Dr Michael Shermer | God does NOT exist

thank you thank you so much according to the Oxford University press's World Christian encyclopedia 84% of the world's population belongs to some form of organized religion and believes in some form of God which at the end of this year is about 5.9 billion people Christians have about two billion of those 5.9 billion about half of those are Catholics Muslims come in at just a tad over 1 billion Hindus at around 850 million Buddhists at almost 400 million and then a several hundred million other ethn religionists animists and other God Believers around the world world why

there are about 10,000 distinct religions each one of which may be further subdivided and classify Christians for example may be a portioned among about 34,000 different denominations from a scientist perspective such percentages uh believe cry out for an explanation why do so many people believe these things but from a skeptic's perspective which is what I do what are the chances that these guys got the right God and the right religion and the billions of other people that don't believe what they believe got it wrong when you leave the house tonight just ask yourself that question

what are the chances that they just happen to get it right and the tens of billions of people that live before Jesus they never heard of it the tens of billions of people that have lived since then who don't believe that they just happen to be wrong or is it more likely that all of these religion and God beliefs are socially constructed psychologically constructed and that none of them are right in any reality sense and any ontological sense they're all constructed this way in my few minutes I will present to you two lines of U

of evidence for this claim that humans created God and religion not vice versa the first is evolutionary theory the second is uh social psychology comparative world religions and mythology first we go back in time our story goes back millions of years so put yourself back in time let's say three and a half million years ago you're a little homed on the plains of Africa little australine your name is Lucy thank you a lot of people in America don't get that joke and you hear a rustle in the grass is it a dangerous predator or is

it just the wind well if you assume that the Russell in the grass is a dangerous predator and turns out it's just the wind you've made a type one error a false positive you thought a was connected to B but you're wrong that's a relatively harmless error to make you just become more cautious Vigilant skittish like you see animals on the plains of Africa today on the other hand if you think the Russell in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator your lunch congratulations you've just been a Darwin

Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing and we are the descendants of those who are most likely to make type one errors versus type two errors false positives rather than false negatives now why can't you just sit there in the grass and collect more data until you get it right because predators don't wait around for prey animals to collect more data that's why they're stealthy and stocked their prey so we evolve the propensity to make snap decisions the rule of thumb is assume all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators

and not the wind just in case assume everything you read and hear and see is real now what's the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator the wind is an inanimate force a dangerous predator is an intentional agent his intention is to eat me and that probably can't be good so we also evolved the capacity not only only to find these patterns and make those ones kinds of Errors instead of the other assume everything is real we also Infuse into those patterns intentional agency we just think everything is not just real but real and

animated alive even if it's invisible we now have a lot of evidence from cognitive psychology that this begins at a very early age perhaps as early as age two or three I I'll just give you one experiment among many a Jesse barings research with little children who are brought into a room and they're giv one of these little balls with velcro on it and you throw it at the dart board and it sticks on it that's the goal so they're brought into the room but they're not allowed to just do that with their good hand

they're turned they're turned around and they have to do it backwards so they're really bad at it as any of us would be and and then the experimenter leaves the room and and he says just do the best you can and come out and tell me how you did so of course they all walk up there and just stick it on the thing right all right part two the experiment uh the little children are brought in and each of them is told right next to the D dartboard is a chair here on the chair is

Princess an she's an invisible princess and she can see everything you're doing experimenter leaves the room all of a sudden the children stop going up to cheat the shadow of enforcement the the sort of infusion of agency in of an invisible being in a chair that sees what we do keeps track of our moral Behavior begins at a very early age our brains have evolved this capacity for agency that's the earliest God beliefs okay next line of evidence here's what happened about 5 to 7,000 years ago these animistic simple God beliefs and sort of social

religions that evolved to help us live together as a social primate species began to break down as populations Grew From a couple dozen to a couple hundred individuals to thousands tens of thousands millions of people in state societies from bands and tribes to Chieftain and States we needed some more formal means of behavior control and enforcing the rules of social cooperation two institutions evolve for that government and religion government says here's a copy of the rules everybody gets one and here's the punishments if you break the rules religion says if you think you got away

with it and you cheated the state nuh-uh there's an eye in the sky that knows all and sees all and in the next life Justice will be served that's a very powerful force for social control again if it happens with little kids you can do it with adults uh which is what churches are all about so that's the modern version that's what happens with that now second line of inquiry on social phenomenon and comparative world religions as the back of the envelope calculation within an order of magnitude accuracy we can safely uh conclude that over

the last 10,000 years of History there's been about 10,000 different religions and roughly about a thousand different gods again the house question for you which side of the room you leave on tonight what is the probability that Yahweh is the one true God in Aman ra Aphrodite Apollo ball brah Ganesha Isis mithis Osiris Shiva Thor Vishnu wanton Zeus and the other 986 gods are all false gods you guys are atheists just like me of all the gods I just rattled off some of us just go one God further now think about this as another thought

experiment if you happen to be born in say the United States or England in the in the 20th century there's a good chance that you believe that Yahweh is the all powerful and all- knowing creator of the universe who manifested into flesh through Jesus of Nazareth if you happen to have been born in India in the 20th century there's a very good chance you're a Hindu who believes that Brahma is the unchanging infinite Transcendent creator of all matter energy time and space and who manifests into flesh through Ganesha The Blue Elephant God who is the

most worshiped Divinity in India to an anthrop apologist from Mars these are all indistinguishable of course they're individually different but taking the big picture they're all indistinguishable in that sense even within the three great abrahamic religions who can say which is the right one Christians believe that Jesus is the savior and you must accept him to uh receive eternal life in heaven Jews do not accept Jesus as their savior neither do Muslims back roughly two billion of the world's 5.9 billion don't uh accept that so what happens to them again are they really right and

all those other good people who believe just as passionately as they do are wrong where Christians believe that the Bible is an inherent gospel handed down from the deity Muslims believe that the Quran is the perfect word of God it's unfortunate that the creator of the universe wrote more than one holy book Christians believe that Christ is the latest Prophet Muslims believe that Muhammad is the latest Prophet Mormons believe that Joseph Smith is the latest prophet and stretching this track of thought just a little bit more scientologists believe that the science fiction writer elron hubard

was the latest Prophet so many prophets So Little Time flood myths very common throughout history predating the biblical noaki flood Story by centuries the Epic of gilgames was WR written around 1800 BC warned by Babylonian Earth God eia that other gods were about to destroy all life on a FL by a flood UPN pusham was instructed to build an ark in the form of a cube a cube 120 cubits on each side 180 ft roughly speaking uh with seven floors each divided into nine compartments in which two of every animal is to be brought on

to the onto the ship virgin birth MTH likewise spring up throughout time and geography among those alleged to have been conceived without the usual assistance of the male lineage and by the way Mr Hitchens this comes from your brother's book dianis persus Buddha atus Krishna Horus Mercury Rus and of course Jesus consider the parallels between dionis the ancient Greek god of wine and Jesus of Nazareth both were said to have been born from a virgin mother who was a mortal woman but were fathered by the king of Heaven both allegedly returned from the dead transformed

water into wine introduced the idea of eating and drinking the Flesh and Blood of the Creator and to have been the Liberator of mankind flood myths not original to you virgin birth myths not original to you Resurrection myths not original to you Osiris is the Egyptian god of Life Death and fertility and is one of the oldest gods for whom records have survived Osiris first appears in the pyramid text around 2400 BC 2400 before that other guy by which time his following was already well established widely worshiped until the compulsory repression of pagan religions in

the early Christian era Osiris was not only the Redeemer and merciful judge of the dead and the afterlife he was also linked to fertility most notably inappropriately for the geography the flooding of the Nile by the way there is a geographical link between flood myths and bodies of water that flood not Universal floods just where you happen to live the kings of Egypt themselves were inextricably connected with Osiris in death such that when Osiris rose from the dead so would they in Union with him by the time of the New Kingdom not only the Pharaohs

but the Mortal men and women who built the Pyramid so here's what happened the Pharaohs figured out that if you offer eternal life for the workers they'll work work harder and you don't have to pay them as much so Mark's got that right one of the few things he got right the opiate of the masses the masses don't need Promises of an afterlife they need sustenance now this is a problem with religion so that's where that comes from first you just want as a pharaoh a king a leader you just want eternal life for yourself

forget the people well then you find out they'll work harder and they'll support you more if you give them some Ms like like eternal life shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus There Rose another Messiah apollonius of Asia Minor whose followers claimed he was the son of God that he was able to walk through closed doors heal the sick cast out demons and raised a dead girl back to life he was accused of Witchcraft sent to Rome before the court was jailed but escaped after he died his followers claimed he appeared to them and ascended into

heaven this um Redemption after being oppressed is a very common myth throughout history and you can understand the psychology behind it the Native Americans in 1890 began a messiah myth with a pude Indian Woka who received visions of God he was thought to be the Messiah or the deliverer of the Messiah in which the Buffalo would all return the white man would leave and go back to Europe and life would become better again this is what oppressed peoples do they make up stories of makes them feel better it's often claimed that you can't prove a

negative us atheist we can't prove there is no God okay I can prove that humans created gods and religions and I just did and there's there's 50 more stories like this of of the geographical location the time you happen to been born the anthropology of religion the psychology of religion the sociology of religion we we know exactly how this happens now all the way down to the neurology the Neuroscience of Rel we know that people are making this up now of course you can make the argument well God planted the god module in the brain

so he could talk to us or something how come we all seem to talk to different gods then are there just a bunch of them out there and they're competing for our brains why is it uh as as Dan Barker pointed out there's very little agreement amongst Believers why is that so my conclusion then is that as you think about the House vote tonight again what's more likely it's obvious that all these other gods are made up you already know that you agree with me on that you're all atheists for all those other gods so

I would just implore you to go one God further thank you all right [Music]