# The Arguments for Atheism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 15, 2009, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428 "2009-01-15T14:34:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Kinthalis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kinthalis/32/16084_2.png) [@Kinthalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kinthalis)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/81 "2009-01-17T02:30:50Z")
It’s true, he did believe in the supernatural and his work in Alchemy is yet another facet of that. I don’t know what clicked in his head to make him forgo the appeals to personal incredulity and his upbringing in an environment where irrational beliefs were so commonly held. But whatever happened to leave that behind him long enough at least to do his scientific work is something we should all be grateful for. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/82 "2009-01-17T02:40:52Z")
> [@Kinthalis](#): > > It’s true, he did believe in the supernatural and his work in Alchemy is yet another facet of that. > > I don’t know what clicked in his head to make him forgo the appeals to personal incredulity and his upbringing in an environment where irrational beliefs were so commonly held. But whatever happened to leave that behind him long enough at least to do his scientific work is something we should all be grateful for. I don’t think you grok the mindset of Newton and his contemporaries. As I understand it, there would have been no conflict between his scientific work and his religious beliefs. Rather, he viewed science as an attempt to understand the mind and works of the Creator. And the scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of Newton’s day, and quite some time afterward, would have been utterly baffled at an assertion like [QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit] in a faith based world view, all knowledge and all reasoning is essentially subject to the whims of the supernatural, and thus a logical inference is strictly invalid [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/83 "2009-01-17T03:34:54Z")
> [@Kinthalis](#): > > The reason why I state flatly that any other sentient, reasoning species would agree with our scientific findings is that they are objective realities abotu our universe. > > How many times must I repeat this? Believe me, we’d all be quite happy if you stopped repeating yourself and instead dealt seriously with the objections that we’ve raised. You keep insisting that all science and math is objective fact, not dependent on culture, not dependent on species, not dependent in any way on the type of perception or the mind doing the perceiving. Well, you’re wrong. It simply doesn’t work that way, and it’s staggering that anyone would suggest such a thing, given what’s known about the history of science and math. I already listed examples in post 41 showing how understanding of science and math varies among cultures. You have not addressed those examples. Your insistence that anyone who uses reason and logic must come to identical conclusions about scientific topics is factually wrong, because there are examples that prove it wrong. Take those elements, for instance. Almost two hundred years ago, a British chemist, John Newland, was the first to propose that the elements could be arranged in a periodic table, with certain properties repeating for every set of eight elements. He called this the “Law of Octaves”. His fellow scientists responded by asking whether the elements would be willing to play a tune, and the idea was abandoned for almost a century. So if your picture of science is right, why did that happen? There’s a further contradiction in your position that’s bleedingly obvious. You first insist than any possible species must exactly duplicate your (incorrect) version of how scientific research is done. Then you go on to insist that virtually all human beings at all times have been guilty of “superstition and ignorance”. If your way of thinking must dominate every imaginable species, then why is it so rare among humans? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/84 "2009-01-17T04:14:11Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > You have proof of this? [Yes.](http://books.google.com/books?id=yX3qTZUfLP4C&pg=PA48&lpg=PA49&dq=percent+of+children+same+religious+belief+parents&source=web&ots=y4PC9Sa629&sig=0L6x90JcyLOoqOrYZ6A2zCM-7KQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA49,M1) 99% of people raised in a household ascribing to a particular religion continue to follow that religion (somewhere between 10-40% will change denomination.) People who are raised in households that do not follow a religion generally grow up to be atheistic/agnostic. You can see this visually just by looking at the geographicity of religion. People in India are Hindu, their children are all Hindu, their parents are all Hindu, their grandparents were all Hindu. Same thing for Americans and Christianity or Ancient Egyptians and Egyptian mythology. So now if you go to an atheist/agnostic country like Sweden, which is inhabited by people with the same genetic ancestry as people who believed in the Christian God and the Viking mythology, you’ll find that none of these people have had anything they would consider a religious experience. If they had, they wouldn’t continue being irreligious. So either religious people are interpretting things like, “Gee it’s a nice day!” as “God loves me!” or something about the training induces them to create a religious feeling in themselves. Assuming the latter, it could be evidence of God actually contacting them, except that other and even pantheistic religions have all had religious experiences. So this still isn’t evidence for their deity of choice. Native Americans who hang themselves by the nipples for a day and Hindu ascetics who starve themselves for a month also report having experienced religious experiences. Personally, as an atheist, I suspect I would interpret this feeling as being a reaction to _having hung myself up by nipple piercings for a full day and having starved myself for a month_. People who experience glossolalia accomplish nothing more than I’ve seen watching someone under hypnosis doing, i.e. making up gibberish that sounds like speaking. People under hypnosis report themselves as having gone into a dreamlike, peaceful state. People who have used drugs report a similar experience as a religious experiences, and if I recall correctly the two things look the same in a brain scan. So I mean why say that a “religious experience” isn’t self-hypnosis, a spike of endorphins, or simply the effect of prolonged torture? There’s no evidence otherwise. And why do only religious people get or interpret them as such? It can’t be that specifically “religious” if drugs and hypnosis can create similar effects. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/85 "2009-01-17T04:43:43Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > I already listed examples in post 41 showing how understanding of science and math varies among cultures. You have not addressed those examples. Your post (41) is, frankly, stupid. You’re making an argument like that from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Man then goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing.” I.e. if you want to make such an argument then feel free to do so, but don’t expect reality to go along with you. Two is two. A group of people who don’t have “two” don’t have that concept, but the idea of two is sufficiently abstract while being so specifically defined that there will never be any need to equivocate over whether two mathematical representations of it are equivalent. But how does one translate “God” into “A bump on a flying turnip in the Super Mario Game currently being played by Billy Bottle in Alberta that is actually a recursive representation of the universe”? Only by trashing most of the information and abstracting it out to “the origin of the universe” can they be related. Math doesn’t require information to be trashed to translate, regardless of how complex the translation might be. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/86 "2009-01-17T05:11:39Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > [Yes.](http://books.google.com/books?id=yX3qTZUfLP4C&pg=PA48&lpg=PA49&dq=percent+of+children+same+religious+belief+parents&source=web&ots=y4PC9Sa629&sig=0L6x90JcyLOoqOrYZ6A2zCM-7KQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA49,M1) 99% of people raised in a household ascribing to a particular religion continue to follow that religion (somewhere between 10-40% will change denomination.) People who are raised in households that do not follow a religion generally grow up to be atheistic/agnostic. You can see this visually just by looking at the geographicity of religion. People in India are Hindu, their children are all Hindu, their parents are all Hindu, their grandparents were all Hindu. Same thing for Americans and Christianity or Ancient Egyptians and Egyptian mythology. But that is analysing a quite different question - namely, what religion one chooses, irrespective of mystic experiences. It is not responsive at all to the issue I raised. > [@](#): > > So now if you go to an atheist/agnostic country like Sweden, which is inhabited by people with the same genetic ancestry as people who believed in the Christian God and the Viking mythology, you’ll find that none of these people have had anything they would consider a religious experience. This sounds like speculation to me. Are you asserting that _no one in Sweden_ has had mystic experiences? I’d be willing to bet you are wrong in that. > [@](#): > > If they had, they wouldn’t continue being irreligious. So either religious people are interpretting things like, “Gee it’s a nice day!” as “God loves me!” or something about the training induces them to create a religious feeling in themselves. Assuming the latter, it could be evidence of God actually contacting them, except that other and even pantheistic religions have all had religious experiences. So this still isn’t evidence for their deity of choice. You have no evidence that non-religious people have not had mystic experiences which have convinced them otherwise. However, I will grant that all experiences, including mystic experiences, get interpreted through the pre-existing culture of the people having them … though you will find, if you study the subject, that mystic types tend to be somewhat at odds with more mainstream practitoners of whatever faith they happen to hold. > [@](#): > > Native Americans who hang themselves by the nipples for a day and Hindu ascetics who starve themselves for a month also report having experienced religious experiences. Personally, as an atheist, I suspect I would interpret this feeling as being a reaction to _having hung myself up by nipple piercings for a full day and having starved myself for a month_. I have no doubt whatsoever that there is a physical, neurological reason for mystic states. This does not thereby prove them valueless, any more than the fact we know how people hear renders music valueless. > [@](#): > > People who experience glossolalia accomplish nothing more than I’ve seen watching someone under hypnosis doing, i.e. making up gibberish that sounds like speaking. People under hypnosis report themselves as having gone into a dreamlike, peaceful state. People who have used drugs report a similar experience as a religious experiences, and if I recall correctly the two things look the same in a brain scan. > > So I mean why say that a “religious experience” isn’t self-hypnosis, a spike of endorphins, or simply the effect of prolonged torture? There’s no evidence otherwise. And why do only religious people get or interpret them as such? It can’t be that specifically “religious” if drugs and hypnosis can create similar effects. Same answer. I have no doubt that a mystic experience can be induced by drugs or hypnosis or whatever, and in any event has a purely physical origin. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/87 "2009-01-17T05:14:46Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Well, you could also adopt the – entirely reasonable – stance of being undecided on those issues; there’s certainly no necessity for you to believe that _Finnegan’s Wake_ is either great or garbage. It’s completely consistent to say ‘I don’t know’. Alternatively, you can always make statements of the form ‘the predominant view among literary scholars is that _Finnegan’s Wake_ is a work of great literature’, which you can certainly come to using only your own powers of reason. > > Would you accept, though, that Fermat’s Last Theorem either is true, or it isn’t (let’s not get into the question of what constitutes great literature right now)? And that knowledge of its truth value can be arrived at by mathematical reasoning, though perhaps not your, or my, own? If so, then you don’t need faith to believe it to be right or wrong, since you know of the existence of its truth value; that learned people claim it to be true is then evidence favouring one of two possible cases over the other, and you can reasonably assume they’re right. > The supernatural, on the other hand, is not even obviously possible, and thus needs to be taken entirely on faith. Another way to look at this is that your belief regarding the truth value of Fermat’s Last Theorem is absolutely and determinably true or false, while there’s no objective way to establish whether or not your belief in the supernatural is indeed true. Fermat’s last theorem may be a poor example with which to push this discussion further since it’s tangential to real life for everyone except a handful of professional mathematicians. With a topic like that, I could remain undecided without ill effects. However, there are other issues in human existence where remaining undecided just isn’t acceptable. Let’s call these the core questions, things like “What’s the meaning of life?” or “What is right and what is wrong?” or “How shall I raise my children?” On these core questions, my mind will not allow me to remain undecided or to settle for accepting a majority vote from a group of scholars. If I tried that, tension would build up between such a superficial stance and my deep-seated need for a more satisfactory answer. In the end, to be properly human, I need to answer those questions definitively. Even if I choose not to decide, I’ve still made a choice. (Cliched but true.) So then let’s ask, how do I answer these core questions? Can I resolve them with logic, that is to say with a series of discrete, undisputed steps that lead to a firm conclusion, like a mathematical proof? I say that I cannot, since no one has ever produced such a proof. Some people claim that they have, of course, but no one has made such a proof broadly convincing. So then, how do I answer these core questions? Here’s my proposed method for answering them. I will use all the resources that I have to answer them as best I can. And what resources do I have? I have senses with which to observe the world around me, other humans to discuss the questions with, relevant intellectual works, art, tradition, and my own mind with which to synthesize all these things. Now, what will happen if I follow this method? Will I arrive at firm answers to the core questions? At first glance, it seems that I won’t. After all, for any core question there are an almost endless number of possible answers. Countless sources are constantly trying to move me in many different directions at the same time. New information is constantly flowing in, and much of it is contradictory or difficult to understand. The human experience is amazingly complex, even chaotic. So at first glance answering the core questions might seem impossible. That’s where faith steps in. Faith is simply the process of forming strong attachments to certain answers to the core questions. If I have faith in a certain approach or technique or source of authority, that simply means I have found the approach or technique or source of authority to be reliable, and I’m willing to stick with it. I need faith to back up all the major decisions I make. I need faith in my system of ethics. It cannot be logically proven to be correct, but I must have some consistent level of trust in it. Otherwise I’ll end up second-guessing it at every turn, and it will lose all meaning. Likewise for how I approach every other core issue in my life. You, of course, worry that faith leads me to believe in arbitrary things without good reason. But the opposite is actually true. If I did not have some level of faith, then my core beliefs would be constantly in flux, changing to match whatever is popular or convenient. Only a firm conviction can lift an individual above the changing tides of his or her society. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/88 "2009-01-17T05:16:59Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > This sounds like speculation to me. Are you asserting that _no one in Sweden_ has had mystic experiences? I’m asserting that I’ve never heard an atheist talking about having had a religious experience. If there were regular occurring mystic experiences, you wouldn’t have a growing population of atheists. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/89 "2009-01-17T05:22:33Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Don’t quote me on this, but I remember reading that being a cold-hearted psychopath is actually a winning strategy in a game theoretical way for a limited number of individuals in a society; however, the majority still need to ‘play by the rules’, i.e. be moral beings (morality, by the way, I think is best viewed as a selector for the survival fitness of a society – if a great many members of a society experience negative treatment – due to unfairness and injustice, which here have merely the meaning of 'being treated more negatively more often than other members of society – that society will eventually become unstable and collapse, for instance in a revolution.) Sounds sensible; to my mind, it is clear that religion, properly understood, has adaptive value and its development, from the point of view of social anthropology, makes perfect sense. Which is why our hypothetical aliens from Alpha Centuri would most probably have delveloped, completely independently, something totally analagous - just as they would develop something analogous to our maths and sciences. Religion is as inherent in the nature of conciousness as (say) the existence of prime numbers are in the nature of reality itself. > [@](#): > > One reasonable argument for conscious beings showing empathy towards each other would be the golden rule – there’s no great leap in the realization that however I treat others, I am likely to be treated by them, thus I ought to treat them well if I want to be treated well. Empathy is a good way of achieving that, and is selected for even in animals that form social groups. Agreed; but self-interest alone can never explain empathy (such reasoning would not apply if one knew one could not gain from it). Games theory can certainly explain why empathy is a good strategy over large numbers and in the long run, but not on the individual level. > [@](#): > > However, I have a sneaking suspicion that with ‘intuitive knowledge’, you actually mean the same thing I mean with ‘faith’. I do not think so. “Faith” isn’t something one intuitively knows, but rather a set of axioms one has agreed are fundamental without necessarily knowing. > [@](#): > > I’ve tried to be clear from the beginning that I am arguing against having faith, I’m sorry if there was any confusion. Also, what’s a religion without faith? A religion that does not rely on any supernatural element? Plenty of religions have neither the one nor the other, or do not rely heavily on them. For example, faith and the supernatural are not particularly significant in some forms of Buddism and Taoism; faith isn’t an important element in Judaism; etc. > [@](#): > > An atheistic world view is, at least in the way I use the term, one lacking faith. Whether or not people agree with that definition is not of all that much consequence to me; I have stated my definition, and I’ve given the arguments that brought me to the thus-defined stance, I don’t presume to speak for anybody else. We can as well call it ‘Half-Witticism’ as far as I’m concerned. 😉 Fair enough, but not very exclusive. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/90 "2009-01-17T05:25:53Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I’m asserting that I’ve never heard an atheist talking about having had a religious experience. If there were regular occurring mystic experiences, you wouldn’t have a growing population of atheists. That doesn’t follow at all. There are plenty of people who have never had a mystic experience; while not rare, they are certainly not _ubiqitous_. Plus, not everyone who has one thereby ceases to be an atheist. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/91 "2009-01-17T05:27:51Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Your post (41) is, frankly, stupid. I don’t suppose you could trouble yourself to explain why you find post 41 stupid. > [@](#): > > Two is two. A group of people who don’t have “two” don’t have that concept, but the idea of two is sufficiently abstract while being so specifically defined that there will never be any need to equivocate over whether two mathematical representations of it are equivalent. The argument being made in this thread is that any group of sentient beings must inevitably believe all of the exact same things, at least within math and science. The fact that different groups of humans don’t believe the same things disprove the claim. It seems that you want to debate something entirely different, in which case you ought to start your own thread. > [@](#): > > But how does one translate “God” into “A bump on a flying turnip in the Super Mario Game currently being played by Billy Bottle in Alberta that is actually a recursive representation of the universe”? Only by trashing most of the information and abstracting it out to “the origin of the universe” can they be related. Math doesn’t require information to be trashed to translate, regardless of how complex the translation might be. Doubtlessly this paragraph means something to you, but it sure looks like nonsense to me. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/92 "2009-01-17T05:49:32Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Besides which, math and the hard sciences are culture-specific. Members of some cultures are unable to count past ten or twenty or one hundred, but we are. We believe that negative numbers exist. Ancient mathematicians did not. We believe that zero exists. Ancient mathematicians did not. We believe in complex numbers, an invention of the last few centuries. Modern mathematicians believe in thousands of abstract concepts that were invented recently. Did cobordism classes exist before mathematicians started using them? What about Coxeter groups? What would “exist” even mean for such mathetmatical objects, without human minds being invovled? There’s certainly no way to know which of these varying mathematical systems would be used by another species. > > The same is true for hard sciences. We believe in 92 elements (plus some artificial ones) differentiated by the number of protons in the nucleus. Aristotle believed in only four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. If we get wiped out and another species comes along, will their science follow our approach to elements, or Aristotle’s, or a different one entirely? There’s no knowing. If the alternate species or culture is content with not counting past ten and believing in four elements, good for them. When they try to expand their knowledge into something useful, however, they’re going to inevitably discover eleven and iron. Sure, they could just make up nonsense like numbers bigger than ten can only be counted by demons, or that the fifth element is Milla Jovovich, and theirs will be a culture that will get clobbered by a rival culture less self-restricted, because the rival culture has discovered gunpowder and loaded it into their twelve-gauge shotguns. If you know of a _useful_ alternative description of the universe that doesn’t invovle the periodic table, feel free to share. I’m prepared to admit it’s possible - astronomy charts based on geocentricism which allowed for epicycles were probably somewhat useful, but the more accurate heliocentric model was quite a bit more so. In any case, I see no reason why the God concept should survive humanity, because we have no objective evidence of its validity and thus no reason to believe a nonhuman culture would inevitably discover it. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/93 "2009-01-17T06:00:52Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > [Yes.](http://books.google.com/books?id=yX3qTZUfLP4C&pg=PA48&lpg=PA49&dq=percent+of+children+same+religious+belief+parents&source=web&ots=y4PC9Sa629&sig=0L6x90JcyLOoqOrYZ6A2zCM-7KQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA49,M1) 99% of people raised in a household ascribing to a particular religion continue to follow that religion (somewhere between 10-40% will change denomination.) People who are raised in households that do not follow a religion generally grow up to be atheistic/agnostic. You can see this visually just by looking at the geographicity of religion. People in India are Hindu, their children are all Hindu, their parents are all Hindu, their grandparents were all Hindu. Same thing for Americans and Christianity or Ancient Egyptians and Egyptian mythology. Don’t you remember that you linked to the same page of the same book in our last thread, and several of us informed you that it doesn’t say what you want it to say? And don’t you remember that I provided several large surveys showing that the 99% figure just isn’t true? What do you hope to accomplish by passing around information that we all know is wrong? (Also [Sweden is not so atheist and agnostic as all that. 80% of the population are church members.](http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2005/51583.htm)) > [@](#): > > you’ll find that none of these people have had anything they would consider a religious experience. If they had, they wouldn’t continue being irreligious. Not seeing the logic here. Obviously someone can have a religious experience and still be irreligious. > [@](#): > > So either religious people are interpretting things like, “Gee it’s a nice day!” as “God loves me!” or something about the training induces them to create a religious feeling in themselves. Not seeing the logic here either. If I experience a certain piece of music while a guy from Sweden tunes it out, that doesn’t mean that the music doesn’t exist and I’m creating a musical feeling in myself. > [@](#): > > Assuming the latter, it could be evidence of God actually contacting them, except that other and even pantheistic religions have all had religious experiences. So this still isn’t evidence for their deity of choice. If I talk to my mother on the phone, that’s evidence for the existence of my mother, even if other people talk to other mothers. > [@](#): > > People who have used drugs report a similar experience as a religious experiences, and if I recall correctly the two things look the same in a brain scan. Regrettably a lot of what you recall just isn’t true, so I’ll need better evidence than that to believe it. But even if it’s true, what’s your point? John Lennon had a drug experience in which he was in a boat on a river, but that doesn’t mean that boats and rivers don’t exist. > [@](#): > > So I mean why say that a “religious experience” isn’t self-hypnosis, a spike of endorphins, or simply the effect of prolonged torture? First, many of the people who have religious experiences do not self-hypnotize, have not been tortured, and are not very excited or physically active when the experiences happen. Second, these experiences are often much more specific than merely a good feeling. > [@](#): > > And why do only religious people get or interpret them as such? They don’t. Look at the story of John Newton, which I’ve discussed in the other thread. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 6:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/94 "2009-01-17T06:37:03Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Don’t you remember that you linked to the same page of the same book in our last thread, and several of us informed you that it doesn’t say what you want it to say? And don’t you remember that I provided several large surveys showing that the 99% figure just isn’t true? Here is your description of the source I linked to: ITR Champion: “It just says that 99 percent of Americans keep their parents’ religion.” Outside of the qualifier of “Americans”, your one sentence says exactly what I said, nearly to the letter. I don’t see how you can give **the same summary** as myself and yet say that I’ve entirely misrepresented the contents of the cite. And I offered to find cites from India or Japan, or specific to Jews living in Europe (for instance) and no one asked for them. I’m still willing to try and find specific data on these. But I do believe you will find that India is and has been Hindu for the last several millenia, that the Jewish religion has continued just fine, being passed on from parent to child, and just the same for everywhere else. This seems decent evidence that the “American” qualifier is probably not really meaningful. ETA: And no, I’m scanning through the other thread and I haven’t spotted a single link to any sort of data in any of your posts. Still looking. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/95 "2009-01-17T06:57:48Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > ETA: And no, I’m scanning through the other thread and I haven’t spotted a single link to any sort of data in any of your posts. Still looking. Ahah, I found it. [http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,332590,00.html](http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,332590,00.html) This Fox News report does not say anything different than I did. They are calling denomination hopping “changing religion.” To quote the Pew Research: “Looking only at changes from one major religious tradition to another (e.g., from Protestantism to Catholicism, or from Judaism to no religion), more than one-in-four U.S. adults (28%) have changed their religious affiliation from that in which they were raised.” [(Chapter 2)](http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#) So now since they’re combining religion and denomination, we have to remove 1% which is religion changing, to give 27%. Now I specifically said that denomination hopping occurs between 10 and 40% of the time. Now let’s what’s average of 10% and 40%…oh I believe it’s 25%. What’s a number near 25%…oh I know 27%! Wow! [Pay attention to what’s being talked about, not just the headline.](http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/breadkills.html) ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/96 "2009-01-17T09:57:22Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > And the scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of Newton’s day, and quite some time afterward, would have been utterly baffled at an assertion like They probably would be, but does that make it necessarily wrong? I’m not arguing that you can’t come to logical conclusions if you have faith, but that, strictly speaking, those logical conclusions need to include a deferral to faith and thus have no guarantee of being valid. > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Your insistence that anyone who uses reason and logic must come to identical conclusions about scientific topics is factually wrong, because there are examples that prove it wrong. Take those elements, for instance. Almost two hundred years ago, a British chemist, John Newland, was the first to propose that the elements could be arranged in a periodic table, with certain properties repeating for every set of eight elements. He called this the “Law of Octaves”. His fellow scientists responded by asking whether the elements would be willing to play a tune, and the idea was abandoned for almost a century. So if your picture of science is right, why did that happen? Because science can be wrong. I don’t think there’s anything earth-shaking in that discovery. However, more to the point, science can also be _right_ – a race operating on the four element hypothesis can’t send people to the moon, or build a nuclear reactor, or do genetic engineering or something analogous to that, because their hypothesis is wrong. The elements in the periodic table do exist in nature and make up all the visible matter around us; and while fire, water, air and earth exist as well, they are not the constituting elements of the world. That hypothesis was wrong, and science has since corrected itself, as it always will where it is wrong; that’s the beauty of scientific enquiry, it leads to a picture of the world that gets more and more right. You might not ever reach absolute knowledge of any underlying truth, but you certainly get ever closer. So, you can’t really use the fact that different groups of people may be at different points in that process to relativise all scientific discovery. > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > I need faith to back up all the major decisions I make. I need faith in my system of ethics. It cannot be logically proven to be correct, but I must have some consistent level of trust in it. Otherwise I’ll end up second-guessing it at every turn, and it will lose all meaning. Likewise for how I approach every other core issue in my life. It is never possible to arrive at absolute knowledge by pure reason alone, but that doesn’t imply that you need faith to fill in the gaps. I gave a basic example earlier – if you observe a white sheep, your natural assumption is that all sheep are white, and that’s reasonable; however, this isn’t the same as having faith in the whiteness of sheep, since that issue is already decided in nature, and black sheep exist. Your reasonable assumption of sheep’s whiteness is thus wrong. The same thing, though hopefully a bit more refined, works for child rearing: based on the things you know, you make a reasonable assumption on how to raise your child best; if you’re right with that, you give your child the best possible start into their own life, and if you’re wrong, well, most likely your child will deal provided you weren’t grossly unreasonable, truth be told (but that’s again a whole other kind of worms). The thing is, it’s not faith to make a guess at the best possible solution if it exists; you can be right or wrong with that guess, it’s in principle an objectively determinable matter, even though actually doing the determining may prove prohibitively hard. > [@](#): > > You, of course, worry that faith leads me to believe in arbitrary things without good reason. But the opposite is actually true. If I did not have some level of faith, then my core beliefs would be constantly in flux, changing to match whatever is popular or convenient. Only a firm conviction can lift an individual above the changing tides of his or her society. At the considerable danger of ending up in an unreasonable position. I prefer to question my convictions, since it’s the best way to get them at least as close to reasonable as my fallible reason can. And you can certainly come up with moral judgements in that fashion, it’s an ability man as a social animal possesses quite naturally. > [@Malthus](#): > > Which is why our hypothetical aliens from Alpha Centuri would most probably have delveloped, completely independently, something totally analagous - just as they would develop something analogous to our maths and sciences. Religion is as inherent in the nature of conciousness as (say) the existence of prime numbers are in the nature of reality itself. The thus-arrived at religion, however, would only be a heuristic shorthand for making certain decisions within society – like, for instance, in Feng Shui the ability of a dragon to freely move through the room is a heuristic for arranging furniture and stuff in such a way that it’s generally pleasing to those living there (I think I stole this from Douglas Adams). That doesn’t mean that how we like to furnish our rooms has anything to do with dragons. > [@](#): > > Agreed; but self-interest alone can never explain empathy (such reasoning would not apply if one knew one could not gain from it). Games theory can certainly explain why empathy is a good strategy over large numbers and in the long run, but not on the individual level. It’s necessary on the individual level to exist in large numbers in the long run; if you think it to be the other way round, I think you’re mistaking cause and effect: because individual humans (well, probably something far pre-human) evolved traits conductive to forming stable social structures, they were able to form stable social structures, not the other way 'round. > [@](#): > > I do not think so. “Faith” isn’t something one intuitively knows, but rather a set of axioms one has agreed are fundamental without necessarily knowing. Then I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean with ‘intuitive knowledge’. ---
**Author:** ![Duhkecco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8491ac/32.png) [@Duhkecco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duhkecco)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/97 "2009-01-17T13:47:31Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Well yeah, I’m a bit guilty of using shorthand in my bullet points, but it’s actually in the post where I attempt to reason those things out – atheism, in and of itself, doesn’t explain anything. So, that means that your point was wrong. Fine. > [@](#): > > I’ve argued in the OP that in a faith based world view, all knowledge and all reasoning is essentially subject to the whims of the supernatural What’s your definition of “faith”? ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/98 "2009-01-17T14:19:04Z")
> [@Duhkecco](#): > > So, that means that your point was wrong. You’re misreading me – I claimed that atheism holds explanatory or descriptive power, not that it itself explains anything; it merely allows for reasonable explanation. That’s why this kind of ‘bullet point’ discussion you’re attempting doesn’t really lend itself to reasoned argumentation, all the subtleties get lost. > [@](#): > > What’s your definition of “faith”? What do you want, another bite-sized definitional nugget? I have purposely tried not to limit the concept of faith too much by giving a potentially overly restrictive definition, however I suppose I could live with either the ‘belief in a transcendent reality as long as the existence of such is not in clear evidence’, or ‘any belief not arrived at by reasonable assumptions’. Now, I’m sure somebody’s gonna jump up and try to disqualify my arguments on a technicality now that I’ve given such a definition, so I’ll just pre-emptively state that I don’t think my arguments depend much on the exact definition of faith, since I’ve given a positive construction of an atheistic world view via reasonable assumptions. ---
**Author:** ![Duhkecco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8491ac/32.png) [@Duhkecco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duhkecco)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/99 "2009-01-17T15:45:05Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > You’re misreading me – I claimed that atheism holds explanatory or descriptive power, not that it itself explains anything; it merely allows for reasonable explanation. Got it. Atheism “holds” explanatory power but it doesn’t “explain” anything. > [@](#): > > I suppose I could live with either the ‘belief in a transcendent reality as long as the existence of such is not in clear evidence’, or ‘any belief not arrived at by reasonable assumptions’. Now, I’m sure somebody’s gonna jump up and try to disqualify my arguments on a technicality now that I’ve given such a definition, so I’ll just pre-emptively state that I don’t think my arguments depend much on the exact definition of faith, since I’ve given a positive construction of an atheistic world view via reasonable assumptions. How can you say that your arguments don’t depend on an exact definition of faith when you defined atheism as the “absence of all faith” (and emphasized this in your OP), and the title of this thread is “The arguments for Atheism”? Yeah, you might want to reformulate your definition. ---
**Author:** ![Duhkecco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8491ac/32.png) [@Duhkecco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duhkecco)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428/100 "2009-01-17T15:50:47Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > I’m prepared to admit it’s possible - astronomy charts based on geocentricism which allowed for epicycles were probably somewhat useful, but the more accurate heliocentric model was quite a bit more so. Perhaps you’ll be interested in this from [Deferent and Epicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle): > [@](#): > > Claudius Ptolemy refined the deferent/epicycle concept and introduced the equant as a mechanism for accounting for velocity variations in the motions of the planets. The empirical methodology he developed proved to be extraordinarily accurate for its day and was still in use at the time of Copernicus and Kepler. > … > Whether or not Copernicus’ models were simpler than Ptolemy’s is moot. Copernicus eliminated Ptolemy’s somewhat-maligned equant but at a cost of additional epicycles. > … > Copernicus’ theory was at least as accurate as Ptolemy’s but never achieved the stature and recognition of Ptolemy’s theory. In scarcely more than a hundred years, Copernicus would be overcome by events set in motion by Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Copernicus’ work provided explanations for phenomena like retrograde motion, but really didn’t prove that the planets actually orbited the Sun. I’m guessing that you have never independently verified the validity of geocentrism, but I’m sure that you accept it as fact. (And, so do I, of course.) On what basis did you accept geocentrism as true? Was there any “faith” involved? > [@](#): > > In any case, I see no reason why the God concept should survive humanity, because we have no objective evidence of its validity and thus no reason to believe a nonhuman culture would inevitably discover it. Of course, if the “God concept” is merely a human concept then it won’t survive humanity. But that’s begging the question. Theists believe that God exists. Kind of changes the conclusion. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-arguments-for-atheism/481428.md?page=6)