Website - Atheist FAQ
Website - Atheist FAQ
This page contains answers to some questions that I have been asked about my beliefs, especially by Christians.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2007. I found the day meaningful (yet somewhat ironic) for declaring freedom from the belief in deities.
Because It Is Not What We See.
I also found the much of the content of the Positive Atheism website to be insightful, which led me to question the idea of calling myself a god-believer. Of particular excellence was the admonition to be consistently truthful in discussion.
The catalyst for me was reading some quotes and deciding that they resonated with me a whole lot better than anything from Christianity that I had ever come across. Then I started investigating and taking the evidence into account rather than discounting it offhand because it did not match what I felt. Then eventually I began to really understand that what I felt did not have to be explained in terms of God.
No, not really. When I was had spiritual experiences as a Christian, I genuinely enjoyed them. I also enjoyed being among people who believed the same thing as me. I was also willing to ignore the un-enjoyable elements of organized religion in favor of the personal experience and the communion with others like me.
That is Pascal's Wager. It is a crock. Here are some of my own reasons for thinking so.
If you say "any god will do", that doesn't work, because so many of them claim to be exclusive. If you honor one, you're annoying all the rest!
Here is another resource concerning the Wager, which even presents an "Atheist's Wager" (a much better bet!).
If your belief doesn't influence your actions at all, it is meaningless. I highly doubt that the Christian god would honor people who don't really believe in him, but then again, gods have been known to be fickle, capricious, and unfair.
Some people see supernatural design in nature because they have prior knowledge of a creator.
Evolution is entirely more obvious than design, when the evidence is examined. Here's an excellent resource concerning evolution questions.
The only way you can get a creator portrait out of nature is to look at a subset of it. On the whole, we have a mix of kindness and competition, brutality and beauty. All species evolved by managing to survive and propagate, with no particular branch of evolution being a special end in itself. I never understood why that never had more of an impact on Christian thought: billions of years of life, death, adaptation, and mutation, and all they got out of it was this lousy people-centric doctrine.
No. What you believe (and what you teach your children under a certain age) is your own choice. When I have the time and energy, however, I may try to at least incrementally expand the frontiers of your understanding.
There are at least seven definitions of this word in The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48.
If you take "faith" to simply mean "reliance on testimony", sure. Most people don't get the opportunity to test and verify every single tenet that they believe in — it would be exhausting. But to say that all positions on the question involve faith (in this particular sense) would not be saying much: it is still up to the reader to act on their readings and assign them varying degrees of credibility. I could make a fairly strong argument about credibility, but that would be veering off-topic from the point I want to make.
When people say "faith" in this context, what they usually mean is
[T]he assent of the mind to the truth of what is declared by another, resting solely and implicitly on his authority and veracity; reliance on testimony.
— [1913 Webster]
Thus, biblical faith would mean, "unquestioning belief in the testimony of those writers of the bible who have claim to have met god and write on his behalf."
Taking the definition of "faith" to involve some sort of unquestioning belief of what someone says, I disagree heartily with the assertion that it takes faith to disbelieve in the existence of supernatural powers. A free-thinking atheist would not take the sayings of any one person to be absolute truth; instead, they would leave open the possibility of correction, or the possibility of the existence of a theory that better fits the facts. The main difference is that this person works with the facts, rather than omitting them or distorting them. [In order to be fair, yes, there are some who believe in gods and are able to arrange their concept of god to match the facts.]
Instead of faith, it takes: (1) gumption, (2) the willingness to consider factual and verifiable physical evidence that might disrupt a belief system, and (3) unwillingness to ascribe to untestable beliefs. While that might involve a leap in understanding, it certainly isn't a "leap of faith", in the sense that the word "faith" is commonly used.
That is playing around with the definition of words. You are probably about to explain the spiritual experience and excoriate the ritual element. That argument won't work with me, because I don't care one way or the other about the ritual element.
Retort: How did God come from nothing?
There is one theory that nothingness (the combination of matter and antimatter) is inherently unstable, and that it tends to degenerate into a violent separation of matter and antimatter, and hence a Big Bang.
Further reading: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Obsolete.htm
Another theory is that the universe is like a spring that expands and contracts every however-many-billion years, going from Big Bang to Big Crunch to Big Bang. This theory is not widely accepted anymore, however, because evidence is arriving (within the past 10 years, particularly) that shows the universe to be continuously expanding.
I am taking "we" to mean "we humans".
Sure. Long odds on a particular outcome do not imply that this outcome could never happen, or that "something else" was involved. Evolution is a slow and gradual walk along the slopes of "Mount Improbable" (source: Richard Dawkins). It is not a sudden leap from the base of the mountain to the very peak of the mountain.
If you want to convince another human being, there is either reason, emotion, or a combination of the two. Emotion is important, but it should not stand alone if you want to communicate a theory of belief to the general public. Think of scam artists for a negative example.
In practice, emotional "literacy" is needed in order to communicate in-person. Reason, on the other hand, can be used without need of emotion to write a generally accepted theory.
It's also a matter of priority. If well-formulated and well-founded logical statement and personal belief are in conflict, logic wins. Likewise for other evidence-confirmed scientific theories.
Personal testimony is a great tool for getting recommendations for places to eat, but it is not a reliable way to answer difficult questions. If an unknown homeless person came into a business operation of yours and gave you a strategy for spinning straw into gold, would you invest the entire company's funds based on his advice? Personal testimony needs qualification and credentials before it can be safely acted on, otherwise you are opening yourself up for abuse. And in the case where the advice could have serious, life-changing consequences, and sufficient time is given to investigate a response, you would need independent confirmation and experimental verification if possible.
Also: if you allow personal experience as a proof, you must also allow it as a disproof. Would you accept and act on the testimony of an atheist, agnostic, Jehovah's witness, or Confucianist based solely on personal experience? If I were to make an argument that watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series depicts science as a source of inspiration and wonder that puts the Christian spiritual experience to shame, would you take my word for it? (And I do believe this to be true.)
If so, the only way to preserve one's faith would be to either prevent contact with those who believe significantly differently than yourself, or to discredit anyone who believes differently than yourself as a matter of principle.
You might claim that reliability of the source can incrementally improve personal testimony, or that it might "ring true". If the non-obvious theory of Christianity is outside of the bounds of things that can be proven, it isn't worth believing in (unless you have investments in family or some other subjective concern). Otherwise we would be hostage to every unprovable idea that came from someone we respected.
The great thing about theories is that they don't need a reliable source. Anyone can test them. Anyone can show them to be false, if they can find a single contradiction in the premises.
What I care about is historical context. What do you think the writers intended when they wrote the text? How do you think the first hearers of the text understood the text? The interpretation of literature is meaningless without such context, especially literature that tells you how to live your life!
It is entirely too convenient that the interpretation of the text can be adapted to match new evidence and by so doing come up with revised beliefs that are immune to criticism. It literally can't be falsified, or made wrong when contradictory evidence arrives. What I mean by "cannot be falsified" is that if your canon adapts to new knowledge, it is impossible to find (or even conceive of) any evidence that will make the canon ultimately untrue. All you have to do is say that the discredited parts of the canon were metaphorical.
Faith vs. works. Misquoting of Old Testament prophecies to fit the writer's agenda. Different understandings about the supernatural and human natures of Jesus between gospels and apostolic writings. Different depictions of the crucifixion and Judas' betrayal. A spurious tale that was known to be inserted in the Gospel of John in the 10th(?) century: the woman caught in adultery. The failure of Jesus to come back within a generation of his departure, which led to the Wandering Jew myth. Different genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23. The likelihood that the writer of Revelation is not the same John as the people who compiled the New Testament thought he was. The completely changed nature of father god between the Old and New testaments — talk about someone being different after having a child!
These blatant inconsistencies discredit the Bible as a God-inspired book (after all, if God inspired it, shouldn't he have taken care to edit it and keep it in a preserved state? He looks after every swallow, why not every word as well?). And since the Bible is the only literary evidence that can be said to be inspired by Christianity's God, discrediting it discredits Christianity's God utterly.
A prime example of point (3) is the covering the cost of "In God We Trust" license plates in Indiana. Not only did I feel alienated every time I drove my car and frustrated by the illicit marriage of patriotism with religiosity, I was also irritated that money is being squandered to pander to those who have monotheistic beliefs, rather than putting it to practical uses like highway maintenance.
Thank goodness, I now live in a state (California) that keeps religion out of public policy and aggressively funds science ventures.
I certainly don't feel depressed about the lack of god-given meaning in my life, or even find existential questions worth worrying about.
It's rather liberating actually: instead of having meaning imposed on you from elsewhere, even though it may or may not fit the mold of your mind, you get to discover your own meaning and your own worth. It is not so much about the question "Why should I continue to exist?" as it is "How can I make the most out of the time that I have?"
I suspect that some forms of existentialist thinking may have originated as a way for dissenters to the religiosity of their day to express themselves both (1) before Darwin proposed evolution and (2) as a way to avoid persecution for their doubts after Darwin. Before Darwin, the prevailing view was argument by design — if you didn't agree with the design theory but didn't have a viable alternative, people tended to consider you a fool. Now we have a satisfactory model that need not admit supernatural influences.
No. I was angry when I began to realize how much I had been lied to in the various things I had read, and when I considered how much time had been wasted on a farcical myth. That went away after a few months. It's not healthy to hold on to anger forever. And religious matters are not something that I think about all of the time.
![[FSF Associate Member]](/static/logos/fsf-member.png)
