The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [29]
On the matter of the God question, either God exists or he does not, regardless what I think on the matter, so I’m not particularly worried about it, even if the afterlife turns out to be what Christians think it is with a heaven and a hell, and with belief in God and his Son as the requisite criteria for entry. Why?
First of all, why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God care whether I believed in him? Shouldn’t he know this ahead of time in any case? Even assuming that he has granted me free will, since God is said to be omniscient and outside of time and space, shouldn’t he know everything that happens? In either case, why would “belief” matter at all, unless God were more like the Greek and Roman gods who competed with one another for human affections and worship and were filled with such human emotions as jealousy. The Old Testament God Yahweh certainly sounds like this type of deity in the first three of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17, King James Version): “I am the LORD thy God.… Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
Yikes! The sins of the fathers are to be borne by their children’s children’s children? What sort of justice is that? What kind of God is this? This just sounds so … well … ungodly to my ears. Most people have learned to get over jealousy, and I’ve even managed to keep it in check much of the time myself, and I’m no god, that’s for sure.15 Wouldn’t an omniscient, omnipotent, omniphilic deity be more concerned with how I comported myself in this world, rather than obsessing over whether I believe in him and/or his Son in hopes of getting to the right place in the other world? I would think so. Behavioral comportment dines at the high table of morality and ethics; jealousy feasts on the empty calories of baser human emotions.
In any case, if there is an afterlife and a God who resides over it, I intend to make my case along these lines:
Lord, I did the best I could with the tools you granted me. You gave me a brain to think skeptically and I used it accordingly. You gave me the capacity to reason and I applied it to all claims, including that of your existence. You gave me a moral sense and I felt the pangs of guilt and the joys of pride for the bad and good things I chose to do. I tried to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, and although I fell far short of this ideal far too many times, I tried to apply your foundational principle whenever I could. Whatever the nature of your immortal and infinite spiritual essence actually is, as a mortal finite corporeal being I cannot possibly fathom it despite my best efforts, and so do with me what you will.
PART II
THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
—RICHARD FEYNMAN,
SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN, 1974
4
Patternicity
Imagine that you are a hominid walking along the savanna of an African valley three million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? Your answer could mean life or death.
If you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made