The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould once proposed a truce between science and religion. Science, he argued, governs facts, whereas religion governs meaning. And since each has its own “non-overlapping magisteria,” or domain of authority, each can peacefully coexist with the other.
Gould’s proposition, while well-intentioned, is also incredibly misleading. First of all, as we’ve seen in a previous post, Socrates had effectively divorced morality from religion, showing us that the nature of morality is inescapably secular. On these grounds alone, it could be argued, Gould has been refuted, as the domain of values is not an appropriate province of religion to begin with, or at least not exclusively so. That was Socrates’s surprising, but ultimately convincing, conclusion in the Euthyphro dialogue, where he showed that divine command theory ultimately collapses into arbitrariness. Moral philosophy is therefore its own distinct domain, one that can, admittedly, take insights from both science and religion, but that must operate independently.
But Gould was wrong twice over. Religion also makes claims about the natural world, and inevitably so. Saint Paul, after all, was the one who said, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14), and also that “your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). As a Christian, belief in the literal resurrection of Christ doesn’t seem to be optional, and, consequently, represents both an empirical claim and a full encroachment into the “realm of facts.”
The supposed non-overlapping magisteria, then, are doing quite a lot of overlapping, after all. Religion and science both have plenty of things to say about the physical, psychological, and moral worlds, and there is no reason for either of them to “stay in their own lanes.” And we know, from experience, that they don’t. The only question, then, is which we should be paying attention to, and which can better inform our understanding of both the physical and moral landscapes.
When framed this way, science and religion necessarily compete with each other, because they present two antagonistic ways of acquiring knowledge about the world. Whereas religion relies on revelation, faith, and, ultimately, appeals to authority, science relies on experimentation, testing, and institutional mechanisms for error-correction. Neither science nor religion alone can determine our ethics—remember, moral philosophy is its own domain—but both can inform our values, and since religion and science are mutually incompatible, we need to determine which is the more effective overall approach to understanding the world.
The key to answering this crucial question, and to confidently proclaiming the superiority of science over religion—both in its description of the physical world and in its ability to inform our views about ethics—is the concept of knowledge convergence. It’s also the key to understanding the venerable tradition of agnosticism, which we’ll get to in a bit. But first, let’s see how convergence works.
Imagine, for example, two physicists, one working in the United States and speaking English, and the other working in China, speaking Mandarin. Despite living in separate corners of the globe and within two distinct cultures, both physicists nonetheless accept, for instance, exactly the same laws of thermodynamics, and can seamlessly converse with one another on the topic. There is no Eastern orthodox thermodynamics, nor is there a Western reformed quantum mechanics; for the most part, physics is physics, and chemistry is chemistry, regardless of where you were raised and which language you speak. This is an underappreciated yet phenomenal fact. (As an aside, we even see convergence in moral philosophy, as, for example, when we find some variation of the Golden Rule present in virtually every serious ethical framework.)
While interpretations of scientific findings can, of course, vary—for example, questions regarding the ultimate implications of quantum mechanics—the practical, technological, and mathematical aspects of established fields of science can be widely shared, understood, and implemented. While there will always be areas of doubt, ignorance, and speculation in science, this merely creates additional space for future convergence.1
Convergence of knowledge, then—developed by those with real expertise in their respective fields—is a strong indication that something is probably true, or at least approaching a closer approximation to the truth. That also means, conversely, that divergence of knowledge is a strong indication of the opposite—namely, our ignorance regarding some topic.2 Whereas science is science anywhere in the world, religion is most definitely not religion—not even across the same neighborhood.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE), the famous Roman statesman, lawyer, and philosopher—who rose to prominence as one of Rome’s greatest orators and rhetoricians and did much to transmit Greek philosophy to the Roman world and beyond—in his book The Nature of the Gods, may have been the first person to fully articulate this view. Of course, he didn’t know anything about modern science, but he did know quite a bit about the philosophy of God and religion in the ancient world. In presenting the religious views of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics (of which he most closely identified), Cicero made this observation:
On this question [the nature of the gods], the pronouncements of highly learned men are so varied and so much at odds with each other that inevitably they strongly suggest that the explanation is human ignorance, and that the Academics have been wise to withhold assent on matters of such uncertainty; for what can be more degrading than rash judgement, and what can be so rash and unworthy of the serious and sustained attention of a philosopher, as either to hold a false opinion or to defend without hesitation propositions inadequately examined and grasped?3
We can trust the laws of thermodynamics because the most reputable scientists in the world concede to their veracity—after rigorous testing and review. The laws were developed within a system of active criticism, and have survived enough attempts at refutation that we can safely take them to be facts. We also don’t have to adjudicate between competing sets of thermodynamic laws—there are exactly four, with wide application. You can challenge these laws if you’d like, but you’d have your work cut out for you to be taken seriously, especially within a community that holds itself to precise standards of evidence.
In matters of religion, things are very different. As Cicero wrote:
Indeed, there is no topic on which not merely the unlearned but even educated people disagree so much, and since their beliefs range so widely and are so much at odds with each other, two possibilities exist; it may be that none of them is true, or at any rate no more than one of them can be.4
Cicero didn’t know the half of it, and it’s worth taking a moment to consider the explosion of gods and religions that modern anthropologists and historians have since uncovered across the globe.
Humans Have Created Nearly 20,000 Objects of Worship
Anthropologists estimate that at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses, and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans.5 You may not give it much thought, but in relation to these thousands of gods, you are already a full-fledged “atheist”—even if you otherwise believe in the Judeo-Christian God. You likely do not believe in the existence of Marduk, Ishtar, or Baal of the Ancient Near East; Ra, Osiris, Isis, or Amun of Ancient Egypt; Zeus, Athena, Apollo, or Dionysus of Ancient Greece; Jupiter, Mars, or Venus of Ancient Rome; Odin, Thor, or Freya of the Norse world; Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, or Krishna of the Hindu traditions; or Quetzalcoatl or Huitzilopochtli of Mesoamerica.
In fact, if someone were to ask you if you believe in Quetzalcoatl, you’d probably say, “of course not, there’s not a shred of evidence, beyond folklore, to suggest that he exists, or ever has.” What may not be apparently obvious to you is that the same reasoning holds for every other god on the list, who, at some point, had passionate followers fully convinced of their existence—and ready to argue the case. The uncomfortable fact is that there is not a scrap more physical evidence for the existence of Yahweh, than for Quetzalcoatl.
Our list above includes a mere 23 gods. But humans have created many thousands of gods, which raises the question: Why are humans, in this area, so prolific?
In 2008, the skeptic and historian of science Michael Shermer coined the term patternicity—or the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise—as a proposed explanation. Building on the work of previous thinkers like Stewart Elliott Guthrie—who explored the anthropology and cognitive science of religion—Shermer proposed that our minds are primed, via evolution, to detect patterns and to avoid potentially dangerous, if ambiguous, situations.6
“Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much,” Shermer wrote, “but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.” We’re wired, then, to be a bit paranoid, and, as a result, to overdetect agency in the environment. You don’t have to be trained to see or hear imaginary things; this is your default state. On the contrary, you have to be trained out of what is termed “hyperactive agency detection.”
It turns out to be very difficult to turn this pattern-recognition machinery off. The result is the misattribution of agency to a host of natural events and ambiguous noises, images, feelings, and altered states of consciousness (dreams, hallucinations, mental disorders, etc.). This is why we see faces in the clouds and the Virgin Mary on toast. And when this individual bias scales up culturally, the result is religion.
Which leads to . . . .
10,000 Distinct Religions in the World
There are currently an estimated 10,000 distinct, regionally-based religions worldwide,7 with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism being the largest, but with smaller ones like Judaism, Sikhism, Shinto, Taoism, and others having dedicated followers.
The major religions themselves often make competing, mutually contradictory claims. You can’t, for instance, simultaneously practice Judaism and Christianity, because the denial of the divinity of Jesus is what, in large part, distinguishes the two religions. The same goes for Christianity and Islam, each making similar antagonistic claims against one another.
So how is one supposed to go about deciding which religion is correct? Well, as it turns out, most people make no such conscious decision; they have it made for them. A study by Yahya A. Sharif, for example, shows that “individual religious affiliation is predominantly a function of socio-cultural and geographical contingency rather than the outcome of independent, evidence-based inquiry.”8 The upshot is that you could guess someone’s religion, with a very high degree of accuracy, knowing only where they were born.
But hold on, you may be thinking. Christianity, the world’s largest religion, surely has, over time—in its domination of the religious landscape—achieved some sort of doctrinal consistency, right?
Turns out, not in the slightest.
The Explosion of Christian Denominations
Within Christianity itself, according to the Center for Study of Global Christianity, in mid-2023 there were 47,300 Christian denominations/rites. By 2050, it is predicted that there will be 64,000.9 The number is getting bigger, not smaller; in other words, Christianity is experiencing divergence, not convergence.
Beyond the well-known Catholic/Protestant split, Christian Protestantism itself includes Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism (Reformed Christianity), Methodism, Hussitism, Adventism, Pentecostalism, Quakerism, Plymouth Brethren, and Baptists, among others.
But you can make the case that the situation is far worse than even this suggests; take any single local church of one of those denominations, and you are likely to find doctrinal discrepancies even among its own co-religionists. The Christian “personal god” is exactly that; there are as many varieties of god as there are believers.
But believers face an uncomfortable, highly-likely prospect; namely, that religion is nothing more than our agency-detection systems gone haywire, producing, as they have, a multitude of mutually contradictory, location-bound gods.
Cicero was dealing with three major belief systems in his book and thought he pretty much covered everything important. If he were to write the same book today, it would require volumes upon volumes and this wouldn’t even scratch the surface of Protestant Christianity!
But Cicero’s case is that much stronger today. We can ask: What’s more likely to be true, that the 10,000 distinct, regionally-based religions are all false, or that one among them—and further, one among its own sects—is the real, true religion, and everyone else is mistaken or had been born in the wrong part of the world?
When a topic surfaces in which we humans have no answer—or no possibility of ever developing one—we seem to prefer bad explanations to none at all. If (1) God does not exist, or (2) we can have no possible knowledge of him, then you would expect there to be an explosion of hypotheses, all varying by region. And this is exactly what we find. You find it in Cicero’s time, and now, exponentially, in ours.
Further, religious opinions are impossible to adjudicate because, in all likelihood, they are, frankly, imaginary. The Quran, for instance, tells us that Muhammad is the final prophet, yet the New Testament makes it very clear that no new prophet is necessary to supplant the importance of Jesus, the final completion of prior biblical prophecy. Both views are captured in the sacred scriptures and theological traditions of each respective religion, each with billions of passionate adherents. So how can we decide which is correct?
Short answer: We can’t, other than by sheer obstinacy, and that’s why continued divergence in religion is—and will always be—the trend. The historical pattern holds: We invent religious tales and interpretations, write them down, fail to prove them, and then double-down in our confidence to compensate for our lack of evidence. This is not a great way to go about developing knowledge of the world.
We would all be wise, instead, to show some humility on the topic. As Cicero wrote:
Should you ask me to identify God or his nature, I shall cite Simonides as my authority: when the tyrant Hiero posed the same question to him, he asked for a day’s grace to consider it privately, and when Hiero put the same question to him next day, he begged two days’ grace. After doubling the number of days repeatedly, and being asked by Hiero why he did this, he answered: “The longer I ponder the question, the darker I think is the prospect of a solution.”10
The more you think about God, the more unsolvable puzzles and paradoxes present themselves. As Protagoras had said, “Concerning the gods, I am unable to know whether they exist or not, nor what they are like, for many things prevent knowledge: the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.”11 It’s a race you’ll never complete, because the finish line speeds away at a pace faster than you can run.
And what is true for the individual is true for humanity itself. Despite thousands of years of sustained reflection by history’s brightest minds, we are nowhere near an understanding of the nature of God, and, in fact, are probably farther away—as the proliferation of competing and contradictory religions attests.
God, it seems, is either too mysterious for us to comprehend or, more than likely, simply doesn’t exist. This accounts for the extreme divergence of religious views and justifies (at the least) our suspension of judgment between them. Cicero saw this clearly thousands of years ago; whether humanity ever follows his lead, is another story.
If we take seriously what we’ve said so far—that all religions are geographically-bound delusions, or, at the least, that we ought to simply suspend judgment on the existence of god altogether—then by what principles should we live? In other words, what are the secular alternatives to religion?
We’ve already encountered one such system with Epicureanism; let’s now turn to another, more powerful practical philosophy that can assist us during life’s toughest moments, all without the false consolation of religion: Stoicism.
Notes
- See David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (New York: Viking, 2011).
- We can again use the example of quantum mechanics to prove the point. The mathematical and technical aspects of the field are well-established, leading to the development of various technologies. This is convergence. Divergent opinions concern only the field’s philosophical implications.
- Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.
- Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 4.
- Gary L. Wenk, Ph.D., “Why Do Humans Keep Inventing Gods to Worship?,” Psychology Today (blog), July 6, 2021, reviewed by Ekua Hagan, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/202107/why-do-humans-keep-inventing-gods-worship.
- Michael Shermer, “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise,” Scientific American, December 1, 2008, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/.
- African Studies Association; University of Michigan (2005). History in Africa. Vol. 32. p. 119.
- Yahya A. Sharif, “The Geography of Belief: Religious Affiliation as a Function of Birth, Socio-Psychological Imprinting, and its Implications for Truth Claims” (September 30, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5549164 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5549164.
- Dave Benson, “Christian Denominations,” Lausanne Movement, accessed February 19, 2026, https://lausanne.org/report/polycentric-christianity/christian-denominations#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Center%20for%20Study%20of,*%20Asia%20*%20Africa%20*%20Latin%20America.
- Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 23.
- Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 126.