The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,138

political aim in the USA is to get round the constitutional separation of church and state, by putting religion into the schools wrapped in science’s clothing. (That’s not solely our view: it’s what Judge John Jones concluded when presiding over Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, when he ruled that the teaching of intelligent design in school science classes was unconstitutional.) The methodology is to present an anti-Darwin stance in schools, perhaps in order to deny ‘naturalism’, the belief that nature can work perfectly well without gods. Alvin Plantinga and Dennett discuss this point in Science and Religion; Are They Compatible? This is yet another example of Benford’s distinction. Believers in, and promoters of, an intelligent designer want a human-centred system of the world. They want evolution to be guided. They have completely missed Darwin’s point, that a creator is unnecessary: natural selection can produce the same results without there being any human-type design.

This anti-Darwin prejudice, this wish for a human kind of design in evolution, must be distinguished from all those places in the world that haven’t yet emerged from a medieval dependence on religion in people’s daily lives, and where evolution isn’t ‘believed in’. And it must also be distinguished from an unthinking commitment to religion, hence disbelief in evolution – or in science in general – in the lives of most people even in scientific/technological societies today.

Dennett and Thomson explain the commitment to religion very well. It is irrational and faith-based, but for many people it seems almost to be a necessary part of being human. It provides a sense of identity and a shared culture. Part of the reason is that most religions have, in the course of their evolution, changed to become more and more adapted, more appropriate to the creatures they’re serving. All of their organisation, and most of their practices, have been developed better to serve their practitioners. Those that didn’t do so well have been lost to history. Few people now believe in Odin or Osiris.

Modern religions, with their beliefs in gods or at least in the supernatural, have all achieved congregations that seem happy with the hierarchy of senior people who determine the letters of the faith. This complicity between congregants and the hierarchy makes the belief system almost irrelevant, even though it seems to the congregants to be central. The joint activities, the singing and the praying, the individual commitments in common, give the congregants a warm feeling of belonging. From outside, each of these faiths seems a beautiful harmony, the odd spat over homosexuals or female bishops aside. It’s not surprising that rationality can’t edge its way in.

For decades, psychologists have been making scientific studies of religious belief; not with a view to proving or disproving the existence of any particular flavour of deity, but trying to find out what goes on inside the minds of believers. Some have concluded that belief in the supernatural is a more or less inevitable consequence of evolutionary survival value (an ironic finding, if true), because it knits human cultures together. Only recently has it occurred to a few psychologists that perhaps the thought processes of atheists also need to be investigated, since such people form a fairly large group that seems to be immune to these supposed evolutionary pressures. Comparing believers with non-believers is likely to shed more light on both.

Even if religion and other kinds of belief in the supernatural really are natural consequences of humanity’s past history, built into our thought processes by evolution, there is no compulsion to continue to think that way. Our sporadic tendency towards violence, especially against each other, can also be explained in similar terms, but there seems to be a widespread (and sensible) view that this does not excuse violent behaviour. A true human being should be able to override such innate urges by an act of will. The same can be said of belief in the supernatural: by exercising our intelligence we can train ourselves to disbelieve claims for which there is no clear evidence. Of course, believers think that there is evidence – certainly enough to convince them – but it tends to be obscure and heavily dependent on interpretation.

An instructive example of the influence of religious belief on rational judgement occurred in 2012 when Sanal Edamaruku, founder of Rationalist International and President of the Indian Rationalist Association, was invited to examine a miracle. What follows is based on an interview with Edamaruku published in New Scientist, and we report what was