The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [102]
Religious faith and belief in God have equally adaptive evolutionary explanations. Religion is a social institution that evolved to reinforce group cohesion and moral behavior. It is an integral mechanism of human culture to encourage altruism, reciprocal altruism, and indirect altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a social community. Believing in God provides an explanation for our universe, our world, and ourselves; it explains where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. God is also the ultimate enforcer of the rules, the final arbiter of moral dilemmas, and the pinnacle object of commitment.
It is time to step out of our evolutionary heritage and our historical traditions and embrace science as the best tool ever devised for explaining how the world works. It is time to work together to create a social and political world that embraces moral principles and yet allows for natural human diversity to flourish. Religion cannot get us there because it has no systematic methods of explanation of the natural world, and no means of conflict resolution on moral issues when members of competing sects hold absolute beliefs that are mutually exclusive. Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
9
Belief in Aliens
In the spring of 1999, I appeared on the Southern California NPR affiliate radio station KPCC with Joe Firmage, author of the immodestly titled book The Truth. Firmage is a young man best known as the founder and original CEO of the Internet giant USWeb, a company then valued at around $3 billion. Unlike most CEO authors, however, Firmage was not on a book tour to tout his pearls of wisdom for constructing a Silicon Valley powerhouse; rather, Firmage wanted to talk about building a powerhouse of a different sort, one that can carry humans to the stars … and beyond.1
Where does a Silicon Valley Internet phenom get inspiration for such an undertaking? It began in the early morning hours of a fall day in 1997, when Firmage was awakened to see, in his words, “a remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light hovering over my bed.” This alien being spoke to Firmage, asking him “Why have you called me here?” Firmage replied, “I want to travel in space.” The alien wondered why such a wish should be granted. “Because I’m willing to die for it,” Firmage explained. Now that’s a commitment any form of intelligence could understand. At this point, Firmage says, out of the alien being “emerged an electric blue sphere, just smaller than a basketball.… It left his body, floated down and entered me. Instantly I was overcome by the most unimaginable ecstasy I have ever experienced, a pleasure vastly beyond orgasm.… Something had been given to me.”2
How powerful is such an experience to change the course of a person’s life? Firmage promptly announced his resignation from his billion-dollar company and went out and founded the International Space Sciences Organization, which according to its Web page seeks “to advance human understanding of the fundamental nature and functions of matter and energy, yielding breakthroughs