Why I'm an atheist

[sarahmichigan]

This is going to be kind of anti-climactic since I've been thinking on it for a while and leading up to it, and yet it's going to be short. But here goes.

I'm an atheist because I think the burden of proof is on those who believe in ANY kind of supernatural phenomena. As far as I can tell, material, natural explanations explain the world and how it works and how it came into being just fine.

To me, positing a Higher Being (especially the more specific you get about what this being is like) to explain things is like saying that tiny black fairies contort their bodies to show the time on my digital watch rather than relying on naturalistic, material explantions about electricity and such.

Now, I understand why some people have an intuition that there just MUST be something bigger than us that created the world. That's fine, and I can understand that. (I have trouble figuring out, sometimes, how people go from "some higher being" to "my specific sect or doctrine," but that's another subject.) However, I don't have that intuition.

I remember when I was taking philosophy courses at Western Michigan University, and sometimes the professor would ask, "What's your intuition about that statment or assertion?" This was in the context of many philosophical arguments, not just ones about the existence or non-existence of God. I remember thinking, "Intuition?! This is supposed to be a philosophy course, and not a New Age class about how to fine-tune your ESP."

But really, when it comes to belief in a higher being of some sort, I think a lot of us are going off our gut feeling. My gut says that only the material world exists, and there isn't anything "super" above the natural world. Any weirdness that can't be explained by science can usually be explained by psychology.

Comments

[tacit.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is that I can't justify considering other people at all, much less at a similar level to myself.

Really? It seems pretty straightforward to me.

You live in a society--a large, complex society supported by the combined efforts of hundreds of millions of individual people. Because you live in this society, you enjoy tremendous benefits you could not hope to enjuy any other way.

Longer lifespan, for one. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely lived past their early twenties. Without the benefit of the society you live in, you'd probably be dead right now.

Higher quality of living, for another. Even a homeless man living on the New York streets enjoys a higher standard of living than 90% of the human beings throughout 90% of our history. You have access to a plentiful supply of high-quality food, and that access is ensured because tens of thousands of people combine their efforts in production, packaging, shipping, logistical planning, tracking, distribution, refrigeration, and maintenance of the infrastructure (the roadways, the power grid, the computer networks, the trucking companies) that make it all possible.

Cooperation is a moral imperative not because God says it is, but because every member of a society benefits when it works. The evolution of cooperative systems is something that is becoming well-understood, and purely cooperative strategies tend to work better in the long run than strategies that favor short-term gain over the cooperation of all the members of a society. (Google "tit for tat competition game theory" for a rather extensive reading list of why cooperative strategies work better than strategies that favor an individual's gain at the expense of a larger society, even from the perspective of that individual.)

Here's a concrete example of a moral principle supported by utilitarianism even though it may seem that it is not: Racism is wrong.

One can argue tat a society that enshrines the idea that one race is superior to another can function quite well, and that in any event those who bear the brunt of the ill effects of racism are those of the disfavored race. In fact, institutionalized racism carries benefits for the favored race, right? After all, slave societies have access to abundant, cheap labor, which offers practical and economic advantages over societies that do not practice slavery, right?

Not necessarily. Institutionalized racism hurts everyone in a society, even the members of the favored race, though that injury is often not obvious at first glance.

The man who pioneered open heart surgery was black. He developed the techniques of open-eart surgery in the United States in the early 1930s, during a time when the notion of a black man having a higher education was somewhat shocking. Now, had he not been allowed into medical school, had he not been allowed to become a surgeon, the same techniques would have been developed sooner or later by someone else--but how much time would have passed? How many lives were saved by his actions, because he developed these techniques when he did? The lesson is that in any society that marginalizes some of its people based solely on the fact that they are members of some particular group, that society loses the benefit of whatever those people might have contributed to that society. Because you can not predict in advance which members of a society might contribute some new innovation that benefits that entire society as a whole, you can not discriminate against some members of society and expect no impact on that society as a whole.

No god needed. :)

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

Those are all reasons it's in my best interest for society to be ethical. The problem is, what reason do I have to be ethical myself, as long as I can appear to be so?

[tacit.livejournal.com]

Simple: when society benefits, you benefit. Your life is better when you are ethical.

It may seem in the short term that you can gain by a pattern of self-interested, unethical behavior when the society at large acts ethically; and sometimes, over the short term, this is true. But the surprising results from the competition I mentioned above is that a pattern of not cooperating with the society in order to achieve short-term gain is not sustainable over the long term; individual entities actually do better on a personal level when their actions are ethical.

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

There's no external reason to actually follow the ethical rules, as long as you create the appearance of doing so.

The internal reason is, when you fail to follow the rules, you have to continue the facade. Is it easier to perpetuate a facade, or is it easier to just follow the ethical policies in the first place? (Some people do choose the former, and maintain the facade for a long time, if not forever -- for every preacher caught with his pants down [literally], there's probably a dozen who don't get caught.)