1. Man created God in his own image.
Summary:
Modern religions evolved culturally & their influences can be traced back in time, with doctrines changing as cultures did. This indicates that mankind created gods, rather than the other way around.
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature–to say nothing of killing and dying for them–would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p24
“The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature–to say nothing of killing and dying for them–would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p24
2. Argument from Incompatibility
Argument from Religious Diversity
Argument from Multiple Theisms
Argument from Religious Diversity
Argument from Multiple Theisms
Summary:
Most people believe in the explanations their culture gives them. This implies that gods were created by societies. If there is only one God with specific attributes, then why are there so many contradictory beliefs about God?
Robert Ingersoll, American lawyer & orator, 1833-1899
“The average man adopts the religion of his country, or, rather, the religion of his country adopts him. He is dominated by the egotism of race, the arrogance of nation, and the prejudice called patriotism. He does not reason–he feels. He does not investigate–he believes. To him the religions of other nations are absurd and infamous, and their gods monsters of ignorance and cruelty. In every country this average man is taught, first, that there is a supreme being; second, that he has made known his will; third, that he will reward the true believer; fourth, that he will punish the unbeliever, the scoffer, and the blasphemer; fifth, that certain ceremonies are pleasing to this god; sixth, that he has established a church; and seventh, that priests are his representatives on earth. And the average man has no difficulty in determining that the God of his nation is the true God; that the will of this true God is contained in the sacred scriptures of his nation; that he is one of the true believers, and that the people of other nations–that is, believing other religions–are scoffers; that the only true church is the one to which he belongs; and that the priests of his country are the only ones who have had or ever will have the slightest influence with this true God. All these absurdities to the average man self self-evident propositions; and so he holds all other creeds in scorn, and congratulates himself that he is a favorite of the one true God.
“If the average Christian had been born in Turkey, he would have been a Mohammedan; and if the average Mohammedan had been born in New England and educated at Andover, he would have regarded the damnation of the heathen as the ’tidings of great joy.’”
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p10-11)
“The average man believes implicitly in the religion of his country, because he knows nothing of any other and has no desire to know. It fits him because he has been deformed to fit it, and he regards this fact of fit as an evidence of its inspired truth.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p12)
“The average man adopts the religion of his country, or, rather, the religion of his country adopts him. He is dominated by the egotism of race, the arrogance of nation, and the prejudice called patriotism. He does not reason–he feels. He does not investigate–he believes. To him the religions of other nations are absurd and infamous, and their gods monsters of ignorance and cruelty. In every country this average man is taught, first, that there is a supreme being; second, that he has made known his will; third, that he will reward the true believer; fourth, that he will punish the unbeliever, the scoffer, and the blasphemer; fifth, that certain ceremonies are pleasing to this god; sixth, that he has established a church; and seventh, that priests are his representatives on earth. And the average man has no difficulty in determining that the God of his nation is the true God; that the will of this true God is contained in the sacred scriptures of his nation; that he is one of the true believers, and that the people of other nations–that is, believing other religions–are scoffers; that the only true church is the one to which he belongs; and that the priests of his country are the only ones who have had or ever will have the slightest influence with this true God. All these absurdities to the average man self self-evident propositions; and so he holds all other creeds in scorn, and congratulates himself that he is a favorite of the one true God.
“If the average Christian had been born in Turkey, he would have been a Mohammedan; and if the average Mohammedan had been born in New England and educated at Andover, he would have regarded the damnation of the heathen as the ’tidings of great joy.’”
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p10-11)
“The average man believes implicitly in the religion of his country, because he knows nothing of any other and has no desire to know. It fits him because he has been deformed to fit it, and he regards this fact of fit as an evidence of its inspired truth.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p12)
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist, & revolutionary, 1737-1809
“It has been by rejecting the evidence that the world or works of God in the creation afford to our senses, and the action of our reason upon that evidence, that so many wild and whimsical systems of faith and of religion have been fabricated and set up.
“There may be many systems of religion that, so far from being morally bad, are in many respects morally good; but there can be but ONE that is true; and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things consistent with the ever-existing word of God that we behold in His works. But such is the strange construction of the Christian system of faith that every evidence the heavens afford to man either directly contradicts it or renders is absurd.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 p91
“It has been by rejecting the evidence that the world or works of God in the creation afford to our senses, and the action of our reason upon that evidence, that so many wild and whimsical systems of faith and of religion have been fabricated and set up.
“There may be many systems of religion that, so far from being morally bad, are in many respects morally good; but there can be but ONE that is true; and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things consistent with the ever-existing word of God that we behold in His works. But such is the strange construction of the Christian system of faith that every evidence the heavens afford to man either directly contradicts it or renders is absurd.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 p91
Antony Garrard Newton Flew, British philosopher, 1923-2010
“Religious experiences are enormously varied, ostensibly authenticating innumerable beliefs many of which are in contradiction with one another... The varieties of religious experiences include, not only those which their subjects are inclined to interpret as versions of the Blessed Virgin or senses of the guiding presence of Jesus Christ, but also others more outlandish presenting themselves as manifestations of Quetzalcoatl or Osiris, of Dionysus or Shiva.”
— Antony Flew, God and Philosophy, Hutchinson, 1966 p126 (quoted by Jerome I. Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief, Cornell University Press, 1997 p90)
“Religious experiences are enormously varied, ostensibly authenticating innumerable beliefs many of which are in contradiction with one another... The varieties of religious experiences include, not only those which their subjects are inclined to interpret as versions of the Blessed Virgin or senses of the guiding presence of Jesus Christ, but also others more outlandish presenting themselves as manifestations of Quetzalcoatl or Osiris, of Dionysus or Shiva.”
— Antony Flew, God and Philosophy, Hutchinson, 1966 p126 (quoted by Jerome I. Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief, Cornell University Press, 1997 p90)
John Hick, English theologian & philosopher of religion, 1922-2012
“I have argued that it is rational on the part of those who experience religiously to believe and to live on this basis. And I have further argued that, in so believing, they are making an affirmation about the nature of reality which will, if it is substantially true, be developed, corrected and enlarged in the course of future experience. They are thus making genuine assertions and are making them on appropriate and acceptable grounds. If there were only one religious tradition, so that all religious experience and belief had the same intentional object, an epistemology of religion could come to rest at this point. But in fact there are a number of different such traditions and families of traditions witnessing to many different personal deities and non-personal ultimates.
“To recall the theistic range first, the history of religions sets before us innumerable gods, differently named and often with different characteristics. A collection of names of Mesopotamian gods made by A. Deinel in 1914 contains 2200 entries (Romer 1969, 117-18). In Hesiod’s time there were said to be 30,000 deities (Hume [1757] 1956, 28, n. 1)... What are we to say, from a religious point of view, about all these gods? Do we say that they exist? And what would it be for a named god, say Balder, with his distinctive characteristics, to exist? In any straightforward sense it would at least seem to involve there being a consciousness, answering to this name, in addition to all the millions of human consciousnesses. Are we then to say that for each name in our directory of gods there is an additional consciousness, with the further attributes specified in the description of that particular deity? In most cases this would be theoretically possible since in most cases the gods are explicitly or implicitly finite beings whose powers and spheres of operation are at least approximately known; and many of them could coexist without contradiction. On the other hand the gods of the monotheistic faiths are thought of in each case as the one and only God, so that it is impossible for there to be more than one instantiation of this concept. It is thus not feasible to say that all the named gods, and particularly not all the most important ones, exist – at any rate not in any simple and straightforward sense.
“Further, in addition to the witness of theistic religion to this multiplicity of personal deities there are yet other major forms of thought and experience which point to non-personal ultimates: Brahman, the Dharmakaya, Nirvana, Sunyata, the Tao... But if the ultimate Reality is the blissful, universal consciousness of Brahman, which at the core of our own being we all are, how can it also be the emptiness, non-being, void of Sunyata? And again, how could it also be the Tao, as the principle of cosmic order, and again, the Dharmakaya or the eternal Buddha-nature? And if it is any of these, how can it be a personal deity? Surely these reported ultimates, personal and non-personal, are mutually exclusive...
“The naturalistic response is to see all these systems of belief as factually false although perhaps as expressing the archetypal daydreams of the human mind whereby it has distracted itself from the harsh problems of life. From this point of view the luxuriant variety and the mutual incompatibility of these conceptions of the ultimate, and of the modes of experience which they inform, demonstrates that they are ‘such stuff as dreams are made on.’ However I have already argued (in Chapter 13) that it is entirely reasonable for the religious person, experiencing life in relation to the transcendent – whether encountered beyond oneself or in the depths of one’s own being –, to believe in the reality of that which is thus apparently experienced. Having reached that conclusion one cannot dismiss the realm of religious experience and belief as illusory, even though its internal plurality and diversity must preclude any simple and straightforward account of it.
“Nor can we reasonably claim that our own form of religious experience, together with that of the tradition of which we are a part, is veridical whilst the others are not...”
— John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989 p233-235
“I have argued that it is rational on the part of those who experience religiously to believe and to live on this basis. And I have further argued that, in so believing, they are making an affirmation about the nature of reality which will, if it is substantially true, be developed, corrected and enlarged in the course of future experience. They are thus making genuine assertions and are making them on appropriate and acceptable grounds. If there were only one religious tradition, so that all religious experience and belief had the same intentional object, an epistemology of religion could come to rest at this point. But in fact there are a number of different such traditions and families of traditions witnessing to many different personal deities and non-personal ultimates.
“To recall the theistic range first, the history of religions sets before us innumerable gods, differently named and often with different characteristics. A collection of names of Mesopotamian gods made by A. Deinel in 1914 contains 2200 entries (Romer 1969, 117-18). In Hesiod’s time there were said to be 30,000 deities (Hume [1757] 1956, 28, n. 1)... What are we to say, from a religious point of view, about all these gods? Do we say that they exist? And what would it be for a named god, say Balder, with his distinctive characteristics, to exist? In any straightforward sense it would at least seem to involve there being a consciousness, answering to this name, in addition to all the millions of human consciousnesses. Are we then to say that for each name in our directory of gods there is an additional consciousness, with the further attributes specified in the description of that particular deity? In most cases this would be theoretically possible since in most cases the gods are explicitly or implicitly finite beings whose powers and spheres of operation are at least approximately known; and many of them could coexist without contradiction. On the other hand the gods of the monotheistic faiths are thought of in each case as the one and only God, so that it is impossible for there to be more than one instantiation of this concept. It is thus not feasible to say that all the named gods, and particularly not all the most important ones, exist – at any rate not in any simple and straightforward sense.
“Further, in addition to the witness of theistic religion to this multiplicity of personal deities there are yet other major forms of thought and experience which point to non-personal ultimates: Brahman, the Dharmakaya, Nirvana, Sunyata, the Tao... But if the ultimate Reality is the blissful, universal consciousness of Brahman, which at the core of our own being we all are, how can it also be the emptiness, non-being, void of Sunyata? And again, how could it also be the Tao, as the principle of cosmic order, and again, the Dharmakaya or the eternal Buddha-nature? And if it is any of these, how can it be a personal deity? Surely these reported ultimates, personal and non-personal, are mutually exclusive...
“The naturalistic response is to see all these systems of belief as factually false although perhaps as expressing the archetypal daydreams of the human mind whereby it has distracted itself from the harsh problems of life. From this point of view the luxuriant variety and the mutual incompatibility of these conceptions of the ultimate, and of the modes of experience which they inform, demonstrates that they are ‘such stuff as dreams are made on.’ However I have already argued (in Chapter 13) that it is entirely reasonable for the religious person, experiencing life in relation to the transcendent – whether encountered beyond oneself or in the depths of one’s own being –, to believe in the reality of that which is thus apparently experienced. Having reached that conclusion one cannot dismiss the realm of religious experience and belief as illusory, even though its internal plurality and diversity must preclude any simple and straightforward account of it.
“Nor can we reasonably claim that our own form of religious experience, together with that of the tradition of which we are a part, is veridical whilst the others are not...”
— John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989 p233-235
3. Argument from (Evolutionary) Psychology
Summary:
Belief in God has a root in psychology or emotions, not fact. Psychological forces often offer us different reasons besides objective fact to believe various things, like the existence of a god. While these beliefs may or may not be of benefit to humanity, it is not a reliable measure of reality.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life.
“The most important of these emotions is fear of death, which is instinctive and biologically useful. If we genuinely and wholeheartedly believed in the future life, we should cease completely to fear death...
“...Among animals and savages [sic], instinctive pugnacity suffices for this purpose; but at a certain stage of development, as the Mohammedans first proved, belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity. We should therefore admit that militarists are wise in encouraging the belief in immortality, always supposing that this belief does not become so profound as to produce indifference to the affairs of the world.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p90-91
“Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
“Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p13-14
“Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing–fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p22
“To judge of the moral influence of any institution upon a community, we have to consider the kind of impulse which is embodied in the institution and the degree to which the institution increases the efficacy of the impulse in that community. Sometimes the impulse concerned is quite obvious, sometimes it is more hidden. An Alpine club, for example, obviously embodies the impulse to adventure, and a learned society embodies the impulse toward knowledge. The family as an institution embodies jealousy and parental feeling; a football club or a political party embodies the impulse toward competitive play; but the two greatest social institutions–namely, the church and the state–are more complex in their psychological motivation. The primary purpose of the state is clearly security against both internal criminals and external enemies... Undoubtedly the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen in the present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people’s thoughts to God. Battle, pestilence, and shipwreck all tend to make people religious. Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it appeals especially to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants’ nest to find out which of the ants performed their formicular duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our importance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. Then there is the comparatively modern idea that cosmic evolution is all designed to bring about the sort of results which we call good–that is to say, the sort of results that give us pleasure. Here again it is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” (1930) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p41-42
“It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life.
“The most important of these emotions is fear of death, which is instinctive and biologically useful. If we genuinely and wholeheartedly believed in the future life, we should cease completely to fear death...
“...Among animals and savages [sic], instinctive pugnacity suffices for this purpose; but at a certain stage of development, as the Mohammedans first proved, belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity. We should therefore admit that militarists are wise in encouraging the belief in immortality, always supposing that this belief does not become so profound as to produce indifference to the affairs of the world.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p90-91
“Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
“Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p13-14
“Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing–fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p22
“To judge of the moral influence of any institution upon a community, we have to consider the kind of impulse which is embodied in the institution and the degree to which the institution increases the efficacy of the impulse in that community. Sometimes the impulse concerned is quite obvious, sometimes it is more hidden. An Alpine club, for example, obviously embodies the impulse to adventure, and a learned society embodies the impulse toward knowledge. The family as an institution embodies jealousy and parental feeling; a football club or a political party embodies the impulse toward competitive play; but the two greatest social institutions–namely, the church and the state–are more complex in their psychological motivation. The primary purpose of the state is clearly security against both internal criminals and external enemies... Undoubtedly the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen in the present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people’s thoughts to God. Battle, pestilence, and shipwreck all tend to make people religious. Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it appeals especially to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants’ nest to find out which of the ants performed their formicular duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our importance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. Then there is the comparatively modern idea that cosmic evolution is all designed to bring about the sort of results which we call good–that is to say, the sort of results that give us pleasure. Here again it is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” (1930) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p41-42
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Maybe the psychological reason for this amazing blindness has something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability. J. Anderson Thomson, from his perspective as an evolutionary psychiatrist, points me to an additional reason, the psychological bias that we all have towards personifying inanimate objects as agents. As Thomson says, we are more inclined to mistake a shadow for a burglar than a burglar for a shadow. A false positive might be a waste of time. A false negative could be fatal. In a letter to me, he suggested that, in our ancestral past, our greatest challenge in our environment came from each other. ‘The legacy of that is the default assumption, often fear, of human intention. We have a great deal of difficulty seeing anything other than human causation.’ We naturally generalized that to divine intention...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p172
“Maybe the psychological reason for this amazing blindness has something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability. J. Anderson Thomson, from his perspective as an evolutionary psychiatrist, points me to an additional reason, the psychological bias that we all have towards personifying inanimate objects as agents. As Thomson says, we are more inclined to mistake a shadow for a burglar than a burglar for a shadow. A false positive might be a waste of time. A false negative could be fatal. In a letter to me, he suggested that, in our ancestral past, our greatest challenge in our environment came from each other. ‘The legacy of that is the default assumption, often fear, of human intention. We have a great deal of difficulty seeing anything other than human causation.’ We naturally generalized that to divine intention...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p172
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (A.J. Ayer), English philosopher & humanist, 1910-1989
“...Such antagonism as there is between religion and science appears to consist in the fact that science takes away one of the motives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged that one of the ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in the inability of men to determine their own destiny; and science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which men regard an alien world, by making them believe that they can understand and anticipate the source of natural phenomena, and even to some extent control it. The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards religion marks the physicists’ own lack of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the anti-religious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome of the crisis through which physics has just passed.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p155
“...Such antagonism as there is between religion and science appears to consist in the fact that science takes away one of the motives which make men religious. For it is acknowledged that one of the ultimate sources of religious feeling lies in the inability of men to determine their own destiny; and science tends to destroy the feeling of awe with which men regard an alien world, by making them believe that they can understand and anticipate the source of natural phenomena, and even to some extent control it. The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards religion marks the physicists’ own lack of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the anti-religious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome of the crisis through which physics has just passed.”
— A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin Books, 1936 p155
4. Religion Itself Evolved
Summary:
Rather than suggesting evidence for the literal existence of a god, religion is an adaptive system that itself evolves like an organism and competes for resources (human attention and devotion) within the habitat of human minds. The features of religion are what they are not because they are true, but because they are adaptive.
Marek Kohn, British science writer
“To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill’s bottom that religion may be adaptive.”
— Marek Kohn (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p190)
“To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill’s bottom that religion may be adaptive.”
— Marek Kohn (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p190)
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...The Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group selection because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and in-group brotherly love, and this helped religious groups to survive at the expense of less religious groups...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p198
“There seems to be no doubt that many of the attributes of religion are well fitted to helping the religion’s own survival, and the survival of the attributes concerned, in the stew of human culture. The question now arises of whether the good fit is achieved by ‘intelligent design’ or by natural selection. The answer is probably both. On the side of design, religious leaders are fully capable of verbalizing the tricks that aid the survival of religion. Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: ‘Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.’ Again: ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.’ And again: ‘Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.’ Luther would have had no difficulty in intelligently designing unintelligent aspects of a religion to help it survive. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he, or anyone else, did design it. It could also have evolved by a (non-generic) form of natural selection, with Luther not its designer but a shrewd observer of its efficacy.
“Even though conventional Darwinian selection of genes might have favoured psychological predispositions that produce religion as a by-product, it is unlikely to have shaped the details... Are religions such stuff as memes are made on?”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p221
“Organized religions are organized by people: by priests and bishops, rabbis, imams and ayatollahs. But, to reiterate the point I made with respect to Martin Luther, that doesn’t mean they were conceived and designed by people. Even where religions have been exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution... Given this background, memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me to offer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions. In the early stages of a religion’s evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions, are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes – cartels of mutually compatible memes. This doesn’t rule out the additional role of deliberate manipulation by priests and others. Religions probably are, at least in part, intelligently designed, as are schools and fashions in art.
“One religion that was intelligently designed, almost in its entirety, is Scientology, but I suspect that it is exceptional. Another candidate for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English. Mormonism, however, has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of America – indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one, and there is talk of fielding a presidential candidate.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p233-234
“Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion. The question gains urgency from standard Darwinian considerations of economy. Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. Unrelentingly and unceasingly, as Darwin explained, ‘natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.’ If a wild animal habitually performs some useless activity, natural selection will favour rival individuals who devote the time and energy, instead, to surviving and reproducing...
“On the face of it, the tail of a peacock is a jeu d’esprit par excellence. It surely does no favours to the survival of its possessor. But it does benefit the genes that distinguish him from his less spectacular rivals. The tail is an advertisement, which buys its place in the economy of nature by attracting females...
“To an evolutionist, religious rituals ‘stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade’ (Dan Dennett’s phrase). Religious behaviour is a writ-large human equivalent of anting or bower-building. It is time-consuming, energy-consuming, often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a bird of paradise. Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith. Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose. Was it some kind of architectural peacock’s tail?... What is it all for? What is the benefit of religion?
“By ’benefit,’ the Darwinian normally means some enhancement to the survival of the individual’s genes. What is missing from this is the important point that Darwinian benefit is not restricted to the genes of the individual organism... Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in as much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us. Plenty of examples are known of animals manipulated into behaving in such a way as to benefit the transmission of a parasite to its next host...“Third, the ‘central theorem’ may substitute for ‘genes’ the more general term ‘replicators.’ The fact that religion is ubiquitous, probably means that it has worked to the benefit of something, but it may not be us or our genes. It may be to the benefit of only the religious ideas themselves, to the extent that they behave in a somewhat gene-like way, as replicators...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p190-193
“...The Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew suggests that Christianity survived by a form of group selection because it fostered the idea of in-group loyalty and in-group brotherly love, and this helped religious groups to survive at the expense of less religious groups...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p198
“There seems to be no doubt that many of the attributes of religion are well fitted to helping the religion’s own survival, and the survival of the attributes concerned, in the stew of human culture. The question now arises of whether the good fit is achieved by ‘intelligent design’ or by natural selection. The answer is probably both. On the side of design, religious leaders are fully capable of verbalizing the tricks that aid the survival of religion. Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: ‘Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.’ Again: ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.’ And again: ‘Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.’ Luther would have had no difficulty in intelligently designing unintelligent aspects of a religion to help it survive. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he, or anyone else, did design it. It could also have evolved by a (non-generic) form of natural selection, with Luther not its designer but a shrewd observer of its efficacy.
“Even though conventional Darwinian selection of genes might have favoured psychological predispositions that produce religion as a by-product, it is unlikely to have shaped the details... Are religions such stuff as memes are made on?”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p221
“Organized religions are organized by people: by priests and bishops, rabbis, imams and ayatollahs. But, to reiterate the point I made with respect to Martin Luther, that doesn’t mean they were conceived and designed by people. Even where religions have been exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution... Given this background, memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me to offer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions. In the early stages of a religion’s evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions, are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes – cartels of mutually compatible memes. This doesn’t rule out the additional role of deliberate manipulation by priests and others. Religions probably are, at least in part, intelligently designed, as are schools and fashions in art.
“One religion that was intelligently designed, almost in its entirety, is Scientology, but I suspect that it is exceptional. Another candidate for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English. Mormonism, however, has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of America – indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one, and there is talk of fielding a presidential candidate.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p233-234
“Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion. The question gains urgency from standard Darwinian considerations of economy. Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. Unrelentingly and unceasingly, as Darwin explained, ‘natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.’ If a wild animal habitually performs some useless activity, natural selection will favour rival individuals who devote the time and energy, instead, to surviving and reproducing...
“On the face of it, the tail of a peacock is a jeu d’esprit par excellence. It surely does no favours to the survival of its possessor. But it does benefit the genes that distinguish him from his less spectacular rivals. The tail is an advertisement, which buys its place in the economy of nature by attracting females...
“To an evolutionist, religious rituals ‘stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade’ (Dan Dennett’s phrase). Religious behaviour is a writ-large human equivalent of anting or bower-building. It is time-consuming, energy-consuming, often as extravagantly ornate as the plumage of a bird of paradise. Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith. Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose. Was it some kind of architectural peacock’s tail?... What is it all for? What is the benefit of religion?
“By ’benefit,’ the Darwinian normally means some enhancement to the survival of the individual’s genes. What is missing from this is the important point that Darwinian benefit is not restricted to the genes of the individual organism... Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in as much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us. Plenty of examples are known of animals manipulated into behaving in such a way as to benefit the transmission of a parasite to its next host...“Third, the ‘central theorem’ may substitute for ‘genes’ the more general term ‘replicators.’ The fact that religion is ubiquitous, probably means that it has worked to the benefit of something, but it may not be us or our genes. It may be to the benefit of only the religious ideas themselves, to the extent that they behave in a somewhat gene-like way, as replicators...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p190-193
5. Argument from Tradition
Summary:
People tend to adhere to the religion of their parents and surrounding culture, which creates a lens through which all experiences are interpreted, creating confirmation bias that tends to conform to those traditions. This indicates that people believe in their god out of habit and tradition, rather than out of evidence that such a god exists.
Robert Ingersoll, American lawyer & orator, 1833-1899
“Heredity is on the side of superstition. All our ignorance pleads for the old. In most men there is a feeling that their ancestors were exceedingly good and brave and wise, and that in all things pertaining to religion their conclusions should be followed. They believe that their fathers and mothers were of the best, and that that which satisfied them should satisfy their children. With a feeling of reverence they say that the religion of their mother is good enough and pure enough and reasonable enough for them. In this way the love of parents and the reverence for ancestors have unconsciously bribed the reason and put out, or rendered exceedingly dum, the eyes of the mind...
“Yet it will hardly do to say that the religion of my mother is good enough for me, any more than to say the geology or the astronomy of the philosophy of my mother is good enough for me. Every human being is entitled to the best he can obtain; and if there has been the slightest improvement on the religion of the mother, the son is entitled to that improvement, and he should not deprive himself of that advantage by the mistaken idea that he owes it to his mother to perpetuate, in a reverential way, her ignorant mistakes.
“If we are to follow the religion of our fathers and mothers, our fathers and mothers should have followed the religion of theirs. Had this been done, there could have been no improvement in the world of thought. The first religion would have been the last, and the child would have died as ignorant as the mother. Progress would have been impossible, and on the graves of ancestors would have been sacrificed the intelligence of mankind.”
— Robert Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic?, Anodos Books, 2019 (1900) p8-7
“Heredity is on the side of superstition. All our ignorance pleads for the old. In most men there is a feeling that their ancestors were exceedingly good and brave and wise, and that in all things pertaining to religion their conclusions should be followed. They believe that their fathers and mothers were of the best, and that that which satisfied them should satisfy their children. With a feeling of reverence they say that the religion of their mother is good enough and pure enough and reasonable enough for them. In this way the love of parents and the reverence for ancestors have unconsciously bribed the reason and put out, or rendered exceedingly dum, the eyes of the mind...
“Yet it will hardly do to say that the religion of my mother is good enough for me, any more than to say the geology or the astronomy of the philosophy of my mother is good enough for me. Every human being is entitled to the best he can obtain; and if there has been the slightest improvement on the religion of the mother, the son is entitled to that improvement, and he should not deprive himself of that advantage by the mistaken idea that he owes it to his mother to perpetuate, in a reverential way, her ignorant mistakes.
“If we are to follow the religion of our fathers and mothers, our fathers and mothers should have followed the religion of theirs. Had this been done, there could have been no improvement in the world of thought. The first religion would have been the last, and the child would have died as ignorant as the mother. Progress would have been impossible, and on the graves of ancestors would have been sacrificed the intelligence of mankind.”
— Robert Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic?, Anodos Books, 2019 (1900) p8-7
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957 pv
“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p23
“With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957 pv
“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p23
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents’ religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents’ religious beliefs.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p129
“If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p25
“...None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents’ religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents’ religious beliefs.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p129
“If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p25
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“There is a thing called the genetic fallacy; in avoiding it we need to realize that the validity of a claim is independent of its origin. So even if things came out of our religious traditions, it doesn’t mean that their present justification rests on these religious traditions.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p106
“There is a thing called the genetic fallacy; in avoiding it we need to realize that the validity of a claim is independent of its origin. So even if things came out of our religious traditions, it doesn’t mean that their present justification rests on these religious traditions.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p106
6. Argument from Lack of Scientific Consensus
Summary:
While some scientists believe in God or gods, most do not, presumably based on their scientific understanding of the universe. Those who do believe often do not adhere to traditional religious views.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakable hollow sound of bottoms of barrels being scraped. The only website I could find that claimed to list ‘Nobel Prize-winning Scientific Christians’ came up with six, out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists. Of these six, it turned out that four were not Nobel Prize-winners at all; and at least one, to my certain knowledge, is a non-believer who attends church for purely social reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi ‘found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from.’“A study in the leading journal Nature by Larson and Witham in 1998 showed that of those American scientists considered eminent enough by their peers to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society in Britain) only about 7 per cent believe in a personal God. This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of whom more than 90 per cent are believers in some sort of supernatural being. The figure for less eminent scientists, not elected to the National Academy, is intermediate. As with the more distinguished sample, religious believers are in a minority, but a less dramatic minority of about 40 per cent. It is completely as I would expect that American scientists are less religious than the American public generally, and that the most distinguished scientists are the least religious of all. What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p126-127
“...As this book goes to press, my colleagues R. Elisabeth Cornwell and Michael Stirrat are writing up their comparable, but more thorough, research on the religious opinions of the Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS). The authors’ conclusions will be published in full later, but they have kindly allowed me to quote preliminary results here. They used a standard technique for scaling opinion, the Likert-type seven-point scale. All 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society who possess an email address (the great majority) were polled, and about 23 per cent responded (a good figure for this kind of study). They were offered various propositions, for example: ‘I believe in a personal God, that is one who takes an interest in individuals, hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions, and passes judgement.’ For each such proposition, they were invited to choose a number from 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement). It is a little hard to compare the results directly with the Larson and Witham study, because Larson and Witham offered their academicians only a three-point scale, not with a seven-point scale, but the overall trend is the same. The overwhelming majority of FRS, like the overwhelming majority of US Academicians, are atheists. Only 3.3 per cent of the Fellows agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists (i.e. chose 7 on the scale), while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed (i.e. chose 1 on the scale). If you define ‘believers’ as those who chose 6 or 7, and if you define ‘unbelievers’ as those who chose 1 or 2, there were a massive 213 unbelievers and a mere 12 believers. Like Larson and Witham, and as also noted by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, Cornwell and Stirrat found a small but significant tendency for biological scientists to be even more atheistic than physical scientists. For the details, and all the rest of their very interesting conclusions, please refer to their own paper when it is published.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p128 (citing Stirrat & Cornwell, “Eminent Scientists Reject the Supernatural: A Survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society,” Evolution: Education and Outreach, December 2013)
“...I asked [Jim Watson, founder of the Human Genome Project] whether he knew many religious scientists today. He replied: ‘Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them, and I’m a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I can’t believe anyone accepts truth by revelation.’”— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p125-126
“The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakable hollow sound of bottoms of barrels being scraped. The only website I could find that claimed to list ‘Nobel Prize-winning Scientific Christians’ came up with six, out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists. Of these six, it turned out that four were not Nobel Prize-winners at all; and at least one, to my certain knowledge, is a non-believer who attends church for purely social reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi ‘found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from.’“A study in the leading journal Nature by Larson and Witham in 1998 showed that of those American scientists considered eminent enough by their peers to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society in Britain) only about 7 per cent believe in a personal God. This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of whom more than 90 per cent are believers in some sort of supernatural being. The figure for less eminent scientists, not elected to the National Academy, is intermediate. As with the more distinguished sample, religious believers are in a minority, but a less dramatic minority of about 40 per cent. It is completely as I would expect that American scientists are less religious than the American public generally, and that the most distinguished scientists are the least religious of all. What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p126-127
“...As this book goes to press, my colleagues R. Elisabeth Cornwell and Michael Stirrat are writing up their comparable, but more thorough, research on the religious opinions of the Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS). The authors’ conclusions will be published in full later, but they have kindly allowed me to quote preliminary results here. They used a standard technique for scaling opinion, the Likert-type seven-point scale. All 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society who possess an email address (the great majority) were polled, and about 23 per cent responded (a good figure for this kind of study). They were offered various propositions, for example: ‘I believe in a personal God, that is one who takes an interest in individuals, hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions, and passes judgement.’ For each such proposition, they were invited to choose a number from 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement). It is a little hard to compare the results directly with the Larson and Witham study, because Larson and Witham offered their academicians only a three-point scale, not with a seven-point scale, but the overall trend is the same. The overwhelming majority of FRS, like the overwhelming majority of US Academicians, are atheists. Only 3.3 per cent of the Fellows agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists (i.e. chose 7 on the scale), while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed (i.e. chose 1 on the scale). If you define ‘believers’ as those who chose 6 or 7, and if you define ‘unbelievers’ as those who chose 1 or 2, there were a massive 213 unbelievers and a mere 12 believers. Like Larson and Witham, and as also noted by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, Cornwell and Stirrat found a small but significant tendency for biological scientists to be even more atheistic than physical scientists. For the details, and all the rest of their very interesting conclusions, please refer to their own paper when it is published.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p128 (citing Stirrat & Cornwell, “Eminent Scientists Reject the Supernatural: A Survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society,” Evolution: Education and Outreach, December 2013)
“...I asked [Jim Watson, founder of the Human Genome Project] whether he knew many religious scientists today. He replied: ‘Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them, and I’m a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I can’t believe anyone accepts truth by revelation.’”— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p125-126