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Atheists and Believers: An Explanation
(I wrote this article and I would like the full TFP treatment.)
I make it a point to observe as much friction between believers and non-believers as possible. My goal is to understand why, with as much that each side has to justify their stance, they can never seem to convince each other. Ultimately, I am an atheist myself, so a religious person's justifications are a curiosity of mine. In this article I hope to explain and understand why people decide to believe what they do, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Viewing belief and non-belief as two dichotomous side of human existence, I feel that if we understand more about the other, we can begin to hold better conversations with less friction and possibly productive outcomes.
Religious faith is the trust in a guiding presence. It is the warmth and reassurance of a community full of like-minded friends. It is the confidence that your soul will be nurtured after the completion of its trials on Earth. It is a deep and fruitful relationship with god. You might be surprised that I'm not more conflicted about rejecting it all completely, so let me help you understand. Religion has been sold to me as a beautiful life, filled with love and security, and it’s not even my skepticism and distrust that makes me shake my head at it all. It is the reason why all the logical arguments in the world cannot sway a believer into thinking otherwise. Atheists and believers do not want the same things out of life, so when someone comes to me promising eternal salvation or the love of a supreme being, they're not playing to my tastes. Similarly, when I provide logical proofs for the lack of any god, I am ignored by the most devout because I am not addressing what religion is about.
As an atheist, my entire view of the world can be summed up fairly easily; you don't need god to explain anything, so why is he necessary? This is Occam's Razor in full effect. When I am "blessed" with fortune, I am able to see all of the factors that combined to provide me with it. Most of the time, I can attribute my good fortune to my own doings. I do not need to involve Jesus or Buddha in the matter. Furthermore, my rejection of their existence does not prevent me from experiencing fulfillment. Then there are spiritual people who do not have a religion but instead believe in forces that defy current scientific logic. People might claim to have experienced supernatural events, but the million dollar prizes for proof of god or proof of the supernatural remain to be awarded. (There is an organization out there that will pay you a million dollars if you can prove it.) It is a simple challenge and all that anyone can contest it with is the assurance that you have to believe in god first in order to feel him. Therein lies all I need to know about religion and spirituality: they contain truths that are only real to the set of people who are interested. The "truths" do not affect me and this fact allows me to deduce that they are neither standard nor comprehensive. The "truths" are different for every religion or spirituality, with each claiming its own universal validity. This means that there can only be one correct belief system or that none of them are right. Trying to flip the stage and use logic against logic, religious people will claim that it is up to atheists to prove that there is no god. The problem is that, logically, you cannot disprove the existence of something that doesn't exist to begin with.
There are believers out there who don't necessarily shun logic. More to the point, they believe that logic is on their side when arguing for the existence of god. Unfortunately, belief and non-belief are two incompatible debates because the logic employed in one uses different rules than the other. I've found myself in numerous discussions with believers and when I begin by stating that God is unnecessary to explain anything, the conversation predictably shifts to the question of our origin. How did the universe come into existence? How do you explain the existence of the matter that made up the Big Bang? Not only is there an illogical leap to assume that this matter had an intelligent creator, there are two more fallacies to starting the "origin" argument. First, if we are in the business of explaining the supposed something-from-nothing, then we also must ask, "Who created god before he created the universe?" Second, even if we concede that the universe must have been "created" by something, it still does not explain anything else. That means that everything that actually matters in life remains within the grasp of rational explanation.
Speaking of rationality, I have one concession to make. Humans are not rational at all. This truth flies in the face of the intellectual believer, who thinks of man as a masterpiece, a superior animal (if animal at all) who uses his dominant, thinking mind to make sound, honorable and moral decisions. One needs only to look as far as Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational to realize that humans are far from perfect and every ideal we think we see in ourselves can be stripped away by the everyday situations we find ourselves in. Demonstrated in the book,Ariely conducts experiments that catch the hidden beast at work within every man; the vulnerable and credulous critter at home behind our noble facades. Every lesson rings out loudly; no matter how chiseled, civilized and rational we believe we are, man's brain contains artifacts of the animals we descended from who had far more pressing priorities than serving any higher power.
My favorite lesson contained in Ariely's book focuses on our decision-making ability when under the influence of sexual arousal. As we can probably predict, our judgment is impaired in most impassioned states: anger, jealousy, desperation. But what happens when we predict how we will feel when we are sexually aroused? The experiment involved asking individuals a series of questions about sexual boundaries ("Can you imagine being attracted to a 12-year-old girl?"), moral boundaries ("Would you keep trying to have sex after your date said 'no'?") and safe sex ("Would you use a condom if you felt your date would change her mind while you went to get it?"). The subjects were first asked the questions while unaroused, but told to predict their answer as if they were actually aroused. The next step of the experiment had the same individuals answering the same questions, but this time they were actually in the heights of passion (masturbating) while doing so. The results were stunning. Without exception, the predictions of sexual boundaries, moral boundaries and adherence to safe sex were way off. Many "immoral" considerations received twice as many approvals during actual arousal than they had been predicted. The example questions that I cited were among those with the highest rates of reconsideration. What does this mean? It is only an example of how flawed humans and their "superior" judgment capabilities are and how little our standards of society matter when we are in the heat of passion. It is also a shining case against "abstinence only" sexual education.
The fact that I can follow a path of logic away from the warm embrace of belief does nothing for me in the way of convincing believers to do the same. The reasons for this are numerous, but all of them have one of two root justifications: either the idea of non-belief paints too uncomfortable a picture or it grates against the most basic of human motivations; the need to be right. As a former believer I met once said, "See yourself traversing a deep, dark chasm, stepping on a bridge illuminated by god's light and steadied by his hand." The notion of abandoning belief is too big of a leap to imagine for someone who has given their religion first priority in all of their life's decisions for so long. "Now turn off that light and remove the hand." One could envision the devastation. This is why churches urge their followers, without trepidation or hashing, to reject logic and let faith be their only guide. It's too scary not to.
It isn't that religious people are staring truth in the face and choosing to ignore it and it isn't because they're unintelligent; they simply cannot (or are not allowed to) fathom such a dramatically different reality for themselves - especially one that is blasphemous. This is the role of dogma in the belief system at work. Dogma is seen by non-religious people as an efficient system through which guilt can be delivered with the purpose of inducing subordination. Conversely, religious people view their dogma as the ultimate source of values and morality. This is why the faithful fear that a world without god would burn down in minutes.
I once met a girl who claimed to be a non-practicing Mormon. When I asked her why she did not leave the church, she replied that the faith provided a good set of morals for her to follow. I, being an Atheist who uses nothing more than his brain to choose how to behave, was spurred by this response to challenge her further. I asked her, "What morals could a church teach you that aren't already taught by secular society and adhered to by our basic human instinct for compassion?" I have yet to receive a response. My own take on her situation is that she probably knows for herself what is right and what is wrong, but the support system that the church community (and the larger "believer" demographic) provides is a powerful tool in recruitment and retention. Social contracts are built upon yet another basic human motivation; the need to belong. Why would someone who does not practice a religion retain a relationship with the church and continue to tithe part of their earnings? The answer lies in the stark truth spoken by another woman, a non-believer. "I'm an atheist, but I find it depressing," laments a 20-year-old test-tube baby. She grew up as a child of two lesbian women in a diverse liberal community; a member of no churches and practitioner of no cultural traditions. She is a human, like the rest of us, but barren of all that we might claim makes up ideal humanity. Still, she is an intelligent, well-adjusted citizen of society with a functioning moral compass, a boyfriend, and a future. Her lack of belonging is sorrowful, but she does not let it stand in the way of her search for truth.
Atheism is more of a discipline than a belief system. There are more basic human traits that draw us toward the warm light of belief than away from it. We all want to believe there is something more fantastic than just existing on this round rock that is hurtling through space. We all want to feel the love of an eternal creator, especially when we know we will eventually be abandoned by our earthly ones. We want magic and we want synchronicity with nature. We want more than what our eyes plainly see. Atheism asks that you only accept what you can justify, observe and accurately predict. The world is fantastic as it is, and we can make it a far better place if we only realized that it is really all we have. You might call this a depressing view, but in it I find so much more fulfillment than the thought of it being some arbitrary trial and transitional state of being. This is all we've got, folks. Let's make the best of it.
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