Question from Camary:
How do you think you’re here today?
Question from Devon:
With no belief in God or Creation, how do you explain the beauty of this world?
Question from Ethan:
How can you think something so complex, something so wonderful as the world can be made out of a big bang?
Answer by SmartLX:
These questions all fit into a category I typically mark with the tag “origins”.
My big article on the apparent design of the world is #4 in my Great Big Arguments series. (Search the site for “great big arguments” and you might save yourself some research, or else want to do more.) It’s got bits about the origin of life, the perception of beauty, the evolution of intelligence and so on. If you’d like to discuss something in more detail, put a comment either here or on that page. (I see all new comments, even on old pages.)
Notice that all the questions above say “how can/do you think/explain…” You folks are challenging me to explain something, so what if I couldn’t? Why would I accept your explanation even then, if I don’t believe in the thing you’re using to explain it? Why would I assume the presence of something even more wonderful, even more exotic and even less explicable than the entire universe and everything in it, which nevertheless has no available, substantial evidence for it? That would just make things worse.
Category: Text
Death And What Probably Doesn’t Come Next
Question from Sarah:
We all have to go somewhere or will happen to us when we die. If you do not think or believe in God or heaven where do you think you will go or what will happen to you when you die?
Question from Jessie:
What are you living for if nothing happens after you die?
Question from Rachel:
I know you don’t acknowledge a God, but do you believe that we have a soul or that there is some sort of afterlife?
Question from Emily:
What do you believe will happen to your soul after you die? Christians believe that we have a purpose beyond death and that our souls will be in heaven. If you’re not going anywhere but the ground what comfort can you or your family find in death?
Question from Elizabeth:
Where do you think that you’ll go after you die?
Question from Brooke:
What makes you think that God doesn`t exist, and if he doesn`t what comes next? What is there to live for?
Question from Heather:
I know you do not believe in heaven or hell, but where do you believe your soul goes after you die?
Answer by SmartLX:
Looking again at this sudden deluge of questions, I notice they all arrived within ten minutes of each other, so I reckon the questioners are in a group somewhere. Welcome to you all, and I’ll get to everyone before too long.
I’ve answered the main thrust of the above questions once before in Death: Just Curious, but as I’ve said I’m happy to retread old ground for newcomers. (Brooke, for the first part of your question, see the post immediately before this one.)
An afterlife would require something of a person’s identity, mind, memory and so forth to persist after death. All evidence indicates that these things operate entirely within the physical brain, which is completely irreparable mere minutes after it loses its supply of oxygen from the bloodstream. Even while people live, physical damage to the brain can rob them of their memories, drastically change their personalities or turn them into complete “vegetables”. A “person” does not appear to be a separate entity from the tissue and bio-electrical activity in his or her head, as suggested by the concept of a soul, so there’s no good reason to believe in souls.
That said, I have heard from a few atheists who believe in an afterlife and even in ghosts (as you can see here, on the old archive). This is not a contradiction as their explanations do not require the existence of gods; they tend to focus more around energy. I say to them just what I say to others: present the evidence.
I’ve just said that there’s no good reason to believe in souls. A not-terribly-good reason to believe in them would be that if they don’t exist, there is no comfort to take from death or nothing to live for. Even if both were true (and I’ll get to them presently), you would be reasoning that souls are real because it would be better if they were real. This is wishful thinking, and it has no power to determine what really is or isn’t. Formally, it’s known as an appeal to consequences and is recognised as a logical fallacy. More simply put, it just doesn’t follow. Fortunately, things aren’t quite so bleak.
Death is always a loss to the living. There can however be different sources of comfort in death, even tragic death, for those left behind. For those who willingly sacrificed themselves for noble causes, such as the lives of others, we can celebrate their bravery and selflessness even as we mourn. For those who led full lives, we can reflect on their legacies. For those who died with important work unfinished, we can take up a cause in their names. Most obviously, the deceased will no longer suffer whatever pain and anguish led up to their deaths, so at the very least there’s that. If horrible people die, people we wish had been punished more for their misdeeds, at least they can’t hurt anyone anymore.
As for why we would want to live if there’s no life after this, why wouldn’t we want to make the most of the one life we know we have? I’m sure you value this life too; Heaven is meant to be all that and a bag of chips, but are you all constantly wishing and hoping that any moment a car would kill you instantly and send you straight there (indicating that God’s plan had finished with you)? I doubt it. We all have things we want to do before we die – romance, kids, careers, travel, charity, art – and the possible existence of a subsequent (but likely very different) life doesn’t change that. Even the religious are in the dark about their gods’ supposed plans, so apart from doing their bit to propagate their religions, they choose their own purposes in life as well. Atheists just leave out the religious bits.
Why I’m An Atheist
Question from Jenna:
Did God disappoint you in anyway that caused you not to believe? Or do you just not believe because no one ever taught you the right thing?
Question from Ryan:
What event(s) in your life made you believe there is no god?
Question from Randy:
In what part of your life have you decided or came to the conclusion that there is no God?
Question from Carly:
As an Atheist, why do you think that people believe in God if you don’t? With that answer, why don’t you believe in God?
Answer by SmartLX:
We’ve had a sudden influx of questions, some of which are fairly similar, so I may be grouping more together in the short term.
My essay “Why I am an atheist” on Pharyngula will answer the above questions. It was a gift to PZ so I won’t reproduce it here, but click the link. It won’t bite.
Edit: Carly, your question is related but slightly different. Most people believe because, like me, they’ve been brought up to believe in a particular faith but, unlike me, they’ve never seen a good reason to question it. This is not a comment on their intelligence or anything else; chances are, by the time they’re of an age where they might question their faith, they’re so emotionally invested in it that they see doubt as downright dangerous and actively avoid challenges. (This emotional investment is what I inadvertently allowed to fade away.) All those who have been converted by “religious experience”, religious apologetics, doorknockers and so forth are of insignificant number compared to the billions who simply accept what they’re told as children.
Irreducible Complexity and Irredeemable Credulity
Question from Tomas:
What is your take on Irreducible Complexity? From what I have read, it appears to be Intelligent Design in a new wrapper but it does have some new arguments to it.
Also, it seems like any new religious “hypothesis” on the existence of God (or any god) is an old one that is simply retold to account for any existing argument against it. Isn’t that proof that their “hypotheses” are just efforts to grasp at straws since none of them have held up against any scrutiny?
Why can’t people who claim to believe in God (or supernatural entity) just simply have faith? Why must they try to prove it with facts which ultimately disprove their God?
Answer by SmartLX:
For those who came in late, irreducible complexity is the idea that certain biological mechanisms such as the eye and the bacterial flagellum cannot have evolved gradually, because if they were one step less complex or if they were missing one component then they wouldn’t work at all, which is not beneficial and therefore would not be naturally selected. It’s a specific type of the general creationist argument that evolution can’t have produced something or other.
If something were actually established as genuinely irreducibly complex, then by definition it really couldn’t have evolved. Where it falls over is that nothing has ever been established as such. The mechanisms and physical features which are presented as irreducibly complex invariably have very good explanations of how they likely evolved. These explanations usually (always?) pre-date the idea of irreducible complexity, sometimes by over a century, which means those using the argument haven’t even checked to see if it’s valid for their chosen biological object.
To give you a general idea of the explanations that exist, before we move on, there are a few possible sources of the kind of complexity that can appear irreducible.
– Multiple components can evolve in tandem.
– A slightly less complex version of something might have served an entirely different purpose until one last mutation turned it to its current function.
– A delicate structure might have formed in the presence of other supporting structures which were later dismantled and discarded, like scaffolding.
My series on the Great Big Arguments covers almost every kind of argument for God that it’s possible to make. Even the latest apologetics are heavily based on what has come before, to the extent that after 9 pieces I really don’t know what further Great Big Arguments I can write about. Even the last one was only on a variation. (Folks, let me know if I’ve missed something.)
An apologist would say that just because an argument has not been universally acknowledged as sound doesn’t mean it isn’t dead right, and the fact that people reject the arguments for God doesn’t mean He’s not real (and it’ll be their own problem when they face judgement). I say that just because an argument has been regularly refuted for years, decades or even centuries doesn’t mean it can’t still convince people who don’t know the refutations, and therefore pretty much all of the existing arguments are still useful when proselytising. Some organisations (such as dedicated apologetics ministry CARM) have actually advised against using certain convoluted arguments, but even these archaic rejects still crop up everywhere.
Some believers do keep their faith to themselves; it’s just that since we always hear from the bible-bashers instead, it’s easy to forget about the quiet ones. Those who do try to spread the faith, apart from simply wanting those around them to agree with them, are often commanded to do so by their religious leaders at all levels. It’s certainly easy to interpret most holy texts as demanding followers to recruit. Religions themselves would not have survived so long or become so popular if conversion and assimilation wasn’t an intrinsic part of their lifestyle. It’s a part that some believers reject, but those who embrace the call of the missionary are motivated to do the work for everyone.
An Atheist Pastor
Question from Pastor Tim:
For the last six years I have been a youth pastor at a church I grew up in. I met my wife in this church and “we” plan to raise our kids in this church as well. A year ago I enrolled in Bible college and I became extremely interested in knowing everything there is to know about Christianity, the origin of the Bible, and also other religions. This is where my current problem began.
You see, the more I learned the more I realized that the Bible is a complete fabrication. At first I just had a few doubts but now I realize just how crazy the whole thing really is. I’m on the verge of being kicked out of school for some of the questions I’ve been asking. I’m trying to save face at church but I teach dozens of kids about a God I no longer believe in. I know you’re probably getting a kick out of this but for me it is total hell (pun intended). Just the other day my senior pastor wanted to know what has gotten into me and I wanted to tell him but it would just kill my wife, her family and mine.
I feel like a robot and I dread Sunday school. It makes me wonder though if there are others at church that feel the same but keep it to themselves for fear of being socially outcast. I have no one to talk to – everyone around me is out of their minds. It’s a holy ghost charismatic church. You know – the whole speaking in tongues – slain in the spirit deal?
I have been trying to teach less about god and more historical significance of stuff in the Bible but I feel like a total fraud and I know this is not what the parents want for their kids. I want so bad to come out but I just can’t; our whole families go to this church. I think if I tell her it will lead to divorce. I love my wife and still believe strongly in a lot of the good values taught in the Bible. Something has got to give, please help!
Answer by SmartLX:
Tim, it sounds like it sucks to be you, and believe me when I say this does not make me happy. I don’t do this often, but I’ve changed your first name in your “question” so that someone in your family or congregation doesn’t stumble across this site and peg you. I’m not saying that “coming out” to your community as an atheist is necessarily the wrong thing to do, but if you go for it you should definitely wait until you’re ready.
The good news is that you are far from alone. May I introduce the Clergy Project, an online community specifically created (partly by Daniel Dennett) for members of the clergy who have lost their faith. They’ll have far better advice than me on dealing with your still-religious friends and family, telling your secret, making a living after leaving the church and so on. They’ve had a lot of good publicity lately, so you can go in with your eyes open. Importantly, they are completely confidential until you decide to go public, which you may choose not to.
I urge you to present yourself to the Clergy Project, because people in your unfortunate situation are the very reason it exists. Dennett conducted a study beforehand which found huge numbers of non-believing clergy, most of them feeling just as trapped as you. I say again, you are not alone.
Why isn’t evolution completely impossible?
Question from Abdul:
How can a undirected process create DNA that is way more complex than Microsoft or a quantum computer?
Simplicity cannot create complexity.
I don’t get Darwinian evolution, can you guys please help me out.
Answer by SmartLX:
Abdul, I thank you for correctly referring to evolution as an undirected process. Many who challenge it make a point of calling it a random process, which it certainly is not.
Complexity can indeed emerge from simplicity. The laws of the universe allow order and information to increase in a given area, usually with the help of an influx of energy. Otherwise there would be no increases in complexity at all, even with intelligent assistance; buildings could not be erected, coherent thoughts could not be assembled and ink could not be arranged to form words. Practically nothing we do would be possible, and physics wouldn’t be able to explain anything at all.
If an increase in order and complexity is physically possible, then how does it happen without guidance? It can definitely happen by chance, such as when the letters in alphabet soup float into the order of a word or a name, but just as often it happens by deterministic physical mechanisms doing their own thing. Evolution gets its raw material from mutations, which can duplicate genes in a sequence or recombine them in many different ways.
Once the mutations have happened, some life forms have the mutation and some don’t. If the mutation has any effect, positive or negative, on the likelihood that a life form will survive and procreate, then over multiple generations the proportions of the population with and without the mutation will change. Over thousands of generations, mutations upon mutations can have profound effects on the nature of the life forms. Life has had about 3 billion years to compound this effect and produce the immense biological diversity we see today.
If there really were a saying as simple as “simplicity cannot create complexity” that immediately disproved Darwin’s theory of evolution, it would not have survived for 150 years. Most scientists barely have the resources to do their own research, let alone sustain a massive worldwide conspiracy to pretend that a bogus theory is valid. Why would they do that anyway? It’s a terrible way to promote atheism, for example, because many scientists are still religious and many religious people accept evolution. No, the theory has survived as a scientific theory because it has enormous explanatory power, requires very few assumptions and is backed by a mountain of evidence.
A “Survey”
Question from Leonard:
Don’t you find it to be most odd that there is something instead of nothing?
Wouldn’t it be more logical and simpler for there to be nothing?
Answer by SmartLX:
These are not survey questions, Leonard. This is an argument, nominally rephrased as a pair of questions. Any questionnaire containing the above is essentially a push poll, and certain ethical implications follow.
It might be logical to think that there should currently be nothing, but only if we knew of any point in the history of the universe when there was nothing, and we don’t. As far as we know there has always been something, and our current laws of conservation of matter and energy tend to back that up. We have no idea what preceded the Big Bang, if anything, and it is far beyond our current understanding to simply assume there was nothing at all.
Putting this aside, the usual follow-up to this idea by apologists is that the only way there can currently be something is if someone created it. Firstly, if there was someone there then there wasn’t nothing, and secondly, where did the someone come from? Yes, many theists object to that question because their chosen someone is supposedly eternal and uncaused, but then what actually stops the universe itself from being that way? Adding an uncaused, intelligent, inexplicable being such as a god never, ever simplifies the circumstances, and is quite unnecessary unless you impose arbitrary constraints on the universe – which the god immediately breaks to justify itself.
Living Without God
Question from Sophia:
I don’t know how many atheists have been Christians before, but I have questions as a Christian. The idea that a God is there for forgiveness, mercy, and justice is very comforting to me. There are certain things humans are unable to do. For instance, law enforcement may fail, but our free will brings it’s own consequences and has its own justice. Let me make it clear now that I don’t believe in hell. Humans make their own hell. We live in one already, full of war and hate, but our responsibilities include keeping the beautiful things alive.
Moving on… I have specific questions. Feel free to answer any or all of these questions.
1. When someone fails you, like a parent, spouse, or even yourself, what gives you comfort?
2. I’m sure most atheists think that “doing the right thing” is important, but why are some things right and others wrong if these precedents aren’t set by a higher authority, but by our own twisted judgment?
3. If you were once part of a different religion and then turned to atheism, why? Please go further than saying that “Christians still do bad things, what’s the point.” (I get that too often. If that’s your viewpoint, that’s fine, just explain further.)
Answer by SmartLX:
At least half of all atheists in the Western world were once members of a religion, and many still are in an official sense even though their faith is gone. I was raised as a Catholic myself.
Law enforcement may well fail to punish the guilty for their crimes. Human nature endows us with empathy and therefore usually a measure of guilt for our malicious actions, regardless of whether we’re caught, but it’s still a fact that some crimes and awful deeds go completely unpunished. It does not follow that there must be an afterlife and an ultimate judge in order to catch those who escape justice. Justice is an ideal we strive for, not a necessary physical component of the universe. If there’s no judgement after death, it’s up to us humans to give as many people their just deserts while they’re alive, because no one else will, and that’s that. A thing is not made true simply because it would be better if it were true, or bad or unthinkable if it were false. (Few things described as “unthinkable” really are unthinkable; most of them are just unpleasant.)
To your specific questions, then.
1. Sometimes the same person who’s “failed me” or caused me trouble or harm is the one who gives me comfort afterwards; that’s what it means to apologise, and to atone. Aside from that, I’m not a complete misanthrope, because the entire human race never lets me down all at once. There’s always some good in someone somewhere.
2. Our collective sense of right and wrong has changed over time. Slavery has been declared more and more unambiguously wrong, for instance, while different forms of personal freedom have gradually achieved the status of universal human rights. That alone is a very good indicator that right and wrong are not determined by some ultimate authority and then irreversibly fixed. That said, our judgement as a society has had a very long time to un-twist itself, as we constantly strive for ethical and legal standards with the greatest benefit. What we call “right” and “wrong” is relatively stable these days and helps us get along pretty well, though they’re still making changes to laws and so on. If we don’t assume our morality is absolute, we can always improve it.
3. I didn’t declare myself an atheist because I thought Christians were bad. I realised that I didn’t believe in any gods anymore, let alone the Christian one. It was that simple. (Incidentally, while bad Christians don’t indicate the lack of a god, neither do good Christians indicate the presence of one.)
Eternity, and not by Calvin Klein
Question from Brenton:
Is the universe eternal?
Answer by SmartLX:
We don’t know, but whether it is or not, neither option makes a god very likely.
Cosmologists now almost universally accept the Big Bang as a factual event which occurred about fourteen billion years ago. A far greater point of contention is whether the matter and energy in the universe have always existed, and were simply in some other state before they coalesced into the singularity which “exploded”, or if the Big Bang was truly the beginning of time and causality.
If the universe is eternal, there is no need for a creator god. Most theistic gods are regarded by their believers as eternal and thus in no need of their own creators; this is a real possibility for the universe itself.
If the universe is not eternal, and nothing material preceded it, then either it was created or produced by something or it emerged directly from nothing. Neither of these can be judged as more or less likely than the other based on our experience so far because, while we have no direct evidence of anything emerging from nothing (though quantum mechanics may suggest this possibility), we have no evidence at all of anything being created from nothing as creator gods are meant to have done.
That leaves the idea that something material (or with direct material influence) and outside the universe pre-dated it, and somehow resulted in its emergence. Again a god is possible here, but it could also be another previous universe, or the “quantum foam”, or any number of hypothetical entities. A god as an explanation is the least useful entity in this scenario because a full-blown intelligent god is itself an inexplicable cause, and it’s no more likely than any of the others. It’s also the only one which requires that we posit anything supernatural.
I realise that I’ve read quite a lot into your very simple question, but delving into these issues is the usual purpose of asking questions like this on an atheist website.
I Don’t Get No Respect, No Respect At All
Question from Patrick:
I’m fifteen years old, so obviously, living in their house, I still have to do as they say. Because of this, I still go to church with them and all that, although I do tell them that singing and dancing and all that are things that I’m uncomfortable with. In church, if I sit down, my mom waves for me to stand up, and if I don’t she grabs my arm and pulls me up. She’ll try to dance with me and stuff, and it just gets annoying. Now I do understand that she’s taking my best interest at heart and stuff, and I do understand that she doesn’t want me to go to hell and crap, but seriously? How can I show her my views and prove my views to her so maybe she’ll take me more seriously?
Last week, my mom, my sister and I all visited our cousins, and when I told my Aunt I was an atheist, my mom rolled her eyes and shook her head at my Aunt. I don’t speak out against my mom because she’s extremely religious, but I would like at least a little bit of respect! I told her I was uncomfortable with standing and singing and stuff because I’ve been pretending all my life and I don’t want to pretend anymore.
If I ask if I can stay home from church, she tells me that that is not something a good ‘Christian’ should do. If I hint anything on not believing in her god, she threatens to call the pastor to come and pray for me and talk to me and stuff. IT DRIVES ME NUTS!
So basically, how do I get her to see how serious I am about this?
Answer by SmartLX:
Remember that your mother is under a LOT of peer pressure to “raise you in the church”, especially if it’s the kind of church where they dance in the pews. Clearly she knows that you don’t believe, or at least that you’ve lost your enthusiasm for the whole thing, but this fact reflects badly on her from the perspective of her friends in the congregation, her pastor and possibly other members of your family. That’s not to say that she isn’t also genuinely concerned for the welfare of your soul, but even if she wasn’t she couldn’t easily let you out of the flock without what she would see as serious social consequences.
The usual assumption among churchgoers is that church attendance raises religiosity. That’s often true if you’re religious to begin with, but if you’ve already rejected the core claims of the religion then church can have the opposite effect. If you think your mother really thinks that dragging you to church will bring you back to the faith, talk to her after a service and ask her what specific parts of that service she thought would have done that. (Churches are all about spreading the Word, but many are at a loss when faced with the idea that the Word might not stick.) If you think she’s primarily “keeping up appearances”, point out that a sullen, reluctant teenager in the midst of all that forced joy stands out a lot more than an absent teenager.
I don’t know your pastor of course, but it might actually be worth escalating to him, whether you contact him directly or your mother brings him in. If he thinks he can roll out one of the Great Big Arguments and bamboozle you into believing after a few minutes, he’s in for a surprise. If he thinks your skepticism could spread to others in the church, he might even ask your mother not to bring you for a while. If he prays for you, it won’t do anything, so what do you care?
If the pastor can’t make any headway himself, he may tell your mother to redouble her own efforts to restore your faith, which at least will force her to confront the issue, respect that your position is sincere and open a dialogue with you. Once you’re at that stage, you’ll probably solve the problem just by being honest. As I’ve said to others on this site, the religious can become far less eager to engage with doubters if they think they themselves may be made to doubt or question. If you’ve read any of the “New Atheist” material from the last six years, you’ve got some idea how to turn religious apologetic back onto itself. If you need help with anything specific, comment and ask or search the site.
I know it’s a rotten spot to be in, but remember it won’t last because you won’t be fifteen forever. When you’re an adult, your mother will have far less power over your weekly routine. That said, if you can deal with this now you can enjoy your teenage years more without this adversarial aspect of your relationship with your mother. That’s a good reason for her to cut it out too, if you can get it across.