Will secularism survive? Yes, if we can
keep science afloat.
Secularism should survive for the
simple reason that there is no need for God. God is a persistent
memory from the childhood of humanity—that invisible friend who
once provided comfort in a strange and scary world. Humanity has now
reached adolescence, a crazy and dangerous time when children are
fully developed physically but have not yet learned how to avoid
self-destructive behavior. Fortunately, adulthood is just around the
corner, provided the teenager survives until then. If humanity ever
reaches adulthood, it should dispense with God.
As late as the nineteenth century, it
still seemed reasonable to believe in God. People looked at the world
around them and thought, “I can’t see how the universe and life,
in all their complexity, could have come about naturally.” So, they
concluded that those things must have come about supernaturally. But
the fact that you do not understand something does not imply that it
cannot be understood.
Today’s physicists and cosmologists
have shown that no laws of physics were violated—no miracle was
required—to produce the universe. The laws themselves look just as
they should look if they came from nothing. Similarly, biologists,
beginning with Darwin, along with modern-day computer scientists,
have shown how easily complexity can arise, without design, from
simplicity.
Of course, this is not what the many
people who still talk to their invisible friend want to hear.
Currently, science is under heavy attack in the public arena because
of its unwelcome message, and scientists are struggling to defend
themselves.
But, barring a new Dark Age in which
science is removed from the schools and its books and journals
burned, the empirical fact that there is no need for God is bound to
seep into common knowledge. The world will remain scary, but we will
grow up and learn to grapple with our fears like
adults—realistically, without the expectation of help from some
imaginary realm.
Victor J. Stenger is a professor
emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,
and an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. He is the author of five published books. Forthcoming are:
The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come from?
and God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Can Now Show that God
Does Not Exist.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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