Science, Religion, and the Search for Human Nature

Science, Religion, and the Search for Human Nature

This past Thursday we got to talking—as we seem often to do—about death and the possibility/lack of an afterlife. An afterlife of course suggests a meaning and purpose beyond our own individual experiences, a sort of cosmic shape that, as Karen Armstrong writes, many people require (we had read the "Afterword" of Armstrong's book The Battle for God). Some, however, do not "recoil in dread from the emptiness of the cosmos." Armstrong mentions Albert Camus: he "believed that rejecting God would enable men and women to concentrate all their attention and love upon humankind" (366).

I was struck by Camus's idea, but skeptical. First, is there any evidence that atheists are more loving and kind than religious people? (They certainly don't attract much loving kindness: witness polls which reveal that no single group or demographic is more distrusted by the population in general than atheists—which raises another interesting question: why?) Second, what is it about atheism that would encourage a greater sympathy for humanity? Does Camus (of all people) suggest that humans are naturally inclined to love, and so once supernatural beings are set aside the love will naturally flow to one's own earth-bound kind? I find this notion appealing, of course, but I remain unconvinced (would, in a world of atheists, such love extend beyond family and friends?).... It did seem to me that minus a deity there might be a greater tendency to revere the earth, this world, our own time and place. But then I may be projecting.