I'm an Atheist

I'm an Atheist - English


I’m an atheist.

The bare minimum to be an atheist is that you aren’t convinced that some kind of god exists. That’s it. You don’t need any more than that. Theism means being convinced there is a god, atheism is the lack of that conviction.

I take it a step further. I believe no god exists. Every religion describes a being that is active, intercessory, involved, participatory. Every action requires a response action. Every act leaves evidence. All changes create history. Any of the gods described by the world religions should be evident, they should all be in some way visible.

And there is no evidence. That’s why we have religionS, and not just a religion.

There’s no Christian Chemistry, Buddhist Biology, Muslim Math, Hindu History. There’s just chemistry, biology, math, and history. In the pursuit of knowledge, we follow where the evidence leads and greater amounts of evidence lead to a single conviction. Our learning always proceeds from mystery to certainty, not the other way around.

Contrast all our fields of knowledge with all of our religions. Christianity began as a crowd of conflicting cults; one cult dominated only because it got lucky in latching on to the mother of an emperor. Even that dominance didn’t last; the church splintered as soon as the empire did. Today there are tens of thousands of branches of Christianity.

If there ever was a historical Muhammad, then his lifetime was the only time Islam was unified. Their own texts tell us that they split as soon as he died.

Judaism was just one of many polytheistic religions among the Canaanite tribes, and one particularly unpleasant cult came to dominate there. Even then, Judaism has never been a single, united religion. From the Maccabees to the orthodox Jews of today, from the Tabiades to the secular Jews of today, Judaism has been as splintered and factionalized as every other.

Is Faith Harmless?

Short answer: No.

If you'll allow me to steal from Peter Boghossian, faith is a broken epistemology, it's a way of pretending you know something you don't really know.

Epistemology is the way you know things. Faith allows people to claim to know things they don't. Faith is the buttress for claims from the mild to the asinine, from the irritating to the debilitating, to deadly. It is the exact same process that Catholics use to believe a cracker becomes the actual, physical body of the risen savior that Jews use to justify mutilating infant genitalia, that Muslims use to bomb churches. There is no difference.

Many have argued that secularists, humanists, antitheists should spend their time on the latter two and ignore the former as harmless. They definitely have a point that shouldn't be ignored. We are a minority and we only have so much time, money, and energy. We're also nowhere near as united as the forces of irrationality that give credence to faith. We need to invest our efforts where they're most valuable.

However, I don't think we should ignore the crackers. PZ Myers desecrated a communion wafer that he received from a student who smuggled it out of a service for him. Both Myers and the student received death threats, as well as Myers's university was flooded with letters demanding he be fired. Clearly, this isn't a small issue for the Catholic League.

With this example, I wish to demonstrate two things:

1. Clearly, this is the same faith. Myers's minor act of desecration against a minor tenet of faith received a response out of all proportion. His university was flooded with letters and even now, five years later, they're still receiving mail about the incident. Through the lens of faith, there is no difference between this and the more "serious" acts of faith.
2. I believe that there is a more practical connection between these. The "minor" acts of faith give legitimacy to the more ridiculous tenets. That no one really cares to question the small things that don't matter, but this means that, with faith allowed a leg to stand on, the more absurd beliefs can point to those and say, "See? These are fine!" And then they turn around with Matthew 23:24

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

The smaller faiths give legitimacy to the larger, which turn around and give legitimacy to the smaller. The edifice demands you dismantle the entirety all at once, bootstrapping itself on nothingness all the while.

In answer to the argument from practicality, that we have bigger fish to fry, I offer this: the smaller faith takes less time and energy to ridicule. Spend a few moments ridiculing their weekly ritual cannibalism, point out that they believe not simply absurdities, but foolish, childish absurdities:

Every week you go to a sing-song and promise yourself in slavery to a cosmic zombie because a rib-woman was convinced to eat a magic fruit by a talking snake, which broke the universe, and then God needed blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magic so he raped a virgin to give himself a body and killed it. 

All faith is bad. All faith is equal. All faith is equally harmful. Some particular instances of faith just happen not to be harming people at this particular moment. 500 years ago those angry Catholics wouldn't have stopped at threatening to kill PZ Myers. He'd be rather horrifically dead.

Science is a Hologram

A hologram is a really cool thing where you can produce a three dimensional image. It's not just a two-dimensional representation of a 3D image, the image actually is 3D. When you move around it, you get the parallax effect of different elements passing in front of and behind it.

Another aspect of a hologram, and the one more important to my analogy is that each piece of the holographic image actually contains the entire image. Look at just a small part of the hologram and you'll see the same picture, but at worse resolution (like zooming in on a picture and seeing more pixels). If you include more elements of the hologram, the picture resolution improves.

Every piece of scientific research improves the whole picture. It may be hard to see it, but a lepidopterist publishing a paper on the genitalia of the female Large Chequered Skipper is actually advancing the cause of all science. The paper improves knowledge of the Large Chequered Skipper biology, of the biology of all hesperiidae, of all lepidoptera, of all insects, of all animals, of all life; it improves the knowledge of the evolution of genitalia, of butterflies, of insects, of animals; it improves the knowledge of chemistry and physics; it improves the study of biology, of science. At all levels, in increasingly small ways, every bit of study improves our knowledge and understanding of increasingly broad methods.

In the other direction, each act of science contains the whole of science. The scientific method is iterations of¹:

1. Define a question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form an explanatory hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and collecting data in a reproducible manner
5. Analyze the data
6. Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

And every time someone goes out and sciences, they're performing part of that process. Each bit of science contains in itself the behavior of the whole institution, the epistemology of the verfication of observable knowledge and the construction of theories therefrom. Every piece contains the whole, and every piece is part of the whole. Science is a hologram.

1 - Stolen, without shame, from wikipedia.