Most of us feel that without God, our society would slide into chaos — people will loot with impunity, most social norms would break down and eventually, the human race would revert to a barbaric way of life — what it was, thousands of years ago. Fear of God, they ardently feel, is what holds us back from this anarchy. Besides, let us not be concerned here with individual goodness or the lack of it, but discuss the effect that belief in God has, on a collective scale, like on an entire country.
The United Nations (UN) ranks many countries on a Human Development Index (HDI) which gives weightage to indicators like civic consciousness, law and order problems, crime rates per capita, empowerment of women, child mortality, gender equality, public health, economic growth and others. HDI (its maximum score can be 1) has been accepted as a benchmark, calculated by a neutral and reliable enough authority, to define the state of well-being of a country.
There are at least three countries — Norway, Sweden and Netherlands — that consistently get a high HDI rank (among the top 15 in the world) but where more than 50 per cent of the population admit to being atheists. The goodness in these countries does not seem to have got affected by their atheism and society there has definitely not gone into decline. A popular reason quoted for nations with a majority of nonbelievers scoring high on goodness is that the population there does not ‘wait for God’ to help them — they help themselves, thereby increasing output and efficiency. Here we are not discussing a country like China — with an HDI rank in the 70s — although it is overwhelmingly atheist, because the atheism in China is official policy and not voluntary as in other countries.
What is the broader meaning of ‘goodness’? Psychologists assess personality traits of individuals and studies have been carried out to compare believers and atheists on parameters of integrity and the ability to take moral and ethical decisions. It was presumed that since morality was believed to have predominantly come from religion, the moral intuition of the two groups would differ. M Hauser and P Singer, in their Morality Without Religion, conclude that there is no statistically significant difference between believers and atheists in making such moral judgements.
So then should we still believe that God acts like, say, through the Indian Penal Code that is expected to reduce bad deeds by putting fear in the minds of the perpetrators of evil? Looking at the way things pan out across the world, it does appear that we do not require God (or Satan) to do something good or bad. Bad deeds, especially, are always a result of misguided personal convictions, with God being conveniently put forth as an excuse.