Greg Graffin

From Philosopedia

Graffin, Greg (6 November 1964 - )

Dr. Gregory Walter Graffin was born in Racine, Wisconsin, where he attended El Camino Real High School. When 15, he and some of his classmates formed Bad Religion in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, then disbanded in 1984, reforming and releasing Suffer in 1988.

A vocalist in the group called Bad Religion, Graffin is a non-theist who believes neither in God nor Hell, as shown by his works:

In "Do What You Want" on the album Suffer;

I don’t know if the billions will survive,

But I’ll believe in God when 1 and 1 are 5.

In “God Song” on Against the Grain:

Religion is just synthetic frippery

Unnecessary in our expanding global culture efficiency.

In “Don’t Pray On Me”:

I don’t know what stopped Jesus Christ

From turning every hungry stone into bread

And I don’t remember hearing how Moses reacted

When the innocent first-born sons lay dead.

Well, I guess God was a lot more demonstrative

Back when he flamboyantly parted the sea.

Now everybody’s praying. Don’t pray on me.

In "Operation Rescue":

If no one believed in fairy tales

there would be nothing they could do but fail;

yet everywhere we look someone is trying to

reassure our moral benevolence as a people....

The New Atheists

A cover story in Wired (November 2006), "The Church of the Non-Believers," named what Gary Wolf described as "the new atheists": Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Greg Graffin, Penn and Teller, and Warren Allen Smith. In the article Steve Olson describes Graffin, "the punk rocker," as follows:

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."

Graffin, sometimes called the punker Ph. D., in 2006 co-wrote Is Belief in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant?

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