Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 5


The Road Towards Antitheism

I didn't immediately become the antitheist that I am today after studying philosophy in college. After my lapse into hedonism, I gradually reignited my interest in philosophy, but the process took years. As late as my mid-twenties I was more or less still an atheist who kept his beliefs largely to himself. As I had done in my teens, it was relatively rare when I spoke out on atheism and I usually only ever exposed my beliefs in a reactionary fashion, such as when I was confronted with someone else’s theistic or supernatural claims that I thought was nonsense. Over the years however I did seem to increasingly enjoy initiating conversations about politics, science, god and religion and began enjoying the challenges of pitting together antithetical worldviews. I also briefly became an agnostic for a short while when I began concluding that knowledge of the existence of god was unknowable. I guess you can say that agnosticism was the closest I ever veered away from atheism. This foray was short lived however because I came right back to atheism when I realized that agnostics are really just atheists, since anyone who doesn’t actively believe in god is technically an atheist. I also had a lot of trouble reconciling the seemingly contradictory properties of the concept of god, along with what we would expect to see in the natural world if there was a god.  

With my passion in philosophy and science having been reignited, I began seeking out like-minded company. It was shortly thereafter that I caught wind of the creationism vs. evolution debate that was raging across the US and my red flag went off. I suddenly became aware that various states and school districts were trying to get creationism taught in science classrooms under the new guise of “intelligent design”. I thought to myself, “Haven’t we been there before? Wasn’t this issue of teaching evolution in school settled in like the 1920s or something?” I vaguely remembered reading Inherit the Wind in high school about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee when they put evolution on trial, but I had completely forgotten that the teacher who was accused of teaching evolution actually lost that trial. It wasn’t until 1968 in the Epperson v. Arkansas case that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the banning of the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional. Slowly after this, school districts across the US replaced biblical creation with evolution in the science classroom, but the creationists were always at it trying to get forms of intelligent design taught alongside with evolution. Personally, I never recalled anything but evolution being taught in biology class, but I of course grew up in liberal New York.

Upon realizing that in the twenty-first century there were young earth creationists at it again trying to get their faith-based nonsense rebranded under a different name and taught in public schools, I felt in a sense a call to arms. I started taking my atheism a lot more seriously. I started researching into all the old tactics theists were using to advance their theistic agenda. I began reading about atheism and watching lectures and debates between creationists and evolutionists, and between atheists and theists. I became obsessed with all the arguments made for and against the existence of god, and realized that there was an enormous amount of people engaged in public debates on the matter. And then I came across Christopher Hitchens who I would come to greatly admire. He’s the polemic type of militant atheist who is actively opposed to religious belief and argued that religious belief, far from being benign and humble, is actually a very harmful and negative belief system. His arguments resonated profoundly with me and introduced a new word to me: antitheist. He was the voice I was looking for; he was the person I wanted to be. He articulated many of the negative views I already held about religion (albeit better): its appeal to authority over reason; its ignorance to scientific facts; its misrepresentation of the nature of our origins and the truth; its emphasis on faith and dogma over evidence; and its primitive ethical systems developed by stupefied iron age desert dwellers who didn’t even know the earth was round. I can go on and on, but you get the point.

Having never been religious myself, and having never spent any significant amount of time around religious people, I began to fully realize just how dangerous the religious way of thinking potentially was. I had a few run-ins with stereotypically ignorant religious types over the years. I knew I didn’t agree with them or particularly like them, but their effects were always at an arms-length from me, never able to wield any significant power in my domain. I had now known exactly what they were capable of when they worked together. It wasn’t just trying to get creationism taught in school that bothered me, the religious right in the US was trying to erode away hard won civil liberties that formed the pillars of our secular democracy and the separation of church and state. I became more political and realized that most who debate on behalf of religion were also against secularism – the one condition I draw that I cannot tolerate being violated. I realized that there was also an opinion war at stake here: the more religious someone is, the less likely they are to support a secular government and the separation of church and state. Therefore, I realized that it was vital that atheists, agnostics, skeptics, freethinkers and anyone who supports the preservation of the Establishment Clause and a society that uses reason and evidence, needed to continue fighting the good fight and make the case for a rational, secular, humane society where its citizens are free from the tyranny of dogmatic religious belief being imposed on them by their own government.  

And thus, the road towards antitheism was paved.



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Monday, April 15, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 4


Nihilism And The Search For Deeper Meaning

For a while in my early twenties I suppose you could say that I had lapsed into a kind of hedonistic existential nihilism. I started partying more to the point where it basically became my life. Drinking and smoking marijuana became an almost daily routine. The metal head crowd that I had hung out with in high school had fragmented into smaller groups who shared common mutual interests and I had followed along with the ones who were the more heavy drinkers and users. My best friend at the time was a Russian immigrant who came to the US as an early teen. He actually believed in the ancient Norse gods Odin and Thor. Although most of the time we were busy drinking and smoking and going to nightclubs, we occasionally had an intellectual conversation where our world views came into the light. I’d ask him how sincere he was about his beliefs and if he actually thought Odin was real. I’d occasionally attack the logic he used to justify his beliefs and I quickly found out just how irrational some belief systems are and what absurdities they can be founded on. My best friend had came to the conclusion that Odin was real when he was camping one day in the woods and had run out of water. Feeling like he was going to die of thirst, he prayed to Odin and shortly thereafter found a bottle of water sitting in the woods. To him, this was a sign from Odin that he was real, and from that moment onward, Odin was his god. Now mind you, I was probably high when he told me this story, but you can imagine for yourself how utterly preposterous his applied logic was in determining that his god was real.

Most of my other friends were atheist, agnostic, or lapsed Catholics. I did however have one Muslim friend who was one of the heaviest partiers of us all.  One day after driving me home from a party he gave me a book entitled, A BRIEF ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING ISLAM. He told me that he was meaning to give it to me for some time because he recognized in me that I was smart and a thinker about some of the bigger and deeper issues. It was one of those books that tries to use modern scientific discoveries to show that they were predicted in the Qur’an hundreds of years ago before anyone else could have known. This is offered as a case that the Qur’an is “proof” that it was divinely inspired and therefore that Islam is the one true faith. Now the skeptic in me has looked at this supposed “proof” and concluded that it is a ridiculous stretch of the imagination. The Qur’an is so vague in its descriptions of these purported “facts” that it take great leaps of faith to reconcile them with modern science, and on top of that, it gets many of its “facts” flat out wrong. But at that time, I wasn’t fully aware of this, and after briefly looking through the book, I literally threw it down on a shelf and it collected dust for about 5 years.

During this nihilistic party phase in my early twenties I just wasn’t that interested in religion and philosophy. That early spark of intrigue had faded and became replaced by hedonistic indulgence. Living in New York City where there are thousands of bars and clubs, my life revolved around bar hoping and club hoping, chasing after the next one night stand, and getting fucked up on beer, liquor, marijuana and the occasional club drug. I was a nihilist living in the moment, working the odd job here and there, with no deeper purpose, meaning or direction. The occasional discussion about metaphysical worldviews always involved me articulating my skepticism and disbelief but it was almost never seriously challenged because most of the people in my social circle either weren’t believers, or if they believed, they weren’t religious about their beliefs. Although I had an affinity for indulgence myself, as the years went on I started gravitating towards deeper more intellectual topics. I wanted to have intellectual conversations with my friends instead of just talking about whatever gossip and drama happened to be going on at the time. I started growing tired of the mindless self-indulgence that I saw going on everyday amongst my friends. I stopped caring about the silly one-upmanship that we were all trying to pull on each other to gratify our precious egos. I was searching for something deeper and more intellectually satisfying in my life but unlike those people who are susceptible to religion, my natural born skepticism wouldn’t steer me towards god.



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Sunday, April 14, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 3


The Atheist Goes to College

When I first got to college I immediately took some courses in philosophy. The philosophy of ethics really attracted me in particular. Unfortunately, at the time I was still in my late teens and was entering the beginning of a heavy party phase, and so my grades were sadly not as good as they could’ve been. However, the seed had been planted, and I began to think more deeply about questions of philosophy and ethics than ever before. I remember being in philosophy class one day and the professor asked everyone to raise their hand if they believed in god. To my amazement, almost everyone in class raised their hand. It turned out that I was one of the few, if not the only atheist in the class. Even with this newfound recognition of my minority status, I never felt any serious pressure to conform to those around me when it came to religion or god perhaps because New York is such a secular city. Even though many people in New York believe in god, they generally aren't religious about and it keep it to themselves.

College is traditionally when we truly grow, and as I started making new friends and spent time with a more diverse crowd of people, I learned that religious belief and concepts of “god” were about as diverse as people’s tastes in food and music. I learned that no two people quite believe in the same concept of god. Many friends I made who called themselves “Catholic” were really only Catholic in title. They had premarital sex, used birth control, were pro-choice, they never actually went to church, and on the outside conducted themselves almost indistinguishable from any other secular nontheist. These kinds of people are what I like to call non-religious theists. They technically believe in a god that perhaps intervened a long time ago, but they more or less accept that events that happen in the world are natural, and they aren’t at all religious about their beliefs. I don’t have that much of a problem with these kinds of theists as quite a few of them I have called friends during my life; they’re more like the benign tumors of theism. It’s only if and when they cross the line of secularism that my alarm goes off. So many of those students who raised their hands that day in philosophy class and affirmed their belief in god really just believed in some sort of vague spiritual force or energy that exists somewhere out there, or they believed in some kind of powerful anthropomorphized being they call “God”. It’s another form of relatively benign belief in the supernatural that I can live with, as long as that line of secularism is respected.

Some theists say that colleges are just atheist and secular factories designed to transform good natured god-fearing kids into godless moral relativists. I’ve argued with quite a few of these types over the years, but as I recall, there is a bit of truth to this claim. In my introduction to ethics textbook, which I still have, it does ask the reader to question the source of their morality and we had a few class exercises that challenged the idea of grounding your morals in religion. For example, if you believe that you should do what god says because otherwise he will punish you, we learned in class that in a sense it would turn morality into a mere obedience system whereby the actual “morals” themselves could be meaningless and all that would matter is what you believe god commands you. God could command you to plunder and kill, and you would be obligated to do so unless face his punishment. This was my first introduction to what I would later learn is called the Euthyphro Dilemma and it was the first time I had thought about morality in such a way. Most college students who came from religious backgrounds who were confronted with this dilemma I’m sure have had to reconsider why they believe it’s good to obey god. These kinds of courses do force the theist to reexamine their beliefs and I suppose that is why many theists think colleges exist only to churn out godless secularists. As a non believer, was never challenged in college on the metaphysical grounding of my beliefs, but I was challenged often as to why I hold certain ethical views – but that was the whole point of the class. Contrary to what many theists presume, we were never taught the idea that moral relativism was the solution to all of the world’s problems.

While cleaning my apartment I came across some old college term papers from one of my philosophy classes. There was an assignment where we had to create a mock trial whereby we were to imagine ourselves being accused like Socrates was in The Apology of blasphemy or some sort of thought crime and we were to write a transcript of the trial’s proceedings. So (naturally) I imagined myself living in a world where atheism was a crime and I was put on trial and asked to justify my lack of belief in god. In it, I explain to the prosecutor why I’m an atheist:


I myself am an Atheist, I don't think religion is evil, I understand it has many good aspects of it, but I just do not have a place for it in my life. Let us say for example I didn't live in this era and place of religious freedom. I probably wouldn't be an Atheist, but lets [sic] say I was in a time and place where Atheists faced punishment or even death. I am accused by the authority for not believing in God. My devotion to Atheism is so that I am willing to [face] whatever punishment they have for me, even death.

Pros [Prosecutor]: So you began to question the very existence of God. Was there a particular moment in your life when you began to question God, such as a traumatic event or was it a gradual process?
Me: It was a gradual process. I didn't wake up one morning and say "I don't believe in God." I guess as I got older I just didn't except the explanations religion gives you. I mean it's so vague.
Pros: So you weren't convinced from what you were taught as a child. And I’m assuming you have your own theory and beliefs of how the world was created. What is it that you believe in?
Me: Evolution.
Pros: Evolution. I see. I've heard of this theory. Something about how we humans, are descendents from Monkeys.
Me: Yes, and it was the Apes not the Monkeys.
Pros: And this is what you believe in? You are positively sure that evolution is true.
Me: From the evidence I have see, yes, and it makes a whole lot more sense to me than religion had.

It's funny how I justified the world's existence through evolution, which not only does it not address the origin of the universe, it doesn't even address the origin of life itself! At nineteen, I wasn't as knowledgeable about the cosmological arguments or any of the other ones which theism uses. (That didn't stop me from getting an A on the paper though.)


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Friday, April 12, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 2


Natural Born Skeptic

So there I was, a kid growing up in New York City in the 1990s, hailing from a secular home, and completely non-religious. I wasn’t all that different from my peers around me to be honest with you. New York is what I like to call the secular metropolis. Most of my peers and friends growing up weren’t religious at all. None of any of my close friends went to church. Belief in god and religion almost never came up in conversation. Looking back it seemed we were all a bunch of teenage nihilists, with a healthy rebellious spirit. We’d rather drink beer, talk about music and girls and ideas on how to get into trouble to keep us from being bored. Throughout all of my teen years I went through life basically living under the assumption of atheism. I seemed to have an intrinsic inclination towards the naturalistic worldview. I don’t recall ever believing that there were supernatural agencies at work behind anything that happened to me. I even thought that the spiritual idea of karma and the “what goes around, comes around” philosophy was nothing but wishful unsubstantiated nonsense. To me, things just happened, and it was foolish to look for a deeper intentional agency to explain what naturally occurred. When I got an outbreak of acne as a teenager, I didn’t go blaming it on god or karma; I blamed it on my genes that I inherited from my parents as the root cause. There was always a rational scientific explanation in my worldview.

There was one time when I was about 8 or 9 and was playing in the park that was part of the apartment complex I grew up in with the neighborhood kids and I remember this strange girl suddenly showed up. Her name was “Linda” and no one had ever seen her before.  She must’ve been visiting someone living nearby, perhaps a relative. I remember her trying to play with us and that all she wanted to talk about was god and that Jesus Christ died for our sins and how we all needed to recognize this amazing event. We weren’t particularly amused. At some point, I remember sitting down with her on one of the benches with my friends and I was spearheading a campaign of rationalism and doubt against her infatuation with the divinity of Jesus and her insistence that we all believe like her. My memories are a little fuzzy, but I recall that we went back and forth debating for hours until dusk that afternoon. Then there were other times when someone would make a speech about how karma rules the world, and I instinctually interjected with a dose of skepticism against such claims letting it be known that there was no such evidence to justify those beliefs. It seems that I was a natural born skeptic, or perhaps a natural born atheist. When Blasé Pascal spoke of the person who says to himself, “[I] am so made that I cannot believe”, he was speaking about people like me.

In high school I started hanging out with these kids who were wannabe Satanists. They were metal heads who fancied death metal and thrash metal and rejected most mainstream alternative and hard rock as being too “gay”. Although I never quite got into death metal, I started getting into Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and thoroughly enjoyed the caricatures they made about the religious right’s hypocrisy. In this new crowd that I hung out with, it was cool to hate on and make fun of religions like Christianity. I couldn’t have imagined what it would’ve been like to have been an actual practicing believer in god during those days. I would’ve most likely have had to keep those beliefs “in the closet” so to speak or else face the taunts and teases and possibility of being ostracized. But still, even in this anti religious environment in the late 1990s in high school, when death metal music and Marilyn Manson were at their peaks, I wasn’t at all a militant atheist. I never spoke adamantly about my lack of faith in god; I was never confrontational or tried to convert others to think like me. I pretty much kept my atheism to myself, only making it publicly known when the topic of god occasionally came up. But whenever god or religion did come up, I always remember expressing the voice of doubt towards anyone who even remotely believed.



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Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey Part 1



Chapter 1: From Skeptic To Antitheist


In The Beginning

I have to be honest when I say that I never actually believed in god. The closest I ever got to believing was a relatively short phase of agnosticism. I was raised in a secular home by secular parents that I guess could be described as culturally Catholic. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, especially in my early years, although I was never really taught the connection between these celebrations and Christianity. I was actually sent to a Christian preschool when I was 4 not because my parents were trying to inculcate me into religion, but because it was cheap. It was there that I was first exposed to religion and was taught some of the traditional Christian beliefs. Before eating we were all instructed to say, “God is good, God is great, let us thank Him for our food, amen.” For some reason I never once questioned why I was being instructed by the teachers to say this before lunch as I recall now years later, especially since we didn't do this at home. I guess it was just something I did as a child who was too young to question the rationale behind what I was being instructed to do.

That year at the Christian preschool academy was not something I look back at as a bad or traumatizing period in my life at all. I actually have fond memories of that time. What’s interesting to me about it is that the experience never rubbed off on me in any lasting way. Once I got home it was back to my godless secular family, where mom and dad were about to separate. My dad, who was never at all a religious person, moved out of the house when I was about 7 and like almost all kids whose parents divorce, I stayed and lived with my mother. My mother was a lapsed Catholic and never inculcated me with any religious beliefs. I remember asking her when I was a kid about 5 or 6 what happens after you die, and I remember her telling me that “when you die you just die.” She said you basically just go into non-existence just like it was before you were born. I’m not sure why, but I was actually satisfied with that answer. I just didn't expect there to be any rewards or punishments of any kind in some afterlife. It all just seemed so natural that when you die, your consciousness becomes extinguished like the flame of a candle that has run out of wick. I never had any problems with the finitude of life and accepting that one day I would die and cease to exist. Reflecting on this years later, I now actually prefer that death is final.

The only exposure in my family to religion was through my maternal grandmother, who my mother, my sister and I would occasionally visit on weekends as she lived only a block away. Although my mom was not religious as an adult, my grandmother was a devout Catholic. She was a biblical literalist who believed that Genesis, Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark and the flood, and all the other preposterous stories in the Bible all had literally happened according to how the Bible said they did. I remember her trying to teach me about the Bible when we would visit and I remember immediately putting up a wall of skepticism. Since I could remember I was always into science and I knew about evolution, the age of the earth and the universe, and I knew that they all contradicted what the Bible said. So like a typical skeptic, whenever my grandmother tried to tell me about Adam and Eve I brought up evolution and dinosaurs and she’d struggle to explain how that all worked with the Bible’s version of history. I must have been about 6 or 7 when these “debates” happened, and looking back, I can see that it was just my nature to be skeptical towards anything that contradicted known science. As I grew older my grandmother would occasionally ask if I had reconsidered Christianity again, I guess hoping that my skepticism was just a phase. But I’d always be honest and tell her that I was still a non-believer and she eventually stopped proselytizing. She was a very nice woman and died of old age when I was 25. I have fond memories of her.



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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey: Introduction


I want to first start off by saying that I’m not one of those atheists that blames all of the world’s problems on religion. Religious belief has certainly been the root cause of some of humankind’s problems throughout our history, but it is no way is the root cause of all of them. There are many reasons why we harm one another and our environment that has little to no religious motivation. So when I criticize the social effects here of religious belief, I am by no means claiming that religion is the root of all evil.

With that out of the way I want to articulate as best I can why I think the atheistic or naturalistic worldview is perfectly rational and justified and is preferable to theism. The atheistic worldview is built on the naturalistic worldview, also known as metaphysical naturalism. For short here, whenever I refer to naturalism or the naturalistic worldview, I will be referring to metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is roughly defined as “a worldview with a philosophical aspect which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences”, or “the thesis that nothing besides the natural world, or nature, exists”. There is also methodological naturalism, which is an aspect of naturalism that assumes metaphysical naturalism to be true when conducting the scientific method (meaning to assume natural causes when doing scientific research since supernatural causes are out of the reach of the scientific method).

Now all of science operates more or less under both aspects of naturalism. Even though this is true, science doesn’t have to be committed to the idea that the natural world is all that there is, and a quick check of history will tell you that many of the famous scientists (or natural philosophers as they were once called) of years past did assume supernatural causality was responsible for observed phenomenon. When Isaac Newton for example was at the limits of his knowledge in understanding the complex rotations of the planets under his theory of gravity, he appealed to the supernatural to explain that which he could not. It took another genius, Albert Einstein, to discover what gravity was by means of a natural explanation – general relativity. Over the years as our scientific knowledge grew larger, these supernatural assumptions were slowly debunked and replaced with natural explanations. And to date, everything that science can currently explain is explained by naturally occurring phenomenon. This has resulted in the widespread prevalence of naturalistic causality and explanation becoming the preferred worldview and methodology of choice for scientists. So if it is true as many theists claim that knowledge of the supernatural dimension is forever off limits to the scientific method, then scientists are justified in their metaphysical and methodological naturalism, because such unreachable knowledge is never objectively observed, fails to sufficiently explain anything, and therefore might as well not even exist.

To claim that a being or phenomenon exists outside of what science can determine through observation and experimentation, is to open up the imagination to potentially unlimited amounts of conjecture as to what might exist beyond our senses. You could literally posit the existence of anything that the human mind could conjure up, customize it anthropomorphically to your liking, and say that it’s off limits to being empirically verified. No one will have any way to know for sure if this being or phenomena exists or not, but if its alleged effects could be explained naturalistically or shown to violate known physical laws, then the naturalist is justified in at least disbelieving this being or phenomenon exists until adequate evidence is produced.

Although, I strongly believe the natural world is all that exists, I don’t claim to know this empirically. It is impossible as far as I know to prove a negative (i.e. that god doesn’t exist). All the atheist or naturalist can hope for is that plausible, natural alternatives can be produced to explain the existence of things believed to require supernatural causes. One criticism of naturalism is that it cannot be scientifically proven. Although that is true, it also cannot be proven that we’re not all living inside a giant computer simulation and that the reality we experience is not in fact real at all. No one can empirically prove or disprove such a claim, and anyone who doubts such a claim, more or less has to take it for granted that their cognitive faculties are reliable. Naturalism, much like atheism, cannot as far as I know be empirically proven, but this is not at all required. All the naturalist/atheist merely has to demonstrate is that there is no valid evidence for the claims made by theists that the supernatural exists and that there exists natural explanatory alternatives, and he or she is justified in holding the disbelief in the supernatural.


When it comes to the claim made by some naturalists that we should only believe what can be scientifically proven, an idea known as scientism, I partly disagree here. First, anything that can be scientifically proven we know to be true, unless all of our cognitive faculties are unreliable – which we have no evidence for and no strong reason to believe. Second, the existence of truths that cannot be scientifically verified, like mathematical and logical truths, aesthetic truths, metaphysical truths (like believing we are not living in a computer simulated reality), and ethical truths are only to a certain degree not scientifically provable. We cannot scientifically prove that 1 + 1 = 2, we cannot use science to prove logic, and we cannot even use logic to prove logic. We could show that if our universe behaves logically by fully understanding its laws of physics, then it would make sense why mathematical and logical truths exist, but ultimately these kinds of truths might have to be accepted as a given set of axioms. Science can show us why we might prefer certain kinds of beauty from the socio-cultural and biological evolutionary process, but science cannot prove whether a specific painting or work of art is beautiful. Aesthetic beauty fundamentally lies in the eye of the beholder. Ethical truths cannot be determined alone by science because once you interpret the scientific data that a given set of ethical values hinges on, you will have to make sense of them using philosophy. Although science does indeed play a role in determining moral values, it doesn’t have the final and only word on morality.

In short, just because we cannot empirically prove that the natural world is all that exists, the naturalist/atheist is rationally justified in adopting naturalism because there is no evidence to the contrary. When it comes to the existence of extraordinary claims, like the supernatural, I essentially employ a verificationist attitude: when adequate evidence is produced, I will incorporate it into my belief system, but until then, the default position is disbelief. This is why atheists are called skeptics. We believe a healthy dose of skepticism is needed in our lives to separate fact from nonsense. This is because all kinds of people are making fantastic claims not only about the supernatural, but also about the paranormal, and they’re offering little to no evidence to back up these claims. As a skeptic, I just can’t go on believing that such claims are all true without adequate evidence because that’s being gullible; and being an agnostic on all such claims would then force me to consider the truthfulness of some of the most imbecile and irrational ideas mustered out of every half-thinking brain. Rather, if the assertion is not knowable a priori, or backed up with adequate evidence, the default position should be disbelief – especially if it violates all the known laws of physics. Therefore, since no such evidence exists that supernatural occurrences and agencies are real, the naturalist is perfectly justified in disbelieving in every unscientific claim.


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Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey





I think it's important that we all tell our stories about how we arrived at our core beliefs. Each and every one of us is unique in our life experiences that shaped our journeys towards atheism. For some of us, it was a long process rife with emotion and with many bumps along the road. For others, it was a sudden realization - an epiphany of disbelief as the result of an argument, a book or a person. I want to share my story with you about my personal relationship with disbelief. It's a very inward and subjective reflection and I'd really appreciate it if others can find hope, inspiration and can relate to it on some level.

Blase Pascal wrote of those who are so made that they cannot believe. That would describe me. I've been a natural born skeptic ever since I can remember and have had the luck of growing up in a secular country, and in a secular metropolis. I've since discovered just how important it is to preserve this system that has benefited me and millions of others so well regardless of whether they've been religious or not.

So please read and enjoy my atheist journey from skeptic to antitheist.



Natural Born Skeptic: My Atheist Journey

Introduction

Chapter 1: From Skeptic To Antitheist
Part 1: In The Beginning
Part 2: Natural Born Skeptic
Part 3: The Atheist Goes To College
Part 4: Nihilism And The Search For Deeper Meaning
Part 5: The Road Towards Antitheism


Chapter 2: Atheism With A Purpose
Part 6: Why Fight Religion?
Part 7: What Kind Of Atheist Are You?
Part 8: Purpose And Meaning In A Godless World
Part 9: Purpose And Meaning In A Godless World (Continued) 
Part 10: The Journey Ahead

Monday, April 8, 2013

The Night I Cried Myself To Sleep


Is there no greater tragedy than life itself? Is there no greater comfort than death? To make amends with our existence we fool ourselves into thinking that we are much more important than we are. The solipsistic enterprise knows no recessions. But realize that we are born into a losing struggle, one in which there can be no victory.

The night I cried myself to sleep, turmoil faded into darkness. I realized that my life was going down a road that I feared travelling, and I had no control over it. I was trapped in a speeding car, the doors were locked, and there was no way I could get out of it. At best, my vain attempts could only slow it down and give myself more time to avoid the inevitable. Hope seemed so out of reach, but it forced me to search for another road I could have turned onto.

When one is full of emotion, clarity of thought gets fuzzy. Being all alone and crying in the midst of one of life's many despairs, I thought of the possibility that I might not be alone, that I might somehow be watched over by some caring force, something that could sympathize with my plight. Was this wishful thinking? Was this the reason why so many of us want there to be a spirit force out there that knows and understands what we're going through when we know that no one else does?

I can certainly see the appeal in wanting there to be a shoulder to cry on when there isn't one. No one's tragedy really wants to go unnoticed, but I personally just couldn't bring myself to accept such metaphysics. I don't do well with wishful thinking. I prefer the coldness of reality over the preference of fantasy. It is a sad idea that one can die alone and unloved but I accept that it's true. Love is perhaps the only light that pierces the darkness of the tragedy that ultimately becomes our lives.


So the night I cried myself to sleep I could easily see why someone going through the same troubles would want a sympathetic heart beating along side them, or at least a loving presence. I had realized that this is why religion so powerfully endures: religion is so inextricably tied to our most fervent human emotions.

Monday, April 1, 2013

The Ontological Argument: Putting The Absurd Where It Belongs


Continuing with my refutations of the most popular arguments made for the existence of god, I thought I'd conclude with the ontological argument. The reason why I've never addressed it before is because I never even thought that the ontological argument was even really an argument. It’s really just an attempt at brain trickery through wordplay. What it surreptitiously tries to achieve is to trick the skeptic into agreeing that it’s possible that god may exist, and once having made this deal with you it moves on to try to “prove” god exists through the logical conclusion of its premises. Many agnostics and weak atheists who haven’t considered the paradoxical nature of god may actually fall for it, but when I first heard it, my bullshit alarm immediately went off. It is generally stated a bit more complex than many of the other arguments for god and there are many versions of it. The version here that I’m going to use is a derivation of philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s Modal Ontological Argument.

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists (i.e. God).

2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.


When I first heard another version of the ontological argument I thought to myself, “Wait a second! You can’t define god into existence!” But that’s exactly what theists were trying to do. Another objection I have is what is meant by “possible world”. From a theistic perspective, a “possible world” might mean any other world god chose to create besides this one which we live in. But that definition presupposes god’s existence in the first place. In logic, a possible world really means possible scenario in our world, but not the existence of another physical or dimensional world. For example, I could say, “There’s a possible world in which I’m rich.” It need not necessarily be another physical world where I’m living the good life, but instead could be an alternative history to this world. I personally like the idea of a possible world being an alternative universe, perhaps in a level 3 multiverse, but for the sake of argument, I will define a possible world as another possible scenario of this world, one in which a hypothetical situation or thought experiment can be conducted.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Why Reason Matters In The Gay Marriage Debate


Why do secularists feel so passionately about the use of reason when it comes to making informed moral decisions? Because our moral values and laws should be based on the most informed, most pragmatic, most practical and rational, and the most scientific and evidence based reasons that are humanly available. They should never be solely based on what has traditionally been done or believed, or what a certain book believed to be divinely inspired says, or be based on some strict ideology exempt from criticism and reform.

The Supreme Court of the United States is taking up the legality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the role of states and the federal government on gay marriage. It is amazing how fast public opinion has changed on the gay marriage issue. The issue first confronted me back in the summer of 2004 when president George W. Bush was running for reelection and it was the hot button social issue. At first I wasn't sure about it. It seemed kind of weird to me. But this was only because I had not really thought about it at all prior to that time and I was making a judgement purely on my emotional reaction to it. Over the years I warmed up to the issue of gay marriage as I became more educated on the matter and of sexuality in general.

I just recently saw a debate between Pastor Doug Wilson and columnist Andrew Sullivan entitled "Is Civil Marriage for Gay Couples Good for Society?" Andrew makes a very emotional opening speech and Pastor Wilson essentially makes the slippery slope argument basically saying that if we allow gays to marry today, Muslim polygamists are going to demand to be able to marry 4 wives tomorrow.



Although there is no evidence that this is the case at all, the main rebuttal Andrew presents is that polygamy is not a state, it's not an orientation, same sex attraction is. Polygamy is therefore a preference, it's not a sexual orientation; no one is born needing 2 or 3 wives. A man may wish to have more than 1 wife, many men do, but a polygamist gets to have at least 1 spouse where as a homosexual would not be allowed to have one if current discrimination continues. That's the meaning of equality: gay people just want to be equal to their heterosexual counterparts. And finally, if a man can have 4,5,10,20,or 50 wives, it upsets the male to female balance ratio making it harder for other men to find wives.

There are still a great many number of religious conservatives who believe that homosexuality is a choice, like the way going to Baskin-Robbins and picking out an ice cream flavor is a choice. They think all gay people are really just straight people who are just tempted by sin. Their ill-informed religious worldview just won't allow them to accept that gay people are born the way they are, and so they'll say things like, "There is no gay gene!", and "There are ex-gay people who have been made straight by the power of the lord!" And of course I naturally have to laugh in response to such confident nonsense. Even if there isn't a gay gene, to anyone educated, sexuality is obviously a complex arrangement of hormonal influences in the womb and neuro-physiological development of the brain.

But while on the slippery slope argument anti-gay marriage proponents seem to love making, let me address a few of them briefly.

Pedophilia - underage children are not old and mature enough to make the kind of important decisions like consenting to a marriage requires. In cultures where children are allowed to marry, it is often their parents that arrange it for them whereby the child has no say in the matter. Consent requires a person of legal age and most scientific research deems that age somewhere around 16-18 for most people. The same goes for sex with children. Pedophilia harms children and takes advantage of them, that's why young children are not able to consent to sex.

Bestiality - animals also cannot consent to marriages and are also in the same class of vulnerability as children are when it comes to sex. Marriage allows such things as the power of attorney amongst spouses and that role cannot be fulfilled by an animal. Can you imagine a lawyer having to deal with a horse or a dog when dealing with a divorce or its spouse's death? There needs to be a human recipient who can give a civil consent in such legal matters. A human being can own an animal, but there is simply no need for them to be married to the animal since all the legal benefits of marriage have no practical application between species.

Think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic. That's the definition of reason. It is very hard to make the case against gay marriage if you cannot appeal to religion. But in a secular democracy like ours we champion individual liberty, equality and freedom of the will so long as it doesn't hurt anybody. Gay marriage harms no one, and the slippery slope arguments made by dissenters are unfounded and fallacious.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Moving The Goal Posts


It's amazing to see Christians and Muslims debate the existence of god today, especially the formidable ones. They have to concede that evolution is now a fact and that it happened, and that Big Bang cosmology accurately describes the history and evolution of our universe - meaning that it is not thousands of years old, but billions. And in order for them to make the case for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, they must use science that actually disproves their own religions, at least in their literal contexts.

This is particularly problematic for Muslims, because they must show their own Qur'an to be false on its claim to scientific "facts" to argue the Kalam. For example, the Qur'an says that the heavens and the earth was made in 6 days in chapters 7:54; 10:3; 11:7; 50:38; & 57:4, then it says it was made in 8 days  in chapters 41:9-12. A Muslim might then say that a "day" might mean a period a lot longer than a literal 24 hour day that we experience, but luckily we also have in the Qur'an the definition of just exactly how long a "day" is for god. The Qur'an says that a day for god is the equivalent of 1000 years for us in chapters 22:47 and 32:5, and then it says that a day for god is 50,000 years for us in chapter 70:4.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

God, Time And Creation: More Problems For William Lane Craig


Central to any argument about whether god exists or not is the notion of time and its relationship with being. "What is time?", is such a profound question that underlies our entire sense of reality. The fundamental nature of time is so puzzling that we do not get a consensus amongst physicists and philosophers alike on what its true properties are.


In philosophy, there are generally two theories on the nature of time, A-theory and B-theory. The A-theory of time states that the present is all that exists. The past no longer exists, and the future is a mere possibility, but doesn't yet exist. There is only the eternal now of the present moment. Because past and future do not exist, they aren't in a sense, real. The A-theory of time is adopted by most Christian theologians as describing the nature of time within Christian theology. Buddhism also interprets time according to the A-theory. The A-theory states that there is a "master time" or absolute time of which all clocks are set to, even if others tick slower of faster. Our intuitions are more closely in tune with the  A-theory of time because we feel that we exist only in the present, and so the present is therefore all that exists.

The B-theory of time states however, that the past, present and future all exist and are therefore all equally real. The past doesn't cease to exist once it's gone and the future doesn't come into being when it is reached at the present moment. Think of it like driving down a road. The town up ahead doesn't begin to exist when you reach it, it already exists, you just haven't gotten to it yet. Under the B-theory of time, the future already exists, it has already happened in a sense, we just haven't gotten to it yet on our subjective journeys through time. This means that notions like the experience of the passage of time are subjective illusions, and indeed time itself is an illusion. Past, present and future are more like destinations that we can in theory, travel to. The B-theory of time runs counter-intuitive to how we generally sense our understanding of time.

Now what does physics say on the matter? Issac Newton's understanding of time as a fixed absolute would agree with the A-theory of time, but we now know that Newton was wrong on time for all his genius. Einstein's general theory of relativity helped close the gap in our knowledge on the true nature of time. Time and space are intertwined in what we now call space-time, and the laws of physics permit the passage of time to increase or decrease depending on your speed relative to other objects, and the strength of gravity where you are. The faster you move and the stronger gravity is around you, the slower time passes.

This has amazing implications on what we think of as "now". We generally believe that the present moment is the same for everyone and everything. While I'm typing this blog, you are currently doing something at the same time. My now is your now, and your now is my now. But general relativity tells us that that is not quite so. If another being living in some far off galaxy at the far reaches of the universe, say 13 billion light years away were to travel away from us at a certain speed, their "now" would actually be our past. And depending on how far or fast they were moving would depend on how far into our past their "now" would be. So their "now" could be a year ago or a thousand years ago before we were even born. If they started traveling towards us, their "now" would encompass our future, even after we might be dead. But you're thinking, "Wait a minute, the future hasn't happened yet. How could someone else's "now" be our future that hasn't yet happened?" I've pondered exactly this problem myself.

The reason this occurs is because time is relative, as Einstein showed us. When objects move, their clocks tick slower. So if a traveling alien billions of light years away starts moving away from us and their "now" becomes our past, the straight line of time between us that represented our "now", becomes angled for the alien backwards towards our past. But ahead of the alien, in the direction he's (or it's) travelling, that diagonal angle points toward someone or something else's future. So, if the alien travels towards us, its "now" is our future. And that means that the future already exists much like the town up ahead when you're driving down a road.

Physics therefore, has demonstrated that the B-theory of time is more compatible with its laws. Watch physicist Brian Green explains in the clip below from the Nova ScienceNow special, Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time how this concept works.




Time is like a frozen river, and our experience of the present may just be a subjective illusion. What does this say about the existence of god? Well, the Kalaam Cosmological Argument, so often used by theists as the "shock and awe" tactic and front line of offense is predicated on the A-theory of time, which we now know not to be true. That doesn't mean that god is definitively disproven, but it punches serious holes in the argument that theists have to address.

This is where William Lane Craig enters since he is the current champion of the KCA. I've voiced my concerns over the problems of god and timelessness numerous times, particularly how a "timeless" and "changeless" being can have a causal relationship with temporal events, like creating a universe. Furthermore, if the beginning of the universe is the first event and thus the beginning of time, if god caused the universe to exist, then the cause of the universe would have to precede time. In other words, time would have to exist, before time existed. Logically, it's like saying I was born, before I was born.

I recently was reading a paper Craig wrote years ago about timelessness and creation in which he takes on these same concerns that were made by Oxford University Professor Brian Leftow. In it he writes:

God's choices are not events, since He neither deliberates temporally nor does His will move from a state of indecision to decision. He simply has free determinations of the will to execute certain actions, and any deliberation can only be said to be explanatorily, not temporally, prior to His decrees. If time is essential to choosing, then a timeless God could not choose between a beginningless or a finite time either.

It would seem according to Craig, that the execution of god's will must create time since he believes god is temporal posterior to the creation of the universe, which is an event. But how can god have "free determinations of the will" if he is timeless? In the paper Craig scrutinizes three theories that Leftow criticizes. I won't mention all of them, but the theory that Craig settles on, is one that states that time was preceded by what Craig calls "finite time". In other words, in order for god to have created the universe before time existed, and in order to explain god's timeless state before he somehow willed time into existence, another form of time had to exist before time existed. Craig argues:

Since [the beginning of time] is preceded by finite time, that time is not the consequence of t's being the time of the first event (otherwise it would be infinite or amorphous, since if t's elapsing is itself sufficient that there should have been n finite time units prior to t, it would also be sufficient for there having been n+1 finite time units prior to t). So the times prior to t must be either substantival time units in their own right or the relational consequences of events going on prior to t. Thus, if God refrained from creating t, that would have no intrinsic effect on times prior to t; they would still have existed, only now they would be at the end of time. Thus, it is difficult to see how God could do anything at t to bring it about that time was infinite when it was in fact finite.

Basically Craig is saying finite time that existed before time cannot be infinite (hence the name) and must be some kind of "relational consequences of events going on prior to" time. But this doesn't make sense when Craig constantly stresses the absolute beginning of time at the Big Bang and according to his website says, "A sequence of mental events alone is sufficient to generate relations of earlier and later, wholly in the absence of any physical events." That sounds like regular time to me, and so it appears the theist might have to commit to the idea that time began before time began in order to make sense of the cosmological argument.

If theists can be expected to just make up imaginary units of time, as is the case with "finite time" existing before time on purely philosophical and theological grounds, with no scientific theories or hypotheses backing them up, then how can we be expected to have a serious debate? The atheist goes to great lengths to make his case as scientific as possible. That doesn't mean to say that a theist can't be knowledgeable of science and use it to make their case, but if they get to violate logic by resorting to theories that have no scientific basis, and in some cases are even refuted by science, like the A-theory of time, then they should at least stop making a big fuss when we say that the universe came into being without a prior cause. It's only fair.




Further reading on arguments against god:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument
The Fine Tuning Argument
Objective Morality Without God
Refuting William Lane Craig: "Is Good from God?" A Debate Review
Refuting William Lane Craig: The Moral Argument
The Logically Implausible God
The Logically Implausible God Part 2
The Ontological Argument: Putting the Absurd Where it Belongs

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Who Are The Skeptics?


The "skeptical" community consists of atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, humanists, non-believers and the like. We are generally united in our skepticism towards supernatural and pseudo-scientific claims. But what about those of "faith" who believe in god and their religion's fantastic claims? Are they skeptical? Well, theists actually are just as skeptical as non-believers are, but they're only skeptical towards things that contradict their religious beliefs. Take creationists for example, they're extremely skeptical towards evolution and they'll look for any possible way out of actually having to accept its evidence, but then they'll believe in talking snakes, people living inside fish, and that two of every animal and insect once shared a single boat during a worldwide flood.

So where is the consistency with skepticism? Why only apply it towards things that contradict your faith? Why believe something just because it's written in a book, but disbelieve in science that at least has evidence backing it up? Most theists behaves this way towards their religion: When it comes to their religion, they'll believe whatever is required that they believe, no matter how improbable or how impossible. They'll believe it because their religion requires it. But if their faith is strong, then anything that contradicts that belief they will have already decided can't be true, and so they throw up a wall of extreme skepticism that blocks the passage of any evidence. This is not true of every theist, however. There are at least some who constantly doubt their religious beliefs and do allow evidence to change them.

So both non-believers and believers are technically skeptics, just in different ways. I certainly am skeptical about the supernatural claims made by religions, and since theists cannot offer any real scientific evidence to back up their claims, I am within reason to continue doubting. I've heard the best arguments theists have for the existence of god, like the cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument, etc. and I've seriously considered all of them very deeply. In the end, neither of them are proofs, they're probability arguments founded on intuitive logical assumptions. There exists natural explanations that describe non-supernatural processes that can result in our universe and its apparent fine tuning. And as long as a plausible, natural alternative exists to a supernatural one, I can reasonably maintain my doubt and skepticism.

So whose skepticism is more justified? Certainly not the creationists. Neo-Christians who accept the cosmological explanations of our galaxy, sun and earth, and who accept evolution certainly are on better footing, but it seems to me that as time goes on and our understanding of the world through science gets greater and greater, the skepticism of the atheist becomes more and more justified. The more we understand, the less and less we need the hand of god as an explanatory device.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Catholic Sex Scandal


I haven't written at all about the Pope's decision to resign because I really don't care about it. But when the news came out of his resignation, it was accompanied by yet another sex scandal perpetrated by priests. I'd like to add a few thoughts on the subject of why so many priests seem to be entangled in sex scandals involving young boys. To me, the obvious reason why is because priests are forced to take a vow of celibacy. It is not natural for a human being to be able to suppress their sexual desire because we are all to one degree or another, sexual beings. Sexual desire in Christianity has been likened to an addictive craving for gambling or sweet foods, but science tells us that that is not exactly the case. Sexual desire is not some addiction, it is natures way of ensuring the survival of the species by making it want to reproduce. When suppressed it can deviate in peculiar ways.

Now I don't think that taking a vow of celibacy makes one a homosexual pedophile, rather, the desire for male children in most cases already exists in people who become priests. What better place is there to hide such desires than in the priesthood? Priests are not expected to marry and engage in sexual relations with adult women, so a man who's attracted to boys can hide under the cloth and be free from societal pressure to marry and be attracted to women. The same is also true for regular homosexuality and that's why the priesthood is a haven for repressed homosexuals in desperate need to hide their sexuality. 

The best thing the Catholic Church can do to alleviate the problem of homosexuality and pederasty in the priesthood is to change back the rules for priests and allow them to marry and have sex as Protestant denominations do. Or better yet, allow priests to be openly gay while serving their church and god so that the "issue" of homosexuality is no longer an issue. The pederasty however can not be allowed for obvious moral reasons, but allowing consenting adult homosexuality and priests to marry would be an obvious starting point. Now I feel that most Christian denominations will eventually come around to accepting homosexuality, it's only a matter of time. And when they eventually do, since Christianity frowns upon all sexual relations outside of marriage, many will actually take the position that gay sex is only right within marriage and do 180 degree about-face on their current stance on gay marriage!

The Differing Moral Concerns Of Liberals & Conservatives


Now I'm not a professional demographer, but I sometimes like to reflect upon the differences between what liberals and conservatives think are the most important issues facing us today. Liberals generally care about equal civil rights, the environment, economic inequality, healthcare, corporate special interest in government, reproductive rights, and gun control. For conservatives, it's issues like immigration, the deficit, secularization, religious liberty, abortion, traditional marriage, big government and the overreaching of government power, terrorism, gun rights, and taxes.

I'm a pretty liberal guy on most social issues and I happen to fall in line with most of my fellow non-believers when it comes to politics. But some of the social issues that I am most concerned about, like corporate special interest in government and economic inequality, are not shared by most conservatives - who also tend to be the most religious Americans. And I've wondered, "Why is that?" Why aren't conservative Christians more motivated by the fact that most of our politicians are in the pockets of the richest banks and corporations, who are using their power and influence to make it so that they can continue to profit at the expense of the American worker and the environment? Why are conservative Christians up in arms over the idea of two men or two women marrying each other, while the ever increasing big money influence in politics barely passes their radar? If Jesus were alive today, I believe he'd be just as angry as I am about the role of big money in government.

I strongly believe that the preoccupation of conservatives on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, is helping to allow big business to take over government. Why? Because it allows a political party like the republicans to pounce on these social issues by offering candidates that capitalize on them, all while they give into big business' agenda, and economically screw over the very people who voted them into office. So while conservatives are protesting over Tom and John getting married, their senators and representatives are busy crafting economic policies that allows big business to get even more rich in such ways that very little of that wealth trickles down into the middle class. This to me is one of the greatest moral abomination of our day that very few conservatives notice, and it's tragic.


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