Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists.

Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk. But since our scientific understanding is never complete, the pseudo-argument known as the God of the Gaps is always available as a last resort. Today the more sophisticated theists have tried to place God into two of these gaps: the fundamental physical constants and the hard problem of consciousness.

Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity.

An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as “not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down from close to 100 percent a century before. According to an old idea in social science called the Secularization Thesis, irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.66 Recent studies confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.67 The decline is clearest in the developed countries of Western Europe, the Commonwealth, and East Asia. In Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries, religious people are in the minority, and atheists make up a quarter to more than half of the population.

The data show no signs of a global religious revival. Among the thirty-nine countries surveyed by the Index in both 2005 and 2012, only eleven became more religious, none by more than six percentage points, while twenty-six became less religious, many by double digits. And contrary to impressions from the news, the religiously excitable countries of Poland, Russia, Bosnia, Turkey, India, Nigeria, and Kenya became less religious over these seven years, as did the United States (more on this soon). Overall, the percentage of people who called themselves religious declined by nine points, making room for growth in the proportion of “convinced atheists” in a majority of the countries.

Why is the world losing its religion? There are several reasons.80 The Communist governments of the 20th century outlawed or discouraged religion, and when they liberalized, their citizenries were slow to reacquire the taste. Some of the alienation is part of a decline in trust in all institutions from its high-water mark in the 1960s.81 Some of it is carried by the global current toward emancipative values (chapter 15) such as women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and tolerance of homosexuality.82 Also, as people’s lives become more secure thanks to affluence, medical care, and social insurance, they no longer pray to God to save them from ruin: countries with stronger safety nets are less religious, holding other factors constant.83 But the most obvious reason may be reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically literate, they stop believing in miracles. The most common reason that Americans give for leaving religion is “a lack of belief in the teachings of religion.”84 We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.

Whatever the reasons, the history and geography of secularization belie the fear that in the absence of religion, societies are doomed to anomie, nihilism, and a “total eclipse of all values.”86 Secularization has proceeded in parallel with all the historical progress documented in part II. Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87

Muslim-majority countries score poorly on measures of health, education, freedom, happiness, and democracy, holding wealth constant.90 All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth.