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This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn’t exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves – it helps. Antibiotics, unlike God, help even those who don’t help themselves. They cure infections whether you believe in them or not.
Isn’t this the fruit of abandoning intersubjective myths in favour of objective scientific knowledge? And can we not expect this process to accelerate in the coming decades?
Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their pet fictions.
Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values. It legitimises human social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Religion
asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change.
In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but that humans must nevertheless obey.
To help rich people enter God’s kingdom, the Church encouraged them to give lots of alms, threatening that misers will burn in hell. Modern communism also dislikes rich people, but it threatens them with class conflict here and now, rather than with burning sulphur after death.
No matter what the capitalists do, as long as they continue to accumulate private property they are bound to create class conflict and are destined to be defeated by the rising proletariat.
The assertion that religion is a tool for preserving social order and for organising large-scale cooperation may vex those for whom it represents first and foremost a spiritual path.
The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour.
Such journeys are fundamentally different from religions, because religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it. Often enough, one of the most important obligations for spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions.
It happened even to Buddha and Jesus. In their uncompromising quest for the truth they subverted the laws, rituals and structures of traditional Hinduism and Judaism.
More importantly, science always needs religious assistance in order to create viable human institutions. Scientists study how the world functions, but there is no scientific method for determining how humans ought to behave.
People from such cultures might well agree with liberals and Christians that human life is sacred and that murder is a terrible crime, yet condone infanticide.
Because when you read the fine print, you discover that Catholicism also demands blind obedience to a pope ‘who never makes mistakes’ even when he orders his followers to go on crusades and burn heretics at the stake.
When we descend from the ethereal sphere of philosophy and observe historical realities, we find that religious stories almost always include three parts:
To establish their claim to authority, they repeatedly reminded Europeans of the Donation of Constantine. According to this story, on 30 March 315 the Roman emperor Constantine signed an official decree granting Pope Sylvester I and his heirs perpetual control of the western part of the Roman Empire.
It was inspired and supported by evangelical Christian groups, which maintain that God prohibits homosexuality. As proof they quote Leviticus 18:22 (‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable’) and Leviticus 20:13 (‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads’).
Is the story true? Scientists cannot argue with the judgement that humans ought to obey God. Personally, you may dispute it. You may believe that human rights trump divine authority, and if God orders us to violate human rights, we shouldn’t listen to Him. Yet there is no scientific experiment that can decide this issue.
Devout Jews and Christians claim that at least the book of Leviticus was dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, and from that moment onwards not a single letter was either added or deleted from it. ‘But,’ the scientist would insist, ‘how can we
Its religious elite consisted of priestly families, who owed everything to birth and nothing to intellectual prowess. The mostly illiterate priests were busy with the temple ceremonies and had little time for writing or studying any scriptures.
Hence according to our best scientific knowledge, the Leviticus injunctions against homosexuality reflect nothing grander than the biases of a few priests and scholars in ancient Jerusalem.
Merely believing in this factual statement becomes a virtue, whereas doubting it becomes a dreadful sin.
Thus the ethical judgement ‘human life is sacred’ (which science cannot test) may shroud the factual statement ‘every human has an eternal soul’ (which is open to scientific debate).
Without the guiding hand of some religion, it is impossible to maintain large-scale social orders. Even universities and laboratories need religious backing. Religion provides the ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and the uses of scientific discoveries. Hence you cannot understand the history of science without taking religious beliefs into account. Scientists seldom dwell on this fact, but the Scientific Revolution itself began in one of the most dogmatic, intolerant and religious societies in history.
Religion is interested above all in order.
Science is interested above all in power.
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire
contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning.
No paradise awaits us after death – but we can create paradise here on earth and live in it for ever, if we just manage to overcome some technical difficulties.
One day our knowledge will be so vast and our technology so advanced that we shall distil the elixir of eternal youth, the elixir of true happiness, and any other drug we might possibly desire – and no god will stop us.
Without adequate funding, it wasn’t easy to drain swamps, construct bridges and build ports – not to mention engineer new wheat strains, discover new energy sources or open new trade routes.
Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.
When Ebola erupted in West Africa in the summer of 2014, what do you think happened to the shares of pharmaceutical companies that were busy developing anti-Ebola drugs and vaccines? They skyrocketed. Tekmira shares rose by 50 per cent and BioCryst shares by 90 per cent.
Prayers, good deeds and meditation might be comforting and inspiring, but problems such as famine, plague and war can only be solved through growth.
megalomaniacal
Just as Christians and Muslims all believe in heaven, and disagree only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.
Indeed, it may not be wrong to call the belief in economic growth a religion, because it now purports to solve many, if not most, of our ethical dilemmas. Since economic growth is allegedly the source of all good things, it encourages people to bury their ethical disagreements and adopt whichever course of action maximises long-term growth.
Unlike other religions that promise us pie in the sky, capitalism promises miracles here on earth – and sometimes even delivers. Much of the credit for overcoming famine and plague belongs to the ardent capitalist faith in growth. Capitalism even deserves some kudos for reducing human violence and increasing tolerance and cooperation. As the next chapter explains, there are additional factors at play here, but capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it
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The traditional view of the world as a pie of a fixed size presupposes that there are only two kinds of resources in the world: raw materials and energy. But in truth there are three kinds
of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge.
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened
up the scientific road to progress.
We trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to revolutionise production yet again, and to open whole new sections
in our ever-expanding supermarkets.
The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse.
An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and might threaten the very existence of human civilisation.
If previously it was sufficient to invent something amazing once a century, today we need to come up with a miracle every two years.
We talk a lot about global warming, but in practice humankind is unwilling to make the serious economic, social or political sacrifices necessary to stop this catastrophe.
