Evidently True

I grew up in a Catholic household in a predominantly Christian part of the rural Midwest.  It seems like there's a church on every street corner of my hometown.  The Christian world view was part of our culture and our identity.  As a young boy interested in science, it's therefore no surprise that one of the sources of information that I was given was a cassette tape that talked about all the evidence of God's work in nature.  I listened to this cassette repeatedly. 

It's been many years, so I only really remember one particular part.  The preacher (I assume he was a Christian preacher or minister that made the tape) was talking about the fact that when you look at the branch of a tree, you'll notice that the side branches do not grow out of that branch in a random pattern.  In fact, they follow a repeating pattern where, for example, every fifth branch is pointing in the same direction.  This order was evidence of God's hand in the creation of a tree.   God made the tree with a certain logic, and this was evidence of the creator's work. 

For a Christian, or any believer, the existence of a god is assumed.  It's part of the fabric of the Universe.  As such, any observation of order in the Universe is considered evidence of that god's existence.    The problem with this argument is that it is circular.  There is an assumption that a god exists with certain properties and any observations that are made are taken as evidence that the god exists.   The argument is "God exists.  God creates order in the world.  I see order in the world.  Therefore, God exists."   The argument implies that the only way there can be order in the world is because God causes it.  Thus, any order is evidence of God.  It's not a valid argument to assume something is true and then use that assumption to argue that it is true. 

Another problem with this is that the selection of evidence is arbitrary.  Observations that demonstrate their claim is taken as evidence; any observation that contradicts it is ignored.    If something is true, then there shouldn't be contradictory evidence.  If there is, then the thing can't be true.  In reality, if there is contradictory evidence, perhaps you don't have to throw out the idea altogether, but you need to revise it to account for the contradictions.

Let me give an example of something that is also a part of the fabric of the Universe - gravity.  Gravity is a basic property of matter.  Anything with mass will attract anything else with mass.  On the earth, we see this in the fact that things fall to the ground.  The gravity of the earth is so large that we don't normally notice that all the smaller things are attracting one-another, but this fact has been verified in laboratories and in outer space.  There are other known forces that cause objects to be attracted to one-another, including the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force.  When we remove the effects of those other forces, we still find that gravitational force is there.  Similarly, if we see two objects being attracted to one-another, we don't assume it is because of gravity.  We look at all the possible explanations and then decide if it is because of gravity.

We didn't start out with some theory of gravity from the start and afterwards looked to find evidence of it.  On the contrary, we observed that things fell to earth, and we wondered why.  As we studied this more and more, scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and others did experiments to measure the effects of gravity and to come up with a description of how it works.  Over the centuries, our understanding of gravity has grown, and it helps us to understand how the Universe works.  Everywhere we look, we find that the effects of gravity are there.  There are no contradictory observations.  The interesting thing is that we still don't know exactly what causes gravity.   I think scientists are still working on trying to explain how gravity is related to Relativity, as Einstein described it, or with quantum mechanics.  

The argument about gravity is like this: "We observed that objects attract one another.  The force that we call 'gravity' explains that attraction.  Therefore, gravity exists."  This is not a circular argument.  We don't assume that gravity exists at the start.  The existence of gravity is the conclusion.

If we wanted to follow the same process for proving the existence of a god, we would start with our observations.  What are these observations?  We see order in nature.   Is the existence of a god the best explanation for this order?  Scientists have observed true randomness on the quantum scale.  How does an orderly creation explain this?  We see "good" things happen.  Is the existence of a god the best explanation of this?  We see "bad" things happen.  How does the existence of a god explain this apparent contradiction?  

The more we know about nature, the more we find that there are better, simpler explanations for the apparent order in the universe than "god did it'.  For the example of the regularity of the branches in a tree, we know that natural selection would have favored trees that can position their leaves in locations that capture the most sunlight.  A tree that grows branches in regular intervals, thus filling every available gap, would collect more sunlight than one that grew branches at random.  Random branches would likely leave gaps (missing the opportunity to capture sunlight), and there would be branches that block other branches (wasting energy spent on growing the branches that are blocked).   Over the millions of years that trees have been evolving, the individual trees of a given species that did the best at collecting sunlight would be more successful.  They would have more energy from the sun that they could use to produce more seeds.  Over the generations, their offspring would be more successful than the offspring of trees with worse branch placement.  These "orderly branch" genes would come to be dominant in the population of trees.  Eventually, all the trees in the population would have these orderly branches.  Thus, it's no surprise that all trees of a species show the same order to their branches.  They are all descendents of trees that developed a particular genetic mutation that allowed them to have more orderly branches than the trees before them. 

The existence of orderly branches in a tree is evidence of evolution.   Like gravity, evolution is a universal property that we have observe everywhere we look.  It is completely consistent with all the observations we make, and it accurately predicts what observations we will make in the future.  We continue to learn more and more about evolution as we gather evidence.  When we find evidence that appears to contradict evolution, we generally find that the evidence actually clarifies our theory of evolution.   If we ever found evidence that truly contradicted evolution, we would be willing to throw away that theory in favor of one that explains all the evidence.  This is how we learn about the world.  This is how we increase our knowledge of the Universe and better understand our place in it.  This is how we use evidence.

A blast from the past

When I started this blog, it was probably the first time that I "publicly" stated my opinions on religion and philosophy.  I generally kept these thoughts to myself.  However, I thought this blog would be a good forum to express some of the thoughts I have, and perhaps to start some conversations about these subjects with people with whom I've never spoken of them before.

Obviously, my disbelief in religion didn't start when I started this blog.  I wrote the following eleven years ago.  I've kept it to document my thinking at the time.  I've matured and become more educated about philosophy, rationalism, and skepticism since then.  My thoughts and arguments are more informed and refined.  However, the fundamental belief has not changed. 
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"What I Believe"

I am an atheist.
 
Let me give a couple of definitions just to make things clear. A theist is someone with religious beliefs, that is, someone who believes in a god or gods. An atheist is someone who has no religious beliefs, that is, they have no belief in any god or gods. So atheism is a statement about a lack of belief, it says nothing about what an atheist actually believes. Actually, I’m what is sometimes called a strong atheist or a nontheist. Not only do I have no belief in a god or gods, but I believe gods do not exist. This is a stronger statement than simply saying I’m an atheist.

I do not believe that any gods, especially the Christian God, exist. Nor is there any Heaven or Hell. We are born, we live our lives, we die, and that’s the end of that. There is no existence after life. This makes it especially important that we live a happy, constructive, and fruitful life while we are on this planet. We are not here to prepare for something after life; we are just here. There is no "meaning of life". The only meaning to life is that meaning which we give to it. We are not here "for a purpose". We provide our own purpose to life.

Because this life is all we have, life is incredibly precious. To take someone’s life is to take the most important thing that person has. To waste one’s own life is to waste the most important thing you have. Life should be valued highly, and we should live our lives to the fullest. The biggest "sin" is to fritter one’s life away waiting for some reward in the afterlife instead of making our own "heaven" here on Earth. We do not forgive others because it is what Jesus would do. We do it because when we forgive, we retain the opportunity to continue to have the love and companionship of those we forgive. This is what enriches our lives and makes life worth living. When religion works, it is by distilling the knowledge of those who came before us and giving us examples of how to live our lives in a way that makes us happy and makes others happy.

How did I get to be an atheist?

There was no single event or incident which "caused" me to become an atheist. I’m not an atheist as a simple rejection of the Catholic Church (under whose teachings I was raised) nor as a rejection of any individual’s beliefs. Becoming an atheist was the result of a decades-long search for the truth.

As I mentioned above, I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. As early as my First Communion, I felt that something just wasn’t quite right about what the church was teaching. I remember wondering why I had to confess my sins to a priest if God was everywhere and knew what I was doing at all times. Now, as an adult, I know that the main reason for this is to make the confessor think about their sins and be remorseful for them. The point is not that this was a major inconsistency in the Catholic dogma, but that at that early age (6-7 years old) I was already questioning the practices and teachings of the church.

I remember a later incident in Catechism where we were asked to tell of some time that we had experienced God in our lives. I couldn’t think of any. One kid in the class talked about how he was pushing something heavy up a hill and asked God for help. He found the strength to make it to the top after that. I thought, "how does that prove that God helped? He could have just found the strength within himself."

By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I was no longer going to Catechism. However, I still considered myself a Catholic.

In my seventh grade English class, we had to do a debate. The topic I drew was abortion. I took the anti-abortion side. For my sources, I found a bunch of religious pamphlets that preached about the sanctity of God-given life and how abortion was tantamount to murder. I argued this case in the debate. After the debate, my teacher, Mr. Lawson, commented to me that I had made an argument from a position of religious faith. Since faith is a system that is unassailable, what I had done was not debate, but put forth a position against which there was no rational argument. Since I respected Mr. Lawson, I took his words to heart. This was when I first started to acquire the tools for rational thought and evaluation that I would need on my search for the truth.

By the time that I was in high school, I believed that there must be some religion out there that possessed the truth about God. I knew it wasn’t the Catholic Church, so I started looking around for "the One". I had become what amounted to a Fundamentalist. I believed there was a God, and that the Bible was the true word of God. But I disagreed with the fact that, in the Catholic Church, the Priest read and interpreted the Bible to you. You were not encouraged to read it and interpret it for yourself. Since I disagreed with how they interpreted the Bible, I decided they didn’t know the true message in the Bible. At some point around the eleventh grade, I encountered a cult called The Way. They claimed to have a cadre of biblical scholars who had reevaluated the Bible using the original documents. They gave examples of how verses in the King James version of the Bible had been incorrectly translated and they had the real translation. I thought I had finally found the truth. These people had the true "Word of God". I went to one of their church meetings and was listening with an open mind until they did their "speaking in tongues" trick. I thought, "more hogwash". This meeting was supposed to be a friendly, informal meeting for a few of us who were interested. When they passed the hat at the end, I knew this was just another rip-off.

This episode didn’t stop my search. And I was still of a Fundamentalist bent when I entered college. It was sophomore year at Denison when a critical turning point in my life occurred. I was sitting up one night talking with my roommate discussing religion. He was either a religion or philosophy major (I forget which). He ended the conversation with the following statement: "You have to question your beliefs". What he meant by this is not that we should automatically reject the beliefs we were raised with. Instead, we should question all our beliefs. We should ask ourselves why we believe what we believe. There are two possible outcomes of such an enquiry. One outcome is that we realize that we don’t have a good reason to believe what we believe, and in fact, we should believe something else. The other outcome is that we continue to believe what we believe, but now, since we’ve thought about why, we have a good reason to believe it. Our belief therefore becomes stronger, and it is based on our own, personal reasons. We shouldn’t believe things simply because that’s what we were raised to believe or because that’s what everyone else believes.

This was really a life-changing event for me. It got me to step back and change the question from "which church has the truth about God?" to "what is the truth about God?" Never before had I even considered the question of whether God even existed at all.

The next big event on my evolution was senior year at Denison in my Philosophy of Feminism class. We were reading a book called, "The Redemption of God." It was the Ph.D. thesis of a woman who explored the fundamental patriarchal nature of the Christian God. Her hypothesis was that God could be "redeemed" if we redefine what God is. Instead of the all-powerful gray-bearded man, God is simply the power of Love in the world. Jesus wasn’t necessarily the Son of God, but was someone particularly gifted in channeling the power of Love to help and heal others. This was the first time that I came across the concept of redefining God. I mean, God just was, right? But here this woman redefined God into something that made a whole lot more sense to me than what any Christian church had ever told me. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe she was right. Maybe God wasn’t this thing that churches had taught me "He" was, maybe God was something else.

It was at about this same time that I started reading some Existential philosophy. I came across Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement with respect to God:
"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing." Or, to restate this "It does not matter if God exists or not, I am still responsible for my own actions." I basically agree with Existential philosophy. We are all ultimately responsible for our own actions. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, we make a choice to act in a certain manner. It is our choice, and we are responsible for the results of our actions. So I think Sartre was right. If we were to do things because we thought that is what God wants, it still does not absolve us from the responsibility for those actions. We can’t abdicate responsibility for our actions because it’s "God’s will." Once we realize this, we realize that the existence or nonexistence of God really doesn’t matter. If we act in a moral way, we do it because we want the societal and personal benefits of that. If we act in an immoral manner, we accept the societal and personal punishment that we will receive. God doesn’t enter into the equation.
I continued my quest. I discussed it with friends; I read books. But at this time, I knew that I didn’t believe that the Christian God existed.

It wasn’t until probably around the summer of 1989 that I realized that I was an atheist. I had searched and searched, and kept coming back to one fundamental thing, God doesn’t make sense.

So, for about eleven years now, I’ve been an atheist. I’ve read a number of books on atheism, rationalism, and science. These books resonate with what I see as being the truth about the universe. By applying Occam’s Razor, if we take any model of the world that contains a god, we can take the same model minus the god and get just as good an explanation of how the universe works. I have yet to see, hear about, or read about anything that exists or has ever occurred where the best explanation requires the existence of a god.

I consider myself a good scientist. As such, if someone came to me with some concrete evidence of the existence of a god, I would be forced to consider the validity of this data. Because it is physically impossible to search the entire universe to show that a god does not exist, I have to concede the possibility of a god. However, given the overwhelming absence of evidence of such an entity, I believe that no such being exists.

Therefore, my lack of belief in any god or gods makes me an atheist.  My belief that, in fact, no such beings actually exist makes me a strong atheist or nontheist.

Written in the Summer of 2000.