I Need It To Be Real

"I believe in science. I believe in evolution. I believe in Nate Silver and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I do admit he could be a kind of an asshole. I cannot get behind some supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes. I don't believe a billion Indians are going to hell. I don't think we get cancer to learn life lessons, and I don't believe that people die young because God needs another angel. I think it's just bullshit, and on some level, I think we all know that, I mean, don't you?... Look I understand that religion makes it easier to deal with all of the random shitty things that happen to us. And I wish I could get on that ride, I'm sure I would be happier. But I can't . Feeling aren't enough. I need it to be real."

         -Piper Chapman (Orange is the New Black)

How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World

Science has long advanced in part due to its rejection of religion as it uncovered information inconvenient for believers and their institutions

Mar 14, 2014 |By Mitchell Stephens

 

Editor's Note: Excerpted with permission from Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, by Mitchell Stephens. Available from Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2014.

Science’s contributions to the spread of disbelief is the least controversial segment of the virtuous cycle for which I am arguing in seventeenth-century Europe. For science’s methods are clearly troublesome for religion. The devout, to begin with, are not wont to view their precepts merely as propositions to be controverted or confirmed. The orthodox, as a rule, are used to arguments being settled by authority, not experiment. The hope belief offers does not always stand up well to observation and experience: life sometimes works out okay; sometimes it doesn’t. Faith, particularly of the “certain-because-impossible” variety, and reason have long been tussling. Miracles are notoriously miserly with evidence. Revelation does not lend itself to experimental verification. And the mystical, by its nature, fails to produce facts.

When it is employed, the scientific method, consequently, has a way of uncovering information that is inconvenient for religion. Conflicts are inevitable with ancient holy books—most of which do end up proclaiming something or other on “how” the earth works or “heaven goes.” Scientists in these centuries diverged from Scripture at their peril. Galileo learned that. But in the end the greater cost would be borne by the holy books. Catholic leaders did indeed have reason to fear that, in taking Copernicus’ theory seriously, Galileo might encourage people to take the Bible less seriously.