The Atheism FAQ

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Answer to Questions about Atheism asked Frequently on CafeMom, by Clairwil - part 19


The flaws of modern Christianity, from an Atheist perspective, continued

3. Failures of practice

We've discussed what different parts of the Christian message are consistent or inconsistent with, and whether there are some deep logical problems with the core story and principles.

But what does theory matter? Who cares, as long as it is doing good? As long as, in practice, it delivers on its promises?

3.1 What does Christianity promise?

" I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. " (John 10)

" You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it. " (Matthew 21)

Matthew 7:7-11
King James Version (KJV)

7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?

10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?

11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

There is a strand within Christianity, which spawned what is known as the "Protestant Work Ethic", that says some people are "elect" (meaning that they are predestined to be saved) and that one indicator of this is how a person lives their life. If a person works hard and lives frugally, they are likely to gain wealth and social success. And so, God being a God of justice, and a God who loves those who love him, such wealth and success are most likely to come to those who are elect, as a sign of God's favour.

When combined with the Pentecostal view of healing (if you're sick, that's lack of faith), this lead onto the prosperity gospel of the 'Word of Faith' movement, which interprets literally:

Mark 11:22-23
King James Version (KJV)

22 And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.

23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

Just 'name it' by making a "positive confession" (eg reciting a promise of scripture), and you can 'claim it' (your faith in God will generate an actual force or power which will enable those things you named to come into fruition).



But this is a straw-man, because most Christians don't interpret those parts of the Bible that literally. They may be willing to take any claims that Christians are wealthier, healthier, happier or saner than their non-Christian peers as evidence of the benevolence of Yahweh and the soundness of their decision to follow Christianity, but they stop short of saying that the Bible promises these things.

Many Christians will tell you what God has promised about the afterlife, or about the big promises he made to the species (eg no more world-wide floods threatening to exterminate the whole of humanity). Some will talk about gift of the spirit (like discernment, or tongues), but they are controversial. But what of this life? Is there anythng most Christians will agree that God has promised his followers while they are on Earth, by which we can judge the worth of those promises?

God promises that:

He will meet your needs and grant you peace of mind (Philippians 4)
He has a plan for your life (Jeremiah 29)
You will not be tempted beyond what you are able to bear (1 Corinthians 10)
He will work for your good and intercede for you, to further his purpose (Romans 8)
Effectively, the Bible says that God promises you that if you give your life to Him, He will use that life for good purposes, and fix things so good actually results, rather than good intentions having bad consequences.

Should we then expect pefect behaviour from all Christians?

The stock answer is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. A Church isn't a showcase of perfect people, but a recovery ward for sinners and we are all sinners. But even so, and despite everything we said about mysteriousness in our discussion of the problem of evil, if God's promise is worth anything, then there ought to be evidence at least of a statistical effect - that on average the influence of Christianity has had a net positive effect upon the world, and upon its followers. That, on average, individual Christians are likely to be nicer and better behaved, because of their Christianity.



3.2 Have Christians and Christianity ever done any good?

Yes, obviously.

Many famous philanthropists were deeply Christian.

There are people who have been inspired by Christianity to devote their lives to helping others. And others, whose lives were on a downward spiral, who were inspired to change what they were doing and shape up.

Christian institutions have, on many occasions, been responsible for feeding the poor, preserving books, brokering peace treaties to end wars and fighing for justice. Many people consider the Roman Catholic Church to be the largest organisation in the world that does charitable activities.

But these things beg further quesitons...

Looking at the list of philanthropic trusts, Getty (born 1892) was a Methodist and Hughes (born 1905) was an Episcopalian. But would they have been less philanthropic if they'd followed some other system of moral teachers, like Bill Gates (born 1955)?

There are people all over the world who devote their lives to caring professions, not just in religious countries. There are people whose get inspired to change their lives from a bad path to a good path due to reading something that touches them, or the intervention of someone kind, without religion being involved. How do we tell whether it would be less or more common, if the particular person who intervenes wasn't attributing their intervention to religion?

How do we tell whether there would have been other non-religious institutions that fed the poor, preserved books, etc, if religion hadn't already had a stranglehold on the institutions in that country? After all, if a university, hospital or school has already been built, you don't go and build a competing one right next door just because the first one was started by a church.

Answering this sort of hypothetical question is never easy, and sometimes isn't even possible. You have to take great care that you choose your statistical evidence fairly, rather than with bias aimed at supporting an answer you want to believe. And it is rare that you can find populations that can be fairly compared. If you look at different countries, than you have to take wealth and local culture into account. If you look at the same country over different time periods, then you have to take into account any other factors that might have changed (such as increased globalism or new technology).

And, finally, all the arguments that can call into question whether a particular act of good done in the name of Christianity would have still happened without Christianity's influence, can also be applied to whether a particular act of evil done in the name of Christianty would have still happened without Christianity's influence.

We can't look at just the good in isolation. We have to look at both things, the good and the evil done in the name of Christianity, and work out the net effect as best we can.

In short, brokering a peace treaty to end a war is a good act, but we have also to ask whether religion caused that war in the first place, whether there were other wars where the influence of a Pope or church prolonged them rather than shortened then, and whether countries of equal prosperity but less religion in the same period also had fewer wars.



3.3 War

Jesus said to love your neighbour, love even your enemies, and to turn the other cheek when they hurt you. How does the track record of Christiantiy measure up to that standard, in practice?

Following the Reformation in 1517, most of Europe ended up in a series of religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, that carried on at least until 1660 (the Restoration of Charles II of England). This period included the various successors of Henry VIII (Protestant), Mary I (Catholic) and Elizabeth I (Protestant) under which Britain's affiliation swung so much a song was written about the Vicar of Bray whose nimbly followed all the changes. There were numerous bloody uprisings by those more sincere and less nimble than the deft Vicar (eg Wyatt's Rebellion, the Prayer Book Revolt), not to forget the Gunpowder Plot.

All in all, a lot of killing, not just done in the name of religion for political reasons (though there were some political factors involved), but often traceably and provably because of religion (eg through a particular monarch's personal convictions, such as Mary I or Oliver Cromwell).

Far from trying to broker peace, it was usually the religious authorities who were pounding the pulpit to get money and soldiers behind the effort. For comparison, China was being ruled by the Ming Dynasty and was, at that time, roughly comparable in wealth to Europe. They waged a couple of short wars (less than a year each) against Vietnam, and against Sri Lanka. And they nastily put down a series of rebellions in the south of their country by the Miao, similar to Cromwell's actions in Ireland.

When you read the histories, including surviving letters and personal journals, and compare the two area (one where religious division was a major factor, and one where it wasn't), the conclusion is inescapable that religion did play a major role, and was directly responsible for much of the death and ongoing division.

And that's just war between two branches of Christianity. It doesn't even touch upon the crusades against the followers of a different religion or the persection of pagans and heretics. But before we move on, we should mention a special category - wars where one of the armies was directly under the authority of a church rather than a nation, such as the Salt War and the War of the Eight Saints. In one particularly awesome moment, at the Siege of Mirandola in 1510, the pope decided his general was being rather negligent and so, sacking the general, the pope took personal command of the army as they took advantage of some cold weather to storm over a frozen moat and sieze the enemy citadel by surprize, slaughtering the poor defenders in bloody hand to hand combat.



The painting Julius II enters the breach at Mirandola

Image

3.4 Science

In Europe, after the decline of the Roman Empire, during the early period of the Middle Ages sometimes known as the Dark Ages, many of the mathematical, medical and scientific texts written in Greek were burned or left to decay, but the Christian monasteries did preserve some translations and summaries written in Latin by approved sources (such as Calcidius, an early Christian whose translation into Latin of the bits of Plato's works that he agreed with, was the only version spread by the Church for a period of nearly 800 years).

Today the evidence of progress is so overwhelming (our increased lifespans, the increased information available to us, the things technology allows us to do that our ancestors never dreamed of) that it is hard to conceive of a time when the concept wasn't accepted. But back then, theology declared man was in decline - that we used to live longer (several biblical figures are claimed to have lived to be more than 200 years old) and that we were closer to god. The time of the Greeks was seen as a golden age, a time of legendary geniuses such as Aristotle, a pinnacle of knowledge that would never been equaled let alone surpassed. Even during the Carolingian Renaissance, the objective was only to preserve, spread and better understand that previous knowledge, not the experiment to find new knowledge. Theory reasoned from the Bible, previous authority tested by time, and spiritual intuition were seen as being more reliable than experiment or observation, and medicine was mired in theory of humours and the demonic theory of disease.

Where would we be now, if the natural human inclination to use our reason had not been forced for so long to subjugate itself to unchanging authority endorsed conclusions?

Image

No amount of later Christians being involved in refining the method of science or being scientists can compensate for that gap. Remember, we're trying to look at net effects here. Even as late as Galileo in the 1600s, the Church was still having a dampening effect in many areas of science, forcing conclusions to be phrased in twisted ways in order to avoid implying anything that might dangerously conflict with theology.

Some Christians argue that science is a mixed blessing, because it makes wars nastier and developed atomic bombs and internet pornography. But it is notable how few historians say they would want to live in the past, unless they could very carefully choose their gender, social status and not fall ill or need dentistry.

Talking of gender...



3.5 Equality

Historically Christianity has been strongly connected to hierarchy, being supported by it, and supporting it with authority stemming from non-evidence based sources such as Biblical pronouncements about kings ("Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves" - Hebrews 13), husbands ("Wives, respect and obey your husbands" - 1 Peter 3), parents ("Children, obey your parents as you would the Lord" - Ephesians 6) and slave owners ("Slaves, always obey your earthly masters. Don't obey them only while you're being watched, as if you merely wanted to please people. Be sincere in your motives" - Colossians 3)

Not only is that antithetical to the change required for scientific progress. It is also antithetical to the change required for progress towards equal human rights for all, no matter a person's race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or disability. (Did I mention Leviticus 21? "Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles.")

There have been some denominations (generally the less hierarchical ones, such as the Quakers) which did strive towards equality on various things before the movement became popular. And there are many Christians who, once something such as racial equality became acceptable, became willing to defend it, since it was now part of the 'status quo'. But, in general, Christianity because of its conservative hierarchical nature, has been behind the curve on all the equality fights - a dragging anchor rather than a billowing sail. Wouldn't you expect, if Christians were receiving guidance from a holy spirit that knew inequality to be wrong, that on average they would be ahead of the curve, leading the charge for greater morality in society?

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of equality for women.

On the afternoon of July 20th, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood before a convention at Seneca Falls, New York, upon Women's rights to proposed a motion:

Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
The resulting anti-suffaragist movement who fought against this were mainly conservative Christians, and the campaign they mounted was one of the dirtiest in history.
http://www.stopthereligiousright.org/suffrage.htm

Here is one of the postcards they distributed:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Votes ... =isch&sa=X

Sermons were preached against women voting in pulpits across the country. Indeed, so fiece was the religious opposition, that a resolution to tackle it was one of the initial demands agreed at Seneca Falls. (LINK) (LINK)
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/ ... r_ch09.htm
http://washingtonhistoryonline.org/suff ... frage.aspx

Preachers were as certain then that equality for women was wrong, as preachers before them were certain about slavery being the natural condition for those suffering the 'Curse of Ham' (black skin), and preachers after them were certain about homosexuality being an abomination.

A few preachers might be excused as selfish individuals twisting the word of the lord for their own ends. But when an interpretation is near universal, and lagging the rest of society, then we have to accept that Christianity has, in this, been a net evil upon society, showing no statistically valid evidence of guidance from a benevolent wise being.

Even today, a century later, a majority of Christians in the world follow denominations where women don't have equal rights to lead services and interpret the word of God.
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Answer to Questions about Atheism asked Frequently on CafeMom, by Clairwil - part 20


The flaws of modern Christianity, from an Atheist perspective, continued

3. Failures of practice, continued

3.6 Individuals

Ok, but what if all of the historic torture, inquisitions and missionary invasions were problems caused by the hierarchical natures of sort big religious organisations that tended to be best fit to survive in the environment of historic Europe? What if that wasn't the sort of church Jesus intended? What if that were all just one big ghastly mistake?

How well does Christianity work out nowdays, across the world, on a personal local level of individual church communities and lives, rather than on the scale of nation spanning evil impersonal bureaucracies corrupted by power?



3.7 The role of the local church

The Bible constrains ministers to serve and care for their congregations, like a good shepherd tending to a flock of sheep. Not to lord it over them or look out for personal gain, but to be humble and set a good example. (1 Peter 5)

I could talk about famous preachers who are millionaires, but that would be a cheap shot. Despite the institutional riches of the wider church organisations with vast holdings of property, most individual ministers are not fantastically rich or greedy. They are decent men, trying to do what they feel is right.

But how successful are they at achieving that aim? Of making church congregations non-judgemental communities of quiet law-abiding hard working citizens, at which all feel welcome?

Much earlier in this FAQ we discussed the possible advantages to a believer of reading the parts of this FAQ that show what the Christian worldview looks like to those not inside it. So I'm going to tell you a secret here, that you could use to benefit your church.

For the last 60 years, the number of people in America that are no longer affiliated with any particular church has been dramatically increasing:



and a Christian research organisation, the Barna Group, has been doing detailed research to find out why. And the answer they've come up with is rather interesting.

It turns out that traditional churches have evolved to be very good at ministering to young adults who follow the traditional life path of leaving home, getting an education, finding a job, getting married and having kids—all before the age of 30. But society has been changing, that life path is increasingly less common, and churches (because of the conservative hierarchical nature of religions) have been increasingly falling behind in their ability to serve the new less traditional portion of their flock. We're not talking criminals and layabouts here. Statistically, the disaffected mostly fall into a group characterised by the label “young creatives:” Actors, artists, biologists, designers, mathematicians, medical students, musicians, and writers.

When surveying people who regularly attend church, what the Barna Group found is that between 20% and 40% described their church as being like a country club, only for insiders. They see it as out of touch with the world they live and work in, anti-science, and ignoring the problems of the real world to instead concentrate upon movies, music, and video games are harmful - concentrate on S*x. In particular, they see that the “teachings on sexuality and birth control are out of date.” (source) (source). (For explanation of why, there's a good essay about Fossilized Opinions.)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightat ... -opinions/


Ok, but what about the remaining 60%-80% - the portion of the flock that still feels comfortable with the traditional church and the traditional church values? That attends services and coffee-mornings, that feels a personal connection with God when they sing hymns praising Him, and hears timeless wisdom in the words preached from the pulpit. On average, do those words affect how they behave? Does that feeling of personal connection actually translate into sinning less?



3.8 Teen pregnancy

"With data aggregated at the state level, conservative religious beliefs strongly predict U.S. teen birth rates, in a relationship that does not appear to be the result of confounding by income or abortion rates." (source)http://www.reproductive-health-journal. ... ent/6/1/14

And by "strongly", they mean a positive correlation of 0.73, and odds of the data producing that by chance of being less than 1 in 2000. The same relationship holds true when you compare between countries across the world, with the less religious ones having fewer problems with teen pregnancy. There a detailed discussion of the reasons behind this here, but to summarise: it is directly related to the message that is, in practice, given from pulpits about purity, S*x, virginity, and the source of worth of women.



3.9 Divorce

Divorce rates, by religious affiliation or non-affiliation, in the USA, 2005:

21% - Atheist or agnostic
23% - Christians as a whole (all denominations)
29% - Baptists
30% - Jews

(http://web.archive.org/web/200710200526 ... 05-11.html) And, again, this is backed up by multiple studies, including international ones, and the relationship is still strongly there, even after controlling for income and other non-religious factors. (Note, adultery is also just as common among Christians.).http://godisimaginary.com/i38.htm



3.10 Prison

Code: Select all

Affiliation   % in population    % in prison   relative frequency

Atheist         6%                 1%             0.2
None           24%                 9%             0.4
Other **        3%                 3%             1.0
Jewish          1%                 1%             1.0
Christian      65%                77%             1.2
Muslim          1%                 9%             9.0
** Hindu, Pagan, etc.

In America, Christians are more likely than average to commit serious crimes like homicide, and end up in prison. (And that's not to do with income; nor is it explained by people converting after being arrested.)

Which makes in interesting that:

When it comes to the death penalty, atheists and nonreligious people are also markedly less supportive than their religious peers (Beit-Hallahmi 2007; Gallup Poll, 2004). As for the general treatment of prisoners, secular people are much less supportive of retribution and are less likely to favor harsh ⁄ draconian sentencing than religious people (Grasmick et al. 1992; Blumstein and Cohen 1980). A recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Survey (2009) found that secular, religiously unaffiliated Americans are the group least supportive of the governmental use of torture. (source) https://docs.google.com/file/d/1eh1VW8S ... edit?hl=en

Especially given what the Bible says about God judging Christians on visiting prisoners, feeding them and ministering to them (Matthew 25).



3.11 Other sins

Steven Weinberg said "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Where as the Bible says (Psalm 14) that those with no God are filthy, corrupt people who do abominable works. "there is none that doeth good, no, not one."

Which is correct?

When look at worldwide, of the societies where people are free to choose whether to worship or not, the less religious ones tend to score far better on a wide range of measures; from how much supportive aid, per capita, the country gives to poorer nations; to how likely they were to rescue Jews being persecuted during the Holocaust. (source) https://docs.google.com/file/d/1eh1VW8S ... edit?hl=en

This ties in with the atheist view of religion, which says it is an evolved social practice, and that certain forms of it spread better in societies that are screwed up and individuals feel more in need of security and promises of justice in an afterlife. (link https://docs.google.com/file/d/1D3Qca3D ... edit?hl=en) Whereas it flatly contradicts what we'd predict from the religious view of religion, that it is a blessing not a curse.

The World Value Survey Cultural Map 2005-2008

Source: Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, "Changing Mass Priorities: The Link Between Modernization and Democracy." Perspectives on Politics June 2010 (vol 8, No. 2) page 554. (source) http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/ar ... le_base_54



If you are a Christian who goes to church, look around you, and ask yourself how well your community and the people who prosper within it match up to your standards. To quote one ex-Christian, "my step son's mother is a Christian and she is one of the most horrible people I know. Cruel, vengeance filled, dishonest. So I looked at that and it seemed to me Christianity had taken away from her accountability."

Dave Barry said "If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person."

How well do the people in your Church behave, not to you or others they recognise as Christians in good standing, but to the parents of a daughter who was raped by the pastor's son and who wants to go to the police rather than let the pastor deal with it? To their non-Christian neighbours? To people they meet once at random in a big city, who are not of the same 'social status' as them and who'll they'll never meet again?

Surprisingly, this is something that scientists have actually managed to study rather accurately:

Image

because such things are easy to set up proper randomised trials upon. Many studies have found the same, and it isn't just waitresses in particular. Christians are also more likely to steal newspapers rather than leave the correct money in the honesty box, if they think they are not being watched. (source) http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/201 ... ppers.html

But you don't have to trust scientists on this one. Just find a cafe near a church, and ask the waitresses there about Christians and tipping. Here's an article on a Christian website admitting to and discussing the problem - (LINK). http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/ ... ppers.html



3.12 Summary

Christians are more likely to notice other Christians being nice, both because they are more likely to be the recipients of that niceness, and because that's who they spend time with. So the above results, based on reliable statistics about the general population, and looking at the whole of history, may well seem shocking - "That's not the religion I recognise, full of wars and selfish people. The people in my local church regularly donate time and money to the local homeless charity, and visit each other when sick or bereaved. Those statistics must be wrong."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-t ... ref=false
The thing is, non-Christians are also mostly nice, donate to charity and help out acquaintences who are in need. What the statistics say isn't that all Christians are nasty. Just that, on average, being Christian doesn't seem to make people nicer, better behaved or less sinful than their non-believing irreligious neighbours.

Christ said to love thy neighbour. But so did many non-Christian moral philosophers, and apparently the non-Christians have been better at listening.
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Answer to Questions about Atheism asked Frequently on CafeMom, by Clairwil - part 21


The flaws of modern Christianity, from an Atheist perspective, continued

4. Failures of complexity

4.1 Occam's Razor

In 1323, in the village of Ockham in the south of England, a Christian scholar, Friar William, wrote a book entitled the "Sum of Logic" (Summa Totius Logicae). In this he expounded a now famous principle:

It is futile to do with more things, that which can be done with fewer.

This means that if you need to choose between two alternative explanations for something then, other things being equal, it is rational to prefer the theory that makes the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

Later mathematicians have proven that the reason why it is rational, is that the simpler theory actually is more likely to be true. (LINK) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff ... _inference

Note, though, that phrase "other things being equal". If two theories don't have equal explanatory power (for instance, because one of them contradicts known observed evidence), then the 'other things' are not equal, and the Occam's Razor tie-break doesn't apply.



4.2 What is complexity?

So how should we measure the complexity of a theory? The number of words needed to explain it? The age of the youngest child able to comprehend it?

It turns out that there's a catch to measuring it that way, and to understand the catch you need to know about black boxes.

If you've ever experimented around with electronics, trying to create a new device, you'll know that breadboarded circuits can get complex rather fast:

Image

And if the device is one you want to take somewhere in order to test, it is handy to have a way to protect the delicate water-vulnerable components, so shops like Maplins sell what are called 'project boxes':

Image

These are just sturdy boxes, often black, into which you can pack your device, and then drill one or two holes in the side for the buttons needed to control it, and another hole for whatever the output is.

It is from this we get the concept of 'Black Box Testing', in which someone is given a simple looking black box with two inputs and one output. They are told which combinations of input ought to produce which output, and then asked to test whether the box is working or not, without ever looking inside it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-box_testing

The important thing to note, though, is that putting the device inside a black shell hasn't made the device itself simpler. All it has done is hide the complexity, in order to make using it simpler.

The same thing happens with language.

We can call a structured asset-backed security in which an obligation to repay a debt is resold as packaged pledged collateral, a "CDO", but just calling it by a short name doesn't make the thing referred to any less complex. A bank might be misled into thinking it is simple and something they understand, if they use the short name frequently enough that it seems natural to them, but that doesn't make them correct.

So to measure how complex a theory actually is, we need to unpack all the words, unpack all the black boxes. This can be difficult if frequent use has made us unaware of how much complexity a simple-seeming word is hiding.

It is made harder when you realise that the words used in an explanation, may themselves then be in need of explaining. For example, what exactly is a "structured security" in the context of financial instruments? We have to look at recursion, and ask at what point we no longer need to explain our terms.

Luckily the hard work in coming up with a good definition of what "complexity" actually is was done back in the 1960s, by a couple of mathematicians who came up with Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity, which is now the standard definition accepted by academia, and the specific definition used in the proof that (other things being equal) the simpler theory is more likely to be correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

4.3 How simple is the God hypothesis? (Part I)

People are familiar with the word "God". They use it frequently, so it feels simple to them, in the sense of being basic and fundamental.

And it is easy to explain to young children that "In the beginning, there was God, and He created everything. He lives in a nice place called Heaven, and if you follow His rules on how to get there, the real part of you, your soul, can go live with Him there after your body dies here on Earth."

All you have to do is accept on faith just one ad-hoc premise "The supernatural universe-creating deity described in the Bible exists", and then everything else is explained. You can't get fewer than just one ad-hoc premise. Surely William of Ockham would approve?

Compare that to science, with unpronounceable words like "Deoxyribonucleic", lots of mathematics and competing hypotheses to explain abiogenesis, rather than the certainty of just a single straight answer from an eye-witness. Surely science contains far more complexity than religion?

This reply comes in two parts, because before answering the question, I want to talk about faith.

Why is faith relevant to complexity? The key is that word "ad-hoc".

When a child is very young, they usually accept without questioning the explanations given them by authorities they trust. They might be curious about what Santa finds to eat at the North Pole, but a contradiction between the North Pole being empty and Santa living there won't bother them. Much of life, from mirrors to motor cars, is indistinguishable from magic for them, anyway.

When a little older they start to play the "Why?" game. You tell them that Santa eats fish that his elves catch for him, and your daughter asks "Why?". So you tell her "On Fridays, Santa only ever eats fish", or "Squishy-La-La only knows how to cook fish", and she asks "Why?" again. So you hastily make up yet another explanation, to fill in the holes in the first one: "It is always Friday at the North Pole because the sun never sets so the day never changes" or "Each elf is only ever allowed to learn how to do one thing." and she won't mind if the explanations are fantastic or raise more questions than they answer, because that makes the game last longer and fantasy is fun - she wants the world to be strange and magical.

That's what an ad-hoc explanation is. It is one, generally without supporting evidence, that's been assembled after an unanticipated hole in the previous explanation has been revealed. It has the form and appearence of an explanation, but it didn't predict the thing it is being used to explain, because it was assembled after it was raised, for the special purpose of explaining it.

You can explain anything, if you are allowed to use as many ad-hoc assumptions as you like, but every time you have to add one, you decrease the probability of your explanation being correct.

Humans often don't enjoy the feeling of questioning something they've already decided to believe in. It is an unpleasant sensation, ranging from an irritating waste of time, to unsettling, like an annoying person rocking a boat or solid ground turning out to be quicksand. So many, when asked whether "Who created God?" is as valid a question as "Who created the Universe?", will take the first answer that comes to mind, without caring whether the particular answer they grabbed is a good one, because they have faith there there does exist a good answer out there, and they are not particularly bothered to hunt for it - knowing it exists is enough for them.

But, without that child-like faith, deeper questioning reveals that the 'simple' explanation of God that can be given to a child contains issues, black boxes, that unpack to reveal many many ad-hoc assumptions. I've mentioned some of these in the FAQ in passing, but in Part II of this answer I'll gather them in one single place, to make clear what believing the 'God Hypothesis' actually entails.



4.4 What is faith?

According to the original Greek story, when Pandora opened her box, she released many spirits, both good and bad. Among the good ones were Pistis, Elpis, and Agape. Pistis was the a spirit (daimona) that personified reliability and trustworthiness, making agreements honestly and acting according to those agreements in good faith. She is explicitly contrasted with the personifications of deception and lies.

Meanwhile, the Romans had a god Semo Sancus Dius Fidus (probably borrowed from the earlier Sabine religion, and rationalised as being yet another son of Jupiter), who was in charge of oaths, both private ones such as marriage, hospitality, loyalty or commercial contracts, and public ones such as treaties between nations. His temple had no roof because the Romans believed oaths should be sworn under an open sky (where Jupiter, a sky deity, could keep an eye on things), and this practice continued after the Romans conquered Greece, and imported Pistis into their pantheon as being a female version of Sanctus named "Fides". Fides is depicted on their coins as a young matron, clad in white, crowned with a wreath of olive leaves and carrying a cup or basked filled with fruit or corn. The treaties Rome made with other countries were signed and kept in a temple near the Senate under her protection.

In particular, fides came to mean the terms of a treaty of surrender, offered to a weaker enemy who, if they accepted them, would then have to trust that the victor would stick to. This caused some problems in translation, because unlike the Greek word "pistis", the Roman "fides" didn't necessarily imply that the victor had an obligation to protect the lives and freedoms of the surrendering people.

(source)(source)(source)
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XRR ... A237&hl=en
http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Pistis.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancus

This, then, is what the authors of the New Testament (Paul, in particular, who was a Roman citizen) would have understood the meaning to be of the word "pistis". And pistis is mentioned quite a bit in the New Testament.

In Galatians 5, Paul lists it as one of the "fruits of the spirit".

In Romans 5, Paul talks about being "justified" by it

In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul lists it as one of the three theological virtues.

And in Hebrews 11, Paul defines pistis as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen", and spends the entire letter talking about it.

But how should pistis be translated into modern English? This is a question that significantly divides the Christian denominations.

Catholics and traditional Protestants favour the interpretation that emphasizes the trusting acceptance aspects of "pistis", like the trust required by an enemy of Rome deciding to surrender rather than be slaughtered in battle. They usually translate "pistis" as "faith", and often consider the ability to believe 100%, prior to receiving full evidence, as being a supernatural gift from God, to be treasured and nurtured.

'new perspective' Protestants favour the interpretation that emphasizes the more Greek influenced meaning of "pistis" as steadfast loyalty and commitment. They usually translate "pistis" as "faithfulness".

(source)(source)(source)(source)
http://biblesuite.com/greek/4102.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752c.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3004.htm#article1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Perspe ... ithfulness

4.5 Is faith a virtue?

According to Christianity it is a vital requirement. Paul writes "Without faith, it is impossible to please God" and even Jesus says "Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed". And John 11 & 12 make it even clearer: "Jesus shouted to the crowds, "If you trust me, you are trusting not only me, but also God who sent me." and "Jesus told her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.' "

And one can see why it would be useful to an organisation, based around an authoritarian hierarchy, to promote the virtue of child-like faith. Without questioning, there are no reality-checks to balance the power to use (or abuse) that the obedience of the followers gives to those in charge. When curiosity is seen as a sin (or even as an attack by Satan), people are ashamed of it, and don't like to mention it when they do think of questions they don't know the answer to. Certainly becomes more valued than correctness.

We've spoken a bit about the problems having that unchecked power causes on an organisational level. The power-hungry violence, the fossilised bigotry, the support of superstition over science. And we could talk about how those systematically contribute to S*x abuse scandals (like the one where a Minister Seduced Girls with Promise that S*x Would 'Heal' STDs)

But I think there's a deeper problem. Have you ever noticed a young child treating a parent as a god, having total trust that the parent can do anything, fix anything? It is a natural stage for developing humans to go through, that has survival advantages at that age, but it is only a stage and children ought to grow out of it, if they are to become mature and self-reliant adults.

We can see what happens if a creature doesn't grow out of it by looking at cats. A cat, in its natural feral state, goes through a playful trusting kitten stage, but then they grow up to be come self-supporting. However in domestication, the relationship that a kitten has with the parent cat it taken over by the relationship the kitten has to their owner, and it persists even after the cat grows up physically. The cat's emotional development is stunted, and remains kitten-like, in the areas where the owner continues to supply the parental role.

Taken to extremes, religion can have the same effect on humans. It isn't children who treat parents as gods. It is some worshippers who treat gods as parents. They see their god as an all powerful father who loves and cares for them, and they take emotional comfort from that - it makes the world appear to be a safer place, like the sort of child who will only explore the garden because they have the security of knowing their parent is watching from the porch and will rescue them if there is trouble.

That may sound harmless, or even a positive form of support, but it has a downside too. When life is cruel to them, they want to carry on believing the parent figure is loves them, so they take them blame upon themselves, thinking they must have deserved it, and and they try harder to please big daddy. And when life is pleasant to them but cruel to others, they see that as the natural order of things, a sign of daddy's favour, and the dirty sinfulness of others.

Image

An English Priest, Charles Kingsley, who was a professor of history at Cambridge University, wrote:

" We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's hand book, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor in order. "

If your followers have faith in an afterlife full of love and justice, without demanding evidence, then you can get away with doing nearly anything to them in this life, that you can persuade them is endorsed by God.

Why would a good deity consider it a virtue for you to trust absolutely in absence of evidence, then give you a brain and a universe where that type of thinking isn't a virtue in any other situation?



4.6 Critical Thinking

So what sort of thinking is a virtue in everyday life? Mathematicians have studied the problem of how best to evaluate pieces of evidence and weigh them against each other in order to decide whether a particular conclusion is justified. The answer they found is called Bayes' Theorem:

Image

and one implication of it is that the more extraordinary a claim is, the more extraordinary should be the evidence that you demand before believing it. Or, as David Hume put it:

"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

So, for example, if a friend claims to have tossed a fair coin twice, and have gotten 'heads' both times, the odds against that happening are only 1 in 4, and if you'd generally say that you could rely on your friend's word 9 times out of 10, then just your friend making that claim should be enough to persuade you.

If your friend claims to have tossed it 5 times and have gotten 'heads' each time (odds of 1 in 32), and you'd bet him $10 that he couldn't do it, then you should probably ask for additional evidence, such as a video of the event or the testimony of an additional friend, in order to bring the chances of the evidence being incorrect below the chances of the event having happened.

If there were 20 tosses (odds of 1 in 1,048,576) then you'd want to be there in person to watch the attempt to win the bet, and you'd want to have the coin examined to see it wasn't weighted or double headed. If the bet was for $1,000,000 (such as the prize offered by James Randi for evidence of the paranormal), then you'd also want to eliminate the possibility of electronic devices hiding magnets by keeping such things away, and sleight of hand by requiring a t-shirt and close camera monitoring from multiple angles.

If the God hypothesis is highly complex. If when we unpack the black boxes, it turns out to require multiple leaps of faith, not just one. Then critical thinking, of the sort we praise in all other areas of life, requires that we demand the very highest calibre of evidence, not just in quantity (eg the personal testimony of a billion believers), but in quality. It has to be the sort of evidence that admits no other possible explanation, or for which any alternative explanation for the evidence is so improbable that the God hypothesis seems likely by comparison.



4.7 How simple is the God hypothesis? (Part II)

Ok, so let's unpack the black boxes within the hypothesis "The supernatural universe-creating deity described in the Bible exists" and list some of the unlikely assumptions we find hidden within them. I'll put in brackets which part of the FAQ goes into more detail on the issue, where relevant.

If there's a supernatural creator who designed humankind, then He deliberately created some individuals to be, right from birth, less likely to believe in Him (part 10)

History and archaeology do support the naturalistic explanation of how the Christian and Jewish religious beliefs evolved from the stories and beliefs of earlier religions in the region. History and archaeology flatly contradict the non-naturalistic explanation of how the Christian and Jewish beliefs appears (for example, the Exodus didn't happen, nor did a global flood of the type described by Noah, nor is the age of the Earth and the history and geography of many civilisations compatible with the scattering described after the fall of the Tower of Babel). (part 10 and 11)

The way the tenets of belief have changed over time and spread geographically are predicted by the naturalistic explanation, but contradict what would be predicted by the non-naturalistic explanation. (part 11)

The naturalistic explanation of the psychology and subjective experience of belief and a personal relationship with God, and why such a capacity in humans developed, is backed up by studies of the brain and correctly predicts which sort of tenets are more likely to be held and emphasised in practice by religions that are successful at surviving and growing. (part 12)

If there is one true religion in the world, supported by objective evidence, then just from straight statistics we can say that less than 5% of the followers of that religion are following it because of that evidence. And that if there is convincing subjective evidence supporting it of a supernatural origin, the God of that religion is not being even handed in which nations He gives that evidence out to. (part 12)

The Bible appears to contradict itself. (part 13)

Some prophecies in the Bible appear to have failed. (part 13)

The Bible appears to contradict the evidence we have from various sciences (biology, geology, physics, and astronomy). (part 13)

The miracles God has chosen to use to exhibit his power just happen to be the sort that can be explained by other factors, and they vary in power through the ages in a way that religion doesn't predict, but that naturalistic forces do predict would happen if other factors were the cause of exaggerated stories and civilisation with greater awareness of science and closer scrutiny of claims that contradict science were keeping down the amount of exaggeration to what would still be plausible for that day and age. Thus the lack of claims of flying or amputees regrowing entire limbs in societies where such claims would be checked and exposed if false. (part 14)

God appears to be inert, doing less than he might to reveal his existence. Why choose to reveal his teachings so ambiguously that there many different religions in the world (no single religion has even a third of the world's population) holding mutually incompatible positions on important issues (such as whether there is an afterlife, and what someone has to do in order to end up in the 'nice' part of the afterlife)? Why keep himself so hidden that Atheism exists and is spreading as we learn more about how the universe works? Why are the gaps left unexplained by science continually shrinking, including area after area that previous religious followers claimed would forever remain unexplainable? (part 14)

Why does prayer produce no objectively detectable results? The absence of evidence is evidence of absence. (part 14)

Either God isn't worthy of being worshipped, or God has done such a poor job of teaching us the difference between good and evil that have no clue from His actions which one He is, or he is less powerful than NASA (let alone such constrained beings as the Odin of Norse theology), or he is more evil than Donald Trump, or it is ok to gratuitously torture animals, or God is a bigger confidence trickster than P.T.Barnum, or... well, the excuses get even worse from there. But to summarise (part 15 - 18), that gratuitous evil appears to exist is a problem for Christianity, that neither justice or freewill can adequately explain, but that naturalistic explanations do cover.

In direct contradiction to promises in the Bible in Jesus' own words, over the last 2000 years organised religion as a whole, and Christianity in particular, has caused more harm than good. Religion has divided people more than it has united them, causing and enflaming wars; it has supported conservative hierarchical authoritarianism, delaying the introduction of democracy and delaying equality for many groups of people (such as women); and it has also, for that and for other causes (such as a belief in the decline of man, and the superiority of theory over experiment) been chiefly responsible for delaying the progress of science by many hundreds of years. (part 19)

On average, religion and religiosity have also had no net positive effect upon the lives of those who believe. They don't live longer, healthier or happier lives on average, nor are they more charitable, nicer, more law abiding or better at avoiding sins (eg divorce) than their non-religious peers. (part 20)



In short, no matter where you look; at society or at individual marriages, at history or at the human brain, at the stars or at bones in the ground; in all the places where we'd expect to find evidence, given the God hypothesis, we instead find none. Not a single shred of reliable evidence, let alone something that would count as 'proof', that would be so fantastically persuasive that it equals the evidence that should be demanded by a hypothesis containing so many many flaws requiring ad-hoc miracles and contorted mysterious Godly motives to explain away.
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Answer to Questions about Atheism asked Frequently on CafeMom, by Clairwil - part 22


The flaws of modern Christianity, from an Atheist perspective, continued

4. Failures of complexity, continued

4.8 Story Logic

Think, for a moment, as a script writer, or as a non-Christian follower of some other religion who, for the first time, is having the story explained to them. How plausible would they find it?

The naturalistic explanation of how religions come about predicts a God created in the image of the human - one who shares our flaws, and the assumptions of the society in which the story evolved from previous versions of the story. It predicts a story centered around our planet, and probably around the nation who wrote the story. It predicts the interesting events will have happened within recorded history, or just a bit before, not billions of years ago. It predicts distances and times on a human scale, or rather the scale that humans thought the universe was when the story was written, not the scale of the universe as known to modern science.

The naturalistic explanation predicts that the story is good as a story - it has the right storytelling structure to be memorable and motivate human minds. It will be tailored to our psychology, not that of an alien from Alpha Centauri, or even a dolphin. It predicts it will share motifs and ideas from previous stories in the area. It should contain death, sacrifice, blood and drama, love, forgiveness, big battles and small heart-warming moments - everything that you'd expect to find in popular epic plays, films and national sagas. The naturalistic explanation predicts flaws in the underlying logic that don't bear close examination, but a generally compelling surface narrative, littered occasionally with trivial petty bits and inconsistencies.

What is the story logic behind the sacrifice of Jesus? One man being dead for 3 days, before returning to heaven, as a sufficient exchange to stop billions of people burning in hell for all eternity? Why is the character of God portrayed in the old testament so different from the portrayal in the new testaments? Isn't a better explanation that the new testament was written by people exposed to Greek philosophy, a thousand years or more after the old testament was composed in a very different more primitive tribal society?

Gene Roddenberry, himself a prolific author of stories, arrived at the verdict: "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

When you start to question the mechanics of the sacrifice, and why God decided to make it necessary, there's something that doesn't make sense outside of the context of a tribal society where the magic of sacrificing animals and children to great powers in order to appease them was an accepted thing.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text ... of-reason/

Nor does the concept of an all powerful benevolent creator deity, when you ask yourself what He could have done instead, at various points in history. The concepts of sin, and evil, and a fallen angel being a sort of 'loyal opposition' are story elements. They make motivational sense on a human scale, but they don't fit the actions of an ethical being with a free hand to design things however he wanted - to constrain Him that way demonstrates a vast lack of imagination.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... l#universe

Noah parading all the animals onto his Ark, two by two, is an image that children love. It is a brilliant story. Suspiciously so. A rainbow as a promise? A dove carrying word, when God already directly communicated to Noah to tell him to make the Ark? Did God run out of txt minutes? It is big. It is dramatic. It is fun to tell. It is a story that is useful, that we tell to children for a purpose, that survives right back to an actual small local flood event which spawned it because it has the right story elements to keep getting passed down the generations.

But it is just a story.

And one that is far better explained by natural events, than by a supernatural creator actually existing.



If you've accepted the basic premise of an intelligent individual creator of the entire universe who personally intervenes on the planet Earth, then all you're doing is arguing about which precise miracles He chose to use. Was it a miracle of providence that all the species of animal on the planet happened to be available in one small area (including those which would die because that area is too hot or too cold for them)? Or was it a miracle of creation, where He effectively waved a magic wand and with a *BAMF* sound effect all their pairs just teleported from around the world to be available, rather than walking there? Was there another *BAMF* as he teleported them into a Dr. Who TARDIS like Ark that was bigger on the inside than the outside, or did they pack into the arc like sardines in a miracle of providence that none of them needed to eat each other during the 40 days and 40 nights?

I think, for me, the implausibility is not the question of whether each aspect was a miracle of providence or a miracle of creation.

For me the question is, given infinite power, WHY DID HE DO IT THAT WAY? What need does an infinite God have for a human to build a wooden ship in order to save all his creatures. Why not just say *BAMF* and make them all able to breathe water for 40 days? Or teleport to Mars for a holiday while he wipes out those troublesome humans? Or just let them drown then re-create them ab-initio, in the new post-Deluge habitat where He wanted each to live? Was He bored? Was creating animals tricky for Him to remember how many legs spiders have, that He had to keep one spider alive as a template in order to re-create the species from?

The Bible says the flood covered the tallest mountains on the entire planet: "all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.". The person who exaggerated the story didn't know that Mount Everest is 29,029 feet or that there are over 100 mountains over 20,000 feet. The writer didn't anticipate that modern geology and archeology would have a way of detecting whether there had actually been such a flood.



Waters higher than this.

Image

So, in praise of the deity of his tribe, he took an existing story, changed the name of the God being prayed to, and altered the details. Here's what actually hapened...

A Sumerian king named Ziusudra who was chief executive of the city-state Shuruppak at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period about 2900 BC. A six-day thunderstorm caused the Euphrates River to rise 15 cubits, overflow the levees, and flood Shuruppak and a few other cities in Sumer. A few feet of yellow sediment deposited by this river flood is archaeologically attested and artifacts at about this sediment level have been radiocarbon dated.

When the levees overflowed, Ziusudra boarded a commercial river barge that had been hauling grain, beer, and other cargo on the Euphrates River. The barge floated down the river into the Persian (Arabian) Gulf where it grounded in an estuary at the mouth of the river. Ziusudra then offered a sacrifice on an altar at the top of a nearby hill which storytellers mistranslated as mountain. This led them to falsely assume that the nearby barge had grounded on top of a mountain. Actually it never came close to a mountain.

Here's what the grain barges of the time roughly looked like:

Image





Here's a link to a map of the area
http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=31.770 ... orm=LMLTCC

Here's more about Shuruppak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuruppak

You can trace the story onwards from that starting point in history, through at least two versions:

(source) http://www.livius.org/fa-fn/flood/flood ... hasis.html
(source) http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mes ... /tab11.htm
and see how each element in the story gets exaggerated as we go forwards in time. For example, the first version just talks about sheep and cattle. The second says "all the beasts and animals of the field". And, finally, the Bible version, written after the other two, claims "of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark" and "Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive."

It is just a story. No supernatural intervention required to explain it.



4.9 The Burden of Proof

"But what about science?" I hear believers cry. "Isn't that just as complex, with just as many ad-hoc explanations required to cover things like the Oort Cloud, abiogenesis, complex life forms, and the initial creation of the universe?".

"Ok, so we believers do rely on faith rather than objective evidence, but you also have things you can't prove. You cannot prove that God doesn't exist; therefore, atheism is based on faith too."

There are several points here, some of which I've already covered, but which will be useful to recap.

Most atheists don't claim that it is certain that God doesn't exist. Their claim is a far weaker one - merely that they have not yet come across any reliable evidence that God does exist. Note, they are not demanding 100% proof that He does exist, just evidence of sufficient reliability to match the extraordinariness of the claim being made by the theists.

There are indeed things that science has multiple possible explanations for, but that it can't yet say reliably which of those explanations is the one that actually took place. The question is whether, by adding religious terminology to the explanation, the situation is in any way improved.

For example, scientists don't yet know whether the energy behind the big bang came from the collapse of some previous universe, from a quantum event balanced out by the creation of an equal amount of negative energy, or from some different reason. But does saying "God did it, but we don't know how" provide any additional explanatory power over saying "we don't know how"? It is turtles all the way down. http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php? ... e_way_down

The nice thing about science is that it doesn't indulge in ad-hoc explanations. If the explanation can't pay rent in terms of the predictive power it adds to the situation, then it is discarded. For example, the Oort Cloud explanation of where the asteroids get restocked from is something that makes testable predictions about the possible density and location of the belt, where the asteroids should enter from and how that frequency should change over time.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_belie ... periences/

Scientific theories are sometimes overturned by new evidence. This doesn't mean accepting a scientific theory is an act of faith, because "accepting" in this context doesn't mean "have faith that it is 100% certain tha t the theory is true". In the context of science, when one accepts a theory, what one is accepting is that the theory is compatible with all the evidence discovered so far, and is at least as good as any of the competing theories at explaining that evidence, and making successful predictions.

Certainty isn't required before a person acts, even a rational person. All that is required is sufficient evidence that taking the action is a good bet. And in most of science, where science makes a claim at all, the leading theory is leagues ahead of any contenders, leaving it a very good bet indeed. It is only in a few areas, the fast moving cutting edges of science on the rim, rather than the massive rarely changing solid centre, that there are competing theories at all. There's only one theory used to predict what happens when you bounce a torch beam off a mirror. There's only one theory used to predict how much force you need to apply to a beach ball to push it under water. There's only one theory needed to say whether plants generally thrive without water.

Compare that situation to religion, where there are thousands of competing hypothesised deities

The burden of proof lies with the theist, to say why their particular deity is the one you should believe in; not with the atheist who makes no positive claim, but merely points out that the theist has not yet produced reliable evidence that supports their claim, let alone shown that the balance of evidence supports their particular deity hypothesis as being a better explanation of observed reality than all the other deity hypothesis or better than the default null hypothesis that there are no supernatural deities.

In absence of such evidence, the correct action is to not believe, just as when a politician claims that giving money to his campaign will lead to national prosperity, your correct action is to keep your money in your pocket UNTIL the politician presents sufficient evidence to rationally convince you. If the politician says "Listen to my story, doesn't it stir your emotions. And you better dang well pay up just on faith, or when I get elected things will go badly for you." does that really make it more likely that his initial claim to herald national prosperity is true? Shouldn't you weigh the alternative explanation that the politician is just human, prone to wanting to manipulate and gain money, because it benefits him?

There's little reason to suppose that a follower having faith in God would benefit God. Or the follower.

There's great reason to suppose that a follower having faith in God would benefit a church and help that church spread EVEN IF there is no actual supernatural deity behind it.

It is the simpler explanation.

And the burden of proof lies upon the priest making the additional claim (that his church does actually have the backing of a supernatural diety) to provide evidence to outweigh the additional complexity due to that claim.

What he can't fairly do is turn around and say "No, you prove my deity doesn't exist".

If Bertrand Russell were to claim that a china teapot orbits the sun in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars, nobody could disprove his assertion, especially if he added that the teapot is too small to show up even in a telescope. But, as Russell notes,

" If I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. " (source) http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9202.htm#BURDEN

Answers in Geneis has a Statement of Faith that says "By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.", and this is not an uncommon position among Christian fundamentalists, based upon Isaiah 55:8-9.

But, though they don't see it that way, in doing so they have surrendered the argument. You can't show that the preponderance of evidence supports your side by choosing to ignore or deny the parts you find inconvenient.

And nothing less than such support should make a rational person accept the God hypothesis.

Image

Even if, for some bizarre reason, you meet someone who actually is a were-unicorn despite refusing to demonstrate it, the rational thing to have done would still have been to not believe until shown evidence. Especially if they also claim that they want all their followers to go forth to persuade others that were-unicorns exist.

Why would a deity who gave humans brains with the ability to be rational, then penalize them for being rational?

Especially as we see about us harm happening in this world from people not being rational, and harm happening from people being religious. Kind hearts are good, but you do more good with a kind heart and good decisions, than just from a kind heart alone.



4.10 The Final Drawback

There's one special drawback of supporting a supernatural religion that I've been saving for last. I might have put it in the section on practical evils, but it fitted better here, along with the discussion about faith.

And it is a very important drawback, that's intrinsic to every supernatural religion, no matter how moderate.

Because by supporting one supernatural religion, you also support the idea that supernatural religions are, in general, the sort of thing that causes good and should be accepted, tolerated or even supported.

And, by doing so, you provide a camouflage of respectability that helps all supernatural religions survive and spread, no matter how extreme.

By promoting faith over rationality, you bear partial responsibility for contributing to the negative effects of religion as a whole, not only your own.

If you want to claim that your unsupported beliefs about the afterlife and the requirements to enter it, unlike the unsupported beliefs about the afterlife and the requirements to enter it of other supernatural religions, should be respected by society, then the onus is upon you to earn that respect.

Promoting religion causes real measurable harm. It isn't something to be indulged in upon a whim, like choice of wallpaper colour, because it makes you feel good. It requires justification. Sufficient justification to counter balance this:

Image

So please, think. Do you really have sufficiently good reasons to believe in and promote belief in a supernatural deity? If you have any doubts, any questions raised by the FAQ that you can't yet answer, you owe it to society to take those doubts seriously and investigate further until you can answer them to your own satisfaction.

But watch yourself. Look at each answer you propose to accept, and ask whether it meets the standards that it ought to. Is it a good answer, or just an excuse?
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To expand on an earlier answer about coming out as atheist (especially when young), taken from reddit:

Should I come out to my parents as being an atheist?
(Taken From the FAQ entry)

The short answer is No.

The slightly longer answer is that if you are not in a position where that is likely to end well for you, you should probably wait until you're more self-sufficient. However, you know your own parents better than we do. You could try breaking the ice on the subject of atheism to get a feel for their reaction to it in general, if you're not sure. Always keep in mind that for many people religion is a highly emotive subject, and for many parents who have been raised to believe in the "moral superiority" of religious belief, a child who comes out as an atheist can be interpreted as a betrayal of them or as a failure of their own.

In some religions, it can actually be dangerous to "out" yourself. If your father is a hardline Muslim, for example, getting kicked out of the house is the least of your worries. You risk being beheaded or set on fire. If you're coming from one of those, keep that in mind as well.

/r/atheism will almost invariably respond that you should wait. A common proverb here is "The best place to come out to your parents is at a home you own, over a dinner that you paid for yourself".

If you do decide to "come out," then consider that "atheist" has many evil, hateful connotations to religious people. It's right up there with "Satanist." You might be able to reduce the amount of flak you get by choosing a label for yourself that has a similar meaning but is less controversial. Please consider using an alternative such as "agnostic" or "humanist" or "non-religious", which does not carry quite as much baggage.

There's also another approach: You could say "I've lost my belief" or "I don't know what to believe any more" or even "God doesn't speak to me any more." Asked if you are an atheist, you could say "I don't know."

This makes you look less like a monster and more like a victim. You'll be subject to sympathy rather than anger. You won't be kicked out. But you run the risk of having folks work really hard to bring you back to God. Expect (more) frequent church visits, and maybe a talk with the priest/pastor/counselor.



If you get kicked out of your home, these guys may be able to provide you with a place to stay:

http://secularsafehouse.org/
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Atheist (Strong) :== "I believe that no supernatural deities exist."

Atheist (Weak) :== "I do not hold a belief in the existance of any supernatural deities."

Agnostic (Strong) :== "I believe that it is not possible for anyone to know whether supernatural deities exist or not."

Agnostic (Weak) :== "I personally don't know whether supernatural deities exist or not. I don't hold a belief 100% in either direction."

Apatheist (Type 1) :== "Whether or not a supernatural deity exists should not affect our perceptions of Good and Evil."

Apatheist (Type 2) :== "I don't care whether or not a supernatural deity exists. I'm not interested. It is not an important question."

Ignostic (Type 1) :== "The question 'Does God Exist' is meaningless, because the concept of 'God' is meaningless." (also known as Theological Noncognitivism)

Ignostic (Type 2) :== "The question 'Does God Exist' is meaningless, because the term 'God' is meaningless or insufficiently defined."

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A reply by RaverLady to GloBug, in another group, reposted here with her permission:
You don't agree with what I believe, therefore my beliefs must be wrong.
That is not the reason.

Actually, it is a direct examination of reality which suggests that your beliefs are wrong. Here is why:



1. There are no apparent gods. Every single idea or argument humans have ever put forth concerning gods are all just words. There is no actual substance or observation or part of reality which can be examined which is a god. There is no effect that can be examined which shows a god. As far as can be determined, gods are no more a part of this reality than unicorns or Santa. Upon examination, every human suggestion of or about gods is comprised entirely of conjecture.



2. There are no suggestions of gods in nature. Everything that can be observed, from the motions of galaxies to the behavior of insects to the dreams of humans, can be seen to be arising from natural systems with mechanisms that can be examined and apprehended. Nothing that can be observed suggests any kind of supernatural agency in its creation or maintenance, and nothing has been examined which is inexplicable enough to admit a supernatural component. There is nothing in the universe which a god would have had to interact with for it to be like it is now.



3. Everything supernatural has been debunked. It is easy to understand why ancient humans believed in gods, fairies, ghosts, magic, etc. It was because they had not yet learned to apply observation and reason to understanding what is the case. Almost as soon as the system of reason and observation was put into use, the old supernatural claims began to fall apart. All of the magical things people used to believe in were found to be superstitions and just-so stories with no basis beyond confirmation bias and wishful thinking.

Almost all of the previous claims about gods have been debunked as well - that gods magically created the earth, that gods designed life, that gods cause plagues/cure illness, that gods caused a world-wide flood, etc.

Only claims completely outside the ability to be examined (like "afterlife justice") can continue to be associated with gods because any and all things which could be examined showed no gods and no supernatural agency.



4. People are known to invent gods to explain what they don't understand. Even in recent times, people invented a whole belief system - the "cargo cults" - to explain a sudden inexplicable interaction with strangers. Given this human propensity for invention, it is easy to see where the old god stories come from and why they are not a basis for understanding what is really happening.



5. There is no apparent moral order outside of humans. Morality was invented by humans as a social evolution strategy. Proto-moral behavior can be observed in our closest relatives and many species, so it is clear to observation that morality was devised as a means for creating social cohesion. However proto-immoral behavior can be observed as well, serving different purposes. The origins of both are rooted in the biological.

So, there is no reason to think that there is a supernatural component to "good" and "evil." These are judgements our species learned to make, among many, based on trial and error and how things worked out. It is an ongoing process and still underway. This is also why our moral arc slowly bends toward justice - it is a form of error correction.



6. There is nothing in nature which suggests any kind of afterlife. There is no observable mechanism by which an afterlife could occur. A very close examination of the foundation of being and personality show that they arise from physicality, from the mechanism of a functioning biosystem with a complex neurology. Everything that can be observed about these systems suggest that they are only temporary emergent properties of complex patterns which are not maintainable beyond the dissolution of the pattern.

There is no suggestion at all that humans could encounter a fate different from anything else that lives and dies, and certainly no suggestion that some humans meet different fates "after" death.



7. Given the utter lack of examination, evidence and plausibility, there is no reason that any one utterly arbitrary projection - for example, single god, binary afterlife - makes more sense to believe than any other projection - like binary god, single afterlife, or multi-god multi-life, or leprechauns, or what have you. With no suggestions of gods and no need for gods and nothing to go on, fixing on one and investing it with the property of "truth" is nonsensical.



As you can see, simply looking at the reality that we find ourselves in very strongly suggests that we are naturally occurring biological organisms who rely on finite biological systems. Looking at our biology and our history it is clear that we are learning creatures who have only very recently learned to distinguish reality from fantasy and apply reason to our understanding.



So I hope you will see that for some, challenging your unfounded beliefs is not about disageement. It is about the fact that they do actually appear to be incorrect.






As far as where the ideas came from, that would be all the sources of information I have come across since I was old enough to understand them.
In other words, it came from other people. However, other people do not know any more about "the afterlife" than you do. If you can't tell anything about it, they couldn't either. So you know what they said about it means nothing.




I kind of feel like that is all religion. For the most part it was made up by someone at some point and accepted by many as a belief system.
Yes. But we know better now.


It might seem odd to you for a person to believe in something that is made up, but I can't give you a reason that you would find acceptable. I like the idea of believing in God. I like the faith I have.
I understand, but I was wondering if you might consider thinking of something beyond what you personally like.

I can see now that you do understand the truth. So, as people who understand truth, I feel we have a moral obligation to promote the truth, and the system of truth - reason - because understanding what is really going on is the only way to deal with reality well.

Perpetuating unreason is a really big problem for the human race right now. Being a voice for reason, and for accepting the truth, in a world where so few do, would be a much greater contribution than simply doing something that you happen to like.


I have only stated my beilefs. I understand that there are loonies out there who use their beliefs to justify wars and genocides, but I am not those people.
Of course not. But unreason - believing things which don't seem to be true for no acceptable reason - is a problem everywhere, in every system. Part of why it is so hard for people to use reason is because religious beliefs systematically dismantle reason by dismissing it and degrading it. That's a big problem.


I truly beileve in doing onto others as you would have done onto yourself.
You are a beautiful person. But you don't need gods for that.


I only believe religious beliefs are dangerous when they are used as an excuse for hate.
This is where I disagree. Unreason and refusing to understand the truth creates a lot of error. The greater the distance between what is claimed and what the reality is, the bigger the error. For most religious beliefs, this distance is a chasm.

And right now, refusing to look at the truth isn't just happening in religion. It is happening in economics and business and politics. As a result, we're blowing it.

Generous estimates give the biosphere maybe twenty years before it starts to become completely unhinged from runaway warming. Whether lifekind can even be maintained beyond that point is not a guarantee.

Do we really need more delusion and believing nice things that aren't true and refusing to face reality? Or do we need truth?




My logical brain says you are right. The spiritual side of me disagrees. You perceive faith in the unseen as wishful thinking. I do not. Faith is a state of being. It's a force inside you.
Again, I understand. What I would like you to understand is that you don't have to ignore the truth about reality to have those feelings. The most spiritual people I know are all non-theists, because at the heart of their spiritual quest was a desire to find out what is really going on, and be true to that spiritual quest, and this is where the truth in that quest inevitably leads. You have arrived there already yourself.

I am neither atheist nor theist, but I can tell you I have a vibrant spiritual life, and I feel a magnificent creative force inside me which animates every moment of my awareness. I feel a deep connection to all of reality knowing that the particles that make up my being are the stuff of stars. I feel a great reverence knowing the incredible age of the universe, and the unlikeliness of evolution to sentience. I feel wondrous awe at each sunrise knowing that matter and energy can become shaped into patterns that come alive and rejoice. And I feel profound respect for the greatest things of life - humans, who have made beauty and discovered truth and, despite our differences, have created great oceans of love for each other.

Understanding all of that, based on the truth about what is happening, does not detract from spirituality. My spiritual side and my logical brain are both in perfect agreement, because they are both telling me the same thing. That is what appreciating the truth does.



If you don't believe me, ask a buddhist. Buddhism does not even posit a god, or a soul , or an afterlife, or a supernatural. But this reality-based system is giving people spiritual awareness and experience and skill enough to measurably increase their well-being. Studies have shown that Buddhists really are happier than people in other religious categories.






Describing faith in God to someone who doesn't believe in it, is like trying to describe the sky to a person who was born blind. It's just not possible.
This is where I very strongly disagree. Comparing people who use reason and observation for understanding reality to the "born blind" is getting it exactly backwards.
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A short but excellent FAQ:

9 Questions That Atheists Might Find Insulting (And the Answers), by Greta Christina

http://www.alternet.org/belief/9-questi ... paging=off



Two more books people have suggested:

"Losing my Religion?", by William Lobdell

"William Lobdell", by Julia Sweeney



Have you ever been the victim of a confidence trick? Someone fooling you, betraying your trust and walking off with increasing amounts of your money, with a promised payoff somehow being put futher into the future each time?

Was there a voice in your head that gave you increasing warnings, as time went on that, at first, you tried to ignore?

Sometimes the right decision is to listen to the voice that tells you that perhaps your faith has been misplaced.

Read about the Sunk Cost Fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs ... st_fallacy

Then, if you feel duped, the next step to take is precisely the same one that you'd take, if you started to suspect that you might be the victim of a confidence trick. Stop hankering after an emotion the belief causes or some promised reward. Instead take a step back and look for objective evidence on either side. Decide, not what you most want to believe, but what the evidence suggests is most likely to be true.
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Thank you for bringing this all here.
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Clairwill? Is that you? :D
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