For this thread I think we can agree that most atheists in the western world were not raised as atheists but rejected God/Christianity at some point in their life and of their own choosing. Given that most Dopers are atheist (or so it seems), I ask you, in all sincerity, what did you replace God with?
God, for the Jews/Christians/Muslims, answers a lot of the oldest philosophical questions: Where did we come from? What is morality and where does it come from? Why do men do evil? Why is there evil? These questions are answered for people who believe in God. But what about those who don’t believe in God?
When you become an atheist, these philosophical questions again are unanswered. What belief system, philosophy, moral code did you replace God with that satisfied those questions for you?
I am not asking for a criticism of believers in God or why you rejected God, per se. What I want to know is what you replaced God with and how you defend this alternate belief system. Is there no single belief system that you replaced Him with? Or are the questions being asked irrelevant to the atheistic viewpoint?
Hold it there, son, you are asking a whole lotta big questions in one little thread…
I don’t know if my answers mean anything, because I don’t think I’m a true atheist…except that I know I do not believe in a diety separate from ourselves. Most of the time. But that doesn’t mean I reject enything and everything not of this world.
I was not in the “most” category, I was raised completely free of any kind of religious dogma whatsoever. I was also raised without any emphasis on lack of religion. My parents were sorta indifferent to the whole topic. I’m very grateful for that. VERY grateful. It meant I didn’t have to battle my way out of any kind of indoctrination to even be able to ask the questions.
As for evil… I truly believe that it is simply the dark to the light that keeps the play passionate. If we are spirit that exists outside this plane, evil and good are equal. They are simply different sides of the same coin, and it is not possible for a coin to have only one side, so each are necessary for the whole to balance, and in balance there is perfection. Not perfection as we would understand it in an earthly way, but perfection spiritually.
I could go on, but it will get really, really complicated. I was just inspired to offer a couple pennies outta my pocket, since you asked.
I didn’t replace God with anything. I devloped an understanding of the world which made God irrelevant.
Some of the questions you ask are actually much simpler without the constraints of religion. Why does evil exist? Because humans are not perfectly moral. If one does not believe in an omnipotent being of pure good who guides the Universe, then the existence of evil carries no paradoxical implications.
My personal morality is based upon the extension of empathy and the understanding that my moral reference frame is not privileged in any way.
I find that science provides several interesting hypotheses for the origin of life. I am not troubled at all by my inability to point to one of them and say, “this is absolutely how it happened.”
In a way, that leads me to what is probably the best answer to your question. I did not replace the certainty that faith provides to many people of religion. I simply stopped needing it.
This is like asking me what I replaced Santa Claus with. I became an atheist when I was almost 5, which wasn’t too long after I found out about the nonexistence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It was no different, the role of God in my 4-year-old mind was similar to that of other mythological beings children that age believe in. My fear of sinning was identical to my fear of stepping on cracks or still being in the bathroom when the toilet makes that gurgling sound at the end of the flush.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me. The Question of Evil is more easily answered if you believe in God than if you don’t believe in God?!?
If you don’t believe in God, the answer’s simple. There is evil in the universe because no one created the universe. There is evil because there is no omnipotent superbeing sitting there watching us who can snap his fingers and say “evil be gone!”.
But if you do believe in an omnipotent God, the existence of evil is a heck of a lot harder to explain. Why doesn’t God remove the evil, if He is omnipotent? If Satan is causing evil, why doesn’t God just get rid of Satan? Honestly, I don’t know how you guys get to sleep at night.
Why does the belief in god answer these questions? The belief in god has to do with the belief in god. Wether or not that belief answers any questions depends on the belief.
I was not raised atheist, but neither was I raised religious. I was aware that other people believed in various deities (including my mother, who is Deist), but I never really did myself. I read the Bible and Ovid and Norse myths, and felt no need to believe any one of them was “real”. I went to church with my grandmother, but it was just a fairly boring meeting with odd yet somewhat interesting rituals; kind of like 4-H. There was no need to “replace” anything; I went through various phases of attempts at magic and reading omens and placating spirits as a child, but they were abandoned as they proved ineffectual. They are fun, sometimes, though, thinking you could influence the world in some mystic way (as opposed to the pain-in-the-ass way of getting off your duff and changing the world through your own sweat).
My answers to the “great questions” are pretty much the same as Spiritus’. Without a God, there is no reason to assume that all men are good, or that the world is fair, or even that we will be able to figure out how the world came into being. Atheists have no “problem of evil”. The world just is. There is no need to have “answers”; if there are “answers” and we figure them out, well and good, but I’d rather say “I don’t know” than claim knowledge that I do not possess.
Whoa, cowboy, are you saying that people who belive in God have all their moral and philosophical questions answered? I think not.
Like tracer and Stoid I was rasied without any religious dogma. I am an atheist but usually keep that fact to myself as I have been called everything from a moron to worse for my (non)beliefs.
I like what Stoid wrote.
What do I replace God with? You assume that my life is incomplete, my soul is incomplete because of atheism. But I don’t see it that way. There is nothing to replace.
I see several posts since I started writing this…I may have to come back
I never felt any particular need to replace god. I used to believe in god the same way I believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. When I stopped believing in those things I didn’t have an empty void in my life that needing filling.
**
Where did we come from? I don’t pretend to know everything. There are various theories about how single celled organisms originated and how those evolved into more complex forms of life.
What is morality and where does it come from? Morality is a system of right and wrong. It was created by man not handed to him on two stone tablets.
Why do men do evil? Why is there evil? There are a lot of reasons why men do evil. Some people are greedy for example while others are just plain sadistic. There is evil because some people don’t care what they do to other human beings.
**
I didn’t replace any god. I guess I just started thinking for myself. I don’t need an imaginary creature telling me what is right and what is wrong.
Marc
For me, it is unromantic. I am a scientist. I must exist in a system which is internally consistent and relevant to the observed world. Religion is neither. This is just pragmatism – religion and the existence of God or any other supernatural entities are irrelevant to our observed (and observable) universe, hence unnecessary. My universe is internally consistent since it follows the laws of science. With internal consistency, I can formulate theories with predictive values based on the observations. In short, God was replaced by Science.
Now to the OP. I believe, to paraphrase Einstein, morality (and human behavior) should be based on empathy. Fear of punishment after death is truly IMHO an immature concern when we spend our days concerned with how to live. Unfortunately, human behavior is most often governed not by empathy but by greed. Greed, when it negatively affects other people, is perceived as evil. We strive to live in a society, but simple biology tells us that self-preservation is more important. Thus, evil.
Our ultimate creation (i.e. before time, before Big Bang, etc.) lies outside of our observable system, therefore I do not concern myself with it (pragmatism). It holds absolutely no bearing on my current observable system, and therefore the questions are unaskable, unanswerable, and uninteresting. From Planck Time after Big Bang till the present, cosmology and evolution do fine for me.
Instead of a God, I have a universe filled with wonders far beyond the imaginations of any of the authors of the bible.
Instead of a flat Earth 6000 years old covered with a Vault of Heaven that has a few points of light hanging from it, I have a universe 14 billion years old and 14 billion light-years wide, peppered with suns more distant and ancient and numerous than our ancestors had ever dreamed.
Instead of a morality imposed by the promise of heavenly reward and the threat of eternal punishment, I follow a live-and-let-live morality simply because it’s the sensible thing to do.
Instead of a creation in which my not-too-ancient ancestor was moulded from the clay of the Earth according to some designer’s blueprints and every other living thing was created separately by some “lesser” process, I have a vastly long and proud lineage stretching back four billion years, and I share a distant but very real kinship with everything living, from my next-door neighbor to my next-door neighbor’s dog to the pine tree in my back yard to the anaerobic bacteria living in my gut.
And, finally, instead of a promise of eternal life, I have the knowledge that this one time around is the only shot I will ever have at living, so I’d better make the most of it while I still exist.
It’s been a long climb, up from the morass of our ancient ancestors’ confusion to the real knowledge of the universe we possess today – but oh! The view from up here was worth the climb!
In fact, It was the realization that the world was so much more simpler to understand without the trappings of religion that led me towards being an atheist.
In fact, looking from the outside, into the world of religion and GOD, I’d say being an atheist is a safe bet.
Coz’ even if I dont believe in GOD, But lead a completely moral and virtuous life, then what GOD forsakes me?
Others have probably basically answered the question, but I somehow feel the need to summarise and give my views.
Firstly, the answer to your final question is “Yes”. Many of the questions you see as unanswered by atheism you only ask because of your non-atheistic viewpoint. Many (all?) aspects of Christianity are highly questionable from any rational viewpoint. This has necessitated rational Christians attempting to provide answers to the questions raised. No Christianity, no such questions. Unlearn, unlearn, as Yoda would say.
Secondly, as others have suggested, many of the answers that Christianity allegedly provides are illusory. Without descending into detail, the whole Christian viewpoint is based upon the universe being created and controlled and whatever else by this thing called “God” which is admitted to be unknowable. Therefore, every so-called “answer” that Christianity allegedly provides based upon “God” amounts, fundamentally to “I don’t know”.
Religion answers these questions only for those whose curiosity is very, very easily satisfied. I mean, really: we have evil because a talking snake persuaded a naked woman to eat an apple? And if we read the story allegorically, it doesn’t answer much of anything.
To assume that belief in God must be replaced by something is part of the dichotomous world-view that religion tends to foster. When people hear that I don’t believe in God, they sometimes assume that I worship Satan. That’s hilarious. When I say I don’t believe in God, I mean I don’t believe in beings of god-like proportions. Satan is just the opposite of God, and both are part of the religious world. They don’t exist in mine.
When I finally threw off the bonds of religion, the only thing that was replaced was the credulity that had made me try to believe in fairy tales. That credulity was replaced by an improved understanding, which, as Spiritus Mundi said, made God irrelevant.
I very much envy those of you who were raised without religion. You had such a head start on the road to intelligence!
Morality came from a need for societies to enfore rules necessary for the function of society. A man living alone has no use for morality. Evil is when someone violates the rules of society for his own benefit, but at society’s expense. It exists because a certain amount of selfishness is rewarded.
I didn’t really replace it with anything, other than observing the world and using common sense.
