When he accepted Pierre Simon-Laplace’s book on astronomy, the emperor Napoleon asked the renowned mathematician why it nowhere mentions God. Laplace replied, somewhat brusquely, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”
Similarly, in their recent book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow write: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue torch paper and set the universe going.”
For centuries, there have been flashpoints between science and religion. In most of these, science has been the upstart, challenging traditional doctrines and beliefs. For example, Galileo’s travails with the Church and Darwin’s theories of evolution by natural selection upset the predominant religious world views of their eras.
Some scientists have sought détente between science and religion, such as the late evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who suggested the two occupy mutually exclusive intellectual domains that he called “magesteria,” and since they do not overlap, they do not conflict.
In recent years, though, many prominent scientist atheists have actively promoted their world view. Hawking and Mlodinow’s comments are just the latest broadside in this cultural conflict.
Science and Atheism
Perhaps the most prominent scientist spokesperson for the modern atheistic movement is the British biologist and science popularizer, Richard Dawkins. In his bestseller, The God Delusion (Houghton, 2007) Dawkins likens religion to a “mind virus” and uses the philosophical tool Occam’s razor to argue that “there almost certainly is no God.”
Dawkins’ approach of using scientific methodology to discredit the “god hypothesis” is also employed by David Mills in Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (Ulysses Press, 2006), and by physicist Victor Stegner in his God, The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Prometheus, 2007).
Another leading voice in the movement is Daniel Dennett, a neurologist who looks at religious beliefs from a cognitive evolutionary perspective. His Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon draws upon current thought in anthropology, genetics, and psychology to conclude that belief in the supernatural is an adaptive mechanism for enhancing reproductive fitness. Further, like a virus, it spreads and reproduces.
Sam Harris, who has a doctorate in both philosophy and neurology, has written three controversial books on the clash between reason and religion. His books include: The End of Faith (Norton, 2004 - Winner of the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction), Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), and The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010). In the latter, he argues that moral truth can be understood through science.
A new writer in this field is Greg Graffin, an evolutionary biologist who moonlighted as a rock guitarist for cult punk band Bad Religion. In his book, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God (Harper Collins, 2010), he says that is a naturalist, who “posits that the universe is made up of only four things: space, time, matter, and energy -- and that’s it.” He is also critical of what he calls “pop atheism.”
Organized Atheism
Dawkins and Harris have each founded organizations to debunk religion and promote rational, scientific based thinking.
Dawkins’s Foundation for Reason and Science (richarddawkinsfoundation.org/) exists: “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”
Harris is the CEO of Project Reason (project-reason.org/), which seeks “to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.” Among its activities is a forum on “The Biology of Belief,” which examines the neurology of religion at the level of the brain.
While organizations such as the American Humanism Association and the Council for Secular Humanism have always embraced science, these new organizations actively engage in research and science-related activities aimed at debunking religion. Among their members are many other scientist authors, like Steven Weinberg, Peter Atkins, J. Craig Venter, Laurence Krauss, and Steven Pinker.
A Market for Disbelief
How influential these writers and their movements will be in a society that remains overwhelmingly theistic remains to be seen. Nevertheless, as the popularity of these new books and other highly visible public projects demonstrates, there is an audience for atheism.
Are science and religion compatible? Dawkins, for one, doesn’t think so, or, in his own words: “The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.”
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