What would convince an atheist that a religion is true?

In several years of debating atheism and theism, I have made an observation. Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, "Nothing - I have faith in my god." Although such people may well exist, I personally have yet to meet a theist who would acknowledge even the possibility that his belief was in error. Many theists, by their own admission, structure their beliefs so that no evidence could possibly disprove them. In short, they are closed-minded, and have been taught to be closed-minded. (For more on this, see "Thoughts in Captivity".)

In light of this, it is ironic that atheists are often accused of being the closed-minded ones. Fundamentalist proselytizers very frequently claim that we are hard-hearted, that we are dogmatic and irrational, that we reject God based on preconceived bias, and so on. Such claims result from psychological projection. Incapable of coping with the fact that there are some people who genuinely do not believe in their god, these theists simply deny that such people exist, and instead insist that everyone thinks the same way they do. Therefore, people who reach different conclusions than them must have some secret ulterior motive for not believing. This is truly ridiculous, but unfortunately, some people really believe it.

Thus, in the spirit of proving that atheists' minds are not closed, I've assembled below a list of everything I can think of that I would accept as proof that a given religion is true. Also included are things that I would accept as circumstantial evidence of a particular religion's truth and things that would not be acceptable to me as proof of anything. While I do not claim to speak for all atheists, I would confidently say that any religion that could produce one of the things from the first list would probably gain a great number of converts.

The first category deals with things that would absolutely convince me of the truth of a particular religion. If shown any of these, I would convert on the spot.

Verified, specific prophecies that couldn't have been contrived.
If the Bible, for example, said, "On the first day of the first month in the year two thousand and ten, the pillars of the earth will shake and a great part of the New World will be lost to the sea," and then January 1, 2010 comes and a tremendous earthquake sends California to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, I would become a believer. No points are awarded under any of the following conditions:

If the prophecy is vague, unclear or garbled (like Nostradamus' ramblings, for example). It must be detailed, specific and unambiguous in its prediction and wording.

If the prophecy is trivial. Anyone could predict that it will be cold next winter, or that this drought/plague/flood will eventually subside. The prophecy must predict something surprising, unlikely or unique.

If the prophecy is obviously contrived for other reasons. No official seer or court astrologer ever predicted that the king he worked for would be a brutal, evil tyrant who would ruin the country.

If the prophecy is self-fulfilling; i.e., if the mere fact of the prophecy's existence could cause people to make it come true. The Jewish people returned to their homeland in Israel just as the Bible said they would, but this isn't a genuine prediction - they did it because the Bible said they would. The predicted event can't be one that people could stage.

If the prophecy predicts an event that already happened and the writing of the prophecy itself can't be shown to have preceded the event.

If the prophecy predicts an event that already happened and the happening of that event can't be verified by independent evidence. For example, Christian apologists claim that Jesus fulfilled many Old Testament prophecies, but the authors of the New Testament obviously had access to those prophecies also; what would have prevented them from writing their story to conform to them? The extra-biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus is so scanty that it is impossible to disprove such a proposal.

And finally, if the prophecy is the lone success among a thousand failures. Anyone can throw prophecies against the wall until one sticks. The book or other source from which it comes must have at least a decently good record on other predictions.

These conditions, I think, are eminently reasonable, and are only what would be expected of a true prophet with a genuine gift.


Scientific knowledge in holy books that wasn't available at the time.
If the Bible (or any other religious text) contained some piece of knowledge that the people of the time couldn't possibly have known but that is now known to be true, that would be highly convincing to me. A passage about the atomic theory of matter or the heliocentric solar system would be interesting, but not conclusive, since the Greeks, for example, proposed those ideas long ago independent of any claim to divine revelation. A mention of the theory of evolution would have been impressive. A reference to the germ theory of disease, or the laws of electromagnetics, would have been compelling. But what would be indisputable proof would be an elucidation of a truly modern theory of physics, such as relativity or quantum mechanics - not just something that the people of the time couldn't possibly have known of, but something so counter-intuitive that the odds against guessing at it correctly would be staggering. Just think: What if Jesus had said something like this?

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thine energy is as thine mass times the speed of light multiplied unto itself."

Of course people of the time would have been baffled, but just imagine how many souls it would have saved today. As with the prophecy item, there must be independent verification that the piece of knowledge was written in texts that existed well before it was actually discovered by science.

Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer.
If cities condemned as sinful by preachers tended to explode in flames for no apparent reason, if glowing auras of holy light sometimes appeared around believers to protect them from harm, or if atheists and only atheists were regularly struck by lightning, this would be compelling proof. But it wouldn't have to be so dramatic; even minor but objectively verifiable miracles would do, especially if they could be invoked by prayer. If a hospital did a double-blind study to determine if intercessory prayer helps the sick, and it was discovered that only the patients prayed for by members of a certain religion experienced a dramatic, statistically significant increase in recovery rate, and this result could be repeated and confirmed, I would convert. This one shouldn't be so hard, especially for the Christians - after all, Jesus told them that they would be able to work miracles through prayer!

Any direct manifestation of the divine.
I'm not that hard to convert; I'll be happy to believe in God if he tells me to in person, as long as he does it in such a way that I could be sure that it was not a hallucination (for example, in the presence of multiple reliable witnesses, none of which are in a highly emotional or otherwise altered state). Where are the voices speaking out of burning bushes, or out of thin air when people get baptized? In Old Testament times, Moses saw God so often that he knew him on a first-name basis. Why doesn't this happen any more today?

Aliens who believed in the exact same religion.
And one more, though this one is just a bit off the wall. If humanity was to contact an extraterrestrial civilization, and if said extraterrestrials had a religion that was exactly like some religion on Earth, I would become a believer. (Though it would raise some interesting theological problems for Christians. Does Jesus have to travel to every planet in the universe individually, dying and being resurrected on each one?)


The second category deals with things that would not be conclusive, but that would count as circumstantial evidence. Show me one of these and I might not convert right away, but your religion will look a lot better to me.

A genuinely flawless and consistent holy book.
True inerrancy is, so to speak, the holy grail of theism. Almost every religion claims their scripture is perfect, but none that I know of have actually met this exacting standard; I have yet to read a holy text entirely without error or self-contradiction. A book that was free of such problems would be circumstantial evidence in favor of the religion that possessed it, but not compelling, since this is still explicable as the result of purely human forces.

A religion without internal disputes or factions.
It seems reasonable to expect that, if there existed a god that was interested in revealing itself to humanity and desired that we follow its commands, that god would write down whatever instructions it had to give us in a way that was only amenable to one interpretation. Thus, if a religion was true, we might expect that no factions or sects would form within it and all members of that religion would speak with one voice regarding ethical and theological issues. Why the alternative scenario should ever hold for an inspired religion is not clear. Did God intend to communicate his message clearly but failed to do so? However, since this could still be the result of human influence, it would only be circumstantial, not conclusive, evidence in favor of a given religion's truth.

A religion whose followers have never committed or taken part in atrocities.
If a given religion's sacred text consistently promotes peace, compassion and nonviolence, and if that religion's history reflects that fact, that religion would look much more attractive to me. Historically, almost every religion that has ever had the power to do so has persecuted those who believed differently, and I do not think it likely that a morally good deity would allow his chosen faith's good name to be smeared by evil and fallible humans.

A religion that had a consistent record of winning its jihads and holy wars.
Strangely, none do. One can only wonder why.


The final category deals with things that would not convince me; none of the following would persuade me to rethink my position. To date, all the evidence I have ever seen presented for any religion falls into this category.

Speaking in tongues or other pseudo-miracles.
To convince me, a miracle would have to be genuine, verifiable, and represent a real and inexplicable divergence from the ordinary. Anything that can be explained by peer pressure, the power of suggestion or the placebo effect does not count. Favorable coincidences or kind or courageous acts performed by human beings also do not meet this standard. (This post clearly illuminates the difference: "Biblical miracles aren't about accidents and people saying 'Whew, that was close.' Biblical miracles are people raising their hands and telling something impossible to happen, and it happens." ) Seeing the Virgin Mary in a water stain or Mother Teresa in a piece of pastry is not impressive. Nor is glossolalia, not even if it really sounds like a language. And faith healing, or people being "slain in the Spirit" and toppling over, owes more to showmanship and the placebo effect used on eager-to-please individuals that have been worked up into highly excitable, suggestible states. (Now, if faith healers could restore severed limbs...)

People's conversion stories.
I'm not interested in the testimonials of people who converted to a religion, not even if they used to be atheists. Everyone has moments of weakness in which emotion overrides logic. Instead of telling me how fast a religion is growing, how much of a difference it's made in people's lives, or how devoted its converts are, let those converts explain what logic and evidence persuaded them to join in the first place. If they can't do this, their stories will not affect me. After all, for obvious reasons, atheists are almost never the sort of people who go along with the crowd.

Any subjective experience.
Saying "I know God exists because I can feel him in my heart" or something similar will not affect me. Most arguments of this sort rest on the assumption that a person cannot have a completely convincing subjective experience and be mistaken regarding its cause, but a look at the diversity of world religions easily disproves this. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists - members of all faiths claim to have had convincing subjective experiences of the truth of that faith. Obviously, they cannot all be right. Why should an atheist accept any one of these testimonies as more valid than any other?

The Bible Code or similar numerological feats.
Using the same algorithms employed by the Bible Code numerologists, skeptics have been able to find assassinations and other historical events "predicted" in Moby Dick, War and Peace and other works of fiction that don't claim divine inspiration, so don't expect it to impress me.

Creationism of any sort.
I'm thoroughly familiar with the pseudoscience practiced by advocates of "scientific creationism" or "intelligent design". If you attempt to prove God's existence to me by listing the evidence for a young earth, more likely than not you'll be disappointed. (Though I'm always happy to debate the merits of evolution.)

Purist: Pretty much sums it all up, doesn't it?

Personally, the day I see a severed limb restored in my presence, I'll convert on the spot!

mkmyers45: this is the ultimate proof no?

jayriginal: Follow up article on how not to convert an atheist here

http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/hownot.html

Don't try to be an armchair psychologist.
I find it all too common for proselytizers to attempt to psychoanalyze someone they have just met, or even someone they have never met, confidently speculating on the abusive upbringing, personal tragedy or bad experience with a church that led the person to abandon belief in God and become an atheist out of anger or bitterness. It's a fool's errand to try to see into someone else's mind in this manner; not only that, it will usually be wrong. As already stated, the reasons people become and remain atheists usually have very little relation to the caricatures so common in apologist literature. Not only will this immediately cause an atheist to believe the person doing it has no idea what they're talking about, it will raise in their mind the suspicion that it is being used as a diversionary tactic to avoid dealing with their actual stated reasons for nonbelief.

It is as if an atheist accused a theist of believing only because they were brainwashed in childhood, without responding to the arguments the theist actually presented. Would not a theist who was the target of such tactics be justified in believing that their adversary was trying to poison the well of discourse rather than deal with the facts?

Don't tell atheists what they think; let them tell you what they think.

The single greatest and most common mistake theists make in dialoguing with atheists, in my experience, is to attempt to present the atheist viewpoint themselves and then argue against it. The problem with this is that relatively few theists can accurately depict the atheist viewpoint, and when they try, they often end up presenting nothing but the same old false stereotypes - atheists are nihilists, atheists have no purpose in life, atheists just want to be free of moral restraint, atheists are angry or arrogant, and so on - which are common in apologetic literature, but which do not represent the true beliefs of the vast majority of atheists. The result is that the theist goes to some effort only to set up and then knock down a straw man, while the atheist's actual position remains untouched. This brings the atheist no closer to converting. If anything, it is far more likely to produce annoyance at the one who would presume to speak for atheists without understanding their views, and make a conversion even less likely.

To evangelistic theists, my best advice is this: Don't rely on books written by other theists to tell you what atheists think. Don't even rely on books written by theists who claim they are ex-atheists. Most such books, based on the ones I have read, cannot be trusted to accurately convey the atheist viewpoint. If you want to learn about a position, there is no substitute for asking people who actually hold that position. If you want to have a productive dialog with an atheist, be sure to assume as little as possible, and whenever it is practical ask them what they think, rather than presuming.

Purist:


There's this common assumption that atheists are angry at God, or disappointed in a particular church's practices/pastors, or just simply bitter people, etc. It's pretty annoying when some people suddenly feel like psychologists and begin to psychoanalyze you just based on a few sentences you typed or uttered. They always seem so SURE of why exactly you are an unbeliever. They have met "so many others like you"; heck, they were even "ONCE like you"! While some atheists certainly do give these impressions, it is definitely not representative of the views of the vast majority. As has been mentioned repeatedly on this forum, people reject religion and God for various reasons. Why don't people get this?

jayriginal:

To evangelistic theists, my best advice is this: Don't rely on books written by other theists to tell you what atheists think. Don't even rely on books written by theists who claim they are ex-atheists. Most such books, based on the ones I have read, cannot be trusted to accurately convey the atheist viewpoint.

jayriginal:

As in, I could reel off a few names guilty of this.

mkmyers45: Names..Names..Names..

jayriginal: The Problem with Atheism

Sam Harris

(This is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007)

To begin, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge just how strange it is that a meeting like this is even necessary. The year is 2007, and we have all taken time out of our busy lives, and many of us have traveled considerable distance, so that we can strategize about how best to live in a world in which most people believe in an imaginary God. America is now a nation of 300 million people, wielding more influence than any people in human history, and yet this influence is being steadily corrupted, and is surely waning, because 240 million of these people apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers.

Of course, we may well wonder whether as many people believe these things as say they do. I know that Christopher [Hitchens] and Richard [Dawkins] are rather optimistic that our opinion polls are out of register with what people actually believe in the privacy of their own minds. But there is no question that most of our neighbors reliably profess that they believe these things, and such professions themselves have had a disastrous affect on our political discourse, on our public policy, on the teaching of science, and on our reputation in the world. And even if only a third or a quarter of our neighbors believe what most profess, it seems to me that we still have a problem worth worrying about.

Now, it is not often that I find myself in a room full of people who are more or less guaranteed to agree with me on the subject of religion. In thinking about what I could say to you all tonight, it seemed to me that I have a choice between throwing red meat to the lions of atheism or moving the conversation into areas where we actually might not agree. I’ve decided, at some risk to your mood, to take the second approach and to say a few things that might prove controversial in this context.

Given the absence of evidence for God, and the stupidity and suffering that still thrives under the mantle of religion, declaring oneself an “atheist” would seem the only appropriate response. And it is the stance that many of us have proudly and publicly adopted. Tonight, I’d like to try to make the case, that our use of this label is a mistake—and a mistake of some consequence.

My concern with the use of the term “atheism” is both philosophical and strategic. I’m speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one. I didn’t even use the term in The End of Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And, as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation, I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.

If the comparison with astrology seems too facile, consider the problem of racism. Racism was about as intractable a social problem as we have ever had in this country. We are talking about deeply held convictions. I’m sure you have all seen the photos of lynchings in the first half of the 20th century—where seemingly whole towns in the South, thousands of men, women and children—bankers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, church elders, newspaper editors, policemen, even the occasional Senator and Congressman—turned out as though for a carnival to watch some young man or woman be tortured to death and then strung up on a tree or lamppost for all to see.

Seeing the pictures of these people in their Sunday best, having arranged themselves for a postcard photo under a dangling, and lacerated, and often partially cremated person, is one thing, but realize that these genteel people, who were otherwise quite normal, we must presume—though unfailing religious—often took souvenirs of the body home to show their friends—teeth, ears, fingers, knee caps, internal organs—and sometimes displayed them at their places of business.

Of course, I’m not saying that racism is no longer a problem in this country, but anyone who thinks that the problem is as bad as it ever was has simply forgotten, or has never learned, how bad, in fact, it was.

So, we can now ask, how have people of good will and common sense gone about combating racism? There was a civil rights movement, of course. The KKK was gradually battered to the fringes of society. There have been important and, I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race—our major newspapers no longer publish flagrantly racist articles and editorials as they did less than a century ago—but, ask yourself, how many people have had to identify themselves as “non-racists” to participate in this process? Is there a “non-racist alliance” somewhere for me to join?

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

Another problem is that in accepting a label, particularly the label of “atheist,” it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I’m not saying that meetings like this aren’t important. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.

While it is an honor to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard [Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single person with four heads, this whole notion of the “new atheists” or “militant atheists” has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm’s length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them. And while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think this whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully marginalized under the banner of atheism.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

Now, it just so happens that religion has more than its fair share of bad ideas. And it remains the only system of thought, where the process of maintaining bad ideas in perpetual immunity from criticism is considered a sacred act. This is the act of faith. And I remain convinced that religious faith is one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised. So we will, inevitably, continue to criticize religious thinking. But we should not define ourselves and name ourselves in opposition to such thinking.

So what does this all mean in practical terms, apart from Margaret Downey having to change her letterhead? Well, rather than declare ourselves “atheists” in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in general.

The problem is that the concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining fixated on people’s beliefs about God and remaining even-handed in our treatment of religion. But we shouldn’t be fixated, and we shouldn’t be even-handed. In fact, we should be quick to point out the differences among religions, for two reasons:

First, these differences make all religions look contingent, and therefore silly. Consider the unique features of Mormonism, which may have some relevance in the next Presidential election. Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas. For instance, the Mormons think Jesus is going to return to earth and administer his Thousand years of Peace, at least part of the time, from the state of Missouri. Why does this make Mormonism less likely to be true than Christianity? Because whatever probability you assign to Jesus’ coming back, you have to assign a lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in Jackson County, Missouri. If Mitt Romney wants to be the next President of the United States, he should be made to feel the burden of our incredulity. We can make common cause with our Christian brothers and sisters on this point. Just what does the man believe? The world should know. And it is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing even to most people who believe in the biblical God.

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world’s religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can.

You might remember that Thomas Friedman recently wrote an op-ed from Iraq, reporting that some Sunni militias are now fighting jihadists alongside American troops. When Friedman asked one Sunni militant why he was doing this, he said that he had recently watched a member of al-Qaeda decapitate an 8-year-old girl. This persuaded him that the American Crusader forces were the lesser of two evils.

Okay, so even some Sunni militants can discern the boundary between ordinary crazy Islam, and the utterly crazy, once it is drawn in the spilled blood of little girls. This is a basis for hope, of sorts. But we have to be honest—unremittingly honest—about what is on the other side of that line. This is what we and the rest of the civilized, and the semi-civilized world, are up against: utter religious lunacy and barbarism in the name of Islam—with, I’m unhappy to say, some mainstream theology to back it up.

To be even-handed when talking about the problem of Islam is to misconstrue the problem. The refrain, “all religions have their extremists,” is bullshit—and it is putting the West to sleep. All religions don’t have these extremists. Some religions have never had these extremists. And in the Muslim world, support for extremism is not extreme in the sense of being rare. A recent poll showed that about a third of young British Muslims want to live under sharia law and believe that apostates should be killed for leaving the faith. These are British Muslims. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should be brought to justice. These people don’t have a clue about what constitutes a civil society. Reports of this kind coming out of the Muslim communities living in the West should worry us, before anything else about religion worries us.

Atheism is too blunt an instrument to use at moments like this. It’s as though we have a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment—with peaks and valleys and local attractors—and the concept of atheism causes us to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic religion, and then just flattens it. Because to be consistent as atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.

I’m not at all suggesting that we leave people’s core religious beliefs, or faith itself, unscathed—I’m still the kind of person who writes articles with rather sweeping titles like “Science must destroy religion”—but it seems to me that we should never lose sight of useful and important distinctions.

Another problem with calling ourselves “atheists” is that every religious person thinks he has a knockdown argument against atheism. We’ve all heard these arguments, and we are going to keep hearing them as long as we insist upon calling ourselves “atheists. Arguments like: atheists can’t prove that God doesn’t exist; atheists are claiming to know there is no God, and this is the most arrogant claim of all. As Rick Warren put it, when he and I debated for Newsweek—a reasonable man like himself “doesn’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” The idea that the universe could arise without a creator is, on his account, the most extravagant faith claim of all.

Of course, as an argument for the truth of any specific religious doctrine, this is a travesty. And we all know what to do in this situation: We have Russell’s teapot, and thousands of dead gods, and now a flying spaghetti monster, the nonexistence of which also cannot be proven, and yet belief in these things is acknowledged to be ridiculous by everyone. The problem is, we have to keep having this same argument, over and over again, and the argument is being generated to a significant degree, if not entirely, over our use of the term “atheism.”

So too with the “greatest crimes of the 20th century” argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I’ve got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great. I can assure you that this bogus argument will be with us for as long as people label themselves “atheists.” And it really convinces religious people. It convinces moderates and liberals. It even convinces the occasional atheist.

Why should we fall into this trap? Why should we stand obediently in the space provided, in the space carved out by the conceptual scheme of theistic religion? It’s as though, before the debate even begins, our opponents draw the chalk-outline of a dead man on the sidewalk, and we just walk up and lie down in it.

Instead of doing this, consider what would happen if we simply used words like “reason” and “evidence.” What is the argument against reason? It’s true that a few people will bite the bullet here and argue that reason is itself a problem, that the Enlightenment was a failed project, etc. But the truth is that there are very few people, even among religious fundamentalists, who will happily admit to being enemies of reason. In fact, fundamentalists tend to think they are champions of reason and that they have very good reasons for believing in God. Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence. The desire to know what is actually going on in world is very difficult to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become difficult to argue with. And this desire is not reducible to an interest group. It’s not a club or an affiliation, and I think trying to make it one diminishes its power.

The last problem with atheism I’d like to talk about relates to the some of the experiences that lie at the core of many religious traditions, though perhaps not all, and which are testified to, with greater or lesser clarity in the world’s “spiritual” and “mystical” literature.
Those of you who have read The End of Faith, know that I don’t entirely line up with Dan, Richard, and Christopher in my treatment of these things. So I think I should take a little time to discuss this. While I always use terms like “spiritual” and “mystical” in scare quotes, and take some pains to denude them of metaphysics, the email I receive from my brothers and sisters in arms suggests that many of you find my interest in these topics problematic.

First, let me describe the general phenomenon I’m referring to. Here’s what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he’s healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from his search.

We’ve all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able.

If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us “So, what are you going to do next? Don’t you have anything else in the pipeline?” Steve Jobs releases the IPhone, and I’m sure it wasn’t twenty minutes before someone asked, “when are you going to make this thing smaller?” Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they’ve accomplished, say, “I’m done. I’ve met all my goals. Now I’m just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you.”

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one’s favorite food always available to be placed on one’s tongue or having all one’s friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one’s desires get gratified, in spite of life’s inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone’s consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is “no.” No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here’s the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn’t contingent upon merely repeating one’s pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves “atheists” or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he’s probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don’t know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, “not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.” But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as “atheists,” tend to represent while advocating atheism. As “atheists” we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. [/b]This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. [b]It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. I don’t think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.

Finally, I think it’s useful to envision what victory will look like. Again, the analogy with racism seems instructive to me. What will victory against racism look like, should that happy day ever dawn? It certainly won’t be a world in which a majority of people profess that they are “nonracist.” Most likely, it will be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning.

We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know. This is certainly a future worth fighting for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term survival as a species. But the only path between now and then, that I can see, is for us to be rigorously honest in the present. It seems to me that intellectual honesty is now, and will always be, deeper and more durable, and more easily spread, than “atheism.”

jayriginal:

I used to get that all the time (the bolded). So annoying.

jayriginal: Good And Bad Reasons For Believing
By Richard Dawkins
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important
to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we
know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky,
are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we
know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?
The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually
seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling, ) that something is true. Astronauts
have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is
round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright
twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful
ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or
hearing or feeling, ) is called an observation.
Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always
lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the
murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather
together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular
suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is
evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can
help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can
think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into
place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the
universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis )
about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true,
we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the
world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the
same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When a
doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at you and see
measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then
he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see, Then he runs through
the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? );
hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly
way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child
has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or
X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and
more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on
from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you
against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition,"
"authority," and "revelation."
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion
with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been
brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as
Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the
microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they
said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to
have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their
parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either.
They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such
and such"; "We Christians believe something else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right.
The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he
didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But
that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where
their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs
handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed
down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing;
perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and
Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that
they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because
people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up,
it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up
a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make
it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but this
is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches
such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist churches. They
all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a
bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims.
People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over
their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good
reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their
different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary,
the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in
to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like
anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman
Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's
body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she
died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The
belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six
centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as
any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a
tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had
been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the
more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman
Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But
the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six
hundred years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another
way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in
anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because
you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church,
the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just
because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important
people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this
country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a
faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that
they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in
1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope
said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that
that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good
reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said
any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope (
1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If
people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be
terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and
we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen
the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead,
I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like "authority."
But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who wrote the
books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the
evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests
claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off
to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If
you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into
Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut
himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by
himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people
just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though
there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It
isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It
is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But
is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd
probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I
answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just
have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with
me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is
not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We
all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right
and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so
how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog
is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by
somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise,
you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But this is a bad
argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through
the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of
little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside
feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things
to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice,
little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it
is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong.
There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves
them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill
in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you
just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas that
you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'" about an
idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing
something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular
experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside
feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they
are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I
want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are
built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which
their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of
Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are
built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we
are built to be good at surviving in a world full of , other people. Most of
us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it from other
people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim'' through a "sea of
people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that
make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water,
the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak the
language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people sea."
Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England, Pepe
is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or
more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at
"swimming about in their people sea," children have to learn the language of
their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this
means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of
traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means
things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The
child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child
can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the
words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing
in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be
suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the
grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the
grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if
some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the
children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do?
Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once
something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and
there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on
forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god or
gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had
a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into
blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions
of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when
they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told
different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different
things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are
right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe
different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or
Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are
right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the
same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both
languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't
be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because
different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in
Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because
you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something
that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people
probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only
believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody
tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is
there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think
very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Your loving
Daddy

@jayriginal:

Thank you for educating and enriching us with all this knowledge. . . .

jayriginal: The Improbability of God

by Richard Dawkins

The following article is from Free Inquiry MagazineVolume 18, Number 3.

Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The achievements of religion in past history - bloody crusades, torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the last possible moment - are even more impressive. And what has it all been in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.

Why do people believe in God? For most people the answer is still some version of the ancient Argument from Design. We look about us at the beauty and intricacy of the world - at the aerodynamic sweep of a swallow's wing, at the delicacy of flowers and of the butterflies that fertilize them, through a microscope at the teeming life in every drop of pond water, through a telescope at the crown of a giant redwood tree. We reflect on the electronic complexity and optical perfection of our own eyes that do the looking. If we have any imagination, these things drive us to a sense of awe and reverence. Moreover, we cannot fail to be struck by the obvious resemblance of living organs to the carefully planned designs of human engineers. The argument was most famously expressed in the watchmaker analogy of the eighteenth-century priest William Paley. Even if you didn't know what a watch was, the obviously designed character of its cogs and springs and of how they mesh together for a purpose would force you to conclude "that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use." If this is true of a comparatively simple watch, how much the more so is it true of the eye, ear, kidney, elbow joint, brain? These beautiful, complex, intricate, and obviously purpose-built structures must have had their own designer, their own watchmaker - God.
So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood.

Throughout most of history it must have seemed utterly convincing, self-evidently true. And yet, as the result of one of the most astonishing intellectual revolutions in history, we now know that it is wrong, or at least superfluous. We now know that the order and apparent purposefulness of the living world has come about through an entirely different process, a process that works without the need for any designer and one that is a consequence of basically very simple laws of physics. This is the process of evolution by natural selection, discovered by Charles Darwin and, independently, by Alfred Russel Wallace.

What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? The answer is statistical improbability.

If we find a transparent pebble washed into the shape
of a crude lens by the sea, we do not conclude that it must have been designed by an optician: the unaided laws of physics are capable of achieving this result; it is not too improbable to have just "happened." But if we find an elaborate compound lens, carefully corrected against spherical and chromatic aberration, coated against glare, and with "Carl Zeiss" engraved on the rim, we know that it could not have just happened by chance. If you take all the atoms of such a compound lens and throw them together at random under the jostling influence of the ordinary laws of physics in nature, it is theoretically possible that, by sheer luck, the atoms would just happen to fall into the pattern of a Zeiss compound lens, and even that the atoms round the rim should happen to fall in such a way that the name Carl Zeiss is etched out. But the number of other ways in which the atoms could, with equal likelihood, have fallen, is so hugely, vastly, immeasurably greater that we can completely discount the chance hypothesis. Chance is out of the question as an explanation.

This is not a circular argument, by the way. It might seem to be circular because, it could be said, any particular arrangement of atoms is, with hindsight, very improbable. As has been said before, when a ball lands on a particular blade of grass on the golf course, it would be foolish to exclaim: "Out of all the billions of blades of grass that it could have fallen on, the ball actually fell on this one. How amazingly, miraculously improbable!" The fallacy here, of course, is that the ball had to land somewhere. We can only stand amazed at the improbability of the actual event if we specify it a priori: for example, if a blindfolded man spins himself round on the tee, hits the ball at random, and achieves a hole in one. That would be truly amazing, because the target destination of the ball is specified in advance.

Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. Only a tiny minority would have Carl Zeiss engraved on them, or, indeed, any recognizable words of any human language. The same goes for the parts of a watch: of all the billions of possible ways of putting them together, only a tiny minority will tell the time or do anything useful. And of course the same goes, a fortiori, for the parts of a living body. Of all the trillions of trillions of ways of putting together the parts of a body, only an infinitesimal minority would live, seek food, eat, and reproduce. True, there are many different ways of being alive - at least ten million different ways if we count the number of distinct species alive today - but, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead!

We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated - too statistically improbable - to have come into being by sheer chance. How, then, did they come into being?

The answer is that chance enters into the story, but not a single, monolithic act of chance. Instead, a whole series of tiny chance steps, each one small enough to be a believable product of its predecessor, occurred one after the other in sequence. [/b]These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations, random changes - mistakes really - in the genetic material. They give rise to changes in the existing bodily structure. Most of these changes are deleterious and lead to death. [b]A minority of them turn out to be slight improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction. By this process of natural selection, those random changes that turn out to be beneficial eventually spread through the species and become the norm. The stage is
now set for the next small change in the evolutionary process. After, say, a thousand of these small changes in series, each change providing the basis for the next, the end result has become, by a process of accumulation, far too complex to have come about in a single act of chance.

For instance, it is theoretically possible for an eye to spring into being, in a single lucky step, from nothing: from bare skin, let's say. It is theoretically possible in the sense that a recipe could be written out in the form of a large number of mutations. If all these mutations happened simultaneously, a complete eye could, indeed, spring from nothing. But although it is theoretically possible, it is in practice inconceivable. The quantity of luck involved is much too large. The "correct" recipe involves changes in a huge number of genes simultaneously. The correct recipe is one particular combination of changes out of trillions of equally probable combinations of chances. We can certainly rule out such a miraculous coincidence. But it is perfectly plausible that the modern eye could have sprung from something almost the same as the modern eye but not quite: a very slightly less elaborate eye. By the same argument, this slightly less elaborate eye sprang from a slightly less elaborate eye still, and so on. If you assume a sufficiently large number of sufficiently small differences between each evolutionary stage and its predecessor, you are bound to be able to derive a full, complex, working eye from bare skin. How many intermediate stages are we allowed to postulate? That depends on how much time we have to play with. Has there been enough time for eyes to evolve by little steps from nothing?

The fossils tell us that life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3,000 million years. It is almost impossible for the human mind to grasp such an immensity of time. We, naturally and mercifully, tend to see our own expected lifetime as a fairly long time, but we can't expect to live even one century. It is 2,000 years since Jesus lived, a time span long enough to blur the distinction between history and myth. Can you imagine a million such periods laid end to end? Suppose we wanted to write the whole history on a single long scroll. If we crammed all of Common Era history into one metre of scroll, how long would the pre-Common Era part of the scroll, back to the start of evolution, be? The answer is that the pre-Common Era part of the scroll would stretch from Milan to Moscow. Think of the implications of this for the quantity of evolutionary change that can be accommodated. All the domestic breeds of dogs - Pekingeses, poodles, spaniels, Saint Bernards, and Chihuahuas - have come from wolves in a time span measured in hundreds or at the most thousands of years: no more than two meters along the road from Milan to Moscow. Think of the quantity of change involved in going from a wolf to a Pekingese; now multiply that quantity of change by a million. When you look at it like that, it becomes easy to believe that an eye could have evolved from no eye by small degrees.

It remains necessary to satisfy ourselves that every one of the intermediates on the evolutionary route, say from bare skin to a modern eye, would have been favored by natural selection; would have been an improvement over its predecessor in the sequence or at least would have survived. It is no good proving to ourselves that there is theoretically a chain of almost perceptibly different intermediates leading to an eye if many of those intermediates would have died. It is sometimes argued that the parts of an eye have to be all there together or the eye won't work at all.
Half an eye, the argument runs, is no better than no eye at all. You can't fly with half a wing; you can't hear with half an ear. Therefore there can't have been a series of step-by-step intermediates leading up to a modern eye, wing, or ear.
This type of argument is so naive that one can only wonder at the subconscious motives for wanting to believe it. It is obviously not true that half an eye is useless. Cataract sufferers who have had their lenses surgically removed cannot see very well without glasses, but they are still much better off than people with no eyes at all. Without a lens you can't focus a detailed image, but you can avoid bumping into obstacles and you could detect the looming shadow of a predator.

As for the argument that you can't fly with only half a wing, it is disproved by large numbers of very successful gliding animals, including mammals of many different kinds, lizards, frogs, snakes, and squids. Many different kinds of tree-dwelling animals have flaps of skin between their joints that really are fractional wings. If you fall out of a tree, any skin flap or flattening of the body that increases your surface area can save your life. And, however small or large your flaps may be, there must always be a critical height such that, if you fall from a tree of that height, your life would have been saved by just a little bit more surface area. Then, when your descendants have evolved that extra surface area, their lives would be saved by just a bit more still if they fell from trees of a slightly greater height. And so on by insensibly graded steps until, hundreds of generations later, we arrive at full wings.

Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step. That would be like having the almost infinite luck to hit upon the combination number that opens a large bank vault. But if you spun the dials of the lock at random, and every time you got a little bit closer to the lucky number the vault door creaked open another chink, you would soon have the door open! Essentially, that is the secret of how evolution by natural selection achieves what once seemed impossible. Things that cannot plausibly be derived from very different predecessors can plausibly be derived from only slightly different predecessors. Provided only that there is a sufficiently long series of such slightly different predecessors, you can derive anything from anything else.

Evolution, then, is theoretically capable of doing the job that, once upon a time, seemed to be the prerogative of God. But is there any evidence that evolution actually has happened? The answer is yes; the evidence is overwhelming. Millions of fossils are found in exactly the places and at exactly the depths that we should expect if evolution had happened. Not a single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.

The patterns of distribution of living animals and plants on the continents and islands of the world is exactly what would be expected if they had evolved from common ancestors by slow, gradual degrees. The patterns of resemblance among animals and plants is exactly what we should expect if some were close cousins, and others more distant cousins to each other. The fact that the genetic code is the same in all living creatures overwhelmingly suggests that all are descended from one single ancestor. The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume
that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. In other words, the fossils, the geographical distribution of animals, and so on, are all one gigantic confidence trick.

Does anybody want to worship a God capable of such trickery? It is surely far more reverent, as well as more scientifically sensible, to take the evidence at face value. All living creatures are cousins of one another, descended from one remote ancestor that lived more than 3,000 million years ago.

The Argument from Design, then, has been destroyed as a reason for believing in a God. Are there any other arguments? Some people believe in God because of what appears to them to be an inner revelation. Such revelations are not always edifying but they undoubtedly feel real to the individual concerned. Many inhabitants of lunatic asylums have an unshakable inner faith that they are Napoleon or, indeed, God himself. There is no doubting the power of such convictions for those that have them, but this is no reason for the rest of us to believe them. Indeed, since such beliefs are mutually contradictory, we can't believe them all.

There is a little more that needs to be said. Evolution by natural selection explains a lot, but it couldn't start from nothing. It couldn't have started until there was some kind of rudimentary reproduction and heredity. Modern heredity is based on the DNA code, which is itself too complicated to have sprung spontaneously into being by a single act of chance. This seems to mean that there must have been some earlier hereditary system, now disappeared, which was simple enough to have arisen by chance and the laws of chemistry and which provided the medium in which a primitive form of cumulative natural selection could get started. DNA was a later product of this earlier cumulative selection.
Before this original kind of natural selection, there was a period when complex chemical compounds were built up from simpler ones and before that a period when the chemical elements were built up from simpler elements, following the well-understood laws of physics. Before that, everything was ultimately built up from pure hydrogen in the immediate aftermath of the big bang, which initiated the universe.

There is a temptation to argue that, although God may not be needed to explain the evolution of complex order once the universe, with its fundamental laws of physics, had begun, we do need a God to explain the origin of all things. This idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just set off the big bang, then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation, postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all!
The details of the early phase of the universe belong to the realm of physics, whereas I am a biologist, more concerned with the later phases of the evolution of complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present in the beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition, explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get
much more complex than an Almighty God!

jayriginal:



One of them is a lawyer, I could get sued.

Enigma: ^^^ Intelligent followers of the posts and their 'evolution' will recognise (and perhaps understand) what I have done here.

Enigma: ^^^^ Please where on this thread have I stated that atheism equal evolution?

Enigma: ^^^ Intelligent followers of the posts and their 'evolution' will recognise (and perhaps understand) what I have done here.

Enigma: ^^^ And where does that which you have quoted say that atheism = evolution?