You don’t have to be a behaviourist to enjoy people watching.
Years ago, I used to walk to and from the station on my way to catch the steam train to the grammar school. (I know that sounds as though I have been around since the time of Charles Dickens, but it’s more a comment on the speed of change in my lifetime.) Emblazoned in my memory of that walk is the vision of an old woman in her semi-basement who sat looking out of her open window, which was at pavement level. She shamelessly watched the legs of the world go by in the foreground (this was before the concept of ‘upskirting’ had reared its ugly head), and the motor traffic on Station Road in the background. It looked to me as if she thought she was invisible to us passers-by due to being behind the frame of the opening! In those days before television, I suppose this was what passed for entertainment… That’s how low the bar of ‘purpose for our existence’ is!
Since then, I’ve collected multiple examples of Christians claiming, on camera, that their ‘god’ is responsible for many things. The historian Tom Holland asserts that the concepts of science, homosexuality and heterosexuality, monogamy, secularism, and creation all come from Christianity, while the Christian evangelist Glen Scrivener claims that Jesus gave us compassion, empathy, hospitals, hospices, and charity.
Many others proclaim that our morals are entirely due to Christ.
How?
Did ‘God’ dispense them down onto us in a sort of celestial toilet flush of golden rain?
Focusing on the example of monogamy, it seems to me, as a retired science teacher, that Christians have been undereducated in biology. Judging by the behaviour of different animals, many birds and mammals are more ‘Christian’ than us! We are only about seventh in the monogamy ranking. According to Dr Mark Dyble at the University of Cambridge, the Californian deermouse gets top billing with a 100% monogamy rating (as a result of their mating for life). If you want a pet whose love you can rely on, maybe consider getting one of those!
At 66% in the monogamy league table, we humans are at least well above gorillas, although a little below beavers. Not much of a consolation for Christians, perhaps. Indeed, one of our closest rivals for the top spot is the meerkat (‘Compare the meerkat’ takes on a new significance!)
Like any good Whist player, Glen Scrivener scoops up every behaviour that he likes and discards (yes, dis-CARDS) the traits that he rejects. Here you can see him jumping on my position when it suits him. It even suits him to claim that my atheism is Christian!
What yardsticks are they using to make these judgements? I contend that it is the biological imperative—following that which most enables individual Homo sapiens not to die today and best reduces the possibility of them dying tomorrow—that is behind much of what makes us human, for good and ill, not the Christians’ non-evidential ‘god’. Not accepting this is the argument from incredulity fallacy.
If only Christians studied a Modes of Life module… Well, then they would know that all possible strategies are exhibited by diverse organisms: predation, parasitism, saprophytism, commensalism, symbiosis, scavenging, theft, and compassionate sharing, to name a few. If you watch David Attenborough’s recent and stunning six-part Kingdom series, you will see that there’s nothing original about ‘sin’!
The only criterion that determines success in nature is: ‘Does it work?’ If it doesn’t, the penalty might be an early death. Coming to realise this fact is a revelation that Christians rarely seem to achieve, and it is this inability that explains why they adopt the much simpler pseudo-explanation that such ‘goodness’ must come ‘from’ their non-evidential ‘god’. In actuality, ‘goodness’ only pertains to a species in the same way as patriotism pertains to sovereignty: it’s a mental fabrication.
Morality, like monogamy, is also a matter of our personal choice. That’s not to say we shouldn’t subscribe to more civilised versions of it; it’s just that it is sensible to recognise the fact that ‘oughts’ do not carry the same weight as ‘is-es’. Oughts are just thoughts while is-es are actions. Respect to Hume.
Christians are ‘from-ists’ rather than ‘ought-ists’, one might say.
If we didn’t believe that behaviour is under conscious control, we wouldn’t have crimes or punishments for those who commit them. There would be no accountability; we might even adopt the ridiculous notion that another person can ‘take on’ our guilt and die for our sins! Is it me, or does Christian doctrine sound like Orwellian doublespeak?
The natural environment is one thing. Behaviours and attitudes are something else, a very flakey something else… We have no choice whether or not we live on this stage, but how we act on it is up to us. As many Christians exemplify, even hypocrisy is available as a tactic! Bah-humbug to determinism!
How are we going to spread such a difficult understanding?
Here’s a suggestion…
We must Break FREE!
We have to Break FREE!
We’ve got to Break FREE!
Atheism UK (AUK) launched the BreakFREE! campaign at ‘Hitchmas’, which featured Sir Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray, and Lawrence Krauss celebrating the life of their late friend Christopher Hitchens in the Royal Geographical Society’s hall on 14 December 2024. You can join AUK or make a donation and receive a BreakFREE! button badge at our website: atheismuk.com.
Look out for our forthcoming BreakFREE! YouTube channel.
More of my content is on Patreon: Freethought Productions (subscriptions gratefully accepted).
Related reading
A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp
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