Like most atheists, I took that title late in life. Unlike many atheists however, I did not start with a religion which I had to first discard. My parents, themselves raised by Catholic and Protestant parents, did not indoctrinate me into any religious tradition at all, and thanks to the rigorous religious neutrality of the California school system I never felt in any way unusual. I knew of religion, of course. My best friend in third grade was Catholic, and when I would eat over and his family said grace, I would respectfully lower my eyes. One morning after a Saturday night sleepover I went with them to their church, took grape-juice communion with the other kids, and attended their Sunday school. Everyone's family had different ways of doing things, and to get along I was careful to respect the rules of the house in which I was a guest, as I assumed that others would respect how my family did things.
The first inkling I got that my situation was not entirely symmetric with my peers was in seventh grade social studies class. The teacher, saying that he was bending the rules a bit by asking, had us all write down our religious faith on a slip of paper and hand it to the front. I left my paper blank. This did not escape the attention of the kid directly in front of me, and he turned around to see if I had made a mistake or had not understood. "You're supposed to write down your religion," he said helpfully.
"I don't have one," I explained.
"What do you mean you don't have one?" Others had now joined into the exchange and all seemed rather perplexed. "Are you an atheist?" one asked.
"No," I said, "I'm nothing."
I realized at that point that I was a minority, and a misunderstood one at that. Fortunately religion was not a significant part of public life in our community so someone like me could pretty much pass. The topic would come up from time to time, and in every case my cohorts would be confused by the idea that a person could exist without a stated religious affiliation. One boy who was determined to figure it out asked me if I believed in God. "I dunno," I said.
"Oh," he said with conviction, "So you're an Agnostic -- someone who doesn't know whether there's a God or not."
Despite attempts to pigeonhole me, I continued to prefer calling myself "nothing." Agnostic implied that I had an opinion about the matter, which I really didn't. I never gave the idea of God much thought. It was a theory that some people had, like lucky numbers or ESP, something that might exist or might not, but which didn't really matter to me. If people chose to think God controlled things that was fine by me; perhaps they were right.
The turning point came for me as I was strolling between classes on my college campus. I was working on a science fiction story about a scientist who had discovered proof that God exists. The story was mostly about the personal and social fallout from the announcement of the discovery and the ironic reversal of the conclusion a few weeks later, but I needed a plausible-sounding experiment that might be performed that could have a positive or negative outcome. I couldn't think of any. Even in the realm of science fiction, unburdened as it is by the normal fetters of reality, I was drawing a blank. As I pondered further I came to realize that there was no possible experimental way to verify -- or falsify -- the existence of God. God was outside the realm of science, and since science encompasses all of nature, He could not have any possible measurable effect on reality. I had moved subtly from nothing to skeptic.
During college I took some quasi-spiritual seminars and followed a few gurus; Berkeley was a haven for them at the time. They instructed either forcefully willing the outcome you wanted, or giving up caring about the outcome at all, but neither approach seemed an effective path to success or knowledge. I kept being drawn back to science. It was the only system of inquiry that produced verifiable truths, and it was always verification that was conspicuously absent in those other approaches. Much as we might like to think that some beliefs are true, our strongest wishful thinking is brushed away like so many cobwebs when confronted with objective evidence.
It was only many years later that religion finally became something I had to take seriously. My wife was raised Baptist, and although she had long since drifted into cynicism about the tenants and trappings of her family faith, she still felt that religion of some kind had a role in the social and moral instruction of children. I, of course, wanted to raise our children the same way I was. Although my wife felt that I was a very morally grounded person, she nonetheless pushed me to adopt some highly liberal form of religion. I realized that I could not do that, but was unable to formulate an adequate response. I could not longer pass; being nothing was no longer sufficient.
In my renewed quest, I read a great deal about science, philosophy and religion. Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins became my heroes, and the astounding tale they told of selfish genes, evolution and the dawn of consciousness brushed aside the cobwebs of religious creation myths. But the key book was George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God. Considered by some the "gold standard" of philosophical atheism, it was not so much his carefully argued rebuttals to all arguments for the existence of God which I found compelling, nor his sketchy but devastating critique of religion as a basis for morality. It was rather his discussion of the necessity and completeness of reason which finally closed the door on faith. Reason, he argued, is not some arbitrary system of rules for making judgments but is in fact the entire basis of rationality and knowledge, fully independent of any outside agency be it God or Man. This cut me to the core, and when I went outside that day the world practically glowed with its forceful and immediate reality.
My earlier observation that God was not amenable to science had been confirmed and was now furthered with the understanding that anything with no measurable effect on reality does not, by definition, exist. My journey to atheism was complete. But I had been running a Red Queen's Race; all my research and effort had essentially left me where I started. Although I can now justify my atheism I remain as I began, a person with no theological affiliation whatsoever. For no matter how much theists want to peg the non-believer to some quasi-religious "-ism", we are all born and will remain, if left alone, natural atheists.
- jack*
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