When I was in elementary school, I got into a conversation about religion with my friend’s mother. As I sat in the back seat of her car on that warm September afternoon, her son at my side, she asked me about my beliefs.
“So do you and your family go to church?”
“Oh, I actually don’t believe in God,” I replied brusquely.
At this though, she looked at me, practically shell-shocked. I was shocked enough by her look of shock that I returned the look in full-force. Back then, I didn’t actually realize how common it was for people to affiliate with religion. It had hardly ever been a subject that came up before between my friends and I.
“So… what do you think happens when you die?” she asked me smugly.
“I don’t really know. I guess nothing,” I replied uncertainly.
“So you don’t believe in heaven or hell or God or any of that?”
“No, not really. How do you know that God exists?” I turned the question on her. Slightly taken aback, she measured her words for a moment.
“Just look at the world around you! I see God in the smile of every baby,” she explained.
I didn’t fully understand where she was going with her point and looked at her confused. By now, the car was motionless and we’d arrived at my house. With her motor idling, she looked at me intently.
“How is that proof of God?” I asked impudently. “I think there are other explanations for babies,” I continued. A palpable tension had begun to fill the car as her son eagerly waited for this philosophical discussion between his mother and friend to come to a close.
I left the car perplexed, the words of our conversation still buzzing around in my head. “How are babies proof of God?” I wondered to myself.
As time went on, religion remained a source of intrigue for me in my life. Though I never fully bought into it for more than a few weeks at a time growing up, I was quick to jump into nearly any conversation on the subject.
By high school, though, I had begun to feel a little irritated with so many of my religious adversaries when it came to these debates. I was surprised at the way that the brief talk I’d had with my friend’s mother had primed me for almost every conversation I’d ever participate in on the subject.
So much of the appeal of religion is steeped in the notion that Planet Earth is such a remarkable place that it demands a higher purpose. It’s one of the few points on which I’m tempted to agree with even the most fervent of fundamentalists.
To look at the sky and the ocean and the wonderful diversity of life, it’s clear we’re a part of something awe-inspiring. When religion first began offering its answers for how things came to be, it’s no wonder people were so receptive to them.
The tides of the ocean were a mysterious force; the sun that seemed to give life to crops would disappear each night; earthquakes, tornadoes, and tsunamis were each inexplicable events. In a pre-science world, how could anyone even be blamed for attributing these phenomena to the gods?
But as centuries and millennia have unfolded, science has sunk its teeth into so many of the mysteries that confounded early civilization. And the earth-shattering truths that we’ve found have changed what it is to be human.
Some of the discoveries have been mesmerizing in their beauty. But it’s a beauty that doesn’t exactly compute with religion’s idea of glamor. Where the religious often see God in the broad sense of beauty around us, science finds beauty in the unrelenting nuance found within each new crevice it pokes its head into.
Where religion sees that a sunset is beautiful and clambers to explain why, science takes centuries to understand the way moisture and atmospheric conditions culminate in such spectacular collages.
Sometimes the beauty that science finds is perplexing and sometimes it’s revelatory and sometimes it’s downright disturbing. But that’s the magic in a methodology that grows from itself and doesn’t falter before inconvenient truths.
That’s the power in a worldview that evolves constantly instead of staying rooted in archaic origin stories. As time has gone on, sciences have emerged from sciences as we’ve gained increasingly prolific tools of self-discovery. What archeologists found in their deep dives into lost civilizations could hardly have been foreseen.
From the discovery of dinosaurs to the birth of civilization, none of it was what we expected to find. The revelations were so profound that they necessitated the emergence of entirely new professions, and in each of these new professions, experts have uncovered whole encyclopedias worth of information. In all of that information, there’s a simply hair-splitting sea of detail that those bygone civilizations offered no explanations for.
According to Wikipedia, “The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.”
I feel as though the religious mentality can be thought of similarly. The stories of Genesis and Adam & Eve offered grand, blanket explanations for how we came to be and they were told originally by people who hadn’t yet gained the implements through which humans would eventually understand their origins.
Just as those with limited political insight might be the most vocal about their opinions, religions assuredly assert the realities of the universe with a dated understanding of the world they come from. The truths that science has found in the gaps religion left us to scour have hardly all been agreeable ones.
When the discipline of entomology began, scientists hardly expected to learn that female praying mantises decapitate males when they mate, or how parasites cause crippling illnesses in unsuspecting populations.
When mycologists began examining mushrooms, they hardly expected to find fungi that can take over the minds of ants and zombify them. When people first began looking up, the sky was a mystery and we seemed to be the center of it.
But when astronomers look through building-sized telescopes today, they see that we’re floating at inconceivable speeds through a void that stretches further than the mind can fathom. To whom that cosmic realization was predictable is hard to imagine — but certainly not people in the Bronze Age.
The strongest arguments against religion emerge from the painstaking nuance that we’ve discovered when we’ve put magnifying glasses to each of these unexplored new areas. It’s in the finer details we’ve unearthed that those hallowed stories of religion reveal their age.
Where the religious often speak obliquely about how the majesty of life is proof of their God, a deeper examination of that very majesty reveals a more complicated truth. The people who wrote Genesis weren’t aware of our place in the cosmos and they didn’t understand why the sunset at the end of every day. But that we’ve learned we owe no supernatural explanation to the moisture that congeals into breathtaking sunsets certainly doesn’t remove the magic from them.
The devil is in the details, but the details we’ve uncovered haven’t exactly pointed toward Satan. They’ve revealed a complex evolution that spans billions of years.
Fossils that we’ve found provide meticulous recountings of the transition between chimpanzees and humans. We’ve learned of Homo habilis and Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens; their bones can be found in museums by those curious enough to enter.
Our findings were so much more convoluted than our ancestors could have anticipated and they’ve revealed truths that, while uncomfortable for some, are simply breathtaking in the scope of their beauty. That we share common ancestors with all living organisms (besides maybe the octopus?) is a staggering revelation that could never have been assumed.
The profoundly intricate, gritty realism that opens up in every subject when examined closely enough is flagrantly incompatible with the sweeping explanations offered in Genesis.
I can hardly blame those archaic civilizations, though, for the limited understanding that they had of the world. They’re forgivable for the all-encompassing answers they offered. That the sun morphs into mosaics of color each night as it sets beneath the horizon is a spectacle that demands an explanation and the one that we’ve found is hardly explained in a sentence.
That colossal forces of nature were constantly riling in unpredictable ways must have mystified and terrified older civilizations. Understanding and anticipating weather patterns, though, wasn’t something we would achieve for centuries.
To base our understanding of the world today on the civilizations of our ancient past, though, is to discount the value of science in its entirety. The notion that science and religion are compatible disciplines isn’t one that’s supported by our history.
That religion has stood against science at nearly every conceivable turn is as incontrovertible of a truth as our insignificant place in the cosmos. It’s only in the rarest of cases that, after centuries of contention, the Church might acknowledge that science was right, as happened with the Catholic Church and evolution.
But even as science explains more and more of the world around us, so much of organized religion has remained steadfast in its belief that the religious texts of our ancestors offer more complete insight into the great mysteries of life than the scientists who got planes into the air and rockets soaring through the atmosphere.
Of course, our holy texts didn’t elaborate on the existence of dinosaurs; people in the Bronze Age hadn’t yet discovered dinosaurs. Of course, the Bible and the Quran didn’t detail the brutal millennia it took for humanity to evolve; people in the Bronze Age hadn’t yet discovered the fossils that would explain our origins.
They hadn’t invented the devices that could determine their age. They can’t be blamed for the deficits in their knowledge, but the harm in clinging to those deficits today is difficult to overstate.