Growing up in a small town in Alabama, before I went off to kindergarten at the age of 5, I learned the ABCs, how to tie my shoes and how to count to 10. Before that, I learned that God created the world.
Spending your developmental years in the United States, especially the South, it is hard to deny the strong influence of Christianity on your life. Even if you did not grow up in the Church, you know some of the myths that are associated with Christianity.
In my high school, my biology teacher skipped over the chapter on evolution because she did not believe that people came from monkeys. And while I could probably write a million of these sorts of anecdotes, the United States is becoming less and less religious, with the fastest growing belief being disbelief.
Secularism is on the rise in America, and it seems to have sparked a culture war between the religious and nonreligious. The religious hold tightly to their Biblically inspired beliefs, and the nonreligious use science as the center of their worldview; however, science and religion do not have to be at odds.
Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at The University of Chicago, said in a recent article in USA Today, “Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth. And while they may have a dialogue, it’s not a constructive one. Science helps religion only by disproving its claims, while religion has nothing to add to science.”
While Jerry Coyne is partially right in that infallible acceptance of religious doctrines is incompatible with both reason and science, Coyne fails to recognize that faith is not exclusive to the fundamental religious movements rooted in superstition and militant against the institution of science. And if religion was not at some point necessary, why does it exist today?
The University of Alabama’s own Dr. E. O. Wilson suggests, “the human mind evolved to believe in gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.” Ancient humans created religious figureheads in order to develop purpose-driven lives, not dissimilar to how capitalistic societies use competition for drive. The creation of religions and the enforcement of moral codes also aided in suppressing the naturalistic desires of selfishness in order to create civil constructive societies where people could live with one another.
I do not believe that religious explanations for the natural world are productive or rational, but I cannot support the holistic attack on religion that we see from books like “The God Delusion” or “God is Not Great.” There is still some value to be had from religious institutions. For instance, if a guy in New York attempts suicide and his Catholic mother has to fly in from California, there will be a priest by her son’s bedside when she arrives. Nonbelievers have yet to establish this sort of supportive community that’s almost exclusively seen in religious groups.
As long as someone is not militantly spreading doubt about the theory of evolution or teaching kids that the world is 6,000 years old, why should anyone care that someone finds comfort in the idea of an afterlife?
Biology, physics and chemistry do a great job of teaching us about the human body or how the earth rotates around the sun, but as far as teaching morals—it falls short. Whether or not morality exists outside a world without religion, we will never know. What we do know is that religion offers moral guidance, although not always in alignment with everyone. Whether you call yourself a Christian or not, you have absorbed some basic Christian tenets—don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t kill, etc. The main message at the core of all religions is be kind to one another.
If we look to the past, progress has always trumped tradition and superstition. And although I agree with Coyne when he says, “And any progress — not just scientific progress — is easier when we’re not yoked to religious dogma,” and as much as it pains me to say it, I also believe that we still, in some ways, need religion. And for now, we can just be satisfied in knowing that, although it may not happen as fast as we would like, the world is going to progress.
Michael Patrick is a junior majoring in political science.
