by George Claassen

Is there any reason to still believe in God? Or are religious faith and reason incompatible? 

I ask this because the pressure on scientists to become believers in God seems to get stronger by the day. Atheism is more and more used as an excuse to get rid of competent people. We all know that in the American election the chances of a candidate who openly states he or she is an atheist is absolutely none to be elected as president.

The vast majority of scientists say these questions can immediately be answered with a direct no and yes respectively.  

No, there is no single reason today to continue believing or to have to believe in God. For that, science has since Copernicus and Galileo in the 15th and 16th century, Darwin in the 19th and modern discoveries today been too emphatic in discrediting and in fact killing the fairy tales of the Bible, the Koran en other holy books.  

And yes, reason and religious faith are indeed incompatible in an age where scientific findings and reason have probably become the only mechanisms to survive in a universe and solar system in which the God in whom so many believe, clearly has never made his appearance, or is rather too quiet when humankind has needed him most.  

Sometimes science needs to turn to literature to get this message across, as the British scientist Lewis Wolpert does by looking at Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast – The Evolutionary Origins of Belief Wolpert examines the exposure Alice experiences to the irrational thinking of the White Queen.

Alice finds it difficult to believe in impossible things and tells this to the White Queen when they discuss faith.  

Yet the White Queen is not put off track. “I dare say, you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” she tells Alice.  

In the last decade of the 20^th century some scientists tried to link religion to a possible genetic trait. Yet, today there is still no scientific evidence for the existence of a God gene. The researcher who has first formulated the theory trying to explain the presence of religious faith in some people or the absence of it in others, Marc Hamer, has long been discredited and proven wrong. Rather then use the term God meme or religious meme, as Richard Dawkins, evolutionary zoologist of Oxford University, proposes.   

Dawkins takes the evolutionary process of variation, natural selection, and heredity a step further and in The Selfish Gene he applies it to a process of human simulation and cultural transfer: biological genes are extended to what he calls memes. A meme is a unit of cultural transfer, or unit of simulation. Genes are replicated, copied from parents to descendents from one generation to the next.  Comparatively a meme is anything that can be replicated from mind to mind, via any form of copying, Dawkins explains.

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he writes in The Selfish Gene.

Dawkins quotes his colleague N.K. Humphrey who believes “memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.”

Today religion is one of the strongest memes noticeable in the social conduct and fabric of people. Dawkins writes the “survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”   

The British scientist on the psychology of consciousness Susan Blackmore explains the difference between science and religion. The core of science is the scientific method, based on the testing of any idea. Religion does not work that way. “Religions build theories about the world and then prevent them from being tested. Religions provide nice, appealing and comforting ideas, and cloak them in a mask of ‘truth, beauty, and goodness’. The theories can then thrive in spite of being untrue, ugly, or cruel,” she writes in The Meme Machine.  

Some people, especially the religious, but also some leading religious scientists such as Francis Collins and John Polkinghome, propagate the NOMA-principle as formulated by the late Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. According to Gould religion and science are two separate fields; he defines the relationship between the two as Non Overlapping Magisteria. According to this science should refrain from meddling in religious matters and vice versa.  

In contrast to this, is the view propagated by Dawkins, Wolpert, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Steve Jones, Jared Diamond, Ernst Mayr and numerous other scientists and philosophers of science, who believe Gould’s NOMA-principle is far too accommodating to religion – especially because of religious propagation of miracles in direct conflict to natural laws. Dawkins writes in The Devil’s Chaplain that everyone who believes in the miracles of religions is indeed making claims belonging to the field of science, “a violation of the normal running of the natural world”. To believe in miracles, is to overthrow the natural laws and immediately places the believer in the field of science. If theologians want to be honest, they must make a choice, Dawkins writes: “You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's, but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles.” 

A very large majority – some research suggests more than 95% - of the elite scientists in Britain and the USA agree with this view. Wolpert refers in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast – The Evolutionary Origins of Belief to the White Queen-syndrome so characteristic in religious believers and believers of paranormal phenomena.   

According to Wolpert continued research shows that the percentage of scientists believing in a creator God has dwindled drastically since 1914. It is indicative that this declining trend started in the early part of the 20th century when modern genetics began proving and extending Darwin’s theory of evolution. And after that further strengthened by the tremendous strides of progress made in cosmological discoveries that showed the Earth and Universe is far older than the beliefs propagated by creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design.  

When Darwin in 1859 published The Origin of Species, Gregor Mendel had not yet conducted or completed his genetic experiments in the garden of a Bohemian monastery. He eventually published his research results in 1865 in an obscure German science magazine, but Darwin, who openly admitted in The Origin of Species he could not explain what the reason is for natural selection, could not read German. And until his death in 1882 he was unaware of Mendel’s important work that in essence strongly substantiated his evolutionary theory.   

Only at the beginning of the 20th century Mendel was rediscovered and this led to the development of modern genetics, culminating in the mapping of the human genome in 2001.  

Wolpert shows how scientists of note have over a century gradually become less inclined to believe in God. In two studies in 1914 and 1933 scientists were inter alia asked the following: Do you believe in a God who communicates with people and to whom you can pray and from whom you can expect an answer? Do you believe in everlasting life? Yes, No, and I don’t know were the only possible answers that could be given.  

Between 1914 and 1998 the percentage of scientists – it included human scientists – believing in God remained constant at more or less 40%. But among the natural science elite – winners of Nobel prizes, the Field medal and other prestigious natural sciences awards – only 30% percent believed  in God in 1914 and by 1933 this had declined to just 20%. In 1998 the elite scientists of the British Royal Society’s US compeer, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), had only 10% believers in God, where biologists were the representatives in the majority, Wolpert explains. This is an important finding because biology is the basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution.  

And it was Darwin who gave the idea of a creator god its first serious, yet not the final fatal head wound, in the 19th century - a wound that gradually became septic through the revelations of modern genetics, geology, palaeontology, palaeoanthropology, physics, chemistry, and other scientific fields and which should eventually lead to the death of the everlasting life idea in the distant, maybe far distant, future.   

According to the Larson en Witham study of 1998, Dawkins shows in The God Delusion, similar figures and statistics are applicable to the Royal Society in Britain. Here top scientists believing in God and an everlasting life, have become a very small figure. Only 3,3% of Britain’s top scientists agree with the statement that a personal god exists.  

The question is: are these overwhelming figures among knowledgeable scientists relevant? Should these percentages carry any weight? The great majority of scientists believe they are if we adhere to the principle of peer reviewed, testable and evidence-based science, and believe in the relevance of scientific expertise.  

If rational thinking based on evidence is accepted in the scientific community, these findings are very relevant. And if the public only accept the view of scientists when it does not clash with their own beliefs where does that leave science?  

One example: when scientists are called to testify about their findings as experts in their field in court cases, their expertise and the probability factor in their scientific field can carry a lot of weight in the court’s judgment. If this kind of statistics is presented by top scientists like these from the NAS and the FRS in a court case, the chances are excellent that the overwhelming probability (without reasonable doubt) would be against an Intelligent Designer and a created universe, based on the available evidence. It would confirm the triumph of science over superstition and belief in the supernatural.

Dawkins explains this lucidly in The Selfish Gene, that the Universe we observe has precisely the characteristics that we would expect if there was no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing else than meaningless indifference. He argues we are machines reproducing DNA and that this is our only reason for living.

Wolpert also believes scientific thinking is the most important purpose in life. In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast he writes: “My thinking is based on a belief in the scientific process, and the necessity for evidence. I am committed to science and believe it to be the best way to understand the world. ... I know of no good evidence for the existence of God. ... Science provides by far the most reliable method for determining whether one’s beliefs are valid. It may be difficult, as it will go often against common sense, but its value is inestimable.” 

The trait so common among people to attribute anything we cannot understand and explain to God is the easy, uncritical and non-investigative route, Wolpert, Dawkins and other non-believing scientists argue. It is also a very common phenomenon among Afrikaners, most of them very religious. Gideon Joubert did this in his bestseller, Die Groot Gedagte. And also unfortunately Leon Rousseau in his long expected book, Die Groot Avontuur. We see this attitude towards the inexplicable also in the Afrikaans media in the words and views of leading Afrikaans thinkers such as Wilhelm Jordaan, Okkie Geyser, Anton van Niekerk, Louw Alberts, Eugène Cloete and others.  

The evidence for evolution has become so overwhelming that many religious believers have accepted it. But the new method to avoid the terrible reality of evolution (terrible from the viewpoint of the creation story of the Bible) is to propose the vague idea of Intelligent Design. They believe this Intelligent Designer has used evolution to develop life on Earth. Who or what he is, is usually not openly defined, although members of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the most important propagators of Intelligent Design, have admitted that it can only be the God of Christianity.  

The American geneticist Jerry Coyne believes “… the real war is between rationality and superstition. Science is but one form of rationality, while religion is the most common form of superstition… If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by calling our ignorance ‘God’.”

This is further expanded by the British physicist William Bowen Bonner’s explanation of the scientific method in The Mystery of the Expanding Universe:  

“It is the business of science to offer rational explanations for all the events in the real world, and any scientist who calls on God to explain something is falling down on his job. This applies as much to the start of the expansion as to any other event. If the explanation is not forthcoming at once, the scientist must suspend judgment: but if he is worth his salt he will always maintain that a rational explanation will eventually be found. This is the one piece of dogmatism that a scientist can allow himself – and without it science would be in danger of giving way to superstition every time that a problem defied solution for a few years.” 

Believers in a creator God persistently use the argument that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. But that is a safe wall behind which no rational and intelligent person should hide, argue non-believing scientists. It is not the duty and aim of science to get evidence for God’s existence. As the scientist from Yale University Robert Dorit wrote in Scientific American, “science does not look for the fingerprints of God”. Scientists like Dorit argue in a rational and evidence-based world it is the duty of religious believers to bring their evidence for the existence of the gods they pray to and from whom they continue to ask protection against critical questions about their faith.  

Robert Todd Carroll, American sceptic and publisher of The Skeptic’s Dictionary, writes about the absence of God when you look at nature around you (www.skepdic.com):  

“The argument from design is one of the ‘proofs’ for the existence of God. In its basic form, this argument infers from the intelligent order and created beauty of the universe that there is an intelligent Designer and Creator of the universe. The argument has been criticized for begging the question: it assumes the universe is designed in order to prove that it is the work of a designer. The argument also suppresses evidence: for all its beauty and grandeur, the universe is also full of, well, to be delicate, let us say that the universe is also full of nasties. I suppose I should be more specific, but I think the reader knows the kind of thing I mean: babies born without brains, good people suffering monstrous tortures such as neurofibromatosis, evil people basking in the sun and enjoying power, reputation, etc. Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes rattling the planet, hurricanes and tornadoes blindly wiping out thousands of lives a day. Is it unfair to call these things the nasties, what is blithely referred to by theists as non-moral evil or physical evil? To say, as many defenders of Design do, that these nasties only seem nasty to us but we are ignorant of God's plan and vision and cannot know how good these nasties really are, is self-refuting. If we can't know what's good and what's not, we can't know whether the design, if any, is good or bad.”

A theologian and religious reformer of the University of South Africa, Sakkie Spangenberg, a scientist of ancient religions who left his church because of its “dogmatic belief in the literal truth of every word in the Bible”, also refers to the phenomenon of natural disasters or the suffering of people.  

“Homo sapiens is not the centre around which everything on Earth turns – even though Christian dogmas want us to believe this. This species can also disappear as the dinosaurs did – and maybe the tsunami disaster of 2004 was a timely reminder of that possibility.”  

Another reason why belief in a creator God is not necessary anymore, argue many scientists, is the evidence in nature that religion does not provide the sole and only moral compass. Religious scientists and non-scientists  – Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project and a Christian, comes to mind as a strong propagator of this view – allege we need the moral compass of religion to withstand Satan’s evil in society. Research today shows that religion is not the only moral compass in life. Marc Hauser, professor in psychology and biological anthropology and director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard, said in an interview in New Scientist of 3 March 2007: 

“What interests me is the assumption that morality and religion are synonymous. The evidence we have suggests that having a religious background makes no difference to your moral judgment.” 
 

In an article on 20 March 2007 in the science section of The New York Times the science writer Nicholas Wade wrote about recent research with chimpanzees and other primates. Wade emphasised how wrong most religions are in claiming morality is a unique human quality:  

“Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, which cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days. Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioural rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.” 

Non-believing scientists sometimes refer to the injustice religions perpetrate by following the instructions and prescriptions of their holy books – this despite the findings of modern science. The Christian and Muslim religion’s view of gays is a typical example where these holy instructions are kept in place in contradiction with modern research.  

Research since the 1980s has determined a genetic explanation for being gay, although the final word about the nature/nurture factor has still to be determined. Arguments by some religions that homosexuality is only a human condition and that it forms no part in the sexual behaviour of other species, have also been refuted. Numerous primate scientists have found that some primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos quite often practise homosexual behaviour.

Yet science is conveniently ignored when gays in Iran and other Muslim countries are stoned to death or hanged. In South Africa a gay Dutch Reformed minister, Laurie Gaum, was stripped of the cloth and in the largest DRC congregation in Pretoria, the Moreletta DRC, and virtual warfare is preached against gays.   

The late American physicist Carl Sagan emphasised that science needs evidence to be regarded as valid. His views on the need for evidence for UFO’s to be accepted, could just as well have been applicable on religions’ claim about a creator God. In The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark he wrote:

“…everything hinges on the matter of evidence. On so important a question, the evidence must be airtight. The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.”

Today we have the dilemma that while in 2009 it will be 150 years ago that Charles Darwin’s epoch-making The Origin of Species was first published, an event that turned humankind’s thinking about its origins on its head, there are still millions – probably more than a billion – believing steadfastly that evolution is just a theory and not valid science. Even ignoring what scientists and science have to say about its validity. Also that governments and the common citizen make important decisions based on this fallacious viewpoint.

What do scientists say about evolution as a theory? the protesting parents should first have asked.  

Jared Diamond, the American evolutionary biologist and physiologist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writes that evolution is the most profound and powerful idea thought out over the past two centuries.  

Ernst Mayr, die German-born American evolutionary biologist, probably one of the most important since Darwin, states it even more strongly in his book What Evolution Is:  

“Evolution is the most important concept in biology. There is not a single Why? question in biology that can be answered adequately without a consideration of evolution. But the importance of this concept goes far beyond biology. The thinking of modern humans, whether we realize it or not, is profoundly affected – one is almost tempted to say determined – by evolutionary thinking.”  

The British biologist Julian Huxley wrote in Religion Without Revelation “Evolution is the most powerful and most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on Earth.” With regard to religion’s diminishing influence in the light of scientific discoveries, he also remarked in Religion Without Revelation,  “Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.” 

In contrast to this, the views of two influential thinkers of the church showed how seriously reason was endangering the institutions of religions.  

First there was the German religious reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) who reacted to the formulation of the theory of heliocentrism: “This mad man Copernicus should be repressed by some Christian prince.” 

John Calvin was also aggravated by Copernicus and his findings: “Who will dare to put the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” he asked. 

One could easily ask, reformulated in a modern idiom of the church, mosque and synagogue: “Who will dare to put the authority of Darwin, Penzias and Wilson, Mayr and science above that of the Holy Spirit?”  

Many scientists and philosophers point out that reason is endangered by religious thinking. Dick Taverne, the British sceptic, writes in The March of Unreason – Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism: “The new Rome that science built is under siege by the barbarians.”

Richard Dawkins explains this affinity to superstition in The Devil’s Chaplain, as a comment on Bertrand Russell’s hypothetical china teapot orbiting the Sun. He writes as “a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence: fairies, unicorns, werewolves, any of the infinite set of conceivable and unfalsifiable beliefs…”

Dawkins elaborates on this in The God Delusion by pointing out Russell’s argument that it is not the scientists who have to prove God exists, but rather the believers; “the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers… The fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

The author Douglas Adams reacted to the claim by religious people that the beauty of nature is evidence of God’s existence:  

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

One of the questions asked by scientists is why in our country where freedom of speech is protected by the constitution, religions always claim protection against criticism of their beliefs, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that cast serious doubt on those claims. Religion is nothing else than a form of superstition, the American geneticist Jerry Coyne remarked: why should religions have more authority and protection than other superstitions and pseudosciences? Sceptics point out that we do not give special protection to people believing in astrology or the Jeti, or to people believing that you can talk to the dead. Why then this special protection allocated to religions?  

Let anyone practise whatever superstition they like or prefer, but do not expect scientists and other rational thinking people to accept these claims without any criticism, sceptics argue. 

They refer to Carl Sagan’s baloney detection kit to help one to distinguish between valid and invalid claims. “Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.” Without a baloney detector, this distinction cannot be made.

Will science one day through its findings hit the final nail in the coffin of religion? Probably not soon and most possibly never. Although Max Planck believed that a “new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”, the religious meme may be so strong that new scientific truths will never change the minds of those finding the probability of ultimate death too ghastly to contemplate.

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