Not by Reason Alone

"If this book works as intended," avows Richard Dawkins in the preface to his best-selling book The God Delusion, "religious readers who open it will be atheists by the time they put it down."

Show people data, and enough of it, and in a process as inevitable as Darwinism itself, people will drop their babyish dependency on magical thinking and return to their natural state, which is atheism (or at least a sober agnosticism). This is Dawkins's basic premise, shared by many of today's vocal neo-atheists.

But this trajectory contradicts what we know about emotion-laden beliefs, which are extraordinarily robust and resistant to change. Religious belief, not disbelief, has been the default state of the human psyche for most of its recorded history. Faith allays our deepest fears and mitigates unbearable losses. Religious beliefs confirm our intuitions about the way the world functions, and satisfy a need for meaning and order. To override spiritual beliefs with mere "facts," no matter how persuasive, means trumping the genetic instructions that hardwire us for faith.

Dawkins doesn't see it that way. "What that argument says is that what is psychologically easy is what people will naturally do," he says. "But if what gives us a good feeling doesn't tally with the evidence, then we should be able to reject the thing that gives us a good feeling. Neither I nor most of my friends have difficulty with that idea."

One way to explain religious deconversions is to think of them not as a subtraction but as a substitution. When religion departs, science-based humanism jumps in to take its place. "The point you hear again and again," says the anthropologist and biologist David Sloan Wilson, is that "somebody who says 'There's no God' trades the belief in for science. I'm perfectly happy thinking of science as another kind of religion. It's a very specialized kind of religion, in which the stated God is objective knowledge: factual realism."

Science delivers payoffs like critical thinking and "the skeptical turn of mind," as Dawkins puts it. But "it can also be a great conveyor of poetic beauty,"he argues. Religion has worked for so long for so many because it has been a champion at harvesting awe, which ought to come naturally, Dawkins maintains, if we are simply paying attention to the world.

The question is whether science alone can really ever scratch the same itch. Wilson isn't so sure it can.

"The more precarious our lives get, the more we need meaning systems that serve as a practical guide to life," he says. And science, he points out, can tell us how to do better, but not how to be better; it is incapable of delivering the practical directives we crave.

Enter moral philosophy. Dawkins argues that thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Russell can help us wrestle with how to live from a nontheistic point of view. Could you embrace pure science without entertaining the added dimension that moral philosophy brings to the big questions? You could, Dawkins says, but "you'd be an incomplete person."