Row and Bee
Author notes
Christians and Atheists
Kilre onAtheists are more often than not skeptics: for various reasons, those not born already into a non-believing family tend to look for hard evidence of their beliefs and, not finding anything other than vague feelings that are echoed around the globe by believers of other religions, conclude, logically, that there's nothing to religion that isn't already in the heads of the faithful. Scientists that turn to atheism do so because of an utter lack of repeatable, falsifiable testing able to be done on religious claims. Take the study of the therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer done not long ago, that concluded that prayers had no statistical benefit, and in a good number of cases worsened the condition of those prayed for. Doesn't help the god character much now does it?
So, in a nutshell, atheists are the kind of people that require hard evidence for anything they will hold up as truth. We think people that take things "on faith" for which there are no logical reasons for doing so are quite silly, and perhaps deluding themselves. For instance, there is good evidence for airplanes not doing odd things in flight, and for the huge number of planes flitting about in the sky, there are fewer plane crashes than car crashes–basically, things have to go seriously wrong for a plane to crash. Based upon this reasoning, and the many tests done to ensure the best safety for airplanes–I mean, they're pressurized metal tubes with wings after all–it is safe to "have faith" in airplanes landing you safely at your destination. If the airplanes regularly popped out of existence in flight, you might have something to fear from planes. But they don't. You can see more on that here.
How does this relate to the supernatural? For one, it already sets it up for the fall. Long ago, we as a species used to believe all sorts of questionable ideas that we now know are completely and utterly false. Gods used to hurl lightning and make the thunder; gods used to control the weather, the animals, the sea, our fertility, the Earth itself! We used to think that Earth was the center of the universe. We used to think that when people got sick it was because a demon was inside them, or that our humors were out of whack. We used to think that the moon was a source of light, and not just reflecting light from Sol. We have scientific explanations for every single one of these misunderstandings now. Everything that happens has a natural cause: lightning is electricity discharged from clouds; Earth is no longer the center of the universe thanks to work done by Copernicus and Kepler; we discovered bacteria and viruses and the fun they have inside our bodies, and demons and humors packed their bags and went the way of other superstitious claims with no supporting evidence. Evolution freed us from the superstition that things were created at one time or another by any number of supernatural forces.
The evidence is stacked against religious superstition, and continues to be stacked as more people discover the wonders of the human mind. Recent studies have found several interesting things, namely that our brain is a mess of chemical activity and quite often the signals cross. For example:
During epileptic seizures, sufferers often claim to hear the voice of angels or of God. Some epileptologists believe that many of the great religious figures, such as Moses and St. Paul, had epilepsy. Now neurologists believe they've found the sweet spot for spiritual experience – in the temporal lobe. Some scientists say the temporal lobe, which is associated with emotion and memory, is the seat of spirituality. It's also where epileptic activity takes place.
In a compilation of research scientists found that through testing, not through praying, we can find out about what goes on in our wetware. Their results should not be shocking at all from a monistic point of view. In fact, it's exactly what we should expect to find if we had evolved slowly over millions of years: a fallible, often wrong, easily fooled, and overly susceptible to change from environmental factors.
Another study by Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curie, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen examined the human brain in much the same way as the study linked above: they tried to find how the brain thinks while comparing commonly held truths to religious thoughts. From a Newsweek article discussing the findings:
Harris, Kaplan, et al. put 30 people in fMRI machines. Half of them were committed Christian believers, the kind of Christians who would immediately agree with the statement "Jesus ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father." Half were committed atheists, the kind who would agree with the statement "The belief that Jesus ascended to heaven is clearly false." Up on a screen before them, participants would read declarative statements. Some were statements of religious belief, some of religious disbelief. Some were statements about more ordinary facts. Participants had to push buttons—indicating true or false—as the researchers watched their brains light up. Belief in God, disbelief in God, and belief in simple empirically verifiable facts all lit up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that governs your sense of self. We are, in some sense, what we believe.
In essence, we think and believe with the same parts of our brains. You see? The creationists are right, we take the same truths and come to different conclusions. Some are unfounded beliefs that are held up with next to no evidence, held in the brain with the same convictions that a biologist has about the truth of evolution after over a century of strenuous testing to prove it both false and true. So the divide in human society is between people that revel in revealed knowledge and those that revel in seeking and testing reality for what is fact and fiction.
I can actually see from the other side of the gap. Why do we continue to question things? Why can't we just take some things on faith? We've gotten this far already. Look at what our species has accomplished. There really should be some things that science should stray away from, for faith is all that some people have in their lives.
Yet, I think that that position is utter tripe. We would not have gotten where we are if not for all the scientists, theistic and otherwise, that threw aside their beliefs to find the truth in the world in which they found themselves. The advancement of society won't be found through kowtowing to peoples' sensitive faiths; I hardly think that we should respect the beliefs of people that are used to unfairly punish women, gays, and non-believers alike, because of knowledge handed down from a mentally unstable desert-wandering tribe of people.
When people tell me to leave off religion, I ask myself why. Why should I tip-toe around superstitions? Why should I not ask for hard evidence of their beliefs? I'm not looking to disprove them, but merely asking for confirmation of the truths they think they're telling me. Unfortunately for most believers, the probability of their god being the right god is less than zero, considering all the gods that have come and gone, and all the personal gods in "existence" today, watching over all the people on this planet. They all have various experiences that they attribute to their god acting on the physical world, even if they're just coincidences. Yes, there are medical miracles that happen from time to time, but the weight of the evidence tips on the side of naturalistic explanations, and often it's just that we don't know what happened–it is not a god intervening, as the odds are against it, and as the prayer study above shows, even asking for intervention is more likely to hurt than help.
What bothers me the most is those that have immovable convictions that there is a god out there that cares for them, and everything that happens is part of some inane "plan". Well then, is it part of the "plan" that thousands die daily? That men beat their wives, and women in general, for stupid reasons that only make sense to an inebriated mind or a brain hyped up in holy fury? That our sun is going to obliterate our world in a few billion years? That we could die at any moment, to a huge number of biological problems inherent in our bodies from birth? What about AIDS? What about Hurricane Katrina? The tsunami that killed thousands in Asia after an undersea earthquake? Praying does nothing to alleviate any of the suffering that has existed on this Earth since evolution began its long, slow crawl from the oceans, billions of years ago.
It's great that some people think there is something out there watching out for them. What is not great is that they gleefully ignore any evidence to the contrary. It's not really my place to search for that evidence for them, but I'm sure as hell going to mock those that forgo hard evidence from testing and accept things "on faith".
Now, as to what brought this rant on, we have to go back a good week or so to Blasphemy Day, where an opinion writer for the student newspaper compared atheists to Christians. I loathe to bring up a cliche, but that is exactly like comparing apples to oranges.
Like I've detailed above, theists take things without solid evidence backing their position, and take as fact things that can't be proven. Atheists to a whit want evidence for everything, and if they're not insecure hormone-driven teens they'll understand that it is philosophically impossible to prove a negative and that it's fine to admit they don't know certain things, though the hard evidence does indeed point to a distinct lack of any god.
We get it — people dance like idiots in mega-churches, some ministers squander donations on hookers and just maybe the Earth is older than a few thousand years.
Feel better now? It’s perfectly fine to be atheist, but don’t wait for a burning bush to be satisfied. You’d have better luck teaching trigonometry to your dog.
Actually, atheists would love to wait for a burning bush that talks, while they teach trigonometry to their dog. And, if our brains have anything to say about it, and they will, we'll hear "voices" from the crackling vegetation long before we can get our pooch to actually recognize characters on paper.
Cheers.
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