Although I declared myself an atheist many years ago, I generally don’t make it a point to explain the reasons for my position. I am by nature a non-confrontational person, so religious discussions are something I generally avoid, unless I am in the company of like-minded individuals.
Recently, however, a good (religious) friend of mine raised concerns about my non-belief, while also expressing a hesitancy to discuss the same. I presume that this person is worried about upsetting me, and doesn’t want to risk damaging our friendship. I have been reflecting on this, and I believe that my lack of belief is something that should not be hidden, and that if I am to be honest with myself then I should be prepared to explain and even vigorously defend my position.
So, how did I get to where I am today?
My parents are/were Southern Baptist, and I was raised the same. (My father passed away in 1991, and as of this writing my mother is still living.) As a child, I believed in the Abrahamic notion of God, and the divinity of Jesus Christ. Being young, and without critical thinking skills, I simply accepted what I was told. I didn’t begin to feel doubt until I was a teenager. Even then, I chalked it up to a “crisis of faith”. (I was even baptized when I was nineteen years old.) As time passed, though, my doubts grew. The things I’d been taught made less and less sense, and I eventually declared myself agnostic.
Agnostic: (1) One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God; (2) One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.
Eventually, though, I came to the realization that an agnostic position is just non-committal. I realized that being agnostic about God made as much sense to me as being agnostic about Santa Claus. Sure, I can never be completely, absolutely sure that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but does it really make sense to believe in him? It was then that I became an atheist.
Atheist: A person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
I did not experience a definitive “ah-ha” moment that made me an atheist. Rather, it was a long, slow reconciling of conflicting thoughts and emotion. I can, however, describe some of the things that moved me along the path.
First, the bible upon which my former faith is based is filled with numerous contradictions, errors, and misconceptions. Much of the information therein doesn’t feel divinely inspired to me, but more like people with a very limited understanding of the world constructing a crude mythology to accommodate their ignorance (and personal desires). Just a few examples:
- A flat earth (“the ends of the earth”, “the four corners of the earth”, and descriptions of the earth resting on pillars).
- A young earth (4000 – 6000 years, as I recall). Science tells us otherwise.
- A solid sky (“the firmament”), including descriptions of angels opening “the windows of heaven” to allow the rain to fall.
- Differing accounts of various major events, including the creation and Jesus’ death and resurrection.
- The book of Exodus claims to contain an historical account of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but historians and archaeologists have been unable to verify any of the events related in that book. No known Egyptian records refer to the biblical Moses, the devastating plagues that God supposedly inflicted on the country, the escape of the Hebrew slaves, or the drowning of the Egyptian army. Moreover, records contained on Egyptian monuments show that the pharaoh ruling at the time of the alleged escape of the Jews was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea.
- The second chapter of the book of Luke states that, shortly before the birth of Jesus, the emperor Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Roman world. Luke states that every person had to travel to the town of his ancestors in order for the census to be taken. He points to the census as the reason that Joseph and Mary traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where Jesus is said to have been born. In the book entitled “Gospel Fictions“, Randel Helms states that no such census was ever taken in the history of the Roman Empire. He also says that it is ridiculous to think that the practical Romans would require millions of people to travel enormous distances to towns of long-deceased ancestors merely to sign a tax form. Moreover, in “Asimov’s Guide to the Bible“, Isaac Asimov states that the Romans certainly would arrange no such census.
- Descriptions and approval of horrible acts of cruelty and injustice, including genocide and sacrifice. This includes the destruction of whole cities, including innocent children and pregnant women. This sounds more like justification for human actions.
- Grossly disproportionate punishments, including prescribing the death penalty for such things as homosexuality, working on the sabbath, and cursing your parents.
- Pestilences caused by the anger of God or the malevolence of Satan, rather than poor hygiene and a basic misunderstanding of how disease is spread. Some of this ignorance is still seen today in religions that don’t allow blood transfusions or medical treatment of serious ailments, relying instead on prayer.
- Mythical creatures such as dragons and unicorns.
Further, concerning the issue of the alleged historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts, Robert Ingersoll wondered why it was that the first century Jewish historian Josephus, “the best historian the Hebrews produced, said nothing about the life or death of Christ; nothing about the massacre of the infants by Herod; not one word about the wonderful star that visited the sky at the birth of Christ; nothing about the darkness that fell upon the world for several hours in the midst of day; and failed entirely to mention that hundreds of graves were opened, and that multitudes of Jews arose from the dead, and visited the Holy City?”
So, you may ask, if I’m so sure that God does not exist, then why do so many people believe? One possible answer lies in the evolutionary model of belief developed by Michael Shermer in his book “How We Believe” and he explains it much more eloquently than I can:
I developed an evolutionary model of belief in God as one of a suite of mechanisms used by religion, which I define as a social institution to create and promote myths, to encourage conformity and altruism, and to signal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a community. Around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, as bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, even before the invention of government, religions were the first social institutions to codify moral behaviors into ethical principles, and God evolved as the ultimate enforcer of the rules.
Human universals are traits shared by all peoples, such as tool use, myths, sex roles, social groups, aggression, gestures, grammar, phonemes, and many related to religion and belief in God, including: anthropomorphizing animals and objects, belief in the supernatural, beliefs and rituals about death, beliefs about fortune and misfortune, divination, folklore, magic, myths, and rituals. Although such universals are not totally controlled by genes alone (almost nothing is), there are good reasons to believe that there is a strong genetic predisposition for these traits to be expressed within their respective cultures. That is, your culture may dictate which God to believe in, but the belief in a supernatural agent who operates in the world is universal to all cultures because it is hard-wired in the brain, a conclusion enhanced by studies on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different environments.
Of course, genes do not determine whether one chooses Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, or any other religion. Rather, belief in supernatural agents (God, angels, and demons) and commitment to certain religious practices (church attendance, prayer, rituals) appears to reflect genetically based cognitive processes (inferring the existence of invisible agents) and personality traits (respect for authority, traditionalism).
Shermer, Michael. “How We Believe”
(Specific religions are culturally based. If your parents are Christian, you are likely to be. If they are Muslim, you are likely to be. And so on.)
Here’s where we get to the root of supernatural belief:
Imagine that you are a hominid on the plains of Africa and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? If you assume the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it is just the wind, you have made a Type I error (a false positive), but to no harm. But if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator, you have made a Type II error (a false negative) and there’s a good chance you’ll be lunch and thereby removed from your species’ gene pool. Because we are poor at discriminating between false positives and false negatives, and because the cost of making a Type I error is much lower than making a Type II error, there was a natural selection for those hominids who tended to believe that all patterns are real and potentially dangerous. This is the basis for the belief not only in God, but in souls, spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and all manner of invisible agents intending to harm us or help us.
We believe in the supernatural because we believe in the natural and we cannot discriminate between the two. We create gods because we are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional agency. The gods will always be with us because they are hard-wired into our brains.
Shermer, Michael. “How We Believe”
Thousands of cultures throughout history have constructed elaborate mythologies to explain the mysteries of the world around them. I’ve found it quite easy to dismiss these myths. I’ve also found that it’s not a great leap to apply the same logic to the mythology you’re raised in, and dismiss it as well.
I have been accused of being arrogant in my non-belief. I recall an argument I had with a co-worker many years ago in which he stated: “Do you really think that you’re so smart, that you know everything? Science can’t know everything. Only God can know everything.”
Well, I completely agree that “science can’t know everything.” Science is a methodology for learning, for understanding, not a path to absolute knowledge. Science provides a steady, self-correcting path towards the truth. Science can’t state unequivocally that God doesn’t exist. It can (and does) say, however, that no compelling evidence for the existence of God exists. It is that, finally, that I rest my convictions upon.