A recent University of Minnesota study suggests that atheists are America's newest hated minority.
As a devout agnostic (if that's possible), I view atheists as being similar to theist religious practitioners, just without the mythology. After all, atheism is a belief: There is no God. Now, while there is no compelling evidence to support the existence of God (and the so-called "design argument" is not evidence), there is also no basis for a logical proof of God's nonexistence. In the absence of evidence on either side, I reserve judgment.
There is something special, it seems, about consciousness and life, but absolutely nothing about those qualities provides any insight into their creation. And whatever sense of wonder exists about the universe, nothing supports the choice of one world religion over another.
Consider the Big Three: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea is that God decided to communicate with the inhabitants of this tiny piece of rock in a pretty nondescript part of the universe. He communicated through prophets, and his word was established over a period of several thousand years. Practitioners of the Big Three will agree that each religion is talking about the same God, but the details about what he said differ from religion to religion. In the case of Judaism and Christianity, there is the pivotal disagreement over whether Jesus was the messiah. Christians say yes; Jews say no. Muslims agree that Jesus was a prophet, but they do not accept him as the messiah. Neither Christians nor Jews pay attention to any of the work of Muhammad, and absolutely no one pays any attention to Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Mormons. But this omniscient God, in all his wisdom, must have known that confusion, war, and death would ensue from such mixed signals. Still, he sent the message or messages anyway and let the fun begin. Is this benevolence? Or is it just a scam?
Let A, B, and C be statements that are mutually exclusive and restricted to either a value of "true" or "false." The statements are constructed such that if any one of them is true, the other two must be false. This is how modern religion is set up. For each member of the Big Three, there is at least one statement of belief that differentiates that religion from the other two. If we examine the rules we set up for such exclusive statements we see that there is no restriction on all of the statements being false. As there are logically only four possibilities among three religions, with each of those religions believing that the other religions' key statements are false, there should be at least a 25% chance of all of those religions being wrong and no one having the right answer. Personally, I think the odds are much greater than that.
So, while I think established religion is all wet, I have nothing that says there's nothing out there. Still, I suspect that these surveyed Americans would anathematize me just as much as they would the atheists. After all, I choose not to participate in their mythology and superstition, and I prefer questioning and healthy doubt over blind, uninformed belief.
There is some disagreement over what constitutes an atheist and what does not. Let's get into the particulars.
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:
a·the·ism
n.
1. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
2. The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
Let's first address the use of the word disbelief. In this case, a disbelief in the existence of God is logically equivalent to a belief in the nonexistence of God (since existence is a binary quality; a thing exists or it does not, Schrödinger's cat notwithstanding). That is why I call atheism a system of belief. It is a firm position on the existence of God. Every other word in the above definition is much firmer: doctrine, denial. Atheism is not a religion, of course, but it is a type of faith, namely a belief in the absence of proof. (And one would infer from the University of Minnesota study that Americans were reacting to the atheists defined under part 2 of that definition.)
Imagine the flipping of a fair coin. If you state that you do not believe that the coin came up heads, you are stating that you believe it came up tails. There is no other option. However, if you argue that you cannot know either way (let's say you're blind and aren't allowed to touch the coin), you have demonstrated agnosticism.
While tons of "proofs" exist for and against the existence of God, each of them has a logical fault that can be analyzed. Some remain compelling, but none is particularly rigorous or cogent.
As for agnosticism, our definition follows:
ag·nos·ti·cism
n.
1. The doctrine that certainty about first principles or absolute truth is unattainable and that only perceptual phenomena are objects of exact knowledge.
2. The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist.
To me, agnosticism is the more reasonable approach to religion, since first principles cannot be known. All laws of physics break down at the point we think the universe began. But what happened before that? And why did it happen? It could be the result of chance or an infinite dance of creation and destruction that has no creator. We simply don't know and can't know.
The simple matter of the scale of the universe causes me to reject the anthropomorphic God idea. If the choice were only between the God described to us in religious scripture and nothing at all, I'd have to choose nothing, which would make me an atheist. However, I do not believe that those are the only choices. The concept of God is, I believe, broad enough for us to call almost anything God, even if it is some ideal concept of consciousness of which we are imperfect derivatives.
I think agnosticism is the scientific choice when it comes to religion. A goal of science is also to recognize the limits of knowledge. In mathematics, for instance, the only science in which proof is even possible, Kurt Gödel proved that true propositions can exist that cannot be proved within the logical framework of the system. In other words, all the unsolved problems and unproven conjectures in mathematics have a sense of mystery about them, since it is no longer guaranteed that a proof is possible. But those propositions can be very true nonetheless.
I think the first problem when considering God is that he or it remains undefined, despite what you might hear from the clergy. When it comes to the specific religious interpretation of God we choose, we run into some real trouble. As most people's faiths are determined by the faiths of their parents, it seems arbitrary and too geographically predetermined to be a worthwhile choice to make.
There are things we can't explain, and in those cases I believe the best thing to do is conclude that we can't explain them yet and work harder to explain them in the future. Some things, though, in Gödel's parlance, will remain "formally undecidable."
As a devout agnostic (if that's possible), I view atheists as being similar to theist religious practitioners, just without the mythology. After all, atheism is a belief: There is no God. Now, while there is no compelling evidence to support the existence of God (and the so-called "design argument" is not evidence), there is also no basis for a logical proof of God's nonexistence. In the absence of evidence on either side, I reserve judgment.
There is something special, it seems, about consciousness and life, but absolutely nothing about those qualities provides any insight into their creation. And whatever sense of wonder exists about the universe, nothing supports the choice of one world religion over another.
Consider the Big Three: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea is that God decided to communicate with the inhabitants of this tiny piece of rock in a pretty nondescript part of the universe. He communicated through prophets, and his word was established over a period of several thousand years. Practitioners of the Big Three will agree that each religion is talking about the same God, but the details about what he said differ from religion to religion. In the case of Judaism and Christianity, there is the pivotal disagreement over whether Jesus was the messiah. Christians say yes; Jews say no. Muslims agree that Jesus was a prophet, but they do not accept him as the messiah. Neither Christians nor Jews pay attention to any of the work of Muhammad, and absolutely no one pays any attention to Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Mormons. But this omniscient God, in all his wisdom, must have known that confusion, war, and death would ensue from such mixed signals. Still, he sent the message or messages anyway and let the fun begin. Is this benevolence? Or is it just a scam?
Let A, B, and C be statements that are mutually exclusive and restricted to either a value of "true" or "false." The statements are constructed such that if any one of them is true, the other two must be false. This is how modern religion is set up. For each member of the Big Three, there is at least one statement of belief that differentiates that religion from the other two. If we examine the rules we set up for such exclusive statements we see that there is no restriction on all of the statements being false. As there are logically only four possibilities among three religions, with each of those religions believing that the other religions' key statements are false, there should be at least a 25% chance of all of those religions being wrong and no one having the right answer. Personally, I think the odds are much greater than that.
So, while I think established religion is all wet, I have nothing that says there's nothing out there. Still, I suspect that these surveyed Americans would anathematize me just as much as they would the atheists. After all, I choose not to participate in their mythology and superstition, and I prefer questioning and healthy doubt over blind, uninformed belief.
There is some disagreement over what constitutes an atheist and what does not. Let's get into the particulars.
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:
a·the·ism
n.
1. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
2. The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
Let's first address the use of the word disbelief. In this case, a disbelief in the existence of God is logically equivalent to a belief in the nonexistence of God (since existence is a binary quality; a thing exists or it does not, Schrödinger's cat notwithstanding). That is why I call atheism a system of belief. It is a firm position on the existence of God. Every other word in the above definition is much firmer: doctrine, denial. Atheism is not a religion, of course, but it is a type of faith, namely a belief in the absence of proof. (And one would infer from the University of Minnesota study that Americans were reacting to the atheists defined under part 2 of that definition.)
Imagine the flipping of a fair coin. If you state that you do not believe that the coin came up heads, you are stating that you believe it came up tails. There is no other option. However, if you argue that you cannot know either way (let's say you're blind and aren't allowed to touch the coin), you have demonstrated agnosticism.
While tons of "proofs" exist for and against the existence of God, each of them has a logical fault that can be analyzed. Some remain compelling, but none is particularly rigorous or cogent.
As for agnosticism, our definition follows:
ag·nos·ti·cism
n.
1. The doctrine that certainty about first principles or absolute truth is unattainable and that only perceptual phenomena are objects of exact knowledge.
2. The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist.
To me, agnosticism is the more reasonable approach to religion, since first principles cannot be known. All laws of physics break down at the point we think the universe began. But what happened before that? And why did it happen? It could be the result of chance or an infinite dance of creation and destruction that has no creator. We simply don't know and can't know.
The simple matter of the scale of the universe causes me to reject the anthropomorphic God idea. If the choice were only between the God described to us in religious scripture and nothing at all, I'd have to choose nothing, which would make me an atheist. However, I do not believe that those are the only choices. The concept of God is, I believe, broad enough for us to call almost anything God, even if it is some ideal concept of consciousness of which we are imperfect derivatives.
I think agnosticism is the scientific choice when it comes to religion. A goal of science is also to recognize the limits of knowledge. In mathematics, for instance, the only science in which proof is even possible, Kurt Gödel proved that true propositions can exist that cannot be proved within the logical framework of the system. In other words, all the unsolved problems and unproven conjectures in mathematics have a sense of mystery about them, since it is no longer guaranteed that a proof is possible. But those propositions can be very true nonetheless.
I think the first problem when considering God is that he or it remains undefined, despite what you might hear from the clergy. When it comes to the specific religious interpretation of God we choose, we run into some real trouble. As most people's faiths are determined by the faiths of their parents, it seems arbitrary and too geographically predetermined to be a worthwhile choice to make.
There are things we can't explain, and in those cases I believe the best thing to do is conclude that we can't explain them yet and work harder to explain them in the future. Some things, though, in Gödel's parlance, will remain "formally undecidable."
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