There I've said it. I'm just too damned dumb to accept atheism. And, the way I see it, so are you even if you won't admit it... yet. It's the whole faith thing that stops me in my tracks. What is faith but a willingness to accept as true something that you cannot prove and otherwise wouldn't believe? It's a suspension of the common sense skepticism that we invoke every day to see us safely through a limitless variety of situations great and small. I know that's a crude definition but it works for my purposes.
To me, atheism is itself a quasi-faith. The belief that there is no greater moral power than man himself is a bit over-reaching. It is a conclusion that is founded on man's own intellect which is probably quite feeble and flawed. It's a conclusion that cannot be reached until we know everything that is inside us and outside us. Do we have any real idea of what a God would look like, how we can discern the presence or absence of a God?
Just look at how precious little we actually know. Quantum physics suggests there are no fewer than eleven dimensions. Mankind's entire experience is based on just four dimensions, one of which we don't even understand. We have the left/right dimension, the up/down dimension, the forward/backward dimension and we have something that may or may not actually even exist, time.
Time may not exist? Absolutely. Years ago I heard this perfectly explained by a senior US Navy officer who commanded the atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory. Every day he went to work with an awareness that we don't understand time, we can't even prove it exists.
All of our faiths, atheism included, are formed out of this four-dimensional awareness. Any other dimension could instantly shatter the wobbly foundations of our strains of faith. And who is to say that our dimensional realities - four, seven, nine or eleven - would be constant throughout our universe or anything that lies beyond?
It is no wonder we cling to so many "revealed" religions, each founded on one or several supposed human-deity interfaces from the ancient past. All it takes is for some guy to convince his people that he just had a quiet word with their Maker who told the guy to pass along thus and so. It either gets traction or it doesn't. If it gets traction, there you go - scripture. And then you can hand that down, century by century, unless your religion gets overtaken by another faith or your faithful get trashed by conquerors who set up their Gods instead. But the longer you keep it going the more certain adherents are to believe it's true.
Revealed religions are, in my opinion, hooey. That's why there are so many of them each convinced that all others are hooey. See, no matter what revealed religion you embrace, you already agree with me about each and every other revealed religion. That speaks volumes.
But this is about atheism which, for many, seems to be the default option when revealed religion is rejected. Why? Because you say so. Really? Because you with your pointy little head, you who understands so little, you who has never looked high and low or far and wide, you can't see God so he can't exist. And we're supposed to put aside our skepticism because of that?
So where does that leave me? I think I'm going to go with Einstein and accept that, somewhere on a scale between possibly and probably, there exists a superior being that we can perceive as Godlike. I'm going to accept this is evident in the vast mysteriousness of the universe and in human consciousness, compassion and reason. I guess that is a loose sort of Deism. Maybe that's just where you wind up when you're too dumb to be an atheist.
15 comments:
This was the topic that ended up with me leaving the discussion board EnMasse.
http://enmasse.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7413&start=591
Some people there wanted to insist that atheists who attacked religion were no better than the fundamentalist zealots they claimed to despise.
I argued to the contrary that champions of rational and scientific understanding were responding to the very real dangers of irrational, incoherent human speculation that was dressed-up as revealed truth.
(Ironically, the word verification for this comment is "rable" which is close to the name of the discussion board "rabble.ca/babble" that I left in the great schism when EnMasse was formed.)
I left EnMasse because my anti-atheist interlocutors were incapable of reading me correctly and insisted on ascribing all sorts of nasty attributes to me, as if all our years of comradeship were disposable in their pathetic desire to be proven right.
My atheism is based on the unknowable nature of the vastness of existence that you yourself refer to here. A vastness that is conveyed to us via human-directed scientific-rational thought.
Science will not provide us with the answers. But our revealed religions, these human speculations have already failed so spectacularly.
You can know nothing about whatever god-like figure you postulate might exist. What sort of religion is that then? What sort of higher power is this? What does it explain for you? Absolutely nothing.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an atheist who KNOWS there is nothing beyond what human science will show us. But they'll ask you why you're inventing something to believe in that really explains nothing.
I'm just curious how it makes more sense to say "you can't see God so he must exist." rather than "you can't see God so he can't exist."
Only one of those seems like a rational place to start to me.
Thwap, first of all, what does atheism mean to you? If, like me, you accept man is incapable, either through intellectual impairment or lack of knowledge and discovery, of really grasping notions such as god why should a belief in the possibility of a god be any less valid than a belief in the non-existence of any god? Why should we not continue looking, inward and outward, for signs that point to the existence of some greater entity, even a creator of some sort?
You assert that "science will not provide us with the answers." How can you possibly defend that? What do you know of what science will or will not do, what it may achieve, what capabilities it may develop in the future?
Finally, what makes you think that my perception of a possible God constitutes a religion at all? I think that too is a reach you haven't established.
@nrepin, why should you frame this as limited just to the two possibilities you posit? What I find interesting is that, like adherents of revealed religion, you argue premised on an assumed ability that we are intellectually capable of these questions. My premise is that we're not.
I don't think you fairly represent Einstein:
On 22 March 1954 Einstein received a letter from J. Dispentiere, an Italian immigrant who had worked as an experimental machinist in New Jersey. Dispentiere had declared himself an atheist and was despaired by a news report which had cast Einstein as conventionally religious. Einstein replied on 24 March 1954:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it
MoS,
I just don't see any reason to think about this unknowable God.
If there is an unknowable God, what does it matter? We don't know anything about it. We can't even speculate. It's pointless.
Science can't explain everything. I can't see how this is controversial. Science is based on our sense perception and we only perceive a limited amount of information.
The farther we get (say in understanding the very big like universes and in the very small sub-atomic stuff) only points to still vaster greatness and unapproachable smallness.
But we blunder along and unknowable gods are irrelevant to our progress.
I understand, Thwap, that you see no reason to think about a God but I don't recall suggesting you should.
I never suggested that gods are unknowable. They are now but, to me, that's as much a reflection of humanity's limitations as anything else. What gives you the right to declare what science may discover in the future or that concepts such as god are irrelevant to our progress?
Why the stridency in your beliefs? What need does that meet? Think whatever you like and more power to you. Pax vobiscum.
@ Anonymous:
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."
I'm not going to use the word "God" God implies a higher power that meddles in human affairs. That I just cannot accept, there is no logic or evidence to that.
Yes science has a theory that there may be multiple dimensions, but at the moment that is all mathematical modeling and conjecture. A recent article in Scientific American postulated that these extra dimensions will likely prove untestable, and will remain enitirely theoretical. There is nothing known that can traverse the dimensional boundaries.
Does any of this preclude that another dimension gave shape and form to our own universe? That we are a 4 dimensional bubble that popped into existence within a higher dimensional framework No. But I wouldn't call that "God". God implies consciousness, a way of thinking and acting that understands us (even if religions claim we cannot understand God).
Our current understanding of our universe implies so far that any other form of "power" will be unconscious, that it is just physics, math, laws of existence.
Granted this does not mean we know everything, but I am very comfortable accepting that there is no God that interferes with or is aware of human affairs. If science eventually finds a higher power that can form universes, that would be neat, but I would bet that higher power will care not a whit whether we worship it or not. Which means it is irrelevant as a God and a source of religion.
Your superior spirit is your brain. So MOS, do you hope there is an eternal life for you with streets paved with gold and you shall go on for ever and ever? I don't. People who call themselves Christians believe a person must be one inorder to live an ethical, moral life. Knowing this first hand not to be true and asking the question, does one have to attend a religious faith in order to be so, always produces a look of having been challenged and then comes the look of willful blindness. There isn't anything limited about the human mind. When we are born we have the ability of learning any human language spoken on earth. There is nothing arrogant about the brain being our superior reasoning power.
Anyong - can my brain be my superior? I'm not sure I agree that our human brain isn't limited. It may be the dominant brain of any we know so far but that's about it. And, no, I have never and will never suggest a nexus between revealed religion and ethics or morality. Our history is proof of that disconnect.
You see, this is what I was talking about. How is it "strident" to ask you why you want to believe in the possibility of an unknowable God? Why is it zealotry for me to ask you what you get out of this? What does it explain for you?
Now, David Hume did something similar, but not quite what I think you're doing. Hume did not declare himself an atheist because he didn't know. But he didn't call himself a Deist either. For intents and purposes he was an atheist undeclared.
I'll repeat what I said in my first post and perhaps you can clue me in as to what is strident about it:
"I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an atheist who KNOWS there is nothing beyond what human science will show us. But they'll ask you why you're inventing something to believe in that really explains nothing."
And as for your not making a religion out of this unknowable God, I can see that. Up until the point that you gain some knowledge of this God. What then? Are you going to invite it over for drinks? If it turns out to vote "conservative" are you going to call it a fuck-head and have nothing to do with it? Or will you simply nod politely when you pass it walking down the sidewalk?
I think your assertion is wrong. I don't think it's possible to be too dumb to be an atheist. Atheism is a belief system. Your beliefs may be wrong, but I am not too dumb to have incorrect beliefs.
This video is pretty good in my opinion on the discussion of theism and gnosticism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIKeC9k2-Jg
There's having an open mind and then there's having a mind so open one's brains fall out. It's not that we can't see God so he can't exist, it's that there's nothing to suggest that God exists, so it's pretty unlikely that he does. It's even sillier to get so butthurt about that idea that you define "God" into a meaningless concept in an attempt to... prove what point, exactly?
Do yourself a favour and stick to the political stuff.
"The belief that there is no greater moral power than man himself is a bit over-reaching."
Morals come from a combination of genetics and culture traditions. There is no need to ascribe it to some greater power. If we met intelligent aliens they would likely have very different morals.
"Science is based on our sense perception and we only perceive a limited amount of information."
These days science is based on sensors created by our technology. They are much more powerful then our human senses and are continuously improving.
To me, atheism is really just the logic conclusion of science. You believe in finite number of things supported by evidence and reject the infinite number of thing unsupported by evidence, of which God is only one. Science is the process of understanding the universe, not the conclusion. By applying it we gradually improve our understand over time. We don't even know how far we are from a complete understand, or even if there if enough evidence available to gain a complete understanding. I think it is possible that we will completely understand the fundamental rules that govern the universe.
doconnor,
"Science is based on our sense perception and we only perceive a limited amount of information."
These days science is based on sensors created by our technology. They are much more powerful then our human senses and are continuously improving.
I could be wrong but I believe that technology only gives us extensions of our already existing senses (sight, sound, texture, etc.,) but that there are obviously things happening that we can't even imagine because we don't have the sensors for them.
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