Maybe instead we should explain why we don’t believe Scott Dickerson will tell us about his beliefs? 
As for my personal answer to the OP, it basically comes down to Occam’s Razor–that no God (or a totally indifferent one that’s not at all like most religions espouse) is far more likely an explanation than any sort of entity that is somehow directly interested in humanity.
You mean you’re not out of the womb yet? <rimshot>
Ah! But a God specifically designing the Universe so as to be able to harbor life is not the only explanation for why the Universe we live in can harbor life.
There’s also one of the variabts of the Anthropic Principle: There could be an infinite number of Universes out there, each of which has slightly different parameters. A few of them are capable of arboring life as we know it, but most of them are not. However, it makes sense that the Universe we find ourselves in is one of the few that can harbor life, because if it couldn’t we wouldn’t be around to talk about it!
This is going to be long.
There are a number of reasons I’ve decided I’m an atheist. I have spent a substantial amount of time thinking about this, and reading, and observing, and testing various hypotheses, over the last few years. The more I learn, the more confident I am that my judgement is accurate.
There are many different angles on this, and reasons for thinking the way I do, so for simplicity I’ll just address two of the bigger ones in detail.
First: Every human society has a supernatural explanation for The Way Things Work.
Whether it’s a single all-powerful loving deity, or a pantheon of multi-armed spirits, or a giant winged serpent, or whatever, the one thing all human tribes have in common is some supernatural narrative that purports to explain how the world works and how we’re supposed to behave in it. There isn’t a single culture that lacks this.
These stories vary widely in the details, but they all have three important elements in common. One, they tell us where we came from. Two, they give us rules for interaction and behavior. And three, they tell us what happens after we die.
I find it extremely telling that every human society has its own set of myths and legends covering these exact subjects. There are two possible conclusions: Either there’s One True Explanation, which was given to one small set of believers, and Misleading Falsehoods were planted in the other societies (either by an ineffably mischevous Good Deity or by a malicious Bad Deity); or all human beings share qualities that cause them to manufacture these beliefs. The first possibility cannot be tested; the second, indirectly, can.
I ask the question: Are there aspects of human psychology and behavior that could lead to this sort of mythmaking? And, for myself, the answer comes back, emphatically yes.
First, I note the human drive to answer and explain. Something happens, and we ask, Why? What’s the cause? Starting with circumstances X Y and Z, what is the likely outcome? Obviously, this would be a major survival skill at the dawn of agriculture, if not before. And lately it’s taken us into some incredibly obscure areas, all the way down to the interior of the atom. Do we need this knowledge to feed ourselves and reproduce? Of course not. We simply need to know.
And yet, we all die. What happens then? Nobody knows. It’s been an obsession of sentient humankind for as long as we have history, and it has defied all our attempts at explanation. To borrow a metaphor from a previous post, it’s the UFO we’ve been trying to analyze for as long as we’ve been awake. Except it’s more like a big UFO-shaped hole in the sky, and it defies all our attempts to penetrate the perimeter.
Clearly, we are too driven by curiosity to let “nobody knows” suffice. We have to have some explanation, even in the absence of hard proof.
Look, for example, at how the seasons work: a year-long fluctuation in climate that, if you don’t know you’re on a big rock orbiting a fusion furnace, seems utterly mysterious. Look at how “primitive” cultures, in response to this, created rain gods, or anthropomorphized the sun. Look at how lightning bolts were explained as weapons thrown by the king of the gods. Look at how ancient Chinese astronomers were punished by the Emperor for failing to predict a solar eclipse so forces could be marshaled in advance to make noise and scare away the dragon that was eating the sun.
Clearly, it is well within the bounds of human psychology to invent an explanation, and adhere to it, when actual verifiable knowledge is insufficient to the task. We now know about the Earth’s axial tilt and its impact on local climate variation over the year. We know about the discharge of electricity during storms. We know about the moon blocking the sun from time to time. All of these “primitive” beliefs have died out, having been replaced by concrete, well-tested explanations.
But we still don’t know what happens after death. Is it any wonder that “primitive,” supernatural explanations for it should persist?
The second element of human psychology worth considering is the power of narrative. I find it fascinating that all of the religions and supernatural belief structures I’m aware of capture their wisdom in narrative format, i.e. “once upon a time.” Jesus went here, stood on a hill, and made a speech. Buddha sat on the river, talked to the boatman, and asked him some tricky questions. Muhammad walked across the desert, saw some city, and did some things with some dudes. Apollo descended to earth, saw this chick, and made some nooky. Xenu sat on a volcano, got blowed up, and now a piece of his spirit lives in my pancreas. And we’re supposed to extract our lessons from these parables.
I mean, you’d think God could hire a technical writer to explain the rules more clearly.
For whatever reason, humans take narrative very, very seriously. Aside from the fact that it forms the basis of every religion I’ve ever heard of, consider how much importance people have attached to worlds as disparate as those of Tolkien, Star Trek, and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name but a few. Vast and complex rationalizations have been invented to account for how, in one story, Watson had been shot in the arm, but in another story, the wound was in his leg (or whatever), and some readers have spent lifetimes figuring out the exact routes, streets and corners, Holmes used in some pursuit or other. Hard-core fans agonize over why Data isn’t supposed to use contractions, except in that one episode where he’s standing between his future and past selves. And just what does it mean to make a Kessel run in twelve parsecs? Hell, some people live their lives by these stories, even though we know they’ve been invented by fallible humans in our own immediately recorded past. Most of the folks who are trying to get “Jedi” added to the Australian census as a valid religion are kidding around, but some, needless to say, aren’t. And where in Eastern Europe were the authorities cracking down on the folks living like hobbits in the hills?
Narrative is power, and it isn’t just in our mass media. Think about how we have to train ourselves to recognize the difference between anecdote and data. Look at how quickly we’re willing to jump to all sorts of broad conclusions based on one powerful but isolated incident, or how a carefully constructed study, with a well-defined cohort and solid longitudinal basis, can be torpedoed in the public mind by a single contradictory tale of woe. For whatever reason, humans are psychologically wired to extrapolate from narrative, and that, to me, puts the whole storytelling basis of religion on a suspect foundation.
So all of that, in my opinion, indicates that humans can be predisposed to invent stories for themselves in order to fill in gaps of understanding, whether or not those stories have any relationship to fact, and to emotionally imbue those stories with an irrational degree of power and importance.
Second: These stories contain no knowledge beyond that of the people who originally believed in them.
You would think that an all-knowing, all-loving deity would be able to give his people all sorts of fascinating and uplifting information. If the Jews really were God’s chosen people, why didn’t he suggest, even obliquely, that they mix together some sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, and see what happens when it’s touched with a flaming brand? Is there a single place anywhere in the scriptures of any religion where some transcendant bit of knowledge, something beyond the immediate observational power of the day’s technology and contradictory to the immediate evidence of one’s unaided senses, is transferred from the supernatural power to humankind?
In other words, why didn’t Prometheus come down from Mount Olympus with the germ theory of disease? Or the Copernican model of the solar system? The basic fact that each star in the sky is a really, really distant sun? I’m not even talking about radio transmission or quantum theory or other modern inventions that would have no practical impact on the life of the day. If people knew ten thousand years ago about, say, washing hands before assisting with childbirth, the immediate and verifiable impact on health would be undeniable.
“Okay, Moses, look. These commandments will be useful for shaping your culture, but there’s something more important you need to know, but that you won’t be able to actually verify for, oh, a couple of thousand years at least. This ground you’re standing on? It’s a big ball. No, bigger than that. And the sun in the sky? It’s an even bigger ball of fire and light. And the ball you’re on goes around the sun-ball. Plus, the ball you’re on spins in place. That’s why you only see the sun-ball half the time, because the other half of the time, it’s hidden on the other side of the ball. No, listen, pay attention. The axis on which your ball spins is tilted, so some of the time, you’re pointed more at the sun, and other times, it’s kind of at an angle, which is why you have summer and winter. Isn’t that neat? Now get back down there, the people are being distracted by shiny objects again.”
Where are these revelations? They simply don’t exist. Now, one might rationalize this fact away, saying, “God helps those who help themselves,” or some such pithy maxim. In other words, God knows we don’t appreciate what we don’t create ourselves, or whatever, and makes us figure it out for ourselves. Aside from that contradicting the numerous examples where God does come down and give us stuff (mana from heaven, don’tcha know), what about all those cases where the information contained in the scripture is demonstrably wrong? There are no windows in the sky. Leprosy is not caused by demonic possession. And so on.
The more I look at it, the more it seems self-evident that these religious texts must be the work of their human adherents, because of this limitation of knowledge. The few useful bits of information that are captured here and there, in fact, seem to me to be learned through experience, and handed down as a Rule From God in order to minimize fuss and argument. (For example, the admonition in Leviticus against eating shellfish seems to me to be a trial-and-error realization about not getting sick by eating things that live in proximity to the settlement’s waste outflow.)
I’ve mentioned this in another thread, but the Bible contains no mention whatsoever of tobacco, or the practice of smoking in general, because the ancient Canaanites had never heard of it. There’s tons about alcohol and inebriation, but zip on the broadleaf weed. Likewise, the creation myths of North American natives don’t include the horse, despite its huge importance to their later cultural development. After the horse was introduced, of course, the myths adapted, but the point remains: They couldn’t mythologize what they didn’t know about.
You can take any culture, determine what they did and didn’t yet know about, and verify that such knowledge does and doesn’t appear in their religious beliefs. A tribe in South America? Big snakes in South America? Result, a religion that prominently includes big snakes. Big snakes in Inuit religion? Zippo. The only reasonable conclusion is that the religion is a construct of human imagination.
Oh, sure, there’s lots more. You can look at how our new understanding of DNA has revolutionized our ability to comprehend the world, usually flying in the face of what “religious authorities” have asserted based on their reading of their various scriptures. (The progression of evolution, for example, has been stunningly confirmed by genetic analysis. It’s also remarkable that the biggest variation in human genetics is found in Africa, spreading outward concentrically, exactly as would be the case if the species arose there.)
And you can look at primate behavior, and see how it’s mirrored in ourselves. It makes no sense that a pack of otherwise ordinary teenage boys would beat the crap out of a retarded kid, and enjoy themselves, until you see a bunch of baboons do exactly the same thing on the savannah. Then it’s like a light goes on: Of course.
And so on, and so on, and so on. The bottom line is, when I look at the world, it takes more work to try to impose order and meaning on it, commensurate with the influence of some all-powerful being, than it does to simply accept that all of those supernatural structures have been invented by fallible humans to fill in the gaps of their insecurity and lack of knowledge, and that otherwise we’re a small cog in a vast physical system that has no broad consciousness or intent. In other words, I’d rather accept that the world is the way it seems to be, instead of trying to pretend that there’s something deeper, or to imagine that the way things seem to be is just a mask for something else. It’s just simpler that way.
That’s why I’m an atheist.
Cervaise, why do you find mythmaking suspect, especially when in this day and age, we have all these dinosaur-related mythologies? At least some of these did not originate from religion.
Personally, I don’t believe there is a Scott Dickerson. After all, the evidence is insufficient to warrant such a belief…
Cervaise - I don`t agree with your final conclusion, but I must say that was a very entertaining read.
One of the best stands I`ve read in a long time.
I give you credit where credit is due.
Cervaise. I am in awe.
You are so eloquently right.
Because, unlike with religions, nobody is going around saying that Jurassic Park is real and threatening to chop off your head if you don’t Believe.
At least, no one who’s made any inroads into government, anyway.
Comments as we sail along…
TESTY:
“…Not trying to be snarky with you, but wouldn’t the term ‘Belief’ be more appropriate to ‘believers?’ I think that the whole point of denying the existance of god or gods would be that we don’t need ‘belief’…”
(In the words of Bertrand Russell: “I don’t believe in belief.”) I understand your point, Testy, but I’m trying–and it’s not easy–to make this a relatively unslanted thread on a very slantable topic. I don’t want to appear to endorse the “what you think is merely BELIEF, what I think is TRUTH” point of view. As far as this thread is concerned, one’s “belief” is simply one’s account of what is the case.
FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT BELIEVE THAT SCOTT DICKERSON WILL REVEAL HIS BELIEFS, OR THAT HE EXISTS: Where any three of you are gathered together, I am with you.
CERVAISE: thank you.
Bravo. I thought I’d heard most of it already, but you bring up some excellent points. Please excuse me whilst I add them to my repertoire.
Damned fine read. (If you’ll pardon the pun.)
Cervaise, that was simply marvellous.
I was wondering whether I wanted to be drawn into this or not, largely because I couldn’t face designing and trying to construct such a post as yours. Now you’ve done it for me and better than I would have too.
Thankyou.
pan
Cervaise wrote:
Actually, it can’t. Neurosurgeon V. S. Ramachandran, MD, Ph.D., and others have done quite a bit of work in this field. Experiments suggest that there is some connection between spirituality and the brain’s limbic system. But as Ramachandran points out in his book, Phantoms in the Brain, science cannot determine the order of causality. Whether limbic activity produces spiritual experience or whether it is the other way around is not testable scientifically. Science requires a falsifiable hypothesis for testing. You can’t just jump to the conclusion that man invented God. As Ramachandran explains, “Indeed, if you are ever tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.”
Furthermore, you’ve drawn a false dichotomy with your two-choice restriction. You’ve presumed that an intellectual comprehension of God is relevant and that therefore, if He exists, all people must comprehend Him the same way — similar to how all people comprehend the Peano Axioms and can deduce that 1+1=2. But if it is the relationship with God, rather than any particulars of God Himself, that is relevant, then you would fully expect exactly as many different interpretations of God as there are people. In fact, if God is ontologically identified as necessary existence itself — the metaphysical realization of the most valuable aesthetic — then particulating God is a logical error.
But that’s only an equivocation. If I am discussing law and use the term “force”, I do not mean mass times acceleration. Likewise, if I am discussing physics and use the term “force”, I do not mean legal validity. Conflating a god-of-the-gaps synthesis tool with a metaphysical a priori analytic is a logical mistake. You’ve mixed up the phenomenal and the noumenal. A God Who is the Moral Absolute is an entirely different concept from a god who manufactures thunder bolts. What you are doing is the equivalent of appealing to the history of alchemy as evidence that chemistry is not valid, or appealing to the history of astrology as evidence that astronomy is not valid.
That’s interesting, particularly given that your entire post was a narrative, intended to appeal to various aesthetic considerations — the beauty of science, the goodness of intellect, the steadiness of logic. When you say that Jesus went to a mountain and made a speech as a summation of His ministry, it is the equivalent of saying that Cervaise went to a computer and typed out a post as a summation of what you’ve written. Although His miracles and deeds can be taken as metaphorical and He did much of His teaching in parables, you’ve neglected that He in fact gave very specific commands and moral imperatives, such as “Love one another,” and “Be perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” He also was quite specific about the ontological nature of His existence, “The Kingdom of God is within you,”; His own metaphysical nature, “My Kingdom is not of this world,”; His own aesthetic nature, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,”; and His own ethical nature, “I am the Good Shepherd.” It is hardly remarkable that He supplemented His teachings with parables and metaphors since there is no natural frame of reference for metaphysical reality. We can only make analogies, similar to the way a quantum physicist has to explain his work to a layman. Or the way you have to explain your atheistic worldview to me.
Actually, Deuteronomy is chock full of practical advice about sanitation and health. But when you ask that God fulfill a role as science teacher, it doesn’t make any sense. For lots of reasons. One, God created man as an inquisitive creature. Spoiling our every endeavor before we’ve scarcely even had a chance at it seems incredibly rude. Two, God values goodness above knowledge, and has deemed that what is important is not facts but morality. Three, science isn’t about what is true but what is false. It is based upon the principle of falsification, whereas God is about truth, specifically moral truth. He has taught us about what matters to Him. And four, the significant metaphysic is not nature but Heaven. When Judas gushed at the sight of Jerusalem from a hill, he turned to Jesus and exclaimed, “Oh, Master! Just look what you will inherit when you come into your kingdom!” Jesus turned to him and said, “Judas, do you truly believe that I have come down through the ages to rule an anthill for a day?”
And neither can you. Is today’s science invalid because yesterday’s didn’t know about subatomic particles? Or the relativity of reference frames? Or the radiation of atomic nuclei? Are your scientific endeavors of today a waste of time because tomorrow they will be seen as naive and primitive? When you review a movie, do you compare it to a movie that won’t be released until twenty years from now? Why should God, even if science were a concern to Him, inform the tribe of Israel about tobacco? Before, you demanded practical knowledge, and now you demand that their heads be packed with knowledge that is of no use to them. And all the while, you have ignored that the moral knowledge taught — not murdering, not stealing, not cheating — is timeless. After thousands of years, the deontics of morality have not changed.
And when the baboons see the teenage boys, what sort of light goes on in their simian heads? Making sense out of teenage boys by looking at baboons is like making sense out of Macbeth by looking at Dude, Where’s My Car?. I can make sense out of “otherwise ordinary” teenage boys beating the crap out of a retarded kid by looking at things other than baboons — the boys’ parents, for example, or the influence of their peers, or their the context of their reality: does it consist chiefly of family picnics and encouragement or solitary withdrawal into a world without moral consequence, and so forth.
Then surely you believe that the magician really did saw the woman in half, or make the Statue of Liberty disappear, or pull a coin out of your ear. Drawings by Escher must send your brain into convulsive spasms. Esse quam videri. With all due respect, you’ve drawn your conclusions generally from a very narrow application of philosophy. Your “vast physical system that has no broad consciousness or intent” speaks only to a pantheistic interpretation of God. You say that you have spent considerable time researching and learning to derive your conclusions, and I do not doubt your veracity. But pretty much all you’ve done here is declare that you have no evidence for a god of fire, no evidence that God values science above morality, and no evidence that God has (as of yet) manifested to your personally. With all due respect (and I do respect you, Cervaise), even most atheists recognize your fallacy. In my opinion, if anything is telling, it is that you and I have reviewed the same data and have come to two very different conclusions.
Wow, Lib, Cervaise really put the fear o’ God into ya, didn’t he?
I love Cervaise. And I love his movie reviews. But I’m still waiting for Almost Famous and Billy Elliot. (Hint, hint!)
Well, I used to be a regular church goer, member of the christian union, choir boy, you name it. Then one day at school, I was flicking through the encyclopaedia checking out the other religions, old and new, and just started thinking, why is christianity any more likely than these? How did all these different religions come about. Surely somewhere there must be evidence of how the different ideas and religions came about.
Then, since I had loads of time on my hands and my curiosity knows no bounds, I set about researching it (much more difficult back then, without the web).
I tried to find out what all of the original ideas were in religion.
I looked at as many religions as i could find, and found a few original ideas (unfortunately this was twenty years ago, can’t really remember much detail)
Basically the different religious ideas were:
Human spirituality : The idea that we, as humans, were connected to some divine energy and this is why we felt emotions/feelings/performed certain acts under certain divine conditions.
Natural spirituality : The idea that all of nature is representative of a divinity of some kind and every natural thing is sacred in some way.
Godkingism : Where there is a lord of the land and he has divine power.
Polytheism : Anything which could possibly be supernatural in origin became an aspect of divinity or a member of the divine court. Gods tended to have a humanoid appearance still.
Monotheism : The idea that a superior intelligence is watching over us and either protecting or experimenting with us.
These ideas, as far as I could see, with a few subtle variations, such as the inclusion of sins or the afterlife or different planes of existance, etc, showed that if you were to believe in one religion, you’d basically have to believe in one of these ideas, but you couldn’t really go with any of the established religion, since there was no evidence of any real revelations in any of these religions, apart from just a way to either control the masses or to convert people from other religions. Most of the current religions are just hodgepodge conglomerations of ideas.
Thus I figured if I was going to believe in a religion, I’d instead believe in the idea behind it, but certainly wouldn’t go as far as calling myself a Christian or a Wiccan or a Muslim or whatever, since these are pretty much just loads of rubbish just thrown on top of a reasonable philosophical premise.
All you need to do then is figure out which, if any, you could find yourself believing in.
Personally, I think all but godkingism are perfectly acceptable philosophies and I remain vaguely undecided. I tend to believe in luck and fate and true love and good and evil, so I lean toward human spirituality.
In conclusion, I don’t think the established religions are even worth paying lip service to. Find out what you really believe and have faith in that. Don’t let years of dogma, propaganda and population control by various priestly sects decide your beliefs for you.
oops, forgot to mention that since these philosophies all contain a need to believe in something with no evidence of existence, by far the most logical choice is that of atheism, or at least agnosticism.
Lib, your response to Cervaise is true enough, but it to some extent misses the point.
Cervaise is not (I repeat not) trying to disprove God. In any way. Instead he is trying for a much weaker statement: the evidence presented for God (any God) is not sufficient for him to accept God’s existence.
In other (cruder) words: the written documents about the Christian God show the exact same patterns as do the documents for other divine beings, including ones that nobody now believes in. The “feelings” that Christians get as to their spirituality are the exact same ones that believers of other divine beings get (or got), including ones that nobody now believes in.
The whole thing seems to those of us on the outside like one big merry-go-round, with one religion in vogue this millenia and a different one the next millenia. And they all seem kinda silly (sorry, but that’s just the way I feel about it, despite the undoubted goodness of Jesus’ words, the inherent usefulness of Buddha’s teachings and the cultural significance of middle-age Islam.)
If you’re convinced that you’re right then we’re happy for you. But in a thread about why we’re not convinced… well… there it is.
The above is not by way of a rigorous argument - hell, I can see the holes in it from here. You can’t just precis what Cervaise said in a few pithy paragraphs. I’m just trying to cut the “your evidence against my evidence is insufficient” argument off at the pass and that’s all I’m trying to do.
pan
Thanks, Kabbes. I always appreciate your well-tempered assurances. And I can see how, from your point of view, it might all look like one big blur. For what it’s worth, most people of faith have the same perceptual difficulties when they look at atheists. My only intent is to raise the point that things are a bit less blurry for us all when we look with a more discerning eye.
Right. And true. And just so you aren’t too despondent: I’ve learned an awful lot about Christianity on this board myself in the last few years - from you especially. And even if I can’t bring myself to believe in the literal mystical truth, I certainly have an appreciation now for the gospel and the message. Which, as you always say, is the key thing anyway.
By his deeds you will know him.
pan
Thank you, kabbes, you’ve boiled it down rather succinctly. From my perspective, it’s quite easy to put all religious beliefs into one set, and see how they’re really all very similar to one another, and then recognize how these similarities hew more closely to well-known paths of human post hoc rationalization than anything else.
And thank you, Lib, for the time you spent analyzing my thoughts. No, seriously. The exchange of ideas between intellectual peers, whether or not they agree, is what I most value about the SDMB. I freely acknowledge that what I see as “plainly true” makes no sense to you, just like what you see as “plainly true” makes no sense to me. We just see the world differently.
I also freely acknowledge that I’m not certain the world would be a better place sans religious belief. Where are the atheist groups riding into disaster-stricken areas, giving of themselves and their possessions to help those in need? Likewise, even though I may personally think it’s all a lot of horsepucky, I readily admit that faith speaks deeply to a lot of people and provides an enormous amount of structure and comfort in a hugely confusing world. I cannot honestly assert that the removal of this faith (whether one considers it a Deep Truth or merely a security blanket) would not have a material adverse impact on society.
That being said, I’d rather not engage in a protracted debate. The question in the OP is simply, Why do you believe the way you do? It is emphatically not, Convince others to believe the way you do. Your faith is deeply held. I have no doubt that even if I were able to download my entire intellectual structure into your cerebral cortex, and expose you to my complete worldview, Matrix-style, it would not make even a noticeable dent in your faith. Conversely, none of your arguments will make a difference in my lack of faith. I see the world the way I see it, as do you. All I did was attempt to articulate what led me to that view.
That being said, I do wish to clarify.
You have a very unique outlook on religion, and you hold a faith that is unique in my experience. More common, you must concede, is the view that the Bible imparts specific factual information, to wit, Adam and Eve were the first people, they lived in the Garden of Eden, they got in an ethical rumble with a snake, and so on. Many Christians endow this tale with at least a measure of truth, which contradicts your assertion about God as a “science teacher,” insofar as the Bible is regarded by millions of people, and has been for centuries, as “received fact.” It’s interesting how many Christians on the SDMB treat these stories as metaphor, as encoded wisdom, rather than hard fact, but they are, especially when considered in context of all religious people regardless of specific faith (Islam, Hindu, etc.), clearly a minority. It’s this view I was addressing above, not yours. Scripture has been and is regarded as Inalienable Fact in most quarters, which is distinctly at odds with your poetical-truth interpretation.
None, obviously, because they aren’t sentient. See, the thing is, humans have a habit of leaping to the supernatural to explain the unexplainable. UFOs, for example, are, by definition, unidentified. Yet look at how easily we leap to all sorts of unfounded conclusions. In The Bad Astronomer’s book, he relates a personal incident in which he received a frisson of uncertainty upon witnessing a line of oddly-moving lights against the blackness of night. He looked at them for a long time, and simply couldn’t figure out what they were, which, as he says, made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. Turns out they were just ducks, but even he, an experienced observer of the sky, is not immune to the back-of-the-brain wiring that gives us a thrill of fear and wild speculation whenever we see something we can’t immediately categorize or explain. All I’m saying is, when confronted with something that cannot be explained — such as, to return to the baboons, whatever mysterious process granted our primate line true sentience while leaving the others to pick bugs out of one another’s bungholes — I’m content to leave it as yet unexplained, rather than inventing a “placeholder” argument or belief just so I can stop thinking about it. Most people don’t do this.
I had to look up “deontics.”
Even so, is it so hard to accept that what we consider “morality” is really just a set of rules to which our species has gradually adapted because it makes us really successful and therefore more likely to pass on our genetic material? “Don’t have sex with your immediate family,” because your progeny will be inferior. “Don’t kill indiscriminately,” because then society breaks down, and we do better when we live and farm as a group rather than wandering the hills picking berries and catching fowl. (And don’t think “thou shalt not kill” has ever in a practical sense, even in the Bible, applied to anything more than “…from your own tribe.” It’s always been perfectly okay in real-world practice to kill whomever you want as long as they come from that other group on the other side of the mountains. The broad idea that it isn’t okay to kill anybody is an extremely recent moral formulation.) “Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t betray your tribe,” etc., etc., all of which obviously are precursors for social organization. Where you see deep moral truth, I see necessary adaptation.
I was going to discuss this in my previous post, but it was already getting pretty long. It’s yet another of the key angles I mentioned that forms my thinking, but I skipped it.
We frequently hear that the supernatural deity is “unknowable,” that he (it’s almost always a he, which I think is interesting) works according to higher rules that are beyond our comprehension, and that whenever things happen that make no sense based on what we previously believed, we should just assume that there’s a grand plan of some kind, an intent that will never be in our intellectual grasp. “God works in mysterious ways,” goes the old saying.
Well, fiddlesticks. If it isn’t possible to know how the deity works, if we’ll never know what he has planned or what he wants from us or how we’re supposed to behave, then what the heck is the point? How on earth am I supposed to give myself over to something that, by definition, cannot be understood or followed with any degree of confidence? The answer most spiritual authorities give, of course, is, “Trust us to give you the rules,” which sort of defeats the whole purpose, since we all know just how fallible humans really are. Whose wisdom was Cardinal Law following?
The alternate answer, the one I’m sure you’re mulling over, isn’t any better. “Look within yourself,” says the teacher. “You will find the truth within.” Well, I look within myself, and I see a hormone-driven territorial chimpanzee with a thin veneer of rational skills. What then?
Or to go back to the original quote, and respond from a somewhat Taoist angle: If God is everything, well, then, God is nothing.
Now, please understand, I am not trying to convince you, or anybody else for that matter, that faith should be abandoned, and that my purely rational atheistic viewpoint should be embraced. I already acknowledged the impossibility of that task. No, by responding specifically to what seem to be your central points, I merely hope to convince you that you cannot convince me. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and growing more and more firm in my convictions. Whatever argument you try to raise, know that I will have a response, and in fact by the exchange my worldview will likely be strengthened.
But by the same token, I recognize the same will be true for you, which is why I don’t see the need for a protracted debate. Our respective positions are unshakeable. Nothing I say will convince you of the truth of my position, and nothing you say will convince me of the truth of yours. Again, if I hope to convince you of anything, it’s simply of the concreteness of my belief. You don’t need to convince me of the solidity of yours, either; I already accept it.
(Of course, that could lead to a whole other tangent, looking at how a far greater proportion of atheists are willing to read the Bible and spiritual texts and examine those beliefs than the proportion of religious folks who would read Darwin and consider the alternatives, coupled with how most atheists are perfectly willing to let religious folks believe whatever they want while religious folks seem hell-bent on winning people to the faith, but this is already long enough.)
Believe me, I’m interested in your point of view. But I know I think I’m right just as much as you think you’re right. And there, I know, we will stay. I’ll wave happily to you on your mountaintop from my own mountaintop, and I may read the tour brochure, but I’m not building a house there.