NO GOD

NO GOD

            The Death of Billy Graham reminds me that belief in God has decreased over the years so that now there is reason to believe that eventually there will be no such thing as belief in God. Graham preached to very large audiences around the world, but I doubt that his listeners would be anywhere near as large today. There is nobody out there today who commands such huge listening audiences, even on television.

A current report in the Huffington Post says: “An ongoing spate of recent studies - looking at various countries around the world - all show the same thing: religion is in decline. From Scandinavia to South America, and from Vancouver to Seoul, the world is experiencing an unprecedented wave of secularization. Indeed, as a recent National Geographic report confirms, the world’s newest religion is: No Religion.”

Studies show that in a number of European countries there are more atheists than religious people. The Huffington report says: “For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday.”

This decline in religious belief has been going on for some time. In the Middle Ages everybody believed in God, but with the Enlightenment, the increase in education, and the progression of modern knowledge, the belief in God has gradually waned. This is not going to change. The arc of non-belief is going to continue, and belief in God is going to diminish to the point where there will no longer be any such belief.

Just look at the ancient Greeks. In ancient Greece, the gods were taken very seriously. It was mandatory to believe in the Greek Gods. Socrates was condemned to death for, among other things, Asebeia, which was: "Not believing in the gods of the state.” Today, nobody believes in the Greek gods, not even the Greeks. The Greek gods make wonderful subjects for literature, but everybody knows that they were myths. The same can be said of the ancient Egyptian gods such as Osiris and Isis, the Roman gods such as Jupiter and Juno, and the Nordic gods such as Odin and Thor. Someday everybody will know that the gods people worship today were simply myths. I doubt that they will be replaced by other new gods. The trend is not toward new religions but toward atheism.

There is really no difference between belief in today’s gods and the ancient beliefs. Today’s gods, like the ancient gods, are still invisible. Religious people believe that the God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, is perfect, good, loving, and helpful to men. They believe that God is omniscient and omnipotent. For some reason we never get any empirical evidence of God, the Virgin Mary, or the saints doing anything to or for men. But we are expected to have faith in them on the grounds that life on earth cannot be all there is. Religious people believe that there must be some form of afterlife called Heaven or Paradise or something. We are also told that there must be something to deal with evil, some rules and some punishment. Evil people cannot just get away with the evil that they do. They can’t go to heaven, so there must be some place like Hell or Purgatory for them to go after they die.

I suspect that the defection from belief in God has accelerated in modern times because of our reliance on science and technology. We expect there to be scientific answers to most important questions, and we expect there to be empirical proof of theories and hypotheses. When you come to religion with its absence of scientific proof and the requirement that you take everything on faith, you find a growing number of people who are skeptical of its validity. The more educated people are, and the more intelligent they are, the more likely that they will disbelieve religious doctrines.

To really intelligent atheists, the idea of belief in God is absurd. They can’t understand how people could believe in ancient religions with their strange rites and dogmas. How could the Catholic Church insist that a wafer of bread is not just symbolic of the Son of God, but is the actual body of Jesus Christ? How could Muslims believe that if you died in jihad you would go to Paradise and have marriage with seventy two virgins with "full grown", "swelling", or "pears-shaped" breasts? Religions stress the idea that one of the highest virtues is the ability to accept those tenets of religion on faith.

          The people who believe most strongly in God and religion are less educated and intelligent than atheists. A British academic did a study of the connection between IQ and religious belief in countries around the world. When he broke down the statistics, he found a strong link between intelligence and lack of faith. People with higher IQs tended to be more disbelieving. People with lower IQs tended to be far more religious. Countries with a lower national IQ tended to have the most believers.
         Your most intensely educated people, such as scientists, have, over the years, drifted more and more to atheism and agnosticism. In 1996, 1000 leading American scientists were randomly chosen from American men of science and asked about their belief in God. Such belief was least popular among the scientists in the most demanding field of science, physics (about 22%). A survey of scientists in the illustrious National Academy of Sciences found that 72% were Atheists and another 20% were agnostic or had doubts.

Try your own survey of the subject. If you question people you know, it is likely that the people who are most deeply religious are the least educated and least intelligent. You will also notice that the most highly educated and most intelligent people you know are likely to be the most skeptical about religion. Many studies done over the years have shown that the lower people’s IQs, the higher their religiosity. Conversely, the higher people’s IQs, the lower their religiosity. This should tell you that belief in God is actually a form of ignorance.