Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (74 page)
Read Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) Online
Authors: Dale McGowan
That doesn’t mean people are saints, not by a long shot. No one is (including saints). But we have a stronger inclination to be moral than immoral, and science points to several reasons why. These sections look at the natural roots of morality, as well as the ways society patches the gaps when human nature fails to keep people behaving.
Clarifying “survival of the fittest”
The phrase “survival of the fittest” brings to mind a world in which the strongest survive by pummeling the weak. That’s about as far from Harris’s definition of morality as you can get — and if that were the contribution of evolution to morality, it wouldn’t be much of a contribution at all. More like something to overcome!
But that’s not what the phrase means. “Survival of the fittest” doesn’t refer to physical fitness, but whether your traits are the best
fit
for your environment. An animal’s survival may depend on being puny so it can disappear under a rock when predators come by, while his bulky, muscular friend can’t hide and gets eaten. So “fitness” isn’t just about strength or the ability to squash others. In many cases, it’s about the ability to cooperate with them.
Cooperation and empathy have been a much better fit for the conditions of human life than “pummel thy neighbor” ever could be. To see why, just imagine two Stone Age populations, one with a genetic tendency to kill each other, the other with a tendency to help each other. Which population is likely to still be around ten generations down the line, passing on those genes and tendencies to their kids? Not the one with murder as a national pastime, I’ll tell you that. “Every man for himself” is a terrible group survival strategy.
This natural cooperation and empathy is strongest in a person’s “in-group” — those closest and most similar to him or her. As I describe in the next section, when it comes to living peacefully with “out-groups” — those who look and act differently from a given person — evolution offers some real challenges. Racism, nationalism, militarism, and the overblown fear of immigrants are among the less helpful things humans have inherited by natural selection, and getting over those fear-driven things is one of the biggest moral challenges facing the modern world.
Being afraid — and getting over it
Things have never been worse in the world than they are today. I know this because my e-mail inbox says so:
Rapists are using sinister new tactics, like recordings of crying babies, to lure and capture their victims.
Child abduction rates have risen 444 percent since 1982.
Violent crime is spiraling out of control.
Slight problem, though —
all of these claims are untrue.
No police department has ever reported a rape or attempted rape using this tactic — or any of a dozen others that frantic e-mails warn about. Child abduction rates, always extremely low, have remained level or declined in recent decades. And violent crime in the United States and United Kingdom has actually been declining steadily since the early 1990s. US figures for 2010, the most recent year on record, show the lowest level of violent crime in recorded history in
every category.
But who would know, given the constant moral panic, the insistence that no one is safe in “this day and age”?
Fear is one of the greatest drivers of religious belief. This makes sense — if the world has gone violently mad, there’s real comfort in the idea that someone with infinite power and goodness is in control. But religion isn’t responsible for the perpetual paranoia, though it often contributes to keeping fear alive. The original culprit, the biological parent of human fears, is evolution.
Imagine a sunny Wednesday afternoon a million years ago. Two pre-human ancestors are walking through the high grass on the African savannah. Suddenly there’s a blur of movement off to the left! One of them assumes it’s something fun and goes in for a hug. The other jumps 15 feet straight up and grabs a tree limb. Even if it’s just a fluffy bunny nine times out of ten, which of these guys is more likely to pass on his genes to the next generation?
(Hint: Look up.)
Counting the incarcerated
New inmates in the US federal prison system are asked their religious identity so officials can make accommodations in diet or schedule and know which clergy (if any) to call in times of need. I contacted the Federal Bureau of Prisons for information about the religious identification of prisoners. The results were interesting:
Most religions have about the same percentage in prison as in the general population. Mainline Protestants, for example, make up 31 percent of the US population and 32 percent of the federal prison population.
A few religions are slightly overrepresented in prison, and some are underrepresented. Mormons are an example of the latter, making up 1.3 percent of the US population but just 0.3 percent of the federal prison population.
You can’t draw direct moral conclusions from these data alone, of course. For one thing, a strong correlation exists between the average income in a given religion and the ability of its members to stay out of prison. Other sociological factors enter in as well.
One major exception to the pattern does exist — one worldview that’s right on the national average in income but is
hugely
underrepresented in prisons: atheists.
About five percent of Americans identify not just as nonreligious but specifically as atheists. But only 0.09 percent of the federal prison population identifies as atheists — 50 times fewer than would be expected.
Remember that the data are taken at the time of entry, so conversions in the pen won’t show up, just their worldviews around the time their crimes were committed. The result contradicts popular assumptions about atheists. Although an atheist is regarded by much of society as inherently immoral, he or she is among the least likely people to end up in a federal prison. I don’t think this is because the legal system has a crush on atheists. Neither do I think it means atheists are necessarily more virtuous. But at the very least, it should give pause to those who think they’re
less
virtuous.
In a long-ago world that was bent on killing us, no trait would have been more useful for survival than perpetual, sweaty paranoia. That’s why humans have inherited a strong tendency to assume that every shadow and sound is a threat, which in turn kept them alive and reproducing. Whenever I come upstairs from a dark basement, I feel a tingling on the back of my neck, my step quickens, and my heart races just a bit — even though my basement, unlike basements on the ancient savannah, rarely contains a cheetah.
That creepy feeling is less relevant now, but half a million years ago it was plenty useful for keeping predators of all kinds at bay — including the strange, unfamiliar humans from over the hill. By the time high blood pressure killed off one of my ancient ancestors at 22, he’d already have several jittery, paranoid offspring pounding espressos and cradling stone shotguns through the long, terrifying night.
Even as evolution has given people a tendency to cooperate with their immediate community, it also makes them fear and distrust those who are different. That worked at one time. But in a close-packed world of seven billion people of countless different colors, creeds, and kinds, such overblown fear and distrust isn’t as helpful for survival. People are in greater control of their environment than ever before, but the human brain hasn’t had a chance to catch up.