history.

 

More to the present point, Jesus would not have existed, nor would any of the other prophets and originators of today's religions. Therefore, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and other faiths would not now exist, although other superstitions likely would have been invented to meet natural human needs and wish-fulfilling beliefs, discussed below.

 

How confident can you be that your particular religion is true, considering that its very existence depends on the success of the one-in-millions sperm accidentally reaching the egg of our concestor's mother first, eventually leading to the birth of your religion's founder many thousands of years later? Plausible?

 

  1. The disappearing "god of the gap."  The earliest deity was probably the sun, followed by the moon, then by additional gods who control seasons, fertility, and other mysterious events. As science emerged as an alternative way of comprehending those mysteries, even religious authorities eventually acknowledged that the sun is not a deity, that seasons are explained by planetary motion, that fertility is explained by our biology, and other prior mysteries are understood without resorting to religion for explanation. No less an authority than Pope (now Saint) John Paul II declared in 1996 that "Truth cannot contradict truth," meaning faith cannot contradict science.

 

The gap between scientific knowledge and the remaining mysteries has progressively narrowed. Within the past century, science has produced astounding insights into the nature of the world and the universe, further narrowing the gap to a small slice of the huge and baffling pie of mystery that confronted our pre-science ancestors as they sought to understand their world.

 

Yes, mysteries remain, but given the remarkable and accelerating progress made by science in debunking previously held religious "truths," isn’t it more reasonable to regard the remaining mysteries as natural phenomena that can eventually be understood by science, rather than continue to attribute them to some decreasingly necessary supernatural deity, for which there is no empirical evidence whatsoever?

 

  1. Wishful thinking.  Numerous psychological studies show that people believe to be true what they wish to be true.

 

The monotheistic god, particularly the Abrahamic god, is usually personified as a powerful, wise, loving (male) parental figure who cares about us as individuals and is capable of protecting us from harm. Afterlives are depicted as idyllic places, at least for the faithful, in which one need not fear danger, being under the eternal protection of the fatherly deity, and where one is joyfully reunited with departed loved ones.

 

Such beliefs may well be a comfort to people who experience anxiety, fear, loneliness, despair, and loss in their real lives—a common human condition. Relief from such emotional torment would indeed be welcome. Sufferers understandably hope for relief and eagerly cling to their clergy's sermonic promises that perfect peace and joy await them in heaven.

 

Is it more probable that loving and protective deities and idyllic afterlives are the product of wish fulfillment, or that they actually exist despite the total lack of evidence for them?

 

For reasons well understood by evolutionary psychologists, humans form durable emotional attachments (love) to family members and friends. Upon the death or loss of our love objects, grief is a natural emotional result. It is then also natural for people to yearn for reunification with lost loved ones in an afterlife. Hence, they are susceptible to assurances by religious authorities that rejoining lost loved ones will indeed occur if the griever remains faithful. The trusted clergy's assurances, combined with the griever's wishes, thereby perpetuate the faith tradition.

 

The conflict of interest of those clergy in purporting certainty is obvious.  Is it more likely that a loving protective god and a blissful heaven are figments of wish fulfillment, or that they actually exist despite the complete lack of evidence that "heaven is real" (notwithstanding popular books and films claiming the alternative)? Shall we not question the self-serving assurances of clergy whose chosen careers depend on gathering and retaining followers to their particular faith?

 

  1. The evident futility of prayer. Adherents of most religions attempt to solicit favorable treatment from their deities by means of some form of prayer. Thankfully, human sacrifice is no longer practiced as demonstration of our piety and devotion to the deities. Scientific studies of the efficacy of intercessory prayer have uniformly found that it has no effect on the intended beneficiary. Horrible events, such as the Holocaust, were surely the occasion of millions of desperate pleas to deities for merciful intercession.

 

Unless one resorts to the cop-out explanation that "God works in mysterious ways," one can only conclude that god either isn't listening, doesn't care, is powerless to intercede, or doesn't exist.

 

  1. Gullibility of followers of religious leaders.  Leaders need followers. More relevant to this discussion, followers need leaders.

 

In every human group and society, certain charismatic individuals emerge as opinion-leaders—that is, they influence the opinions of others. But, leadership would not exist without followership—people need someone whom they trust to be wise and competent to influence conditions in a favorable way. Those individuals who display leadership qualities fill the void and perform the role. The implicit trade-off is, "We'll let you tell us what to think if you'll promise to lead us to our desired goal."

 

Over time, as societies grew larger than small clans, leadership became institutionalized. Organizations and political systems emerged. Faith traditions also have become institutions, well exemplified by the Catholic hierarchy.

 

Of course, leadership is a good and necessary factor in every organizational and societal achievement. But, in addition to their visionary guidance toward the shared goal, leaders also are often motivated to contribute to institutionalization by their own emotional needs for power and influence (Not surprisingly, most leaders throughout human history have been men, who have greater innate personal need to exercise power and control than do women, for reasons understood by evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists). The general population (the faithful) yields power and authority to leaders whom it assumes to be knowledgeable and capable of serving followers' needs. As a result of that largely unconscious symbiosis, leaders are selected, elected, or otherwise chosen to exercise their power to shape followers' opinions and beliefs.

 

In this way, faith leaders and their followers collude in a shared delusional belief in the veracity of their particular doctrine—the glue that binds them together. Once fully institutionalized by an established hierarchy, by multi-generational belief (after all, children generally adopt the beliefs of their parents), and perhaps by a "holy book" containing the alleged thoughts and words of the deity, the faith tradition is complete, self-sustaining, and resistant to change. Christianity is the most "successful" contemporary religion, as measured by number of adherents, and is also clearly the most institutionalized—a coincidence?

 

News headlines inform us daily of religious leaders (abusive priests, corrupt evangelists, and imams promising virgin-equipped paradise to prospective suicide-bomber martyrs) who lure their trusting followers into victimization. Those treacherous leaders are often blind to their own unconscious motives—child sex abusers typically claim, perhaps sincerely, that they "love" children. Of course, most clerics in all faiths are compassionate humanitarians who, along with saving souls, value human welfare—a value they share, incidentally, with secular humanists.

 

Still, how confident can we be that our pastors are immune to this common emotional undertow that can draw them into demagoguery? Are they truly god's representatives on Earth? If so, the hiring process is seriously flawed.

 

  1. Most scientists are atheists.  Numerous studies inversely correlate religious belief with intelligence and education in science. A commonly quoted study found that 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists, a number that increases when only those in the natural sciences, such as chemistry, physics, astronomy, and biology, are considered.

 

Given the uncertain validity of religion, to whom shall we look for good thinking on the subject—brilliant scientists who rigorously and objectively investigate their subject, or people whose beliefs are based on dogma derived from the musings of uneducated mystics of 2,000 years ago and perpetuated by self-serving institutions?

 

I am unable to reconcile the foregoing scientifically derived facts with religious faith. Indeed, like most scientists, I hold that science and religion are irreconcilable. That is, each person must decide: Do I accept the findings of science, or do I reject those findings in favor of a supernatural dogma first declared true by mystics who lived two millennia ago? Of course, a third option is available: I choose not to think about it. However, my guess is that folks who choose not to think about the question have not read this far.

 

Secular humanism as an alternative worldview

 

In light of the uncertainties discussed above, one might assert that I am, technically, an agnostic, since I freely acknowledge that the truth about existence of deities and afterlives is not knowable with absolute certainty. I cannot prove that gods do not exist, nor can a religious person prove otherwise.

 

Are we doomed to a permanent state of dissonant ambivalence about those questions? As a practical approach to living my own life, I prefer to accept the scientific evidence, albeit incomplete, and to conclude that humans have concocted religions to solve pre-science-era mysteries and to satisfy their unmet needs and unfulfilled wishes marinating for millennia in the petri dish of scientific ignorance.

 

I opt for secular humanism as my worldview, which places the well-being of human and sentient non-human animals at the apex of the values hierarchy. I admire societies and national governments that share that worldview and implement those values through policy. I worry that America is drifting in the wrong direction.

 

Political implications of atheism

 

Politics matters. It is through instruments of government that politics impacts people. If politics were not infused with religious ideology, it would matter little that one individual has a personal theology different from that of another. We could live and let live. You like red, I like blue, mox nix.

 

But when governments create laws that encode the religious tenets of one segment of the population into enforced policies that apply to all citizens, we have a problem. No longer are your beliefs of no concern to me. Government has created a problem by imposing, by law, precepts of your religion upon me.  American Christians, Iranian Muslims, and other religionists who currently enjoy majority status in their countries would surely appreciate these sensitivities if their particular creed were to become the minority and be politically dominated by a similarly bigoted majority.

 

I do not personally proselytize for secularism nor attempt by oral argument to convince individual people of faith that their beliefs are wrong. I prefer nonadversarial conversations in search of mutual understanding, respectfully agreeing to disagree on our divergent views. On a macro scale, however, we secular humanists believe the world would be a safer, saner, less violent, more humane, and all-round better place if religion were to somehow disappear.

 

The United States is a highly religious country, and is governed by highly religious political leaders, despite the declared separation of church and state, written as the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Indeed, (the pretense of) religious belief is a basic requirement for success in campaigning for elective office. Some political candidates and office-holders are passionately devoted to their faith and are convinced of its eternal and exclusive truth above all other faiths. Their convictions propel these legislators and other government officials to promote policies that impose their beliefs on society as a whole. Their goal appears to be to remake America into a "Christian nation," if not an outright theocracy.

 

The globe is littered with examples of failed attempts to merge religion and governance to form a nation that serves the natural needs of its citizens. I shudder to think that America may one day be among them, and I do my civic duty as a voter to prevent that outcome.

 

Current public policy issues, into which religious ideology has become infused, include the following:

 

  1. Property tax exemption for houses of worship, which shifts the cost of subsidizing religion to the general tax-paying public.

 

  1. Teaching the pseudoscience of creationism, and its thinly disguised twin, "intelligent design," in public (tax-supported) schools, which undermines legitimate science education.

 

  1. Restricting access to even early-term abortion, based on the religious notion that a fertilized egg is "sacred" and the moral equivalent of a sentient person. Opponents can have a reasoned debate about the time during pregnancy when a healthy fetus's rights overtake those of the host mother, but the idea that that happens at conception is a purely religious artifact.

 

  1. Opposition to birth control by the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, which has influenced public policy, notably by the enactment of spurious laws in certain American states that impose barriers to women's health services. In the most religious populations within America and in many developing nations, the restriction of access to contraceptive resources and information causes unmanaged population growth and the ensuing poverty, deprivation, and needless suffering.

 

  1. Outlawing physician-assisted suicide and other methods of voluntary euthanasia, based on the idea that "Only god can decide when life should end."  We secular humanists consider ourselves the owners of our lives, not governments and not churches.

 

  1. Legal discrimination against LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) persons, an unfairness rooted in religion-based notions of sexual morality. There is no secular basis for objecting to sexual activities that occur between or among consenting adults.

 

  1. Sex education based on religious ideology (such as abstinence-only and anti-masturbation teachings) rather than on medically sound knowledge about physical and emotional health

 

  1. Prayer in schools, the military, and in governmental meetings (including the U.S. Congress).

 

  1. Language such as "under God" and "in God we trust" on currency, in the pledge of allegiance, and in other government documents and artifacts. Such phrases, which may seem harmless to some, imply government endorsement of religion and blur the boundary between church and state.

 

  1. Efforts by some radical religionists to base civil and criminal law on the Christian "ten commandments" or on Islamic sharia law

 

  1. Failure to protect animal rights, particularly as affected by the meat industry and by sport-killing. Religion artificially bifurcates the animal world into human and non-human — humans have "souls" and are created "in the image of God," whereas non-human animals are merely objects whose consciousness and capacity for pain and suffering are largely unrecognized and of little concern. Having surprisingly recent common ancestors (mammals first appeared after over 95% of the period of life on earth had passed), we human animals are not-so-distant cousins of the non-human animals whose flesh we eat and whom we (not I) kill for sport. As known through biological science, animals experience not only physical pain as we do, but many of the same emotions as ours. With rare exceptions, governments do not regulate the pain and suffering we inflict upon our animal cousins. Government properly protects human rights, but fails to protect animal rights due to religion's false categorization as two entirely distinct forms of living beings. Secular humanists are concerned with the well-being of all sentient creatures, human and non-human. We are not necessarily vegetarian, but we care about the humane treatment of food-animals up to the moment of their deaths.

 

Readers are invited to suggest additional religion-infused public policy issues, in the United States and elsewhere, which may in included in future editions of this book.

 

The collapse of religion

 

The time will come—perhaps within the next century in North America—when a critical mass of the populace will recognize the folly of religious belief. A national and global consensus will form that religion is bunk. The scale will tip. Atheism will become the common assumption about whether deities and afterlives are real. Certainly, some isolated contrarians will persist, just as Flat-Earthers persist today, but the paradigm will have shifted. (Recall that the Flat Earth was the prevailing theory before early scientists discovered our planet is a sphere.)

 

American society will then enter the post-Christian era, which has already begun in parts of Western Europe where the majority of the population is nonreligious. When the worldwide, global tipping point is reached, the planet's entire population will enter the post-religion era. From that time forward, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other superstitions will be viewed as similarly quaint and intellectually primitive as sun-god-worship is today. Democratic governments will follow their people—autocratic governments may lag since religion is often used by dictators to control their subjects.

 

That paradigm shift may happen surprisingly quickly, at least in Western democracies where the penalty for apostasy is modest. American public opinion about same-sex marriage changed in only a very few years—over 50% of Americans now (2014) support equal rights for gays. Discriminatory laws began to change quickly once that tipping point was reached.

 

Similarly, once atheism becomes the majority public opinion, lawmakers will feel politically safe enough to come out of the closet themselves and begin to unwind the accumulated intrusions of religion into American government listed above. Truly secular government can then be secured, as envisioned by America's Founding Fathers, several of whom were atheists.

 

Muslim theocracies, however, may take much longer to dismantle the political and societal structures that enforce Islam. After all, in countries like Saudi Arabia where apostasy is punished by death, what official would dare be the first to suggest that Allah is a big lie?

 

My optimism for such a secular future is tempered by the fact that humans have invented tens of thousands of religions during our history as a species, which implies a certain propensity for religiosity. Therefore, we should expect subpopulations of scientifically ignorant believers to persist, led by self-serving demagogues, adhering to religious myths despite removal of the governmental and societal supports they now enjoy.

 

Hopeful predictions

 

  1. The first openly atheist U.S. president will be elected.

 

  1. Political candidates and officeholders will no longer find it necessary to pretend to be Christians (or Jews or Muslims—anything but atheists) to be elected. Indeed, faith-professing candidates will be dismissed as oddly uninformed and therefore unqualified to hold public office, as a Flat-Earther seeking election would be regarded today.

 

  1. The U.S. Congress will rescind or modify laws that encode religious ideology.

 

  1. Religion will disappear as a source of polarization between political parties who will be able to rationally debate the relative merits of conservative and liberal fiscal policies and other issues free of the disruptive noise of irrelevant religion-based biases.  Compromise in the interest of the common good will become politically acceptable once the show-stopping claim that “God is on our side” is no longer asserted.

 

  1. All nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will openly acknowledge their atheism, and the era of unconstitutional religious intrusion into our body of law will come to a close.

 

  1. Marriage, a religious rite, will no longer be recognized by government, and will be replaced by the civil union, a secular agreement between adult partners for tax and legal rights purposes. Civil ceremonies of commitment to partners' social bond will continue, but without reference to religion.

 

  1. God-believers in large numbers will disavow their beliefs, just as the number of Flat-Earth-believers declined precipitously following the first moon landing in 1969. Still, pockets of god-worshipers will no doubt remain in anti-intellectual communities, as some Flat-Earthers persist today in conspiracy-minded cults.

 

  1. The final Pope will resign and the Vatican will be repurposed as a magnificent art and history museum.

 

  1. Radical Islamic terrorism, Christian militarism, execution of apostates, persecution of gays, and other forms of religion-inspired violence will cease.

 

  1. Forced marriage, genital mutilation, honor killing, and other forms of violence toward women will end as the religious basis for gender discrimination is debunked.

 

  1. The evidence that religion is man-made and has no basis in reality will become overwhelmingly obvious once the governmental and civil structures that perpetuate supernatural myths are dismantled.  In reflective moments, formerly religious people will exclaim, “How could I have believed that myth!”

 

  1. People will recognize that social ethics and morality are unrelated to religious belief, particularly to the reward-punishment inducements of believing in heaven and hell. The notion that people can't be "good without God" will be unveiled as an absurdity. Secular humanists will be recognized as the most ethical and socially responsible segment of society.

 

  1. Religious holdouts will be regarded with indulgent bemusement, as is an immature 12-year-old child today who insists that Santa Claus is real.

 

The above changes will be achieved without governmental coercion—freedom of religion and freedom from religion will be preserved. Rather, the power of reason will win greater support among the electorate, who will choose secular leaders rather than religious ideologues. Universal science education in schools and in public media will strengthen the ability of citizens to consider public policy issues free of the distorting lens of religious belief.

 

To be sure, religion is not the only cause of human malaise. Dictators, despots, and demagogues will continue to rise to power, with or without using religion to underpin their regimes. Nationalism, economic greed, and revenge for past atrocities are secular motives that will survive the demise of religion and will continue to cause suffering. However, I expect that science-based education will advance the decline and eventual collapse of religion and other forms of magical thinking, which will serve the humanitarian interest.

 

We sandal-clad, unarmed foot soldiers of the Reason Revolution anticipate that in due time, albeit long after our deaths, religion will collapse under the weight of its own illogic. For the first time in human history, the world will be largely rid of the blight of religion and the intolerance, sectarian hatred, and violence it too-often spawns.

 

That can only happen when secular education (Islamic madrassas, Jewish yeshivas, and Christian bible colleges don't qualify), and science education, in particular, is made accessible to everyone, worldwide. Not everyone need be a professional scientist, but everyone should have a science-based understanding of the natural world, its inhabitants, and how to make reliable decisions based on critical evaluation of observational evidence.

 

The Reason Revolution is among the longest revolutions in history. Galileo's challenge to Pope Urban in the early 17th Century may be considered the opening skirmish; the decisive global collapse of religion may be a century or two yet in our future. Based on that anticipation, the Revolution is only two-thirds complete. The present generation's patient persistence in promulgating Reason will benefit our descendants, who will enjoy living in secular, humanistic, humanitarian societies governed by political leaders who serve the natural needs of citizens during their lifetimes, not collude with their religious counterparts in promising heavenly rewards hereafter.

 

The era when people were bamboozled into worshiping and sacrificing to nonexistent deities, expecting to be rewarded in nonexistent afterlives, will be studied in future history books. Those books will contain chapters on animism, shamanism, polytheism, and the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. The final chapter will describe the collapse of supernaturalism in general and theism in particular. Students of the future will be dumbfounded that people of our time made such grand advancements in science, yet held such primitive anti-science beliefs. That paradoxical irony will be studied in their psychology class.

 

Reconciliation theories

 

How can faith in the supernatural be reconciled with natural science, particularly the science-based "Reasons for skepticism" [hyperlink to target] summarized above? Listed below are the most common ways persons of faith attempt to resolve the inconsistency between science and religion:

 

  1. The science supporting some or all of the reasons for skepticism may be correct, but faith provides comfort for people and is therefore important to maintain, even if belief is unfounded in fact and incompatible with settled science.

 

  1. Science has not advanced sufficiently to discover the existence of God, Heaven, and other realities that are revealed in the true holy book. (The Bible, Torah, Quran, and more than fifteen other religious texts are believed by the various faiths to be divinely inspired).  In this view, science may eventually confirm those realities, currently taken on faith alone.  Therefore, deities and afterlives are actually part of the natural universe and are not supernatural.

 

  1. The (correct) holy book is the only source of truth. To the extent that there is incompatibility between teachings in the holy book and science, then science must be wrong, even if it appears rational. Followers of faiths that do not accept the authority of the holy book are infidels.

 

  1. Science is invalid as a way of knowing. Scientific findings, such as those reported above as “reasons for skepticism,” are misleading and irrelevant to the search for truth.

 

  1. Science is the work of Satan, a temptation designed to lure the faithful away from God.  Scientists are false prophets, and so the “reasons for skepticism” are false.

 

  1. There exists a higher (supernatural) level of reality that science cannot examine and that is accessible only through faith. Therefore, the apparent correctness of the reasons for skepticism is an illusion.

 

  1. "God" is another term for the physical and chemical laws of the universe—a belief known as pantheism.  Gods are not supernatural beings and there is no spiritual afterlife.  Therefore, there is no conflict between religion and science. (This definition of god blurs the distinction between religion and science. Pantheism may serve as a semantic convenience to avoid admitting that one is an atheist.)

 

  1. Philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences are all parts of an intellectual toolkit, enabling humanity to probe the mysteries of existence. Without needlessly discarding older beliefs merely because they are older or because their methods differ, each person may consider new data and seek to integrate the best available information into a coherent view of the world.  (This reconciliation theory contends that all knowledge, including presumably “settled” science, is tentative and therefore subject to future revision as new knowledge is gained, and so it is premature to conclude that science and religion are irreconcilable.)

 

The foregoing reconciliation theories are not mutually exclusive, and the list is certainly not exhaustive. I look forward to receiving additional or better-defined reconciliation theories that describe how readers' faith positions reconcile with science.

 

How to prepare a better reconciliation theory:

 

  1. Carefully review the nine “Reasons for Skepticism” above to ensure your full understanding of them.
  2. If possible, select only one of the above reconciliation theories that most closely approximates your personal approach to reconciling your faith with the science reported in the reasons for skepticism.
  3. Revise the selected reconciliation theory to more accurately reflect your approach—limit to 100 words, please.
  4. If your personal reconciliation theory is categorically different from the ones presented above, please prepare another theory to be added to this list.  Again, limit your statement to 100 words.
  5. Send your text by email to atheism@dandana.us.  Please indicate whether I have your permission to include your name in the “Acknowledgements” section.

 

Thank you in advance for your contributions, which will be included in future editions. 

 

Comments by clergy

 

If you are a pastor, priest, rabbi, imam, or other professional cleric, I especially invite you to provide explanation of how you reconcile your faith with the science-based "Reasons for skepticism" [hyperlink to target] presented in this book. Your unedited comment (300-word maximum, please) will be included in a later edition. Your remarks will not be taken out of context, misquoted, or otherwise distorted. Your exact language will be contained in the book, accompanied by your name, title, and organizational affiliation.

 

I assume you disagree with some or all of the reasons for skepticism. I also assume that as a professional cleric who has devoted your life to the study of your faith, you have a thoroughly thought-out reconciliation theory that you rely on to answer questions posed by doubting members of your congregation. I welcome respectful, thoughtful disagreement, and look forward to publishing your well-articulated views here. My objective is to provide balance so readers may understand alternative explanations articulated by religious authorities representing a range of faith traditions. Please send your comments to clergy@dandana.us

 

Call to action

 

Thank you for reading and for thinking.

 

If you found this e-book interesting, stimulating, clarifying, or otherwise beneficial, I ask that you pass it along. The book is free—my objective is not to monetize this work for personal financial gain.  Rather, it is my chosen form of retirement volunteerism for a worthy cause. At my age and circumstance in life, I am not launching a new career nor seeking further income. My sole ambition is to popularize these ideas about atheism and secular humanism, and perhaps ultimately to nudge public policy toward true separation of church and state.

 

Here are ways you can support the Reason Revolution (none involve money):

 

  1. Send a book download link to friends, family, colleagues, and to members of clubs, association chapters, and other social and professional groups.

 

  1. Include a download link with your recommendation on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

 

  1. Follow "Dana on Atheism" [hyperlink to twitter account - https://twitter.com/Dana2atheism] on Twitter.

 

  1. Contact bloggers with your suggestion that this free e-book be reviewed or discussed.

 

  1. If you have a website, recommend this e-book to your visitors and provide a download link.

 

  1. If you are an author, or if you know other authors, reference this material in future publications on pertinent subjects.

 

  1. Write or recommend a book review in print magazines, trade journals, newspapers, and other media outlets.

 

  1. If you are a student, write a term paper on this subject, using and quoting this book as a reference. If you are a graduate student in a research field, develop a study that tests some question related to this material. Your study's results may be included in a future edition of this book.

 

  1. If a language other than English is your mother tongue, and if you are a skilled translator, contact me at atheism@dandana.us about publishing other editions of this e-book.

 

Humanity will thank you for all you do.

 

# # #

 

Acknowledgements

 

The author wishes to thank the following individuals for their substantive and editorial contributions to this publication: David Anderson, Justin Bailey, Patricia Barone, James Burns, Jay Gonen, Richard Goscicki, Heyward Hawkins, Richard Keith, Ernest Kinnie, Nina McLean, Darrel Ray, Guthrie Sayen, Barb Walts, and Barry Zack.

 

Cover design by Sean Connor

 

About the author

 

Dan Dana is retired from a career encompassing psychology, teaching, mediation, corporate training, and business entrepreneurship. He is the author of three books on workplace mediation and several conflict resolution curricula. Born in 1945 to a Protestant family in rural Missouri, his life experiences include the following:

Dan and his wife, Susan, live in Sarasota, Florida. He is the father of one and grandfather of two. He has been an atheist for over 50 years. Dan may be reached at atheism@dandana.us

 

Other books by the author

 

Conflict Resolution: Mediation Tools for Everyday Worklife (McGraw-Hill) [hyperlink to book page at Amazon]

 

Managing Differences: How to Build Better Relationships at Work and Home (MTI Publications) [hyperlink to book page at Amazon]

 

Talk It Out: 4 Steps to Managing People Problems in Your Organization (HRD Press, out of print) [hyperlink to book page at Amazon]