grep Chelo

This is the first post on my Naturalistic Worldview series where I debate some issues on religion with my friend Brian. Refer to this post for an intro on the subject.

Brian’s post revolved around a couple main arguments, which I’ll try to address mixed in with a few ideas of my own.

The first point revolves around why believe in God but at the same time not believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. I find this to be a somewhat cliché thing to say as an atheist. Yes, it raises some interesting questions on the nature of believe, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I think that atheists need to understand that belief in God is not of the same nature as the one in fairies or ogres. We can agree that both fairies and angels share some characteristics; they’re both anthropomorphic beings with wings tasked with saving humans and grant the occasional wish or deliver a message. The difference lies in that angels live with God, and fairies with Peter Pan; which at the same time share the similarities of beings characters taken out of a book and have a nemesis. My point here is not to say that God and Peter Pan are the same, but that when dealing with religious belief we have to compare apples with apples. Comparing God and Santa Claus becomes silly because it’s not a real comparison, and certainly not one that religious people will take seriously, so atheists should stop using it if they want to have a real discussion instead of just mindless bashing.

Enough ranting against my own cause. I agree with Brian that both scientific and religious views need to take some things for granted to be able to build their theories upon them. However there is one major difference: science is ready to question and explore them, religion is not. Theists and non-theists alike have no problem accepting that Newton’s laws of universal gravitation are true, but that didn’t stop Einstein from proving that they were inaccurate and didn’t actually work in even larger scales. Today I doubt there’s a physicist that will say that Einstein was wrong, yet there are many who are trying to find the errors in his theory that keep it from working with really small particles. This willingness to accept that assumptions were wrong, and that we need to keep exploring and questioning everything we know is the main reason I prefer not to take part in religious views. If we found proof that Christ never existed, Christianism would either fall apart or deny everything and look the other way. If scientists find the errors in Einstein’s theories, they will rejoice and celebrate and start working in the new set of mysteries this will open.

One set of rules tells me that questioning is bad and that I’ll go to hell if I even think about questioning it. The other one tells me that if I question the rules and find something interesting, I may even get a prize for it and perhaps be recognized in history as a smart person. It also doesn’t require me to “believe” anything, for everything is discoverable. If I want, I can try to prove it all by myself, and unless I make a mistake, or find an error in their rules, I’ll arrive to the same conclusions. Needless to say, I’d rather spend 60 years trying to understand the Big Bang than reading a story that must not be tampered with, or I’ll forever roast in a pit of lava while others rejoice.

Now I’d like to expand a little on my first idea about comparing apples to apples. I think we should reserve our analysis to “real” Gods. The ones that people really believe (or have believed) in. This means that Yahweh, Christ, Allah, Thor, Ra, Huitzilopochtli, Zeus and even Xenu (I know he’s not a personal god as the others, but I’ll give it some credit just because so many people have lost their life because of that belief) are valid. It also means that the Flying Spaghetti Monster and whatever God those of the Jedi religion (George Lucas maybe?) have, don’t count. My apologies to the pastafarians, but I don’t think any of you really truly believe in it.

One major hurdle for atheists is that God can not be disproven. This didn’t stop Thor and Zeus from getting the pink slip and being reduced to characters in movies and comic books. We know there’s no need for Thor to strike his hammer to create thunder, but it was only until several centuries after nobody believe in him that electricity was understood. They simply fell out of fashion; or the people that believed in them were slaughtered and repressed until there was almost nobody left with the will to continue professing their faith, like it happened to the Aztec gods. This leads me to believe that there’s a chance that in the future we’ll have a sit-com where Jesus solves crimes with the help of the Holy Ghost and continuously argues with his father. Basically a future version of Psych, but with only one guy talking to himself while wearing three different costumes and sets of makeup.

Belief in a particular God seems to have more to do with what’s fashionable in the environment a person is raised in (or lives in the case of people who convert to a different one), rather than on the veracity of the claims this particular religion makes. So the number of people who believe in God is no more relevant than the number of people who like the Rolling Stones. However, no matter how many people believe it, a very important part of this is that there are consequences to belief and disbelief, and Brian touched on this in his post.

Put simply, if God doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because there are no consequences. If there is a God, doing as He says yields infinite rewards, while not doing so results in eternal punishment. Therefore, it is in the individual’s interest to believe. This reasoning is known as Pascal’s Wager. At first the best choice seems obvious, but there’s one big hole in that argument. What if you worship the wrong God? Then you get eternal damnation, because one of the main rules God sets is to believe and worship only Him. Even if you follow every rule that has been set, failing to properly believe, right down to the correct name, is a total failure. I agree with Brian that this is a utilitarian approach, and that by no means should anyone behave in a certain way just to get a reward. But being animals resultant of a process that focuses on rewarding the fittest individuals and punishing the ones that fail to have an advantage on the others, it doesn’t surprise me that this is the main reason for many people to believe.

I want to expand a little on this subject of believing because it’s the right thing to do. For this I will reference two books, one of them fiction, the other one philosophical. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, introduced the term “Belief in belief” in his book Breaking the Spell. This term refers to individuals who don’t fully believe in God, but who think that believing in God is the right thing to do, either because society tells them to, or because they’re afraid of the consequences of not believing. I really like this term, because it perfectly fits my stance on the issue for many years. I never really thought that God could help my grandpa get well, yet still I prayed. I think many people are caught in this stage, mostly because it’s convenient. The problem is that you can’t stay there for long. You can fool others, or you can fool yourself, but at some point, every person who gets into this mindset needs to make a decision. If you finally stop believing in God, then you can either say it openly, or pretend that you still do because it’s convenient; and lie your way through church events and holidays. Notice how either path leads to hell if God exists, but one of them also leads to prejudice and segregation from their social circle in this world.

Another path, even more convenient, is to exercise doublethink. This term is taken from George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. In it, people are forced to believe whatever is being told to them, regardless of what they know or have proof of. If some piece of evidence is contrary to what they believe, they must conveniently ignore it when necessary. For example, the main character is forced to assert that 2+2=5, and he and the people making him do it truly believe it because that is what they’re being told that moment. However they can still buy a 2 dollar item with 4 dollars and expect 2 back in return. That is the essence of doublethink, fooling the brain into believing something when it’s convenient regardless of the evidence or reasoning behind it. This exercising of doublethink is what makes angels different from fairies. Quoting from the book “Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Coming back to my point, believing that God created man and the whole Universe in seven days requires one of to things: not looking at the evidence (or failing to understand it); or recognizing it but convincing one self to ignore it by using some form of doublethink. I don’t know which one is worse. This also applies to many other myths, like the world flood only survived by Noah and those in his ark, the impregnation of a virgin (where “virgin” is known to be a translation error), or God himself writing a series of books and a certain pair of stone tablets.

Finally, I would like to address the matter of evidence for the existence of God. This is a simple one. There is NO evidence of the existence of God. It is claimed that many phenomena can not be explained without the intervention of God. For example, science hasn’t been able to explain what happened before the Big Bang, and many theologians take this as a sign of supernatural intervention. It can not be explained by science, therefore, there is a God. Read that sentence again and try to find the fallacy in it.

Science is not a set in stone. It evolves. Things that can not be explained by science today might be explainable tomorrow. It has been widely accepted that the conservation of energy is a law that can not be broken. For energy to be used to create the Universe, it had to be taken from somewhere else. Enter God creating everything and providing energy to the system. Now enter String Theory. According to the particle physicists, if there was nothing in the beginning, the only result is that something would take it’s place. This is backed up by math, but we know math can be wrong, so let’s not take it for granted and be a little skeptical for now. What I intend to show is that rules we believe to be flawless can be challenged by science, and even if we can’t see the beginning of the Universe by ourselves, we can think of different ways in which it could have happened, and these don’t need God.

Something not being black doesn’t mean that it’s white. It could be blue, or pink, or green, or have a different color that we don’t even have a name for because our eyes can only see a very small band of the light spectrum. In the same line, if scientific theory A is not true, or it’s not possible to prove it, that doesn’t mean is evidence towards the existence of God. I’ll say it again: there is NO evidence for the existence of God, only lack of evidence for the current theories.

This was longer than I intended, so I focused this post mostly on the “human” side of belief in God, without delving much into the implications of his involvement in our world, concentrating on my reasonings for not taking religion or God’s side in my life. The summary is: they don’t want me to ask, and that’s not something I’m willing to accept.
I also left out many of the common debates, like creation, evolution, morality, and church atrocities, because I’m sure they will come up later on, so there’ll be time to focus on them when the time comes.

Thanks for reading this gargantuan post and feel free to cast the first stone! (No sin-free restrictions apply)