S. T. Joshi - God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

To Robert M. Price

If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help, we need not waste our energies in his defence.

Robert G. Ingersoll, God in the Constitution (1890)

One does not kill by anger but by laughter.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891)

ither there is one god, multiple gods, or none. Either there is such a thing called the human soul or there isn't, and, if there is, it either can or cannot survive the death of the body. Either Jesus Christ, if he existed, was the son of God or he wasn't. Either Mohammed, if he existed, was God's prophet or he wasn't.

That the essential doctrines of many of the world's major religions-especially Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-are matters of truth or. falsity is itself a fact around which no amount of sophistry or special pleading can get. Unfortunately for them, evidence has been steadily accumulating for at least the last half-millennium to suggest that these doctrines are false. What has saved religions from completely collapsing of their own absurdity is, of course, the difficulty indeed, the impossibility-of definitively determining the truth or falsity of these doctrines. The impossibility allows the pious to maintain, as a slim and ever-decreasing hope, that the tenets of their religion might somehow still be true, or at least not clearly false. No amount of negative evidence can ever conclusively put any given religious dogmas out of court (aside from those that can be shown to be selfinconsistent), because there will always remain the remote possibility that they are true. The notion that truth or falsity is somehow not involved in the analysis of religious doctrine-a view fostered not only by many modern theologians but by some recent philosophers of language who maintain that religious principles are merely "language games" that do not commit their exponents to any truth-claims - has now, I trust, been shown to be a dodge and an evasion. The great majority of the faithful would certainly be astounded and offended if someone were to tell them that when they say "God created the universe," they are merely expressing some kind of "attitude of piety" rather than making an assertion about the nature of entity.

What the religious ignore in all this, of course, are two basic facts: (1) although no "truth" about the empirical world is other than provisional-and, in theory, falsifiable-or based upon anything but statistical probabilities, certain propositions are, nevertheless, far more likely to be "true" than others; and (2) the advance of knowledge over the past five hundred years has demonstrated with as near an approach to certainty as it may be possible to get that every single religious doctrine ever propounded is not only overwhelmingly improbable and implausible but entirely at variance with all other "truths" that have subsequently been ascertained.

I do not have the space here to write a full-scale history of this advance of knowledge, but some notes may be in order. Since Copernicus, natural science has been making startling strides in the explication of terrestrial and cosmic phenomena, and Darwin's Origin of Species destroyed one of the last remaining intellectual props of religion-the "argument from design," or the notion that all things in the universe were benevolently designed by God for the advantage of the human race (an argument, however, that David Hume had already shattered on logical grounds a century earlier). All these discoveries meant more than merely the collecting of isolated facts; as John William Draper stressed in his pioneering and still valuable HLotory of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), what was at stake were two d ferinq worldviews, the religious and the scientific (or secular). The former maintained -on no evidence but that of the various sacred texts of the world, all of which differed in significant particulars-that all phenomena were caused, at least in an ultimate sense, by God. The latter established by the immense accumulation of evidence that the postulation of a god was unnecessary to the explanation of visible phenomena. In other words, the advance of human knowledge represented the definitive replacement of supernatural by natural causation. To be sure, the nineteenth-century scientists may have been a bit cocksure about the extent to which human knowledge could extend, but they were sound in their fundamental attitude. Even if all phenomena could not be (and perhaps never will be) explained, the presumption of a natural explanation of these phenomena ought to be paramount. The inveterate human tendency to leap to the supernatural when faced with some inexplicable occurrence should be restrained. A god or gods might still conceivably exist, but one could not be postulated to explain the existence of any object or event within the radius of human knowledge. God had become supernumerary.

But in some ways more important than the advances in natural sciences were discoveries in history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology: these sciences made it eminently clear that religious belief was an entirely natural product of primitive humanity's bewilderment in the face of natural phenomena whose causation it did not understand. Here again Hume was a pioneer, with his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), although the work was carried forward by such monumental works as Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (18901915). Whatever else religion may have been, it was preeminently a means of explaining (and, secondarily, controlling) the natural world to a human species that could not account for it otherwise.' This reli gious sensibility, it was discovered, far antedated the establishment of organized religions in human history; indeed, the latter were, in their various ways, mere condensations and systematizations of the former, and it was seen that these religious were perpetuated not through the accumulation of additional evidence that validated their tenets, but through the systematic indoctrination of peoples into religious dogma from infancy onward, generation after generation. It was this natural accountinq for the origin and continuance of religious belief that shattered another favorite "proof" of theism-that religion must be true because the great majority of human beings believed it to be. Long before the advent of democracy as a political system, the notion of determining truth by majority vote -what I call the democratic fallacy-was a well-established principle of religious orthodoxy.

The dominant question thus becomes not why religion has not died away but why it continues to persist in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary. To my mind, the answer can be summed up in one straightforward sentence: People are stupid.