Outgrowing God Read online

  Unfortunately, there may be a certain amount of truth in that. All countries think it’s necessary to have a police force. And criminals are less likely to steal or commit other crimes if they think the police are watching them. Nowadays our streets and shops are equipped with video cameras, and these often catch people doing things they shouldn’t: shoplifting, for instance. Any would-be shoplifter is obviously less likely to try it on if he knows there’s a camera watching him. So now imagine that a criminal believes God is watching his every move, every minute of every day. Many religious people think God even reads your thoughts and can tell in advance when you’re so much as contemplating a bad deed. You can sort of see why those people might think a God-fearing person, including a God-fearing politician, is less likely to do bad things than an atheist. Atheists don’t have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you’ve heard the cynical witticism ‘Conscience is knowing that someone is watching’.

  The tendency to be good when you are being watched may even be quite primitive, built deeply into our brains. My colleague Professor Melissa Bateson (once an undergraduate pupil of mine at Oxford) did a remarkable experiment. In her science department at the University of Newcastle they kept an ‘honesty box’ to pay for the coffee, tea, milk and sugar that they used every day. Nobody was there to sell the stuff. There was a price list on the wall, and you were simply trusted to put the right amount of money in the box. It would be no surprise to learn that people are honest when somebody is looking. But what if you are alone? Would you be just as likely to put money in the box, knowing that nobody could see? I’m sure you would, but not everybody is so scrupulous, and this was what made the experiment possible.

  Every week, Melissa put up the price list in the coffee room. And every week the paper was decorated with a picture at the top. Sometimes the picture was flowers: not always the same flowers, but flowers. In other weeks the picture was a pair of eyes: a different pair of eyes each time. And the fascinating result was this. In weeks when there were eyes above the price list, people were more honest. The takings in the honesty box were nearly three times as great as in the ‘control’ weeks when the customers had only flowers ‘looking’ at them. Isn’t that weird? If the eyes had been a real spy camera, it would be easy to explain. But the coffee drinkers knew perfectly well that the ‘eyes’ were just ink on paper. Those eyes could no more see what was going on than the flowers could. It wasn’t a rational calculation – ‘I’d better be honest because I’m being watched.’ It was irrational. Like when I stand on the top floor of a New York skyscraper and look down. I know I’m not going to fall. I’m even standing behind thick safety glass. But I still get goosebumps and a tingling of fear up my spine. It’s irrational. Maybe in this case it’s built into the brain by genes inherited from our ancestral past, when we needed to appreciate the danger of being high up in the trees. Perhaps you don’t even need to say to yourself, ‘God’s eyes are watching me, so I’d better be good.’ Perhaps it’s an automatic, subconscious effect. Like the effect of Melissa’s eyes on paper (in case you’re wondering, by the way, she did the necessary sums to show the result was unlikely to be due to chance).

  Whether irrational or not, it does unfortunately seem plausible that, if somebody sincerely believes God is watching his every move, he might be more likely to be good. I must say I hate that idea. I want to believe that humans are better than that. I’d like to believe I’m honest whether anyone is watching or not.

  What if the fear of God is not just fear of upsetting him but of something worse – much worse? Both Christianity and Islam have traditionally taught that sinners after their death will be tormented for all eternity in hell. The Book of Revelation talks about a ‘lake of fire burning with brimstone’. The Prophet Mohammed is quoted as saying that the person with the smallest punishment will have a smouldering ember placed under the bottom of his feet. ‘His brains will boil because of it.’ The Quran (4: 56) says of those who disbelieve its teachings, ‘When their skins have been burned away, We shall replace them with new ones so that they may continue to feel the pain.’ According to many preachers, you don’t even have to do anything bad to be thrown into the fires of hell. It is enough to be a non-believer! Some of the greatest painters have vied with each other to produce ever more horrifying nightmare pictures of hell. The most famous work of literature in the Italian language, Dante’s Inferno, is all about hell.

  Were you threatened with hell fire as a child? Did you truly believe the threats? Were you really scared? If you can answer no to those questions, you are lucky. Unfortunately, many people go on believing the threats until they die, and it makes their lives, and especially their dying days, a misery.

  I have a theory about threats of punishment. Some threats are plausible. Like, if you are found guilty of stealing you might go to prison. Other threats are very implausible. Like, if you don’t believe in God, when you die you’ll spend all eternity in a lake of fire. My theory is that the more plausible the threat, the less horrific it needs to be. The threat of punishment after you are dead is so far-fetched that it needs to be made really, really horrifying to compensate: a lake of fire. The threat of punishment while you are still alive is plausible (prison is a real place), so it doesn’t have to involve hideous torture with your skin burning off and then being replaced to be burned off again.

  What do you think of people who threaten children with eternal fire after they are dead? In this book I don’t normally give my own answers to such questions. But I can’t help making an exception here. I’d say those people are lucky there is no such place as hell, because I can’t think of anybody who more richly deserves to go there.

  Terrifying as hell is, there doesn’t seem to be much clear evidence that religion makes people behave either better or worse. Some studies suggest that religious people give more generously to charity. Many give to their churches in the form of ‘tithes’ (meaning a tenth of their income). And churches often pass on some of that money to worthwhile charitable causes like famine relief. Or to crisis appeals after terrible disasters like earthquakes. But a lot of the money gathered by churches goes to fund missionaries. They call it charitable giving. But is it charity in the same sense as, say, famine relief or helping people made homeless by earthquakes? Giving money for education seems a good thing to do. But if that education entirely consists of learning the Quran by heart? Or missionaries teaching children to forget their tribal heritage and learn the Bible instead?

  Non-believers can also be very generous. The top three philanthropic givers in the world, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros, are all non-believers. In 2010 a terrible earthquake devastated the already poor island of Haiti. The suffering was appalling. People around the world, whether religious or not, rallied round with offers of help and money. My own charitable foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, rushed to start a special charity which we called Non-Believers Giving Aid (NBGA). We recruited a dozen other non-believing, secular and sceptical organizations to join us in appealing for money from atheists, agnostics and other non-believers. Thousands of individual non-believers rallied round. Within three days, NBGA had raised $300,000. We sent every penny of it to Haiti, plus a lot more in subsequent weeks. At the same time, of course, religious charities were also gathering donations. And lots of good people went to Haiti to help. I don’t tell the story of NBGA to boast that non-believers are more generous than religious believers. I actually think that, when faced with a crisis, most people all over the world are kind and generous, whether they are religious or not.

  The Great Surveillance Camera in the Sky theory is sort of plausible, depressing though that is. Maybe it really does deter criminals? You might think, if so, that prison populations would have a high percentage of non-believers. Here are some figures from July 2013. They refer to the religions that convicts say they belong to, in federal
prisons in the United States. Twenty-eight per cent of prisoners are Protestant Christians, 24 per cent are Catholic Christians, 5 per cent are Muslims. Most of the rest are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Native American or ‘unknown’. And the figure for atheists? A tiny 0.07 per cent. A convicted criminal is 750 times more likely to be Christian than atheist. Admittedly we are talking about numbers saying they are Christian or atheist. Who knows what figures are concealed in those ‘unknowns’? More importantly, the total population of Christians in the United States is higher than the total population of atheists. But not 750 times higher. Again, the Christian figures may be somewhat inflated by the fact that prisoners can gain earlier release if they claim to be religious. It’s also been suggested that the prison figures are only incidentally about religious affiliation or lack of it. Poorly educated people are more likely to end up in prison. And poorly educated people are less likely to be atheist. But, however you look at it, these figures are not promising for the Great Spy Camera in the Sky theory.

  Even if the Great Spy Camera theory has some truth in it, it’s certainly not a good reason to believe in the factual existence of God. The only good reason for believing anything factual is evidence. The ‘Great Spy Camera’ theory might be a (rather dubious?) kind of reason for hoping that other people will believe in God. It might bring the crime rate down. It’s cheaper than installing real spy cameras or paying for more police patrols. I don’t know about you, but I find that rather patronizing: ‘Of course you and I are too intelligent to believe in God, but we think it would be a good idea if other people did!’ My friend the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls it ‘belief in belief’: not believing in God, but believing that belief in God is a good thing. When the then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was challenged to say whether she believed in God, she replied: ‘I believe in the Jewish people. And the Jewish people believe in God.’

  So much for the ‘Great Spy Camera in the Sky’ theory. I’ll now turn to the other possible reason why people might think it a good idea to vote for a religious politician rather than an atheist. This is really quite different. Some people think religion is a good thing because the Bible tells us how to behave well. Without a book of rules, so the theory goes, we are adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Also, the Bible is meant to provide us with good ‘role models’, admired characters like God or Jesus, whom we should imitate.

  But not all believers follow the Bible. Some have a completely different holy book, or no holy book at all. I’ll talk here only about the Jewish/Christian Bible, because it’s the only one I know well. But much the same could be said of the Quran. Do you think holy books like this are good guides to being good? Do you think the God of the Bible is a good role model? If so, you might like to take another look at Chapter 4. The Quran is even worse because Muslims are told to take it literally.

  The Ten Commandments are often held up as a guide to how to live a good life. Various American states, especially in the so-called Bible Belt, are torn by fierce arguments about the Ten Commandments. On one side are Christian politicians who want to stick them up on the walls of official state buildings such as court-houses. Those on the other side usually quote the US constitution. The First Amendment to the constitution states that

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

  That’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you say? The point is not that religion is forbidden. You can practise whatever religion you like, in your own way. The constitution merely forbids the establishment of an official state religion. Anybody is free to hang up the Ten Commandments privately in their own home. The constitution rightly guarantees private freedoms like that. But is it constitutional to stick them on the public wall of a state court-house? Many legal experts think not.

  Setting that legal question aside, let’s look at the Ten Commandments themselves to see what we think about them. Are they really a valuable guide to how to be good and how not to be bad? There are two versions in the Bible, one in the Book of Exodus and one in Deuteronomy. They are pretty much the same, but different religious traditions (Jewish, Roman Catholic, Lutheran etc.) number them slightly differently. Also, Moses, in his fury about the golden calf, dropped the original stone tablets and broke them, so God later supplied him with new ones. Here’s one version of the ones Moses didn’t drop, as listed in Exodus chapter 20. God made a great theatrical performance of the announcement, summoning all the people to the foot of Mount Sinai and then appearing in a thunderstorm with a great trumpet blast. I’ve put my own comments after each commandment, and you’ll probably want to add your own.

  I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

  For Jews that is the first commandment, although it sounds more like a statement than a commandment. For Christians it is the preamble to:

  First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me.

  As we saw in Chapter 4, and as God himself often said, he is a ‘jealous God’.

  The God character in the Old Testament was morbidly obsessed with rival gods. He hated them with a passion and was consumed by the fear that his people might be tempted to worship them. A similar obsessive loathing for rival gods persisted for centuries after the time of Jesus. After Christianity became the official religion of the Romans under Constantine, early Christian zealots rampaged around the Empire smashing what they saw as idols and we today see as priceless works of art.* The great statue of the goddess Athena in the ancient city of Palmyra (in modern Syria) was just one example. One of the worst offenders was the revered St Augustine. The manic determination of the early Christians to destroy images of rival gods finds its parallel today in the Muslim zealotry of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

  Second Commandment: You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

  Again, this is all about God being jealous of rival gods. Many rival gods among neighbouring tribes were statues. The Bible drives the point home in the next verse:

  You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

  What do you think about that last sentence? God is so jealous that, if you worship a rival god, he will punish not only you but your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. Even if they were not born when you did it. Poor innocent great-grandchildren.

  Third Commandment: You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

  This means you mustn’t use swear words involving God’s name. Like ‘God damn it!’. Or ‘Don’t be such a god-damn fool!’ You can see why God might not like it, but it doesn’t seem like a terribly serious crime, does it? Hardly worth sticking on the court-house wall. It’s only ‘Thou shalt not cuss’, after all, and that’s not the law in most countries.

  Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

  God took this one very seriously indeed. In the Book of Numbers, chapter 15, the Israelites caught a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. Gathering sticks! A pretty minor crime, you might think. But when Moses asked God what should be done about it, God was in no mood to trifle:

  Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.’

  Rough justice, don’t you think? I don’t know about you, but I think stoning is an especially horrid method of execution. It’s not only painful, there’s something extra nasty about the whole camp or village ganging up on one victim, like bullies in the playground. It’s still done today in some Muslim countries, especially to young women caught talking to men who are not their husbands (some strict Muslims seriously think that’s a crime).

  Stoning no longer happens in Christian c
ountries. One might even mischievously say that Christians are now being untrue to their holy book while the Muslim stoners are still being true to theirs. But do you think the Fourth Commandment is important enough to stick up on the court-house wall, as though it were one of the laws of the land?

  The next verses justify the Fourth Commandment by pointing out that God himself took a rest on the seventh day, after his six days’ labour creating the universe and everything in it.

  Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

  That’s typical of theological reasoning by ‘analogy’ – reasoning ‘symbolically’. It happened this way once upon a time, so that’s enough of a reason for it to happen the same way now. Actually, of course it didn’t happen the first time anyway, because the universe was not created in six days, but who’s counting?

  Fifth Commandment: Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

  That’s nice. It’s a good thing to honour your parents. They brought you into the world, fed you, looked after you, sent you to school and many other things.