Walking With Atheists:A Journey Into The Evolutionary Puzzles of Faith and Faithlessness.

"As an atheist I rape and murder as much as I want. The amount I want is zero" - Penn Jillette

I'm an atheist and it doesn't really cause me any problems in my life. In fact I'm very happy to be an atheist. I don't need religion, faith, or spirituality in my life to guide me. I sometimes do the wrong thing but I at least know when I've done the wrong thing. I have morality and I get it from my experience of being around others, being aware of their feelings, and trying to bring happiness and pleasure, rather than pain, into people's lives. 

I can, and you can, have a sense of morality and it doesn't need to, in my view - shouldn't, come from religion. If you're only being kind because you're worried that your God, or gods, will punish you at some unspecified later date then what sort of person does that make you? Can't you just be kind because kindness itself is its own reward? Because being kind is a basic condition for humanity?

Dr Will Gervais is a cultural evolutionary psychologist (these jobs exist! How can I get one?) for London's Brunel University and, with his team, he had spent over a decade scientifically researching atheism. He was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online (so very much not 'in the Pub') this week for Atheism, Religion, and Human Nature:The Evolutionary Puzzles of Faith and Atheism and it was an interesting talk, if one that went off on some rather strange tangents.

But, hey, atheists are weird right - so that's to be expected. Dr Gervais's belief is that it's not just atheists that are weird. All humans are weird are not just because, in his examples, they do things like ski-jumping and hammer nails into their face (told you some of the tangents were odd) but because we do things that other animals don't do.

Like build buildings and make art. Though I'd argue that animals do build buildings (the nests of birds, the dams of beavers, even anthills) and they do make art (not so much the painting elephants and more the bowerbirds and their collection of all things blue). Which Dr Gervais went on to concede himself. He did make the case, however, that one things animals haven't done is evolve, or invent, any religions.

As far as we can tell. We can't read the minds of animals (or each other) but they certainly don't appear to have any religious beliefs. But in the human story, religions appear in every part of the world and throughout all of our history and people get so into their religion they are willing to fight and, sometimes, die for it. For what I now imagine were reasons of contention, Dr Gervais suggested that one of the fastest growing religious groups in the world today is the group that includes me:- atheists and agnostics.

A thought which led Dr Gervais to asking himself two questions. (1) How is it we became the only religious species on the planet? (2) How come religion is not universal? How come people like me don't buy into it. Slightly disappointingly, the doc then didn't really answer those questions and, instead, went on a different, although interesting and illuminating, angle. 

One that involved lots of graphs, illustrations of (the late great) Hannibal Lecter, Richard Dawkins, Johnny Cash, and the 19th century philosopher William James as well as bizarre references to ivory poaching, unicycles, and smoking crack. At one point he even managed to shoehorn in a fictional story about a man having sex with a chicken carcass before cooking it and eating it. You had to be there, perhaps. At the talk that is, not in the chicken fucker's bedroom or kitchen.

About twenty years back there was a boom in interest in studying atheism. Popular books and scholarly papers were both released and some of them had it that religious belief was somehow 'natural' or a cognitive default and that atheism was something you had to work at and is somehow 'unnatural'. Although I'd contest this. Atheism came very naturally to me and though I asked myself questions about it, and continue to do so, it's always been the answer for me.

So how many of 'us' are there? How many atheists are out there in the world? It's not an easy question to get an answer too. Not least because atheism is illegal in some countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates). In all of those countries (and others including Yemen, Pakistan, Qatar, Maldives, Brunei, Somalia, Nigeria, and Mauritania) atheism, or more specifically apostasy, is punishable with death.

Understandably, people in those countries who don't believe in God are reticent about saying so but even in more liberal countries there is no serious or reliable data. Some say there are about seven hundred million atheists/agnostics on the planet. In the US (in places, a very religious country) a 2017 survey showed that 3% of the population identified as atheists but when the same people were asked if they believed in God, 12% of respondents said they did not.

It seems they don't want to be labelled atheists - even though they are atheists. That's because there is, in America certainly - but also in many other countries, a negative view of atheism and atheists. Another American survey asked people if they would vote for or let their son or daughter marry various different types of person:- a black person, a Muslim, a Jew, a woman (for the voting one), or an atheist.

Atheists scored lower than all other groups (this survey is regularly carried out and until twenty years ago the gays used to be voted lowest but they overtook the atheists about twenty years ago) and in one survey people said they would rather trust a convicted rapist than an atheist. Which is shocking but sadly not surprising when you see who they've just chosen for their next president.

What drives the negative perception of atheism is, to return to Penn Jillette's quote, a belief they are untrustworthy, that they have no religion to guide their morality and are therefore free to do as they wish. For some reason, some religious people seem to assume that without religion everyone wants to go around raping and murdering whereas most people have no desire whatsoever to rape or murder.

One survey found respondents suggesting that atheists were the most likely group to commit incest, kick a puppy, or become a serial killer and yet I've never done any of those things and to the best of my knowledge neither have any of my atheist friends. Slightly depressingly, these survey results were replicated in countries other than America (which can be a bit of an outlier, let's be honest).

Even in Canada and even in the world's most secular country, Czechia. Finland was the only country where respondents didn't think that. Good on the Finns. This was all interesting stuff and it was made very clear that atheists are hugely discriminated against all over the world but at the same time I've never felt discriminated against because of my atheism (though, thankfully, I don't live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar) and, more to the point, why didn't Dr Gervais answer the two questions he asked at the start of the talk.

I can only assume it is because he is an atheist and therefore highly untrustworthy! He was, however, a good speaker and it was a good talk. A Q&A took in humanism, neurodiversity, utilitarianism, the 'Buddhism problem' (a religion but with no gods), and the difference between atheists and agnostics (in my view, all agnostics are atheists even if not all atheists are agnostics) and even Will's dog (an atheist dog) made an appearance. Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Dr Kat Ford for hosting, thanks to Dr Gervais, and, most of all, thanks to God. You non-existent bastard.