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We owe what we know about our wonderful world to science
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Science has taught us how hills come to be formed, how trees
grow, how light originates in the Sun.
No knowledge came from people who believed they were receiving instruction
from God.
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Most religions hold that there is some sort of immortal soul in all people.
The arguments are too long to develop on this page, but I have shown that the
concept of an immortal soul is logically
unsupportable elsewhere on these pages.
How should we live our lives?
Philosophers have taught us about ethical behaviour by argument and rational
discussion over millennia.
How could any intelligent and well informed person believe that it is
preferable that we should
base our behaviour on what someone wrote
following what he believed was a discussion with a god hiding in a burning
bush (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or after receiving instructions from an
archangel in a cave
(Islam)?
Religion has led people to do horrendous things over thousands of years.
I have written about some of many examples of genocide and killing in a
piece on Christian
intolerance.
As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said, "Good people will do good things,
and bad people will do bad things.
But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion."
How obvious does it need to become that religion causes more harm than good
before people will drop the delusion?
There have been long and bloody wars between Protestants and Catholics (both
calling themselves the 'true' Christians) and between Sunni and Shia (both
calling themselves the 'true' followers of Islam).
Of course there can be no resolution to these disputes because both sides are
equally deluded.
In the twenty-first century we have Islamic extremists killing other Muslims
as well as non Muslims, the rise of the bloodthirsty Isis group in the Middle
East and similar religious fanatics in Africa, Thailand, the Philappines and
elsewhere.
In Indonesia, which has been a example of tolerance between adherents of
different religons in the past, the Christian governor Ahok of Jakarta was
recently jailed for two years on the charge of
blasphemy.
His crime: he said clerics had used a Koranic verse to mislead voters by
telling them that Muslims were not allowed to vote for a Christian.
It is human to look for explanations for anything that happens.
Before science people looked to the supernatural in an effort to understand
the world; it didn't work, but the habit continues to this day.
Over the last few centuries it has become increasingly obvious that science
provided a path to enlightenment and superstition was a dead-end.