Evidence, and the Detachable Flying Vagina

I should like to say a few things about evidence vs. non-evidence based ways of learning what is true.  And note that this applies not just to religion, but to everything we may choose to believe or reject, such as homeopathy, ghosts, aliens, a soul the survives bodily death, political opinions, whether or not someone committed a crime, that a certain diet will help you lose weight, moon landing conspiracy theories, or who shot JFK.

We have a choice between believing only in things that we have evidence for, and believing in things that may not have any solid evidence.

I often hear it said that believing that evidence is the only way to know things, is itself a type of faith; that you can’t prove that evidence is the only valid way to know things, so you must have faith to believe that in the first place.  And this is often followed by accusations of being closed-minded because you only believe in evidence.  But this is clearly not true.  There are valid logical reasons to assume that evidence is a more reliable indicator of truth than faith.

If you choose to believe things without good evidence, then you immediately have a problem.  How do you know *which* things to believe and which not to believe?  Most of us never ask this question, because we just believe the things that our parents and/or friends and culture taught us.  Even people who have broadly rejected their parent’s beliefs are not operating in a vacuum.  If you are a Pagan, did you think of that entirely on your own?  Or did you read about it first or have a Pagan friend?  This is human nature, and we are all subject to it.  Nobody alive, myself included, has not let their beliefs be shaped by their culture.

Let’s take two people, call them person A and person B.  They have never met each other and live on opposite sides of the planet.  Using evidence, Person A can learn things that are true and not true about the world.  And Person B can independently learn the same things.  Even if Persons A and B both die and their culture is destroyed and all it’s knowledge lost for thousands of years, eventually a new civilization will arise.  And when that civilization matures enough to begin basing their ideas on evidence, there will be a person C who comes to exactly the same conclusions of his predecessors.  The crucial fact is that they can work completely independently of each other and come to exactly the same conclusions.  There are numerous examples of nearly simultaneous discoveries by scientists.  Darwin, for example, nearly got scooped on the publication of his theory by Alfred Wallace.  This would indicate that seeking evidence is a reliable method of ascertaining the truth.

Now let’s consider non-evidence based beliefs.  Why did the ancient Hawaiians believe in the goddess Kapo, who had a detachable flying vagina?  Because their culture taught them to.  Why didn’t they instead believe in Ganesha, the elephant headed god of the Hindus?

Why did the Chumash Indians believe that they were created on an island off of the coast of California, and that their god made them a rainbow bridge so they could walk across to the mainland?  Why did they believe that Dolphins were people who fell off that bridge and were transformed by their god?  Why didn’t they believe in the Garden of Eden and talking snakes?  The answer is that nobody ever told them about Adam and Eve.

The lesson to be gleaned from this, is that if you are willing to believe things without evidence, than you can *literally* believe anything at all.  And you have no way of knowing which beliefs are more or less valid than other beliefs.  You can only assume that out of the 100’s of billions of people who have lived on this earth past and present, you were lucky enough to be born at a time and place where you were taught the right beliefs.  Think of the staggering odds against that!

Astonishingly Insignificant

A few things that I believe:

We can never know anything with absolute certainty.

We can know some things with nearly absolute certainty.

There are many things which we do not know.

There are many things which we think we know,
but about which we are wrong.

There are many things which we can't ever know because of the
 physical impossibility of acquiring the necessary facts.

There are many things which we can't ever know because the 
human brain simply isn't intelligent enough.

The truth is under no obligation to make sense to me. 
 It is I who am obligated to make sense of the truth.

I have no choice but to accept the conclusions
that evidence leads me to, even if I don't like them.

I am an astonishingly insignificant part of
an astonishingly vast whole.

I am finite, but my parts are infinite.

What would it take to change my beliefs?

An Evidence Based Life.

Like most atheists, I often say that I am willing to change my beliefs if new evidence is presented.  This is true of everything, even everyday beliefs that I probably just take for granted.  But as Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  And to me, the belief that I was created by a supreme being is an extraordinary claim.

But if I am to be intellectually honest, I need to ask myself, what evidence would it take for me to be convinced of the existence of any god.  What standard of evidence would I require?

For example, the God of Abraham, the most popular god in today’s world.    At first I thought that if God wants me to believe in him, all he has to do is come down here and show himself to me and say, ‘Hey, man. Here I am!’  I don’t know what he’d look like, maybe a blinding ring of light shining all around him or something… I dunno.

Do I Need Medication?

But then it occurs to me that there are probably better explanations for that than to assume that I actually saw God.  The more extraordinary the claim is, the greater the number of simpler, more likely explanations there are.  God is such an extraordinary claim that there are any number of other possibilities.  Maybe I just had a hallucination.  Maybe I was dreaming.  Maybe someone was playing an elaborate trick on me with a great costume and some lighting effects.  So I realized that seeing that would probably convince me that I needed medication before I’d believe that I actually saw God.

So it would have to be something so extraordinarily outside of the realm of common possibilities that no human or organization or government could possibly fake it. Then I would have to hear from everyone else around me that they saw it too.  And I mean everyone. In order for me to get over the idea that I was just going crazy, It would take years of constantly seeing the evidence and years of every person I meet agreeing that they see it too, and that nobody can think of a simpler, more likely explanation.

God seems to love appearing on pieces of toast and what-not.  Throw in the Virgin Mary on a waffle and that seems to be enough to convince some people. But I was thinking that I would need to see him appear on the surface of the moon.  And it can’t just kinda look like them, it’s gotta be a perfect full color photograph. Or maybe a video, and he’s mouthing the words, “Sorry about that tsunami, but I saw you masturbating.”  But then again… that would be too easy for some government to fake. Or maybe I could just be hallucinating again.



 
Gettin' Nerdy Wit It!

So then I thought, maybe if God rearranged the stars in the sky to spell out the MD5 and SHA2 checksums of the entire bible.  He’s got plenty of stars, he could do it for all existing versions and translations.  He could even throw in a few sample verses in plain text.  But again… How would I know that I wasn’t just going crazy? People do go crazy and see lots of weird things. I’m not immune…  So what the hell would it take to convince me? There must be something, or else I’d have to admit that I’m just closed-minded.

God Would Know.

Then the realization occurs…  I don’t have to know what it would take.  Any god like the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, any god that created me and who has a plan for my life…  That god would know.  He would know exactly what type and how much evidence that my individual brain would need to be convinced.  I don’t know.  But he would.

And he would also have the ability to show it to me.  And he would also know that if he didn’t show it to me, then I wouldn’t believe in him.  He designed me, after all.  He knows me better than anyone, and he has a plan for me.  So if the God of the Bible does exist, then he must be choosing not to give me the evidence I need.  And he knew when he created me that I’d be fated to burn in hell for all of eternity.

Thanks, God.  Thank you for that wonderful plan.

Waking Up: An Introduction

Hi,

I'm Paul, and I have no idea why I'm doing this. Well, actually that's not true. I know why I'm doing it. I just don't know if I am going to do it. This will take a lot of energy, you see – a lot of motivation. Now where am I going to get that motivation?

People ask why atheists feel the need to talk about something they don't even believe in. I mean why the hell am I doing this? Well, there's something you gotta understand about atheists in America. You see, it's very frustrating to live our lives up to our eyeballs in people who base their entire lives on the fairy tales of illiterate bronze-age nomadic goat herders. Did I insult you? I'm truly sorry. I'm just being honest. Every single day, we feel like we are the only sane person in the asylum – the only sober person in a car full of drunks and nobody will even let us out, much less give us the keys.

Why do we talk about it so much? Some atheists will tell you they do it because they want to save the world from religious politicians who don't believe in global warming because the Bible already told them how the world is going to end. Well, that sounds like a nice practical reason to speak out against the overly credulous majority. But it's crap. Well, it's not crap. But it's also not the real reason. We do it because it is the only way to keep our sanity, the only way to escape the endless frustration of being surrounded by people who live their lives as if the Flintstones was an accurate portrayal of natural history.

A Little Background on Me

Well, this is supposed to be an introduction, after all. Lest you think that I don't love God because I've never properly been told the “good news”, I want you to know that I was thoroughly and completely indoctrinated in my youth. I went to Church, Sunday School, Baptist Youth Fellowship, Vacation Bible School every summer... I sang in the choir. Both of my parents were Deacons of the church. My Christian summer camp councilor wrote home to my mother and said, “You don't have to worry about Paul. He really knows his Bible.” My Mom was so proud.

But you know what? It didn't stick. I wanted it to stick. I prayed to God to help me believe. But I think I began to doubt around my early teen years, you know, the time when your bullshit detector suddenly starts to get big and hairy. I had been blessed with a great science and social studies teacher in middle school, and I used to sit in church, bored stiff, thinking about how ridiculous it all sounded in comparison. (Thank you Mr. Denniston!)

I don't know exactly when I became an atheist. It was a long slow process. But by the time I hit high school, I knew that there was no god. Once you realize it, it's like waking up from a weird dream. It suddenly becomes gob-smackingly obvious. You can never go back.

So what happens next?

Believers often ask how atheists can find any meaning in life. What's the point of living if you're just gonna die? They often ask why we don't just go around raping and killing people, since there's no god to judge us when we die. And atheists often laugh off these questions. But they shouldn't. In my journey from credulity to incredulity, these were questions I had to ask myself. After suddenly realizing there is no god, there is a crisis of sorts, that a new atheist has to go through. Religion formerly provided the answers to all of life's big questions, wrapped up in fancy paper and tied with a golden bow. As a fledgling atheist, I was surprised by these questions popping up in my own mind. And they're not easy questions to answer.

I can tell you, though, that I did eventually find a way to answer them – a way that is vastly more satisfying to me than the old answers ever were. I can't give you those answers in the scope of this blog post. But I can tell you that I am a far more ethical person now than I would have been if fear of hell was my only motivation. I can tell you that I am not even slightly afraid of death. Ok, the process of dying... that's a bit scarey. But actually being dead doesn't scare me a bit. And, oh, the amazing sense of freedom you get when you realize that you don't have to waste this life preparing for the next one.

Waking Up

Being a believer is like being caught in a tornado of errant thoughts and ideas. The beliefs that you have been taught, swirl around you like an impenetrable wall of dark wind. You can't see beyond that wall of confusion, so you don't even realize that you're in it. You don't realize that your world is so small. You may even be happy in that whirlwind of delusion. You may even wish to tell others the “good news” and bring them into the vortex with you... And as long as you stay in there, you'll never know how incredibly huge and magnificent this world is out here. A universe in every speck of dust, the incredible vastness of the cosmos, all exist out here, outside the prison of those thoughts.

So of course I am motivated. Of course I want to talk about this. I want to give you this “good news”. I want to help you to wake up from the dream and feel the wonder, the exhilaration of reality.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

-Henry David Thoreau