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

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

To me, an idea is "valid" or not based on one and only one criterion: how closely it reflects the actual state of the world.

I think this represents an important point of philosophical divergence between atheists and agnostics (and this is an oversimplification): An atheist is seeking to determine all aspects about the universe, even the parts that do not affect his existence, while an agnostic is primarily seeking to determine the aspects that affect him (directly or indirectly). For me, a lot of the stuff about the Big Bang is, "That's neat, but so?" -- unless it can be tied to how I live, how I interact with others, how others interact with me, etc., it's just interesting tidbits (and yes, I know there are ways that the Big Bang affects such things, but much of it doesn't).

I feel that what people believe, spiritually, is only relevant to me if it affects how they interact with me, and especially in a negative way. There are others (theists and atheists alike) who seem to think that merely believing something incorrect is dangerous in and of itself, and I disagree with that. If someone wants to believe that Jesus rose from the grave, and as a result of that belief the person treats me with compassion and respect, groovy... if as a result of that belief the person mocks me and snubs me for not believing it as well, not groovy.

[tacit.livejournal.com]

One could look at the history of the world and construct a pretty compelling argument that believing things on faith is, on the balance, more harmful than it is constructive--because we are human beings, and the things that human beings believe are not easily detached from the things that human beings believe are good for their neighbors. As soon as you create a space in your brain and say "This space is reserved fr ideas that I accept without evidence," then you make yourself vulnerable to anyone who can manipulate any idea he chooses into that space. By creating a precedent for believing things without proof, you set yourself up to be controlled by people who can persuade you to believe the things they want you to believe without proof, such as "it does not matter how much you must torture so-and-so to get him to confess his sins, because the earthly torture he undergoes is nothing compared to the eternal hellfire he will experience if he does not," or "gays are inherently inferior to straights and God commands that they be stoned."

Without faith, good people do good things and evil people do evil things. Getting a good person to do evil things requires faith.

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

By creating a precedent for believing things without proof, you set yourself up to be controlled by people who can persuade you to believe the things they want you to believe without proof

I disagree for several reasons.

First, there's proof for very few things; there's evidence for a great many things. That's one of them Scientist Caveats I was talking about elsewhere. ;)

But I don't think anyone really accepts things without evidence. What differs from person to person is what qualifies as acceptable evidence. For some, "evidence" includes "it's in the Bible" or "it sounds right to me" or "I had a dream about it" -- all of these are faith, but don't necessarily set those people up for every charlatan that comes down the pike.

Sure, some really terrible, gory, horrendous things have been done in the history of humanity in the name of God. Some really terrible things have been done with guns, definitely more bad things than good things... is the problem the gun? I don't think so.

Without faith, good people do good things and evil people do evil things.

This relies on the assumption that there are inherently good people and inherently evil people. I reject this assumption without evidence, and set the burden of proof for its truth on you.