Andre Comte-Sponville (from The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality):
Man is not basically evil. He may be basically mediocre, but that’s not his fault. He does what he can with what he has or what he is, but what he is is not much and there is not much he can do. This should make us indulgent toward him—and even, occasionally, admiring of him. Materialism, as Julien La Mettrie put it, is the antidote for misanthropy. Because men are animals, it is pointless to hate or even despise them. Were we copies of God, we would be either ridiculous or terrifying. For animals produced by nature, we are not without our qualities and merits. Not bad, considering our base beginnings!
Who, a hundred thousand years ago, would have believed that these large monkeys would someday walk on the moon, produce Michelangelo and Mozart, Shakespeare and Einstein, invent the notion of human and even animal rights? We do our best, for instance, to protect endangered species such as whales and elephants—and rightly so. But were humanity itself to become an endangered species, as it might someday, whales and elephants would not lift a fin or a trunk to save us. Ecology is proper to mankind, and animal rights can exist only for humans. That says a lot about our species.
A religion of man? Definitely not. What a sorry god man would make! Humanism is not a religion; it is an ethics. Man is not our God; he is our neighbor. Humanity is not our church; it is our demand. To quote Montaigne, our task is that of “playing the man properly,” and it is an unending one. Ours is an illusionless humanism that cares about protecting our species, especially from itself. We must forgive humanity, and ourselves, for being what we are—neither angels nor beasts, as Montaigne put it before Pascal; neither slaves nor supermen…
Man is finite; man is exceptional. Grotesque if taken as an imitation of God, Homo Sapiens is by far the most extraordinary of animals. Human beings have astonishingly complex and flexible brains; they are capable of love, revolt and creativity; they have invented science and art, morals and law, religion and irreligion, philosophy and humor, gastronomy and eroticism…no other animal species could have achieved humanity’s best—or its worst.
Our pettiness, our narcissism and egotism, our rivalries, hatreds, resentments and jealousies, our distractions and satisfactions of personal comfort or self-love, our nasty or ignominious deeds…do they really need a God to explain them? Faced with the flagrant mediocrity of our species, how can we believe it was made by an infinitely perfect Creator?
It is far easier to reconcile man’s grandeur with a natural origin than it is to reconcile his “miserable nature,” as Pascal called it, with a divine origin! Natural selection suffices to explain our capacity for love and courage, intelligence and compassion. All of these things are selective advantages that make the transmission of our genes more probable. That we are capable of such hatred, violence and pettiness, on the other hand, seems to me to be beyond the reach of any explanatory theology, whereas Darwinism can explain it with no problem.
The better I know myself, the more difficult I find it to believe our origin is divine. The better I know others, too. Believing in God, I once wrote, is a sin of pride. Atheism, conversely, is a form of humility. No doubt about it: we are children of the earth—"humus,” whence “humility”. We would do better to accept our earthly nature and invent the sky that goes along with it.
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