I find religion to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that I’m a soft atheist and don’t personally believe the fundamentals of any of them. This post will be a bit of a meander through thoughts kicking around in my head related to religion and atheism.
Hard vs. soft atheism
I would say that I fall somewhere in the vicinity of weak agnostic/soft atheist. By that, I mean that I’m open to the idea that a deity (or deities) exists and is knowable, but I’m not inclined to believe such a thing does exist without some sort of evidence that it does. I was raised in an atheist family, which certainly shaped my worldview, but I’ve always found religion interesting. For the sake of curiosity, I’ve read the Quran (obviously in English translation) and a fair bit of the Bible.
I’m not a hard atheist who believes there is no deity or deities, full stop. In my mind, that’s a hypothesis with no more evidence to support it than the hypothesis that God does exist. If theism is the hypothesis that there is a deity (or deities), I’m going with the corresponding null hypothesis that there isn’t proof for a deity’s existence; if that’s soft atheism, I guess that’s what I am.
To put that in non-scientific terms, let’s talk purple people eaters. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that someone’s notion of God is a purple people eater. I design a little experiment to try to find evidence of a purple people eater. I run my experiment and don’t find any evidence, so obviously, I haven’t proven that they exist. Those results also don’t prove that purple people eaters don’t exist (the equivalent of hard atheism); it just means we don’t know yet. Faith is believing that purple people eaters exist anyway, and that’s what I don’t have. Show me a purple people eater, then we’re good to go.
This post is quite Christianity-centric, but that’s mostly because it’s what I’m most surrounded by; I’m an equal-opportunity non-believer. It’s not my intent to criticize anyone’s religion; there are just things I don’t get. I think it’s great that people find comfort and a sense of meaning in religion; I’m just not one of those people.
It’s harder to prove a negative than a positive
Looking at provability, the non-existence of something is always much harder to prove than the existence of something. Let’s get back to the idea of purple people eater as deity to illustrate this.
To prove that purple people eaters (or deities) exist, I only need to find one.
To prove that purple people eaters don’t exist (the equivalent of hard atheism), I would have to scour every corner of the known world, and then I’d have to keep looking for the remainder of my life, as well as the life of everyone yet to come, because I might have missed a purple people eater hanging out in a black hole somewhere.
So why haven’t atheists proven there is no God? Because no one has managed to check every last black hole for that stray purple people eater that might be kicking around. Proving that things don’t exist is very, very hard. For me, anyway, the burden of proof in a logical argument falls on whoever is arguing that something does exist, be it God, purple people eater, or otherwise.
When bad stuff happens
There’s a lot about religion that I just don’t get. If there is an omniscient, omnipotent, loving God, who many people believe does directly get involved in the human world in a good way, why does He let bad things happen? I’m not talking bad things on the scale of someone losing their job; I’m talking the really nasty, large-scale stuff, like genocide, war, or famine. I’ve never come across an argument that doesn’t have the feel of wildly scrambling to reconcile things that don’t really go together.
The argument that bad things have to happen so something good can come of it, or that there’s a reason for bad things to happen but we’re just not aware of it, is fine if we’re talking about job loss, but it doesn’t quite cut the mustard when we’re talking about genocide. Was there good to be had as a result of the Holocaust? It seems rather gross and all kinds of non-loving to think so.
In the anti-atheism arguments I’ve come across, there seems to be a lot of faulty logic. There was one article that I came across that said that evolution didn’t happen, but the way people say it supposedly happened, lots of species died out, and therefore it’s reasonable that God allows people to get killed off. Huh?
Another article said that choice and accountability are necessary for spiritual growth, so God doesn’t save people from their decisions. But again, bringing it back to genocide, no one chose to be in an ethnic group that was going to be slaughtered. That same article argued that tragedy is okay because it empowers others to act in a positive way. Really? Another article said pain awakens us to God; if God is so glorious, why on earth should pain be required? There’s the argument that God has his reasons, and we’re just not capable of understanding them. Except that’s not an actual argument, because what do you do with that? You could argue basically anything and wrap it up in a bow of God has His ways and we just don’t understand.
Free will
The main argument, from what I gather, has to do with free will. But I still don’t get it. Let’s say we were to accept a few things as a given:
- God is omnipotent
- He has given humans free will
- He loves us because God is love
- people believe they’re interacting with God on a regular basis and He is intervening in their lives, answering prayers and letting the holy spirit do its thing (I still don’t really understand what the holy spirit is)
- people believe He intervenes to perform miracles on at least a somewhat regular basis, given that there are 10,000+ Catholic saints
- God parted the Red Sea to save the Israelites from the Pharaoh, yet, for reasons unknown to us, decided to go hands off when the Nazis came along and started gassing every Israelite they could get their hands on
Given all of these things, when Hutus started slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, somehow God is bound by His choice to give humans free will, so sorry, but He’s out? God is claimed to perform everyday miracles for people, and the Holy Spirit is all up in people’s business (in a good way, presumably), but He can’t circumvent His own prior choices to stop people from slaughtering and torturing each other? I don’t get it.
More atheist questions
I also don’t understand why Jesus had to die. Sure, it’s the whole basis of Christianity that He died to absolve all of humanity’s sins, but my question is, why couldn’t God have forgiven people without sending His Son to be tortured?
I also don’t get the whole notion of original sin, and I’m not clear on whether I just don’t grasp what the concept is, or whether I know what the concept is and still don’t get it. Was God’s creation flawed? How could that be if God is perfect? Is it necessary to hold a grudge against humans forever because Adam and Eve weren’t well-behaved? If your children disobey you, does that taint stay in your family for a gazillion generations to come? If so, that seems like a pretty harsh punishment given all the love that’s supposed to be floating around.
Focus on the Family assures me that I’m going straight to hell for not believing in Christ as redeemer. They say it doesn’t matter if I (or anyone else) is good or sincere; God doesn’t want my despicable sinful self in his presence. I’m guessing that Focus on the Family is of the fire and brimstone persuasion. To be honest, it seems a bit wonky that a serial killer who believed in Jesus as redeemer would go to heaven, while a kind and caring person who thought Jesus was a purely human preacher spreading positive messages would go straight to hell.
Logical fallacies
I’ve come across a lot of arguments for theism that rely on some faulty logic. There may well be better arguments out there, but I haven’t stumbled across them yet.
I’ve seen the enduring popularity of the Bible used as an argument to support the existence of God. Those two things have nothing to do with each other, though; popular and long-lasting suggests that something is meaningful and it resonates with people, not that it’s true. Being popular and accurate are independent ideas, so the truth of one doesn’t speak to the truth of the other.
Then there are shut-down arguments, which are much like a parent saying “because I said so.” It may be true, but offers no chance of gaining any new understanding on either side. For example, there’s the argument that if things in the Bible don’t seem to make sense, it’s because humans just aren’t capable of understanding why God does what he does. I get that if there is a deity, He/She couldn’t be fully understandable by us, but “it just is” is certainly not going to bring me any closer to believing what someone’s trying to convince me of.
There’s the argument that the world is amazing, therefore there must be intelligent design. There is no more logical must in there than me saying our governments act like puppets so there must be a purple people eater pulling the strings.
Anti-atheism
Some of the Christian sources I’ve come across refuting atheist arguments choose particular arguments that are weak to the point of ridiculousness, which makes me wonder if those arguments actually came from atheists, or perhaps from a purple people eater, or a human inside the stomach of a purple people eater. This is a form of the straw man logical fallacy.
There’s a book by Ray Comfort that’s rather amusingly titled God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists. In the first chapter, which is viewable in the Kindle preview on Amazon, he argues that atheists don’t exist because no one has any way of proving the absolute assertion that God doesn’t exist. He adds that the Bible says ignorance of God is willful, therefore atheists don’t see the evidence of God because they choose not to. But if you flip all of that on its head, then theists don’t exist either. Neither side of that argument is any good, but there does seem to be a blind spot to seeing the flip side.
The good and the bad of organized religion
I’m not anti-religion, and I can absolutely see how religion can be quite beneficial for people looking for a sense of meaning and community. People want answers and direction, and religion is very good at giving answers to that kind of thing. On an individual level, I can see spirituality being a very positive thing.
I do have issues with organized religion, though, and that’s less about the religion itself and more about the fact that people suck. A lot of people do a lot of shitty things. When you get a bunch of stupid people together, and they’re feeling all kinds of self-righteous about their religious fervour, they start doing shitty things in the name of their religion. Those shitty things aren’t part of the religion, and in many cases, they may run contrary to the core values of religion, but people suck, so they go around killing each other.
Sociologically, when groups of people have strong belief systems, it can be very easy to Other groups that don’t believe what the in-group beliefs, and Othering can produce some very messy results. A Washington Times article rather brilliantly says “The most violent religion on Earth is any that have people in them.” Christianity comes to mind as having had a whole buttload of killing done in the name of it, but I’m pretty confident in my assumption that that’s not what Jesus would do.
God and science
I see no reason for God and science to exist as opposing ideas. Take the big bang, for example. Accepting the big bang requires rejecting what Genesis has to say about the world being created in seven literal days (as we understand them), but it doesn’t mean rejecting the notion of divine creation. Science knows about what happened from the big bang forward in time; it knows nothing and doesn’t claim to know anything about what came even an instant before it, which leaves plenty of room for God to come into play.
There’s nothing inherently anti-theist about the scientific method. Science isn’t about a certain body of knowledge; science is a method. You come up with an idea that you formulate as a hypothesis; you design an experiment to test that hypothesis; you run that experiment; you determine whether the results support your hypothesis or not. People get it wrong sometimes, but that’s all part of the process, and by continually questioning, hopefully, people will reach more accurate conclusions eventually. Science is about always questioning.
Concluding thoughts
None of this was meant to try to argue or persuade anyone of anything, nor am I saying I’m right and anyone else is wrong. It was just the thoughts that have bubbled up in my head.
I think what it really comes down to is that there is no one right way. No matter what any of us happens to believe, and there are a lot of different beliefs out there, we’re all fumbling around in the dark to some extent. Since the beginning of humanity, people have looked for meaning in this world and sought answers to questions like what happens after death, or whether there’s anything more than just this life we’re living.
People have come up with many different answers over the eons, and chances are, no one is fully right or fully wrong. Maybe the best we can do is to accept one another and try not to expect others to adhere to our own beliefs, and acknowledge that no matter what deities may or may not exist, humans are fallible, and that means each and every single one of us.
And to close, this fabulous quote from George Carlin comes via Nick at Fiction & Ideas:
Religion is like a pair of shoes. Find one that fits for you, but don’t make me wear your shoes.
This is a very broad question, but what are some of the key ideas that fuel your own religious beliefs (or lack thereof)?
This video of a talk by Dr. Dennis Hiebert on the social construction of reality is an interesting look at how human understanding of religion is socially constructed – and yet, he’s not an atheist.
To talk about atheism doing a lot of damage and taking a toxic approach presupposes an organized entity that is atheism, and I’m just not seeing that. And it seems to be humans organizing that really causes damage, which I would say is certainly the case in terms of the damage caused by religion.
I haven’t heard of John Vervaeke before. I’ll have a look.
Okay, so Atheism as a movement rather than necessarily individuals who happen to not believe in God(s).
Tbh I’m not a fan of “atheism as a movement” because of plenty of privileged cishet men worship Dawkins and have huge fragile egos and complexes on how “rational” they are. I can’t find the post I’m thinking of but basically a lot of women and lgbtq folks don’t like that atheism even as atheists. I’m one.
I’m rather out to lunch about atheism as a movement. I read one of Dawkins’ books, although I’m not even sure which one, so clearly it didn’t make much of an impression on me.
Love the George Carlin quote. I’m increasingly being drawn towards Buddhism, though I can’t say I’m particularly knowledable about it all! I like the themes of interconnectedness and compassion. Feels like it makes the world make sense to me.
Buddhism sounds interesting. It doesn’t entirely match up with my own views, but there’s good stuff there.
As God in flesh and blood, Jesus died to give his risen life- his holy spirit- to us. He said, ‘I am the way, the truth, the life. No one approaches God but by me.’ To me, that’s solid.
Love the tone of this post. You do not seem to be attacking or defensive but asking important and challenging questions. You asked what I believe. I know it sounds a little crazy but I feel like I have an active relationship with God and that he cares for me individually. For reasons you point out in your post and others, my experience is that a religious path leads to more meaning, peace, community and contentment than life without it. The Holy Spirit thing you mentioned is also kind of amazing. Thanks for sharing this well-crafted post and letting us share in return.
That’s great that you’ve found such a positive experience!
As a children we had to attend Sunday School but I believe that my mum, being a Christian, single-parent to four youngsters, and having no money, sent us so we could get Sunday lunch 😉
I’d say I’m agnostic and, as my sons are scientists they too are agnostic/atheist.
Sunday lunch makes a great deal of sense.
Lovely to see you! Glad you’re feeling better and hope the new job is going well!
That’s great!
I am a hard atheist and a secular humanist. One of my system members is Christian. Recently we have been learning about early Christianity. Many of the pillars of Evangelical Christianity like humans being inherently evil and Jesus as paying for humanity’s sin aren’t present in early Christianity.
Oh that’s interesting — I wasn’t aware of that.
We weren’t aware either. An ex Evangelical friend exploring Catholicism and Judaism sent us a video. It’s called “The universal Christ” by Richard Rohr.
I just found it on Youtube, and I’ll check it out.
It’s pretty long however my memory of it now provides me humour on how misinformed Evangelicals are. Especially those who seek to covert through “or you’ll go to hell”, “you’ve made your free will choice to reject God”.
Yeah, when that commenter on this post said I’d used my free will to reject God’s invitation, my thought was that perhaps God doesn’t write out those invitations very neatly, because mine seems to have gotten lost in the mail.
Haha yeahh!
Besides history actually shows the modern bible is a collection of bad translations and misinterpretations and there’s gospels not in it etc.
I’m sure there’s not actually a way to know, but it would be interesting to see how much fundamental parts of the message have changed over time.
I think scholars have attempted that actually. My partner teaches history and we briefly talked about the history of what’s now “the bible”. I have a book by a particular scholar who made it his life work. Went back to the original languages etc.
Oh cool!
Sorry not to have commented sooner, Ashley. I got behind and was reading your posts in chronological order. This one is so substantive (obviously) it’s hard to make a reciprocal comment concisely. I liked Dr. Heibert’s video as well, coming from the perspective of one who ascribes to a Christian paradigm but knew nothing at all about the sociological concept of “social construction of reality” before you mentioned it a while back. So I decided to look into it.
Incidentally, since it was the first thing that came up when I googled “social construction if reality,” however, it made me wonder if the spiders somehow tuned into my leanings, (I believe I used Duck Duck Go for the search, but they seem to customize search results as well.)
I am not a person who believes that the existence of God can be proven and I tend not to take arguments for his existence seriously. I also don’t believe it can be proven that there is NOT a God. Ultimately, God is a word that has taken on many different meanings for many different people throughout time. What that word means for one person may well exist beyond that person’s scope of reality-construction. And yet that same “god” may not exist for another person, because another person ascribes a different meaning to that word.
I don’t even think that the Bible attempts to prove His existence. When I went to Bible College, we were taught that the existence of God is biblically assumed — kind of like an axiom or a postulate. The rest is an account of statements and actions attributed to Him as well as detailed relationships between Him and the humans who believe they are hearing from Him or having discourse with Him. One gets a feeling for whom the God of the Bible is by reading it a lot, and reflecting, and praying. Then decides for themselves whether or not to try to follow Him.
That’s about all I’m comfortable putting in a comments section. Since moving up to Idaho, I’ve been stricken with this long-lost value of not discussing religion or politics in polite company. The Internet is about the only place left to do it, but it’s kinda rubbing off. A while back when the subject was diet I was being facetious when I quoted those Scriptures, but if you or anyone happened to look them up, they’re kinda interesting as pertains to how we all decide to feed ourselves.
Anyway that’s all. I appreciated this post. You’re obviously a very open-minded and fair-minded person.
That’s an interesting description of the bible—I like it.
Religion and politics can be dicey online. I was actually surprised by how civilized the comments were on this post.
It’s surprising but also probably a testament to the quality of your readership. Every now and then I see a comment from somebody that seems designed to create controversy, but it’s far and few between. You seem to have a pretty civilized following lol.
I should add to the biblical description that outside of the things I’ve mentioned, the Bible contains a coherent plan for the individual and for humanity. It’s really a pretty amazing book; and in my experience, it becomes more so when one is able to explore it with an open mind, free of preconceptions about religion, Christianity, etc. The work stands on its own and should be awe-inspiring on many levels, though it has acquired a bad rep due to the “bad parts” (which unfortunately has turned off many a potential reader to discovering its “good parts.”). The work as a whole is monumental and to my view it ties together admirably, evidencing an authorship that defies the limits of human creativity & capability. IMO.
Thank you for sharing that!
My regular readers are fantastic, but usually topics like this draw in random ranty types. Censorship/free speech is another massive draw for the random ranters.
Meant to put the word “contains’ between “Bible” and “a” in the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph, if you’d like to insert it. I seem to leave out words when I am typing quickly and under any stress.
I should probably show you the thread on my Facebook when I shared your post about censorship. I’ll email it to you. (It didn’t get very far, but it does evidence a certain mind-set that’s hard to break.)
I bet those same hard-core free speech enthusiasts are the same ones that would be very quick to bring out the weapons arsenal if someone made the mistake of feeling free to wander onto their property.
Here, I changed the link of that Facebook discussion to “public” from “friends only” so I could share it: https://www.facebook.com/edeninbabylon/posts/456308528953982
I’m not able to view it without a Facebook acount.
Oh, so that’s how that works. Let me see if I can just copy the text (it’s not very long). I’ll send it to you if I can.
Ok cool
I sent it to your email.
So interesting…
I’m a very spiritual person but I have more in common with atheists than any religious person. This is because I believe in what is right in front of me and I think that when you zoom ALL the way out, that’s “god” and we’re an active part of it. I don’t even like calling it god because of the connotation the word has, the association with the whole sky daddy thing.
Scientifically “provable”: every single thing is connected and affects everything else and it’s impossible for anything to truly be disconnected, even the void of space is a “thing”.
So I kind of see us as “cells in the body of god”. We are separate and part of simultaneously. God experiences every single life and that’s why there’s good bad and ugly, because God wants to experience it all.
I hate the christian concept of “satan” as some separate entity from god because it literally makes no sense. If god is omnipotent and omnipresent, that means god made satan, and in my view satan would be a part of god if such a thing existed. Satan is a scapegoat for Christians who feel guilty about making normal human mistakes and atrocities.
In Judaism there is no satan or hell, all punishments from god are received here on earth. I pursued conversion to Judaism for a few years because it made a whole lot more sense than christianity, especially the Reform branch, but in the end I decided no man made religion will ever do it for me.
The god I believe values all life equally. Every microbe has it’s place. The god I believe demands nothing in particular from us. The god I believe in doesn’t hold it against me that I deeply distrust it after it allowed my unborn baby to die. The god I believe in allows miracles as well as obscene tragedies to occur, because in the much grander scheme of things nothing really matters all that much. Do you care about the comings and goings of ants? I do, but I’m a weirdo. The ants care deeply, because that is their life, their experiences.
The fact of the matter is we’re all going to the same place and how we spend each day is far more important than what happens to us after we die. All we ever truly have is this moment we are currently in. We can deal with death when we cross that bridge. And I believe something that every single thing experiences can’t possibly be all that bad.
That’s a really interesting perspective!
Thank you. I’m honestly always a bit embarrassed to share it, but I do it anyway in case I ever run into someone who thinks similarly ahaha.
There’s so much that I identify with here and agree with you about, even though I consider myself a believer in G-d and a participant in organized religion*. I believe in free will and also in a G-d that plays some role in the outcomes of the world; I recognize those contradict and I honestly haven’t fully resolved the contradiction, yet I am ok with it.
*Definitely hear you on the downsides of organized religion.
Judaism seems like it avoids at least some of the downsides of organized religion. The lack of hierarchical structure and the active encouragement of debate seem like very good things in that respect.
The website
“I repented of cursing God blaming him”
Makes me want to be down in the sewer with all the poop pee shit and stuff after seeing website I can so easily see myself getting down in the sewer with all the poop pee shit and stuff and just scraping poop off the sides of the sewer pipe and rubbing the poop all up and down my body and the poop will have seed shells and corn in the poop and the poop will have mucus slivers of red and black specks in the poop And then a chunk of poop will get caught in my belly button and I’ll look at that chunk of poop in my belly button and it would make my penis erect