Verified by 
I once had a UFO experience. In the vast high prairie north of Laramie, Wyoming, I saw two large silver objects cavorting with each other in the blue sky. Cloudless. Perfect vision. I was certain of what I was seeing. I was also transfixed. The two objects were obviously large and very high up. And they were flying in ways that a jet or some other plane could not: They were turning at sharp right angles, stopping, going straight down, halting, going straight up, all with dizzying speed.
I puzzled and puzzled over what I was seeing. I thought the UFO explanation was completely implausible, yet there they were: metal, silver, shiny, and flying in ways that planes can’t.
Finally, I got in my car and completed my journey south to Boulder, Colorado. I was staying with a friend who worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Naturally, I asked him about what I had seen. Did he know of anything that could explain my UFO experience, besides UFOs?
To my surprise he did! He said, “Yes, we were conducting weather balloon experiments today, and released two balloons early this morning. We tracked them as they moved northward.”
Were they near Laramie?
“Yes,” he said.
But what I saw was two large, high-flying, metal objects whizzing around bizarrely.
“That is a combination of optical illusion and jumping to conclusions. The balloons are made of a shiny silver, plastic-like material that is strong and durable. So from a distance, they look to be made of metal. The illusion is that the objects were big and far away, when in fact, they were small and close in. The illusion is due to the fact that in the vast Wyoming sky, visual references are almost nonexistent. So, the balloons were not that high up and not very far from you—perhaps half a mile out or so and couple thousand feet up give or take. They were blowing around in the wind as they moved steadily northward. Since you thought they were big and far away, you also thought that the distances traveled and the angles of changed flight were huge. But they weren’t. The distances the balloons were moving as they jostled in the sky were a mere dozen feet or so.”
So I saw weather balloons, close in, and bumping around normally, not spacecraft from a distant planet populated with an advanced civilization?
“Our weather balloons—Yep.”
In science and philosophy, what my friend had done with my UFO experience is explain it away. Something, X, an odd experience, an unusual artifact, a strange pattern, whatever, is explained away when X is shown to be really due to something quite ordinary that has been wrongly interpreted. The right interpretation explains away the odd results or data.
This is what biological and psychological science has done to religion recently. It is one the greatest scientific advancements in human history.
Most humans are religious. Of the over 7 billion of us on Earth, only a bit over 1 billion are non-religious or secular. However, the 6 billion or so belong to hundreds of thousands of religions, if you count variants (for example, some experts claim that there are 30,000 variants of Christianity, alone). If you insist on excluding variants (an arbitrary move since some religion variants differ more from each other than they do from officially “different” religions), then there are thousands of religions and dozens of major religions (religions with more than, say, half a million adherents). This is all explained in my book, Excellent Beauty: The naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of the world.
Religious people are immune to data. No matter how negative the data, religious belief rarely wavers. Judaism didn’t diminish after the Holocaust. Belief in the Christian god went up after Hurricane Katrina (see EB for references). The September 11th attacks didn’t diminish religious belief in the USA one iota. If the belief that there is some sort of creator deity were a scientific hypothesis, it would have been abandoned long ago, along with the phlogiston theory of combustion and the evil spirit theory of disease. But religious belief continues to hold most of humanity in its unrelenting grip.
So there are scads of religions, and robust anti-religious evidence is simply ignored. What could explain all this?
Enter the theory of evolution. Evolution, itself a powerful and robust theory of why life is the way that it is, has now been used to explain why humans are religious. The very short form is that proto-humans who were religious had more surviving offspring than proto-humans that weren’t religious. What advantage does religion provide? It helps glue groups of humans, tribes of humans, together. (For more, see EB.)
We see then that evolutionary theory explains away why humans are religious. Humans are not religious because there’s some sort of spirit entity or deity that we understand only partially, giving rise to humanity’s plethora of religions. Rather, we humans are religious because of our DNA, which in turn is due to selection pressures and our past. There are scads of religions because it does not matter which religion you belong to, only that you belong to one. Compare language: Languages differ wildly from one another phonetically, syntactically, and even semantically to some degree. Why? Because though language is part of our DNA, its structure isn’t important, only its communicative capacity is. So it doesn’t matter what language you speak, only that you speak one.
It is common knowledge that religion and science are at war. Many religious people hold that all science is wrong. For example, there’s no such thing as evolution, or the Big Bang, or global warming. Denying these any or all of these three is denying all of science, because all of science is deeply and strongly connected. Evolution is true because helium-filled balloons rise, and vice versa. Denying evolution is a religious attack on science. Science doesn’t attack religion directly. Science gives us the truth. And the truth is there was no creation, the universe just happened, and no deity involves itself in life on planet Earth, not even human life. And most importantly, science explains away all religious sentiments we humans have via evolution and psychology.
Now along comes a group of religionists who hold that science and religion are NOT at war. (For example, James Ryerson’s New York Times article “The Twain Shall Meet” Feb. 9, 2016, Sunday Book Review, and Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science, edited by Ronald Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis.) Science says the evidence for gods or goddesses is zero, nil, zilch, bupkis (actually it says something rather stronger, but this will do). Religion says that the evidence for gods or goddesses is so strong that said existence is obvious to the most causal observer. Clearly, these two views cannot both be right.
Religion says that there is no evolution, science says there is. Religion says that homosexuality is a sin, science says it is merely a sexual preference. Religion says there is no chance or coincidence, science says that the universe itself is a chance occurrence and all life today owes its existence to chance.
So there is clearly a war—a very big war—between science and religion. Why deny it?
Here is the answer. Science is winning the war so robustly that it explains away religion: religion is due to evolution and human psychology. Science can explain why, in the absence of any gods and goddess whatsoever, religion will not go away: religion is in our DNA. Given this overwhelming loss to science—this rout—many religionists overturn the gaming tables and say “Religion and Science are BFFs!!!” It isn’t true, and everyone knows it—including the religionists. For note, those who deny that religion and science are at war are trying very hard to convince everyone that science and religion are not at war. If science and religion really were BFFs, why labor so hard to block the At-War idea? The BFF religionists try so hard in order to convince themselves and in order to create a safe space for religion here on Earth where, ironically, religion is one of our most deadly beliefs.
