My Life as Nothing...

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*

Comments

[jimBOB]

"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."

Oh, if only it were so! To True Believers, evidence against their faith is a "test" of that faith, not a reason to abandon it. The motive for the passionate denunciations of evolutionary theory, and for clinging to ridiculousness like Intelligent Design, is that they realize their faith is threatened by troublesome facts.

Personally, I can't quite make the leap to atheism (in my definition atheism is the positive rejection of the notion of God's existence), since, as you noticed in your SF writing, the concept of God is nonfalsifiable. However, in practical terms a scientifically possible God becomes both implausible and irrelevant. So if atheists think God doesn't exists, and agnostics think God's existence can't be proven, what do you call someone who thinks God's existence is irrelevant?

[jack*]

The point is that they recognize that evidence is a threat. The scientific battle over facts is largely over, but the political battle over having to face the facts is still raging.

Unless you are a theist -- that is someone who accepts or espouses a deity or deities, implicitly or explicitly -- you are an atheist. That's just the definition of the word. However many people make finer distinctions between atheists who reject gods, and atheists who are unsure, and atheists who don't care or who have never heard of the idea of God. The last category I would call a natural atheist, or perhaps a dispasionate atheist.

I generally reject the concept of agnostic as a third category. Theists would like to group nonbelievers that way since it bolsters their argument that atheism is a belief system equivalent to theism. It's not. Someone who is uncertain might be best called an agnostic atheist.

[Gaianne]

1) What could constitute a scientific proof of God? Nothing, given then God is not a scientific concept. But it might be worth noting none other than Carl Sagan pushing the limits of this in his novel Contact when his main character (played by Jodie Foster in the movie) starts finding low-probability anomalies in very far out digits in the decimal expansion of pi. (The expansion for pi, in any base, though deterministic, has the statistics of a random sequence, as far as it has been studied.)

A mind warp, for sure, as pi is not built into the structure of the physical world but the mathematical world, a system of logically consistent constucts that somehow provide useful models and approximations to physical phenomena.

And yet, even if it were true--(it could be decided in the positive, but not the negative)--it would prove nothing.

2) God might be very useful in modern science. In Newton's mechanics, once the initial conditions are set--and God might have set the initial conditions--the laws of dynamics--presumably created by God but perhaps not so created--decide everything and God is not needed further at all. How different Quantum Mechanics! Every moment zillions of decisions have to be made all over the universe, randomly, sure, but how? By whom? Einstein is quoted as saying he could not believe that God would play dice with the universe: What an opportunity he missed not to consider that She might be very busy making all these decisions, and very carefully too, so that the outcomes would never differ noticeably from chance! ;)

3) Choosing to be rational may be a practical decision, but it is not a rational one: There is no rational way to choose to be rational--before you can decide to do anything rationally, you must accept the use of reason to make the decision. The sensible (but non-rational) person has faith in reason, and then decides to go ahead and use it for other decisions. And then feels vindicated when the results turn out well. A distinction must be made between the non-rational--that which is outside the scope of reason--and the irrational--that which contradicts reason. Many things are useful to believe (or disbelieve) even though proof is not possible. Trouble mainly comes with religious people like our modern fundies who persist in believing that which is plainly false.

4) Christians tend to have a very limited view of religion--for them Christianity itself forms the ideal model of any possible religion. So it does not occur to them what an anomalous thing it is to have your religion defined by a creed--a set of beliefs. (Most religions are defined by practice.) Since one of the functions of Christian religious beliefs is to serve as in-group/out-group markers, the irrationality (not non-rationality, but irrationality) of a religious creed is not a drawback, but an asset: No one holds irrational Christian beliefs by accident. One has to be a devout follower of the sect to actually believe the crap, and moreover everyone can see plainly that you are.

5) The rise of religion in this context is the abandonment of the principle "all men are created equal" and its replacement by the principle "we are better than you, and are going to stomp you out without compunction." That it is anti-democratic goes without saying, less obviously, it is anti-American in a fundamental sense.

--Gaianne

[jack*]

There is no need to "accept the use" of reason to make decisions. Reason as opposed to what? One does not need "faith" in reason any more than one needs faith in gravity to keep from floating away. To suggest that there is some non-rational form of knowledge is nonsense.

To the extent that religions make truth claims -- that God answers prayers, for example -- they are testable and therefore part of science. And people have been doing these experiments for millenia; the problem is that they all continue to come up negative. So formal religion has retreated and we're left with an all-powerful being who cannot be seen to be acting in any way. How is that different from non-existence? Believers will never agree up front what would constitute a negative result, thus science has no information for them.

[Gaianne]

Even in as rational an activity as a chess game reason is sometimes inappropriate. Sometimes you can look into the tree of possibilities and see that some are plainly bad, and one is plainly best, and choose your next move rationally. But suppose you cannot see that deeply--that no move is plainly best as far as you can look. It doesn't help to have a theory that says if you could look deeply enough, you could rationally choose your best move, because in your own case you can't. So then the sensible thing to do is to use a non-rational combination of experience and intuition.

There are some activities for which rationality is an absolute hindrance--such as some aspects of music, art, or dance. If I am dancing and I am thinking about the physical laws of motion, I am surely dancing badly--and I can count on my audience to agree. If I am foolishly imagining that my weight is suspended effortlessly from a chord stretching out of the sky, I will, in fact, be dancing much better.

Whether nonsense or not, most forms of knowledge are non-rational. (Which is certainly not an argument for the existence of God.)

When you say that formal religion has retreated, you can only mean Chistianity. Non-Christian religions may not have retreated, nor had any reason to, since the all-powerful materialistic Deity implied by the statement has no provenance. You are arguing against a sort of Deity that even many Christians would agree does not exist.

[loyopp]

Jack, I was struck by your description of your experience in seventh grade. None, and I mean "none", of my friends growing up went to church on a regular basis, and only a few even went beyond the secular ritual of showing up at church once a year on Christmas. (The only seriously religious kids I knew were Jewish, actually.) So I was met with puzzlement when I said I had to go to church Sunday morning and couldn't come out to play. However, most kids could say they were "Lutheran" or "Methodist" or what have you, and I frankly think "Nothing" would have been a better answer in many cases. (Ironically, the church I attended was not recognized by the local bishop, so my answer had to be "Catholic, sort of".) Anyhow, I guess we all feel different in seventh grade for one reason or another, no? (A light comment in a heavy thread ... I'll take a pass on the heaviness.)

[jack*]

loyopp: Nice insight from what must be other side of the same experience. Obviously many of the issues involved are personal and relative.

Gaianne: This is a subject for a more in-depth discussion, but it's wrong to equate reason with "thinking hard." This is sometimes called the Toolbox Fallacy -- that reason is just one tool in a box with many others. In fact there are no other tools. All knowledge, even the way your legs know how to do a graceful foxtrot, is based in rationality even if it does not involve deep thinking.