Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart Read online

  The examiner blindfolds you, places you in a windowless van, and drives you off to an unknown location. When the blindfold is finally removed, you find yourself sitting in a white room. The only furniture are two plain stainless steel chairs. You are sitting on one, the examiner on the other. In the corner of the room there is a mysterious, bright-orange sphere that appears to be floating magically in the air. The examiner informs you that you are not to move from your chair or explore your surroundings. She then proceeds to ask you the following questions:

  Is this room located in a larger building?

  Is the structure you are in next door to a bank?

  Is the mysterious sphere in the corner being held up by a newly discovered physical phenomenon?

  Is the mysterious ball being held up by an invisible table?

  Okay, four questions, you think, none of them with obvious answers, so goodbye new iPad. Still, the questions present an interesting challenge . . . and you still want to get the most money you can.

  How should you answer those four questions? The most appropriate answer to all of them is, “I don’t know.” After all, you are in a foreign environment with an unexplained sphere in the corner. How can you claim to have any real knowledge to help answer those questions?

  On the other hand, “I don’t know” also means no cash, so you buckle down and force yourself to make decisions that have the highest probability of being correct.

  Okay, you decide, let’s try the first question: “Is this room located in a larger building?” Obviously, you have no way of knowing for sure if the room is a single isolated box in the middle of a deserted parking lot or whether it is one room in a twenty-story building. But even though you don’t have any direct evidence to help you decide, you still aren’t completely lost. For one thing, “rooms” are not a completely alien concept to you.

  So you ponder. I’ve never seen this particular room before, nor any bare white room with such sparse furniture. But I’ve entered many other rooms of different sizes in my life, some about this size. So even without direct evidence for what’s outside of this room, my general experience with life is helpful. Most of the rooms I’ve entered were part of some larger building structure. So using probability and inductive reasoning, I can say that the odds that this is a single isolated room are very low.

  “Yes,” you tell the examiner, “this room is part of a larger building.”

  Next question. “Is the structure you are in next door to a bank?” Again, you have no direct evidence, but you can still draw upon information from related experiences in your life. There are many uses for buildings, you tell yourself, and if I were to ask myself if the building next door was a bank on random occasions, the answer would almost always be no. “No,” you tell her, “the building next door is not a bank.”

  The examiner’s face gives nothing away. “Is the mysterious sphere in the corner of the room held up by a newly discovered physical phenomenon?” Well, I have very little experience with anything like this ball. How can I explain it? It could indeed be a new phenomenon, or it could be some type of a magician’s illusion, like a magnetically levitated ball, a hologram, or the Pepper’s Ghost2 effect. Which is most likely? Since I have no experience or direct evidence, I’ll favor simplicity and choose the one that requires the least reevaluation of what I already know. So you follow your first impulse that it is most likely an optical illusion. You tell the examiner, “The ball is not held up by a new physical phenomenon.”

  Final question: “Is the mysterious ball being held up by an invisible, undetectable table?” Okay, you tell yourself, this is a different kind of dilemma. If the table is invisible and undetectable, it would logically satisfy what I’m observing: an orange sphere that appears to float in midair. But to believe this, I’d also have to believe in the existence of invisible tables, something I’ve never before encountered.

  The good news is that you have two principles now to help you make your decision. The first is that not believing in invisible tables would be a simpler solution than believing in them. The second and more important is that if the object holding up the ball is undetectable, how do you know it’s a table? After all, couldn’t an invisible shelf, an invisible box, or an invisible chair be holding it up? Those are no less likely than an invisible table.

  So you answer, “The ball is not held up by an invisible table.”

  The result? You walk away with three hundred dollars. It turns out that the room is one of many in a television studio building. The ball in the corner turns out to be held in position by a very thin rod that extends out from the far wall, so you can’t see it. But the building does happen to be next to a Wells Fargo bank. Such is life.

  Indirect Evidence

  The previous scenario offers a powerful method for dealing with situations in which we’re forced to make choices about what we believe without any direct evidence for or against a position. In such cases, we can only rely on indirect evidence.

  The two questions that dealt with the room were different from the ones that dealt with the mysterious orange ball. Those first two questions do not cast any doubt on your preexisting view of the world. They merely ask you to make a conjecture about things you haven’t experienced by reflecting on things you have.

  To do this, you rely on related experiences in your own life—that most rooms you’ve ever entered have been part of a larger building and that most buildings are not banks. The “bank” question emphasizes a principle that we will refer to as the “folly of the lottery ticket.” For example, let’s say you buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket from the California state lottery. Your chances of winning the jackpot are one in 176,000,000.3 You are asked if you believe that your ticket will win and told you must answer yes or no. You have no way of determining whether or not this random ticket is the winner, so it is foolish to believe that you are holding the winning ticket. You may hope it’s the winning ticket, but if you believe it’s the winner and start spending all that money, you’ll quickly wish you hadn’t. Sound judgment argues that it’s not a winning lottery ticket, for the laws of probability predict that this belief would be correct almost 100 percent of the time.

  A key concept here is that you can’t tell what a winning ticket looks like until the results are announced. Each lottery ticket can have many characteristics: one could be dirty, another might have a torn edge, another might be creased, the numbers on one could all be odd, and another even—but none of these characteristics have any meaningful connection to the likelihood of that ticket being a winner. So to believe with any kind of certainty that yours is the winning ticket is to fall into the “folly of the lottery ticket.”

  By the same token, to believe that the neighboring building to the white room is a bank is unsound, since it requires believing in one specific outcome out of many equally plausible ones. Sitting in that white room, you have no way of distinguishing why a bank is any more likely to be located outside the building than a grocery store, a hair salon, or a restaurant—especially since there are many more popular retail buildings than banks. In fact, even after you learn that you are wrong in this case, you still realize that you made the best guess.

  In this scenario, you were forced to choose “yes” or “no” when you would prefer to reply, “I don’t know.” Life often forces us to take a position on matters where we may not precisely know what to believe but must choose anyway.

  The questions about the orange ball force you to deal with something that you have never directly encountered before and something that directly conflicts with the way you expect the world to behave—namely, that objects do not float in air.

  How can we bridge the gap between what we have experienced and a particular event that contradicts our expectations? Favoring simplicity means our current knowledge should be favored over inventing or creating new phenomena to explain inconsistencies or puzzles.

  The
“invisible table” question highlights the point that while some solutions may appear to be logically consistent—an invisible table would explain it, after all—creating a whole new phenomenon makes little sense if other explanations are available within the bounds of what we already know. And since we can’t acquire any specific information about the object, believing it is a table instead of a shelf invokes the “folly of the lottery ticket.” If the ball could be held up by an invisible table, couldn’t it be held up by an invisible box or an invisible chair? What about an invisible genie, or an invisible monster, an invisible fairy . . .

  . . . or God?

  If no experience can validate one explanation over another, all explanations are equally likely (or unlikely). The chance that the explanation you picked on that second question in the white room is correct is unimaginably small since you’re picking one choice from an infinite number of potential choices—every one of them as undetectable as the winning lottery ticket before the draw.

  You’ll recall that we arrived at a fourth non-commandment in the last chapter: all truth is proportional to the evidence. This statement already embodies the concept of favoring simplicity and the problem of the “folly of the lottery ticket.” We favor simplicity because simpler evidence tends to produce more accurate predictions. With the lottery ticket scenario, all tickets are equally unlikely to be the winner, even the actual winner, because no evidence can be produced in advance to favor picking one ticket over another.

  Since the fourth non-commandment already captures what was explored in this chapter, we will not add anything additional to the list of non-commandments. But the concepts we explored in this chapter will be very useful in the chapters to come.

  To recap the list of non-commandments so far:

  I.

  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

  II.

  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

  III.

  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

  IV.

  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

  Now, let’s tackle the question of God.

  5

  The Assumption of a God

  We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

  —Richard Dawkins

  The first four non-commandments dealt with beliefs about existence—that is, what is true and real in the universe. The remaining non-commandments will deal with human behavior and ethics.

  But before we begin discussing ethics, we need to explore a particular belief that relates to existence—the existence of a God. If this sounds more like an afterthought than the next logical step in our process, it is because, for a nonbeliever, that is exactly what we are doing; we are clearing away one final remnant that—given the view of the world we have already discussed—is no longer tenable.

  Many people see a central role for God and religion in influencing human behavior and morality. So before we dig into ethics, we need to tackle once and for all the question of whether God exists. As it turns out, that strange scenario about rooms, banks, and glowing orange balls in the last chapter is very useful in answering this question.

  That’s because it gives us a reference for how we might answer questions on a topic when we don’t have much direct knowledge or experience.

  Let’s ask the same questions we were asked in that room, only this time about a Supreme Being. Take the question about whether the room was in a larger building. This is a question about scale and number. A similar question related to God is this:

  Is there one God, or more than one?

  Whether the room was next to a bank is a question about specificity of type. A similar question related to God would be:

  Is God the Christian God?

  The question of whether the ball was held up by a new phenomenon is a question about the supernatural. A similar question would be:

  Does God supersede the laws of nature?

  The question of whether the ball is held up by an invisible table is a question about attributes. Similar questions about God include:

  Is God a completely just God?

  Is God omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent?1

  All of these questions about God have a common characteristic: they all assume from the start that a God or gods exist. None of the questions allow for the possibility that God isn’t real to begin with. Rather, they start by assuming the existence of God and then quickly move on to asking questions about what type of God exists.

  Let’s try to answer those questions as well as we can, presuming for now that God exists. That will better position us later on to answer the question of whether or not God does indeed exist, because we’ll better understand the attributes and characteristics of God.

  Is There a Single God, or Are There Multiple Gods?

  Polytheism is less common in modern times, but many great cultures throughout history have believed in polytheism, including the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

  When you answered the question about whether the room was located in a larger building, you said “yes,” because most of the rooms you’ve encountered have been in larger buildings. Applying the same principle to the belief in God is more difficult. Unlike rooms, most people would say they haven’t had a personal experience with a God or gods before. Assuming you are among them, how can you determine whether there is one God or multiple gods?

  Well, one thing you can do is to focus instead on one attribute of God with which you do have experience and make an educated guess by extrapolating from that attribute.

  For example, you can focus on God’s attribute of being the creator of the world and universe. No doubt you encounter numerous objects each day that were invented in your lifetime: laptop computers, the Internet, Hot Pockets, e-books, ballpoint pens . . .

  A few of these inventions were no doubt the creation of a solitary genius. But, more likely, especially in the modern world, they were the product of collaborations. A survey of the United States Patent Office, a very large database for inventions, quickly shows that the vast majority of inventions have multiple people listed as contributing to their creation.

  Consider one particularly well-known invention: the Apple iPhone. Apple has 416 patents related to the iPhone alone.2 One of them, U.S. Patent 7,479,949 (touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics), deals only with the aspect of the iPhone that relates to multitouch functionality—and that patent alone lists twenty-five different inventors. As this example illustrates, inventions—and particularly complex ones—tend to take the efforts of many to bring to fruition.

  If we were to apply this same characteristic to the question of whether there is a single God creator or multiple god creators, based only on our experience with inventions, we probably would come down on the side of multiple gods. After all, the iPhone is a complex device, but it’s much less complex than the universe.

  Is God the Christian God?

  When you answered the question about whether the room was next door to a bank, your response was “no” because it was far more likely to be next to something else—a home, a retail store, or any of a thousand other possibilities. This choice seems obvious, because banks make up only a tiny fraction of the possible options. Applying the same methodology to the question of which type of God might exist, you have many choices. Jews believe in one type of God. Muslims believe in another. So too do Hindus, Mormons, Sikhs, and Christians. If we count historical gods as well, the number grows exponentially. To name a few examples, you would
have to count Greek gods (Zeus, Hermes, Hades, Hera, Aphrodite, Dionysus), Norse gods (Othin, Thor, Loki, Njord), Egyptian gods (Ba, Isis, Anubis, Osiris), Sumerian gods (An, Ki, Enlil, Enki), Aboriginal gods (Baiame, Wuriupranili, Yhi)—the list goes on and on. Well over 2,500 deities have been catalogued by historians.3 As a matter of fact, depending on how you define “god,” Hinduism alone is said to have as many as 330 million of them.4

  Which defining characteristics should you use to guess well about which God or gods are most likely to exist?

  That’s a tough one. Was Jesus more accurate in predicting the way the world works than Allah? Is the God described in the Book of Mormon wiser than the God of the Torah? This dilemma is a lot like the lottery ticket problem. As we’ve already discussed, when you look at two lottery tickets before the draw, you have no way to tell which one is the winner, or even if they are both losers.

  The same is true of gods: put one next to another, and there’s no way to tell which is more likely to be real.5 Any choice among the various gods is arbitrary, because you have no way of knowing which one is holding the winning ticket. And that means you have to conclude that God is not the Christian God, because putting your money on any given number of a roulette wheel with 2,500 numbers (or more) would be a terrible bet statistically.6 And even if you were to decide to believe in the Christian God, you’d still need to choose among the various versions described by the 41,000 different sects of Christianity.7 And how would you decide between the Catholic version of God, the Calvinist version, the Pentecostal, the Seventh-day Adventist, and so on?

  What if instead of asking whether God is a Christian God, the question were changed to, Which version of God is most likely correct?