Do We Need God to be Moral?

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Some years ago, I watched an episode of "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher," that has always stuck with me. The topic was the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, which was erupting dramatically into the headlines. I don't remember who all was on the show, but I vividly remember a collision between Sandra Bernhard and some right wing fundamentalist. His point was that the Catholic Church was doing all these sinful things because they were not following scripture strictly enough. They were religious, but not religious enough, and needed to get right with God. It got pretty ugly from there. I was utterly struck by the absurdity. How is it, I thought, that the openly atheistic Bill Maher and a bisexual, secular Jew like Bernhard had managed to figure out that sexually abusing children is wrong, when a disturbing number of Catholic priests had not. How, then, is more religion the answer?

Sex abuse, of all things, does not really seem to be inhibited by religion or any strictly enforced moral code. Louise DeSalvo explains, for instance, that it was epidemic during the straight-laced Victorian era, in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. There have been several high profile cases in Amish communities, where by some measures, it is rampant. Some of the most heinous crimes do not seem to be deterred by religious piety.

This issue came to mind as I was reading an article in Slate, this morning, which addresses the question of kindness and generosity in the religious vs. the atheistic.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-[Dr. Laura] Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

So, it's not, so much, God, who keeps us on the straight and narrow. It's eyes. All of which seems to point to the notion that our moral compass is entirely externally imposed and motivated. If the research is accurate, that would seem to be the answer, at least in the United States. And, there's the rub. It seems that when we look beyond our own borders, this argument runs into trouble.

It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

Slate's Paul Bloom postulates that it is not so much "God" or, even, religious doctrine that moderates our behavior, but a strong sense of community.

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

Although, even extremely cohesive community doesn't seem to prevent some of the more hideous abuses I discussed above, the idea does have a certain resonance. The key seems to be in our shared experience and empathy. And, empathy appears to be a natural part of our human development. Children who are raised in safe, nurturing environments become increasingly empathetic throughout their early development. Those who do not, develop with varying degrees of attachment disorder, with some abused and neglected children demonstrating a complete incapacity for empathy. Some of those start abusing others when they are still children. Religion seems irrelevant, when we view it through that prism. In fact, some religious constructs, such as "Spare the rod, spoil the child," would appear to run directly contrary to healthy development of an innate moral compass. If our only impediment to antisocial behavior is fear of judgment and punishment, something is just horribly wrong. It is also less likely to be consistent, inclining people towards secrecy and shame.

I am always somewhat amused when people say, "You can't legislate morality." In point of fact, we legislate morality all the time. Prohibitions against murder, theft, rape, and a litany of other crimes are based on fairly universal taboos, that seem to arise pretty naturally. We don't need the Ten Commandments to tell us that murder is wrong. I have yet to meet the atheist who disagrees.

"Just Ask This Scientician"

I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

-- Albert Einstein

I stumbled on this very compelling post in Wolf & Goddess, on science, atheism, and Richard Dawkins.

Yesterday Wolf and I were in a book shop and I saw Richard Dawkins‘ book The God Delusion. The title scared me, I leafed through it with ill-concealed hysteria and asked Wolf if he found the title sad or threatening. Wolf is grounded in his faith (unconventional, he is no monotheiest) and moves easily past naysayers. I fear contamination. A guy, a clever guy, a scientist, publishes a book asserting God is nothing more than a dangerous delusion and I linger, fearfully - wanting to read it, and yet not.

It is like passing the scene of a car accident, not wanting to look and yet wanting to. You want to look and see people ashen faced and trembling, lighting cigarettes and saying “what a relief I could have been killed”. You want to see survivors not corpses. I want to read The God Delusion and survive. I don’t want to be contaminated with even more doubt.

While doubt, as such, is not my issue, I can relate to the agita atheists like Dawkins inspire. The smugness. The certainty. Why is it that so many atheists come across as more militantly dogmatic than Christian fundamentalists? It strikes me as ironic... but, it's really not. Human beings crave certainty. We long for clean, straight lines in our reality. Throughout much of human history we satisfied that need with religious authority. Today we satisfy it with science. Science has become religion.

A short while ago, I was listening to this interview with Brian Weiss. In it, he shares about an exchange he had with Carl Sagan. These two men of science butted heads about the validity of Weiss's renowned work with reincarnation and regression therapy. Sagan, not surprisingly to the those familiar with Sagan, was initially very dismissive. But Weiss pointed out to him that he was dismissing something without actually looking at the body of research Weiss has accrued -- the documentation of people who found historical records confirming their past identities, the cases of people speaking in foreign languages they did not know, and that his regressed patients get better. Sagan admitted, according to Weiss, something fairly extraordinary. "Brian," he said, "I've not been acting as a scientist, have I?" (Weiss discusses this incident and explains his own beliefs that science requires an "open mind" beginning at the end of video 6 in the series.)


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This is my biggest problem with both practitioners and laymen in this new discipline of scientism. They view science as an entity, an authority, and a kind of unassailable "book of facts." Anyone who thinks of science as something that establishes "facts" is neither practicing, nor honoring the scientific method. Science provides few definitive answers. It is, rather, a method of asking questions. Good scientists are involved in a process of discovery. They are not absolutist.

A linearized, pragmatic scheme of the four points above is sometimes offered as a guideline for proceeding:[25]

1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

Step 8 in that list is fairly important. Science, far from providing final answers, is constantly revising itself. A great many "facts" that we learned in school have been adapted and changed. Just recently, for instance, I read that falcons can no longer be considered close relatives of hawks and other raptors. They are, rather, close cousins of parrots.

When a falcon swoops from the sky to seize its fleeing prey, no one would mistake the sleek predator for a gaudy parrot.

Yet the secret kinship of falcons and parrots is one of many surprises in a landmark genetic study of 169 bird species being published by Field Museum researchers.

. . .

The analysis also showed falcons are more closely related to parrots than to other hunters such as hawks and eagles. If true, the finding would mean that falcons do not even belong in the scientific order originally named for them.[emphasis mine]

Science provides an ever evolving body of knowledge. Not only are scientific findings and categories being constantly revised, there is much that remains unknown in various scientific fields. Otherwise, a lot of scientists in a wide range of fields would be out of jobs. And yet, many practitioners of this new religion of scientism tell us that much that we observe and experience cannot exist because it cannot be clearly and consistently observed and there is no scientific evidence for it. But the world turned on its axis before we knew that it was round, or had any conception of an axis.




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In recent years, for instance, there has been a good deal of breakthrough research into insect aerodynamics. But, throughout much of the modern age, it has been a mystery.

Traditionally, scientists assumed that the basic physics of insect flight resembled the basic physics of human aviation.

For example, there's an urban legend that many decades ago, scientists analyzed the plump bodies and stubby wings of bumblebees and concluded they were too heavy to fly. Over the years, during repeated retellings of this story in schoolyards and barrooms, it acquired a punch line: "But bees don't know they can't fly, so they fly anyway."

The urban legend is based on fact: A bumblebee study was conducted in 1934 by the European scientists Antoine Magnan and Andre Saint-Lague. They applied mathematical analysis and known principles of flight to calculate that bee flight was "impossible," say insect-flight researchers Douglas L. Altshuler, Michael Dickinson and three colleagues at Caltech and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in an article for today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Since this time," the authors note, "bees have symbolized both the inadequacy of aerodynamic theory as applied to animals and the hubris with which theoreticians analyze the natural world."

Nothing in the natural world needs the imprimatur of our scientific institutions to function. Nor, does anything in the unseen or metaphysical world. For those of us who have seen glimpses of what lies beyond the veil, it is every bit as real as the flight of bumblebees.

None of this is intended as a disparagement of science; only to the practice of and belief in science as somehow conclusive and absolute, and the negation of all that lies undiscovered. The greatest scientists have been those who were open to the mysteries. Lahirondelle of Wolf & Goddess closes her rumination with an Einstein quote; the same quote alluded to by Weiss in the interview linked above.

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

-- Albert Einstein

Yes, Mr. Weiss. Einstein was almost certainly a mystic.

Addenda:
-- The title quotation is from "The Simpsons," episode "Lisa the Vegetarian."
-- Books by Brian Weiss can be found in the bookstore in the Past Life Work section.