The Halo Effect

 Why do sensible, educated people believe in God?  

As I explored previously in this blog, belief in God involves acceptance of logical paradoxes, disregard for the lived experience of other people, and belief without reasonable evidence.  So what is the motivation for belief?  

One answer is that belief in God is the cultural norm.  Most nations have a dominant religion, and that religion permeates society and culture.  So there are Protestant Christian, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Shia Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and other religions, each with its own diversity of sects, which each dominate a culture.  People are also taught the precepts of religion from childhood.  It is easiest to simply believe and observe the rituals than to intellectually challenge the medium surrounding us all.  

Another motivation for belief is hope in the midst of despair.  All people, at some time, experience disappointment in life, defeat, discouragement and depression.  Some people have lived in situations utterly without hope; others may experience an internalized feeling of despair.  In either case, religion can be a source of hope and I would not want to take that away.  

But for those who would live their lives by a standard of truth, and are able to withstand the vagaries of life without reliance on religion, I expect that more of them would reject religion.  In western cultures, particularly in America, we have a culture of questioning academic orthodoxy and dogma.  For educated people trained in critical thinking, why does religion receive a pass from rigorous skepticism?  

I think part of the answer is the halo effect.  

This image in the style of a Russian Orthodox icon was generated by AI, which is still unable to count fingers on a hand. 

The halo effect is a form of cognitive bias, one of dozens of common, repeatable human errors in perception or judgment.  These errors are explored in a number of popular psychology books, including Inevitable Illusions by M. Piattelli-Palmarini, Predictably Irrational, by Daniel Areily, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli, Nudge by Richard Thaler, Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, etc.  Most of these cognitive biases reflect internal heuristics (rules of thumb) which people use to make rapid, simple judgments about complex things.  

The Halo Effect was first rigorously documented in 1920, by Edward Thorndike.  Thorndike defined the halo effect as a cognitive bias in which one facet of a person or thing affects judgment about other facets of that person or thing.  The usual example is that a person who is deemed to be attractive is also perceived, without evidence, as being smart, neat, diligent, well-behaved, friendly or other positive qualities.  

In the case of religion, I think that the positive aspects of religious doctrine lead people to conflate being *good* with being *true*.  

Certainly, there is much about religious doctrine that is objectively good.  Most religious teachings include some version of the Golden Rule. It is well represented by Jesus’ admonition to love your neighbor as yourself.  In general, the Christian New Testament reflects core human values of goodness, including kindness, empathy, forgiveness, fairness, justice, service and responsibility.  There are also teachings of gender inequality and intolerance, which are considered negative in modern values, but predominantly, the New Testament is an instruction to be good.  It is much like the departing words of the alien in Steven Spielberg’s Christ-like story, "ET":  “Be good.”

But one critical value is missing from the human values represented in the New Testament, the value of Truth.  In any prioritization of human values, Truth should be one of the highest values, exceeded only by kindness. **

My grandfather spent a number of years as a missionary in Japan, running a Christian bookstore and teaching English at a Christian boys’ school, while raising his family.  He believed that mission work should first address the physical needs of people for food, shelter and economic development, then education, then fellowship, before broaching the ideas of the Christian religion.  He believed that living the example of a good life was the best way to bring about conversion to Christianity.  After World War II, he was the founding director of the Methodist Committee on Overseas Relief, and later was director of the World Council of Churches’ world literacy program.  By objective criteria, he was a good man, and lived a good life.  But living a good life doesn’t make his religion true.

One of my friends argues that on balance, the force of religion for good outweighs any question of whether or not it is true.  It is depressingly true that there is evil in the world, and evil behavior by people of all cultures.  Perhaps some of those people could be influenced by either the teachings of Jesus, or the prospect of eternal damnation for their deeds.  But the persistence of evil despite the prevalence of religion gives me doubt.*

On balance, the influence of religion for good does not offset the fact that it isn’t true.  I think that a false belief in God will ultimately lead to greater evil, as it has so many times in the past.  

In the long run, you cannot reason to sound conclusions from false premises.  Belief in something that isn’t true, will eventually lead to conflict with others who hold conflicting absolute beliefs.   This is especially true for belief in an all-powerful god and in god’s absolute truth.

In writing the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wrote of the self-evident truths of inalienable human rights.  It was John Adams who inserted the line “endowed by their creator”.  I suggest that human morality should be derived along the thinking of Jefferson and Franklin, as a self-evident truth that people should be good, according to core human values, without the need for instructions from a god that doesn’t exist.  
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Appendix
*  Donald Trump recently mused aloud that his chances of getting into heaven were small, but perhaps he could tip the scales by winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  That isn’t my notion of how the scales of heavenly grace would work, but whatever.  

But just as the Christian religion urges people to be good, it offers a Get Out of Hell Free card through repentance and forgiveness.  Evildoers through the ages have relied on the idea of heavenly forgiveness while perpetrating heinous crimes against humanity.  In the time of Martin Luther, the Catholic church sold "indulgences", which were pre-approved forgiveness tokens for planned or completed sins.  Religious people banking on divine forgiveness span the spectrum from Ivan The Terrible (who tortured thousands, murdered his son and then prayed for forgiveness) to fundamentalist Christian pedophile ministers to decamillionaire televangelists.  These Christian faithful sinners are either banking on  heavenly forgiveness or are secretly complete atheists.  I’m inclined to think that they believe that they can game the system with late-life repentance.  It is hard for me to understand exactly what these people believe, given the deep hypocrisy between their public religious exhortations and their private behavior.

**In an attempt to restore truth to the New Testament and exclude superstition, Thomas Jefferson constructed a manuscript of the teachings of Jesus.  Jefferson collected text from the four gospels, but excluded all miracles, mention of the supernatural, the divinity of Jesus and the resurrection.  Jefferson called his final manuscript "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth".  It was first published in 1904.   

From Agnosticism to Atheism

                                                    "And the three men I admire most,
                                                    The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
                                                    They caught the last train for the coast
                                                    The day the music died."
                                                                Don McLean, American Pie

I am nearing the end of what I have to say about atheism.  I have ideas for six additional posts, but in a general sense, this post is the culmination of what I have to say about atheism and belief in God. 

I had doubts about the existence of God and souls from my early teens.  As I grew older, married, and had a family, I kept my doubts to myself.  I went to church with my family, worshipped and prayed as a practicing Christian.  As the children grew older, we stopped attending church and I stopped praying.  I returned to my earlier doubts and considered myself an agnostic.

Being agnostic implies uncertainty.  As it is often used, being agnostic incorrectly suggests something of a 50 – 50 proposition – “Eh, maybe it’s so, maybe not”.  Even if evidence or lack of evidence leads you to an opinion, at the end of the day being agnostic means giving a shrug and saying, “I really don’t know.”  This post is about how I moved away from a mindset of uncertainty, to decide with reasonable certainty that there is no God.  This is the path to atheism.

About a decade ago I read a short passage in an essay which radically changed my thinking.  The essay is “A Dream of Socrates”, in the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.  In the essay, Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes in the style of the dialogues of Plato.  Hermes and Socrates have been discussing the virtues of Athenian society. 

“Hermes: ‘Most Athenians would indeed call those virtues.  But how many really believe it?  How many are willing to criticize a god by the standards of reason and justice?’
Socrates: [Ponders.] All who are just, I suppose.  For how can anyone be just if he follows a god of whose moral rightness he is not persuaded?  And how is it possible to be persuaded of someone’s moral rightness without first forming a view about which qualities are morally right?’”

The notion that people should judge gods (or God) was revolutionary to me.  But why shouldn’t we judge God?  We are intelligent beings and we can appraise justice and reason.  We should expect God to be reasonable and just.  Being reasonable and just should be something intrinsically part of how we define God.  If the world does not show evidence of God’s reason and justice, we can logically conclude that God doesn’t exist.  And if God is not reasonable and just, we’re talking about a demon, not God.  I will not believe in an unreasonable, unjust or capricious God.

Some people would tell me that God doesn’t want to be judged.  We are told, without proof, that we are lower beings created by God, and therefore we have no right to judge God.  But isn’t that unreasonable and unjust?  

On social media, I’m frequently told that I will suffer eternal damnation if I don’t repent and worship God.  If God demands worship under the threat of eternal pain and suffering, isn’t that extortion?  Is it reasonable?  I’ll answer for you.  No.  Is it just?  No.

Much of this blog has been an exploration in the ways in which God is apparently unreasonable and unjust.  My essay “God as Sustainer of All Things”  (https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/10/god-as-sustainer-of-all-things.html) contains a list of dozens of rationalizations that religious authorities use to excuse God’s apparent injustice toward humans.  If God exists, we have to twist logic like a pretzel to justify God’s apparent indifference and cruelty towards humankind.  Occam’s Razor gives us a better resolution of the paradox.  It is simpler, and therefore logically correct, to conclude that God doesn’t exist.

Agnosticism
Dictionaries define agnosticism as a belief that any ultimate reality, including the existence of God, is probably unknowable.  (It’s funny that agnostics are even agnostic about agnosticism.  “Is reality truly unknowable?”   “Eh, I’m not so sure.  Maybe not.”)  It’s appropriate that I am an atheist, not an agnostic, because I believe that objective truth does exist and is generally accessible to everyone.

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Carl Sagan 1984, after others circa 1890.

A list of famous agnostics includes many smart people whom I greatly respect.  Presumably they thought about the problem, doubted the existence of God, but could not bring themselves to the point of denying that God exists.

Agnosticism.

Famous agnostics:

Thucydides, Confucius, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Erico Fermi, Alexander Von Humboldt, Mark Twain, Edwin Hubble, John Tyndall, Marie Curie, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Karl Popper, David Attenborough, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jacob Bronowski, Neil Gaiman, Noam Chomsky, Matt Groening.

Part of the rationale for agnosticism lies in the fact that knowledge is always incomplete.  There are always unknown aspects of reality.  The progress of science has been a bit like the process of peeling an infinite onion.  After we began to understand the elements as the fundamental building blocks of matter, we learned of fundamental sub-atomic particles – the proton, neutron and electron.  Then we learned that protons and neutrons are not elementary particles, they each consist of three quarks.  Seventeen elementary particles have been recognized, including six varieties of quark.  Similarly, Newtonian ideas about gravity and mechanics were replaced by Einstein’s gravity and  others’ quantum mechanics.  Dark matter and dark energy are additional mysteries; the early evolution of the universe contains paradoxes, etc.  Each layer of reality peels away to reveal a new mystery.  Could the next scientific discovery reveal the face of God?  Agnostics believe so.  They would say that don’t know what we don’t know.

However, the notion of the “unknown unknowns” has limits of reasonable conjecture.  Edward Abbey expressed the reasonable limit of "unknown unknowns" in this aphorism:

“Is there a God?  I don’t know.
Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?  I don’t know.”
Edward Abbey

Isaac Asimov's “The Relativity of Wrong” is a brilliant essay on incomplete knowledge.  He shows that incomplete knowledge is not the same as not knowing anything.  The discovery of general relativity does not invalidate Euclidean geometry; it simply expands the domain of geometry to include new truths about non-Euclidean space.  New subatomic particles don’t change the composition of salt from sodium and chlorine.  And uncertainty about the existence of God is something that we can address using logical principles and then reason to a logical conclusion.  

Atheism
In contrast to Agnostics, Atheists actively assert that God does not exist.  Through various processes of reasoning, atheists conclude that there is evidence of absence; i.e., that God does not exist.  Here’s a list of well-known atheists.

Famous Atheists:

Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Anton Chekov, Dave Barry, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Terry Pratchett, Salman Rushdie, Maurice Sendak, H.L. Menken, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Kahneman, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Andrei Sakharov, Irwin Schrodinger, Alan Turing, Charles Richter, Henri Poincare, Ayn Rand, Linus Pauling, Richard Leakey, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, James Watson, Orson Welles, Karl Marx, Oliver Sacks, Kurt Vonnegut, Kenau Reeves, Lisa Randall, Tim Berners-Lee.

The Atheism symbol is derived from a simplified
schematic of atomic structure and the letter "A".

Standards of Proof
Standards of proof depend on why we’re trying to prove something.  Let’s consider four different standards of proof commonly used in society.

• Preponderance of Evidence: Civil suits in the United States, regarding damages due to a negligent or improper act, are decided according to a lower standard of proof than a criminal case.  A jury in a civil suit must decide their judgment on the preponderance of evidence.  If 51% of the evidence supports the plaintiff, and 49% supports the defendant, the judgment should be decided in favor of the plaintiff
• Reasonable Certainty:  A higher standard of certainty is required in judicial criminal cases in the United States.  This standard is also called certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.  A defendant in this country is presumed innocent until proven guilty by an overwhelming weight of evidence, such that no reasonable doubt remains about the defendant’s guilt.  Reasonable certainty suggests that no reasonable doubt remains.  This standard is unquantified, but is generally understood by ordinary citizens in society.
• Unequivocal determination:  Scientific meta-studies aggregate all of the relevant research on a topic.  Examples include the IPCC climate assessment reports and the National Climate Assessment.  After integrating the findings of many studies, the reviewing organization may issue an unequivocal determination on a finding.  This standard requires that the likelihood of the finding is significantly greater than 99%.  (A finding of >99% likelihood, but with reasonable remaining uncertainty is assigned a grade of “virtually certain”.)  When all reasonable objections to the finding have been removed by evidence, the finding is judged to be unequivocal.
  
• Mathematical certainty:  A mathematical proof is an even higher standard of proof.  A mathematical proof of an assertion requires that there is no possibility of contradiction within the domain under consideration, reasonable or unreasonable.

In becoming an atheist, to make my assertion that God does not exist, I chose the standard of reasonable certainty.  On the basis of the preponderance of evidence, we would easily conclude there is no God, because there is no rigorous evidence that God exists.  On the other hand, it seems unlikely that atheism could provide mathematical certainty that God doesn’t exist.  However, we do not live our lives according to mathematical certainty.  The standard of reasonable certainty allows us to reason to a conclusion, and would rebut all reasonable (that is, evidence-based) objections.

Proof
It’s easier to prove something exists than that something doesn’t exist.  Still, there are tools we can use.  We can look for internal inconsistencies to disprove an assertion, or inconsistencies between reasonable expectations and reality.  In formal logic, the first is reductio ad absurdum, and the second is modus tollens.  In the first method, if you can reason from a proposition to a contradiction, the proposition is disproved.  In the second, if you can disprove a consequence of the proposition, the proposition is disproved.  (Given the proposition: If P, then Q.  If Q is not true, P is disproved.)  Let’s use the second method and consider the logical consequences if God exists.  

As an aside, I have added a step to modus tollens.  I first consider our expectations of God in terms of character, and then what interactions logically follow from those traits.  Logicially, if P, then Q, then R.  If R is disproved, then Q and P are also disproved.

Please take a moment to think of things that logically follow if God exists.  Find a piece of paper and make a list.  Be serious.  Begin with the assumption that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere, as is the general assertion of Abrahamic religions.  First write down characteristics of God that logically follow from being all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere.   Second, write down conditions or events in the world that logically follow from the characteristics that you assigned to God.  You may think of things that are in the world we know, and also things that are not.  Go ahead, take your time.  I’ll wait.

Here is my list of God’s characteristics which logically follow if God really exists.  Given that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere, I expect that God would have developed empathy and responsibility.  God knows and understands suffering of living things, and from empathy, should care enough to develop the characteristic of responsibility and fairness for the outcomes in the living world.  From empathy, responsibility, and fairness, God should become caring, reasonable and just.  Here is my list of God's characteristics, if God exists.

• Empathetic
• Caring
• Responsible
• Reasonable
• Fair
• Just

If God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just, I would expect that the following conditions would exist in the world, representing the interaction between God and humanity.

• God would communicate to all of humanity clearly, consistently, and continuously about God’s plans, purpose, desires and instructions for humankind.
• Revelation of God would be given equally and fairly to all societies, as soon as each society was capable of understanding God.
• Sacred texts would be consistent across all cultures and times.  Sacred texts would also be complete from the first version, not subject to revision and without internal contradictions.
• Clear indications of God’s divinity would be given through demonstrable miracles in modern as well as ancient times, meeting scientific standards for observation.
• God would show reason and justice in God’s own actions or inaction.
• Sacred literature would also exhibit clear standards of reason and justice.
• God would mitigate the suffering of innocents.
• God would clearly answer prayers.  (Note that “answer” does not mean “fulfill”, but instead means “respond”). 

None of those things happen in reality.  They are contradicted by lived experience and all credible reported experience.  They are not true.  How does your list compare?  Does your lived experience and the experience of others confirm or disprove the existence of God?  

This is what David Deutsch means when he says that we should judge God.  Does the world we live in reflect our logical expectations of God?  To me, the logical consequences that should follow from the existence of God don’t exist.  If God existed in the form that human religions have proposed, as an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good being, creator of the universe and humankind, we would have a fundamentally different world and different human experience.

Conclusion
If the Abrahamic God exists, then God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just.  God would interact with humans in ways that are reasonable and just.  But God does not communicate clearly and consistently with humanity.  God did not give his revelation to all societies fairly and equally.  Sacred texts across cultures are wildly inconsistent, and contain revisions and corrections to earlier texts (i.e., the New Testament).  There are no modern miracles meeting suitable standards of observation.  God’s actions, as recounted in the Old Testament, are cruel and unjust.  God does not mitigate the suffering of innocent victims of either human or natural misfortune.  God does not clearly respond to prayers.  

God’s interactions with humanity are not empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable or just.  We should judge God not only on the basis of our own experience, but also the lived experience of others.  We might think about those drowned in the Titanic, victims of Nazi gas chambers and slaughters, Native Americans accepting missionaries and dying of smallpox, victims of famine and war, non-viable babies, and all the tragic events suffered by all of humanity.  We should think about prayers which were met with silence.

The lived experience of humanity contradicts the care that we should expect from an all-powerful being.  Therefore, we must logically conclude that God does not exist.
QED.

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The image of a path above was generated by a free AI tool on the Internet.  It replaces another image from the Internet used in the original publican of this post. 

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), in his 1979 book “Broca’s Brain” and the Cosmos television mini-series in 1980.  Sagan was drawing on previous use of the concept by Marcello Truzzi in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Simon LaPlace in the early 1800s, and ultimately by philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “On Miracles”. 

 

“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”
Carl Sagan, 1979

To make sense of the aphorism, we should first ask what qualifies as an extraordinary claim.  There are three classes of extraordinary claims:

• Statistically improbable claims.
• Claims outside the range of prior experience, with unknown probability.
• Claims contrary to the body of established scientific knowledge or preponderance of existing evidence.

Religious ideas are of the third kind, assertions that are contrary to established scientific knowledge.  (I will discuss other kinds of extraordinary claims and evidence in my science blog.)  Religious or spiritual claims are closer to Hume’s original idea about extraordinary claims in 1748 than the other kinds of extraordinary claims.  

                        “What is a miracle?”
                        “A miracle is something that happens contrawise to the will of nature.”
                                            Source is forgotten, likely to be Robert Heinlein or A.C. Clarke

Social scientist Marcello Truzzi, who founded an organization to investigate paranormal claims, coined a similar wording of the ECREE aphorism that Sagan later used.  In 1978, Truzzi wrote, “extraordinariness must be measured against theoretical expectations provided by the general body of scientific knowledge at the time...claims require extraordinary evidence if they entail the falsehood of established scientific results that are themselves extensively tested and well understood.... A black swan is one thing; a swan that visits you from beyond the grave is something else.”

Religious Claims
Let’s try to summarize religious and spiritual claims.  It won’t be easy.  There are about 3000 distinct religions followed by some group of people, now or in the past.  From this variety, it may be difficult to compile a simple list of religious claims, but I will try, using parallel ideas in a number of religions.  

God and Gods, each having many of the following characteristics:
    Non-corporeal, invisible, silent spirits.
    Immortal.
    Capable of magic or miracles.
    Interested in humanity.
    Intervening in human affairs.
    Responsible for creation of the world, or parts thereof.
    Often engaged in conflict with other gods, spirits, or beings.
    Protecting humans from evil spirits, people or natural disasters, often in exchange for worship.
    All-powerful.
    All-knowing.
    All-good. (In some traditions, not all.)
    
Divine Creation of the World
    Creation of the universe or world by gods or other spiritual beings.
    Creation of the living world.
    Distinct creation of people, separately and above the living world, and endowment of people with sentience, knowledge or wisdom.
    Creation of the spiritual realm, of heaven and hell.

Sacred Gifts
    Gifts of knowledge or other gifts to humanity, including positive and negative gifts.

Immortal Souls
    Spiritual, immortal extension of the human self, capable of existing without the body after death.
    Includes self-awareness, memory, will, thoughts and emotions.
    Generally believed to travel to non-material spiritual places after death -- Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Valhalla, Folkvangr, the seven Samaawat, Alma d-Nhura, Deva Loka, Narka Loka, etc.

Human Spirits
    Ghosts existing after life in the physical world (but not necessarily immortal).  May include malevolent spirits.

Divine Superior Beings
    Demi-gods, including Jesus, Maui, and Heracles, and divine relatives, including the Virgin Mary.  Often considered the offspring of god or gods, sometimes through parthenogenesis, sometimes the offspring of humans and gods.  Often believed to have a previous physical life, but currently are non-corporeal spirits.  Prayer for intercession is often directed toward divine superior beings rather than to God.

Spiritual Superior Beings
    Angels, demons, animal or natural spirits with greater magical power than humans or human spirits.
    May include antagonistic spirits such as Satan.

Afterlife Places
    Heaven, limbo and hell.  Places without a physical presence or contact with the physical world, where one can meet people from one's former life.

Miracles
    Extraordinary events, contrary to expected behavior of natural systems, generally for the benefit of people experiencing difficulty.

Divine Causation
    Routine natural events, seasons, tides, eclipses.
    Routine human events, birth, death.
    Movement of heavenly bodies.
    Extraordinary events as reward or punishment (usually punishment), including natural disasters, virgin birth, ascension to heaven.

Natural Spirits
    Attribution of living identity, will or sentience to animals, plants, places and objects; anthropomorphism of nature.  

Sacred Places
    Attribution of sacred living identity to mountains, rivers, and lands.  Sacred objects and places are believed to enable religious miracles.     

Spiritual Inanimate Objects and Places
    Religious icons, relics of saints, churches, temples, springs and objects or places believed to have magical powers or enable miracles.

Reincarnation
    The belief that souls are recycled into new people or animals.  Some religions attribute a “leveling-up” process of attaining higher or lower status according to moral behavior during life.

Divination and Prophecy
    Belief that the future can be determined by religious ritual or by religiously endowed individuals. 

Saints and Spiritual Intermediaries
    Belief that the spirits of sacred humans can intervene and influence God’s actions, or parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions.

Sacred Texts
    Belief that the Bible, Devi Bhagavatam, Quran, Book of Mormon or other sacred texts are divinely inspired, contain divine revelation, are literally true, and have an absolute obligation to be obeyed.
    
Prayer
    The belief that humans can communicate with gods and higher beings, to give thanks and ask for divine help.

Ancestor Worship
    Belief that deceased ancestors actively intervene and protect their descendants.

Human Religious Intermediaries Priests, Pastors, Popes, and Shamen
    Belief that special humans possess magical powers or can intervene to influence divine action.

Divine Humans
    Egyptian, Roman and Japanese societies held that their leaders were gods, or became gods when assuming office as emperor or pharaoh.  Chinese and other cultures believed that their leaders were semi-divine descendants of gods.

Belief in Transcendent Reality, and/or denial of physical reality.
    Belief that physical reality is corrupt and is superseded by a transcendent reality.

Karma
    Belief that good or bad actions have real-world consequences in luck or future events.

Ordinary Scientific Evidence

The scientific method systemized the search for truth and standardized the criteria for truth, beginning in the 17th century.  Scientific evidence involves the following elements.

• Empirical observation.
• Identification of processes and developing hypotheses about processes.
• Experiments designed to fulfill predictions or invalidate the hypotheses.
• Clarity of data from experiment.
• Repeatability.
• Relevance of evidence, often measured by statistical tests.
• Peer review and publication.

In general, religious claims fail most or all of the standards for scientific truth (or as it is otherwise known, truth).  Stories of 14th century BCE conversations with a burning bush or visions by a 15th-century French girl do not qualify as evidence.

 
Moses and the Burning Bush, Holman Bible, 1890

Vision of Joan of Arc (1428), artist and date unknown to me.

With religious claims, there are few repeatable observations with objective observers.  There are no identified processes.  There are no experiments to invalidate the claims.  There is little clarity of the data.  There is often little relevance of the evidence, and little critique of the claims.  We see that religious claims fail to meet standards for ordinary evidence before even considering the need for extraordinary evidence,

Why Are Religious Claims Extraordinary Claims?
Religious claims are extraordinary claims because they violate known scientific knowledge about processes.  The list of religious claims is too long for a complete rebuttal, but fall into four general categories.  First are claims involving spirits, second are claims involving higher classes of beings, third are claims involving miracles and fourth are claims of future knowledge or predestination.

Spirits represent disembodied beings, with self-awareness, memory, will, ability to communicate and other powers.  But scientific knowledge places the seat of sentience in the brain.  Through observation of patients with brain injuries (as described well in the books by Oliver Sachs) we know which parts of the brain enable these aspects of sentience.  We can observe patients in which memory, will and communication are gone, and have established that the brain performs those functions of humanity.  Without a physical brain, spirits cannot have sentience; souls cannot persist after death.  To claim otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.  

The same reasoning applies to the existence of higher beings, gods, demi-gods, angels and demons that are believed to exist in the spiritual world.  Without a brain, how do they think?  How do they persist as self-aware entities?  To claim that an angel or demon possesses sentience without a brain violates our scientific understanding of sentience.

Religious claims of miracles and magic are also extraordinary claims.  We know how physics, chemistry, and life sciences work.  A miraculous event, by definition, is contrary to the expectations from those natural processes.  As such, every miracle or magical claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Claims of prophecy and predestination violate the scientific understanding of time.  In all well-documented experience, information can not flow backwards through time.  Future events are fundamentally uncertain, despite high precision in prior conditions and known processes.

Extraordinary Evidence
What is extraordinary evidence, as compared to the normal scientific evidence described above?  

I return to David Hume, who first established the ECREE standard in 1748.  “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.  

In essence evidence of a miraculous event must be strong enough to invalidate the scientific knowledge precluding that event.  To be considered true, a miracle involving levitation must be supported by evidence sufficient to invalidate our well-established notions about gravity.  To be considered true, the claim of a soul, ghost or spirit must demonstrate disembodied sentience in some unquestionable, observable, repeatable form.  The claim that God exists needs to be demonstrated by apparently unlimited power – perhaps by moving thousands of galaxies overnight to spell out, “I am God” in every language on earth.  Of course, none of those things have ever happened or ever will happen.

Conclusion
Religious claims are extraordinary claims, defying our existing body of scientific knowledge.  Religious claims fail to meet even the lowest standards of scientific evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence required for such claims to be regarded as truth.  
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Afterword
Non-Religious Paranormal Beliefs
There are also a substantial number of non-religious paranormal beliefs, some of which overlap with religious beliefs.  Some (telekinesis, telepathy, extraterrestrial visitors) do not involve spiritual elements, while others (ghosts) do not involve higher spiritual powers.  These also require extraordinary evidence, but are irrelevant to the discussion of atheism.

Non-Interventionist God
Albert Einstein said, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist... I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”  The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) framed a special case of the non-interventionist God.  Spinoza held to a physical sense of reality, but viewed all of creation as a sub-set of God.  According to commentator Paul So, Spinoza “rejected the existence of Soul, Angels, Demons, Miracles, Divine Creationism, the possibility of Afterlife, Divine Revelation, validity of Prophecy, Biblical literalism, Tradition, Scriptural authority, and last but not least the existence of a personal God.”

Giordano Bruno in the 16th century rejected many of these same religious claims, while introducing revolutionary speculative cosmological ideas that are today held as true.  He speculated that stars were far-away suns, that planets might orbit those suns, and that intelligent beings might live there.  He also made contributions to the study of memory, mathematics, geometry and language.  Bruno may have been approaching the rationalist’s idea of a non-interventionist God, but was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

Giardano Bruno, 1548-1600, portrait from 1830 biography.

Execution of Giardano Bruno, source unknown to me.

Spinoza’s non-interventionist God eliminates most, but not all, of the unsupported religious claims.  Spinoza’s God presumes that God is the creator; that God is reality, and that God is greater than reality.  These claims are also unsupported by evidence. 

Baruch Spinoza, 1632 - 1677.

Spinoza tried to rationalize religion by removing the most fantastic claims, and altering the definition of God to equate God with our observed reality.  But God is unnecessary to explain our observations, and equating God with reality brings no additional understanding.  There’s also no evidence, extraordinary or otherwise, that God is greater than our reality.  The central claim that God exists is completely unsupported.  According to Occam’s razor, the best explanation of our reality is that God does not exist.

Atheism and Morality, Part II: How Does an Atheist Become a Moral Person?

Christians sometimes ask atheists, “If you don’t believe in God, how can you be a moral person?”  

The question is really two questions.  First, how do you know what is moral without being told by a religious authority?  Second, how do you control your impulses without the threat of divine punishment?  I addressed the first question in last post, and the second question in this post.

How Does an Atheist Become a Moral Person?
The answer is simple.  You choose to be a moral person.  Personal morality is based on personal values, which can be derived through lived experience, observation of other humans, and self-reflection.  I believe the most important human values developed through this process are empathy, truth, justice (i.e., equity, fairness) and responsibility.  Other core values include service, progress, respect for nature & animals, self-care and liberty.  Not everyone who observes and reflects on the human condition gets there; there are a lot of people whose world-views are based on self-interest and bullying others.  But the morality of the four core values of empathy, truth, justice and responsibility should be indisputable.  Atheists and religious people alike should agree that these are the foundation of morality, based on the precepts of caring for other people and doing the least harm.  

 “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want?  And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero.  And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.  The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.  I don't want to do that.

Penn Jillette, of the illusionist team Penn and Teller

 The entire question of morality, of course, concerns people who are interested in being moral.  There exists a distressing percentage of people who have no interest in being moral and act entirely for their own self-interest.  According to popular media, about 1% of men are psychopaths, and up to 4 % of men are sociopaths; a somewhat smaller percentage applies to women.  This blog post is not about them.  This blog post is about the people who aspire to live moral lives, and their reasons for doing so.

A good friend just posted a question on social media regarding religion and morality.   She asked her religious friends (excluding the non-religious) this question: “Does either fear of hell or promise of heaven/good rebirth affect your choices/behavior?  If so, which is the stronger motivator?”  She had about a dozen responses.  Interestingly, in all of the current responses there was no consideration for consequences in the afterlife due to their decisions and behavior.  (I think that I read one response that half-heartedly admitted to fearing punishment after death, but it seems that response was deleted.  So it may be that people don’t want to admit that fear in public.)  The question was posed by someone who is generally on the liberal side of the political spectrum, and I presume that her respondents are also liberal.  A conservative group may produce different results.  But with those caveats, this group makes their moral decisions in the same way as atheists – according to principles of right and wrong, and consideration of doing good or harm to other people.  The only religious motivation mentioned in the responses was that the joy of a religious life gave encouragement to do good works.  Religious joy may be a motivation for religious people, but that does not imply that atheists are immoral.  Like many religious people, atheists find joy in doing good deeds for the sake of doing good. 

Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash

Does Religion Make People Moral?
If people require the discipline of a God to be moral, are they really moral?  If fear of God is the motivating factor to behave with kindness and justice toward other people, is that behavior moral, or simply fearful?  Coerced behavior isn’t rooted in morality.   For people who are only moral because of the threat of eternal damnation, the only thing that matters is avoiding punishment.  When religious doctrine becomes the authority for what is moral, morality itself is distorted.  Religious doctrine has no clear foundation of ethical morality.

Let’s briefly consider the historical record for Christianity and morality.  
If religion (specifically Christianity) actually produced moral behavior, would the world have seen the cruelty associated with the following Christian campaigns through history? 

• Systematic persecution of pagans and Jews in the late Roman Empire and Middle Ages.
• The coerced conversion of Northern and Eastern Europe to Christianity around 1000 CE, enforced by unspeakable torture and murder.
• The Crusades, from 1100 CE to 1300 CE.
• Burning of heretics at the stake in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
• Burning of witches at the stake in the Renaissance.
• The repression of science in the Renaissance, through arrest and threatened torture.
• The Italian and Spanish Inquisitions of the Renaissance, marked by repression, torture and murder.
• The conquest, enslavement and exploitation of Native Americans and other indigenous groups in the course of conversion to Christianity.
• European wars of religion from 1400 CE to 1700 CE.      

The Christian Bible had reached its current form by about 400 CE.  By 1000 CE, Christianity was a mature religion, and Christian principles of loving your neighbor, of forgiveness and non-violence should have been well-established.  Brutality in the name of Christianity continued for the next 900 years.  Mark Twain, a relatively recent author, decried the brutality of Christianity during his time, in writings such as “Letters from the Earth”, “The War Prayer”, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, “The Chronicle of Young Satan”, and “Grief and Mourning for the Night”.

Across centuries, religious doctrine sometimes corrects errors of the past, with actions ranging from Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses to the belated admission by the Catholic Church, after 359 years, that its conviction of Galileo was wrong.  Missionaries no longer use torture and murder to convert adherents of other religions.  But after a millennium and a half of cruel subjugation of people with other beliefs, can we really say that religion can claim any high ground with respect to morality?  

Historian Thomas Cahill argues that every human culture practiced some form of human sacrifice prior
to encountering Christianity.  That is an improvement, but relative to other crimes of Christianity it is a fairly low bar.  It seems to me that Christianity did not become less brutal according to its own principles, but rather in accordance with the general improvement of human behavior over the very long term.  Steven Pinker documents this gradual improvement well in his books “Enlightenment Now” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.  The arc of moral history does bend toward justice in the long run, but not necessarily because of religion.

The Origin of Moral Authority
Morality derived from religious authority is necessarily suspect, because religious authority is often concerned with behavioral issues other than care or harm to others.  Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have many moral laws about sexual issues, including gender identity, sexual orientation, interracial or intercaste relationships, abortion, contraception and sexual liberty.  There are also many non-sexual restrictions specific to women, including the freedom of women to work, study,  to refuse compulsory dress, or even the freedom to appear in public alone.  

There are religious decrees asserting moral control over other aspects of life.  Western societies have slowly loosened these restrictions, but in my lifetime, local government typically restricted business hours and activity to ensure observance of the sabbath.  There are religious decrees concerning caste status, cutting hair or not cutting hair, eating or not eating certain foods, wearing hats or not wearing hats, all of which infringe on the fundamental moral value of liberty.  Some religious moral dictums are arbitrary traditions, and some reflect ancient health concerns, but many aspects of religious morality exist to perpetuate religious control.  Some religious moral standards exist in order to perpetuate patriarchy, slavery, caste systems, or social hierarchy.  There is no real moral authority for these religious judgments.

Considering all of this, moral authority from religion is null and void.  People who take moral guidance from their religious authorities are mistaken.  True morality comes from consideration of the well-being, rights, freedom, and feelings of other people.  Religious issues outside of those considerations are morally irrelevant. 

Atheists in religious societies (as we all are) are necessarily independent-thinkers.  Perhaps atheists understand the origins of morality and its foundation in human values better than religious people.

Moral Dilemmas and Conflicts
Morality necessarily involves dilemmas and conflicts.  Sometimes, moral considerations are in conflict for different people in a particular situation.  Indeed, moral conflicts are nearly ubiquitous in civil discourse.  An example might be the fishing rights of indigenous people, where their need for sustenance competes with the need to protect wild fishing stocks.  Other examples might include conscientious objections to military service, restricting the liberty to own guns to improve public safety, requiring vaccinations and masking in certain jobs to prevent the spread of disease, or setting immigration quotas for asylum and resettlement.

As an atheist, humanist and western liberal, there are some common notions of morality that I reject.  I reject nationalism and patriotism.  I reject restrictive norms of sexual identity and behavior, except for actions involving minors, actions with those incapable of knowledgeable consent, relationships with a power differential, and relationships which cause harm to others in a committed relationship.  Otherwise, the moral value of personal liberty should prevail.  

I recognize truth, self-care, and liberty as core moral values of a different kind.  These are values which do not directly benefit or harm other people or nature, but exist as moral values for their own sake.  These values are sometimes in conflict with other values, such as when a doctor must comfort a dying patient, or times when self-care is in conflict with serving others.  

There is one value, one of the top four values in my opinion, for which mystical religions are clearly immoral.  That value is truth.  As I hope to show in the final essays for this blog, mystical religion fails every test of rationally determined truth.  

Truth is part of morality, and religion isn’t true.  Therefore, I conclude that religion is immoral.
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The image of Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash is used without permission and not for profit.  It will be removed upon request.  This seems like a sufficient moral accommodation.