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Part 1: Atheism as skepticism
Part 2: You’re an atheist, just like me

Part 1

Most people are rational about most things. When a problem is presented to them, they attempt to think through the situation until a solution is found that can be applied by themselves or someone else using physical or intellectual tools. If your car is broken, you go to a mechanic and expect him to utilize his training to identify the problem. If your stomach hurts, you hope your doctor can give you medication to feel better. Typically, no one prays that their car should be miraculously fixed by god or that he would do the same to heal your stomach. There are physical, real-world solutions at hand, and our brain correctly identifies those and invokes them for aid.

Generally speaking, people only ask god for help when there is no rational response to their present situation or question available. For example, let’s suppose that I have a cold. If my parents tried to organize a national prayer drive to beseech god to heal me, most people—even Christians—would think they were crazy. If, on the other hand, I contracted rabies, it might seem perfectly respectable to organize a prayer drive. After all, there is no known cure for rabies, so there’s really no harm in praying. Once a cure becomes available, people won’t pray for rabies victims anymore. They’ll expect the victim to drive their car to the doctor’s and get a shot. God becomes moot, because a rational, real-world solution exists.

Let’s move to a bigger question: what happens when we die? Or, let’s make it a little easier: what happens when a dog dies? If we base our answer on the observable world, it’s pretty obvious that “nothing” happens. The functions of the dog’s organs have ceased, and it is no longer conscious. That’s it. We’ve never observed dog angels, dog demons, or a dog God, and so we don’t imagine them. Unfortunately, the dog does not go to heaven. It simply…turns off.

If a person is being rational, even if they believe in a spirit world for humans, they will most likely admit that they have never experienced a demonic possession, they’ve never seen someone walk on water, and they’ve never heard god talk to them directly. They believe that these things exist because they have accepted a belief system that says they do.

Humans, by their very nature, are skeptics. If we see a television ad that promises us 1 million dollars just for buying a CD, we probably don’t believe it. If your friend calls you up and says that she was just abducted by aliens and flown to their base on Jupiter, you’d either think she was out of her mind, or you would ask her for some proof. Skepticism informs how we do everything, not just “big” things. If you see moldy cheese, you’re skeptical of the positive benefits you would get by eating the cheese. Skeptical then, is another word for discerning. Humans have discernment, and use their life experience and their intellect to make decisions about problems and situations they encounter.

Atheists are skeptics just like everyone else. When someone says that their friend is able to walk on water, they find this very hard to believe. They know that liquid water is not very good at holding heavy humans up. Chances are, if you attempted to make a human walk on water a million times, each attempt would end in failure. In order to have a religious belief, one necessarily needs to stop being skeptical at some point. You don’t believe that your friend can walk on water, but you’re perfectly willing to believe that Jesus did. You’re skeptical in one case, but not the other. An atheist is skeptical about both. If your friend can’t do it, and no one else can do it, it seems unlikely that Jesus was able to.

On their most basic level, most religions ask two questions: where did we come from, and where are we going? A rational response to these questions would look at the possibilities and tools available to the 5 senses that we possess. It would not invent something for which we have no evidence. If someone said that the earth is suspended on the back of a giant turtle, but couldn’t provide evidence of this, we would call it irrational.

Rationalism, by definition, is attempting to find a reasonable solution to an unfamiliar problem. If my truck breaks down, I might think that a unicorn got stuck in the fan belt. By most standards, that would be considered unreasonable, since there is no evidence for unicorns in the modern world, nor could they likely get stuck inside a small portion of my engine compartment if they did. A unicorn in the fan belt is therefore an irrational response to the problem. It’s not impossible, mathematically speaking, but it’s probably so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

Skepticism helps us find reasonable solutions to unfamiliar problems, even if it does not always give us exactly the right answer. Suppose my mechanic says that any of the following might be the problem:

1. My truck is low on oil
2. My truck is depressed and refuses to run
3. My truck is out of fuel
4. A unicorn is trapped in the fan belt
5. Someone found a magic lamp with a genie inside, and one of their three wishes was that my truck wouldn’t start

Any reasonable person would be skeptical of reasons 2, 4, and 5. Granted, those technically are possibilities in the strict sense, but they’re not reasonable possibilities based on how we understand the world to work.

As a human being, I’m presented with a question: how did we come to exist? Although we can quibble over which god might have helped the solution along, we really have two choices. Either some kind of an intelligent being with creation powers made everything, or the universe came into being on its own. This is a difficult question to say the least. We know that the universe exists, as we are here. We don’t know that god exists in the same way, however, as we don’t have the same evidence for his existence as we do the universe. The existence of something instead of nothing is already such a seemingly improbable event that it seems even more unlikely that an all-powerful god who created this astonishing thing should exist in addition to it. If the universe is improbable, god is even more so.

Consequently, the atheist is skeptical that god exists. Is it possible that god exists? Yes. Is it reasonable? Depends on who you ask. I feel that it is not a reasonable solution to the problem of how the universe came to be, as it only creates much more difficult questions to answer. How did god come to be? How did he gain consciousness? Where did he gain the ability to create something out of nothing (think about how truly enormous a feat that is)? If he’s perfect and lacking nothing, why would he choose to create? If the laws of the universe exist solely because of him, how does he keep them “operating”? You’re certainly free to disagree with me, but I’m simply explaining that adding god to the start of the universe adds so much more complexity to an already complex occurrence that it makes the solution unreasonable and gets us no closer to answering the question of why there is something (god or the universe) instead of nothing.

To get back to the point of the article, how does all the above relate to why I’m an atheist? Simply put, religions make a lot of very big claims about what the main players in that religion can do, but not a single one of them can produce evidence for the claims outside of their holy book. I’m not a Jew because no one has ever convinced me that the actions of Yahweh and his prophets is based on real events. We have no tangible evidence of the Red Sea being parted, of the Passover events, and so on. I’m not a Christian because no one has ever convinced me that what the Bible says about Christ is true. He performed countless miracles, but we don’t have any evidence of them today aside from the Bible. I’m not a Mormon, because the Book of Mormon and the story of its writing make incredibly strong claims that should be easy to prove with modern science, and yet, not a single shred of evidence exists to support them. I’m not a Muslim, because I don’t believe that people are able to fly “up” to Heaven on the back of a magical horse (just one of Islam’s magical claims).

So, if I don’t believe in the major religions, and they are the only evidence we have for god, I’m left with no believable evidence for god. It’s not that god couldn’t exist, it’s just that I have never seen any legitimate reason to believe that he does. I’m skeptical. Should he peak his head through the clouds one day and say hello, I’ll change my tune. Until then, however, I’ll probably feel that science can make the best attempts at explaining the universe without having to invoke a magical god that has never demonstrated himself outside of pages written by man.

Part 2

I’ve often heard it said that atheism is a religion, as it takes far more faith to argue that god doesn’t exist than it does to believe in him. The reason, people say, is because it would require the non-believer to know everything, and that would pretty much make them god. For example, what if god were living on a planet somewhere and just hadn’t talked to us in a while? If I say that it’s impossible for god to exist, and he is hanging out on a distant planet, wouldn’t I be wrong? Of course.

That’s why I might be called a “weak” atheist. A strong atheist might argue that the very concepts of omnipotence and omnipresence are outlandish, and this is how they “know” that no god can exist. There might be some truth to that, but I’ve not been convinced of it.

My weak atheism, on the other hand, simply says that because I see no evidence for god, I don’t need to invent one. In reality, you too are a weak atheist, but you don’t know it. Would you think it fair for me to say that you’re a member of the religion of anti-Zeusism because you don’t believe in Zeus? How do you know Zeus doesn’t exist? The fact that you can’t prove that Zeus doesn’t exist means that you have enormous faith that he doesn’t.

I think we’d both agree that this makes no sense. You are not “religious” about Zeus not existing, and neither am I. The Greek myths make a lot of extraordinary claims, and I think we can both agree that no good evidence exists to support them. If, however, both of us could look up in the sky when it’s raining and see Zeus hurtling thunder bolts down to earth, we would have good evidence. Until then, you and I both are atheistic about his existence.

If I tell you that here—in my apartment—I have an invisible bird that talks to me in plain English and places food in my fridge when I’m hungry, you would be completely within your rights to ask for evidence of this. If I provided no evidence, you would continue not to believe in my bird, just like you didn’t believe in it before I told you about it. We could say that you are an atheist when it comes to my bird. If I wrote a book about my bird’s exploits and handed it to you, you would still be an atheist unless this magical bird talked to you, or you could witness it placing food in my fridge. You are not any more religious today about my bird than you were yesterday. You’re simply being rational.

We could continue to do this all day. I could ask you why you don’t believe in all of these gods:

• Athena
• Ra
• Horus
• Ba’al
• Venus
• Hades
• Poseidon
• Apollo
• Eros
• Minerva
• Zoroaster
• Marduk
• Tiamat
• Ishtar
• Kishar
• Amen
• Anubis
• Set
• Isis

For each example, you would say that you have never seen any reason to believe in them. All of these gods at one point were believed in by thousands and possibly even millions of people. Every one of them has been written about by their followers. And yet, you have chosen not to believe in them, despite having more or less the same evidence for them as you do for Yahweh, Christ, or Allah. Quite simply, when it comes to the above gods, you are an atheist. When it comes to your own, you are willing to suspend rationality and believe in miracles, magic, and invisible beings. The simple difference between us is that I just exclude one more god than you for all the same reasons that you ignore these other gods.

In short, I’m not an atheist because I’m possessed by demons or because I’m wicked and have rejected Christ or Allah. I’m an atheist for all the same reasons you are: we’re smart, and we know a myth when we see one. For some reason, we just see your particular myth differently. I’m an atheist because there is no evidence to separate your belief system from the rest of the pack.