Atheism, God, Free Will, and Other Boring Stuff

(This hub is a response to izettl's hub, "Explaining God to an Atheist," and is structured like a response. It sort of stands on its own, but reading that hub will definitely make this one more intelligible - I have posted a link to the right of the text, and under the photo image. Please inform me if the link is not working. I've also posted, as a bonus, a link to izettl's story, "My First Condom," which is hilarious - check it out.)

I didn’t really want to write a hub about atheism. Like the rest of you, I’ve posted my ramblings on Hubpages in the hopes that someone would bother to read them, and there is always the risk of alienating people when you admit to them that you do not believe in the existence of a god or gods. I suppose I asked for it, though. I ventured to debate religion with TheManWithNoPants (I will post a link to this hub, for those who are interested - it's called, "Pain, Suffering, and a Loving God") and in the unfolding of this debate, a hubber by the name of izettl also jumped into the action. I want to say at the outset that these two hubbers have been very generous, patient, and thoughtful in engaging in discussion with me, and because of their good-natured curiosity and polite manner of conversing with me, I’m encouraged to think that I can contribute a hub on this topic without arousing too much anger.

All of us who debate religion on the Internet or in our normal lives have probably learned a few things about debating religion – it is easy to cause hurt feelings and anger in religious discussions, the debates have a way of going nowhere fast, and it is nearly impossible to change a person’s religious (or non-religious) viewpoints. Nevertheless, we might also find some unexpected rewards for enduring the pain of a mental slugging match. We find the stimulation of having our views challenged, of being prodded to re-think and research our positions (to honestly “re-search” our beliefs), and maybe also the guilty pleasure of throwing off our gloves and swinging away with our toughest arguments when we get our hackles up. Perhaps the most surprising, and most rewarding, part of the experience is when we find commonality with our opponents. In spite of our very different answers, we all have a deep and burning curiosity to ask who we are, and what our lives mean in the grand scheme of things. We all take an interest in human suffering, and find empathy for our fellow travelers in life – whether we are Christians following Christ’s direction to love our neighbors, or we are Buddhists committed to the principle of doing no harm, or we are non-believers who think that this life is our one and only shot, and want to fill our experiences with something more than the self-interested pursuit of material goods; things like love, laughter, and cooperation. In the end, isn’t that what most of us are looking for – a life experience that fulfills us, rewards us, and transcends our baser impulses; to find the deeper meaning that comes from understanding ourselves and each other? As I said to TheManWithNoPants; at the end of the debate, I hope that the worst we will be able to say about each other is that we are both deeply committed to our beliefs.

Now, to respond to izettl. My responses will sometimes address issues that izettl did not directly bring up. I’m not trying to be unfair to her or accuse her of taking positions that she did not – rather, I’m trying to anticipate different points of view on the issues she raised, and to anticipate some of the responses that I would expect to get. So, here I go:

Clearing up some misconceptions about atheists and atheism:

Atheists are led to atheism by trauma, loss, and/or and oversensitivity to suffering:

Some of us, maybe. But trauma, loss, and hypersensitivity to suffering are not unique to atheists. Plenty of people fit that profile and don’t become atheists, just as plenty of insulated people with fortunate lives lose faith anyway. In the end, atheists lose belief because they feel there is a lack of convincing evidence for a god's existence, and even a lack of convincing arguments supporting the existence of a god.

Atheists find comfort in ultra-rational ways of thinking (think “Bones” from the TV show of the same name) and put their own brand of “faith” in logic, science, and reason:

Some atheists are probably guilty of this on some level. I want to say otherwise, but c’mon. You’ve talked to us. Many of us are enamored with the world of thought. I’d argue that this is not such a bad thing. A lot of ground can be covered by asking the right questions, and thinking about issues in a rigorous and clearly-defined fashion. However, this is not unique to atheists, either. I mean, if you want to argue that believers have no devotion to these ideals, go ahead – it could certainly help my argument, but I don’t want to say it. If there’s a point of disagreement, it is on what we consider to be convincing evidence (or arguments) regarding the existence of God, but most of us are still trying to argue the issue in logical terms.

However, in point of fact, one need not be committed to a world of rigorous thought and learning to be an atheist – it only requires that one doesn’t find the idea of a god (or gods) very convincing. If you went looking, I don’t think it would take you too long to find atheists who didn’t care about science, logic, reason, etc., but still just don’t see a reason to believe.

Also, by definition, faith requires one to accept things without complete certainty. Otherwise, they probably would have called it "certainty" instead of faith. Logic, on the other hand, does not require unquestioning devotion - even to itself. The fields of logic and metalogic are devoted, in part, to asking what kinds of questions can be answered by what forms of logic. They also seek to find the limits to logic, and to discover where errors can be made. In any event, there is no need to be devoted to the idea that logic produces complete certainty in order to use it, or to believe that it can produce reasonably reliable results. We all have confidence in logic to some extent, or we wouldn't bother debating anything at all. So science and logic are not "faiths" in the same sense that religions are - they both assume a degree of falsifiability, even in their structure, and both rely on evidence and reproducible results to prove their positions.

In izettl’s words, “[the world of atheism] is more painful, lonely, yearning, wishing, missing, and, well, boring.”

Well, there’s really no way to refute a statement of opinion, but I certainly don’t feel that way, and I know plenty of atheists who don’t feel that way. As a former believer (I was raised Roman Catholic), I can honestly say that my experience of the world has not radically changed. My perception of some of the causes and consequences of human experience is different, but the qualitative experiences – the feelings – are no more or less frequent, and no more or less intense, and certainly not more dreary or painful. Where my faith in God once gave me solace, my faith in my loved ones now gives me solace. Where faith once assuaged my loneliness, now a sense of self-confidence and a willingness to reach out to others in times of need takes its place. I do not yearn, wish for, or miss anything from religious life, but sure, I experience those feelings. Believers and non-believers are not different here. We all yearn to find meaning where meaning is not obvious (not to say it's not there), wish to understand more about our existence than we do, and on occasion, we all feel we are missing something. In those cases, we either get down to the business of living our lives in a way that is meaningful to us, or we waste away wishing for something inaccessible. How many people have spent their lives yearning to be closer to God, or to understand a God who, so often, seems inexplicable and mysterious? Believers are not spared the feeling of yearning for the inaccessible.

I also feel that your way of life is no more boring than mine. Maybe it’s boring to live in a universe without a God, and maybe it’s boring to say, “I don’t know,” but then maybe it’s boring to live in a universe where, every time we encounter things we do not understand or questions we cannot answer, we say, “God must have done that.” If we had taken that attitude throughout all of human history, we would probably still think that plagues were curses from demons, and that lightning was hurled from the gods above.

Lack of belief is a tenuous position, because one scrap of evidence for God’s existence could invalidate our position:

Good. If it’s that “easy” to invalidate my position, show me the evidence. I think you’ll find that it is no more tenuous than taking the position that Zeus is not the one, supreme god. Remember, one little scrap of evidence that Zeus exists would invalidate your belief in your god (I’m assuming that you do not believe that Zeus exists – sorry if I’m wrong). Are you sweating, yet? I doubt it. I don’t think there are any better reasons for think that Zeus is the supreme God than there are reasons for thinking that there is a god at all. If I’m wrong, I’d like to hear why.

New topic: God as the hidden variable/ God in science:

God is not excluded from scientific thinking just because assuming his existence gives scientists answers that they don't like. God is excluded because there is no evidence of God, and therefore there is no reason to include Him in the equation. In fact, without the ability to access Him, there is no possible way to include him in an experiment. However, throwing God into the equation often leads us to the wrong answer. Was, “the gods hurl lightning bolts” the answer to the question, “what is lightning, and where does it come from?”

On the contrary, what we know about the universe seems to suggest that a few of our notions of God must be incorrect - if He exists at all. For example, if God created this universe for humans, why is it so vast when all we need is this one small planet? Why isn’t the Earth the center of the solar system? Why did God design a universe for humans, and then make it take 14 billion years for humans to appear? Why, if we are designed by the most amazing mind imaginable, are our lungs and our stomach connected by the same pathway? Couldn’t the all-knowing God have prevented a lot of suffering (by drowning and choking), by reconfiguring our plumbing a little?

It has never yet been profitable to human knowledge to insert God or any supernatural beings into our scientific questions. You (izettl) say that “life experiences are not logical…When an outcome isn’t as planned, scientists may not know what the extraneous variable is, but they know one exists.”

Okay, that part seems true enough. I don’t know if that means that life experiences are not logical, or that logic doesn’t work, but it does suggest, as you say, we are missing some data. I challenge anyone to give me an instance in which we’ve attributed an unknown cause of an event to a god, and it has turned out that a god was indeed responsible. Does a god explain lightning, as we once thought? Does God explain disease, as we once thought? Or has the history of our scientific discoveries shown time and again that most of our mysteries have had natural explanations? Eventually, the illogical becomes logical when we find the missing data – germs exist, electricity exists, and so on. It is not unreasonable to assume that our unanswered questions today will have natural explanations in the future, rather than supernatural explanations, given the track record of human discovery.

We only use 8- 12% of our brains, couldn’t the other 90% contain an awareness of God, and shouldn’t we be suspicious of our limited capacity of intelligence?

Yes, we should be suspicious of our limited intelligence. Particularly, I would think, when it leads us to think that it is a good idea to use supernatural beings that we have never seen to explain things that we can’t understand. You talk about how deceptive our perceptions can be. Yet, you appeal to the efficacy of following feelings and intuitions. Can we not just as easily be fooled by our feelings and our intuitive perceptions? Am I any more sure that I feel God’s presence than I am sure that I felt the presence of my imaginary friend when I was six? Of all the things we should be suspicious of, I would think emotions would be much less reliable indicators of truth, on the whole, than reason. I'm not saying there's no place for emotions in human thought or discovery, but I'd hardly rely on intuition to answer the big, "why are we here?" - type questions.

We should be most suspicious of those answers that seem to provide full explanations without supplying full evidence. If my shoes are missing, I could explain that by saying that leprechauns stole my shoes. I could tell you that I’ve seen the wee people, that I feel their eyes upon me at night, and that I’ve seen the effects of leprechauns in other people’s lives – after all, others have lost their shoes, their keys, and their wallets, and in an inexplicable fashion.

If I can find a leprechaun, or maybe their legendary pot of gold, I’m on my way to proving my theory is correct. I cannot “prove” that I’m right just because modern science is unable to disprove the existence of leprechauns, or because modern science cannot yet tell me what happened to my shoes. The failure of science to explain all things does not mean that God did it.

I’m not picking on supernatural/ religious thinking in particular. The scientific community has often made similar errors by assuming the existence of natural phenomena for which there was no proof – the theory that fire is really a substance called “phlogiston” that highly combustible materials have more of, and less combustible materials have less of, is one example. The lesson is; where there is a gap in knowledge, you don’t just throw in any old explanation – you go looking for more data.

Also, the “8- 12%” brain activity factoid you cite is a misconception. It is not entirely correct in any event, but is more or less an approximation of average brain activity at any given time. That is, we are only using about that much on average, but over the course of a lifetime (and probably the average day) we use almost all of our brain – by using 12% in this part of the brain on one task, another 12% of a different part of the brain on a different task, and so on. There are no “unused” parts of the brain. If you want to test this out, let someone poke parts of your brain with a scalpel, and see if 88% of the time it has no effect on you. Also, supposing that you could prove that I don’t have access to 90% of my brain, it doesn’t therefore prove that there is a knowledge of God in that 90%, anymore than it proves that I have an inaccessible knowledge of leprechauns in there somewhere. By being inaccessible, it becomes useless even if it is there. How do you know that the perfect argument to demonstrate that there is no God isn’t in there?

New Topic: The Free Will Break-down:

It’s not clear in any case that we have free will. With or without a god, a case can be made for determinism. However, most believers try to use the “free will” argument to explain why God could love us, but still allow suffering in the world. This argument does not work unless you assume that God never intervenes in our lives (and in fact, it also requires that God cannot be all-knowing):

If God interferes in human life, at all, we do not have free will.

If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, any time he intervenes in a life he does so with the definite knowledge of what the outcome would be. His will is therefore perfect, because when He takes action, events never turn out to be other than the way he knew they would when he took that action. In other words, it is commonly thought that God does not make mistakes.

You do not make the problem go away by saying that we have the “free will” to ask him for help or not. If I ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar, it is not a violation of free will if she helps me by giving me a cup of sugar. My neighbor is a free agent, like myself. God is THE agent – his will becomes reality. If he acts, he alters reality without fail and with perfect knowledge of the results beforehand. To tease out the argument a little, remember that God would also have always known (since before creation) who would ask for help, and who would not.

If God knew all of the things that would happen to us before He set the universe in motion, we never had the free will to do otherwise.

That seems pretty clear to me. People have trouble with this. They often say, “It’s like watching a taped game of football – you know what’s going to happen without fail, but the players still had free will during the game.”

Yeah, but if I’m an omniscient, omnipotent God, and I know that if I will into existence two football teams, they will play a game, and the game will go down in a specific way – without fail– then by willing those teams into existence, I will into existence that specific outcome of the game as well. The players never had free will, because with my perfect knowledge beforehand, the game could not have been otherwise.

Conclusion: Either we have free will and God does not intervene by answering prayers or performing miracles (and did not know what would happen when He created the universe – as per above), OR God interferes in our lives, and/or is all-knowing, and our lives are predetermined

Conclusion 2: If God does intervene, we need some other explanation besides “free will” for why He simultaneously loves us and allows suffering.

Here people are tempted to throw out explanations like, “He’s testing us.” This is unthinkable, as an omniscient being knew from before creation how you would respond to the test. Therefore, by creating those who will fail the test, He creates needless suffering.

“He’s so far beyond us; we are like a bear caught in a trap, unable to understand that we may have to suffer in order to be freed.”

Okay, but then why create the suffering at all? Why create humans at all, if they can only exist with suffering as part of their existence? It’s easy for people in the Western world to talk about suffering that is eventually alleviated, or works out for the better, but there are people who suffer their whole lives without much reward. Why this from a loving God (if He can intervene)?

“What is suffering, anyway? Couldn’t suffering be an illusion?"

Really? It would be difficult to try to convince someone suffering through some really painful affliction that suffering is just an illusion. If I suffer because I don’t have the kind of car I want, I can totally see the argument. If I suffer because I have bone cancer, my pain seems far less abstract.

Final notes:

1) “Bruce Almighty” was cute, but hardly philosophically sophisticated. All your examples from the movie are funny ideas of trying to put a mortal in the spot of a specific God. It is not really examining in any depth whether we have free will, or whether God can answer prayers without interfering with free will. I suppose I could go through the movie and try to catch all the inconsistencies, but it seems easier just to assume that "Bruce Almighty" was never meant to be a concise philosophical argument.

2) “God is like love. You can’t see it, touch it, and so on, but you know it’s there.”

Yeah, but unlike God, I do experience love firsthand. I may not be able to fully define it, but that the experience is there is unquestionable, and uncomplicated by trying to ascribe my feelings and sensations to some supernatural being. I feel love; does this prove the existence of Cupid? If I think I feel a love of God, I have firsthand access to the love – the love is there. But how do I know I am correctly ascribing it to God? Where is my firsthand experience of God?

Thanks for your time. Sorry this hub was so unbelievably long. I’m also sure that I’ve biffed arguments, forgotten some of the best points, made some things unclear, and I could have argued some things better. If you see the holes, point them out. It’s all about getting the ball rolling. Thanks especially to those who actually took the time to read all of this nonsense. I hope you got something out of it.