Some Poignant Quotes

Just a few quotes I have come across over the years of exploring freethinking/atheism material on the web. Some of them help to wrap up effective points into small packages.

"If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
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~ Thomas Szasz

"Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
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~ Ron Patterson

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.
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~ Adolf Hitler (just to debunk the myth of Hitler being an atheist)

"To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
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~ Julian Ruck

"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."

~ Jack Gurney – “The Ruling Class”

“...if the definition of God is unfalsifiable, the question of the existence of God is meaningless.”
~ freethoughtpedia.com

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."


~ Gene Roddenberry

On the Supernatural

During the entire history of mankind, there has never been any independently verifiable evidence of the supernatural. Indeed, many proponents of the supernatural realm hardly have any idea what implications such a realm would have in the observable world, let alone any ideas of how to prove its existence. In previous posts, I have insisted that a rational person should have evidence of something before it is believed. This is hardly a novel thought, and I think anyone would agree with it. But due to the supposed non-physical nature of the supernatural, religious people feel they are exempt from having any burden of proof. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone has a reason for believing something, and we can honestly say that with the supernatural, evidence is not it.

As the first basic precept of religion, proving the existence of a supernatural realm should be at the top of the believer’s list of things to do. It should come before any other arguments, because if the supernatural does not exist, nothing in their religion is true. Given the very definition of immaterial, acceptable evidence for may never surface. This leaves argument as the only tool one can use to justify belief, but the arguments I have heard make flawed assumptions.

• Some mysterious or unknown feature of our universe (before the big bang, beauty in nature, physical laws, complexity of life). Things that are unknown are unknown. The ignorance of a cause for something does not make it magic. Things like the stars, the weather, and disease used to be thought to have supernatural causes.
  
• The existence of morality and of abstract ideas and concepts in our brains as being separate from our physical reality. Every one of those thoughts, ideas and concepts we have we have — including morality (view video in previous post) — is a result of known physical processes in a physical brain.
• The authority of the Bible. What if the only evidence for evolution was a book, and not all that observation, experiment, and not the independent lines of verification from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics, molecular biology, developmental biology, embryology, population genetics, genome sequencing, and many other sciences?
  

Skeptics of the supernatural have often been called “closed-minded," and accused of bias towards a particular world-view. This is an disingenuous thing to say. Anyone can agree that it is not close-minded to require evidence for beliefs. If you can’t provide the evidence for something, you shouldn’t malign those who don't believe it. How can you blame them for not believing you? If your position takes faith to begin with, you cannot expect others to follow suit. But more to the point, if your position takes faith to believe it, maybe you shouldn’t have so much confidence in your position.

- Evan

The Appeal to Ignorance: religion's secret weapon

Ever since humanity’s beginnings, religion has been inserting knowledge where there previously was none. Needless to say, so far no religion has ever been correct about the workings of the universe. For thousands of years, science has advanced its understandings, theories, and methods, while religion has retreated. During the heyday of ancient Greece, no one knew what the sun actually was. This was a spiritual question back then, because not only was it a complete mystery, but the sun was the giver of all life. So the Greek religion claimed that it was Helios, the sun god, riding across the sky in his chariot. No one knew what the seasons were, so their mythology said that the goddess of summer and growth had her daughter stolen by Hades every year, causing winter, then returned to her later, reinitiating summer. Christianity is no stranger to propagating incorrect ideas that align with its theology (i.e. geocentrism, young earth, creationism), so why should we trust Christianity’s claims of today?

The only thing that Christians can do is appeal to ignorance in an attempt to increase the validity of their claims. Even a successful dismantling of evolution and the big bang would merely reduce us to a state of ignorance about life and the universe, it wouldn’t validate some other claim. Today’s religious people move from absolute ignorance to absolute knowledge by saying that because we don’t know the answer, it must be God.

The problem is that “we don’t know” should be the end of the conversation. “We don’t know” in no way justifies any claim about the subject, so it cannot justify religion. On top of this, criticisms from the religious against scientific theories more often than not reveal an ignorance of the theories, research, and methods themselves, and are not even valid criticisms. Such statements include:

• evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity

• carbon dating is a lie and shouldn’t be used to tell the age of the earth

• saying that life evolved is like saying a tornado assembled a jet in a junkyard
  

• if crocodiles and ducks are related we should see half-crocodiles, half-ducks today

Not only are these false arguments, but even if they were valid, they would say nothing about whether religious claims are true, only that our science has problems. Christians believe that if science is wrong, then their religion is right.

This also happens at the macro level in Christian theology. What is the meaning of existence? Why is this universe the way it is? It must be God. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. But why must it be God? Is there an actual reason besides “it couldn’t be anything else”? No there is not. The fact we cannot begin to answer some of these questions yet in no way validates belief in God. When it comes down to it, there is no actual positive evidence that God has done any of the things that Christian theology claims. The dependence of Christian apologetics on these so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments is staggering, and is one of my main reasons for not being religious.

- Evan

You don't know there's not a God

This response almost always occurs after someone says there’s no evidence of God. The fact is that no one is ever called upon to prove a negative, because it’s logically impossible. That’s right, it’s impossible to prove there’s no God. But don’t get excited yet. It’s logically impossible to prove the non-existence of any number of things. Think of anything we can’t directly observe. It’s logically impossible to prove that that thing doesn’t exist. This leaves the argument “you don’t know there’s not a God” on very shaky ground, since the same statement can be made for many different things, even things that contradict one another.

Let’s examine a claim that we can neither prove nor disprove: I am an alien in human form. If I told you this, you would not actually believe it no matter how hard I insisted it was true. My word would never be enough. You would require some sort of positive evidence for such an extraordinary claim. Needless to say, you wouldn’t be agnostic about it. You wouldn’t say “I neither believe nor disbelieve that you are an alien from another planet.” You would simply dismiss my claim as unverifiable, thinking I was pulling your leg, unless I came forth with very strong evidence (like building a homemade death ray).

“You don’t know there’s not a God.” This appeal to ignorance is very common, suggesting that the atheist should at least be agnostic about God. Surely if they were consistent, they would become agnostic themselves? But we don’t have to be agnostic. One of the best indicators that something isn’t there is a lack of evidence for its existence. Religion has never made any discoveries or predictions about the world, so it must have nothing to contribute as to its true nature.

- Evan

Miracles

It’s one thing to say that Jesus lived, walked the Earth, had teachings to share with people, and got crucified by the Romans. It is an entirely different thing to say that he turned water into wine, healed the blind, was born of a virgin, and was raised from the dead. Historical claims are completely different from supernatural claims.

The world we live in is all we know. When someone says that Jesus was born from an immaculate conception, all we have to do is look at all the births that have ever happened, and see what percentage of them were immaculate. It turns out that that percentage is zero. If someone claimed immaculate conception today in whatever circle, they would not be taken seriously. How could one even prove that a conception was immaculate (unless we had a microscope focused on the egg in her body and saw it spontaneously gestate without sperm)? In order to believe such a thing, you have to not require any evidence. Christians take pride in having faith, but I don’t think there’s anything good about it. Not requiring evidence for your beliefs leaves you much more open to accepting false ones. For example, if the Guiness Book of World Records accepted every claim without independently verifiable evidence, the book’s credibility would plummet, and no one would read it. The literal truth of the miracles of the Bible works in the exact same way.

Even miracles that multiple people claim to have seen are still without strong evidence. Many people have claimed to see Bigfoot, the Lochness monster, leprechauns, and other things that sensible people don’t believe in. No one takes these claims seriously because we realize that personal testimony is the lowest form of evidence. Why should the claims of the Bible receive different treatment?

- Evan

Egocentric Us: the denial of science

Because human experience is the the only thing we know, most religions often place humanity as the reason for all existence. This idea manifests itself in monotheistic theology. We are claimed to be God’s ultimate creation, and are at the focal point of the universe. If this isn’t true, then how do we explain the church’s tendency to deny scientific discoveries that take away this self-proclaimed importance? Such discoveries as heliocentrism (sun-centered instead of earth-centered solar system), elliptical planetary orbits (instead of perfect circles), sunspots on the sun (instead of a flawless, life-giving orb), the age of the universe and of the Earth, the big bang, and evolution have all been met with fierce and passionate opposition by the church and their followers. Notice that like evolution, heliocentrism at its time was thought to be an idea that made humans seem worthless. But today it is an accepted fact, one that doesn’t detract from how great humanity is. Why can’t evolution and the big bang be the same?

When looking at the universe, there is nothing that suggests that it was all made for us to live in. We are literally a speck on a speck on a speck, and there are vast forces and immense objects out there that push our world to the sideline. Even the events on our planet are enough to make the same point. The forces of nature that are out of our control (earthquakes, weather, melting polar ice) don’t care whether we live our die (unless you believe that God is the one that intentionally kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people per year with natural disasters).

The randomness of genes is another example of how the universe wasn’t made for us. Uncontrollable birth defects produce disturbingly deformed newborns (Google-image it if you dare). This is easily explained by the randomness of genetics, but very difficult to explain with a god that personally creates and shapes each living thing. Some humans are born with debilitating or painful genetic defects that make life much more difficult to bear. The idea that the people affected by these unfortunate circumstances are being taught a lesson by God is a poor excuse for the pain and suffering that they go through. What specific lesson would they be learning that someone without these horrible experiences couldn’t also learn? The randomness and naturalism of the universe is much more accommodating to what we see than a planned universe that was built for us to live in.

Today’s population believes in both heliocentrism and the worth and meaningfulness of human life. Because of the underlying theme of their theology, the church believed that heliocentrism made humanity seem worthless; they believed it kicked humans off to the side. I think the same thing is happening today with naturalism. Just like heliocentrism, naturalism doesn’t detract from the specialness of humanity and human experience, it’s just a belief that reflects reality more accurately.

- Evan

God: The Heart of the Matter

Unfortunately, I think many atheists, even prominent ones, have misconceptions about what is going on in the mind of most believers. I don’t pretend to know what is going on in peoples’ minds, but I think I have a better idea than some about what is at the core of believing in God. Such statements as: “religious people are God's slaves,” or “religion makes people take this life for granted, dismissing this world as unimportant and merely a transitional stage to the next,” while having some measure of truth, do not, in my opinion, really speak with believers. This is because the believers just don’t see it that way. In order to get people thinking, you must get on their level, and must not rely on too many statements that the religious cannot connect with.

At the root of religious belief is an inner feeling. To believers, believing in God feels special; it feels right. They cannot imagine a world without God, without that amazing feeling. It is this inner conviction that drives belief. There are many traditional arguments for the existence of God, but instead of showing why these arguments fail, we can just make the point that these arguments are not why people become religious in the first place. Religious people don’t need use arguments to justify their belief in God, they know that God exists – it is how they feel. This statement doesn’t come from me, but from many believers themselves. Viewed in this light, arguments for God are an attempt to make religion seem rational when in fact it is not.

Given that religious belief is rooted in inner conviction, my strategy is to show that inner conviction, no matter how amazing or transcendental or special it seems to you, is no way to judge whether or not a belief is true. Many people around the world use the same grounds – personal conviction – to justify completely incompatible beliefs. Anything that can be used to justify many different incompatible claims is a horrible indicator of truth.

I believe that religious people are concerned with how their beliefs make them feel, and atheists are concerned with whether or not their beliefs are true. For those of you who cannot imagine a world without a god, I think you should try harder. Imagine what it would be like to be an atheist. For as you know, atheists still have happiness and values. What would it be like if it were just us and this beautiful world?

- Evan