There have always been people, as Blaise Pascal put in his
Pensées, “so made that they cannot believe.” I am one of those people, and there are more of us than you may think. I have never felt the grace of god, nor any desire to worship. As a child I could not accept the existence of a big man in the sky who watched over everyone and determined if they were good or not, you can deduce from this also I did not believe in Santa Claus. When I was five and six, my family attended a church and, being so young, I attended Sunday school. It was not much more than a day care as the children were too young to sit still through the sermon, but we still sung songs and played games to teach us about the miracle of Jesus. I remember being very bored and never at all interested, I preferred playing with building blocks. I would sit in the corner and stack them neatly, surrounding myself with a wall as if to try and protect myself from the zombie they called Jesus. At the end of every session of school, the whole group of children would go to a larger room dance to music further illustrating the wonders of the lord. I expressed no interest in dancing and would often sit down only to be prodded by an instructor until I got up again. My family moved away after that and we never attended church again. I was happy about that. I found the whole thing really boring, I could not understand what those people were doing. People do not come back from the dead and why were we called sheep? Some of the other kids were sort of sheepish, but me? I knew I was a person, not a sheep.
I never believed god existed. It was never important to me, who bothered with fairy tales? I read the books about three pigs getting their houses blown down and knew animals did not talk, the story was just made up for fun. Why would the stories about a big boat with all the animals in the world on it be any different? I never got over the fact it would be impossible to get all the little bugs on such a boat, Noah would inevitable miss the camouflaged ones. Of course, I made the mistake of thinking everyone was like me, and did not believe as I did. It is often said by atheists it was weird for them to realize they were the only unbelievers around, I was surprised too, but much later and in a different way. A lot of atheists think there is something wrong with themselves, I thought there was something wrong with everyone else. As the egocentric child I was, I thought everyone thought like me. It was not until I reached Middle School I realized I had been under a misapprehension.
I moved to Mason City when I was in sixth grade. I made new friends, integrated myself into the student body nicely, all of that. But it was not long before I heard about people going to confirmation and going on mission trips and all these things. I was blown away, my classmates actually believed all that nonsense? I did not know what to say, I was speechless, but not for long. By the time I was a freshman I had started looking into this religion thing. I went to the Internet and read about it. I read and read and learned all I could. This was how I found out what I should call myself, an atheist. I felt I needed the word, not because I yearned for a label, but there had to be a way to distinguish myself from the others. Of course, at the time I did not much care about the beliefs of others. I thought they were silly and was perfectly content to leave it at that. But at the end of my freshman year I borrowed a book from a friend and over the course of the summer read it from cover to cover. The book,
god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens, blew me away. I had no idea religious people blew up buildings and killed each other. I finally understood how horrible the attacks on the World Trade Center had been. I knew it was done by Middle Easterners and I knew they did it because they did not like the United States, but I had not understood the role their religious beliefs played. I had been so ignorant. It hit me, it was as if a drop of oil had fallen into the gears of my mind and they began to turn for the first time. I remember sitting still after reading the last words in the book.
Above all, we are in need of a new Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to the masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all of this and more is, for the first time in history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.
However, only the most naïve utopian can believe that this new human civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking alters and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and prepare to fight it. (god is not Great, pg. 283)
These words crawled into my mind and lay down at my feet, like a pet who knows you well enough to know when you are sad or feeling down. For the first time, I understood it. I understood what religion was and why people wanted it so badly. All the pieces fell together and over the course f the summer I adopted a further label. To be an atheist is to not believe. But I had moved beyond that, I did not just disbelieve I was opposed to the very idea, I was an antitheist.
I know now much more than I did. I have grown. My argument against the existence of god and the supernatural has grown and sharpened since then. I now wield the weapon of reason adequately enough to poke holes in my friends’ arguments. God is not real because there is no evidence is usually the starting point. “But absence of evidence,” as the great astronomer Carl Sagen said, “is not evidence of absence.” With the greatest respect to Mr. Sagen, this is a logical fallacy,
argumentum ad ignorantiam. The thing is, when we talk about there being no evidence for something we cannot say the thing is true merely because it cannot be proven false. There is more to it than that. You have to think about the probably there is a god, an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being who created the universe. First, the assumption such a being exists is unnecessary because we need not make an assumption about the origin of the universe simply because we do not know how it happened. I do not really understand how a car works, I may now a detail here and there, but I am largely in the dark about it. Now, simply because I do not understand how it works, I should not automatically assume it is magic. I should instead realize it may be possible for me or someone else to find out eventually having dismantled, reproduced, or investigated the car. I should not jump to conclusions, I should, in fact, draw none until all the available evidence has been collected. Of course, we know a great deal about the origin of the universe. When astronomers look through their telescopes they can see the galaxies hurtling away from each other. If you wind the clock back, at one time in the distant past all the matter in the universe was in one place. Approximately fourteen billion years ago, a nearly infinitely dense, infinitely small point in space exploded with such force the debris is still flying. We know this just like we know how stars are big fiery balls of gas and planets are the rocky remains of dead stars coalesced in the orbits of living ones. The Earth itself is nothing more than a cooling rock in orbit of a star in the outer spiral arm of an insignificant galaxy amongst billions of others. We know these things, they are known to us because we have collected the available evidence and put it all together like the pieces of a massive puzzle. When we find new evidence we add it to the collection and see how the picture changes, such is the nature of the scientific method. As Pierre-Simon Laplace put it when Napoleon commented Laplace never mention god in his study of the movement of the planets, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Is it possible god ignited the Big Bang? It is just as probable, if not less so, aliens from another dimension did it. Regardless, we should not make such assumptions. In accordance with Occam’s Razor, we must cut away unnecessary assumptions.
