Why people believe in god-4: Darwin’s problem

In a previous post, I tried to pin down what people actually believe when they say they believe in god. Today I want to look at what goes into religious belief, using Charles Darwin’s own journey as an example.

Charles Darwin was encouraged by his father, a successful doctor, to study medicine and was duly sent off in 1825 to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a leading place for such studies at that time. But Darwin found that he hated the study of medicine, especially the horrors of surgery in those pre-anesthesia days. When his father realized that this was not the field for him, he suggested in 1828 that he matriculate at Cambridge University, get a degree, and then become a clergyman. To get into Oxford or Cambridge University at that time one had to be a member of the Church of England (i.e., an Anglican), the rule being abolished by an act of parliament only later in 1871. Although Darwin had been baptized in the Church of England, his family tradition was nonconformist Unitarians and his father and grandfather were freethinkers.

Darwin felt that he should make a good faith attempt to see if he could honestly accept the doctrines of the Anglican church. In his autobiography Darwin says that he “had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England; though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted. It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible.” (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Nora Barlow (ed), p. 49, my italics.)

I think that the key phrase here is “persuaded myself”. I think most religious people deep down suspect that their belief in a god makes no sense, or at least know that they really don’t understand the things they are being asked to believe, but they are willing to persuade themselves, as Darwin did, to go along with the charade. The key question is “Why?” Why go to all that trouble to overrule an instinctive skepticism that arises from their natural logic and reasoning powers? Why does it never strike them, as it never struck Darwin until he was much older, how illogical it is to say that they believe in what they cannot understand and what is in fact unintelligible?

But there were limits to even Darwin’s youthful credulity. Even when he was a believer in the literal truth of the Bible, Darwin could not bring himself to actually rejoice in the contradictions, to make the ridiculous claim that some apologists do, that because the doctrines of religion seem nonsensical, that accepting them is somehow a sign of intellectual superiority, that it indicates that one somehow understands and appreciates deep mysteries. As he said, “I might have said with entire truth that I had no wish to dispute any dogma; but I never was such a fool as to feel and say “credo quia incredibile.” [“I believe because it is incredible.”] (Barlow, p. 49)

As we all know, Darwin ended up being an unbeliever. He shied away from the label of atheist and called himself an agnostic, the former term being a little too strong for someone who hated confrontations, though it is hard to tell the difference in his case since he said quite clearly in his autobiography that although his disbelief crept over him at a very slow rate, it “was at last complete” and that he “never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” (Barlow, p. 72)

It seems pretty clear that most adults have no actual reasons to believe in god. They have not in their lives seen god or heard god or witnessed any acts that can be unequivocally ascribed to god. Those who claim to have witnessed miracles tend to ignore plausible alternative explanations. But they lack Darwin’s instinct to follow his thinking to its logical conclusion that there is no god.

Those who actually claim to have seen god or had god speak to them are presumed to be delusional and in need of psychiatric help or frauds of the sort who try to sell pieces of toast with Jesus’s image on it on eBay. The latest story that I heard of was someone who claimed that a rock fall suddenly revealed a ‘hand of god’ in a rock formation behind his home and he (naturally) has put it up for sale on eBay.

So why do people believe in god? This really consists of two related questions: Why did such beliefs arise in the first place? And why do those beliefs persist in the absence of any evidence in support of them?

I’ll examine these questions in the next post in this series.

POST SCRIPT: David Attenborough talks about god

The noted nature documentary filmmaker has made many people aware of the wonder of nature. He talks about why he does not believe in god. (Thanks to Machines Like Us.)

Why people believe in god-3: What do religious people actually believe?

Apologists for ‘moderate’ religion always start by saying that they accept science, and begin with arguments for god that seem to be superficially compatible with science, but ultimately end up saying they believe in absurdities that violate almost every major scientific principle, such as virgin births or that people can actually come back from the dead. However sophisticated religious apologists may argue intellectually, they seem to need the same emotional crutch of magical thinking as much as any religious fundamentalist, and desperately want to believe that there is this invisible entity who is looking out for them personally. Religious scientists like Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, John Lennox, and John Polkinghorne all start out arguing on a high intellectual plane, but they end up making almost the very same assertions of belief of the average churchgoer in the pew on any given Sunday.

So what do religious people actually believe? There are no simple answers. In his book God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007, p. 12), Victor J. Stenger tries to pin down the philosophical foundations of people’s belief in god. But I am interested in more practical questions.

The vague “Do you believe in god” type questions that are usually asked of believers are useless because it is not clear what people believe even if they say yes. Is it the deist god Deigod or Gosh or the full-blooded, omnipotent, omniscient, miracle working Supergod or (as is most likely) some personally concocted hybrid?

So here are some questions that would help make the discussions more fruitful. I wish that the polling agencies would ask questions like these as this gives a much better picture of what people actually believe.

  1. Is god a (a) material or (b) non-material entity? (i.e., is god made up of the same kind of stuff like protons, electrons, etc. with properties like mass, charge, spin, etc. that every other thing in the universe is made up of, or is he made of something that is non-material?)
  2. Does god exist everywhere in space?
  3. Is god a sentient being like us, with thoughts and feelings?
  4. Can god change the past?
  5. Does god know the future?
  6. Does god know absolutely everything that happens every moment, including every thought of every being?
  7. Can god intervene in events whenever and wherever, to violate natural laws and change their course (i.e. perform miracles)?
  8. Do you believe that you have a soul or spirit that will continue to exist in some form (perhaps reincarnated) even after you are dead?

My experience suggests that most religious people would answer the above questions as follows: 1: (b), 2: yes, 3: yes, 4: no, 5: yes, 6: yes, 7: yes, 8: yes

I also have bonus questions for those who call themselves Christians:

  1. Do you believe Jesus was totally human when he lived on the Earth, with a fully human body, with no powers or abilities not possessed by any other human?
  2. Do you believe that Jesus really died on the cross, with his body experiencing the same changes after death that any human body does?
  3. Do you believe that the same physical body then came back to life?
  4. If the answer to question #3 is ‘yes’, where is that physical body now?

I suspect that most Christians will answer: 1: yes, 2: yes, 3: yes, 4: heaven.

Of course, all these answers lead to all manner of severe contradictions, either because they are internally inconsistent or they violate basic scientific principles. For example, the idea that god took a fully human form in the shape of Jesus is central to Christian dogma. Otherwise what was the point of the whole exercise? But if Jesus is totally human, how could he perform his miracles? It is to evade this type of contradiction that religious language and concepts like ‘kenosis’ or the doctrine that Jesus is fully god and fully human are introduced, which make no consistent logical sense but can be interpreted in any way that the situation requires.

As for the second question, we know that our bodies undergo irreversible decay rapidly after death, which is why organ removal for donations must be done immediately. So if Jesus was totally human and his body decayed for three days, how did he recover the use of his organs when his body was resurrected?

There really is no way to escape these contradictions without resorting to saying that Jesus is at least on occasion Supergod.

More sophisticated religious believers know this is a problem and will try to avoid answering the questions I posed, likely retreating to an extreme form of religion-speak suggesting that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know the answers to such questions because god is so deeply mysterious that any attempt to understand his nature in any concrete way is doomed to failure. This non-answer enables them to avoid having to publicly acknowledge any contradictions while privately assigning any properties they want to god that gives them emotional satisfaction. Or they will give the answers I provided and wave away any contradictions by invoking the ‘mysterious ways clause’ that allows god to circumvent any contradictions in ways that we cannot know.

I know that some readers of this blog are religious. I hope they will take a stab at answering those questions so that we can get a grip on what exactly we are talking about.

POST SCRIPT: Hey, I never promised you a rose garden

God makes Jesus an offer that he thinks of refusing.

Why people believe in god-2: When good physicists get theology

All believers in an even minimally activist god face the challenge of explaining why there seems to be no evidence for his actions, and why the world seems to be understandable and explicable without postulating his existence. They cannot face up to the fact that the logical conclusion is that there is no god, and this is where the vague and cloudy language of theology comes in, trying to mask this fundamental problem.

Physicist John Polkinghorne in his book Faith, Science, and Understanding (2000) pulls the same trick as chemist Francis Collins, biologist Kenneth Miller, and mathematician John Lennox, arguing first for the possibility of a deist god (whom I have called Deigod), and then asserting without argument that this makes it rational to believe in Supergod. But Polkinghorne has a weapon that the other two don’t have. He has studied theology formally and so can dress up the same weak arguments in obscurantist language.

Polkinghorne is a highly able and respected particle physicist. He was a former professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society who, at the age of around fifty, gave up physics and became an ordained priest in the British Anglican Church. So he has studied both physics and theology in considerable depth. In his book he invokes the usual staple of the anthropic principle as an argument for god, which essentially suggests that the universe seems to be exquisitely fine tuned in order to allow for human life to emerge and that this suggests that it must have been designed. It is a popular argument amongst religious scientists. As Polkinghorne puts it:

The wonderful order of the world is perceived…as being a reflection of the Mind of the Creator, and the universe’s finely tuned aptness to the evolution of life is perceived as an expression of the Creator’s fruitful intent. (p. 22)

Another physicist Victor Stenger in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis has effectively demolished that anthropic argument. But that has not stopped it from being regularly advanced because it has proved very lucrative, especially recently for physicists, with the annual Templeton prize essentially rewarding those who concoct new ways to try and make science and religion compatible, and being repeatedly given to physicists who invoke variations of the anthropic principle.

Some new atheists argue that the Templeton Foundation exists essentially for this sole purpose, to use its wealth to co-opt scientists and journalists to keep on forever discussing the issue of how to find ways of reconciling science with god, thus perpetuating the idea that such a reconciliation is even conceivable. They suggest that we should fight back against the pernicious influence of the Templeton organization by not going along with this strategy and by boycotting these ‘dialogues’.

Polkinghorne also goes in to some depth about how the uncertainty principle and chaos and complexity theory, all of which introduce elements of unpredictability into the world, and thus can be postulated as the vehicles of god’s action that escape detection. He also invokes consciousness as a deep mystery that is inexplicable without reference to god. All this is to establish the possibility of existence of Gosh (the God Of the Scientific Holes).

But then he too makes the great unexplained leap to assert the existence of Supergod, and says that he actually believes that Jesus rose from the dead and performed the miracles claimed in the Bible, without making any attempt at all to explain what, if anything, the uncertainty principle or chaos or complexity theory has to do with such miraculous, macro-level science-defying events. All of these people think that allowing for the logical possibility of any god at all allows for the existence the particular god they want to believe in.

While I have criticized the books by religious scientists like chemist Francis Collins book and biologist Kenneth Miller for the faults in their reasoning, at least they both write clearly about their religious beliefs, without using the usual impenetrable theological jargon. Physicist John Polkinghorne, on the other hand, while he writes well when explaining physics, because he is also a theologian has the unfortunate ability to revert to the usual theological linguistic obscurity when discussing how god works. Here is a passage from his book:

God’s act of creation would not only have involved a divine kenosis of omnipotence, resulting from allowing a creaturely other truly to be itself, but also a divine kenosis of omniscience, arising from allowing the future to be truly open. (p. 150)

The meaning of the above passage was initially incomprehensible to me but I thought that it may be due to the fact that I was unfamiliar with the work ‘kenosis’, which is the kind of neologism that sprouts all over the place in theology. So I looked up the word in the dictionary and it means “the relinquishment of divine attributes by Jesus Christ in becoming human.” So I think that what he is saying is that when God chose to appear in the human form of Jesus, he gave up the powers of omnipotence and omniscience. But why not simply say so? What is the need for things like the “creaturely other truly to be itself”?

If he did speak more straightforwardly and people understood what he was saying, then some obvious questions would arise in their minds. People might ask how Jesus, if he was not omnipotent, could bring Lazarus back from the dead or walk on water or transform water into wine, and all the other tricks claimed for him. Or how, if he was not omniscient, he could know in advance that Peter would deny knowing him. Polkinghorne cannot help speaking obliquely because, to paraphrase taking a cue from George Orwell, religious speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible, designed to make lies sound truthful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Reading this kind of passage in Polkinghorne’s book brought back memories from the time when I used to indulge in this kind of metaphysical talk as part of my religious training. It is possible to convince oneself that this kind of thing makes sense, as long as one keeps it on a high abstract plane and do not demand concrete examples of what is being said. And of course, one has to want to believe that there is some sense to believing in god.

POST SCRIPT: Jesus the Supergod

Maybe Jesus didn’t fully invoke the ‘divine kenosis of omnipotence’ and become a ‘creaturely other truly being itself’.

Why people believe in god-1: The fog of theological language

As regular readers of this blog know, I am an atheist. I hope it is clear what I believe: I believe that the material world governed by natural laws is all that exists, and I reject all things supernatural, which includes the soul, ghosts and spirits, the afterlife, reincarnation, any form of spiritualism, and so on. In the process, I have argued strongly that there is absolutely no reason to believe that god exists and that to do so is irrational, driven either by childhood indoctrination, psychological need, or both.
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Skyhooks and cranes-8: Alternatives to natural selection

In the half century after Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, the idea of evolution gained considerable ground but the theory of natural selection was just one of several mechanisms that drove the process, and hence the anti-religious implications of the theory were somewhat muted.

Some of these alternative theories were modified forms of Lamarckism, the idea that characteristics that an organism acquired during its lifetime that enabled it to survive better were somehow transmitted to the entities in the body that carried inherited traits to their progeny, so that children inherited that acquired trait. These changes could either come about because of animals needing or desiring a change (the famous Lamarckian example of giraffes getting longer and longer necks as a result of having to strain to reach high leaves) or the ‘use-disuse’ theory, that body features that people used a lot would grow and become more common while those that they did not need or use would atrophy and disappear (the example here being the building of certain muscles in the body or the disappearance of fish-like features once they became land animals).
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Religious dogmatism

The Catholic Church, like other rigid religious belief structures such as Orthodox Islam and Judaism or fundamentalist Christianity, does not hesitate to draw lines in the sand, to state clearly what is allowed and what is not, and then follow that policy wherever it leads, even if it leads over a cliff. In the face of derision they are willing to hold on to their position for decades, even centuries, before quietly conceding that they were wrong.

For example, when they decided that Church doctrine required the belief that the Sun orbited the Earth, they pulled out all the stops to force people to oppose the Copernican model, in 1616 banning the teaching of the heliocentric model and in 1633 putting Galileo under house arrest and forcing him to recant his view under threat of torture by the Inquisition.

Of course, that didn’t work, with even Catholics rejecting that absurd policy. The church quietly reversed that position only hundreds of years later, in 1992 when Pope John Paul II lifted its edict of Inquisition against Galileo. But the Pope then went on to claim that Galileo may have been divinely inspired, saying: “Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions.” This was a rather pathetic effort to recover some dignity from an embarrassing debacle for religion.
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Are religious people reliable allies on the environment?

Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson gave Case Western Reserve University’s annual Distinguished Lecture on March 3, 2009 in Severance Hall, the magnificent building where the equally magnificent Cleveland Orchestra plays, was packed for the occasion. It seemed to underscore the community’s support for, at least interest in, the theory of evolution.
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Pope Benedict challenges all superstitions other than his own

In a previous post, I said that when religions compete with others for adherents, they do not resort to evidence because no religion can produce any. Hence they have to resort to emotional appeals, scaring people that if they don’t believe in their god, awful things will happen to them, but if they believe, they will be rewarded in the next life or the afterlife, in the form of heaven or other goodies.

So basically, it is a competition that tests which religion has the best combination of fear and bribes to achieve its goal of increasing market share. Christianity, for example, has had a good run by scaring the daylights out of people with awful visions of hell and what happens on judgment day to people who have not accepted Jesus, and then promising a quickie salvation from that awful fate if only they say the magic words “I accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.”
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Are Facebook and MySpace killing religion?

There was welcome news in a recent survey (sent to me by Bill, a reader of this blog) that found that the number of people professing themselves to be Christians in America has declined while the numbers of nonbelievers has risen significantly.

According to the ARIS survey, compared to results in 1990, “The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent…”Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,” [survey co-author Ariela] Keysar said. “We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union.””

Furthermore, “Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.”

This confirms what I have said many times in the past, that many people are effectively and functionally atheists, even though they may shy away from explicitly adopting the label. I am pretty confident that even this survey is underestimating the number of nonbelievers due to the reluctance of people admit to it.

Correspondingly “The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent.”

The good news is that the main result of the survey that the number of nonbelievers has risen significantly has been widely reported in the media. USA Today, in a long article with charts and graphs, said that “this category [nonbelievers] now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.” The Washington Post also made the increased numbers of nonreligious people its lede.

Such media reports will, I think, further encourage those who already harbor secret feelings that the tenets of religion make no sense to become more open about expressing their doubts.

So what could be the source of this decline in religiosity? Here’s my theory: Facebook. Not only Facebook but other social networking sites like MySpace that are exploding on the internet. All these sites are filling a niche that once used to be largely the preserve of churches, which was a place to meet like-minded people. If you moved to a new location, joining a religious group was often the best way to get to know others like you. A Sri Lankan friend of mine used to live in a small town in central Ohio. The people were friendly but almost the first question that was posed to her was to ask her what church she belonged to. When she said she was a Buddhist, they were a little nonplussed. But with the internet, it becomes far easier to find affinity groups and so the utility of churches as a meeting place and networking center has declined.

This does not mean that religion will go away. Most people will still feel the need for something transcendental in their lives, especially the need for rituals to mark landmarks like birth, coming of age, marriage/commitment, and death. I suspect that churches and priests will end up largely serving those sporadic needs, with regular weekly religious services becoming sparsely attended by aging populations.

ARIS survey co-author Barry Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. says that today, “religion has become more like a fashion statement, not a deep personal commitment for many.”

Over time, the US is likely to become like the Scandinavian countries. The people there belong to churches (mostly Lutheran) but do not think of the church as the place to ask the big existential questions of life, meaning, and death. They are not even much bothered by those questions at all. The church is seen as simply a place that conducts ceremonies.

And contrary to American ideas that a country without religion would be a depraved one, this article by Peter Steinfels, in the February 27, 2009 issue of the New York Times (thanks to reader Chris) says, “It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.”

Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist and author of a book on religion in Denmark and Sweden called Society Without God (New York University Press, 2008), says that he found “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”

The people were not anti-religion probably because in those countries religion is not the powerful negative force that it is in the US. There is no sense in being hostile to something that is largely irrelevant. But the secular nature of their religion is clearly evident.

The many nonbelievers [Zuckerman] interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label “atheist.” An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church.

Though they denied most of the traditional teachings of Christianity, they called themselves Christians, and most were content to remain in the Danish National Church or the Church of Sweden, the traditional national branches of Lutheranism.

At the same time, they were “often disinclined or hesitant to talk with me about religion,” Mr. Zuckerman reported, “and even once they agreed to do so, they usually had very little to say on the matter.”
…
This indifference or obliviousness to religious matters was sometimes subtly enforced. “In Denmark,” a pastor told Mr. Zuckerman, “the word ‘God’ is one of the most embarrassing words you can say. You would rather go naked through the city than talk about God.”

One man recounted the shock he felt when a colleague, after a few drinks, confessed to believing in God. “I hope you don’t feel I’m a bad person,” the colleague pleaded.

Social conformity or not, Mr. Zuckerman was deeply impressed with the matter-of-fact way in which many of his interviewees spoke of death, without fear or anxiety, and their notable lack of existential searching for any ultimate meaning of life.

This is the way America is going. The churches will still be there. The priests and rabbis and imams will still be there. But god, whose only purpose is to allay fears of death by fostering the delusion of a life after this one, will have largely disappeared.

POST SCRIPT: What if god disappeared?

Thanks to Machines Like Us.

When religious people and atheists talk

Within the last few years I have observed and been involved in discussions with people representing various religious denominations. I have noticed that when people of different faiths meet and the topic of religion comes up, one of two scenarios unfold.

One the one hand, you may have the holding-hands-and-singing-kumbaya phenomenon. This ecumenical approach seeks to find commonalities in religions and to emphasize the things that all religions share, such as that in every major religion one can find some version of the Golden Rule, to act towards others as one would want them to act towards you, and so on. This group of people tends to suppress those things in their religious texts that highlight differences with, or preach intolerance of, other religions.

The other is the “My religion is better than yours” or “My religion is right, yours is wrong” approach, taken by those seeking to either convert the other person or by people pursuing a political agenda. Such people are so convinced of the rightness of their own religion that they are often completely ignorant of even the most basic tenets of other faiths, having just a caricatured view of only those parts that they think puts the other in a bad light. So, for example, the anti-Muslim bigots in America can often quote those parts of the Koran that seem to call for violent action against infidels while ignoring those parts that are more tolerant.

But while it is understandable why the former group has decided for political reasons not to compare the relative merits of their respective religions, what is interesting is that even in the latter case, they do not try to argue, on the basis of evidence, why one religion might be superior to another. One can see why. After all, how can you rationally argue that Judaism (to pick a religion at random) is better than Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or whatever? What possible data could you produce? They rarely use evidence because introducing the notion of evidence immediately shows the weakness of their own religion. Would it make any sense for a Christian and a Muslim and a Jew to argue about the merits of the evidence for Jesus rising from the dead compared with that for Mohammed to ride on a winged horse or for Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks? To do so risks making all of them skeptics because it would become immediately apparent that the claims of each religion are all absurd and unsupported.

Instead, the appeal for religious allegiance is almost always based on emotional or moral grounds, that one religion provides greater emotional satisfaction or rewards (material and spiritual) than the other or conforms more closely with current societal values. For example, it is hard to see a majority of Americans embracing orthodox Islam or Judaism, irrespective of the theological merits of those religions, simply because of their absurd and unconscionable restrictions on the role of women. Most women will simply not go along.

When religions try to convert people to another faith, it is almost always on the basis of some sort of emotional appeal. Fundamentalist Christian evangelists have a two-pronged strategy to making converts: first scare the daylights out of people by declaring them to be sinners destined for the fires of everlasting hell, and then promise them an escape from such torments if they accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior.

This is why it must be disconcerting for a religious person to have such discussions with an atheist. Atheists believe that god does not exist not because the idea of nonexistence is appealing or satisfies some emotional need, but simply because the idea of believing in something for which there is zero evidence strikes them as an absurd thing to do. To convince an atheist, you need to provide evidence for god, and this mode of persuasion is foreign to religious believers.

To bring the discussion back to a form they are familiar with, religious people try to assert that atheism is also a ‘belief’. They try to argue that since atheists cannot prove that god does not exist, then assuming so must make it a belief. This tactic puts them back into a more familiar discussion mode, since it is arguing for one belief versus another, and the argument can then be made on the basis of emotional appeals, by asking which belief is more satisfying.

This is, of course, a false argument. Believing in the nonexistence of an entity because of the lack of any evidence for it is not equivalent to believing in the existence of an entity despite the lack of evidence for it. The former is a rational belief while the latter is irrational.

This is not to say that emotions do not play any role. Human beings are emotional animals. But for anyone with a logical or scientific attitude towards life, holding rational beliefs is far more emotionally satisfying than clinging on to irrational ones.

The crucial difference in the emotional responses is this: Religious people believe in irrational things because it makes them feel good. Atheists feel good because they believe in rational things.

POST SCRIPT: Extra fluffy toilet paper, eco-destroyer

This article points out how America’s passion for the softest possible toilet paper is harming the environment because producing it requires destroying vast amounts of virgin forests to get that extra fluffiness. It causes “more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions”.

Thanks to very aggressive promotion and marketing by companies like Kimberley-Clark, Americans are convinced that only the softest will do and so 98% of the toilet rolls sold in America are made from virgin forests, while in Europe and Latin America 40% is made from recycled products.

Our local Heinen’s supermarket has been stocking toilet paper and paper towels made from recycled paper for some time. I can report that they are perfectly acceptable.