God As A `Needless Hypothesis'

It is not necessary to believe in “God to be a good person. In a way the traditional notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual but not, religious ... Some of the best people in history did not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were committed in His name.“

These are not the words of a free-thinking rationalist that religious fanatics are gunning for. They are the words of Pope Francis.

More than a century after Nietzsche proclaimed his demise, is humankind beginning to feel that ­ like an adolescent who outgrows childish clothes ­ we have outgrown the psychological, emotional and spiritual need of God?
Socio-biologists claim that religion, and the concept of God not only helped our proto-human ancestors understand the forces of nature, such as thunder and lightning, but also served an evolutionary purpose. Those who worshipped a particular deity formed a clan, or tribe, the members of which would help each other in conflicts with other clans and in the sharing of resources such as food, so as to enhance the chances of survival of the entire group.

According to socio-biology , in prehistory , religion served an evolutionary end. The more cohesive a factor religion was in bonding a clan together, and making it better equipped to overcome competing claims in the struggle for survival, the more effective it became as an evolutionary tool.

From the outset, religions were genetically programmed to vie with each in fierce, often lethally violent, competition.`Stronger' religions ­ which not only had a comparatively larger number of followers, but whose adherents were more committed to their common faith system and therefore to each other ­ prevailed over `weaker' religions which lacked both numbers and unswerving singleness of belief.

Fanaticism, unquestioning and unquestionable dogma, became the adrenaline, the testosterone, of religion; violence, latent or manifest, lay at the heart of all religious creeds.

Spiritual masters like Buddha and Mahavira, Jesus and Muhammad and Guru Nanak ­ evolutionary mutants who saw through the illusory divisiveness of religious barriers to the undifferentia ted unity of the human spirit ­ preached a gospel of oneness.

But their followers subverted their teachings to foster separateness and strife, from the Crusades, to the civil war in Buddhist Sri Lanka, to Khalistani terrorism, to the rise of the IS and the killing of rationalists in India and Bang ladesh by Hindu and Islamist fanatics.

From being an aid to human evolution, religion has become one of the most serious threats to civilisation, a construct based not just on the airy-fairy ideal of a common humanity but on the literally down-to-Earth reality that all of us share a common planet equally endangered by environmental despoilation and religio-political jingoism.

The backlash against religion has been spearheaded by scientists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who have cogently and eloquently argued that far from being a negation of moral codes and an ethical life, atheism as a form of consciousness-raising is an affirmation of spiritual transcendence.

When the French philosophermathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace presented a copy of his monumental work on the creation of the universe, Mécanique Céleste, to Napoleon, the soldier-emperor asked, why there was no mention of God in the book. Laplace replied “I had no need of that hypothesis.“

Is it time we outgrew that `needless hypothesis'? Those who say it is, can do so with the blessing of Pope Francis.