My good friend, Steve, recently wrote a blog post about a discussion we had. I thought the comments were all very interesting, but I felt like some of the points I made weren’t getting across, and it was a ripe opportunity to make some more.
Fair warning, the following is what I believe. I am shedding society’s veil of tacit, compromising blind acceptance as well as the insane intellectual disconnect, the cloud through which I am time and time again amazed we are able to scientifically deduce anything. If this post makes you angry, I suggest considering what exactly you are angry about, and why you really believe it so strongly.
As Steve pointed out, religion has given humanity a lot – I have always been the first to agree with that, my problem with it is it’s stubborn refusal to go away, like a house guest that has overstayed it’s welcome. Religion is the crutch of humanity. We have outgrown it. It serves us no longer, you needn’t look far to find ample evidence for that.
Steve says, “When a person points their finger at another and declares them to be wrong because their beliefs conflict, then we are- to put it bluntly- fucked.” If someone told me “2+2=5 and nothing you say can convince me otherwise”, am I really supposed to pretend that is a perfectly correct statement? If you tried to introduce a constitutional amendment which dictated that “2+2=5…In GOD’s country at least”, am I supposed to be ok with that? How about if you want to replace my children’s math books with a new edition which is identical the old one in every way except for the chapter on addition, which has a “special exception for 2+2=5″, is that ok? Some things are just WRONG. And while I am fine if you want to sit at home in your rocking chair chanting over and over “2+2=5 because Jesus loves me”, that is YOUR prerogative. However, when it comes to my tax dollars, my public education, my support of science, and my will for humanity to follow the advancements it has already made with still more, I realize there is more riding on this issue. When people don’t just sit there in their rocking chairs chanting to themselves, but actually believe everyone who disagrees is wrong and they have to impose that belief on others, it concerns ME. It makes me think it is our duty as thinking, rational people to fight back – “believe what you want, but not in my government or my school” only works for so long when dealing with the sort of extremism we are seeing. Whether or not carrots are tasty is an objective thing, but some things are simply not objective, and religion has clouded where that line really ought to be for too long.
Now the beauty of science is, since it’s inception, the sum of all human knowledge has, like entropy, been ever-increasing. This means we can only become more sure about what we know, while facts can go from “unknown to known”, they can not generally go from “known to unknown” (we can discover something we thought was correct was actually incorrect, but we can’t say we “know less about it now”, in fact, we know more about it by knowing it is wrong).
This means each and every question one might ask about the world we live in has one or more theories posited by science, right now, which can be used to answer said question. Let me repeat that, there are “catch-all” heuristics for generating theories so that any question you can possibly ask, right now, already has one or more hypothesis which are scientific and testable, right now. The “god of the gaps” is a myth. Right now, if you asked me “Is there a God”, I can give you a scientific answer. The answer is “No, there doesn’t seem to be, there most certainly is not a personal god who interacts with the world directly”. Further evidence may in fact overturn that, but just like I don’t think there is a flying spaghetti monster, just because I can’t prove there isn’t, science dictates we accept there probably isn’t a god either, until evidence to the contrary arises. We get this hypothesis via Occam’s razor, and any “research” trying to prove the contrary had better be based on some evidence, not just one’s pathetic desire to invent some deity to help them feel more self-important and special in our unimaginably enormous universe.
My very long-winded point is, we are not “fucked” because someone tells someone else they are wrong. We are fucked when we let people claim things are wrong in unscientific ways. We are fucked when we get so many people so brainwashed by an unscientific idea, that even scientists must “dance around the truth” and “mince words carefully” so that they aren’t lynched or shot in their sleep (or at the very least, lose all their funding).
And, above all else, we are “fucked” when we let ourselves forget what it is, exactly, these “religious folks” actually believe. Science doesn’t tell you “if people disagree with your results, kill them”, or “it is your duty to science to educate as many people as possible, lest you burn in hell”. Science encourages people to discover, test, and retest things on their own, while still standing on the shoulders of giants. But the “opposition”, if you will allow me some simplifying generalizations here, is quite different. (If you prefer, replace “They” with “Some religious fundamentalists” in this passage) “They” think “we” are all going to hell. “They” think god DEMANDS they “save us”. “They” think their moral views are “right, absolute truth, word of god” and anyone that disagrees with them is damned. That is why “they” try to invade our schools, silence our brightest minds, poison our children’s education, brainwash the lumbering couch-potato masses (have you ever WATCHED a televangelist?), and the sheer number of them is appalling. These same people who benefit from science day in and day out, driving cars, eating processed food, watching TV and using computers, enjoying the finest medical care, insist science is wrong because “it ain’t in the bible”.
Well WHY ISN’T IT IN THE BIBLE? Couldn’t god have saved an awful lot of lives by telling us the germ theory of disease, or how to treat unclean water to make it potable? Oh, yeah, it must not be part of god’s “plan”. God didn’t do any of that, science did, and the intellectual disconnect it requires for people to enjoy all these modern conveniences while simultaneously saying things like “In the beginning god created… That’s enough for me!”. Clearly it’s not enough for you! If that’s enough for you, maybe you should move back to the Middle East, get some fucking camels and sheep and shit, and live like the biblical people used to. Hope you enjoyed your midlife crisis at 18, because you’d be lucky to make it past 36.
If our country was not already so broken by the seemingly unsurmountable foothold religion has on our society, any scientist that wasn’t themselves deluded would have no choice but to say, without bias, “there is no credible evidence there is a god, therefore, we are best served by assuming there is not a god until such evidence presents itself.” I believe agnostics are simply scientists “too afraid or uncommitted” to admit this, even to themselves. Fortunately for Steve, I don’t believe one’s lack of commitment is sending them straight to hell, or requires me to save their eternal soul, which I hope, Steve will consider to be one of this “firebrand atheist”’s redeeming qualities =)
Of course, there are people who don’t believe their faith has anything to do with science. These days MOST people fall into this category. They are happy to admit the universe is 14 billion years old, the earth is 4 billion years old, and the “7 days of creation” was clearly a “metaphor” or something like that. The bible was the word of god, “as interpreted by the man of the time”, so it’s no wonder we didn’t understand some things Take Pi, for example – the bible says it is exactly 3. Since we hadn’t discovered fractions or decimals yet, I guess god figured it was “close enough”. But how can we believe in a god, and simultaneously believe he, in all his perfection, could only manage to get his message “close enough”? That is a pretty hefty intellectual disconnect right there.
Nonetheless, these people are glad humans have discovered science, and used the brains “god gave them” to create all these advancements, “just as god must have surely intended”. There’s just one problem – they are using confirmation bias. “A tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs”. If people did not already believe in god, nothing today, with our current level of understanding, would be anywhere near convincing enough to warrant such a fanciful explanation as god. But since people already believed that, they are just ignorantly incorporating it into their existing beliefs.
In the end, when you consider these people, they are just as uncommitted as the agnostics who say “why, surely, we can never know!” If you are reasonably confident there is no flying spaghetti monster, and you are reasonably confident that 5 million dollars isn’t going to appear under your pillow even if you pray with all your might, then you are deluded if you also think we can’t be reasonably confident that “there probably isn’t a god”, and surely not a personal god as so many faiths dictate.
