The Case for Non-Religiosity

Here is a short steelman case for Non-Religiosity.

(Disclaimer, I personally neither agree nor disagree with the following.)

As our ancestors learned to navigate, survive, and ultimately thrive in a prescientific, highly incomprehensible and eerily mysterious world, several aspects of religion, manifested in all its varying forms, no doubt served humanity and was pivotal, among MANY other factors, in our gradual transition from an unsophisticated, and pre-scientific way of being towards a more sophisticated, post-enlightenment and more rational way of being. Certain aspects of religion served our ancestors in that they ‘likely’ (not definitively or universally) instilled ‘most’ our ancestors with an incomplete yet emerging sense of morality and ethics along with purpose, structure, and comfort as we stood perpetually bare and intolerably exposed to the incredibly difficult hardships and torturously unanswerable questions that were inescapably present in the lives of humans before the advent of modern science. That being said, we do have to recognize and be keenly perceptive as to when any given tool, system, mechanism, process, habit, mode of being, belief structure, etc. is no longer serving its intended purpose, but which instead has withered into an obsolete, and increasingly unjustifiable burden that is hinders growth and development with a thick layer of contradictions and extravagantly blatant fallacies, and to thus ensure that we move on and dispense with that which is unnecessary much in the same way that we dispensed with our body hair and sacrificed brawns for brain. Furthermore, it is through the exploration, mapping and harnessing of the world around us, along with our rapid advancements and ever-increasing dexterity with every field of science, which has vastly improved our standard of living, that one can start to feel comfortable peeling away and dispensing with the buried and superseded layers of religion that currently possesses and doesn’t positively support most of culture and humanity.

Before delving into how science has expunged the need for religion, let’s point out the fallacies inherent and implicit in being religious/adopting a set of religious beliefs and why abandoning religious values will ‘most likely?’ NOT lead to negative societal and cultural consequences:

Religion typically invokes ‘faith’ (blind) and more often than not, requires one to dispense with and ignore evidence, facts and glaring contradictions while adhering to said religion/belief; a belief which is ultimately incredibly influential and hugely consequential (varying from religion to religion) in determining how one orients themselves in the world, socially, morally, and psychologically/emotionally. This results in said belief structures being settled deeply and almost irreversibly into an adherent’s mode of operating and thinking. In addition, when you account for the presence of manifold religions with their endless sects, branches, and denominations, each with either slightly or vastly opposing doctrines but each having their equally intensely held dogmatic belief systems, it is easy to see why declaring a belief in any religion or god can be perilous and, as documented throughout history, violent, oppressive and deadly when two opposing belief systems come face to face. Contemporaneously, one only need to take a brief look at the violence that takes place in Jerusalem, between the Muslims and Jews, and the violence that takes place within varying sects of Islam (Sunni vs Shia) to see how violence is manifested directly because of differing dogmatic, religious belief.

Furthermore, there is a misunderstanding that abandoning religion will lead to mass chaos, destruction, murder, nihilism etc., which is not the case. As a collective human global enterprise, we have progressed and distanced ourselves dramatically from our superstitious and irrational past, and our endless and rapid innovation on all scientific, philosophical, and technological fronts has set in motion an irreversible and unbreakable chain of exponentially positive circumstances that allow us to rely on science and technology, rather than an adherence to religion and a blind belief in god, for our continued survival, prosperity and successful evasion of meaninglessness and misguided ethics. This progression is most evidenced in our extraordinarily well established and refined set of laws and social mores which underlie and yet also predominate most societies; these codes and mores ARE and WILL be the default irrespective of the status of religion in said country/society as evidence by China (90%), Sweden (73%), Australia (63%), the United Kingdom (69%), and many others, whose population identify mostly as irreligious; And there no evidence to suggest a disintegration of society or a wave of meaningless in any of these cultures/countries.

Now, to expound upon the idea that science has completely expunged the need for religion:

Advancements in science, medicine and the development and growth of economic systems are singlehandedly responsible for eradicating the inexorable problems that humans were brutally struggling with for epochs such as the immeasurable number of deaths and unlimited suffering at the hands of disease, unsafe sanitary conditions, poverty, starvation, and inequality. Religion had and has no answer to these problems (with exceptions such as charity) and it can even be posited, no, ‘proved’ that fundamental aspects (or, certain aspects, or all aspects) of religion nurtured and perpetuated many of the pernicious and grotesque ways that past societies operated under throughout history, such as the adoption of sexism, homophobia, slavery/racism; sexism of which still plays a central role in Islam and of which still subtly permeates most parts of the world.

To further develop the idea that religion stands at odds with the modern world, I’ll state a few useful, yet blatant contradictions that arise when analyzing scientific discoveries and placing and examining implicit religious ideology and dogma alongside these discoveries; this will place religion and science at logical odds and show how that religion and science can no longer coexist without major problems; conversely, what’s implicit in adhering to dogmatic belief systems can be conceptualized through a spectrum which has fundamentalists inhabiting one end and your casual, non-practicing believer inhabiting the other.

Here I describe some of science’s most devasting and staggeringly brutal discoveries that negatively implicated religion and religious dogma.

Cont. In short, it’s widely accepted that the explanation for the existence of all organisms and how/why they are the way that they are, can be traced back to and explained entirely through the lens of evolutionary theory, which has been repeatedly corroborated with discoveries in biology, genetics, DNA, DNA sequencing, genomics, behavioral biology, more computing power, a more polished study of the fossil record etc. A theory regarding evolution that pierces religion with a swift, efficient dagger is the explanation for the origins of life. There are many theories for the origins of life which are birthed from logical conclusion from our modern understanding of science and evolutionary theory: A theory of which most notably includes in its theory a large portion of modern science such as math, statistics, biology, and physics. At any rate, it matters not which origins theory you most align with, since these theories are logically consistent with what we know and they are all equally effective at refuting the legitimacy of religion.

• Richard Dawkins, in his book the ‘Selfish Gene’ chooses to elaborate on the theory of the self-replicating molecule which goes as such: Everything in the universe obeys and adheres to the laws of physics; this much is undebatable. Thus everything that is, ‘falls’ into place in accordance with these laws and “the things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation — rocks, galaxies, ocean waves — are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.…If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition…At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator…it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.” This occurrence, which is highly improbable, “only had to happen once.” You can then imagine this replicator as a template for future formations. Furthermore, once a self-replicating process is set in motion, over time, you’ll have more of these self-replicating molecules being formed while, by definition, maintaining stability as it continues making copies of itself. (Left quite a bit out after this point, but for brevity’s sake)…We can then jump to the fact that the modern equivalent of the first replicator is the DNA molecule!!! Once we have accepted that this may very well be a legitimate explanation for the origins of life given the framework which underlies our current understanding of biology, physics, math evolution, DNA, etc. it is easy to eliminate any religious attempt at an explanation for the origins of life and unquestionably eliminates the need for a first principal mover (God) to be responsible for the creation of life.

To illustrate another series of colossally damaging discoveries for religion, I would now like to borrow purely from the field of physics and astronomy. Back when it was a given that the earth was the center of the universe it was immensely easy to marry science and religion. After discovering that the earth was indeed not the center of the ‘heavens’, which was received poorly by many (cough the catholic church) and for a long time, Newton, along with many other physicists helped in establishing the laws of physics, and at this point (1600’s) we now had a much more mathematically sophisticated conceptualization of how the universe worked. But this still wasn’t enough to show that religion and science are maximally contradictory to each other. Subsequently and inevitably came the discovery that the universe was MUCH bigger than the sun and the space which our neighbor planets held; it was now understood (1900’s) that we were a mere spec of dust in an overwhelming sea of stars and pure nothingness…then came (post 1920’s) the discovery that there were not just m(b)illions of stars, but that some of the many ‘stars’ we were looking at, were actually galaxies; and that’s when pandora’s box was opened. Now we knew that there were not only billions of stars in relatively speaking, ‘close’ proximity to us, but that we inhabited ‘a’ galaxy among billions of other galaxies, each hosting billions of stars and (as time passed, the proof) that these stars were home to planets. As you tie this in with later and concurrent discoveries regarding atoms and their constituents, waves, particles, and the relationship between all three, along with the discovery of all of the 20th centuries greatest physicists, which lead to refinement in the mathematical equations of the laws of physics, it became evident that god and religion was by definition and logic, loosing its relevance in the world of mankind.

To wrap up the idea that science and its discoveries marked religion with an unrecoverable and interminably bleeding scar, it is important to note that breakthroughs in almost any field of science has and can lead to the exact same blows which evolution and physics has handedly dealt to any chance of credibility and utility being ascribed to an idea of a belief in god and/or a belief in a set of religious doctrines.