What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

punting: substituting one immediate mystery with an even more profound, more deeply unfathomable mystery. That’s not an explanation—quite the opposite. Consider, for instance, the profound complexities of the human brain and our very consciousness, which involve hundreds of millions of neurons and synapses working together in a nearly unfathomably intricate system. Science hasn’t worked out all the details of this natural, neurological wonder—but as Carl Sagan has pointed out, we don’t know any of the details of a magical invisible deity creating it all, either. To simply claim that “God made it” isn’t explaining anything at all.¹⁹

      Fourth, theists insist that everything in the universe requires some sort of intelligent designer—except, of course, their God. But if you assert that everything in the universe requires a creator/designer—but that the creator/designer itself doesn’t require a creator/designer—then you’re just being boldly and blatantly illogical. For if God can exist without having been created or designed, then by the very same logic, so too could anything, including the universe. And also, if there was in fact an intelligent designer God, then who or what designed it? Something as amazing and complex as a deity that can create eyeballs and minds couldn’t just come out of nothing and nowhere! It must have been created by an even more intelligent designer! In the frank words of American philosopher Daniel Dennett, “If God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod?”²⁰

      As British poet and pioneering atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley reasoned back in 1811, the natural logic and consequence of this theological argument—that because the universe appears designed, it must be evidence of an intelligent creator god—leads to “an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing.” He continues, “The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd.”²¹ And, I should add, lacking any empirical evidence.

      Finally, even if one were to simply admit—yes—that the natural world is so truly full of such irreducible complexity and intricate design that, by all faculties of logic and reason, it must be evidence of some nonnatural, out-of-the-universe creator—what evidence is there that this creator is an intelligent god, per se? None. Endless other possibilities abound. As B. C. Johnson once quipped, one could just as easily speculate that the universe “was cooperatively constructed by several generations of billions of minor ghostly beings . . . all of them working together”—and thus—“the design argument, even if successful, does not come close to implying the existence of a God.”²² Or how about this one: all the wondrous design and complexity of the natural world is the result of a small, humble alien being from a mysterious other dimension—a being who is so humble that he didn’t want anyone to ever know that he was the superintelligent, superpowerful source of our entire universe, so he specifically planted the idea of a God in the early minds of those who would eventually create the world’s religions, just to throw humanity off his humble, alien scent.

      Like I said, possibilities abound—both imaginable and unimaginable. And none of them should be embraced without any confirming evidence. Including belief in God.

      Do I find it incredibly hard to fathom that the universe, with all its complexity, just “came to be” on its own, without any cause or source? You bet. But the only rational, reasonable conclusion to the intricacy of nature is agnosticism: we don’t know its cause or source, and maybe we never will. Deal with it. Accept it. Own it. Embrace it. And definitely don’t accept an irrational, unproven explanation as a suitable answer—especially if it involves the supernatural. As Albert Einstein wrote, in explication of his atheism, “we have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.”²³

       Living on a Prayer—or Not

      Theistic Claim: God exists because He answers prayers.

      Skeptical Response: All stories of answered prayers are merely anecdotal. The actual answering of prayers has never been proven in any sort of controlled, unbiased setting or objective experimental design.²⁴

      Oh, wait just a minute. That’s not quite true. There was that big Templeton study back in 2006.

      Led by Dr. Herbert Benson and funded by the Templeton Foundation to the tune of $2.4 million, this was the most rigorous, empirically sound study of the possible positive effects of prayer ever conducted in the history of science. The study was double-blind and involved a control group and an experimental group—just the right conditions to objectively measure the relationship between an independent variable (in this case, being prayed for or not) and a dependent variable (improved health). Here’s what Dr. Benson’s team did: they randomly divided up over 1,800 coronary bypass heart surgery patients from six different hospitals into three groups: the first group had Christians praying for them—the Christians prayed that the selected heart patients would have “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications”—and the patients in this group were told that people might or might not be praying for them. The second group of heart patients was not prayed for, but they were also told that they might or might not have people praying for them. The third group was prayed for, and these patients were told that they were definitely being prayed for. The Christians that were doing all the praying were given the first name and last initial of the specific patients they were to pray for. The result: there was virtually no difference in the recovery trajectories of each group, with all three groups experiencing more or less the same rates and levels of complications. The only minor differences that did arise actually worked against the prayers; for example, 18 percent of the patients who had been prayed for suffered major complications such as strokes or heart attacks, compared to only 13 percent of the patients who did not receive any prayers.²⁵

      There was also that Duke study back in 2003. In this three-year experiment, nearly 750 heart patients in nine different hospitals, all slated for coronary surgery, were prayed for by a variety of religious people, including Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. The results of this double-blind experiment were similarly conclusive: there were no significant differences in the recoveries or health outcomes of those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.²⁶

      The scientific study of the effectiveness of prayer—or rather, the lack of effectiveness—goes back at least 150 years, with the first known formal attempt to empirically discern prayer’s efficacy being carried out in 1872 by pioneering British statistician Francis Galton. He reasoned that since the British royal family received far more prayers on its behalf than everyone else—praying for the royal family was a structured part of Sunday services throughout Great Britain—then they should live longer and experience better health than everyone else. Galton statistically tested this hypothesis and (of course) found that the regular prayers of the mass of British people had no such discernible effect on the royal family—they did not, on average, live longer or enjoy better health than anyone else, given all relevant variables considered. Galton also conducted horticultural tests in which he prayed over randomly selected parcels of land; his prayers had no effect on which sections of land bore better, richer, stronger, or more abundant plant life. And thus, between Galton’s research in 1872 and Templeton’s in 2006, no compelling evidence has ever been brought forth empirically illustrating the power of prayer.²⁷

      This doesn’t mean, of course, that people don’t experience wondrous, inexplicable things all the time, or that every now and then someone’s prayers appear to have been answered. Such things happen frequently: a wife is told that her dying husband has a zero chance of recovery. Prayers are prayed. And then—voilà—the husband suddenly recovers, astonishing the doctors who are left dumbstruck, unable to explain his recovery. It’s nothing short of a miracle. While these things do happen, what is far and away more common is that the husband dies—a heap of fervent prayers notwithstanding. And also note that for every person who miraculously recovers, there’s another perfectly healthy person who suddenly, for no apparent reason, drops dead of some minor illness, or strange