Faces of the New Atheism: The Punk Rocker
by Steve Olson

Wired, no. 14.11, November 2006

In a few hours, Greg Graffin will be singing about human suffering and redemption in front of thousands of frenzied punk rock fans at the Nokia Theater Times Square, but right now he's in the American Museum of Natural History showing his two children the first-known evolutionary diagram Charles Darwin ever drew.

It's an appropriate day for a man who has been straddling two worlds his entire adult life. In 1980, he and a couple of high school friends founded the punk band Bad Religion. Almost 20 albums later, the group has a worldwide following for its hard-driving and intelligent songs. But the singer is also a scientist. In 2003, he earned a PhD in zoology from Cornell University.

As part of his dissertation research, Graffin asked 149 prominent evolutionary biologists whether they believed in God; 130 answered no. But something surprised Graffin. Only a handful responded that they considered science and religion to be incompatible.

That tolerance frustrates Graffin. He describes himself as a naturalist, which to him means someone who holds that the natural world is all there is. "If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything," he says. "It's a gang mentality." He's also offended by what he calls the "intellectual dishonesty" of scientists who find compatibility with religions that, in the case of Christianity at least, embrace walking on water and resurrection.

The rocker sometimes sings about his beliefs. "There's no justice / Just a cause and a cure / And a bounty of suffering / It seems we all endure / And what I'm frightened of / Is that they call it God's love." But his prose is more upbeat and nuanced. Earlier this year, he cowrote a book titled Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant? composed of a yearlong email exchange with Preston Jones, a historian at the Christian John Brown University. "Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world," Graffin wrote. "There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully."