Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement: the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince everyone else that they cannot get away with murder.³¹ As with Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists. In a nonfiction appendix to her novel Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (drawing in part on Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Russell) lays out refutations of every one of these arguments.³² The most common among them—faith, revelation, scripture, authority, tradition, and subjective appeal—are not arguments at all. It’s not just that reason says they cannot be trusted. It’s also that different religions, drawing on these sources, decree mutually incompatible beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they have wrought, and what they demand of their devotees. Historical scholarship has amply demonstrated that holy scriptures are all-too-human products of their historical eras, including internal contradictions, factual errors, plagiarism from neighboring civilizations, and scientific absurdities (such as God creating the sun three days after he distinguished day from night). The recondite arguments from sophisticated theologians are no sounder. The Cosmological and Ontological arguments for the existence of God are logically invalid, the Argument from Design was refuted by Darwin, and the others are either patently false (such as the theory that humans are endowed with an innate faculty for sensing the truth about God) or blatant escape hatches (such as the suggestion that the Resurrection was too cosmically important for God to have allowed it to be empirically verified).

Some writers insist that science has no place in this conversation. They seek to impose a condition of “methodological naturalism” on science which renders it incapable, even in principle, of evaluating the claims of religion. That would carve out a safe space in which believers can protect their beliefs while still being sympathetic to science. But as we saw in the preceding chapter, science is not a game with an arbitrary rulebook; it’s the application of reason to explaining the universe and to ascertaining whether its explanations are true. In Faith Versus Fact, the biologist Jerry Coyne argues that the existence of the God of scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis.³³ The Bible’s historical accounts could have been corroborated by archaeology, genetics, and philology. It could have contained uncannily prescient scientific truths such as “Thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.” A bright light might appear in the heavens one day and a man clad in a white robe and sandals, supported by winged angels, could descend from the sky, give sight to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We might discover that intercessory prayer can restore eyesight or regrow amputated limbs, or that anyone who speaks the Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down while those who pray to Allah five times a day are free from disease and misfortune. More generally, the data might show that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people: that the mothers who die in childbirth, the children who waste away from cancer, and the millions of victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, and holocausts had it coming.