FIREBLIND.COM

Updated 2007-11-01

It bugs me when religious people say that atheism requires more faith than being religious does. This is stupid. Consequently, I want to make something very clear: atheism is not a religion, and it doesn’t require faith.

I’m going to imagine an animal. I want you to think about it in your head. This animal has 7 legs, but otherwise resembles a horse in the body and height. Instead of a tail though, it has a large pink sword with pokadots. One of its legs is yellow, while all the rest of them are green. In the middle of its back is a large sail like a sailboat that it uses to fly with. Its head looks like a watermelon, and has 3 eyes and a telephone for a tongue. Instead of neighing like a horse, it speaks a language developed from classical German, modern Italian, and ancient Chinese circa 2,000 BC. Using my super awesome mega MS Paint powers, I’ve made this sweet little rendition of it:

Let’s suppose that we are rational beings. One day you and I are out in the fields, trimming back our asparagus crop, and I say to you: “friend, I’d like to tell you about an amazing animal I’ve come to know. It’s called the Giffelburger, and every day it wakes the sun up and forces it to go across the sky. It has 7 legs, a sword for a tail, a telephone for a tongue, and it speaks an amazing language that no one understands. Oh, and it’s invisible. No one can see it, but they used to be able to thousands of years ago.”

You would either conclude that I’ve lost it and should be taken to a mental facility, or that I’ve somehow become brainwashed despite my uncanny good looks.

Either way, if I argued and argued with you, your reply could be as simple as “all the experience and observation in my entire life provides me with no evidence to suggest that such a creature exists or that it has the abilities you speak of.”

Does this reply make you religious? Does it make you dogmatic? Of course not! If an extraordinary claim is made, you have to understand that people are going to want evidence to believe as you do. In addition, the evidence has to be evidence that the people can relate to. You can’t tell them that something is invisible but has incredible powers that can’t be directly witnessed or observed and expect them to believe it.

Am I “religious” because I see no evidence to believe that Mars has an entire city made out of chocolate, including chocolate Martians who go to work in their sugar factories?

Stating that atheism is just as much a religion as any religion is like saying that because a one-year-old does not know who George Bush is the baby is a Democrat. The fact that the baby (the atheist) has not yet been indoctrinated into a belief system does not fold them into an opposing belief system. The idea is stupid.

One of the things that annoys me to no end is the negativity applied to “Science” (capital S) because it is religion and god neutral. Science and atheism are not-anti god, they just have not found relevant objective evidence to suggest that a specific god has done everything the believers say.

If I again came to you the next day and said “look, I have proof of everything the Giffelburger has done; it’s in this nice book”, you’d think to yourself that the book is all well and dandy, but you need something outside of the book if you’re going to believe in this animal. After all, the book was written thousands of years ago by primitive people, and no one since the book was written has actually seen the Giffelburger or talked to it directly.

You would be considered rational and said to have “discernment”. That is, you’re not an idiot, and demand proof that is acceptable to both you and me. The next day the sun rises. Your friend says that the Giffelburger did it, but you can’t see the Giffelburger and so you continue to doubt. In the meantime, both of you can study how the sun comes over the horizon, its composition, how long it takes to move “across” the sky, and so on. But never in your research will you actually come in contact with the Giffelburger, nor will it choose to speak with you.

In a week, you and I are joined by a friend of ours who wants to tell us about the “Cingularizon”, a wonderful, magnanimous bird-like creature with the body and wings of a bird but the breasts of an obese man and the face of Barbara Streisand. He also has a book chronicling all the wonderful things the animal has done, including turning bird seed into cat food.

Your natural observations have never said that either the Cingularizon or the Giffelburger don’t exist, simply that the mechanics by which the sun appears to move across the sky happen in such and such a way and appear to do so without an outside influence. So long as god or these animals choose to remain hidden, Science must take a neutral position to it. It is atheist because it has never seen evidence other than subjective religious evidence to suggest that any process other than a natural one caused the sun to move across the sky.

If the Giffelburger suddenly appeared out of the sky tomorrow and demonstrated how it moved the sun across the sky, science would incorporate this into its explanation of things, and would move on.

This is why evolution is “atheistic”. Humans only have 5 senses. God–if he exists–has apparently chosen not to communicate with us in such a way that our 5 senses and our brain can deduce his presence along fair objective lines. Thus, we are left to look around at the world and try and figure how it ticks and works using only those senses available to us.

Many religious people, including possibly even the great philosopher Kant, have argued that our perception of reality is only a small part of what reality actually is. For instance, a blind person’s concept of reality is lacking in that they are only able to comprehend the universe through 4 senses. Likewise, just because humans only have 5 senses, doesn’t mean that there are not other things and forces out there that we could detect if we had 6, 7, or 8 senses. Science, however, does try and create machines that help us figure out what some of these other forces are. For example, we can utilize and understand magnetism and nuclear forces even though we as humans cannot directly experience them. That is, we can’t “feel” magnetism, but we can observe and interact with it.

If a force is undetectable by us and has no apparent effect on us, we can–for all intents and purposes–say that it is irrelevant to our existence. If a fruit bat has no biological mechanism for interacting with magnetism and has no direct need for it to go about it’s daily tasks of survival, then from the bat’s perspective, we can say that magnetism doesn’t exist. Fortunately, mankind is a little different. We are able to infer the presence of things that don’t seem to have an immediate, observable presence, like magnetism. Or, put another way, we are able to detect “undetectable” forces in a manner that is relevant to our 5 senses. That means that while our current reality is only part of the actual “big” reality, someday we’ll hopefully be able to complete that reality by using mechanisms that relate these forces into stimuli that our 5 senses can interpret.

This has ramifications for god. If god interacts with the known universe, then we can’t say he is undetectable any longer, because his interaction can be inferred via some mechanism. He is then the subject of Science, and can expect his interaction to be examined like anything else in this universe. If the presence of god can never be inferred in a manner detectable to our senses, then we can say that he is irrelevant to our existence, just like magnetism is to my bat. It is very possible that a god is intervening with the physical universe all the time via things like miracle cures for cancer, lifting cars off of people, and so on. But, if he does intervene in such a way, he has done so such that his actions do not really look all that much different than the normal functioning of the universe. Once we figure out how to cure cancer ourselves, it will make no sense to credit god with miraculous cancer cures. Just because Science has not solved a problem yet doesn’t mean that we have to credit the solution to god. It’s simply a gap in our understanding.

If at some point my fruit bat was able to ponder the world around him and wonder why a compass needle moved a certain way in the presence of some iron, would he be correct in saying that god is miraculously moving it? Of course not. Likewise, it’s silly to credit god with something just because we don’t understand it yet.

The best explanation we have for life and the universe is exclusive of god, because god has apparently decided to remain irrelevant to our sensory perception. Until such time as god chooses to reveal himself in a meaningful, empirical way, Science will continue to do the best it can with the natural resources available. And until such time, god will continue to be excluded from the explanation of the way in which the world works just as we exclude the Giffelburger and the Cingularizon from moving the sun. Actually, we’re not even “excluding” them at all. We’re simply not including them because there is no rational, observable reason to do so. The baby in my example is not anti-Republican because of lack of evidence of George Bush, and neither is Science anti-god.

You can’t be against something that you’ve never conceived of. You just…are.