Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart Read online

  A good way to start is to admit to not having the requisite skills to assess the track records of the various gods’ predictions. That means you will need to rely on the experience of others who seem to have those skills. You are also more likely to trust the people closest to you because, as far as you can tell, they have never tried to deliberately deceive you. Given that, you are most likely to end up believing in the God in which your parents and family members believe.

  If your parents are Jewish, you’ll likely pick the Jewish God. If your brothers are Mormons, you’ll likely go with the Mormon God. Still, you owe it to yourself to at least consider the testimony of the vast number of believers in other major religions. And as you look around, it appears that believers in the God of Jesus make up a greater number than any other single option.8

  Is it the God of Moses or the God of Jesus? Your decision comes down to this: shall you ascribe greater weight to the wisdom of those closest to you or to that held by the greatest number of strangers? If you are like most people, you’ll pick the God of your ancestors.

  Does God Have the Power to Supersede the Laws of Nature?

  When you were asked if the orange ball was held up by some new phenomenon, you answered “no” because it was simpler (Ockham’s razor) to believe that you were witnessing an optical illusion than some new physical phenomenon you’d never before encountered, specifically for levitating orange balls.

  Let’s apply the same process to the question of a God: would it be simpler for you to believe that nature is constant and unchanging . . . or that God alters the laws of nature?

  The Bible describes many times when God intervened and manipulated the laws of nature with miracles. God created a fire in a bush that was never consumed.9 God stopped the sun in the sky for Joshua to battle.10 Moses parted the Red Sea.11 Jesus walked on water12 and raised the dead.13 By applying Ockham’s razor, it’s pretty easy to decide that the likelihood of these miracles having really occurred (as opposed to misreporting, confusion, or hysteria) is very low—especially given that you have not heard of any similar miracles in the modern era. You can only conclude that God, and especially today’s God, does not operate outside the laws of nature.

  But wait a minute. What of those modern-day claimed miracles, such as accounts of patients recovering from a terminal illness or infertile couples unexpectedly becoming parents? Should you ascribe these “miracles” to acts of God or, rather, to our misunderstanding of nature? It seems a whole lot simpler to believe that such events are not the work of God or gods but rather are rare outlier events that occur very infrequently, are errors in diagnosis, or push the limits of medical understanding. If you are not yet comfortable favoring simplicity and the laws of nature over a belief in miracles, see appendix A, “Common Religious Objections,” where we discuss miracles in greater depth.

  Is God Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omni-benevolent?

  When answering whether the orange ball was held up by an invisible, undetectable table, you concluded it was not. That’s because, according to the folly of the lottery ticket, to believe that a table is holding up the ball (instead of a shelf, box, chair, or the like) would be to pick one attribute out of many equally plausible invisible attributes.

  Applying this same principle to the attributes of God, you would reject the notion that God is a completely just god because the potential for God to be unjust, moderately just, minimally just, or even occasionally just would be at least equally plausible alternatives. If we have no way of evaluating the justness of God (and at least as much apparent evidence for injustice as justice), picking that specific choice out of many possibilities would be a terrible bet.

  By the same logic, you can’t confidently bet that God is all-powerful or eternal, because either of those choices would be betting on a single attribute from many alternatives.

  Where does that leave us? Combining the answers from the above questions, you might conclude that:

  It’s more plausible that many gods exist.

  Those gods have the disposition of the gods your family has historically believed in.

  Those gods hold no special powers above the laws of nature.

  Those gods are not completely just.

  Now, we’ll admit that presenting the above conclusions has been somewhat tongue-in-cheek on our part, for they show that even if you assume the existence of a God, defining the attributes of such a God presents some insurmountable challenges. Meanwhile, if you answer questions about the characteristics of God on their own merits and apply the same principles we use in our everyday lives in situations where we have limited information, and you don’t presuppose a particular religious view, you end up with some pretty strange notions of what that God might be like.

  It would seem that believers in God don’t just believe in God; they also assume a lot of other things about the nature of God.

  Now that we’ve made this one last attempt at figuring out what God might be like, we can ask a more fundamental question.

  Does God Exist at All?

  Since this is a question about existence, we can use the framework of belief we’ve already elaborated in the previous chapters. When we do that, we can see that a belief in God is inconsistent with the system of belief we’ve already proposed.

  Why? For two principal reasons.

  1. No Observable Evidence

  Since the qualities, powers, and workings of God are supernatural, we have no way to directly observe any attributes of God that would allow us to form reliable beliefs about his existence or nonexistence.

  Remember that one of our core assumptions (the second non-commandment) is that our senses are all we have for figuring out the nature of reality. And since none of God’s characteristics are observable, God can’t be identified as belonging to the external reality. Simply put, there is no observable evidence to corroborate a belief in the existence of a God.

  At the same time, favoring simplicity helps us dismiss the notion of the supernatural altogether, since there are much simpler explanations for describing the laws of nature than the work of an unseen deity. It’s much simpler to explain wind as the flow of air across thermal gradients than as the actions of invisible, supernatural gods. It’s also simpler to explain earthquakes by the natural, explicable movements of tectonic plates than by the actions of invisible, supernatural gods. And as Ockham’s razor has demonstrated time and time again, the simpler explanation is usually the right one.

  2. The Religious Lottery

  The second reason we can dismiss the notion of God’s existence comes from the “folly of the lottery ticket.” We have no way to intelligently choose among the many forms of God and the various religions. So the likelihood that the god of one’s parents turns out to be the right one out of so many options—well, the probability of that being the case is just insignificantly small.

  But let’s be honest. While we can debate forever the merits of how to justify a belief in God, the real reason people tend to believe in God is not because of the existence of corroborating evidence or because of logical reasons for such belief. No, people believe in God out of faith. Or, to put it into the terms we’ve been using, people believe in a given religion because they choose it as their set of starting assumptions. A religion is assumed to be true, and only then does a whole system of belief and behavior emerge from that assumption.

  In short, God is an assumption, not a belief.

  Remember, we’ve already shown that starting assumptions are never logically justifiable. Right? Otherwise they aren’t starting assumptions. But in real life we operate from them anyway. So why are religious assumptions any less valid than an assumption about an objective reality? We can’t logically prove that any assumption has more or less merit than any other. But we can say that the assumptions we’ve already made lead us to a system that doesn’t need God to function successfully.

  Wors
e still, the God assumption conflicts directly with the beliefs and observations derived from our initial assumptions—that is, our first four non-commandments. It creates a contradictory worldview not governed by sense data or evidence. Even if we were to accept a particular God as a starting assumption, is it possible to live and function without assuming that our senses are the only way we perceive reality? Some people can—and do. But the rational mind cannot. With so many varieties of God, can you really be comfortable assuming that your own god is the right one? Some people can—and do. But the honest heart cannot.

  Furthermore, as we’ve already seen, the God assumption isn’t very useful unless we make several additional assumptions about what that God is like.

  It comes down to this: if we acknowledge that a belief in God is a matter of faith and not evidence, then we also need to acknowledge that the attributes of God are also faith-based. In other words, every time we assume a God, we also have to make several additional assumptions about that God—that God is just, all-knowing, eternal, and so on.14 Each of those assumptions carries with it more uncertainty, which you’ll remember is exactly why we favor simplicity. That is, the fewer assumptions we have to make to explain reality, the more likely the assumptions we do have are valid. You might even call this another reason the God assumption is probably false: when you add that assumption, and all the other assumptions that have to come with it, the loss of simplicity takes our confidence down with it. In other words, every additional belief in God requires not just a little bit of faith but a whole lot of faith about a whole lot of different things about God.

  But how do the framework of belief we have developed and our Ten Non-commandments deal with events or concepts that we can’t perceive with our senses? For example, how can we respond to the question, How did the universe begin?

  The system of belief we’ve developed sheds no light on this mystery. So is the system incomplete if it doesn’t answer every question in the world? After all, religion does offer answers about how the world began—so perhaps that system has more merit?

  The problem here lies with our system of language, logic, and grammar—what we’ve called “definitional truths.” That system doesn’t allow for something without a beginning or an existence without a creator. No system that uses our current tools of language and logic can ever resolve such a paradox. A belief in a God doesn’t really answer the question—it just sends the question one step further back. How did the universe begin? becomes How did God begin? and so on. Like the description of the elderly lady’s universe, it is turtles all the way down.

  Instead of replacing one question with another and pretending we’ve answered anything, the most honest approach to questions beyond our comprehension is to state what we weren’t allowed to say in the small white room: I don’t know. That means that we admit the answer is simply beyond our current ability to conceive or even define appropriately with language.

  What we are not saying is that science cannot in principle discover knowledge about the origin of the universe. Indeed, scientific discoveries such as the big bang theory, black holes, and dark matter are our best current attempts to find the answer. But even if we do figure out the origin of the universe, another question will be waiting in the wings: What came before the origin? Some things are just beyond our current abilities to think and express. But that doesn’t mean we have to fall back on the God assumption.

  Believers in God will no doubt have objections to this reasoning. Some of the most common of these objections are:

  The different gods are actually the same God, and we can set aside the petty differences between the various versions of God for a view of a common shared God.

  Since the lottery ticket is worth so much—a place in heaven—shouldn’t you buy a ticket just in case you might win, no matter what the odds? This is known as Pascal’s Wager.15

  There is corroborating, observable evidence for a belief in God in the form of ancient and modern miracles testified to in various holy books and by witnesses.

  A belief in God is necessary to give us hope; it makes the suffering in the world more tolerable and it motivates people to be moral.

  Each of these objections has several flaws. But because they aren’t relevant to the tasks at hand—creating Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century—we’ve addressed these objections in appendix A, “Common Religious Objections.” Feel free to turn there at any time.

  The Fifth Non-Commandment

  Now that we’ve established that it’s much more reasonable to assume God doesn’t exist—the central claim of atheism—we can add this belief to the list of Ten Non-commandments, giving us:

  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.

  V.

  There is no God.

  6

  Putting Factual Beliefs to the Test

  It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  We’re now halfway home—five down and five to go—so it’s a good time to look back at what we’ve built so far. We’ve used observations, inductive reasoning, the scientific method, and the idea of favoring simplicity to create five solid principles. We’ve also decided that it’s best to reject belief in all things supernatural, including gods, and accept that we are each influenced by our subjective experiences, exposure to information, and our own intellect.

  So far we’ve moved along with fairly simple examples like whether the sun will rise. Now let’s broaden the scope, applying the non-commandments to more challenging problems to see how well our framework holds up. If we run into contradictions, or a principle springs a leak, we might have to circle back and reexamine our three core assumptions. Let’s see what happens.

  Since the belief system we’ve described relies so much on the subjective experiences of each individual, we’ll need a volunteer to test-drive the framework and see what beliefs emerge. The lucky volunteer will need to share intimate, personal details about his or her life and innermost thoughts.

  John has agreed to be the guinea pig for this section, and Lex the questioner. (We’ll reverse the roles when we examine ethics and morals.)

  John will offer his views to illustrate and test our emerging framework of belief, but remember, we are not claiming his views represent truth. They are just his best view of the truth given his own experiences and intellect.

  But first a confession. So far we’ve been using probabilities in a way that works fine at low speeds—figuring out whether you left the lights on, for example, and assigning an equal chance to all principles. But it’s not practical to assign probabilities to every variable in real life. There is no real-life Mr. Spock—the ultra-logical Star Trek character—to announce, “Captain, I estimate our chance of success to be no greater than 4.3639 percent.”

  That said, we still must determine how much confidence to have in a particular idea. We’ll do this by deciding whether a source is trustworthy and how much personal experience we have in a given situation. Instead of using precise probabilities, let’s divide our spectrum of belief into five broad categories:

  I believe that is true.

  I tend to agree with that opinion

  I don’t know.

  I’m skeptical of that opinion.

  That’s nonsense.

  The first and l
ast categories are pretty straightforward. Either there is sufficient evidence to give you confidence to say, “Yes, I believe that,” or there’s enough doubt for you to reject it outright. But as nice as it would be for all of life to fall into these two strict categories, in practice we have to accept gray areas where answers are better stated as opinions rather than beliefs. (To be clear, even the strong convictions on either end are still opinions, but we treat them more as settled questions in everyday life. We can’t be absolutely sure the stoplight that looks red actually is red, but we will go ahead and brake anyway.) If an assertion lands somewhere in the middle, and it’s important enough (“Did I leave the car keys on the coffee table?”), then we look for additional evidence to drive our confidence up or down.

  Even though “I don’t know” technically covers everything in the middle, in real life we can’t just leave it there unless the odds really are about fifty-fifty; otherwise, the belief just doesn’t matter much. The realities of life often force us to take a stand even when we may not precisely know what to believe. For most of human history, “I don’t know” has been a terrible conclusion to stand upon. A tendency to say, “I don’t know if that rustle in the bushes is a lion,” and to continue whistling down the path would eventually get the blissful agnostic removed from the gene pool.1 Better for us to either assume the worst or increase our confidence one way or another.

  Also, to answer, “I don’t know” (such as to the question “Does God exist?”), is often taken to mean that such a belief is at least feasible or cannot be disproved. To avoid this misconception, we are more inclined to form an educated presumption of what to believe.

  Speaking of which, it’s time to begin that test drive. Using the five levels of how we classify our beliefs, let’s see where someone who embraces our first five non-commandments falls on a few random topics.