Does God actually matter?

Should animals care whether you are an atheist or a believer?

There has, of late, been a lot of speculation about people turning from atheism to religion. In particular, one of these “New Theists,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, recently went from the atheism that she turned to when she abandoned Islam to embracing, of all things, Catholicism.

While I don’t see any reason not to take her at her word, and her sincerity or lack thereof is really none of my business, there is much speculation that some new theists don’t actually believe any of it but have come to believe that religion is necessary to make most people behave less reprehensibly. Perhaps the reason for the choice of Christianity is that it is sufficiently removed from its violent past to make it a better option than Islam.

Without getting into a tedious comparison between these two related explanations for the origin of the universe and codes of good behavior, I think it is a good idea to instead take a step back and consider whether religion actually is the way to make people behave a lot, or even a bit, better.  

It certainly doesn’t seem obvious. As we all know, lots of religious people do horrendous things, particularly in the name of religion.

Also, there is something a bit distasteful about the implication that at least some people in “leadership” positions might turn to religion not because they believe any of it but to show the way for the masses. The implication is that there is an elite that doesn’t necessarily need religion in order to behave nicely, but the stupid people do because they will never find their way to ethical behavior without the threat of eternal damnation.

While I have never been one to underestimate the amount of stupidity of which humans are capable, I have also never seen much difference in the level of stupidity, or loathsome behavior, found in the elites as opposed to the masses who haven’t been the recipients of a high-level education.

What is perhaps even more salient is that I know lots of atheists and many of them seem to behave just fine, and some of them are particularly exemplary. My personal experience certainly supports the conclusion that belief or non-belief in the supernatural honestly doesn’t seem that relevant to goodness. Certainly when it comes to our treatment of animals, the ethical issue I probably think about the most, it definitely doesn’t seem to matter at all whether you are religious.

Interestingly, a fairly high proportion of animal rights activists are atheists, and they take ethics very seriously. I imagine that, like me, they believe something along the lines of: given that this world is all there is, and this extraordinary array of creatures has arisen from natural selection, and, somehow, even though we don’t fully understand it, consciousness is one of the characteristics that has somehow come into existence as part of that process, and because there are conscious animals who can experience suffering, and because our own personal experiences have demonstrated that suffering is very bad, we shouldn’t cause animals to suffer.

And we should do everything we can to preserve this planet and everyone on it because there is no one coming to save us, and all that is left of us when we die is our legacy of not causing, and even preventing, suffering, which will hopefully live on in other hearts and minds.

Or, if they’re not the type to spell everything out: animals are amazing and we shouldn’t harm them if we don’t have to. It’s not ethical rocket science.

Anyway, there are clearly reasons why a person who doesn’t believe in a god, or the afterlife, might cherish all the life, and especially the conscious life, on this blue dot. We may be the only planet that even has life. Even if not, we may never know if we are the only planet that has life. Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the rest are still complete fantasy, and there is no serious reason to believe that they won’t continue to be so, and many, many reasons to think that they will.

But what about religious people? Isn’t it (or shouldn’t it be) exactly the same outcome when it comes to how we should treat animals? I guess I’m not talking about all religions, but if you are a person who believes in an “all-powerful God with a capital G” who created the planet and everyone and everything on it, why would you ever think that God’s goal was for you to desecrate it and destroy it? If God invented consciousness and bestowed it upon some creatures, was it so you could torture them? Does God look at factory farms and think, “Yeah, that’s just what I had in mind when I invented chickens!” That just seems remarkably unlikely, unless God is a sadist, in which case we are all completely screwed.

But if God is good, and God made humans his favorite species — but made them so that they did not actually have to feast on the bodies of other animals but could sustain themselves with non-conscious life — and then plonked us down here with the job of figuring it all out, isn’t that a sign that He wants us to learn to respect all that has been created?

Perhaps that is the very challenge God presented us with when he put us here. It honestly seems pretty likely (assuming, you know, God). It also helps to explain why the books He gave us as guides to figuring out His wishes are so ambiguous and contradictory and difficult to understand. He wanted it that way, so we could so some of the work in figuring it out ourselves.

Fundamentally (so to speak), while religions do not teach this, and, as a result, many religious people completely disregard animals, why would anyone think that they can rely on religious leaders to be absolutely sure about what God really wants — when the evidence is all around us that He created the world for us to enjoy, but also for us to respect and cherish? And one would want to be particularly careful about this since getting it right is a very high-stakes issue that could affect where you are going to spend eternity. Eternity!

Are people so sure that their priests and imams and ministers and rabbis and whatever are so absolutely certain to be right that they should ignore the evidence in front of them? Are they so willing to bet their eternal future on the idea that God is a monster who bestowed consciousness so widely on the creatures of the earth so that we, God’s favorites, could cause suffering to innocents without compunction?

As I said, I’m not religious, and it seems unlikely that’s going to change. But, of course, it could. I don’t actually have control over my future self, and, though I can make predictions, I cannot tell you exactly who she (I?) will be or will think about the nature of the universe.

But if I do end up going back to religion, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, would I change anything I do or think or believe vis a vis animals? Of course not.

If I did, I would truly believe that — assuming the God I come to believe in is at all the judgmental type — I would end up in hell.