Radical Atheist

People contend that science and religion can coexist. Science itself is not anti-religion but much of what we’ve learned about reality from science exposes the errors in theology.

The Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon were written by people of a certain time and a particular social setting. Holy books reflect the society that gave birth to them. None of them clearly and without requiring convoluted interpretation state anything that was not already known in that time and part of the world.

Why wouldn’t the gods mention something in their books (using “their” loosely, as we know that the books were written by human scribes who only claimed to be inspired by the subject of the book) that was going to be common knowledge only much later. Think of the stunning effect that would have on future generations. A specific and detailed prediction of the internet, for instance. Something that would have made no sense at all to the scribes but would only be understood 1000 years later. The gods in the holy books give no indication of knowing anything about the rest of the world, present or future, that isn’t also common knowledge of the time and people from whence it comes. I’ve heard tons of excuses for that but no rational example of any god showing an awareness of something completely unknown and foreign to the authors of those books.

The Bible, because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, clearly indicates “truths” that are not correct according to the current evidence. For example, the Earth did not come into being in seven days or seven thousand years (There are two places in scripture that say a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, which either means that his time scale is different than ours or that he’s a really boring person) but over millions of years. Science is clearly at odds with the Biblical creation story. Conclusions drawn from available evidence also lend no validity to American Indian creation stories, Egyptian creation stories or any of the thousands of other fantastic and supernatural creation stories.

Creation stories persist because humans have only recently begun to have the means to examine nature on the scale we can today. We’ve been ignorantly superstitious for thousands of years. We’ve only been able to look at the universe the way we can today in the last hundred. There’s a lot of ingrained ignorance, yes, in even the most brilliant mind, to eradicate. We really only just begun.

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What good does believing there’s a perfect god somewhere do? It doesn’t seem to make us any better people than we could be without belief? What benefit has believing that there’s a supreme being out there somewhere watching every little thing you do and condemning you for much of it? “Supreme” can be understood as both absolute and above all others. The problem with that is no religion can prove beyond doubt that their particular god and way of believing in that god are the only possible right and true belief and way of believing. Reality shows us that theists cannot agree sufficiently about the characteristics and behaviors of their particular vision of god among themselves, which pretty much dooms any attempt to devise a supreme guide.

We don’t need gods. We don’t need to feel guilt and shame over many of the things religious belief has managed to persuade us we must. Belief systems from 2000 years and more in the past are routinely ignored in practically every other field of human inquiry except religious belief. That makes no sense. We do need to face our problems, acknowledge that we created them and we have to correct them ourselves without waiting around for divine intervention. We do need to acknowledge our limitations and strive to do the best we can with our abilities. We do need to grasp the fact that it’s up to us to figure out if we are harming this planet and figure out how to fix it if we are. We need to face the reality of life, and too many religious dogmas aren’t helping. They’re hindering our attempts to understand and learn.

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All across the world wide web are comments from theists of every stripe denouncing science as an attempt by the ungodly to disprove their god or gods. In their never-quenched thirst to be seen as persecuted victims of a world-gone-wild (without taking any responsibility for it, even though they brag about the universality of their beliefs), they try to convince the uncritical and uncertain that science is determined to prove gods do not exist. They make it sound like a holy quest, though we know only believers can enjoy those. Religious believers refuse to acknowledge that the best evidence against the possible existence of any particular god is the gross lack of any evidence for one. We have yet to discover any credible, physical evidence that can only be explained by the existence of a certain god and that god’s intervention in our natural world. Science isn’t trying to disprove god, science simply hasn’t found any evidence that irrefutably proves there is one.

Even if we could somehow learn to a 99% certainty that the universe began this way or that, that knowledge will not kill off the idea of god.

Science will never make an absolute declaration that it knows how the universe came into being. Definitive, absolute proof doesn’t exist. Science is not religion. It can only draw tentative conclusions from what evidence we can collect. Scientific conclusions are only as valid as the data. As we come across more information, science has to adjust its conclusions. Religions pretend to know absolute truths, yet they require us to accept these truths on faith.
If science were to state that all the evidence leads us to believe that the universe started in this or that manner, there will always be room to squeeze in religious belief. We’ve already seen in history how religions adapt to current reality in an effort to stay relevant and retain their power over people. In all probability science can’t and won’t put an end to superstitious belief. With our complex brains otherwise intelligent people believe in luck and fate. Beliefs can exist beside knowledge without being eradicated by that knowledge. No matter how smart we become about reality, superstition will survive. There are many theories as to why humans develop and believe in superstitions, but history leads me to accept that every human has them. Religious belief will no doubt change subtlety, as it has before, to accommodate secular knowledge, but it will unfortunately be with us for a long time yet. It is, after all, just another superstitious belief.

Already there are Christian groups that have managed to incorporate scientific conclusions into their dogma. They accept the Big Bang as the best explanation for the beginning of the universe that can currently be drawn from available evidence and still credit their god with having set it all in motion. They give reverence to the Bible, but as an allegorical work rather than literal truth. Scientology is another example of a religion that has incorporated some science into their otherwise wildly fantastical belief system.

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