THE THIRD MOST COMMON RELIGIOUS preference among humans on planet Earth (after Christianity and Islam, respectively) is unaffiliated or nonreligious (people in this category list themselves as secular, atheist, agnostic, or simply nonreligious).1 Well over one billion people classify themselves as unaffiliated. That’s over 16 percent of the world’s total population (which was, when these statistics were collected, a little under seven billion people). That so many people seem not to feel the tug of organized religion is an occasion for much rejoicing among many because they regard religions of all stripes as the source of profound pain and suffering. Consider the Crusades, for an obvious example. And, I hasten to point out, one needn’t kill in the name of one’s religion to cause pain and suffering. If 16 percent of the world’s people are eschewing organized religion, that might mean that the good of the world’s religions is negligible. In fact, there are those who believe that life on Earth would drastically improve if there were no religions at all.2
Why are there one billion unaffiliated people? What fact about religion explains the One Billion? There are, no doubt, several facts that are relevant and in play here, but certainly one important fact is this: There is not one single indisputable bit of evidence in support of any spiritual or religious belief whatsoever. If, upon reading that last sentence, you say, “But what about the time I talked with Jesus/felt the grace of God/experienced transcendence/experienced Oneness/saw the handiwork of Coyote/cast a spell . . . ?” I will point to the uniqueness of your experience, and to its being unshared. And then I’ll point to the vast variety of religions and religious experiences: Could they all be authentic? If not, then which ones are? The number of religions that differ profoundly from one another is very large. So, it is implausible that they are all true. But if not all, which one of them is true? You want to say, “Mine is.” The number of people in different religions saying this is of course also very large. However, though not all the religions can be true, all of them can be false. It is important, in this context, to remember that we all know very well what it is to be an atheist (whether a member of the One Billion or not), for we are all atheists with respect to all of the religions of planet Earth—all but one: ours.3
The word “indisputable” in the preceding paragraph is not used in any unusual sense. It simply means public and repeatable. A public fact is a fact anyone can check. And when they do check, the repeatability of the fact guarantees that they will get the same result as others who check. Science is based on such public, repeatable facts. When soberly considered, there is not one repeatable, public fact that everyone can use to establish the truth of any spiritual, religious claim. This is one reason there are so many religions, differing wildly from one another.
Let’s take a moment to contrast this situation with science. Every claim ever made by any scientist is on public display, waiting for you or anyone else to refute it. You don’t like the fact that Earth is spherical? Fine. Get out your measuring tools and check this truth out for yourself. Don’t know how? Also fine. You can learn how to do the measuring at your local college or public library. You’ll have to learn some ordinary physics, but a committed person would never let that get in the way. Don’t like the fact that you are an African ape? Fine. Learn the required biology and paleontology and refute it. Again, it will take work, but all good things take work. Though no one that I know of is working to refute Earth’s sphericalness, I know of many who are working to refute evolutionary theory. More power to them.
It is instructive to ponder why Earth’s sphericalness, or any other well-known physics fact, gets no attention from religious fundamentalism. These physical facts are as inimical to fundamentalist versions of any religion as biological facts. Why? Because no scientific fact exists in isolation. All sciences cohere in a certain way. For example, the very same facts that explain why Earth is spherical—such facts as the nature of gravity and Earth’s composition—also reveal the nature, origin, and age of the solar system. From here we are lead ineluctably to the nature, origin, and age of the universe: approximately 13.7 billion years. The same is true of evolution. No universe with the chemical and atomic facts of ours could fail to have evolutionary processes occurring on its planets with life on them. Evolution, therefore, is not some ad hoc add-on. It is written into the foundation of our universe.
So, just as in physics, evolutionary theory is winning—by a lot. It is winning in a fair, public, dozens-of-decades-long, and never-ending contest. All standing scientific theories are winners in a struggle to refute them, which can last for centuries in its acute stage, but never truly ends completely. This is simply the nature of science. If you think the moon is made of green cheese—wonderful. Get in a rocket, go there, bring some moon stuff back and check it to see if it is green cheese. Then, and this is the essence of science, let others check, too—not only the moon stuff you brought back, but your actual calculations, lab tests, and results. Make your entire journey and all its associated paperwork public. If you are genuinely interested in the truth, you will encourage others to go to the moon and get their own moon stuff and check it to see if it is green cheese. (The moon, by the way, is made mostly of kinds of basalt and anorthosite, not green cheese. But don’t take my word for it.)
I said that there is not one repeatable, public fact that everyone can latch onto to establish the truth of any spiritual claim. I know many deny this, so let me phrase it as a scientist would, as a challenge: let anyone who has a public and repeatable spiritual fact come forward and demonstrate it to all. Even the most nonreligious person would have to reevaluate her disbelief, as would all those who belong to some other religion.
To really see the clash between science and religion, consider this question: given the importance of religion, of religious morality, of matters of the spirit, why don’t we insist that our most robust methods of scientific confirmation be deployed to establish the truth of religious ontological claims? The supernatural ones are the ones most in need of confirmation. The pope receives some of the very best medical care in the world, far better than billions of other people. This medical care is based on the best science available. Why doesn’t the pope require his Christian beliefs to be subject to the very same scientific scrutiny as the medical beliefs of his doctors? Why don’t we require that his bulls and encyclicals receive the attention of the best science available—especially since they affect billions of humans and other animals? Why don’t we insist that science establish the truth of claims such as “God exists,” “Jesus loves us,” “The world is an illusion,” “There is one, true deity and his name is Allah,” “I am saved,” “I am a buddha,” “Sin exists,” “There is a heaven and a hell,” “I cast a circle,” “Coyote is a trickster,” “Humans have souls,” “We are reincarnated after death”?
We all know the answer to this question; even the most fanatical religious believers know the answer: science would establish that every single one of these claims is false. The physicist Heinz Pagels wrote: “there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no evidence for a will or purpose in nature that goes beyond the known laws of nature.”4 This, now, is the heart of the clash between science and religion: religion makes factual, usually supernatural claims about the universe, about our world, that science refutes. The power of science is well summed up by the American mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). He writes:
To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect. . . . Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.5
If science and some religions differ on, for example, how old the Earth is, and there is only “one True conclusion,” then science is in possession of it, and doubt is both welcome and assuaged because science’s methods are public and repeatable, whereas religion’s are not.
But this is only the beginning of the story. As we will see in chapter 10, adherence to Real Things and the One True Conclusion, contrary to what is widely believed, undoes the commonplace world completely . . . for everyone, scientist and traveler alike. Still, Peirce’s view of science is definitely in the ballpark. Reason and experience (and experiment, which is just a way to control and manipulate experience) do lead to very plausible, very useful conclusions, and none of them supports the supernatural claims of any religion.
But the clash between science and religion is deeper and more dangerous than a dispute over facts (though this is deep and dangerous enough). The power of science is also what causes people to fear it. Science seems to make the world utterly banal, common. Science dashes hopes, renders us all alone in the universe, and puts the burden for our continued existence squarely on our shoulders. The legacy of science seems to be simply this:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.6
That’s it. That’s all science would seemingly tell us (although science wouldn’t supply the value judgment about despair). And we all know this, just as the pope does, so we don’t invite science to confirm our religious claims, preferring instead to keep our science and religion separate; religion is too important, apparently, to let it be upended by science. If you know your mom isn’t going to let you have any cookies, there’s no point in asking her, especially if it is really important that you have a cookie. This is the main reason why science and religion are required to occupy different realms in human life. They both claim to discover and establish truths, but when the truths are of the same kind (ontological, factual truths), which happens often, science wins every time . . . thunder is not caused by Thor wielding his hammer, and there was no worldwide flood, ever. When the truths are of different kinds (moral versus factual), relations seem to improve: science doesn’t usually, at least currently, offer advice on what’s moral and what isn’t.7 But maybe something else nonreligious can, like garden-variety rational thought. After all, many people observe that religion does a pretty bad job of saying what is moral and what is not. The Old Testament, for example (and this is just the tip of the iceberg), tells believers to kill homosexuals, naughty children, and people who work on the Sabbath (see, respectively, Leviticus 20:13; Deuteronomy 21:18–21; and Exodus 31:15). (We will return to the independence of morality from religion in chapter 7 and the issue of keeping science and religion in different realms in chapter 9 when we discuss Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal for “nonoverlapping magisteria.”)
The fully rational person would at this juncture abandon any spiritual quest. And as we have seen, many do this, with smiles on their faces. It is because of this that religion gets tagged as irrational. Science is rational, religion is not. Rationality is good, it is to be embraced. So religion is to be eschewed. But obviously for billions of humans, that is not possible. As rational as the rationality argument is, it is not compelling for many. Why is that? Some scientists (and some philosophers) tend to think our drive or need to be spiritual or to engage in spiritual practices is entirely psychological at the personal level. This sort of explanation has been around awhile, going back to Freud (see his The Future of an Illusion). The most modern and robust form of this idea more plausibly locates our need for spirituality in a human psychology whose first and foremost characteristic is that it evolved. Hence, we travel a spiritual path because our ancestors who did this sort of thing survived better than those who did not. Why? Perhaps spirituality and religion helped knit our clans, tribes, and societies together by indoctrinating us with a moral, ethical sense both for dealing with members of our group and for dealing with outsiders. Religions, according to this explanation, gave us group membership, which helped us survive on a difficult planet; they also gave us a sense that our group or tribe was special, gave us a sense of history and belonging, and they gave us a sense that our lives matter.8 (We will return to this topic in quite a bit of detail in part 2.)
It seems, therefore, that well over one billion people eschew religion because none of religion’s claims is public and repeatable. At least, that is a big part of the reason. One billion people do not reject science. Indeed, almost no one rejects science. There are those who, à la carte, reject, sometimes angrily, portions of science (evolutionary theory is the well-known example). Others, of course, are ignorant of aspects of science. But very few reject outright all of science, saying that it is a complete sham and a conspiracy. In fact, there are very few people who are even agnostic toward science. And even fewer reject the foundation of science: rationality (how would they do so? . . . would they have rational reasons for their rejection? . . . would they use reasons at all? . . . if they did, they’d be, in some minimal sense, behaving rationally).
I don’t mean to suggest here that the existence of the One Billion is due exclusively to science, though if science is broadly construed, this claim is not as far-fetched as some might think. It is easy to imagine one of the builders of Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids being a robust doubter of his or her local religion. Such a person would doubt for basically the reasons we see today in the One Billion or in atheistic scientists: there is no good evidence, and any alleged supernatural truths don’t seem to matter much. It is irrelevant to such doubting whether or not the person knows that the sun is a large fusion reaction or thinks that it is some hot thing in the sky, alleged by his local priests to be the god Ra.9
The One Billion, then, tell us something. They tell us that all religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs, are rationally doubtable. This can be made stronger. They tell us that religious beliefs are rationally ignorable. Stronger still: the One Billion may be telling us that our spiritual journeys and religious quests have a perfectly natural, scientific explanation (a topic of part 2). So, the One Billion are important. They tell the rest of us that it is far from obvious that our journeys and quests are real.10
And finally, the One Billion are flesh and blood examples of what all travelers of any stripe already know: all spiritual beliefs, every one of them, exist under constant attack from external reality . . . from the facts. Let’s now leave the One Billion for the nonce and turn our attention to the six billion—the majority of us who are spiritual travelers of one sort or another. Though the journey may not be real, we, as travelers, certainly are real. And this reality has a special edge to it.
ALL SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS comprise two rather separate dimensions: an ontological one and a moral one. First, spiritual claims make commitments as to what exists, what kinds of things share the universe with us—the unseen part of the universe. These existence claims are always nonnatural (because they are supernatural, see the section above where “religion” is defined). That is, they are claims about what exists beyond the natural realm, beyond our ordinary world of tables and chairs and people and plants and animals. Second, spiritual claims also demand moral commitments, and these moral commitments require certain behaviors from us, they demand certain allegiances and require certain virtues (which behaviors, allegiances, and virtues are required change with each religion and frequently within each variant of each religion). This is one of the things that makes UFO-ology not a religion: it doesn’t carry any claims about how we should behave toward one another, toward nonbelievers, toward the rest of the planet, toward the UFOs even. It merely states that space aliens have visited (and maybe still are visiting) Earth (a claim, by the way, for which is there no decent evidence at all, sorry to say, for discovering that we are not alone in the universe would be momentous).
Both the moral and ontological dimensions can be deep and profound separately, but the real excitement—as well as difficulty—begins when they work together. The fact is that any spiritual journey requires a third, further thing from us that is a blending of the ontological and moral dimensions: we are supposed to, we are morally required to, we ought to . . . believe (or believe in) what our religion says exists. We are required to believe the claims our religion makes about the structure of the world, both its seen and its unseen realms. We are required to believe that Thor and Mjölnir create lightning and thunder; we are morally supposed to believe that there was a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago. And we are morally required to believe first-order moralities: for example, within the fundamentalist Abrahamic religions, you are morally required to believe that homosexuality is immoral.
This blending has three serious consequences. First, it makes believing in the religion itself a moral matter. Second, it ties religion and morality together. And third, it affects what counts as proof of the religion. Let’s discuss these three in order.
All members of modern religions are supposed to behave in certain ways toward their fellow humans (and, very often, toward everything else, living and nonliving, on planet Earth). Usually, fellow believers are accorded one kind of behavior (based on being included), and nonbelievers are accorded a different kind of behavior (based on being excluded). These moral rules for behavior are coupled very closely with the rules for believing a particular religion’s ontology. The result is that it is not only factually wrong to disbelieve in the existence of the god of the Christians, say, but morally wrong as well. What is true for Christianity is true for every major religion: disbelieve that religion on pain of some sort of terrible consequence due to one’s being immoral.
(Importantly, not all religions evangelize, but all think that being nonreligious is wrong. For some of these, conversion is therefore left up to the individual, and converting can be done with little or no formal process [for example, Hinduism or Wicca]. Other religions discourage converting, preferring instead to accord membership to members of a certain ethnicity. For example, to practice the Navajo religion or Judaism, it is best to be born Navajo or Jewish. And yet, many of the religions discouraging converts nevertheless hold that nonmembers are somehow benighted, diminished, or inferior in some way. Seems rather unfair, doesn’t it? This “country-club” attitude is arguably one of the main reasons for the existence of religion: religion implements humans’ deep need to draw Us versus Them distinctions. We will examine this in detail in part 2.)
Not believing in, say, the Christian deity has moral consequences beyond just those associated with nonbelief. To many, religion and morality in general are linked. Lying is immoral not just because society seems to say so, but because God says so. This is why meeting an avowed atheist is so disconcerting to many people. An atheist is often seen as someone outside the moral boundaries of society: if atheism is true, there is no morality—so the thinking goes. A very disquieting thought, to both theists and atheists alike, interestingly. (Ivan Karamazov, a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, is the recognized embodiment of such thinking, for he believed that if there is no god, then everything is permitted. We will question this in chapter 7.)
Third and finally, the moral dimension of any religion is so deep that adherents cannot let the mere fact that science disproves all of the ontological dimension to be a bar to their belief. The proscriptions against homosexuality, abortion, divorce, eating meat, and so on are so important to some that all the evidence in the world that their god doesn’t exist is easily discounted and explained away. So, we arrive at an important conclusion: the very best methods of inquiry and confirmation (science) cannot be used for one of the dimensions of spirituality (the ontological one) because the other dimension (the moral one) is of such vast importance.
We get, therefore, this eye-opening result: The reality of the quest, of the spiritual journey, is substantially based on its morality. The quest becomes real because something real is going to be demanded of us. We will have to really not lie, to not be selfish, to not have sex or eat meat, to have sex daily, to use or not use a condom, to give away 10 percent of our hard-earned money, to have parts of our bodies chopped off or to scar or pierce them, to move out of and destroy our home if someone dies in it, to kill and die. These are real things. Some of them are designed to improve us (where “improve” is strictly defined within the religion), but self-improvement takes a lot of work and is often extremely difficult. Doing these things, therefore, only makes sense if they are part of some sort of robust reality. And for many of them, that reality has to be profoundly gripping. Ordinary reality is not usually considered profoundly gripping (an attitude we will come to reject in chapter 10). Hence, the reality sought by spiritual travelers has to be transcendental. This is precisely what the ontology of every religion supplies: a transcendental realm, as real as—or more real than (preferably)—the physical world and your own body. But can anything transcendental be real?
IF THE JOURNEYS ARE NOT REAL, at least according to the One Billion, but we travelers are real, we have a dark recipe for anguish. That all spiritual beliefs live under threat of this anguish results in what I call the siege mentality of the spiritual traveler. Even the most benign spiritual belief exists in one’s mind completely differently than one’s belief that, say, one has a mother and a father, or that one eats food and breathes. Even those who are completely sure of their spiritual or religious beliefs get their beliefs bruised and battered when they clash with the much more solid beliefs of ordinary reality. But worse, one’s spiritual beliefs often get destroyed when they crash head on into the much more solid and depressing facts that people get sick, people experience pain and suffering, and innocent people die. I’ve had many a Jew tell me that belief in Yahweh is impossible after the Holocaust.
So our religious, spiritual beliefs exist uncomfortably with the rest of our beliefs. Of course, this uncomfortableness goes both ways. In many people, their spiritual beliefs exist as sort of second-class citizens in their minds. The first-class citizens are the ordinary beliefs about tables and chairs and people and governments and so on. Yet, there are many for whom the opposite is the case. Their spiritual beliefs are primary and occupy a position of privilege in their minds, while their beliefs in tables and chairs and governments have a secondary status. But the message is the same in either case. Spiritual beliefs exist apart from all of our other beliefs. Our religious, spiritual beliefs have a different epistemic status, as philosophers say—a different status as (alleged) knowledge in our minds. For example, as we have seen, we do not subject our religious, spiritual beliefs to the same scrutiny that we do our other beliefs. If you think you might be developing late-onset diabetes (type 2 diabetes), you go a doctor, an expert, and let that person conduct tests, form different hypotheses, and eliminate those not supported by the evidence. You do nothing of the sort if you think that you are developing a special relationship with Jesus.
(There is one peculiar exception to this, which doesn’t change things one bit. We do often test our religious beliefs, after a fashion. I’ve had many Christians tell me that they’ve tested their god, only to find that he is there, after all. Here’s one story told to me by the actual participant. In a small, western US town, a Christian woman, rushing to the hospital to see her failing father, asked God if he was real, and if he was, to reveal himself to her. He did. And so she prayed in her car to him to spare her father long enough for her to get to the hospital to see him. How did God reveal himself to this woman? Though she was in a hurry, and speeding, God arranged things so that she wound up behind a slow-moving truck, which stayed in front of her for miles. She did in fact make it to the hospital before her father died. It is hard to see how being behind a slow-moving truck is evidence of God at all. I asked the woman about this, and she explained that she was being taught patience by God. To give an example from another religion, I’ve had several Wiccans tell me that they had tested their spells to see if their religion was the right one. A Wiccan priestess told me she cast a spell to find money. She didn’t need the money, she was just checking to make sure her religion worked. She did indeed find money: she found many coins on the sidewalk, and then . . . mirabile dictu . . . a five-dollar bill . . . in Monopoly money. One can legitimately wonder if the Christian god or Wiccan magic passed these tests. Perhaps being behind a slow-moving truck was a coincidence. Perhaps finding the money also was [though I think one has to admit that if there is a magical mechanism governing a witch’s spells, it clearly seems to have a sense of humor]. Humans are not good at handling coincidences, and have a powerful tendency to see patterns where there aren’t any. We will discuss this in some detail in chapter 5, and especially in the appendix to chapter 5.)
And now, finally, to return to those troubling One Billion, or at least a sizable subset of them, those refusing to take up a seemingly dubious quest, who sojourn in skepticism. They are the physical embodiment of our doubt. Of course, there are those spiritual travelers who don’t doubt. They are not blessed; they are benighted—and dangerous. And the size of their danger dwarfs their numbers: the nondoubters, who never doubt their religion, are a minority and are far and away responsible for the greatest evils of religion. But most of us travelers do doubt. And if that doubt causes profound anguish and suffering, it is also what keeps us human and connected to humanity . . . by reducing our arrogance. There’s a well-known name for this doubt in Christian theology. It is called the dark night of the soul.