The joys of life without God

Do you think the impulse to believe in God is the same as believing in astrology?

Yes, it's a similar foundation of magical superstitious thinking. And our need to be spiritual takes all forms. Given that traits vary in populations, it's natural that some people will gravitate toward New Age spiritualism and others toward conservative Christianity. Even secularists believe in all kinds of transcendent things, such as "mind." This is the Deepak Chopra school. He says, I don't believe that Christian conservative stuff, but the universe is intelligent, it's alive, it knows we're here. What? You're goofier than the Christians!

At the same time, I don't think, as a lot of materialist atheists do, there's something wrong with the brain or genes, and if we could just fix them, we could get rid of all the silly religion. That's not going to happen. Besides, people believe in economic and political ideologies just as fervently as they believe in religious doctrines. Most political, economic, racial -- and racist -- ideologies have no basis in reality at all. They're articles of faith. And the best tool we have for discerning truth from all those false patterns is science.

Do you call yourself an atheist?

I prefer not to use the term. Although I guess I am an atheist. I just don't believe in God. I've always liked Thomas Huxley's term, "agnostic," by which he meant it's an unknowable, insoluble problem from a scientific point of view. By my personality, I'm comfortable with not having the answer to everything. I'm perfectly happy going through my day, thinking, I really wish I knew the answer to that but I don't. I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity. Most people get cognitively dissonant about having uncertainties and need to close that loop and have an answer.

What would you like to have the answer to?

What was here before time? What came before the big bang? Those questions cause people to posit that either God created the universe or some natural forces or some combination. I'm perfectly happy going the natural route. In fact, to answer what came before the big bang, people like Stephen Hawking are playing around with inflationary cosmology and how all of a sudden you get a new bubble universe. They don't have any evidence, but mathematically it's possible.

But when science hits a question mark, that's OK with me. Ultimately, theologians hit the same question mark. We just have to push them one more step when they say God did it. They respond that God is He who need not be created. Well, can't the universe be that which needs not be created? No, they say, it's a thing and has to be created. So isn't God a thing if He is part of the universe? These are old arguments, but at some point a thoughtful theologian has to say, You're right, we don't know. So we make a metaphysical assumption and define God into existence.

Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, recently told Salon that he believes in God, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. "If you believe in God," Collins said, "and if God is more than nature, then there's no reason that God could not stage an invasion into the natural world, which -- to our limited perspective -- would appear to be a miracle."

What does he mean by miracle? If God is intervening into our world, he must be doing so in some measurable way. That's what we do with science. We measure. OK, Francis, where's your data? There was just a big study done on prayer and healing. If praying to God is supposed to heal people, this was the best, most rigorous study ever done, conducted by a world-class scientist who believed he would find a positive result of praying. Here's what he found: zip, nada, nothing.

So, OK, Francis, what else have you got? The virgin birth? I mean, come on. The resurrection? Now we're talking about mythic events, we're not talking about science. What he's doing is rehashing old theological arguments that have been hashed out by evangelicals for a long time. The bit [from C.S. Lewis] that Jesus can't have been a liar or a lunatic and so therefore he's the Lord? That's not science, that's creating straw men you can knock down to leave the one standing you already believe in. It's an example of the hindsight bias we're all susceptible to. We've already made a decision and then we go back and justify it. Scientists like Collins are just particularly good at it.

What's your best answer for why there is no God?

It's not why there is no God, it's why there's not compelling evidence to believe in God. That's a better way to put it. And from my perspective, it's just not there for me. With training in science, I have high standards of evidence. If you said God is real, and you sent your evidence to the journals Science or Nature for publication, you'd be laughed out of the room; you wouldn't get past the first reviewer.

On the other side, the best evidence that there probably isn't a God is that belief in God is so deeply culturally embedded. When you study world religions, it's obvious that, throughout time, all of these different people are making up their own stories about God. If you lived 1,000 years ago, hardly anybody would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you'd likely be a Hindu. What does that tell you? From a Christian perspective, it means we need to get more missionaries over there to tell them the truth! From an anthropological perspective, it's another case. Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god.

So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.

So you're comfortable that humans are just products of physics and chemistry?

The electric meat -- that's us! I don't mind that at all. If anything, it's even more awe-inspiring to think that out of physics and chemistry we're able to get consciousness and thought, and you and I can sit here and have a conversation about electric meat and chemistry. That itself is miraculous.

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