The Idea of a God (reprise)

Please note if you reply to this post or open a conversation elsewhere, I’m addressing this in a rational and calm tone of mind. There’s no need to bring shaming, insults, name calling, or personal/moral accusations into it.

This is the second time I’ve posted about my views on religion and faith. The other may be referenced a couple times in this musing and can be found here.

Over the past several months, I’ve been watching videos ranging from intellectual TV shows (that is, not sensationalist talk shows) including well researched comedians, the Atheist Experience and Talk Heathen, recordings of debates, conversations, and conferences, and more. I realize I share a lot of the same views as atheists and may even be one, so I’m now counting myself as agnostic since I’m still unsure about atheism. For a brief background, I grew up in the Lutheran ELCA church (one of the most liberal denominations), became deist, went back to Lutheran in college, and returned to deism from after college until the past few months. My rationality for deism was that certain remarkable things have happened in my life that were way too specific to be coincidental–certainly now I’m questioning exactly how coincidental they could be, and that’s why I’ve turned agnostic.

I would like to start by clearing up some definitions, distinctions, and common arguments for deities’ (in however you define it/them) existence that just don’t hold up.

 

1a) Atheism is defined as lack of belief in a god(s). This may mean the simple rejection of the evidence of deities provided them thus far, or the assertion that there is no god. If you need clarification on why these two points are different, feel free to start a discussion with me.

1b) Atheism is simply an answer to a very specific question. It doesn’t imply its observers have a particular view on politics, current issues, orientation or identity, or a ton of other qualities non-atheists try to assign them. Just like there are various sects of one religion, and individuals within those sects with differing views, that same breakdown applies to atheism.

2)Atheists are often criticized for the impossibly high level of qualifications for what they’ll accept as evidence. I don’t think it’s impossibly high, otherwise no one would trust scientists. Theists can argue that we “believe” in science, but to us, it’s a trust since we define belief as a feeling that something is dependable/true based on no evidence. Absolute proof of a deity’s existence would level cultures across the entire globe, so you bet we should be seeking evidence that qualifies under a high level of scrutiny.

3a) Arguments from popularity don’t justify the existence of a deity. “Well, x percent of the world believes in some sort of divinity. How could they ALL be wrong?” The vast majority of Europe thought the world was flat or the center of the universe until our human intelligence proved otherwise. I started as Lutheran simply because that’s what was available in our area and what my mother believed. Were I brought up in a secular household, that’s what I would have followed, so the “popularity” of religions is by and large a result of those who raise us. The simple blind trust of following someone else’s opinion created this illusion of religion’s popularity, further solidifying that religion’s numbers can’t be counted as proof.

3b) Trusting science isn’t a justification by popularity. Billions of people are trusting evidence, and can reproduce the exact same results (with a miniscule degree of error in some cases) using that evidence and the processes no matter where you are in the world, whereas you take one translation of one holy book and get dozens, sometimes hundreds of different denominations–ie what translates to a LARGE margin of error. Is science correct 100% of the time? No, and when it isn’t, we look for errors or scrap the idea and try another route. Science is the best model of collective, tested theories that help explain the reality we share.

4a) Saying one religion is true because it has an ancient holy book (and others are false because they don’t) also isn’t evidence. Native American legends and lore have close parallels to many religions, but because they started as an oral tradition instead of written, their mythological figures are false? That doesn’t follow. What about pictographical stories of the Egyptians, Romans, or aboriginal Australians? Consider that Islam and Christianity more than likely started as an oral tradition themselves until they were compiled into books.

4b) Holy books in and of themselves are a combination of metaphor and allegedly truth. How are we to know the difference from sentence to sentence?

5) Correlations between “facts” presented in holy books and the reality we know do not prove the truth of the entire work, otherwise our historical fiction books will create thousands of different religions 2000 years from now. Just because the fetus is vaguely described as similar to how we now know it looks like thousands of years afterward, or an area of the planet described in text matches what exists on Earth is no proof of any other statement in those books, including the existence of a deity.

6) Loads of both good and evil acts have been committed by both theists and atheists. There’s no reason to favor religion because of all of its progress or charity when you can get the same without religion as an atheist. On top of that, atheism doesn’t create an “us vs them” mentality.

7) I treat faith-based world views in much the same way I do religions. I haven’t found good reason to believe in a god that anyone has offered up, and while they don’t make claims about gods, claims about energy and metaphysical interactions that aren’t demonstrable are subject to the same scrutiny in my conception. I see them as ways of understanding the world or humans that at some point in our history merged with mysticism in order to make followers feel part of an exclusive group or feel special because of a heightened awareness.

8) One can be a skeptic without being a cynic. I’m not claiming to know why certain institutions were created, though I will admit that selfish benefits is a possible cause. We see this evidenced in the fraud faith healers who grossly use religion as a cover to take in millions of dollars.

9) Giving “I don’t know” as your answer to something as big as the god question or anything closely related is a legit answer. It’s not a cop out. We should be willing to admit when we don’t have a conclusive answer, and not so readily chalk it up to magic.

 

The coincidences that are too good to be simple coincidence are mostly personal experience. My name in Hebrew means bound or to bind. Turns out I am heavily tied to Illinois, my Mariner Girl Scout Ship, reenacting groups, family, and community. It was for the good of the ship that I told myself I couldn’t come out as lesbian because it would wreck my relationship with the girls, oust me from a leadership role, and possibly lead to the shrinkage of one of the best things I’ve ever had in my life. It’s not hard to see the correlation between my name meaning and the results of my life. To that fact, it was the ship that prompted me to come out of the closet to them, because of a game I introduced (see this entry for the full story)–so the main reason I was holding myself back was the exact reason I let that fear go. The day after I proposed to my wife, the Marriage Equality Act passed. When I decided for the first time ever to quit a job and started looking for new ones this past February, my current company had just put up the notice for my current position. Every time I’ve lost or got hired for a job, it has been around winter solstice or my birthday, without fail. None more are coming to mind at the moment, but don’t doubt there are more.

I’m not sure of whether there’s a higher power because these observances are too perfect for me to take as coincidental. As a deist, I formed my idea of a deity off the core concepts of world religions, and my deity was defined as an entity that exists outside of our mortal conceptions and senses that can put certain things into motion. This commonly translated in my mind to Fate, something that caused accidents and coincidence. It siphoned off part of itself (a soul) when living beings or inanimate objects were created. I guess others would call Fate a force rather than a deity, and they wouldn’t be wrong; I believed it didn’t possess any form of consciousness that would change because of a human plea, whether through sincere or desperate prayer, sacrifice, invocation, etc. I reasoned that religions were touching this idea while at the same time putting motifs and lessons into their holy texts or stories in order to influence their cultures to certain ends (donating to churches, rationalizing forced conversion, controlling how people treated marriage or neighbors, etc.). Then when you die, that piece of Fate inside of you either rejoins this larger pool and experiences pure bliss because it’s no longer existing at a distance in a mortal form, or it rejects the idea that it’s part of something bigger and experiences inconceivable torture–translations of heaven and hell. From there, it seems logical to think Fate could imbue a mortal being with another piece of itself (to make a soul) whenever a new human was created. This lends some explanation to the concept of reincarnation, why people believe in past lives and why there are drove of anecdotes that span multiple countries and faith systems. If this concept were real, the idea of “restless spirits” would follow in that departed souls didn’t accept they were part of Fate, didn’t rejoin, and were trapped in the physical realm.

With that said, this whole concept doesn’t hold up to evidence. Everything is personal. There’s no way to test Fate. I am very fortunate to have the privileges in my life, and hearing about others’ suffering humbles me. This doesn’t mean I have to be thankful to a deity, and it doesn’t prove that “someone’s watching over me”–for if they are, I’d immediately ask why they’re not looking out for children with cancer, or those caught up in gang violence, or the helpless victims of countless genocides. I certainly believe I’m part of something bigger. I’m well aware I have no concrete evidence of this, and I’m beginning to see that feeling is acknowledgement that we’re a social species and need to work together to survive, or the idea that our planet is one huge dying organism, upon which humans have had a devastating impact and for which we should hold ourselves accountable.

Logic, I’ve learned, is an interesting beast. In order to prove that specific event x is caused by specific agent y, you must prove an agent y can cause an event x. For example, I assert that a wireless keyboard can type text on my laptop screen. This is fairly simple, because we know and have observed what all the objects and concepts are, and can prove them over time and again. I can put a wireless fob into a laptop, wait for it to load automatically or load drivers manually, then use the associated keyboard to transfer the letter keys I press into letters in a word processing program. I can test this theory over and over by plugging the keyboard into different devices and see where it works, or troubleshoot if not (for instance, the keyboard won’t work in a laptop that’s powered down). I’ve proved that it happens at least once, so I can say that if I see text typed on a screen, it’s possible that actions from a keyboard put it there. Now, saying a god created this universe is a much more involved process, because “god” and “create” have dozens if not hundreds of definitions. Beyond proving that a god even exists, we then must prove a god can create a universe, before we can say it’s even a possibility that a particular god created this one. Now granted, this explanation is based off my own words coming from observing how points are argued in these different videos, so I could be off in my logic. Feel free to play devil’s advocate (pun intended) if there are flaws.

A common question that comes up in these videos is that if one is willing to accept certain positions without evidence, what would stop me accepting other ideas that have no evidence and end up being false? My answer to that is in two parts. One is that this concept of Fate being responsible for all the freak accidents and beautiful coincidences doesn’t affect me all that much. It doesn’t take time away by requiring worship, or making me think I’m not fulfilling its wishes. It doesn’t cause me to think of other mortals as lesser (in fact, it helps me treat all species as necessary for living on this planet since we are all connected by Fate). If I’m wrong and there is no such thing as Fate, I won’t be devastated, nor will I not know how to live; I also wouldn’t stop treating other people and species like trash just because they’re not part of me–because I realize what pain feels like and don’t wish that upon anyone or creature.

Secondly is that even if I believe one thing without evidence, that doesn’t follow that I’ll believe anything else without evidence. Think of applying the scientific method to the whole of my knowledge and conceptualization of reality. I can assert that all but one of my conceptualizations/pieces of knowledge has evidence. I prove this by offering up the one faith-based belief that I have, and demonstrate all other concepts have evidence. Just like a scientific theory, it’s not 100% correct all the time, but for right now until proven otherwise, it’s the best model for reality that I have.

Trying to summarize this into a cohesive conclusion brings to mind an equivalent experience with a Dungeons and Dragons game I ran for my college buddies (NEVER say D&D doesn’t teach real lessons). The guy playing our cleric wanted to fill the role of a damage dealer, inspired the fire and brimstone preacher archetype, and bringing that fire literally to play with a cleric’s fire-based spells. Problem is, as another friend pointed out, clerics don’t have a lot of high damage fire spells. Wizards and sorcerers had a lot more in that area, and friend 2 correctly assessed that friend 1 was mixing roleplay with class functionality (class = wizard, sorcerer, cleric, bard, etc.). Friend 1 should have just played a fire-based sorcerer and inserted a heavy amount of word choice, personality, interest, and other role play areas revolving around the bible thumpers, which would’ve made a much more effective damage dealer while still achieving his presentation goals.

All this writing has helped me sort out that I’m in the same boat as friend 1. I considered myself agnostic, because I have this idea of Fate that is hypothetically possible, but has never been proven, and thus isn’t actually possible. And now, I see that I’m in fact an atheist, with a hypothetical Fate idea that ties all these religions/mythologies together. For the common sense of logic, I have no evidence to prove or test Fate, so I shouldn’t follow it as my world view.

Until next time readers–live with courage and compassion.