I've been spending far too much time in a Theists vs. Atheists Facebook group. In many ways it's depressing, but it also has encouraged me to sort out my thoughts in new ways.
One cliche catching on among atheists, to judge from the comments on posts in that group, is "Why should I take moral guidance from people who didn't know where the sun goes at night?" Morality isn't based on astronomy, oddly enough, but more to the point, the sun doesn't go anywhere at night. Maybe the problem is that clashing with religious nuts can be distracting and may nudge people to foolish positions.
To repeat, morality isn't based on astronomy or other sciences. If knowing that the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa makes someone more moral, why was the Nobel winner James D. Watson a lifelong racist and male supremacist? Why did the atheist journalist Christopher Hitchen enthusiastically support Dubya's criminal invasion of Iraq? Why are evolutionary biologists so often morally clueless? I don't mean that they're wrong (though they are) as much as that they don't understand morality to begin with.
Theists like to point to the ubiquity of belief in gods in most human cultures as something that shows theism to be plausible. It's not, of course, any more than the commonsense plausibility of geocentric astronomy proves that the sun really does go around the earth. But I can imagine evolutionary psychologists conjecturing that belief in gods, being so common, might have a genetic basis. Actually I don't have to imagine it, because at least one geneticist, Dean Hamer has done it, and published a book with the title The God Gene. I haven't read it, mainly because the promotional material indicated that Hamer's as confused about religion as he is about sexuality and scientific ethics. Among the many objections I have is that religion isn't a thing that can be explained scientifically. Anthropologists and sociologists have found that they can't define religion in a way that covers all the social phenomena that modern European Protestants call religious, or that excludes social phenomena that aren't considered religious. (This is why it doesn't bother me when theist apologists claim that atheism is a religion too. Yeah, so?) It's highly unlikely, then, that a biological explanation for "religion" can be found.
Suppose, nevertheless, that some scientist did find and prove a biological cause for religion. Biological determinists, given their record, would then want to argue that everybody should join a religion - it's in our genes! Evolution made us, and She doesn't make trash! You can't go against Science! It wouldn't prove any such thing, of course, but then I could point out that atheism is a religion and I'm already religious.
Actually, I thought first of the ubiquity of women covering their hair in cultures around the world. Like religion, it's not universal but it's common enough to make me wonder why so many cultures agree that women's nekkid heads are a problem. As the feminist Christine Stansell wrote some years ago (quoted here):
Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.
Notice that Stansell doesn't probe beneath the surface: where does this "old idea" of "sexual shame" come from? I began wondering what fiercely anti-Muslim male atheists would say if it were proved that women veil themselves because their genes tell them to, and if a woman doesn't listen to her genes, let her be anathema! The Apostle was, albeit unconsciously, a proto-biologist! Since most of them aren't distinguished for their deep feminist consciousness, I'm sure they'd adjust.
I think it's worth thinking about this question because so many atheists take for granted that Science is authoritative on social and moral questions in a way that Religion no longer is. A common trope is that religion is all about control, replete with paranoid suspicions of a mysterious They who brainwash and control us. Scientists have been all too happy to move in and take Religion's place in that area. My concern is that no one is qualified to occupy that space as Authority. Skeptics should be readier to deploy their critical faculties against Science too.
