are you an atheist?

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

Men of Truth

The story is right about virtue: The smoothly muscled skeptical-scientific mind is a gorgeous thing—picture the Apollo of Olympia, a poised young athlete in a throng of centaurs, passion-driven half-men. Science is a virtue: a perfection of the human creature gifted with a mind, a use of the mind that, says Aquinas, “perfects the speculative intellect for the consideration of truth.” But to be “men of truth,” in the words of Exodus, is to be vulnerable to truth.

Richard Dawkins speaks as a genuine scientist when he insists, “What I care about is what’s true; I want to know, is there a God in the universe or not?” Perfect. Truth is awaiting you, with its painful grip.

But on the question around which Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling, Onfray, and voices still to come are now springing up—the question of God—the successor of Apollo is not the atheist or the agnostic. Both lack the great virtue of the scientist, the skeptical virtue. Here they are the hankerers after comfort, the scrawny ones who prefer their own commitments over reason.

No matter how excellent these thinkers might be on other questions, on this question they nimbly shift their allegiance: Between the life they like and the demands of vocation (submission to the question), they choose their lives—ironically, the very failing for which they ridicule believers. A seeker of truth has to go where the truth can be found, and to go on until it is found, and both the atheist and the agnostic are early quitters.

Dawkins is right that “the question of the existence of God or gods, supernatural beings, is a scientific question,” straight from the mind hungry for truth. On that question, the path of the scientist was shown to us at the dawn of modernity by a consummate scientist: Blaise Pascal. Here was a scientific mind that brushed aside the medieval proofs of God (which did nothing for him) to attack the question anew.

People may think it just an odd coincidence that the author of the Pensées, a work of apologetics, also came up with Pascal’s law, on the transmission of pressure in confined liquids, but one mind seeking one thing generated both. Pascal was a lifelong seeker of truth: “I should . . . like to arouse in man the desire to find truth, to be ready, free from passion, to follow it wherever he may find it,” he says in Pensée 119. But the scientists who have asked Pascal’s question after him are rarely scientist enough for that.

They do not follow truth wherever they may find it. On the topic they have promised to illuminate, they are the defenders of Ptolemy in the age of Galileo: resisters and avoiders of scientific thought inflexibly wedded to their own commitments; and it is not hard to show this.

The Skeptical Theist

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief.

“Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy,” as Dawkins says—though it is odd that he does so in a discussion of Pascal, who, like him, is a skeptic. A complete misunderstanding of Pascal, however, is crucial to the way that Dawkins and every one of his fellows (past and future) always think.

Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists.

“I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, nature should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.

The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.

A Hidden God?

Pascal says that from base camp we must try to find a non-dogmatic route of assault upon the question. Think about it logically, he says. If we do not know that God even exists, we hardly know how he behaves. So we cannot begin this ascent with any dogmatic presumption about his behavior.

Maybe, if he exists, God would show himself directly to our senses. But maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would hide from us—maybe he is a Deus absconditus, Pascal says, following Isaiah 45: “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” What evidence do we have by which to rule that out? We can’t be dogmatic, can’t say that God is this way or that way: Everything possible is possible.

But we have, in fact, already tested one hypothesis about how God behaves: that he shows himself directly to our senses. That is what got us up here past the tree-line in the first place. We now have evidence for a conclusion that all our fellow seekers of truth ought to draw: Either God does not exist or he exists but does not show himself to our senses.

Our skepticism rejects the likelihood that things we can see will resolve our doubts; that is progress already made. The Humean idea so nicely put by Carl Sagan—that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—was hardly worth resurrecting, given that it was passé before Hume was in diapers. “If this religion boasted that it had a clear sight of God and plain and manifest evidence of his existence, it would be an effective objection to say that there is nothing to be seen in the world which proves him. . . . But . . . on the contrary it says that men are in darkness. . .” (427).

A hundred years earlier, Pascal had already ruled empirical theism a dead end, a foolish hope for what we ought by now to know we were not going to get: clear material evidence of clearly immaterial being. By 1660 there were only two options left: Either God does not exist or he is not a gift to our senses.

Pascal the skeptic has ruled out a fruitless path, the path to God via logic or concrete evidence: the easy route to the summit, sought for centuries but never found. The only way forward is up from where we are, onto the icy slopes out past the limit of concrete evidence. If that is possible.

At this point, of course, the venture is not looking especially promising. The mind is made for hard evidence. It gets traction on rough ground, but what stretches before us is sheer ice (minds are not issued with crampons). Is there a way forward?

That is now the question. If we care about the truth more than we care about some favored means of data-collection, we need to discover whether there is any other way, up here where the air is thin and the ice treacherous, that a rational person could settle the question of God.

The Instrumental Heart

When the smart scientist of the seventeenth century was asked, “Is clear water pure?” he did not go with his gut and answer “yes” or “no.” “The naked eye says yes,” he answered, “but is there an instrument better than the naked eye with which to see?” We need to listen to the scientist who claims that there is, and that scientist is Pascal.

That instrument is the heart. “It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason” (424). “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (423). Pascal’s reasons of the heart are meant to take over from an intellect that operates on hard evidence but has run out of it. “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one” (298).

We are not talking here about feelings, which love to cheat us. Pascal says that the heart convinces, makes us rightly sure. “Demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us” (821).

Many of his readers miss this, and so see him as preparing us to leap—but conviction is not a leap. Dawkins takes him to say that when the evidence runs out, you just throw in your lot with belief in God, because that is logically prudent; he credits Pascal with “the ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do.” But the heart, Pascal is saying, is not a springboard to choice; it charts a path to conviction about God. It is not all done for us by logic and by sight. There is still the reasoning of the heart.

The scientist Pascal claims to know a route that will take us over the ice to convincing discovery. It is the refusal to test his thinking that betrays the faith of atheists and agnostics.

No no, they will say, point to something material on which to base belief and then I will look at it. “Give us solid evidence!” They insist that every belief about reality must be accepted on the basis of evidence (“experience or logic”). On what basis do they accept that? Evidence? But there is none.

There is no evidence at all that everything reality might contain can be apprehended by this faculty or that one, this instrument or that. There is no reason at all to pick a horse, except as a matter of hope or “mood and attitude” (the impulses, atheists explain, of religion, by contrast with science).

But atheists and agnostics pick. They commit in the absence of evidence. They never fail to stew at “the weary old canard that atheism is ‘a faith proposition,’” but “commitment to a belief in the absence of evidence supporting that belief” is their own definition of faith, and that is what they do.

The Dissenter’s Heart

If belief on the basis of senses or logic is the one rational option, why does the dissenter not get all his beliefs that way? On other questions—in fact, in his most fundamental commitments, in his credo—he does believe without evidence, since there is no evidence to support the belief that the divine must knock at the doors of eye and mind.

He ceases to care about what is logically possible because he has flatly refused to accept that it is possible. And how has he done this? He has denied it in his heart. He has answered the question of God first—not by recourse to evidence but by consulting his heart, which has turned in on itself, which seeks no God. “He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved” (Psalm 10). Because he simply “does not buy it,” he will not engage the logic by which it can be bought, and in that disordered posture he cannot unclench his heart and face the disturbing and painful logic that leaves the possibility of God open.

He could do so, though. And looking then into his heart, he might find that he wished to climb with Pascal, out onto the ice, making “every effort to seek [the truth] everywhere” (427), trying everything that all who have found the evidence advise.

He could, but he does not. Instead, he has not a moment to waste on what it might mean to fail to discover a God who might exist, because he doesn’t really care what it would mean, and he doesn’t care because all that he can picture is a world without God. He wholly inhabits question-begging. His logic is sketchy and his logos is lame: His rational power of imagining has atrophied from selective use in the service of his pleasure.

The Mask of the Unbeliever

Who, then, is this person? He is not a skeptic at all (someone who, for want of solid reasons, refuses to commit)—he commits. He is not a lover of reason over passion—he chooses the possibilities he cares about because those are the ones he likes. He is not a skeptic who in the absence of evidence withholds belief—he is a believer.

You cannot even call him selectively non-committal, committing to some reasoning of his own but refraining from ours—for the instrument he is using is the very one he disparages. He denies Pascal’s reasons that do what hard intellect cannot . . . on the strength of reasons of the heart that push religion off his path, as reason fails to do.

The final self-description this character offers is this: That without evidence he cannot believe, but now we must kick away this last support of his identity, too. It is not true at all that he cannot believe without evidence; he has already done so, having arrived at his commitment to evidence without evidence. Evidence is not his only vehicle of locomotion, and he should admit it. He should notice what his heart is already doing for him, when he lets it.

But the chance is that he does not want to. He has accomplished by his heart the thing he wants, which is to free himself from further thinking, and he does not want to know how he got there. (The entire text of Pensée 886 is, “Skeptic for obstinate.”)

He could very well believe other things on the self-same basis, but he does not want to. He likes the world that he has installed himself in, and that is what tells us who he is: a lover—a lover of his own life, a believer in the path that his heart has charted for him, a believer in the world under the sun.

ethan you're gonna spend too much time reading these dudes and become one of em, take it from me man, I spent all last month reading up on NOI and now I don't even feel dressed without my bow tie

coining a phrase just for ethan: "TLDR Bomb"

why a militant agnosticism is the least anybody can do for the kids' sake:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/us/04evolution.html?ref=us

In a Star Trek movie a prophet led the Starship Enterprise to the Forbidden Region to meet 'God'. This god drew them there because he needed a starship. Commander Kirk doubted the entity was really God and asked this rhetorical question, "What need does God have for a Starship?"

The 'god' was angered. Kirk was thrown to the ground. Kirk got up and ask again, "Excuse me, but what need does God have for a starship?

The angered 'god' knocked Kirk to the floor again. Kirk got up again and asked a third time. For emphasis the question was asked three times. There was no answer and this was taken as proof that since God obviously does not need a spaceship, that any person claiming a need for a starship was obviously not God.

The message delivered to the movie audience is , if any personality did come from outer space in a spaceship it certainly would not be God, for "what need does God have for a Starship?"

But what would you do if Jesus returned in a spaceship? Is it possible?

Here is a hymn by the famous Handel. It is dated 1748. That's two hundred and fifty years ago. That is way before airplanes, rockets and our modern marvels. It is still found in some church hymn books such as the Lutheran Book of Worship. It is still sung at some church services. You may have sang the words to this song.

http://www.moseshand.com/images/bright1.gif

And have the bright immensities
Received our risen Lord,

Where light-years frame the Pleiades
And point Orion's sword?

Do flaming suns his footsteps trace
Through corridors sublime,

The Lord of interstellar space
And Conqueror of time?

The heaven that hides Him from our sight
Knows neither near nor far:

An altar candle sheds its light
As surely as a star;

And where His loving people meet
To share the gift divine,

There stands He with unhurrying feet,
And Heaven's splendors shine.

Rhetorical Questions:

What are the bright immensities?

How did Handel know about light-years?

Why did Handel call Jesus Christ, "The Lord of interstellar space and conquer of time?"

A heaven 'that knows neither near nor far'. Is that travel in hyper-space as in the Star Wars movies?

Space Travel in the Bible
How Jesus left.

Acts 1:9 And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.

How Jesus will return

Acts 1:10 -11 And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; 11 Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.

is Jesus Xenu?

I know close reading and rebuttal of these pieces is hardly necessary but

Here is a hymn by the famous Handel. It is dated 1748 ... How did Handel know about light-years?

Even more incredibly, how did Handel intuit the words of a poem written by Howard Chandler Robbins in 1931?!?!?!

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/06/04/cathedral.sex/index.html

"an outrage of notable proportions which bespeaks unutterable squalor."

two people loving eachother... hmm. doesn't sound so wrong.

"We are atheists and for us, having sex in church is like doing it any other place."

I call bullshit. If it were just like any other place, they wouldn't have been in there. It's only exciting because it's knowingly disrespectful.

Churches are kind of cold and hard and uncomfortable, why would anyone choose to have sex in there other than because it's knowingly disrespectful?

... as the choirboy said to the bishop

My point exactly!

He added that a special ceremony would be held to purify the confession box.

I think probably a kleenex would be better.

That box would have heard plenty of sex talk before this I bet.

And plenty of "bashing of the bishop" from priests during esp. fruity confessions I'll warrant

Has anybody seen Julia Sweeney's 'Letting Go of God' on Showtime?

Really enjoying John Safran's Sunday night Triple J show. Dude needs his own thread.

Kinda feel like i woulda definitely voted 'atheist' for most of my life, but in the last year or two that has changed entirely. I think my definition of God just keeps expanding, sometimes it seems to encompass anything that can and/or cannot be true about the universe and reality. If God is perfect and infinite he must embody not just everything good and true, but everything bad and false and - since I'm a fan of Schroedinger - both and neither as well all at the same time. At this point in my thinking I could simply say that the material universe exists only after I have perceived it, that it is a subjective quantum-style creation. Well if God is everywhere and in all things then he surely must be in me and shit that makes total sense then because IM CREATING THE UNIVERSE THAT I EXPERIENCE!!

It reminds me of this thing I read about one of Crowley's methods, where he begins to invoke a deity and keeps on it, amping up devotion and bhakti and concentration and embodiment of this deity, chanting and dressing up and immersing in the rituals for this deity. And once you have got to the point where you experience contact/a very real vision of the deity, then you start back over with a totally different deity. The purpose is to enhance your control of your willpower, to beef up your creative energies and hone them. You could say this deity is only a figment of your mind, a hallucination you experience after focusing so much time and effort on it. But really you could say that about the everyday reality we live in as well...

But if the definition of atheist is 'lack of belief in a personal (likely Christian) deity' then I might still be that. Then again I've come to realize that if JHVH exists and truly interacted with ancient Hebrews, they would naturally be describing Him in human terms because they were not exactly privileged elites who had been initiated into the mysteries of and abstract mysticism. You try and describe the workings of an infinite consciousness, it ain't easy.

i dunno y'all, the universe is a mysterious place, i'm not ruling out anything

i am an atheist but i hate the whole richard dawkins new atheism pish. Not just because the tone can be tiresome and it's preaching to the converted, but also becuase i don't really subscribe to its worship of rationalism - no one lives their life in an at all rational manner and no-one would want to.

in a way i'm agnostic - i accept that i am completely fallible, so that must apply to my ideas on God as much as anything else - but i have an innate and strong feeling that there is nothing benevolent or all encompassing in the universe. I was raised catholic but doubted as soon as i could even begin to think about religion in any way at all, i was 5 or 5 iirc. The moment that confirmed for me that i didn't believe in god was when i was 11 and i saw someone die for the first, and so far only, time. A maybe 16 or 17 year old stranger drove a moped into a tree when i was on holiday with my family in Rome and after that i felt that my suspicion that there was nothing orderly or good about the universe as a whole was confirmed.

The irony that i reject superstitious, subjective, irrational religion on the grounds of feelings is not lost on me.

5 or 6, lol.

Sometimes I wish I believed in God. Like when I found out John Donne had a portrait done of him as he thought he'd look when he was resurrected at the Apocalypse, so he could hang it on his wall as a memento mori.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Donne-shroud.png/453px-Donne-shroud.png

That's a cool thing to do that necessitates a belief in God/Christianity for it to be anything other than just a weirder-than-average portrait. But, ultimately, I'm too angered by religious paradoxes to just accept them. Like, I think I'm an atheist because I can't handle cognitive dissonance in the slightest.

Yes, atheist. Tried not to be once when I was 12-13 to get a boy to like me, didn't work (he liked me but I just couldn't get into God). Anyone else raised to *not* believe in a higher power or deity? That said, I did have a pretty spiritual upbringing (buddhist).

Was Richard Dawkins the one who said rather than "the creator" being a watch maker, "it" is a blind watch maker? That makes sense to me although I don't think there could be an "it".

Answer to OP: no, I don't have it in me to be an atheist. I'm fine with the magical-thinking aspect...actually I think I prefer a world where some things are unknowable, mystical, all that jazz.

It's the nitpicking ORTHODOXY of organized religion that I can't stand. I just can't imagine why I should care that any human authority throughout history or the present would award themselves the authority to proscribe the beliefs of others. Or me. Especially me!

all the antitheists in the house throw your hands up

I think the orthodoxy is useful because over time people found that certain rituals, certain thoughts, certain actions help program the mind in a way to put it in this spiritual state. You could reach a spiritual state sans orthodoxy but it's sort of a proven tool - to the converted - and this is why they want to share it so badly.

throw your hand in the ay-er
if you eschew prayer

I dunno, I am in awe of so many things even while being an atheist. I forget how lightning is formed every time I watch a thunderstorm (this seriously happened to me, like, yesterday. It was all like boooom! and I said to myself "wow, how does that even happen? Oh wait, right." But lightning is still kind of mysterious because how on earth do clouds get their charge anyway? I guess everything has an electrical charge and maybe clouds are just super unstable because it's all this water vapor hustling around? Is this completely inane?).

The idea that the universe has always existed and will always exist, that it expands infinitely, and that every thing is made up of and connected to everything else is pretty magical to me.

I know, and in an intellectual sense it's orthodoxy that interests me, because the Evangelical movement pretty much washed their hands of literacy and reading comprehension in the '70s with the rise of the Moral Majority and I still kind of find the idea of "respecting tradition and putting any stock in the writings of the great minds of history" to be a charming novelty.

But woe to him or her that actually BELIEVES any of it. Ritual is a great tool but I'm pretty sure there are several hundred aphorisms about a good tool turning in the hand of its user.

xp to Adam

dunno, I am in awe of so many things even while being an atheist. I forget how lightning is formed every time I watch a thunderstorm (this seriously happened to me, like, yesterday. It was all like boooom! and I said to myself "wow, how does that even happen? Oh wait, right."

but surely most theists are ok with "that sort of science", though?

(I hope?)

Hmm, atheist, with the added belief that female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. Have mellowed in that I don't mind other people's religion if they're not using it to enable bigotry, sexism or the control of some other person's behaviour by threatening them with Hell.

Anecdotally, all the people around me who went Evangelical in the '70s were not very bright, with stupid parents to boot, and were as scared of a three-syllable word as THE DEBBIL himself.

female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving

haha yeah :/. i don't really think of myself as an atheist and am close to many female followers of Abrahamic religions, so this is a thought i usually only give vent to privately but yeah.

i was always p. neutral on this but i have been getting like militantly atheist in the last year or so

but surely most theists are ok with "that sort of science", though?

Science & religion are alot closer than popular (political) opinion seems to think. Big Bang first theorized by a Catholic priest and all. Increasingly science describes a universe that is more and more magical, interconnected, unseen, etc. The more dogmatic, mythical stories in the Bibles of the world may be incompatible with archeological/geological findings, but I think the spiritual & cosmological makeup of the universe (particularly in Eastern religions) tend to benefit immensely from scientific study.

If science directly contradicts the bible then its wrong (evolution)

If it wasn't something people who wrote the bible had any concept of (gravity) no big problems.

obv some religious people accept evolution and some don't that's the problem with religion multiple grey areas and interpretation means its not really comparable with science apart from for extremists.

I think there's enough leeway in Xtianity to take what you want if you personally are able to reimagine it without the patriarchal elements. But it's also possible that the foundations of the language and theology are too much based in patriarchy/male power to ever be truly gender-value-neutral and still call it Christianity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg

female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving

love this. yup.

i'm not a fan of dawkins-style militant atheism but i'm way way less of a fan of organised religion making its presence felt in my life, and the latter's rather more dangerous, so railing against dawkins seems a bit wrong-headed in a "fight the real enemy" way

....and women wonder how come they fall into abusive relationships, convinced that there is some redemption to be had for being involved. The major western religions pretty much show me how that happens, whatever the religion.

I like being atheist *but* it's no fun unless you've read the Bible, at least, just to put the wind up the annoying end of the God-botherer brigade. Any human being that's ever tried to emotionally blackmail me using their imaginary divine friend has gotten a big earful of 'no, actually you're the blasphemer here, trying to say what God wants or needs from me, a third party, to suit what you happen to need or want from me yourself'.

I'm Irish Roman Catholic (IIRC)

But that's a background as opposed to practicing. I'm happy enough that nothing happens for a reason, that there are basic constants in this particular universe, and that there is no overarching consciousness controlling it all.

I can dig Dawkins as a science writer, and I kinda enjoy that he's out there pissing off organised religions, but I think he'd be better off chilling out with some bones in a lab somewhere doing some actual work.

Are there any mainstream rappers outed as atheists?

I like being atheist *but* it's no fun unless you've read the Bible

yeah! i'm an atheist/anti-religion because i was raised in a religious household with all the attendant crap that comes with that, but i'm so glad i do have that knowledge of xtianity and its workings