We’re all atheists. And we’re all believers.
As an eleven-year-old, I began to notice a problem. I reasoned: If the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus were not real, what else were the adults telling me that might also not be real? What about God? And so I became an agnostic, although I didn’t know the word. By the time I was 12 my sense of betrayal had hardened into an amorphous anger, and I became acutely critical of everything adults told me, trying to outline the boundaries between truth and kindly intended adult fiction.
I had careful arguments with the Catholic nuns in my elementary school about Limbo (where, according to Catholic dogma, unbaptized infants and children are trapped for all eternity), and about papal infallibility. Those arguments with the nuns were “careful” in the sense that, if we were perceived to be arguing with – sassing – a nun, we would be quickly beaten. And we really were beaten. I remember being slapped several times so hard that it set me staggering, and always having bruises on my hands from being whacked with wooden pointers and rulers.
I learned altogether too much about the history of the Papacy. As a twelve-year-old I was given a homework assignment to research the life of a Pope. At the local library I got permission to go into the “adult stacks” and pull a volume at random of the history of the Catholic Church, and so, randomly, I picked one. I learned he was the son of a Pope, had fathered a subsequent Pope (with his sister), and was stricken with paralysis and died while committing fornication with a mistress (McCabe, 1939; McBrien, 1997; Maxwell-Stuart, 1997). The Vicar of Christ? A direct link in the line of authority from Peter?
As a result of all that I became pretty sure that the faith my Mom had raised me in was hooey. My Mom still made me go to church, though, so for three more years I was a Catholic Atheist Altar Boy. However, I never said this to her face, nor to the nuns, nor later to the Christian Brothers who taught us at Garces Junior High School. THEY could hit you so hard that you would hit the wall first, then slide down to the floor. By this time, I had learned those words “agnostic” and “atheist.” Still, I could wear the cool cassock (robes), light and put out candles, ring bells loudly, and sometimes even sneak a taste of some of the wine.
For 10 years, then, I was an atheist. By the time I entered college I was a militant, abrasive atheist. I held the belief that if I couldn’t see something with my own eyes, or derive it from Maxwell’s equations, I wouldn’t believe it. This is a classic example of being determinedly self-limiting – self-blinded, excluding evidence. By the way, excluding evidence is a Really Bad Thing in science – it’s generally considered inexcusable, in fact. It’s called “cherry-picking.”
Many atheists now, like me then, don’t accept the fact that there might be routes other than scientific experiment to gaining knowledge. Many atheists… but not all. As an example of these other routes to truth, however, I would note Einstein’s “Gedankenexperiment” (thought experiment) that led to his multiply-verified special relativity and general relativity, so well proven by now with experimental evidence that they are no longer called “theories.” I would also note the famous manner in which Pauli and Fermi postulated the neutrino decades before there was evidence to prove it, even indirectly. They had faith.
Many of our friends still subscribe to the atheist tradition, and we use here the word “tradition,” in the same way that non-religious individuals refer to “religious traditions.” However, they don’t like being called an atheist – it has negative connotations, more so in some countries than in others. No, we don’t understand that, either – atheists for the most part are just trying to be honest. However, atheist organizations cannot pin down Neil DeGrasse Tyson to even admit he’s an atheist; he tries very hard to avoid that label, because it isn’t helpful to his marketing. In some places and times, like Voltaire’s France, being an atheist was fashionable. However, if you wish to enter Saudi Arabia, and you identify yourself as an atheist, you will not get a visa (they do ask). In fact, it is so NOT OK to be an atheist there that a Saudi who declared himself an atheist could be beheaded unless he publicly recanted.
Therefore, many of us atheists called ourselves “skeptics.” This provided camouflage – you couldn’t quite pin us down, while we could stand back, in a passive-aggressive way, and demand that people from a faith tradition prove things to us. It’s a classic “Heads I win, tails you lose” way to load the argument up front. I have to admit that I used this one a lot. I wasn’t above using ridicule to embarrass devout Christian friends who were scientists. Atheists have at least one thing in common with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons): they both are seeking the honest truth.
As atheists we also called ourselves “humanists” – in part to allay accusations that without religion we had no morals, but in part to also put us on the side of the “humans” on the planet. Who could object to that? As part of this, we argued that religious wars were the reason for most of the suffering and misery of humanity. Therefore, religions must be bad.
The problem with this approach is that it overlooks some of the most basic evidence of human history. Almost all conflict has been political (to gain power) or xenophobic (fear of outsiders) at its core. Attackers just used religion as a cover to justify the atrocities that almost all human beings know to be wrong. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is a classic example of this. They call themselves “Islamic” but are rejected by 99% of the Muslim world as false Muslims, violators of the core precepts of the Qur’an. They also murder Muslims almost exclusively. Faith-based, indeed.
Oddly, I don’t think that anyone ever counted how many human beings were killed by three atheist regimes in the 20th Century. I can count Pol Pot (about 2 million), Josef Stalin (estimates generally exceed 20 million), and Mao Tse-Dung (estimates of the people killed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution alone are up to 70 million). These deaths in the 20th Century exceed the deaths of all so-called “religious” wars in the previous millennium.
By the time I was 22, I was a “Mormon” – a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wait – what?!?? How did that happen?
It happened because I began having problems again, this time with the logic (or lack thereof) of my thought system – my belief tradition – as an atheist. It was a problem of assumptions, of voids, and of functionally parallel belief frameworks. Atheism was just another religion, but it had no explanations. We have a cartoon on our refrigerator: two young men in white shirts have given a pamphlet to a man at his front door. “But this is blank,” says the man. “We’re atheists,” replies one of the young men.
I think most of us would agree that people from a faith tradition have a belief framework. By that I mean that they accept some basic premises: for instance, that God exists, that our existence has a purpose. From these premises, everything both good and bad in their life experience can then be more or less understood. Our improbable human existence can be explained, pain and suffering can be explained, a reward system is laid out, and what happens when we die more or less inevitably follows.
However, atheists – like me once – also have a belief framework. Like the religious belief framework, it begins with certain unprovable assumptions, one of which is that God doesn’t exist. The corollary is that the universe just sort of magically (with a Big Bang) came into existence. This can be argued with just as much basis, with just as much evidence, as a belief in God. Also, atheists assume the physical laws of the universe just exist, and can’t be explained. As an atheist I never tried to jump off a building, because I accepted gravity as a fundamental physical law. That’s a fancy way of saying I wasn’t that stupid. (Or that I had faith.)
Another basic assumption that we atheists built on is that the Anthropic Principle (outlined in a subsequent chapter of that name) is just a lucky accident. Twenty-six physical constants all line up to values within a few percent of what is required in order for life to exist in this universe. “Lucky” actually fails to express the improbability adequately. Try multiplying two percent (0.02) by itself twenty-six times. It’s that improbable. A common argument to explain these amazing multiplicative coincidences is that our universe is one of an infinite number of parallel universes – the multiverse. Ours just happened to be the one that had all the constants line up just right. Ummm… then where did all the energy and matter come from to make all these infinite universes? And while we’re at it, can anyone test for a multiverse? Not even remotely (by definition everything else is a different universe and is un-reachable and un-testable), but there are a lot of highly educated people who still believe in this.
They have faith.
Atheism has prophets – the guardians and promulgators of the Ain’t-no-God belief framework – who also write books. For reasons that escape me as a former atheist, some of these are even proselytizing atheists – preachers. I suspect this doesn’t make sense to you either – on several levels (for instance, why would they even care?). I think this proselytizing may have a lot to do with seeking fame, with craving attention. Some of it may come from the human desire to have fellow-believers and even – especially – followers. Atheism also comes with temples and idols – the Large Hadron Collider comes to mind. I have a book on my shelf in which a theoretical physicist appears to be worshipping this human construct. It’s gold-plated, too (Randall, 2005).
Finally, there’s the Big Bang. There is abundant evidence that all matter and energy in our universe suddenly exploded into existence from a tiny point about 13.8 billion years ago. What triggered this? What preceded it? Like the anthropic principle, this constitutes what I call a void – something that I couldn’t understand or explain – so as an atheist I ignored it. By age 20, I found myself ignoring more and more voids, and I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my basic assumptions. I felt increasingly dishonest.
Like many others, I conflated science with atheism. As I mentioned earlier, I accepted as reality only those things I could sense or test physically, and as a budding scientist I thought that was the only intellectually honest path. I hadn’t seen anything that I could consider a proof in the existence of an imminent God (a God who answers prayers, and cares about His individual creations), so I didn’t want to waste time thinking about it. This approach may actually fall into the domain of agnosticism. Some atheists and most agnostics will readily admit that the vastness and order of the universe argues at least for the existence of a transcendent God (a Being who started this vast universe, but who could care less about some puny, late-arrival sentient creatures on an average planet in the outer fringes of a smallish galaxy). This way of thinking is actually being more honest, in my view: because no one can explain the reason for the physical laws, the Big Bang, nor the Anthropic Principle. Arguing for a multiverse is NOT an explanation – it’s just another belief system, because it’s un-testable and thus unscientific.
I began looking again at the belief systems behind faith traditions. I searched widely. Eventually, I came across the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They had a belief system that was internally consistent and didn’t require me to believe one thing on Sunday and something else during the rest of the week. There were no huge voids I was expected to ignore. They were very open about there being some unanswered questions; one-third of the Book of Mormon was sealed by metal bands against immediate translation, for instance. However, I learned that we were expected to seek and could get answers for ourselves – if we were willing to expend personal energy to get them. I found the fact that we are actually encouraged to get answers truly startling – and profoundly exhilarating. True science and true religion should both encourage us to explore, and endeavor to find answers to things we don’t yet understand.
What struck me most, however, was that there was no fear of science, no fear of education among the members of this Church – and they showed me a way to prove it all was correct.
It was testable.