Does science make belief in God obsolete?
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Does science make belief in God obsolete? Yes, of course - speaks a psychologist While discussing “Science” I mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people who working in their white lab coats, create babies within test tubes.
Traditionally, a belief in a God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?
When even his existence is an illusion, we have no reason to trust such a divine whim, why should we take this fictional being’s commandments seriously?
Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in a God.
Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and was made by a God in six days (to say, nothing of the questions like day and night existing before the sun was created). Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of “Where did the universe come from?” With the equivalent puzzle “Where did God came from/who created this God?”
What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to name a God designer as creator of it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how DNA replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding religious creationist propaganda, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology.
For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain thus creating the so-called divine spark. However, relabeling the brain activity with the word “soul” adds nothing to our understanding.
People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.
This leaves morality itself-the benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that neither science nor a God can show what is right or wrong. It’s not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God or Islamic Allah endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It’s that morality cannot be grounded in a fictional divine decree, not even on mere abstract principle. Why did a fictional God arbitrarily deem some acts moral and others immoral? When even his existence is an illusion, we have no reason to trust such a divine whim, why should we take this fictional being’s commandments seriously?
Those reasons are found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent human society. The essence of morality is the concept of reciprocity and the collectivity of humans being watchful of other’s behaviour. The fact that as soon as I appeal to you to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason, I have to be willing to apply the same standards to you. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and makes both of us as well as the society in general better off. And a God plays no role in it.
For all these reasons, it’s no coincidence that European democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric religious practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in a God has decreased. Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.
UK: Now wrong claims can land astrologers, tantriks and faith-healers in jail
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In Britain, astrologers can now end up in prison, if they fail to warn their prospective customers that their services are “not experimentally proven” and “for entertainment only”. So can godmen, tantriks, tarot cards readers, faith healers, occultists, fortune tellers, seers, soothsayers, psychics, mantra-healers, mediums and babas.
Since May 26, 2008, the flourishing spiritual business in the country - estimated to bag an annual income of more than forty million pounds - has come under the scanner of new customer protection regulations. Result of the biggest overhaul of Britain’s consumer laws since forty years, these regulations are implementing the European Union’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) from May 2005 that will soon govern consumer laws all over Europe.
Besides door-to-door- sellers, children’s advertisements etc., the new British law targets miracle mongers of all kinds and backgrounds - no matter, if they are resident Brits or visiting Indians. It compels them to state in a disclaimer that their services are “for entertainment only” and that they are not “experimentally proven”. Such disclaimers have to be well visible for all potential customers, put up on name boards, invoices, printed papers with terms and condition, in advertisements and in websites. If the “entertainment only” nature of their services is not made clear to a client before the session, they can be taken to court and will be liable to a prison sentence up to two years and a fine up to 5000 pounds.
