The Defense

When someone uses the word "atheist", it tends to evoke images of black-clad body-pierced goth kids rebelling against the happy, conformist Christian faith of their parents. It is nearly forgotten that many of our most revered thinkers, from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, Walt Whitman to Mark Twain, George Orwell to Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sagan to Albert Einstein, were all atheists (of varying degrees). They were not atheists out of some kind of rebellious turmoil, but out of rational thought and contemplation. Even today, there is a direct correlation with increased education and decreased belief in religion.

This is not to say there aren't many intelligent and educated Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, or even Wiccans. But I must name drop a bit in order to counter the conventional cultural "wisdom" equating disbelief in God with unintelligence, laziness, or confusion.

In politics, when Democrats think Republicans are "stupid" or "uninformed" (and vice versa), it's generally because their own political beliefs just seem so right to them. It's just a feeling in their collective gut that is so personally obvious that anyone who disagrees must be on the wrong side of the obvious. We're all guilty of it -- there are times I listen to people like Moore or Franken or Krugman or Kerry and think my God, how could any rational, educated, intelligent person possibly agree with these idiots? But I have to remember that there are those who feel the same way about Limbaugh and Coultier and D'Souza and Bush. And both sides feel in their minds and hearts that the other side is uninformed or illiterate. (More on this later.)

In mere debates on elections and public policy, the stakes aren't nearly as high as going to heaven or hell for all eternity. If it's true that we're judged not only for our actions, but for our innermost thoughts and beliefs, then we better make sure we pick the "correct" religion.

A woman in an electric wheelchair gave me a little Baptist propaganda booklet at Meijer the other day, which detailed (in the form of a comic!) a man who sinned by lusting after a woman (by looking at her from behind and thinking "mmm, nice" in a thought bubble) and daydreaming about baseball in church. You guessed it -- those sins were enough to send him into the fiery pits of hell for all eternity. Pretty strict. When the four-wheeled missionary asked about my own faith, I futilely tried to engage her in discussion about the wide variety of religions and bibles, expressing polite skepticism that one book must be "right" and all the others "wrong." To which she replied in somewhat of a huff that all bibles were heretical and satanic except for the King James Version. Then she revved away with judgmental fury toward the sinless produce.

Ah, of course. The King James Version. It's not even enough to choose the right book, but you even need the right printing.

My father and I had countless late night discussions and debates over religion when I was in grade school (yes, I had an odd childhood, and it wasn't even technically "grade" school since the neo-libbie gifted "grade" school I attended didn't have "grades", or even desks or bells, but that's for another article). Dad was a Catholic schoolteacher in downtown Detroit, and his only sister is a Catholic nun -- i.e., he was biased, but knew his shit. He would have a few beers, and read or describe books of the bible to me, asking me to interpret their meaning, telling me how many adults couldn't grasp the complexities in the stories of Job or Issac (and praising me when I did), encouraging me to always think deeper, to find the hidden messages, or even the discrepancies. Indeed, he showed me how the conflicts and apparent mistakes in the bible (particularly passages in Genesis or books of the New Testament which disagreed with each other) actually added, not detracted, from the book's overall credibility, for the same reason that police officers expect discrepancies in the stories of eye witnesses, and would be highly skeptical if the story of each witness matched exactly in every detail.

We also discussed St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, and his proofs of the existence of God, which so impressed and intrigued me that years later I picked Thomas as my Catholic confirmation name. (If you've never read this, it's wonderful and fascinating and online here.) And, up until recently, had you asked if I believed in God, I would have answered "of course" and sent you to that very link.

But something always bothered me. Perhaps, if you read it, you'll pick up on it as well. The arguments initially seem sound, such as the concept of everything in motion needing to be put in motion by something else, but Aquinas tends to conclude with lines like: "Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God." Try and read that from the perspective of someone who has never heard of God, or believes in something or someone else. Isn't it rather a large, convenient conceptual leap to go from "well something must be out there" to a specific proof of the Judeo-Christian Creator? Wouldn't it have been equally arbitrary to say "and this everyone understands to be Mithra" or "and this everyone understands to be the council of learned elders" or "and this everyone understands to be Steve from Accounting"? Summa Theologica only works if you already take the existence of God as a given, as an "a priori." It only offers support to a premise previously concluded by the writer and reader.

This, of course, is human nature. Look at all the evidence we had concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It's not that the evidence itself was all bad, but that we came at it from the a priori assumption that the stockpiles existed in the first place. Therefore all information that helped support our pre-concluded conclusion served to add credibility -- easy when the premise on which the evidence was gathered wasn't questioned. This is why different people can look at the same facts and events and research and come to different opinions. Michael Moore has a gut feeling, an a priori assumption, that Bush is a slimeball, and therefore only information that supports this preconception stands out to him. On the other hand, my own gut feeling is that Kerry is a slimeball, and so naturally information that stands out to me supports my premise. Of course defeatjohnjohn.com spends more time on anti-Kerry evidence than pro-Kerry evidence -- the idea that Kerry would be a horrible president is my a priori. I just feel it, know it. (Luckily, Kerry seems intent on providing me thousands upon thousands of examples to support my theory, but that's for the other site.)

So, with regards to the existence of God, arguments that presuppose His existence won't persuade me, any more than arguments presupposing Bush's idiocy will win over one of Bush's supporters. I have no doubt of the sincerity behind the believers. "God" simply seems clear to them. They just feel it, know it. It's in their gut. And therefore all the evidence they see around them supports their a priori. That's why arguments between atheists and theists can get so frustrating -- to a believer, something like "well, what about puppies?" is irrefutable proof of their position. Obviously, a puppy couldn't exist without God, because He is the "this everyone understands to be."

When someone is diagnosed with terminal cancer and then makes a surprising recovery, people praise it at a miracle, and proof of God's existence and compassion. And yet when someone is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies, or if someone gets hit by a bus or is tortured to death or worse, God is either never mentioned, or we hear things like "well, God has a plan" or "God works in mysterious ways." Wait... what? It seems awfully convenient for two mutually exclusive outcomes to prove the same theory. (Bone to the libs: "If we find stockpiles of WMDs, that proves Saddam had them! If we don't find stockpiles of WMDs, that proves he had them and destroyed them! Either way is proof! Yay! Hot damn, we're prescient!")

The Baptist-on-wheels was doing what she thought, felt, and knew was right, based on her a priori. What concerns me is not her motivation, but her logic. St. Thomas Aquinas "proved" the existence of God through circumstantial, not empirical means. (The counter-argument that "well, God can't simply come out and prove He exists because we have to have faith" also seems a little too convenient.) None of our beliefs are made in a vacuum. Our basic "givens", our assumptions on which we base all other intellectual endeavors, are taught. No human could ever have the time or ability to discover everything for himself (fire, pi, DNA, etc.) so we teach the young all we know so they can have the highest possible starting point. We couldn't have flown to the moon if our ancestors had taught us a geocentric universe.

What if God had arbitrarily decided that belief in planetary orbits was required for admission into heaven? Hardly seems fair for all the people who lived before Galiello. Well then, why would God allegedly require belief in Himself, let alone Christianity or Islam, for admission into heaven? Those who believe in God do so because they were taught that God existed, just as the Egyptians believed in their gods because that's how they were taught, ditto Sumerians and their mythology, or even modern China and their state-sponsored atheism. Are we to believe that there exists a Supreme Being who is so shockingly unjust as to let Baptists go to heaven simply because they happened to be raised in Baptist homes and Buddhists go to hell simply because they were raised in Buddhist homes?

Even if there was a God, it seems logically impossible for one's own salvation to be dependent on the blind chance of a taught belief in His existence. And since nearly all religions require strict belief in their specific version of "the truth" in order to achieve enlightenment, it seems clear that, at the very least, any religion that claims such has completely disproved its own thesis in a omniscient and just Creator. In other words, if there is a "God", He almost certainly can't be anything resembling the conscious, intolerant entity described in modern religion, for the concept collapses under the weight of its own logic.

There are two types of atheism. Negative atheism, sometimes called "weak atheism" or agnosticism, can be defined as the "absence of belief in God." Because it is the believer/theist that is making the assertion "there is a God", the burden of proof is on them; a disbeliever is simply withholding assent to this assumption. Positive atheism, sometimes called "strong atheism", is better defined as "the belief that God does not exist." This is a "positive" position (in philosophical terms) and, though it may sound like splitting hairs at first, is actually quite different. Suppose a guy is murdered, and the police suspect the aforementioned Steve from Accounting. There is a significant difference between not believing Steve is guilty because of a lack of evidence, and believing Steve is not guilty because specific evidence proves his innocence. Positive atheists therefore go a step further in rejecting the "given" that God exists by asserting there is actual, a posteriori (empirical) evidence that He doesn't (or couldn't).

I am, as detailed above, a negative atheist. Strong belief in the existence of God and strong belief in the non-existence of God both require an element of faith which I cannot logically accept. If there is no evidence that Steve from Accounting is a murderer, then we shouldn't lock him up simply because it feels to some like he did it. Even if hundreds of generations insist that he did it. I also disagree with the positive atheists, who believe there is definitive evidence that there can't be a creator of any type, at all. I believe that, too, would close my mind off from possibility, making me equally as foolish as participants in the religions I have formally objected.

In truth, I like to think there is some point to this whole "life" thing, some reason beyond human understanding and comprehension. I like to believe my consciousness will not die when my body does, that all I've absorbed and learned through the years will serve some eventual purpose. But to accept, as definitive answer, only one version of "the truth", this describable entity called "God" defined and tweaked by man for millennia as a way of explaining the unexplainable, seems wrong to me. I just feel it, know it. I am an atheist not because I am afraid, or hateful, or lost in sin, or uninformed, or disillusioned. I am an atheist because I seek understanding and enlightenment, opened doors instead of closed doors, answers instead of excuses. I cannot base all of my beliefs on one hell of an arbitrary, passed-down "given" which those in my society trust in solely because they happened to be born and raised among others who bought it, too.

I'm at least willing to admit I may be wrong. Maybe Jesus was the Son of God and Man, maybe Kerry would be the greatest President in three generations, and maybe the imaginary Steve from Accounting is one sick murdering son of a bitch. Perhaps I'm now guilty of having faith in my lack of faith. But I think it's important to never stop questioning, and am proud to have arrived at this belief on my own terms -- not because someone told me its what I should follow, but because my mind and heart tell me its right.