Atheism is an escape hatch for those of us who are uncomfortable with the notion that the world we exist in is infinit and essentially un-fathomable by us puny humans. In Atheism we can hide our fears behind the belief that eventually all questions can be defined in mathematical relationships and a well stacked table of fundamental particles and forces. The fact that we aren’t there yet is simply because we’ve just barely begun the enterprise, but someday we will fathom our existence in every possible detail, leaving no question unanswered, complete masters of our existence and our future.
Seems a non sequitur to me. I’m sure some atheists might believe something like this, but I doubt that most do.
Why would atheism necessarily entail that there will eventually be an answer for everything? I’m not seeing it. Most atheists that I’ve talked with (anecdotal, I admit) are atheists because of a lack of evidence, not because they hope to have the answers to everything.
I am atheist not because I can’t handle religion, but because I don’t see the need for religion in my life. I understand science well enough to know how the universe can operate without a governing deity and the logical/epistemological problems with “God” in the first place. I can live a full, happy life without feeling like I am a slave to hazy morals and rules, too.
Atheism is the default. Nobody is religious until they are taught to be. There aren’t any fears being hidden by the hope that everything can be scientifically explained. One doesn’t really have much to do with the other.
I’m a staunch atheist. I believe that when I die, my consciousness will ebb away and my body will rot. I accept that as truly as I accept that the moon obits the earth. And yet I’m still scared to death of dying. My fears are plain for all to see.
… at which point we’ll all realize how futile religion has been all these years. Hallelujah.
Yep, death will pretty much be a long, dreamless sleep. It’ll be like the 13.7 billion years you waited through before you were born.
I’m scared of dying because I love life too much. Being scientifically literate lets you see the world in a totally different way and people don’t understand how much of a privilege it is to live during a time where you can (more or less) understand exactly where you came from.
I just wish I could live longer so I could see what more science would be able to uncover. It’s like reading a neverending mystery novel. I want to know how it ends.
Maybe I’m a recently activated sleeper agent? I registed in 2004, lurked about for years and eventually forget I registered. I’m now ready to participate Is it important?
I don’t think it is at all fear based, but rather quite fearless.
To attempt to understand reality and the Universe AS IT IS without “a God/Wizard did it” shortcuts or fear mongering “You’d better behave because of Sin/Hell/Karma/whatever”. To know what it all really is and how it works. To accept that it really is so vast that we will probably never understand it all.
Honestly, unlike some science fiction which postulates that once we know all this stuff, we will be “masters of our own destiny” and able to change reality, I think this is just another form of superstitious belief. Hope that we can become our own Gods/Wizards and fix the bad stuff we don’t like, rather than adapting ourselves to the way it is.
Possibly. Or not. Maybe our inclination to be spiritual as well as rational are two core aspects of who we are. We need to be rational to solve problems of physical survival, and that also helps us in our scientific ambitions. We need to be spiritual to make sense of our existence and know and feel that we are a part of, not apart from, the universe we live in, that can and does lead to religion.
I think you are misusing the term atheism. It simply means that one has no belief in a god or gods.
As others have said, atheism is the default position and I would suggest that any religion supplanting it is the “escape hatch”
If one is an atheist then you make no claim on the purpose, reason or workings of the universe though perhaps one might choose the scientific method or a particular philosophy in order to do that. But you can be an atheist and adhere to any number of sane, rational, ridiculous or illogical beliefs.
Disagree mostly. To me, it seems like the opposite of what the OP is claiming is true. People who insist on answers when no answer is possible are the kind of people who will embrace a religion.
We have an inclination to be spiritual because it’s an eventuality of our psyche, which is born out of evolutionary pressures. We all like the feeling of someone looking out for us. We all like having answers rather than huge, gaping questions. We like having a path versus no path. All these things give us happiness, and religion usually plugs those gaps for most people. Religion is especially attractive because it’s unfalsifiable.
However, to those who are (IMO) more intellectually rigorous, we have to be okay with ignorance and realizing that some questions don’t have answers yet. There’s no way to rush it, and there’s no way to get around it by invoking whatever answer makes you feel the best.
Why would we need to do that? What’s the evolutionary benefit of feeling that we’re a part of the universe?
I’d suggest that spiritualism is merely the misapplication of our social-interaction hardware to physical problems. We humans devote a big chunk of our brains to figuring out other humans, so it’s not surprising that sometimes that circuitry might be hijacked to impart human motivations to natural processes.
Disagree again. We don’t *need *to be spiritual, we just don’t know any better. If Ug and Og, 10,000 years ago, knew that lightening was caused by electrostatic atmospheric discharge, then they would have had no need for a God to explain it. But … not knowing any better, hell, why not a god?
Clearly it is something we do with the wetware we have. Why does it have to be classifed as a hijack or misapplication, when we seem to have been doing this all along and are still doing it. If it is evolutionary bad, why does it have such staying power? What is wrong with assuming this “religion” thing we do is just as important and intellectually rigorous as that “science” thing we do.
I couldn’t disagree more with the OP. I can’t speak for other atheists, but to me, it’s the other way around. I came into atheism because over time it became very obvious to me that religion is a human contrivance, whose purpose in small part, is to explain away the big questions theretofore unanswered - among other things, to give us comfort that the vasty nothingness (to borrow a phrase from Serenity) out there is actually a vasty somethingness, and that only a deity could comprehend it.
I personally think there’s a natural human tendency toward religion, because it does provide a “baked-in” moral and cultural framework, and most importantly, offers somewhat “easy answers” to life’s big questions: where did we come from; what is our purpose; what happens after we die. The answer to all three of these questions applies to us as equally as it does to the lowliest microbe: we evolved from prior species, all the way back to the primordial soup; our purpose is to fulfill an ecological function until we evolve or go extinct; we rot away after we die.
The problem with us humans is that we evolved to have a big enough brainpan to give us the intellect and skills not only to think about these questions, but to effect some change over them. Our intellect and the development of language gave us the ability to construct creation myths that tell us we are more important than other creatures, that someone has a special plan for us. We no longer need to feel that our purpose on earth is to fill a slot in the food chain; we can fool ourselves into believing that we are more important than that (and in fact, through industry, actually change the world around us, which only serves to reinforce the misperception that we have a greater purpose). We no longer must feel that our destiny is to rot away into bone and dust; we can develop rituals and practices to ensure our bodies endure and avoid the fate of mere animals.
But at the end of the day, we are just mere animals, and the universe will have its way with us, just as with all living things. Religion itself is a bulwark against this idea, telling us that as a people, we’re destined for something bigger.