Discussions about the existence of God usually start by assuming that it is difficult to reconcile his existence with scientific ways of reasoning (Swinburne 2004). It puzzles me that this assumption is accepted so broadly. As a scientist, I see plenty of evidence for the existence of a god --- or multiple gods depending on the culture of interest. Yuval Harari (2014), in his book “Sapiens,” argues that gods, much like corporations, are fictions that gain their reality from our shared convictions.

We attribute a high level of reality to corporations. I agree with Harari that gods, and the churches that have been formed around them, have a comparable level of reality or lack thereof as corporations or any other concept that humans use for organizing their communities. I believe that drawing this connection can have a profound impact on our understanding of morality, because it enables us to discuss both the effectiveness of our fictions towards organizing ourselves, and the moral consequences of our adherence to the expectations of the fictions. It may even help us adapt our morality to meet the environmental challenges we are facing.

To understand why it can make sense to consider God as real, I will first discuss evidence for the existence of Santa Claus. If a scientist were tasked with determining whether Santa Claus exists, he or she would likely first collect information about what properties to look for. These may include bringing gifts to children on Christmas Eve or on Christmas morning. A possible experiment, based on this information, would be to select a sample of participants and instruct them to count all gift-wrapped boxes with tags “From Santa” in their house at any time between noon on December 24 and noon on December 25, and then do a control experiment on a day in June. There is little doubt that the difference would be statistically significant. In that sense Santa Claus “exists” and few people doubt this. On the other hand, every parent understands that Santa Claus is not a bearded man on a sleigh with some reindeer. Otherwise, the phenomenon would disappear, because there would be nobody to buy the gifts that kids receive “From Santa.”

This discussion may appear obvious to the point of ridiculous. However, scientists often make progress by rendering assumptions explicit that are otherwise taken for granted. If we agree that Santa Claus exists as some type of cultural phenomenon, we can discuss how this phenomenon is “implemented.” Consider the analogy to an encyclopedia. A traditional encyclopedia exists as a multi-volume series of books similar to other series. While some books have only one author, an encyclopedia has many. Wikipedia has even more authors, and they are not selected by editorial staff, as the authors of traditional encyclopedias are. Neither is Wikipedia normally sold printed and bound as a series of books. Nevertheless it would be very strange to ask the question “Does Wikipedia exist?” or “Do the authors of Wikipedia exist?” Of course they exist. They just don’t fit our usual image of books and authors.

From a scientific perspective, the difference between a bearded man Santa Claus and a crowd-sourced Santa Claus is one of implementation. In this interpretation, the parents who buy gifts and label them as “From Santa” act as living representation of a concept, much like a person can be a Wikipedia author as well as having many other roles. Santa Claus “exists” in the sense that children get gifts on the day designated by the Santa Claus narrative, but he is implemented through many parents rather than one living or formerly living person. Realizing that there was a Saint Nicholas, who lived in the fourth century (Seal 2005), contributes little to the question of the existence of Santa Claus. Many more children have been read Clement Moore’s book “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” (Moore 1822/1912) and are bound to imagine Santa Claus to look like its character. More importantly, the most relevant quality of Santa Clause is his gift giving, and kids do not imagine receiving gifts from a historical Saint.

There are countless contexts in which people use personifications of crowd-sourced entities. Even adults routinely use “Wikipedia says” as shortcut for “One or more authors of a Wikipedia article claim.” For corporations, this personification has been carried through in many legal contexts (Ripken 2009). Harari (2014) calls corporations “fictions” to capture that they are imagined concepts that are shared among potentially large groups of humans, who communicate about them using language. There is no physical meaning to a corporation, in the sense that its products, buildings, or employees could disappear without affecting the legal status of the corporation itself. In contrast, the legal dissolution of a corporation would eliminate it, even while products, buildings, and employees may still remain. Likewise, Catholic believers will treat bread as Christ’s flesh, provided that a priest, who is dressed in a specific garment, speaks certain words at a prescribed time.

Harari emphasizes that fictions are more influential in humans than in nonhuman species. Forty years ago, Richard Dawkins (1976) proposed the concept of memes as elements of culture, but intended the concept to be applicable to both human and nonhuman animals. Dawkins surmised that memes exhibit similar hereditary mechanisms as the genetic material that is the blueprint of our biological lives. Many authors have since debated the nature of memes (Aunger 2001), and the mechanisms through which they are inherited, but no clear consensus has been reached. When the concept of a meme has remained elusive, it may be that Dawkins combined a broad spectrum of cultural expression into a single term. Indeed, animals have been shown to have distinctive cultural traits (Whiten et al. 1999) that are passed on within communities and are not tied to physical characteristics.

Important as it is to understand the rich culture of nonhuman species, it may be at least as critical to recognize that written artifacts have created a reality for us that is so immediate that we are tempted to forget its roots in human imagination. While it can be argued that any element of culture is transmitted as meme, and even animals have culture, it is the large-scale human fictions, like corporations and churches, that have such a pervasive impact on our thinking that we no longer realize that they are fictions. As adults, we recognize that Santa Claus is not a man, but we certainly consider the corporations as real that produce the merchandize that we buy as the gifts that are supposedly from Santa Claus.

If we accept that a concept like a corporation gains its reality from crowd-sourced implementations, we cannot deny the reality of concepts like the Christian God. Arguments of atheists with religious people often center on the existence of a God. Just as there is no bearded old man called Santa Claus, the atheist viewpoint asserts that there is no such man called God either. That does not keep the crowd-sourced Christian God from having substantial impact. Just as parents keep the crowd-sourced Santa Claus phenomenon alive, it is possible for self-declared Christians to keep the Christian God phenomenon alive, even after they may have lost faith in conventional interpretations of his existence. After all, the crowd-sourced Christian God may represent behavior like altruism that we may want to continue implementing for its own sake because we consider it to be “good.”

When believers refuse to give up a belief in a deity because they are concerned that it will leave them in a moral vacuum, it may be important to acknowledge that there is no simple answer to their concerns. There is no one science or moral philosophy that will take the role of their God. Since the Christian God is culturally viewed as representing “good” behavior, it may be hard to see what could be good about giving up the belief in “good” behavior. However, it is important to recognize that this line of reasoning is cyclic: We believe that the Christian God encourages “good” behavior, because our sense of “good” is shaped by the very same Christian culture that created the God. Herein lies the difficulty of examining a crowd-sourced God. However, an extreme interpretation of the atheist viewpoint, which discounts the existence of a God to the point of not even discussing him, ignores the lack of a scientifically established alternative and misses the opportunity of scrutinizing the moral teachings of the crowd-sourced God.

Consider the Christian communities that put great effort into condemning and punishing people with sexual orientations that they view as inconsistent with their religious faith. They may do so even while few people outside these communities accept such efforts as just (Macgillivray 2008). Furthermore, consider the lack of interest of Christian communities in questions of environmental relevance. In my home state, North Dakota, flaring gas from oil wells is common practice, although the state is moderately religious, and flaring is known to be a major driver of climate change (Raupach et al. 2007). Christian culture is still heavily shaped by documents that have essentially remained unchanged for two millennia, and the Christian crowd-sourced God acts in ways that are correspondingly outdated. Christianity may not be the only belief system that supports homophobia; nor is it the only one that fails to give adequate consideration to the environment. However, the ancient roots of the Christian belief system make it difficult to achieve change.

Fictions establish moral values, and as such they affect morality. It may be tempting to discuss moral psychology based on justice concepts alone, as have Lawrence Kohlberg (1971) and other psychologists, but those approaches are ultimately limited. More recent work, especially related to the moral foundations theory (Graham and Haidt 2013), recognizes multiple foundations of moral thinking, including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The religious and non-religious share some of these values similarly. A person is bound to place value in care and fairness regardless of their belief system. The importance of care for others relates to our innate capacity for empathy, even if we have not been taught to care as part of religious beliefs. Likewise, we can deduce the importance of fairness from the thought experiment of taking the perspective of others, regardless of whether our belief system explicitly mandates reciprocity as a moral obligation, as most religions do. In contrast, expectations related to loyalty, authority, and sanctity depend more strongly on belief systems.

Respect for authority and loyalty to the group are important not only for religious believers. We can try to draw guidance from studies of our closest nonhuman relatives, as do primatologists like Frans de Waal (2013). However, there is no guarantee that instinctive mechanisms are enough for maintaining peace among humans, who have weapons far more destructive than those of nonhuman animals. Group-level violence can be observed in animals as well (Roscoe 2007) and, as such, is not limited to humans. Human language has some impact on social contracts through gossiping, as discussed by (Dunbar 1998). However, there is no “control” group of humans who evolved to live in a peaceful society without relying on fictions such as gods. Even atheists are immersed in a culture that was shaped by a religious past.

Secular moral philosophy was developed to provide guidance on matters of morality, but different variants may be contradictory (Johnston 2004). It could be argued that the equality-focused Marxist ideas that led to the formation of communist countries in the first half of the 20th century were one attempt to create nations based on what was understood about atheist morality at the time. Communism did not succeed and some of its implementations were anything but just (Tismaneanu 2012). Ultimately, when the Soviet Union collapsed, food shortages were a major factor (Sachs and Woo 1994). One could argue that the idea of a central planning committee that steers an entire economy is more comparable to the hypothetical bearded Santa Claus with reindeer and a sleigh than the more practical crowd-sourced alternative. It may be ironic that the first broadly implemented atheist set of beliefs would fall prey to relying too heavily on a central authority similar the somewhat naïve notion of an omniscient God.

Capitalist countries, in which the economy is decentralized, and in which many decisions are taken by small firms or entrepreneurial individuals, resemble the crowd-sourced Santa Claus with its millions of planning and shopping parents much better than the communist idea of central planning. The decentralized self-organization of capitalist countries indeed has been compared to evolutionary principles (Alchian 1950), no matter that most capitalist countries do not expect their citizens to adhere to scientific or atheist worldviews or to even accept the validity of the theory of evolution. One might expect that religious communities would shape their economies to match their belief system. If that were the case, one would expect capitalist countries, with their widespread adherence to beliefs in a strong God figure, to be rather more centralist than communist countries with their mandated atheism, but the opposite has been the case. Whether people accept the basic premises of science has not historically determined if they adopt structures of authority based on science, partially because we do not, even now, have a reliable science of the functioning of societies.

Not all aspects of Christianity defer responsibility to authority. The narrative of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament could be viewed as promoting a crowd-sourcing effort. If everybody is told to remember the rules, then each can help to enforce those rules. For this mechanism to work, it does not even matter whether people literally believe that some God entity gave a person named Moses tablets with instructions hammered into stone. All that is required of people is that they see it as their responsibility to enforce the laws and punish those who do not. It is irrelevant whether we view God as a father figure with a grey beard or, for that matter, any other specific type of being, just as adults know the limits of the notion of a Santa Claus has a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly. Both Santa Claus and God are symbols that allow a crowd-sourced societal enforcement of expectations.

What expectations ought to be enforced from a moral standpoint is a separate question. Neither the fiction of Santa Claus nor of the Christian God holds up well to scrutiny. The central passages of both narratives encourage environmental destruction. The promotion of the modern Santa Claus narrative was largely driven by advertising goals (Belk 1987). Considering the role of excessive consumption on environmental destruction, this may be one of the most problematic narratives of our times. The God of the Old Testament is no more environmentally conscientious. Consider God telling Noah “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (New International Version Biblica 2011: Genesis 1:28) It may be a matter of debate how big the role of this or other Bible verses has been in the current decline of nonhuman life on our planet. However, the term “subdue,” as applied to nonhuman life, hardly nurtures respect for such life. According to the Living Planet Report (WWF 2018), the population abundance of vertebrates worldwide has declined by 60% between 1970 and 2014.

When the Old Testament does not emphasize respect for nature, a lack of scientific understanding is hardly to blame. The concept of Earth as a Mother, which is prevalent in many aboriginal belief systems, is highly respectful of nonhuman life while being no more based on science than the Judeo-Christian heritage. Even with regard to human cooperation, the lessons of the Christian God are problematic. The Ten Commandments contain authority-defining aspects that are far more divisive than most modern moral understanding “… for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (New International Version Biblica 2011: Exodus 20:5).

We may then ask why we still accept such outdated moral instructions. While many answers can be given to that question, it is important to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a science of how humans could or should go about organizing themselves, especially considering the goal of our collective survival. Some environmental questions can be addressed scientifically, especially in the context of resource use. In “Environmental Footprints as Methods of Moral Reasoning” (Denton 2017) I have argued that sciences have a role in contributing to our morality for this reason. Since nothing in science makes our generation special, our actions ought to be defensible from the perspectives of future generations no less than our own. Most current belief systems are inconsistent with environmental bounds, and that may not be surprising considering the age of the documents on which most of them are based.

Translating scientific understanding about the environment into moral guidance is difficult and not only, or maybe not even primarily, for philosophical reasons. When attempting to relate science and morality, a first response may be to observe that we cannot conclude from what “is” to what “ought” to be. However, few people would argue against “collective survival” as a value and, in environmental contexts, that value alone allows inferences on resource consumption and conservation. The more serious problems may be technical. It is notoriously difficult to conclude from the interactions of individuals to broad collective phenomena. It is not enough for any one of us to live within environmental footprints. Our environmental problems will only be solved if we do so collectively, and the role of culture in this effort is well recognized (Hoffman 2015).

Morality ultimately impacts the collective behavior of society. The physical analog of this problem is discussed in the theory of phase transitions, which was the research area of my dissertation (Bohle 1995). Even for particles without any kind of decision-making capabilities, slight variations in pairwise interactions can make a difference between a stable mixture or separate liquids. For individuals, capable of decision-making, statements become even less reliable than for particles. In physics such a scenario would be called “active matter” and in computer science “agent-based systems,” but both physics and computer science can only represent a tiny portion of the intelligence of a mammal. It is unclear if we could ever understand behavior as complex as that of humans. The discipline of psychology has recently experienced many problems when trying to replicate experiments conducted on humans (Diener and Biswas-Diener 2017), even for questions much more basic than how moralities translate to the functioning of societies.

The continuing belief in a God that is described in science-defying documents may be at least partially driven by a lack of reliable alternatives for guiding our morality. We do not have a concept of authority that has been scientifically demonstrated to result in a stable society. The idea of equality was clearly insufficient in communist countries, and resulted in worse authoritarian abuses than the more conventional authority concepts that have remained in place in capitalist countries. That does not mean that the gods of any of the modern religions offer us a promise of long-term survival. Our changing climate alone suggests serious problems with our current morality (Oreskes and Conway 2014). Humans have only used fictions in their moral reasoning for some tens of thousands of years (Harari 2014), which is a comparatively short time on evolutionary timescales.

Modern society is the product of an amalgam of crowd-sourced gods and other fictions. Denying their existence does not do justice to their importance in maintaining peace. Neither does it remediate the potentially calamitous impact that ancient narratives have on our planet. There may be room for debate on whether we should use our scientific understanding to construct different narratives to act as their own gods, or whether we should reason with religions about what their God may have intended, assuming the God does not want his creation to perish. Whatever the conclusions to these questions may be, just as we cannot deny the relevance of the Santa Claus narrative on gift giving between December 24 and 25, we cannot deny that gods have a pervasive impact on our morality, and that it is far from trivial to determine which parts are helpful and which ones are not. We live our lives treating corporations as real and ignoring their fictitious roots, because their reality is so ubiquitous. In the same sense, I argue that gods should be granted a crowd-sourced existence that is commensurate with their impact on the world.

Acknowledgments

The philosophical concepts underlying this paper were developed together with Alan Denton, and benefited from valuable discussions with Karl-Heinz Bohle, Dennis Cooley, Carl Denton, Diana Denton, Frank Denton, Robert Foertsch, and Ron Gaul.

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