The necessity of atheism
To begin, I am very much in agreement with Christopher Hitchens, who said, "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". No one has ever presented any convincing evidence for the existence of their gods or the vague "something else". In the unlikely event anyone provides some unambiguous evidence, I will reconsider, but until then, I take the position of atheism.
I have had religious people say to me that atheism was a position of intellectual arrogance. As a philosopher, I know that there is no way of proving or disproving virtually any truth absolutely, including whether supernatural beings do or don't exist. Technically, philosophers must be agnostic, a term which says the existence or non-existence of supernatural entities is unknowable. I believe, though, that the existence of gods and other supernatural beings is so vanishingly unlikely that to refer to myself as an agnostic gives a false impression. When I have used the term in the past, religious believers assumed I was closer to their side of this debate. I also called myself a tea-pot agnostic, referring to Bertrand Russell's thought experiment, that no one could prove there wasn't an infinitely small tea pot circling Mars, but this tended to side track the conversation. So now I use the clearer term of atheist, and by this I declare that I am not on the fence about the supernatural, I am not having an each-way bet. I admit that it is a strange thing, for an inaccurate term to express my reality better than an accurate one, but here we are.
In a book I am planning to write, I wanted to have a chapter on religion which simply said "Religion is ridiculous". The existence of the supernatural is so poorly evidenced that it is not really worth discussing. Certainly, it is frustrating that so much mental energy over human history has been wasted on this topic, to which I add my own mental energy. Unfortunately, as atheists, we cannot ignore religion because it plays a large part in our unbelieving lives. Something that doesn't exist can still be a powerful force in the world. Terrible things continue to happen as a result of ridiculous ideas. The vast majority of people in the world are believers who follow the moral and political guidance of religious hierarchies. If we wish to understand and uplift the people of our world, we must engage with all widely held beliefs, however mistaken.
Does God exist?
A question which I've often been asked is "Do you believe in God?"
This question itself reveals much, primarily the cultural basis of our beliefs. A person genuinely enquiring into the spiritual truths of the universe, free from cultural constraints, might ask, "Are there other powerful intelligent beings in the universe that exist beyond our everyday perception that might have an influence on the world?" As we see from our history, monotheism was a later innovation in the story of religion and supernatural belief. Asking "Is there a God?" shows we have already been pushed quite far towards accepting an arbitrary version of supernatural belief.
Unchained from our culture's monotheistic frame of reference, we would be freer to interrogate the meaning of existence ourselves. We might ask whether multiple gods exist, whether the mountains have spirits, or whether our dead ancestors are controlling our lives. We would then look into that reality for our own evidence as to what might be true. By asking whether "God" exists, we reveal how our thinking is limited by our culture's dominant conception of religion. As children, before our minds were fully formed and we could properly think for ourselves, the society in which we are immersed had implanted this conception into our minds. Our culture and thought is an interdependent exercise, we gain a vast amount from this but blind conformity to it can shackle us from true independent thought. Breaking those chains is an important step in finding our authentic self and approaching a truth based on our experience of existence, not other people's, often made up, stories.
The cultural basis of religious belief is especially evident in the way it has spread person to person, like a meme or virus. There are no religions that have manifested themselves in different geographical regions with no physical connection between them. When Europeans travelled to the Americas, they found no Christian crucifixes, Tarot Cards, Islamic crescents, or Jewish Stars of David. No one in the New World had heard of Moses, Abraham, Mohammed, Jesus or Alisteir Crowley; instead, they had very different gods and spiritual beliefs. Where communication between different cultures was impossible, the faces, names and commandments of the gods changed, as did the stories people attached to them. As a person moved between disconnected cultures, one eternal and unchanging truth about the world ended, and a new, completely differing one began. If a religious revelation was related to some central, unchangeable truth of existence, why are they not much more consistent? Why are they propagated like all other earthly social customs and cultural fashions, person to person? True religion should appear and reappear as spontaneous manifestations of a trans-cultural truth independently.
Millions of people have claimed that gods and spirits have spoken to them, though apparently these powerful supernatural beings who could travel wherever they wanted, are as bound to individual earthly places as their followers. Supernatural beings always seem to reveal themselves to people in a culture that already believes in them; The Christian gods and saints only speak to Christians, so too with Muslims, and so on. All this seems suspicious; almost as if people are projecting their own ideas upon the world.
The Noble Lie
Asking whether religion is true, is a separate question to asking whether it was good. Many people arguing for religion sidestep arguments for the evidence of its truth, and say it is good for society. They claim it provides an objective moral basis for us to behave, something that just our own culture would be unable to come up with on its own. There is a long history of rulers deliberately using religion for this purpose. Many elites see religion as something for the common people, who have no greater purpose than to be pawns in schemes devised and controlled by their social superiors.
Plato famously talked about getting the populace to believe a magnificent myth, also called the Noble Lie. This myth was essentially to construct a religious conception of the world, which would make people accept their place in the social hierarchy and govern their behaviour. This is a dangerous idea, because it places too much power into the hands of those who control the myth. Plato's idea of convincing people that there were gold, silver, copper and iron classes among the population was never implemented, but similar ideas have been used by elites to control society over history. The Hindu caste system is the obvious version of this in our current world, but in earlier times a Christian idea of the Three Estates was commonly held. It was composed of the clergy, nobility and peasants and to seek to change one's station was to defy God's will.
Religions of peace
The predominant mechanism by which "the great religions" have spread has been the sword. Constantine the Roman Emperor converted to Christianity after he believed it had helped him win a decisive battle. Two decades after this conversion, the Roman persecution of non-Christian beliefs began, eventually leading to the forced closure of temples and schools of philosophy. By the scope and might of the Roman empire, Christianity became the religion of Europe. From there, via an often brutal colonialism, to becoming the largest of much of Africa and the Americas. The religion of Europe's largest empire became the world's largest religion. During his lifetime Mohammed, and increasingly as he gained more followers, was an active war lord. In the centuries following Mohammed's death, the armies of Islam swept all before them. The lands they conquered today still comprise the heart of the Islamic faith. The culture of the conquerors was embedded in the religions: Christian masses were required to be spoken in Latin for centuries, and Arabic is still fundamental to Islam and the language of its adherents five daily prayers. The Emperor Ashoka wrested control of large parts of India through bloody wars, and afterwards converted to Buddhism. Through his power and sponsorship, Buddhism became a mass state religion. Ashoka and his successors sent monks and emissaries to spread Buddhism throughout India and to surrounding countries. The re-emergence of Hinduism after Buddhism was aided by the alignment of the Brahmin class with the ruling military elite. We don't have to search very far for evidence of this relationship between war and religion, as the Hindu epics, the Old Testament, and the Quran show. In human history, violence, empire and religion are inextricably intertwined.
Religious beliefs must be adaptable to spread. Both violent and peaceful people wish to make God in their own image. While some will embrace the violent potential of their doctrines, others will choose to interpret the same texts and passages to be consistent with them being religions of peace. It is perhaps those who claim they follow religions only of peace that are more deluded about their holy books. A book that tells you to be peaceful sometimes and violent at others is not a peaceful book. To deny the violence inherent in the major religions is almost to deny the history of humanity with which religion and power are interwoven. Until relatively recently, all states and empires were attached to religions, their leaders considered anointed by the gods, or even considered gods themselves. When church and state are one, religion must be made compatible with any violence inherent in the state. Religions that weren't useful for war and subjugation, that created overly pacifistic populations, could not be tolerated by rulers looking to expand and defend their empires. It is the religions, or at least interpretations of the religions, that could sanction the violence needed to create empires that became the largest religions in our world.
Once an empire is conquered it must be maintained. Controlling internal populations purely through violence is expensive and unpredictable. Violence can create order, but it also creates resentment and enemies, and can easily slip into chaos and retribution. You can control people's bodies through violence, but religion wields a deeper level of control, allowing you to manipulate the meaning of people's lives. Telling people what to do is far less powerful than controlling why they do it.
Though religion has been generally found wanting as a civilising force, it has been highly effective as a means of social order and control at every level, from continents to states, communities, families, and even our internal worlds.
Science and evolution
Some religious people believe the lack of evidence for god is somehow its own evidence. They think that the inability of our ability to fully understand or control the complexity of the universe means there must be a higher power that does understand and can control everything. This conclusion does not follow from the premise.
An example of this type of errant logic is often raised when people try to undermine the theory of evolution. It is suspicious that it is only people who are quite fervent followers of a specific religion that believe the "creation" theory of the origin of species. Creationist is really just another word for religious fundamentalist, as one irrational belief requires another. One tactic creationists use is to point to the fact that there are "missing links" in our scientific knowledge of the ascent/descent of man from our origins. They reason that if science is unable to completely explain how the universe of life began, or how humans evolved, without any gaps at all in this knowledge, these gaps somehow provide a space in which they can insert the supernatural.
In the beginning of our scientific understanding of human evolution, we relied on a relatively small number of fossils. The reasons for this are that paleontological science was relatively new, and due to the nature of the fossil record. There are many fossils in the Earth's crust, but this is the result of the vast scope of a billion years of life, not because the process of fossilisation is common or uniform. For any individual fossil to be formed, a number of rare events need to occur: the being must be rapidly buried without predation or decay in a low-oxygen environment, a mineral process needs to occur to convert their bones into stone for preservation, and there needs to be a stable geological environment that maintains the fossil in a recognisable form at an accessible level in the ground for us to access.
The skeletons of Tyrannosaurus Rex, millions of whom roamed the earth for 1-3 million years, are a common feature in museums. The skeletons we see in museums are, however, a composite of more than one T. rex. Though we have dozens of partial skeletons, some up to 90% whole, we have not yet discovered a complete skeleton. Large animals are more likely to be fossilised than small animals, so the T. rex started with an advantage over our ancestors in the fossil record, but still, their skeletons are rare and incomplete.
The idea that there should be a neat sequence of the fossils of our ancestor species is unlikely from two perspectives. The first, as discussed, is the random nature of fossilisation; the second is that evolution doesn't proceed in a linear fashion. Evolution is messy, with interbreeding, reversions, dead ends and convergence. Having caveated all of this, the wandering picture we can now draw from the fossil record is impressive. We have thousands of fossils spanning millions of years related to the evolution of humans from our tree-dwelling ancestors. Along with regular new fossil discoveries, other scientific areas are also helping build a more complete picture. DNA science has been revolutionary, but there are also advances in fields like anthropology, geology and anatomy. Still, there will always probably be gaps in our knowledge. Even a major fossil discovery that fills a million-year gap in our evolutionary timeline simply creates two new 500,000-year gaps on either side.
God of the gaps
The "science doesn't know everything" justification for the supernatural has been called the "god of the gaps" theory. As our scientific knowledge increases, the gaps the gods must squeeze themselves into become increasingly small. Despite this, the arguments of religious fundamentalists haven't changed. They continue to point to remaining areas of incomplete scientific knowledge to undermine the general faith in science that they see as in competition with themselves for earthly authority. Even more importantly, for purposes of control, these messages are targeted at existing followers of the religions, who have a lower bar for credulity to arguments that affirm their beliefs.
Like many people who find the scientific status quo inconvenient, believers in the supernatural use the tools of science to undermine itself. They will at once reject the knowledge of science even as they try to support their claims using pseudoscience. Rejecting the authority of scientists generally, they will then point to the authority of a tiny minority of invariably religious scientists who support their claims. When a scientific paper is useful to them, they call it evidence; when a paper is not useful to them, they fall back to "Science doesn't know everything". To claim that science thinks it knows everything is an odd criticism coming from the religious, who claim to represent an omniscient being. Proper science is sceptical at its heart; it often requires us to rest in states of unknowing or uncertainty, because that is the best truth we currently have.
In a time before telescopes, aircraft and spacecraft, the sky, upper atmosphere and space were a mystery to humans. Anyone who has spent a night in an area of the world relatively free of air and light pollution, once the default around the globe, will empathise with the questioning wonder people have felt throughout history gazing up at night. Ancient people would have hungered, even as we still hunger, for some understanding of this luminous tapestry, some explanation for these pinholes in the curtain of night. To fill this demand, in every culture, stories were created that made sense of the myriad celestial objects, imbuing them with a great meaning as seemed to befit their vast, enigmatic nature. Whatever version of the supernatural people believed in had the sky incorporated into it. This place we couldn't reach was often thought of, somewhat conveniently, as home to beings people believed in but couldn't touch or see, such as the gods and the spirits of the departed. Almost always, the complex and mysterious movement of objects in the sky was thought to predict events on earth if interpreted by people with special knowledge. People often believed that the sun was a god, or that the sun was hauled across the sky each day by a god. As much as this sounds primitive to our ears, even today, believers continue to hold that the heavenly realms are somewhere in or above the clouds. We have not moved so very far from our ancient sky god beliefs. Thunder and lightning were almost universally seen as signs of the presence and anger of the gods. Again, we may think of these beliefs to be primitive, but it only takes something like a major cyclone or earthquake today for leaders of religious groups to claim the event was the punishment of the god or gods for some human failing. God is still their go-to explanation for those gaps in our understanding, a supernatural placebo for a world we cannot fully understand or control.
We are pattern-seeking creatures. This desire to understand the patterns of cause and effect in our environment has obvious survival advantages. As part of this, we have an innate discomfort about not understanding things. We like moments of insight and understanding; we see this hunger in repeated phrases in our language, like: to have a eureka or lightbulb moment; when the penny drops; it all clicked; we saw the light; it hit me; it fell into place. We seek narratives that help us make sense and connect things. This is especially true for major concepts like the origin of life and our world, the meaning of the stars, why we suffer, why we die, and whether there is anything beyond this life. Part of religion's attraction is that it changes our conception of the often random world around us so that it seems more ordered, easing our questioning minds. These stories make sense of things, but they also distract us from the intellectual mindset needed to look deeper into the workings of our cosmos. Some people might be happy with this trade-off; ignorance may be bliss after all, but rejecting the search for rationality and truth leaves us vulnerable to misinformation and misdirection.
Perhaps the fundamental error that believers in the supernatural make is overconfidence in their own power of judgment. They believe that their intuitions about what is true or false, who is lying to them and who is telling the truth, are very good. They assume, for example, that they would know if a person pretending to speak for god was sincere or not, that their intuitive feeling about the person would be right. When we test people on these intuitive abilities, such as being able to detect liars, we see that we aren't very good at this. A meta-analysis of studies on detecting liars shows that, on average, people are only slightly better than chance. It is not a person's deepest character that we intuit, but rather we rely on how someone fits into our pre-existing beliefs, stereotypes, likeability, appearance and so on. Charlatans, salesmen, scammers and cult leaders study the cues for trustworthiness better than anyone, and will incorporate them into their performances. It is especially easy to make the wrong choice if we think ourselves more immune than others to deception, especially if someone is giving us information we are predisposed to believe.
There is a good rule of thumb in how to judge big ideas: that fantastic claims require fantastic evidence. The idea of an invisible being who pervades, created and rules our world, or that there is an innate intelligence and ethical logic built into the cosmos, are some of the most fantastical claims someone could make. They should be held to the highest possible standards of scrutiny. Our ignorance in this area, our lack of understanding, should make us cautious and humble about accepting fantastical claims, rather than leading us to entertain them. The gaps in our knowledge are the areas that most demand rigorous critical thinking. It is no coincidence that the level of religious belief generally corresponds inversely to the level of scientific and critical thinking education in a society. Scientists who study the universe, who know more than anyone about its mechanics and structure, are roughly half as likely as the rest of the population to believe in a higher power. For some reason, the gods seem less likely to reveal themselves to the highly educated and well-informed.
Once upon a time, the spirits and gods were much smaller, and they didn't know everything. They concerned themselves with the rivers and the trees, inhabited the mountains and seas, had brothers and sisters, disobeyed their parents, made mistakes, and suffered from all manner of human flaws. Over time, we can see that religions and religious ideas have evolved. The monotheism of the great religions seems to have been created through a game of religious one-upmanship. Each successive generation of believers wanted to pray to a god that was more powerful and more knowledgeable, so ever greater gods fulfilling this need were created. Finally, we arrived at the logical end of this process, a god who is omniscient, omnipresent, created everything, is beyond time and space, and is all-powerful. We have reached the utmost extent of hyperbole; there are no greater attributes we can imagine to give the gods. So there is nowhere else to go, no greater god imagined that can trump the ones imagined a couple of thousand years ago, and religion has been in something of a stasis ever since. We are like children at the end of a game of naming larger numbers that finally ends with "infinity", "infinity plus 1", and then "an infinity of infinities". An infinity of infinities would not be out of place in many religious sermons, as believers struggle for ever more expansive superlatives with which to intoxicate themselves in belief.
We imagine them to have all this power, yet we look out at the suffering and injustice of the world. Omniscient, omnipresent gods pose logical problems when it comes to evil, as has been questioned since ancient times.
A statement attributed to Epicurus asks:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Culture and conformity
We evolved a set of characteristics and behaviours that tended to help our survival, and they have made us susceptible to religious belief.
Evolution is often a fuzzy instrument because it happens due to incremental beneficial changes and is not coherently designed. It makes some people equally as afraid of a poisonous snake or spider as a harmless one. Our need to socially conform is another example of how our evolutionary tendencies are painted in broad, impressionistic strokes. Conformity is a good survival strategy, at least it is much more often than not, and so we have evolved an innate bias towards it.
The brain's memory enables us to learn, and most learning happens through trial and error. Learning enables us to copy the behaviours of others around us, quickening our learning process by incorporating the trial and error of others before us. This distributed learning is a superpower for organisms with this ability. Adults modelling behaviours that children are able to copy is a more efficient way to adapt to an environment than relying on slow, random genetic changes or individual trial and error. The insights of millenia can be embedded in group culture. A child does not need to know the reasons behind the adult members of their group's behaviour; they just need to follow them to get the benefits. One of the most important things for a child to learn is how to get sustenance, and this includes not only what to eat but what not to eat. The adults in a group may have an aversion to a certain poisonous plant, an aversion the adults themselves may have learned as children and don't know the origins of. Children see that no one eats the plant, and will generally avoid it, even if it looks enticing. Failing to conform to this behaviour can cause sickness and death. Conformity is directly related to survival in this simplified example, but in most situations, the best strategy for evolutionary success is to model the behaviour of the older members of your group. The adults around you have, after all, achieved the main evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction. In more complex beings, this is cultural learning. We see how animals that have been raised in zoos, away from the culture of their relatives in the wild, will struggle with basic survival tasks when reintroduced to the wild. The tendency to conform is a fuzzy evolutionary mechanism that gets filled in with the survival details of each different group and environment.
Our bias to conform is clearly evident in patterns of religion. The percentage of religious people who follow their parents' approximate beliefs approaches 90% in many communities. Even Mohammed, the Buddha and Jesus largely followed their parents' religions. We think of them as founders of new religions, when they actually modified and heavily borrowed from the stories and religions of the societies they grew up in. It is hard, after all, to conceive of and market an entirely new worldview to people. The successful new religious leader walks the line between "your existing thoughts are wrong and I will fix them" and "you don't have to change all of your behaviours and accept an entirely new belief system and identity to follow me". Cult leaders thus call people to a truer, more perfect understanding of a mostly familiar faith. People generally have a fraught relationship with change, so it makes sense to allow new converts to keep their core conceptions of the universe, to maintain or repurpose popular cultural traditions, and to rebrand their existing festivals and holidays. The specific stories and customs that religious leaders perpetuate are less important than the purposes they serve, that of collating power and the ability to control people. Whatever other motivations drive aspiring religious leaders, the main thing they seem to seek is to usurp other authorities and their positions of privilege and control. Now, as the one true path to an older divinity, the new leader is the one to give attention to, to be followed, obeyed, and usually, copulated with.
Religious power is unlike other forms of power because if a person believes you speak for their god, you have almost total power over them. What a religious leader says is imbued with an imagined divine authority.
Betting your life
As discussed before, "Do you believe in God?" is a leading question. There is another similarly famous leading question called Pascal's Wager. Philosopher Blaise Pascal believed we all had a simple choice: to accept God's existence or not. If there is no God, whether we choose to believe or not believe in them changes nothing after we die. If there is a God, however, whether we choose to believe in them or not can cause spending an eternity in heaven or hell. From this, Pascal reasoned that choosing belief was the more rational choice, just in case there was a God.
This sounds logical enough at first glance, but when we engage our system two thinking, we can see there are obvious problems with it. To start, can you really choose to believe in something? Is choosing religious belief because you calculated what will most benefit you a sincere belief or just a selfish strategy? Also, believing in something that isn't true, spending our single chance at existence following the made-up rules of a made-up God is to pay an incredibly high cost. It is to waste our rational selves and intellectual potential, to abandon the search for meaning, perhaps the most sacrosanct part of ourselves.
As was pointed out, even in Pascal's day, the cultural basis of his wager is evident. Pascal's Christian God is only one of countless conceptions of supernatural belief. Even in Pascal's religion, Christianity, there are multiple branches that have often been in conflict. Violence between people who believed in the pacifist Jesus has resulted in some of the bloodiest and longest violent episodes in Europe's history. Each branch taught that a person who believed the doctrines of the other branches was destined for hell. Even within the main schismatic branch of Protestantism, there are thousands of sects, cults, branches and so on, all with their own scriptural interpretations they think are vitally important. Pascal's wager ignores the complexity even of his own religion and oversimplifies his equation by assuming there is a binary choice between belief and rationality. In his mind, there was only the Catholic religion of the French state he grew up in, and an amorphous lump of all other beliefs, including atheism.
Perhaps one of the religions now extinct got it right, rather than the unlikely case of the one Pascal just happened to be born into. Given the countless faiths and variations over human history, Pascal's faith was, statistically speaking, very likely to be false. Even in the unlikely case that Pascal was right and a supernatural being did exist, he has no rational basis on which version of them to believe in. Indeed, he is expected to believe without rational reasons, something embodied within the word faith. The very first commandment that Pascal's God is said to have given Moses on the mountain top was "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". If the countless other gods that vie for our belief were similarly jealous, a wrong choice would play out very poorly in the afterlife. In the vanishingly unlikely case that Pascal was born at the right place and time with the right God from among the multitudes, and then the right doctrines from among the countless options, he would still have to conform to all the right customs, duties and behaviours, celebrate the right holidays, wear the right clothes, eat the right foods, pray at the right times, and so on.
If I were Pascal, I wouldn't want to stand before God and explain his wager. To explain that he didn't look into his existence for what was true, but decided on belief due to cultural conformity and self-interest. Pascal's wager is based on a fundamental error, that religion and rationality can coexist in the same space. To embrace one side of religion or rationality more fully, one must loosen and eventually let go of one's hold on the other.
Evidence and belief
I have had seemingly kind, intelligent and sincere people look me in the eye and say they have variously experienced God, Shiv Baba, ghosts, aliens, dead relatives, telepathy, auras, invisible energy, demons, and so on. I have no doubt that the people who told me such things believed what they said was true. So if I cannot judge others by their sincerity, their fervour, or how convinced they are of their beliefs, then I can only look to those who can back up what they say with evidence.
The evidence for various types of supernatural belief has one thing in common: it is universally very poor. Instead of objective evidence, most people's supernatural beliefs are built upon feelings, intuitions, imaginings, and hopefulness. How is rational choice possible in these circumstances? The person who believes things without good evidence is like a rudderless ship, waiting for whatever breeze happens to blow to decide their destination.
Of course, the believer might deny that they believe without good evidence. They will point to things they or others have experienced as unshakeable evidence, whether it be that they were healed of some affliction, witnessed a miraculous coincidence, or had some other experience they believe could only have had supernatural origins. The problem here is that for every person who claims that a supernatural event proves their beliefs, there will be just as many people claiming that similar events prove their beliefs. For an atheist, resolving this is simply being consistent: the same false phenomena have the same causes. People are viewing the inevitable chance happenings and random occurrences of the world through a warped lens. Scientists call this Confirmation Bias, which is the idea that the more strongly someone believes something, the more likely they are to accept poor evidence that confirms their existing beliefs. A believer in the supernatural has a much harder case to make. They must explain why almost identical evidence would justify their particular beliefs but not other beliefs. As has been pointed out before, believers and atheists agree about the lack of evidence for all religions but one - the one the believer follows.
Here we come to the difference between philosophy and religion: their attitude towards knowledge. Philosophical knowledge is grounded in doubt; all ideas are to a greater or lesser extent provisional and able to be questioned. Knowledge grounded in faith starts with most of the important questions of existence already decided, and then works backwards from there. It is not always easy to see the difference between these two approaches to knowledge. An educated person can use all the tools of rationality and logic in discussion; they can construct impressive edifices of thought, but if they are not trying to get to rational and logical conclusions, they are doing something other than philosophy. Philosophers should be happy to be proven wrong, because they can then see the world more deeply and truly. In this way, rationality is both a tool for a philosopher and inextricably linked to their end goal: to see more deeply into the universe. The religious thinker has a different end goal, whether they are aware of it or not; at any point of a reasoned discussion, rationality can be jettisoned and replaced with faith, often masked with evocative poetic language. As someone who has discussed religion with many believers, faith is like a trump card to be played whenever they are backed into a logical corner. I've often felt it would save time if believers in the supernatural started their discussions on the topic with their grounding assumptions. "I have irrational beliefs, which I do not want to question and on which my worldview rests".
Miracles
In the time of Jesus, people apparently witnessed numerous miracles. We make a big deal of Jesus being resurrected these days, but coming back from the dead was apparently a pretty common claim in ancient times. Just looking at the Bible there are a number of instances of this miracle in both the Old and the New Testament. In the days most closely described in the bible, Jesus was performing miracles at quite the rate; walking on water, healing the blind, turning water into wine, killing fig trees and so on. They all sound like things that, if I personally had witnessed, would have been very convincing of Jesus' supernatural credentials. When Paul and Barnabas visited a city, the people of the city weren't expected to just believe what the disciples said on faith. Instead, they performed miracles so people knew they were the true representatives of God. Again, this sounds very convincing, assuming they weren't just conjuring tricks. So, where are our miracles that we may know who to believe? Believers will say there are miracles all the time, so let's have a look at some modern miracles.
The illnesses of the body, even with thousands of years of cumulative medicine, often still mystify and trouble us. Depression and ill health are strongly linked. Just diagnosing what is wrong is often beyond our best medical knowledge, much less do we always know how to intervene in the complex interactions within our bodies. Physical illness also has a mental component, as in addition to the pain and disability of a malady, we worry and stress about what is and might happen to us. Even if we weren't able to understand or heal the physical aspect of an illness, it would still improve our lives if we could alleviate some of the mental aspects. It would help us for someone to listen to our problem, say they understood the cause of our problem, and that it can be made better. This could provide deep comfort, regardless of whether it was true. Hope, ritual and attention have always been a large part of medicine, which is entwined with religion in faith healing.
Faith healing
The number of people seeking supernatural help with diseases is legion. This is good because it means we have a lot of data. When we compare the religious and the non-religious, there doesn't seem to be any difference. People who pray for supernatural intervention seem to fall within the same normal distribution curves as everybody else. Indeed, we can see the effects of lifestyle, genetics, and mental state in how disease plays out in our lives, but not whether someone prayed to Jesus or the Buddha, or whether they prayed 3 times a day or 4.
Our bodies are unique and complex, as often are the maladies that afflict them. Medical professionals can't always accurately predict the path an illness might take in a given person, so we rely on evidence-based guesses, largely from previous case histories. We would expect that for any given correct diagnosis, a small number of people will do much better than doctors predict, another small number will do much worse, with the majority of people falling somewhere in between, clustering around the centre. The people on the edge who experience the best-case scenario are not experiencing miracles here, just mathematics. The unlikely things that happen on the edge of the distribution curve occur just as often to believers as non-believers, all other things being equal. The only difference is that when unlikely things happen to believers, they see it as evidence of supernatural intervention, whereas the rest of us just thank our luck or our immune system. Believers fail to notice that their miracles are never unambiguous; they are never things that are clearly supernatural, like regrowing a limb or a head, becoming young again, or living for five hundred years. The various supernatural powers seem to restrict themselves to performing the sort of miracles that happen anyway, even if they are quite rare.
There is another aspect to faith healing that needs mentioning. Healing is one of the major provinces of charlatans. When people are suffering, disabled or facing death, and nothing else works, when they have lost all hope, they will pay for it. They will be drawn to anyone who offers them any chance that they might be healed. I have heard people in such situations justify pursuing unscientific cures that in the end didn't work and just wasted a lot of money, by saying at the time, "What could it hurt?" In their desperate search for hope, the afflicted will fall back on the familiar phrase "Science doesn't know everything", because in failing to heal them, modern medicine has so clearly shown its limits. Of course, modern medicine doesn't know everything, but that doesn't have any relationship to whether some mystic, priest or shaman does.
People use the phrases modern medicine and science without much understanding of them, which can lead to paranoia and suspicion. It is true that a lot comes under these topics, from advanced genetics to complex modelling, to a lot of highly specialised and intricate fields of information. We shouldn't, however, forget the very simple basics of science and modern medicine, which people sometimes ignore in their wish to criticise. A lot of the time, what science claims to know is nothing more exotic than counting. In asking whether some intervention or cure works, whether natural or supernatural, we don't have to understand all of the mechanisms behind it, but simply how many people tried it and how many got better. If people understood some basics of how statistics work, it would help shield them from being misled by anecdotes, stories, and wishful thinking.
Everything happens for a reason
Coincidences are another place where the supernatural recedes when we apply a basic understanding of probabilities and statistics. I've heard people claim to see supernatural miracles in cases as humdrum as improbably running into someone they know. "How do you explain that?" they might ask, with very little wish to have it answered. It may seem like a one in a million chance to them, but these chances are actually happening all the time. With billions of people wandering the earth each day, bumping into each other, one in a million chances occur many, many times each day. Coincidences, and occasionally very great coincidences, are bound to happen; that's just mathematics.
There are also less obvious factors towards whether events happen in our lives, making them less improbable than they first may seem. Continuing with the example of randomly running into someone you know, there are many factors that make it statistically more likely to happen beyond pure chance. At the moment, many people in my social circles are visiting Japan; it seems to be the hot place at the moment. Japan is pleasant to visit for people I know, as it is not too far away on the globe, there are direct flights there from our local airport, it is a wealthy country like our own with similar standards of safety and services, while also being different enough to feel exotic. Most people I know have things in common that add to this: they have spare income, travel regularly, and are regularly exposed to Japanese food and culture. Once they get to Japan, my friends will probably stay in similar types of hotels, visit similar tourist spots, and so will repeatedly bump into other tourists. They are also more likely to engage with other tourists if they notice they are English-speaking, and possibly even notice a familiar accent. Given all of this, if I invited some friends over for dinner, and one of them realised that a stranger they had met in Japan was also sitting at the table, I'm sure everybody would think it was a very great coincidence. This is true, but the scale of that coincidence is dramatically lessened by many biasing factors, such as the ones I listed above. Many coincidences are like this; they seem less fantastical when we think about things that make them more likely to happen than pure chance. Of course, we have a tendency to exaggerate their unlikeliness, partly because it makes the coincidence a more dramatic and interesting story to tell.
Coincidences are bound to happen to us as a property of mathematics. The lottery is another example. The chances of any single person winning the lottery are very, very small, but with millions of tickets being sold in many lotteries, the chances that someone will win are very likely. Lotteries, after all, wouldn't get many customers if they made the odds of winning so small that they never gave out prizes. Many lottery winners thank God for their good fortune, but God isn't helping believers win lotteries at greater rates than non-believers. If praying to God or being religious helped change anything, why don't we see this reflected in the number of winners and losers? During natural disasters, people who pray are not spared from bad events any more than people who don't pray. A believer will always thank God for "miraculously" sparing their house, as though that is the only way such an event could possibly have happened, for example, dumb luck. In all natural disasters, there are stories of those miraculously spared. It is almost a media trope after earthquakes to publicise the person or animal who was trapped for the longest under the rubble and survived. It is always called a miracle when they come out of the rubble, and God is always invoked in such situations by believers, but amid the complexity of any wide-scale disaster, there are bound to be similar oddities and small chance events happening.
This tendency to imagine patterns in the chaos of life and ascribe our own reasons to them is partly responsible for what we call teleological thinking. This is our tendency to make up a story to explain things, to think things have a reason to them that we can understand. We can see this thinking in children, who, when asked why they think some rocks are pointy, will say that it is so that animals can scratch on them. Pointy rocks are, of course, a result of geological processes, and if they happen to be useful for scratching, that is just lucky for the animal with an itch. Teleological thinking is encouraged by children growing up in a human-manipulated environment, where many of the things they encounter every day were created by intelligence, and do have a reason and purpose behind them. Especially in larger, more consequential events that touch on our lives, we have a bias towards seeing some reason behind them, some intent and intelligence, rather than acknowledging the natural randomness of life. Believers combine this bias to see reason everywhere, with a bias towards seeing God as on their side. They will rarely blame God in the case where their home gets destroyed during a natural disaster, or curse God for allowing the disaster to happen in the first place. There is a general pattern of devout believers thanking the spirits for good fortune, but cursing luck or themselves when something bad happens. This says something about the role the supernatural plays in our minds, making us feel better about a chaotic, often unfair and incomprehensible world.
To imagine that a powerful, all-knowing force cares about us and is on our side is a comforting thing to convince ourselves of, even if subjecting it to the basic standards of evidence shows it is very unlikely to be true. It may be better to have an imaginary friend looking out for you than no one at all.
Finding the hidden
If there is a higher realm of existence or knowing, it has managed to hide itself from us incredibly well. So how can people who don't want to jettison their rational selves look for the supernatural? In going beyond faith, we cannot completely trust what others say or write, trust in ambiguous miracles, or even trust our own intuition. The most promising ways we can have any certainty that a supernatural element exists in life seem to be through deeper scientific knowledge and experimentation with our consciousness. We can only see as deeply into the universe as we are.
The scientific path would be to simply continue our ever-deepening probing into the workings of the universe. This assumes that as our understanding of reality gets deeper, we will eventually reach a level that starts to touch upon the supernatural. God and truth must be the same thing, after all, so the further we travel into the truths of our cosmos and our minds, the closer we should come to the supernatural. This may sound like something of a contradiction, but if the supernatural alters our physical world in any detectable way, as the vast majority of believers claim it does, then at some point we should be able to measure this. Many scientific resources have already been wasted on testing supernatural claims, we would not want to throw good money after bad here, but trust that the supernatural will be an emergent property of increased knowledge.
The other way has already been pursued by many, and that is for us to find ways to directly experience the supernatural. Our minds are biased, prone to hallucination, misunderstanding, distortion, and misinterpretation. In dreams and psychosis, we see phenomena of the mind that seem incredibly real but are just projections from ourselves. Still, if we want to look somewhere, then the unfamiliar edges of our consciousness seems like a likely area to mine for greater awareness. The supernatural clearly isn't viewable through our standard level of awareness, otherwise people would not need faith to believe it. Thus, pursuing experiments with our consciousness that some schools of thought do through meditation, ecstatic experience, psychedelics, and so on, seems to be a reasonable path to take towards direct experience. We need fewer religious leaders who claim to have been given special knowledge and more mentors who concentrate on giving us direct access to that knowledge for ourselves. We return to the problem always evident in religion of this opening us up to manipulation by those seeking power here. Charlatans, in many fields well beyond religion, have always pretended to have the secret path to something that other people desperately seek. They draw people into a web of control, always promising that if they believe even harder, the next secret level beyond where a person is will start really changing everything for them. If someone has experienced a higher level of being, they should be able to give clear, direct steps for others to take to experience that same level of being. If this path is just "believe harder", then you have departed from the rational into faith.
We also need a test that people really are revealing supernatural truths to us. Many people claim to have access to a deeper level of knowing and consciousness, but why are they unable to add anything unworldly to our culture? The spirits have never revealed secrets such as how to cure common diseases, get clean free energy, or even how to fund their religions without bleeding their followers. Why isn't the list of the great inventions of humanity full of gurus, saints, psychics, and mystics? Why didn't Jesus mention penicillin, Mohammed tell us about vaccines, or the Buddha explain the germ theory of disease? Instead, everything in their holy books was something known to the culture at the time they were written, and they contain mistakes, almost as if they were just written by regular people. Nothing people claiming to have access to the supernatural has ever shown an unmistakable supernatural fingerprint. Religion is a work of human hands. This should be obvious to anyone who approaches faith from a rational viewpoint, rather than coming at it with the desire to confirm what they already suspect.
A sincere search for truth should embrace science and contrary evidence. Modern science is vast, millions and millions of people from all cultures, walks of life, and ideologies have contributed to it over hundreds of years. Anyone who generalises about all of "Science" as always good or bad, is a fool and/or trying to sell you something. Science is a process, it does not hold opinions, but is a set of evolving tools designed to help fallible humans in our search for knowledge. There should be no contradiction between the deepest truths of science, and in the unlikely case it exists, the supernatural. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, if offered a choice between God and truth, we should take truth, and trust where it will lead.
Against intelligence
Bertrand Russell said he could not find a word in praise of intelligence in the Bible. It is worse than this. In the New Testament, it says, "If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become 'fools' so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight…the thoughts of the wise are futile." In the Old Testament, God says, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts". It is not just the Judeo-Christian faith. The Tao Te Ching says that "When the people are unhappy, it is because they are too wise". In the Quran, it says, "Allah knows, but you know not". In the Bhagavad Gita, Krsna says, "Abandon all varieties of dharma and just surrender unto Me".
This all makes sense if we accept the religious worldview, and then work backwards. If we start with the assumption that there are supernatural powers infinitely superior to us, then what is the point of thinking for ourselves? How can anything about a temporary, flawed and limited human, even begin to approach the magnificence, perfection and cosmic importance of a god? Religions are right to tell people not to lean on their own understanding, for what is human reason compared to the infallible divine doctrines? Complete intellectual submission is clearly the way to achieve the highest state of human existence. Our lives have no greater meaning or potential higher than serving the commands of the Gods, or at least those who claim to speak for them.
Independent thought has always been a threat to elite control. Religious hierarchies reward adherence to themselves, with little care for the consequences irrationality can have. As Voltaire is reputed to have said, irrationality is inherently dangerous because: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities". Once one has taken in a belief as ridiculous as most supernatural beliefs, what other ridiculous beliefs might they be susceptible to follow? If the religious person can be convinced that the gods desire some action to be performed, it is not their job to think for themselves and question the gods, but rather to submit to the divine dictates. People with a patchy grasp of history often ask, "What harm does it do for people to believe in religion or the supernatural?" The belief itself is usually not the problem, but the irrationality, cultural conformity, and the lack of critical thinking skills the belief required in the first place. The problem with the supernatural being used as the foundation for morality is that it doesn't exist. Anyone unscrupulous or unhinged enough to claim to speak for those beings is all too likely to abuse such potent power over others.
People claim that religion, and always their particular religion, is the only secure basis for morality. Ignoring the fact that religions are made up, they say something like "You can just make up any morality you like". To quote Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, "Without god, everything is permissible". Let us just quietly gloss over the legion crimes of the religious authorities and hierarchies over history here, and look at how secure a basis religion is for morality.
Even within any given religion, there is no consistent doctrine or set of rules. Religions are based on books and stories, and these are open to selectivity, interpretation and miscommunication, wilful or otherwise. If one chooses, for example, one of the two largest faiths in the world, Christianity or Islam, you don't automatically have a shining path to what is true or right. You must still generally pick and choose what interpretation to believe from their holy books. All you have to go on in choosing the right set of religious doctrines and interpretations is your own understanding of what is right and wrong. So people in the end, create a version of god they would like to believe in. Angry people choose the angry parts of a religion, hateful people choose the hateful parts, and peaceful people cling to the peaceful parts. They will all claim the other adherents have it wrong, even though they all quote the same books to support themselves. As Shakespeare wrote centuries ago, the devil himself can quote the bible to his own ends.
Religions claim to offer a consistent and simple morality for people to follow, but this clearly isn't the case. Ultimately, believers are in the same position as atheists, of having to use their own judgment about what is right or wrong. Atheists are freer, however, to pursue wisdom wherever they find it, whether in a religious text, a philosophical text, a novel, a comic strip, or anywhere else. Atheists aren't shackled to a raft of ancient beliefs and actions we find odious or repellent. When religious people pick and choose from their books, what they are really doing is picking and choosing their preferred version of the gods. We have always created the Gods in our own image.
It is a strange fact that a lot of religious believers haven't even read the books at the centre of their faiths. I have met Christians who claim to be devout believers but have never read the Bible, a book they think has been written under divine inspiration. I remember hearing a comedian talk about this, saying something like "If you think God wrote a book, is it weird that you wouldn't find time to read it?" Maybe catching up on your reality television or sports team is more important. It says much about the conformity and social structure at the basis of faith that people believe there is a divinely authored book, but are happy to trust some earthly hierarchy to give them the general gist.
Something?
People don't have particularly good reasons for their religious beliefs. When asked, many people will say they "believe in something greater than us". This is suspiciously vague. We should wonder how many heretics have been burned or buried alive by people whose religion was ultimately based on such a vague feeling. From this vague statement, people make a gigantic leap of logic to thinking that gives them some insight into the construction of our universe, that it proves some specific set of religious doctrines. People will promote concepts like karma, the power of prayer, or everything happening for a reason, which sound very specific, but if you try to pin them down on how these things fundamentally work or whether they can prove them to you, it is all based on vagueness. It is a simple logical error that the belief that maybe something exists, by however many people, is in any way evidence that they do exist. As Gandhi said, a statement does not become true by repetition, though he may have agreed with little else that I am saying here.
The main reason for the prevalence of religion in our world is the inability to tell the difference between one's beliefs and one's knowledge. No one knows for sure if their gods exist or not. Not the popes, patriarchs, grand muftis, gurus, caliphs, dalai lamas, or ayatollahs. As the word faith implies, they only have a belief that they do, a belief they take seriously out of all proportion to the evidence for it. So much of human history has been defined by this simple logical error.
Conclusion
Whether one likes a specific religion or supernatural belief, agrees with it, thinks it would create a better world, etc, is irrelevant. One cannot simply choose a truth, because one cannot choose the composition of the universe we exist within. Truth is discovered by rational inquiry, not bought into being by the superstitions or whims of humanity.
A higher power either exists or it doesn't; unlike in the children's stories, belief in a fairy, one way or the other, by however many people, will not make it true. Truth/God must be revealed and understood through experience, rather than chosen through faith. To ignore or censor knowledge that challenges religion, to reject advances in our scientific understanding, surely this is to limit our understanding of our universe, of allowing us to know the mind of God through their imprint upon creation. If I believed in God, I would see anti-science as a form of blasphemy, and limiting our search for truth as anti-humanity.
We clearly live in an amoral universe. The brutality displayed by people claiming to follow one religion or another is not unique to them, it reflects the potential for brutality within existence generally. For a person to convince me to follow a god, they would not only have to prove the unlikely fact of that god's existence, but explain why, in a world with so much injustice and suffering, the god's mere existence makes them worthy to fashion my entire life around. Looking at much of the world, if it is of the gods making, then it is not at all obvious that they have a morality we should follow. Perhaps the opposite is true; if we want a more compassionate world, we might have to set ourselves against the gods, for the happiness of sentient beings seems of little concern to them. If god created the viruses that afflict sentient beings, the parasites that cause so much suffering, the ability of the strong to oppress the weak, perhaps with our science, our morality and our philosophy, we do have to actively resist many of the creations and wishes of the gods. Luckily, there is no evidence for the gods, so our opposition in changing the world is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It lies within our collective hands to create the world we would wish to have.
Studies have shown some psychological benefits from holding a belief in one religion or another. However, this is more pronounced when religious people engage in a religious community, showing that it is potentially a social phenomenon. Religious answers, however, can provide solace for many of the difficult questions of our lives. They tell us death is not real, injustice will always be punished, and offer us a better world in some imagined future of this world or the next. There is a commonality to the promises of religions, and this is no coincidence. The context of our existence in an evolutionary system, with a human mind and body, with the same pains and worries, is shared by all cultures. If we start from an evolutionary lens, we can find the shared reality hidden amidst the magic and story telling of religions, it is here that the basis for a moral code exists. A moral code not managed by a hierarchy, controlled by a clique, but one grounded on the evolutionary experience, the senses and emotions, that we all share. As Karl Marx said, we must throw off the chain of religion and pluck the living flower.
Whilst religion may be a placebo for the difficulties of higher consciousness, it bodes ill for the intellectual progression of our culture for us to continue to seek refuge in delusions. A truth based on our shared experience of reality, harnessing the best of our philosophy and science as it pushes forward, is the only real shared grounding of understanding that has a hope of uniting, rather than dividing, our increasingly complex and globalised world.
The case that religion is false is clear enough, but that does not mean it is easy to convince people of it. They cling to it with all their being. Atheists need to play a part in not just showing that supernatural belief is false, but also in propagating alternative solutions to live better lives. Often, for those who would change the irrational religious beliefs of mankind, the proposition that religion is a delusion is not expected to be replaced by anything. To take an entire belief system away from people is to leave them intellectually undefended against an incomprehensible existence. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions". That oppression and heartlessness of our world is real, even if the solutions people have turned to seeking healing are not. We need a more comprehensive answer to religion than nihilism. People need to have a comprehensive belief system, to feel they belong in a world and communities that they understand, and to know that their individual lives are part of a greater, more transcendent scheme.
Consumerism seems to increasingly overlap with the psychological role of the supernatural. We see this most clearly when the two are merged in "prosperity" and "manifesting" belief systems. We need a basic level of consumption to live, but consumerism is something beyond this, becoming for many their basis for status and reward. Acquiring things we desire has obvious benefits; we only need to look at the oldest form of consumption, eating, for the evolutionary roots of this. Sating our hunger, though, does not cure it, instead we find ourselves on a hedonistic treadmill. Consumerism seems to tap into the same evolutionary mechanisms, and like hunger we can distract ourselves momentarily from negative feelings with it. The economic activity of modern societies seems to be increasingly directed at distraction from ourselves, though in some ways increasing things like isolation, status anxiety and meaninglessness. As rates of mental health issues in the wealthiest societies show, consumerism seems to cause as many problems as it cures. The fleeting nature of the positive emotions we get from consuming ends up reinforcing consumerism. The most profitable drug that one can sell is not the one that permanently cures a disease, but one that offers temporary relief while the disease festers. People obsessively return to consumerism for its elusive promise of healing and contentment, but over the long term find it does little to solve underlying issues. Above what is necessary for a comfortable, secure existence, consumerism is an empty promise. We have built our societies around this promise, but quickly reached the limits of its ability to make us happier.
Similarly with nationalism and other "isms" that people try to sell as a meaning for our lives, they are mechanisms of control, just as religion is. Nationalism, like racism, tries to tell us we are set apart from others just because of the random chance of our birth. They offer us happiness by grounding our self-esteem in our innate superiority over others, one we have to do nothing to earn other than by our identity. Nationalism is a more modern version of religion and uses many of the same terms to manipulate us, like fatherland and mother country, brothers and sisters. They reach into our evolutionary sociality and misuse it for control, to define them and us, to goad people into selfishness, competition and even war. Like consumerism it offers the intoxication of short-term, mindless emotion, but their negative psychological foundations foster a hatred and anger that destroys us from within.
A new path
So what can solve our existential problem? What offers us the happiness that we seek, that has a firm foundation in the reality of our lives? The search for this should be at the core of how we structure our society.
Short-term happiness should be used for our flourishing rather than distracting and manipulating us. We should be embracing healthy lifestyles, positive thinking, nourishing, enjoyable food, dependable, close relationships, caring, positive sexuality, a compassionate society, humour, the appreciation of beauty, exercise, etc. Our society should be based on increasing the number of healthy, beautiful experiences in our lives, understanding that our happiness is best and perhaps only assured as a byproduct of a caring society. We should look less at how to make ourselves momentarily happy, towards how we make a foundation for a good life.
Longer term, lasting happiness should be based on a positive, healthy lifestyle above, but we need more than this. We need a comprehensible narrative of our place in time and the cosmos in order for our lives to have meaning. For this understanding, in many ways we need to follow what we seek to replace, religion. The questions it asked were important, even if their answers were largely false. We should replace ancient imagined delusions with a modern evolving understanding that can make a positive difference in the way we treat the world and each other.
If there is no higher consciousness to tell us what meaning is, then why should it follow that reality is a meaningless void? If there are no gods, if in their place we are the highest consciousness in the universe, then we should define our own meaning. If we seek to live in a more just, humane world, as the highest creative power in the universe, we should take on this responsibility. Some would say this makes meaning an opinion, but the basis on which we should construct our ideas, such as meaning, pain, pleasure, freedom, beauty, ugliness, happiness, are evolutionary shared realities which transcend the potentially arbitrary and selfish nature of opinion. There is a depth to the statement of Keats, which we are yet to fully explore "Truth is beauty, beauty is truth".
There may be no inherent morality in the laws of physics, but morality came into being within ourselves. We are powerful, we have the ability to make individual choices, and we can use those choices to create a better universe, with more moments in time and space that are compassionate and just. Each moment of sentient experiences has many possibilities, good and bad. We can use our intelligence to intercede and give those moments the highest chance of being beautiful and kind for the being that is experiencing them. All is not within our control; we cannot change the laws of the universe, we can not control everything that happens, but we have some power to change the corner of existence which our own actions touch.
There are no gods or spirits, only us. Our universe is not a moral void because we are not. There is both great freedom and responsibility in this. An ethical life requires much more from us than intellectual submission to any beings or books. The evidence for the rightness of our individual and collective beliefs will lie beyond us, in the physical, sensual, emotional and intellectual landscapes of our world. We are called to our highest flourishing, as both a moral and personal imperative. We must imagine and become the higher powers we have always wished that we had.