Why I am an Atheist

On freethoughblogs' Pharyngula, it's author, the embryologist PZ Myers, asked for submissions for pieces under the title 'Why I am an Atheist'. I've been reading for them for awhile now, and it only just occurred to me that I should probably contribute, rather than just consuming everyone else's contributions. I'm submitting the piece to the blog, but I thought I'd post it here too. Here it is.

*****

My mother told me that at a fairly young age,perhaps 4 or 5, I asked whether God was real, and I was told that no one knew, I had to decide for myself, that there was no need to rush a decision, and I shouldn't worry about it. It is only recently that I really came to appreciate the significance of their decision. It is one of the things I am most grateful to them for, amidst a mix of other love and support-based decisions they made in raising me, or perhaps it would be better to phrase that as: in helping me grow.

The reason I give for being an atheist is the base logical statement all interested atheists develop: there is no evidence to suggest there is/are a god or gods. However, I was an atheist long before the matter had been so completely clarified in my own mind. In preparation for writing this I tried to track back the steps, to figure out what exactly caused this position in the original instance.

I live in the UK, and unfortunately British government schools are inextricably married to religion, as a recent entry here attests, with the Conservative-Liberal coalition government sending Bibles to schools. In Primary schools each half of the day begins with prayer, and in both Primary and Comprehensive the day begins with an assembly which is required to contain some Christian-brand religiosity, although in my memory this often amounted to tacking a token prayer to the end, though still requiring pupils to close their eyes, bow their heads and do the hand-clasping prayer gesture. My teenage years were fairly empty of rebellion, and perhaps this is where it snuck out; during prayer I would keep my eyes open and stare around the hall, hoping to catch the eye of a teacher willing to berate me for not joining in. I am a rebel and I showed them. It was very interesting to me, and possibly heartening, to see a number of teachers also not partaking in these displays of public wishing.

Remembering back to other instances, I didn't hold on to a New Testament which was given, by which organisation I'm not sure, to all first year students in Comp (around age 11/12), nor was I very respectful of bibles on a school trip the same year. All school trips I've been on that includes a group of students sleeping at some camp or similar come with their own spooky myths. The myth of this particular location, the University of Lampeter, was that there was a bible in some rooms, and that if you looked in the bible, 3 lions would jump out of the book and eat you. Easily disproved. I made friends with everyone in the corridor by pretending that the Bible was eating my face off, though I am uncertain as to whether this technique holds it's friend-earning potency in adult life.

In my casual observation it seems that the most fervent opponents of religion are those who have been under its thrall at some point, which is odd as debate of this nature is my favourite pastime. I absolutely love talking about religion and atheism, though it seems I never really Believed, nor was I ever told to. I suppose at a push the British education system is still riddled with Xtianity, but the school I personally attended observed their requirements in the most casual way, with very little apparent sincerity. Religious education (R.E.) was a class on the curriculum, but was largely considered a joke subject, with most pupils viewing it as a free lesson, where they misbehaved horrendously. I eventually took the subject as an A-level (age 16-18) where we mostly covered Islam and Ethics. At that level the class was utterly fascinating.

Religions have a lot of hateful opinions, and their justifications for them are, thankfully, spurious and illogical. As far as I can remember I have not personally been noticeably subjugated, mistreated, bullied or coerced religiously at any point. However, a huge number of people have not been so geo-culturally fortunate, and are suffering horrendously because of inherently unsupportable, and therefore illogical, claims, and while that isn't why I am an atheist, that is why I see the importance of making the effort to be as robustly vocally atheist as I can.

The Reason of Reason

I recently watched the documentary 'Collision' which charted correspondence between and a subsequent debating tour by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson. I am very interested in the work of Christopher Hitchens, who is a highly-regarded journalist that is also well-known for his participation in public debates. It is my interest in Christopher Hitchens which led me to find this film. The topic of debate was 'Is Christianity Good for the World?', with Hitchens, an atheist/anti-theist, arguing the negative and Wilson, a Christian theologian, arguing the positive.

It was a very interesting piece, with fascinating footage of the debaters off-stage which provided some insights into their characters, and helped to humanise them both, which I felt was valuable in an arena where it's easy to demonise the individual who is proposing the world-view counter to your own. Also, seeing the two men treating each other with grace and politeness was very heartening, proving, to me at least, that the effort was to actually engage in a logical process of understanding, and not shout each other down or out emote each other, although bits and pieces of these behaviours do crop up in the piece, though that is human nature I suppose.

If you have the variety of nerditry that I possess, namely the enjoyment of debates, and you have viewed a fair amount of these, you will quickly find that a number of the arguments and refutations become repetitive very quickly. This is largely, I would speculate, due to one side thinking that a point is valid, with the opposing side considering it as solidly debunked and vice versa. This ensures that a vast amount of debates, specifically on the topic of religion/atheism (i.e. the existence / non-existence of god) I should perhaps specify, often cover the same ground. Therefore it is a joy to discover an argument that you've never come across before, it is like finding a free toy in a box of cereal which isn't even promising a free toy (I used to like the holographic pictures). Such was the case in this debate.

In actuality I just clicked through the film again to find an exact quotation of what was said, and I was unable to find the question I was thinking of. I have watched a large amount of such debates recently, which leads to the possibility that I heard this argument elsewhere, so I won't attribute it to Douglas Wilson in any concrete way, but I will present it nevertheless.

Now I should say in advance that this argument is perplexing to me, because my instinct tells me that there is some fundamental fallacy taking place, but after playing with it in my mind all I have managed to achieve is a headache. In questioning the mandate of morality in a world where there is no ultimate moral creator, we must suggest another way of justifying the importance of morality. In my memory of this argument, 'reason' was suggested to justify morality. Using reason we can come to the agreement that murder, perjury and stealing (three things that are often considered as being immoral in every human community that has ever been observed) are immoral because were they practised widely, the community in which they were practised would fall apart under it's own lack of solidarity. If there was a community who did not consider these things immoral, that community would not survive. Taking the argument a level further, and this is the point which perplexed me, is that on what terms are we judging the efficacy / mandate / importance of 'reason'. The proposition was that if we are judging the process of reason using the standards of reason that this is a circular argument and therefore null. My own personal reaction would be to suggest that the effort and the process of reason has been proved time and again to work, the only concrete and clear understanding and achievements we have achieved as a species have come from the application of reason. The process of faith has never once enabled a human to fly, though some would claim, ludicrously, otherwise. It is only reason, specifically scientific endeavor with reason at its core, that can claim that accolade. The counterargument to this claim is that the process of judging the merit of a process by its achievements is itself the use of reason, and so it is, again, circular reasoning. It was at this point that I fell prey to a frustrating headache.

Of course the argument also applies the other way around, I would argue, as if you say "you can only see the merits of reason by using a process of reason" then similarly "you can only see the merits of faith through having faith". The only way to avoid this that I can see would be to claim that the value of reason must be self-evident, which I would be wary of stating, as clearly there are a large number of people who seem to abstain from reason, and if not in every aspect of life then they seem alarmingly able to partition their lives into a) problems that can be solved with reason, usually in the material/scientific realm, and b) problems that can not be solved by reason, which usually land in the supernatural realm and sometimes the moral. I am skeptical of the existence of a supernatural realm because it, by its very nature, cannot be verified or observed using scientific means, which, as techniques and tools improve, has been able to verify and observe more and more. Of all the things we previously believed to be supernatural in origin and now understand, the supernatural claims were proven correct 0% of the time. Zeus threw the lightning until we figured out what was really going on, the world was flat until we figured out that it was actually a sphere, and while we may not yet understand precisely how the Universe came into being, precisely how life arose from non-life and precisely how morality emerged I am confident, because of our reason-based problem solving past record that we will eventually come to know the answers. Even if this is not the case, and we cannot know as a species how these fundamental processes began, then that is still no reason to hypothesize a solution that would be contrary to everything we understand about the nature of existence, which is what a supernatural creator would entail.

Some would also feel that a morality that exists simply as a survival mechanism because of evolution would be devalued, but I would argue that that is simply not the case. Though we arrived at our current state due to evolution, our possession of sentience means that we can evaluate, using reason, what is of value and what is not, what is good and what is not, so while morality evolved for survival reasons, we can understand that it is of more fundamental value. Simply because we have discovered that morality has it's origin in natural selection does not devalue its importance, just as understanding that love developed in because it helped propagate genes doesn't devalue or lessen the impact of love.

I fear I have drifted slightly askew of topic there. The core point of this entry was to discuss the idea that justifying the importance of reason using reason was a circular argument. In the brief discussion I had regarding this it was pointed out to me that this is perhaps an epistemological issue, which is an area I have not read into, so I will be endeavoring in that direction soon.

Headache.

Skepticism

Recently I have become preoccupied by skepticism, rationalism, critical thinking and science, and I have been watching and reading widely on these subjects. My research efforts have been a little formless and scattergun, so I decided to start blogging about it in order to give more form to my efforts. I am intending it to be somewhere I can write as I learn, to serve as a tool to help me keep track of what I am learning about, and also, hopefully, serve in some small way as a link to a community which is growing ever larger in the world, and especially online.


Who am I and where am I coming from?


My name is Adam and geographically I am from the South Wales Valleys. I am an atheist, and while I've never considered, nor experienced anything that suggested, that position to be socially controversial, it seems that it is widely considered as a minority position, and so in the effort of upping awareness I have no reservations about broadcasting my position. I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of a god/gods.


I would like to be able to say that all of my beliefs boil down to:


I believe in x because there is sufficient evidence to support it
or
I do not believe in y because there is insufficient evidence to support it.


Unfortunately that isn't the way life works, and I, as everyone else is, am subject to presumptions and trust in arguments from authority. I believe it is only a rational approach that can help filter out presumptions and falsehoods from actual truth. At this point in human history our knowledge is so vast that it is impossible for any individual to have tested and to conclusively know everything we have discovered or worked out as a species. No one person knows everything, and every individual has been wrong or mistaken at some point in their lives. I believe it is through a process of rational thinking, skepticism and critical analysis (and self-analysis) that we can discover what is actually true or correct.


I don't believe this aim is easy to achieve. This is why I subtitled this blog 'A Skeptical Effort', because being skeptical is a constant effort, it is not something you achieve and then have built into you and suddenly you can think critically about everything. It is something you have to work at, and it involves the willingness to alter your position if you discover you are wrong.


I have a degree in English Language and Communication which, of course, is of minimal use when it comes to scientific matters, but I would say it has made me very capable where it comes to picking apart illogical or inconsistent statements, and also gives me a grounding in research and analysis. Perhaps stating it in such a way is slightly hubristic, time and my efforts will show whether I am mistaken in my self-assurance.


I am eager to improve my scientific knowledge and understanding, which I have left wither somewhat since school, but I am actively taking steps to improve. While I have an interest in all things skeptical, the specific area of interest where I have an acute fascination is religion, as it has such clear and tangible positions on morality, where it's pronouncements, by their very nature, are not open to discussion or alteration, which I believe is a stubbornly ignorant position, and ultimately negative.


My aim is to always be learning and thinking, and using what I learn to be better in interacting with other people. I believe in the importance and value of discussion, and am seldom happier than when pointedly philosophising with good people. I hope that I am always trying to become a better writer. I write fairly often, though broadcast the writing less and less lately, and I also record vlogs, up until now on the topic of the Welsh language, and I also write, perform and record sketches, podcasts and videos with my friends, in a comedy group called The ACRE. I, increasingly infrequently, perform stand-up comedy. I enjoy reading (favourite author Haruki Murakami), playing games (favourite game Final Fantasy 7), watching good films, good comedy and anime regardless of how good it is. I have recently discovered the abundance of long debates and talks on youtube and I have become obsessed with them. Above everything else I value thinking and talking, by myself and with other people. I can't do very good impressions and I know very few jokes. I almost always have a beard of some kind, but I distrust moustaches.


That's some of me and Why.