God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion Read Free

hiding himself from you. 11 Can you fit that into a physical model?
Stenger: I don't know. I don't think so. But you can argue that, again, such a god that requires belief in the absence of evidence is not a very nice guy. That would not be a benevolent God.
    On an earlier broadcast, 12 discussing his book The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason , Dr. Stenger gave a great analogy about seeking evidence, and also told us a little about his personal motivations:
Stenger: People often quote Carl Sagan, although he is not the only one to have said it, that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But I claim absence of evidence can be evidence for absence when the evidence should be there. I live near Rocky Mountain National Park, and if somebody said there were elephants in Rocky Mountain National Park, and you looked and you didn't see any, I think that would be a pretty good case for saying they don't exist in Rocky Mountain National Park. We would have surely discovered the evidence for them by now.
Gaylor: I notice that you had been raised Catholic. When did you leave that institution?
Stenger: Oh, I think when I was a teenager I began to have my doubts. I got interested in science. That is always a good step in that direction. I started reading about evolution, and even though the [Catholic] Church accepts evolution, most of the people around me didn't believe it. So, I drifted away. But I didn't become a really active atheist until really just in the last twenty or so years.
Barker: When you were younger, did you actually believe in transubstantiation?
Stenger: Sure. Sure, you believe whatever you are told when you are a kid.
Barker: But it still tasted like bread, didn't it?
Stenger: Right, right. Well, you know, like I tell people, that the Catholic Church is trying to modernize and produce a communion wafer with half the fat and a third fewer calories. They call it “I Can't Believe It's Not Jesus.”
Barker: I notice that you say in your book that the world is actually worse off as a result of faith. What do you mean by that?
Stenger: The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something which you have no evidence for. When that kind of attitude is present, it means that you're not making decisions—whether it's at a political level or at a personal level—you're not making decisions about your life, about the world, based on good rational, reasonable evaluation of the evidence but on preconceived ideas that you have no basis for…. Faith is folly. Faith is bad. It is not something to respect. We should be fighting its negative influence on the world.
    Stenger has coined a now popular phrase, which became one of the favorite virtual billboard slogans of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: “Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.” 13 He is convinced that “we must act for the sake of the betterment of humankind and the future of our planet. Based on the favorable signs that young people are increasingly abandoning religion, I have great hope that perhaps in another generation America will have joined Europe and the rest of the developed world in casting off the rusty chains of ancient superstition that stand as an impediment to science and progress. I just hope it's not too late.”

     
    For Kara Neumann, it is already too late. She might have grown up to think for herself, to discard her parents' faith, perhaps to work in science, or perhaps to find other ways to improve life on this planet. We will never know. Her lost life is a casualty of Christianity. But we do know that the danger is still there for others, as long as faith continues to be revered in society.
    Dan Barker

 
     
Divine revelation, not reason, is the source of all truth.
    —Tertullian (died 225)
     
The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is