Category: Ideas

While working on my Go-Rilla VS. Elk Diablo comic I was catching up on old podcasts in my iTunes. Specifically I was listening to an episode of Science Friday titled “Balancing Science and Religion” in which Ira Flatow interviewed two scientists who were also religious. It was a really interesting listen but there was one quote at the end that was like a slap in the face to me and I would think to any atheist.

As I look about in the culture and world we live in, a world without the kind of noble intentions that arise many times out of people’s hearts in the consequence of their faith – a world that misses out on a Mother Theresa or an Oscar Schindler – a world where science has to go on in a completely materialist way – does not sound like the kind of world of wonderful humanity and nobility of humankind that I hope will be evolving over the many decades to come.

As if altruism and humanitarianism and “nobility” cannot exist in people who don’t believe in a higher power. Ridiculous, I say!

That made me wonder what famous humanitarians and generally celebrated people in history and modern times were/are also atheists. I googled “humitarian atheists” and before I found what I was actually looking for I found this:

Letter: Atheist actions can be selfless
by Letter to the editor
Thursday, March 27, 2008; 12:00 AM
I’m writing in response to the column, “Defending morality in an atheist’s culture is challenging” (CT, March 25). The author implies that a lack of faith in God translates to apathy toward others’ well being.

The author fails to understand the influence of society and evolution on altruism. It’s obvious that cooperation is the best method for progress — selfishness only works to a certain degree before everyone becomes selfish, benefiting nobody. Scenario-simulations show that cooperation always leads to the most success for groups. Just ask vampire bats, which actually regurgitate blood they’ve foraged during the night for a friend whose hunting was less fruitful. Next time, if the first bat gets no food, his friend can return the favor.

Giving up one’s seat and making sacrifices for another are explained through societal norms and evolutionary mechanisms. Society expects us to act a certain way, so it becomes ingrained into our minds to let an old lady have our seat. We make sacrifices for our kin because evolution wants our genes to flourish. If I die so that my two brothers survive, then there will be two sets of my genes, rather than just the one. My potential sacrifice for friends who are unrelated to me can be explained by my evolutionary triggers backfiring, which would encourage me to save everyone.

As for losing rights to atheist majorities, Norway was rated the most peaceful country in the world (the U.S. was 96th), as well as the least religious in Western Europe. In contrast, Hitler was Catholic, and Stalin Eastern Orthodox.

Finally, I argue that atheists possess stronger morality than theists. With no fear of God, our sacrifices are more selfless. Few of us believe in an afterlife, so we cherish the only life we get more. We put greater value on human life because, in general, we don’t think that any “soul” floats off someplace.

Andrew Shutterly
sophomore, psychology and Spanish

I don’t actually agree that “potential sacrifice for friends unrelated to me can be explained by evolutionary triggers backfiring” – I would expect that it has to do with the evolution of protecting your tribe and is completely natural (in the same way that the evolution of propensity towards religion was helpful for strengthening social bonds) but I agree with pretty much everything else that Andrew says.

The next time your aunt tells you that she doesn’t know the scientific explanation of why her (traditional Chinese medicine/reflexology/crystal therapy/”alternative medicine”) works, it “just does,” you can tell her exactly why – because of the placebo effect. So as long as she knows that she can get the same effect from a sugar pill, she can stop funding her quack healer’s SUV gas bill, and curb the market that preys on endangered species like moon bears, sharks and seahorses.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of giving out sugar pills. The placebo effect can be very powerful, because it’s not just about the pill, it’s about the cultural meaning of the treatment: so we know from research that four placebo sugar pills a day are more effective than two for eradicating gastric ulcers (and that’s not subjective, you measure ulcers by putting a camera into your stomach); we know that salt water injections are a more effective treatment for pain than sugar pills, not because salt water injections are medically active, but because injections are a more dramatic intervention; we know that green sugar pills are a more effective anxiety treatment than red ones, not because of any biomechanical effect of the dyes, but because of the cultural meanings of the colours green and red. We even know that packaging can be beneficial.

From Dr Ben Goldacre (he writes a weekly column, Bad Science, in the Saturday edition of The Guardian newspaper’s daily science page, with expanded versions of the columns with reader comments on his website badscience.net. Devoted to satirical criticism of scientific inaccuracy, health scares, pseudoscience and quackery, it focuses especially on examples from the mass media, consumer product marketing and complementary and alternative medicine in Britain.)