Faith

Some have commented on the virtue or vice of faith. In the book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris argues that faith has reached its end. The only question is whether it will take our civilization with it. On the other hand there are numerous religious people who point to the mass murders initiated by Hitler, Mao and Stalin as examples of the harm that can be caused by atheism.

There is some reason to doubt whether Hitler was an atheist. He made many public professions of belief in God, and none to the contrary. Granted, people do not always say what they really, truly believe, but that is part of the problem with an ethical system that assigns blame or credit on the basis of belief.

I want to approach this issue from a different angle. If we take my approach to ethics we will try to find the best way of assigning blame and credit to the actions of others, or at the very least we should be reasonably certain that finding a better way would cost more than the benefits that we would derive from finding such a system. In this light assigning blame and credit on the basis of faith seems like a bad plan. It is simply not possible to determine what other people believe, so we have no way of knowing whether such an assignment is appropriate.

I will spend the rest of this post examining the anti-theist position. To me it seems that the argument would depend on humans being the product of evolution by means of natural selection. Anti-theists are as a rule atheists and most believe in the explanatory power of evolution. As far as this goes I would have to agree with them. The evidence does indeed support evolution.

Yet the position seems to be that human action is determined about our beliefs regarding unseen gods and the afterlife. If our beliefs are not so guided then there is no reason to worry about what others believe concerning these things. On the contrary we should take the point of view that our behavior has its present form because that form helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. Our behavior has evolved and continues to evolve.

In view of this we should expect that activities that would be so harmful to the future of civilization as to cause its destruction are unlikely. Even Muslim terrorists are motivated by love of Islamic civilization. They are unlikely to do anything that would cause that civilization to end. In fact there is much evidence that the tendency to commit suicide can be influenced by how the act will be seen by others afterwards. This is what we would expect since their reputation would effect the way that people would treat their relatives and hence would effect the survival and reproduction of their genes.

Further, we see that belief in faith healing is less popular in places where effective, evidence based treatments are available. In fact, our society does intervene when parents refuse such medical treatment for their children. This is also exactly what we would expect under the assumption that human behavior is guided by evolution.

Robert Wright, the author of Evolution of God, is seen by some as taking a position that is in favor of religion. Sam Harris interprets him in that way. I see his tone as more neutral. What he said was that religion is also subject to a sort of natural selection. He points out that religious people tend to adopt violence and intolerance when they view interaction with outsiders as being zero-sum. They will do this regardless of how implausible tolerance and non-violence toward non-believers might seem given a literal interpretation of scripture. This is exactly what we should expect given that the people interpreting those scriptures can be thought of as products of natural selection.

If this is true then we should expect religious people to be less violent and more tolerant if they have more opportunities for mutually beneficial interaction, and less for interaction that harms either us or them. Free trade, immigration and tourism would be helpful. Military intervention would be harmful.