Suppose supernatural truths exist, but we could only dimly perceive them. What would this look like? How could we tell that we lived in such a world?

We might see a Babel of religions because of our imperfect understanding, but we’d also see convergence. As the disparate religious groups compared notes, common supernatural truths would become apparent. We’d see positive feedback as we matched our tentative consensus against that rudimentary understanding of the Divine. And if that supernatural Divine wanted us to understand, it would nudge us in the right direction so Humanity would gradually cobble together an accurate understanding.

Of course, in the Christian example where God is eager for each of us to have a relationship with him, we should see not a nudge or a vague hint of the celestial truth but overwhelming and unmistakable evidence that he exists.

Follow the evidence

What we see is neither overwhelming evidence nor even dimly perceived evidence. Humanity sees no common truth that pushes religions toward a single consensus view—there isn’t even any agreement on the number of gods or their names, let alone what it takes to please him/them. Religion’s fragmentation is bad and getting worse. For example, Christianity has 45,000 denominations now, and that is expected to grow to 70,000 by 2050.

Important new denominations within Christianity including Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarian Universalist Church, Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, Messianic Judaism, Shakers, Mormonism, and Pentecostalism. Outside of Christianity we find new religions such as Rastafari, Church of Satan, Cargo cults, Theosophical Society, Transcendental Meditation movement, Wicca, Neopaganism, and UFO cults such as Raëlism, Heaven’s Gate, Nation of Islam, and Scientology. Dozens of new religious movements spring up each year just in the United States.

The unstoppable growth of religious diversity is shown by the tree of world religions and the map of world religions.

If there is a supernatural truth out there and if beliefs are steered by reality (instead of wishful thinking, say), you’d think that religious claims would be tested and either kept or dropped based on how well they matched reality. With this view, we’d see humankind gradually converge on a single religious story. And yet we see the opposite because the assumption that beliefs are measured against the evidence is wrong. Evidence doesn’t drive the search for religious truth.

Christian response

What then explains the popular Christian apologists who weave elaborate intellectual arguments for the strength of the Christian position? They’re simply supporting conclusions already made, and they get their support from Christians who want a pat on the head and assurance that there’s scholarly backing for beliefs they hold for no more substantial reason than that they were part of their environment growing up.

(Yes, adults do switch religions, but this is rare. Believers adopt a religion, not because it is the truth, but because it’s the religion of their culture. Only one percent of believers switch in as adults.)

The Christian response is often to emphasize Christianity’s unique aspects. “Okay, maybe Christianity wasn’t the first to celebrate a virgin birth or have a dying-and-rising god,” they admit, “but look at its unique features!” Sure, Christianity is unique. Every religion is unique. But the problem remains: if your correct religion looks like yet another manmade religion, why would we think it’s correct? Why pick it over the rest? Since it looks like nothing more than a manmade religion, it should be rejected just like the rest.

Another popular response is to argue that the one true God could have his reasons for not making clear the correct path. We simply don’t understand them. Yes, this is possible, but this is the “Aha—you haven’t proven me wrong!” gambit, which again is no justification for belief. You don’t hold beliefs because they haven’t been proven wrong; you hold them because there’s evidence that they’re right. We follow the evidence, and it doesn’t point to Christianity.

Where does this leave Christianity?

Christians agree that people invent religions. That’s how they explain all those other religions. But in explaining away these other religions, they’ve explained away their own. Christianity looks like just one more manmade religion.

Religion is controlled by human imagination and emotions, evolving as conditions change with no immutable truth to constrain it. There is no loving god desiring a relationship who would make his existence known to us, and Christians must celebrate faith to paper over this embarrassing fact. There’s not even a cosmic truth “seen through a glass, darkly” (that is, seen in a mirror, dimly). The glass isn’t dark; it’s black. There is no external truth nudging us in the right direction.

Christians, drop the pretense that this is an intellectual project. Admit, at least to yourselves, that your belief is cultural and built on nothing more solid than tradition.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair

Photo credit: Mike Mozart, flickr, CC

Half a century ago, anthropologist Colin Turnbull spent several years with Mbuti pygmies in eastern Congo. On one occasion, he took his Mbuti assistant to an overlook that offered a view of a distant plain where buffalo grazed. The Mbuti were familiar with buffalo, but they lived their lives in the forest and were not familiar with distance. The assistant pointed to the distant buffalo and asked what kind insects they were.

To him, distance was measured in meters, not kilometers, and he refused to believe that the bugs were actually huge animals.

(This was the point that Father Ted tried to make with Dougal when he contrasted the plastic toy cows with cows in a field: “These are small, but the ones out there are far away.”)

Escape from Camp 14

A more discouraging example of this hardwiring is the story of a 26-year-old man who escaped in 2005 from a North Korean prison camp, first to China, then South Korea, and then the United States. He was in the prison camp, not because he had committed a crime, but because he had been born there as the child of two inmates.

Though he made it to freedom, the story doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. Life had taught him since birth that survival meant husbanding precious energy by shirking work. Survival was immediate—steal food or shoes, avoid punishment, hide to rest from difficult manual labor. He adapted poorly in the West to the vaguer notion that if he didn’t arrive on time or didn’t complete his work that he might eventually lose his job.

Christian Hardwiring

This is similar to Christians who seem hardwired to not be able to see what, to atheists, seem obvious—for example, that the skepticism that Christians apply to other religions sinks theirs as well. Or that “the atheist worldview is hopeless,” whether true or not, is irrelevant to someone looking for the truth. Or that quoting the Bible does nothing to satisfy the atheist’s demand for evidence.

Remember the Mbuti assistant? He adjusted to the idea of distant animals and size constancy over a few days. And the Clergy Project—an intellectual halfway house for clergy who are losing or have lost the faith—shows that even the most-invested believers can choose reason over Christianity.

Other links:

• Patheos has a new blog, Rational Doubt, started by members of the Clergy Project.
• I argue that no well-informed atheist becomes a Christian for intellectual reasons here.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

This colorful drawing is a tree of world religions. From a poorly understood past, represented as the twisting vines of ideology in the trunk, the myriad human interpretations of the divine are shown branching out like tendrils on a vine, groping for something to grab on to. Searching, searching, but never finding. New tendrils reach out with the never-ending confidence that they’re the one true religion.

Example 1: Tree of religion

The trunk expands into named religions 3000 years ago. Here’s one small fragment (the outer shell is the present day, with modern denominations in green, and each curved gray line represents 100 years of evolution):

The tree details the evolution of the great Asian and Middle Eastern religions. Though it ignores religion from the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, it makes a heroic attempt at what it does attempt to cover. It nicely documents the complex project that human religion has become.

Example 2: Church’s many views of government

Consider a very different look at the varieties of church. This one plots American Christian churches on a two-axis chart. The axes consider how big a role government should play in providing social services vs. how big a role it should play in imposing morality.

Here again, we see the dramatic differences in the many variant forms of American Christianity. For example,

• The Southern Baptist, LDS, and Church of Christ want more government involvement in morality but fewer social services.
• Unitarians want the reverse: more social services provided by government but less government involvement in morality
• Black churches want both: more government services and more legislation of morality
• Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians (PCUSA) want neither

Example 3: Map of World Religions

Don’t forget the Map of World Religions (longer discussion here). Contrast the stable map of world religions (Roman Catholics in red over here, Hindus in green over there, and so on) with the map of world science, which is just one color. New and better ideas sweep the world of science within a decade or two, but an established religion isn’t interested in better ideas. It already thinks it has the truth and has no interest in changing.

Search for the truth

If religious claims were as obviously correct as the claim that the sun exists, everyone would quickly agree. That’s not the world we live in.

Alright then, suppose that religious truth does indeed exist, but it’s fuzzy or cloudy. We see, but as if “through a glass, darkly.” Why then aren’t worldwide religious beliefs at least converging on the truth? It would be like evolution, with false beliefs gradually falling away and correct beliefs encouraged and strengthened, either by divine intervention or because they matched up better with reality.

The tree of world religions above makes clear that religion is doing the opposite—diverging instead of converging. Christianity has fragmented and morphed over time as new cults and sects form. We see that same fertility in other religions. The only commonality we see across religions is humans’ interest in the supernatural.

This disconnect between religion and the reality that would ground it makes plain that religion is just a man-made institution.

Asking which [religion] has the best evidence
would be like asking which of the Three Stooges was the smartest.
— commenter Greg G.

Photo credit: The 40 Foundation

Why do humans engage in war? A typical answer has been that resource scarcity drives war. This is the Malthusian model—if you have more water or oil or farm land than I do, I might be tempted to take yours. But studies have shown no clear correlation between war and scarcity.

Maybe there’s some sort of masculine drive for conquest. But this doesn’t explain why war is relatively recent in human history. If war were just “boys being boys,” we should see more widespread evidence in the archeological record. Indeed, some societies today have violence but are unaware of the concept of war.

Margaret Mead

Let’s consider another explanation, Margaret Mead’s 1940 theory about war.

With so many examples of war throughout history, you might expect that we could find the traits that always accompany belligerent societies and never accompany peaceful ones. Societies can be highly- or poorly-developed, resource rich or resource poor, large or small, and so on, but any of these societies can engage in war or not. From Scientific American’s Cross-Check blog:

War is both underdetermined and overdetermined. That is, many conditions are sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary. Some societies remain peaceful even when significant risk factors are present, such as high population density, resource scarcity, and economic and ethnic divisions between people. Conversely, other societies fight in the absence of these conditions. What theory can account for this complex pattern of social behavior?

What’s the answer? Mead argued that war is an invention, not an innate part of humanity. Once invented, war is contagious. Once your neighbors have been infected, your society must get infected for its own safety. Adopt it or get wiped out—the war meme wins either way. A society reluctant to go to war might conclude that a preemptive strike would be the safest move, making the idea of war self-fulfilling.

We’ve turned war on its head in an effort to come to a peaceful result. Can war be pushed to be so destructive as to be unthinkable? Alfred Nobel said, “Perhaps my [dynamite] factories will put an end to war sooner than [peace] congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” This hope has been expressed about poison gas, machine guns, and Nobel’s dynamite, though these have only served to make war more efficient.

Getting past war

Let’s return to Mead’s theory. If war is innate, we’re stuck with it, and war will be a perpetual threat. But Mead argues that it’s not innate. It’s an invention, and society can rid itself of it—maybe not easily, but theoretically.

There is room for optimism. We’ve gotten rid of poor social inventions before: slavery, genocide, mental illness as demon possession, witchcraft as a capital crime, and so on. We’ve adopted lots of good social ideas: democracy, universal education, universal suffrage, trial by jury, and bankruptcy instead of prison. We can change.

War certainly isn’t obsolete, though Steven Pinker argues that it has decreased by every measure.

Getting past religion

Now that we’ve asked the remarkable question, “Is war simply a poor invention for which we can invent a replacement?” let’s ask the same about religion. Is religion innate and an inherent part of human makeup? Many Christians think that we are given God radar, which points us unerringly to the Creator of the Universe, but that’s obviously false given the many incompatible religious directions to which this imagined “radar” sends us. Others say that we’re built with a vague and undirected desire for the divine, but we mustn’t confuse this spirituality with religion.

If religion is innate, we could suppress it, but then it would reassert itself. But if it’s an invention, perhaps it would stay gone once we replaced it with something better.

Christianity once ruled Europe. Today, it’s seen in much of Europe as a quaint custom from the past, like chewing tobacco or chamber pots. Perhaps it’s not too optimistic to see religion as nothing more than an invention that needs improving.

It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon,
it could be a city street,
it could be the face of another human being—
everything is full of wonder.
— A. C. Grayling

Photo credit: Bloody Saturday photo