What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

are against them, but more often than not, they don’t.

      Think about it: if praying worked, no prayed-for mothers would ever die of breast cancer; no prayed-for teenagers would ever die on the operating table; no prayed-for dogs or cats would ever fail to return home; hundreds of thousands of praying Tutsi families hiding throughout the woods, alleys, attics, and cellars of Rwanda in 1994 would not have been found and hacked to death by Hutu marauders; hundreds of thousands of trains packed with praying Jewish families on the way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka in the 1940s would have never reached their destinations; and tens of millions of praying people would never die from starvation resulting from a lack of rain. Heck, three hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century alone—clearly, all of their prayers, and their parents’ prayers, and their children’s prayers, and their spouses’ prayers, did not have the hoped-for healing effect.

      In the face of prayer’s inefficacy, believers will always say: God may not answer your prayer in the way you want—but He has a plan for you nonetheless and knows better. Of course, they offer no tangible evidence for this assertion. But even if it were true—especially if it were true—then why bother praying? If you believe that God already has a plan for you and yours, then praying for any given outcome for you and yours makes no sense. It’s all so deeply irrational in a way that only religious faith can be: you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child recovers, and that’s evidence that prayer works—or, more likely, you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child dies, and that’s evidence that God answered your prayer but just in a different way than you wanted, because God has a plan and knows better.

      Talk about classic “heads I win, tails you lose” balderdash that defies basic rational scrutiny.

      And, well, that’s because praying is not rational. It is simply—and understandably—what most humans do when there’s nothing left for them to do in dire, scary, or painful situations. It is what theists do when they have little or no control over a situation that they’d like to change. It’s what religious men and women do when they need to comfort themselves during trying times. And if it does provide them all with even a modicum of comfort and hope during such times, so be it. Such self-consolation can be a good thing. But it doesn’t come close to proving the existence of God.

      Finally, on this matter of prayer: even if it could actually be proven that prayers to God do in fact work—that an all-powerful deity heeds earnest mental petitions—then that raises the question: What sort of deity would this be, ethically speaking? One that helps suffering or scared humans only when and if they ask/plead/implore? Seems downright malevolent. As American philosopher Georges Rey commented, “the idea of an omni-god that would permit, for example, children to die slowly from leukemia is already pretty puzzling; but to permit this to happen unless someone prays to Him to prevent it—this verges on a certain sort of sadism and moral incoherence.”²⁸

       Proving in the Wrong Direction

      Theistic Claim: Well, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist—so there!

      Skeptical Response: The fact that I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist is not an argument that he does. With that kind of fallacious argumentation, just about anything and everything that anyone anywhere has ever claimed to be true could ostensibly be true. Check it out:

       • “There are tiny, imperceptible leprechauns running around in space, singing Peruvian folk songs. You can’t prove that there aren’t!”

       • “All plants were created by Plantomina, an all-powerful, supernatural witch who flies around the universe creating plants on various planets. You can’t prove that Plantomina isn’t real!”

       • “Every time I play The White Album, a goat in Bolivia feels melancholy. You can’t prove that it doesn’t!”

      And so on, ad infinitum.

      It’s a wretched way to establish a claim as empirically true. In fact, it’s not establishing any truth at all—it’s just avoiding having to prove one’s assertion by turning the tables and making the skeptical doubter bear the burden of proof. But the skeptical doubter isn’t making any claims. She’s just doubting the supernatural claim—in this case, the religious claim that God exists. And any time someone makes such a claim, especially an amazing, highly miraculous claim like the existence of a magical deity—he or she bears the burden of proof; it is his or her job to prove it true, not the skeptic’s job to prove it false.

      And furthermore, when the theist claims that the atheist can’t prove that God does not exist, that raises the question: Which God? Are you demanding that Zeus be proven not to exist? Thor? Ra? Hachiman? Amenhotep? Inti? The God of the Jews? The Heavenly Father of Mormonism? Allah, the god of Islam? And are these all distinct gods—each which must be individually disproven not to exist—or are they all the same god? But even if we stick with the, you know, most popular “God” that American Christians claim to believe in—no one can ever offer a clear, objective definition of this most generic of gods. Everyone has their own understanding of Him—some traditional, others personal, some metaphorical, and still others psychedelic. And then, just to shoot more distracting confetti into the court room, the theist will regularly claim that the God she believes in is incomprehensible, indefinable, ineffable, and unknowable! But to say that God is incomprehensible is to frankly acknowledge that any clear definition of God cannot be offered—for how can you define what cannot be comprehended or grasped?

      When the atheist is asked to disprove the existence of God, she faces a never-ending shell game, where the target is ever shifting, the subject impossible to pin down, and the matter under question ultimately one big dynamic sleight of hand—or sleight of mind, in this case. But at least in a real shell game, the manipulator knows where the ball is hiding. When it comes to theism, even the religious believer in God is peddling something ultimately unknowable, inscrutable, ineffable, invisible, undetectable, indefinable, imperceptible, indiscernible—or more succinctly: not there.

       Ye of Lots of Faith?

      There are countless additional ways in which religious people try to prove the existence of God. None work. None hold up to any sort of evidentiary scrutiny. And that’s when they inevitably, and conveniently, turn to faith in defense of their claim that God exists. Thus, the final “argument” for belief in God is not based on any verifiable evidence or sound logic but rather faith. And as Mark Twain rightly quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Or as Twain’s contemporary and fellow wit Ambrose Bierce put it, faith is “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”²⁹ Or as the much less humorous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, faith is nothing more than “the will to avoid knowing what is true.”³⁰

      While faith may certainly be comforting, and it may be inspiring, and it clearly holds a place of value in most people’s hearts as they navigate the challenges of life, it is, nonetheless, an inherently poor way to establish the truth of anything. For, as American philosopher George Smith asserts, the essence of faith is “to consider an idea true even though it cannot meet the test of truth . . . faith is required only for those beliefs that cannot be defended.”³¹

      Even Paul, the true founder of Christianity, honestly articulated the meaning of faith nearly two thousand years ago, which he defines in Hebrews 11 of the New Testament as confidence in what is hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. That is, faith is believing in what one wishes and hopes to be true (not what is true) and being convinced of things even without evidence of their empirical reality. And this is exactly what the theist does: hangs the entire corpus of her morality upon faith in something that doesn’t even exist.

      And this will not do.

      Morality