The Root of Most Evil

I was listening to Richard Dawkins this morning, and he made the following argument:

Faith is not grounded in evidence.
Therefore, it is impossible to challenge the beliefs of a Man of Faith.
Religion is based on faith.
Some peoples' religion tells them to behead Dutch filmmakers.
Therefore, if a religious person believes that he must behead a Dutch filmmaker, there is no way to dissuade him.
Therefore, religion is a license to immorality.
Therefore, religion is the root of most evil.

What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong with this picture is that morality is not grounded in evidence either.  If your only tool of persuasion is evidence, there is no way you will convince anyone not to behead Dutch filmmakers.  No evidence can possibly demonstrate to someone that he should not behead a Dutch filmmaker.

Atheists often claim that religion is a license to immorality.  On the other hand, believers often claim that atheism is a license to immorality, or that religion/God is the only possible basis for morality.

(Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen's book Permission to Believe goes so far as to argue that the "fact" of morality is evidence of the existence of God.)

In theory, both are wrong; morality and religion are orthogonal in principle.  I may expand on this in a later post.

In practice, I would love to see statistics that study the relationship between religion and morality in the real world.  Such a study would, of course, be limited by the moral standard it chooses to apply.

Deep Thought of the Day: the belief that all beliefs must be grounded in evidence is self-contradictory, because there is not (and could not possibly be) any evidence that supports the belief "all beliefs must be grounded in evidence".