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

This sense of spirituality is considered in a video sketch by the comedienne Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:

NYE: The Universe. For centuries, humankind has strived to understand this vast expanse of energy, gas, and dust. In recent years, a stunning breakthrough has been made in our concept of what the universe is for.

[Zoom to the Earth’s surface, and then to a yogurt shop in which two young women are chatting.]

FIRST WOMAN: So, I was texting while I was driving? And I ended up taking a wrong turn that took me directly past a vitamin shop? And I was just like, this is totally the universe telling me I should be taking calcium.

NYE: Scientists once believed the universe was a chaotic collection of matter. We now know the universe is essentially a force sending cosmic guidance to women in their 20s.

[Zoom to a gym with Schumer and a friend on exercycles.]

SCHUMER: So you know how I’ve been fucking my married boss for like six months? Well, I was starting to get really worried he was never going to leave his wife. But then yesterday in yoga, the girl in front of me was wearing a shirt that just said, “Chill.” And I was just like, this is so the universe telling me, “Girl, just, like, keep fucking your married boss!”⁶²

A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.

Arguments aside, is the need to believe pushing back against secular humanism? Believers, faitheists, and resenters of science and progress are gloating about an apparent return of religion all over the world. But as we shall see, the rebound is an illusion: the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.

Measuring the history of religious belief is not easy. Few surveys have asked people the same questions in different times and places, and the respondents would interpret them differently even if they did. Many people are queasy about labeling themselves atheist, a word they equate with “amoral” and which can expose them to hostility, discrimination, and (in many Muslim countries) imprisonment, mutilation, or death.⁶³ Also, most people are hazy theologians, and may stop short of declaring themselves atheists while admitting that they have no religion or religious beliefs, find religion unimportant, are spiritual but not religious, or believe in some “higher power” which is not God. Different surveys can end up with different estimates of irreligion depending on how the alternatives are worded.

We can’t say for sure how many nonbelievers there were in earlier decades and centuries, but there can’t have been many; one estimate put the proportion in 1900 at 0.2 percent.⁶⁴ According to WIN-Gallup International’s Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, a survey of fifty thousand people in fifty-seven countries, 13 percent of the world’s population identified themselves as a “convinced atheist” in 2012, up from around 10 percent in 2005.⁶⁵ It would not be fanciful to say that over the course of the 20th century the global rate of atheism increased by a factor of 500, and that it has doubled again so far in the 21st. An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as “not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down from close to 100 percent a century before.