I hesitate to write this column because of the likelihood of my receiving a gargantuan amount of oppositional replies that stem from the closed minds that it, or any similar column for that matter, fails to penetrate. I am not writing and apologizing for my belief that God does not exist, though it seems many people today (and over history) think such a belief necessarily warrants that confession. The manner with which people speak of Richard Dawkins would almost confuse any man on the street to think he was not actually a biologist but rather a murderer or slandering immoralist. I find it quite surprising and somewhat amusing when people label this man as anti-theistic as if we didn’t know that already. He is an atheist after all. What I find hypocritical is that these statements come from theists who are equally anti-atheistic. At least Dawkins doesn’t claim my eternal damnation if I fail to accept his beliefs. Regardless, my regrettably brief introduction to atheism barely scratches the tip of the iceberg in this column, but I shall hope to concisely put forth a few ideas anyway. I hope to be treated respectfully as an atheist. Responses concerning my eternal damnation from the reader will fail, in my opinion, to uphold the necessary intellectual integrity required of academic conversation concerning God and His existence. Moving along, I also want to make it clear that I cannot disprove the existence of God and I do not intend to do so. The very nature and description of God makes it impossible to do so. However, because it is impossible to completely disprove God, it must be realized that it is equally impossible to prove God. Thus, the concept of “faith” should be readily obvious at this point. That theologians (William Lane Craig comes to mind) claim to prove God’s existence through surreptitious arguments and statistics is scholarly disheartening and simply preposterous. Simultaneously, it is unfortunate that some atheists claim to disprove God’s existence through their raffish arguments. The best theists and atheists know the ambit within which they must work in such a debate. My personal atheism stems not from discontent with God because of the evidence of evil in the world or any worldly imperfection that is assumed to be incompatible with the omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresent and omnibenevolence of most theists’ God. For that matter, if I were to believe in God, I would not view the problem of evil as a theological problem but rather as evidence to the grandest underachievement of the perfect Abrahamic God. I have read countless responses to Mike Freenor’s article (“God is as evil as the world”) that confidently proclaim God’s granting of free will to humans as the explanation of evil as if they have completely solved the philosophical, and more appropriately, psychological problem of individual free will. Well, in that case, I suppose the countless promising neuroscience research assignments concerning free will should be canceled in light of such stupefying undergraduate psychological gnosis. As for the rest of us, I assert that such proclamations are products of cheap thinking and superficial “philosophy.” Typical evangelical responses such as this are intellectually hollow. Thus, I have hoped to clarify that my atheism does not stand from opposition to God from personal circumstance or experience, but rather is a product of intellectual dissatisfaction with the God hypothesis concerning the universe and all its contents within. Advancements in modern psychology and neuroscience illustrate that humans are perhaps inevitably conditioned to think and behave religiously as a consequential defect or by-product of other natural cognitive processes (especially inference systems, see Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained”) slowly formed from evolution. The fact that religion, if it turns out to be a product of evolutionary psychology (which it appears to be), still exists in society and has not fallen extinct to natural selection, is evidence that it must provide society some good, not that it was instilled by God. Karl Marx’s remark about “religion as the opiate of the masses” hits the nail right on the head. However, theistic-inspired philanthropy should not be overlooked here. Personally, I believe religion to be the betrayal of pure reason and the opposition to intellectually honest truth seeking. Outside the circular logic of religious texts themselves, I find little reason to believe (despite Craig’s and others’ futile arguments) the God hypothesis as truth. Therefore, I concur with Bertrand Russell — there is not enough evidence to warrant belief.
E-mail Warren at [email protected].