On atheism
[Originally posted October 23, 2005]
An excerpt from a reply to someone asking about my views and how I got here.
My atheism is a fairly recent development - within the last year or so, although I didn’t realize it until about six months ago. People would probably like to link it with me being a scientist and especially an evolutionist, but I was a happy evolutionary Catholic for many many years. Three key events made me look at the world differently. First, my best friend is a nurse and served in Iraq for eight months last year, patching up marines and zipping up body bags in Fallujah. We talked quite a bit when she got back. She told me about some of the horrendous things she saw, and those images and impressions - though acquired second hand - will stay with me for a long, long time. I have extraordinary difficulty reconciling that kind of suffering and pointless butchery in a theistic world - especially when most everyone supposedly shares the same god, despite religious differences.
That same year I was deeply involved with, indeed wanted to marry, a man who turned out to be incredibly ill. He had schizo-affective disorder (conceptually somewhere between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia), though I didn’t know it until much, much later. I tried to be the titanic column, to reverse the downward trend he was on, to motivate and support both our lives, but he was dragging me down too. In effect, despite all my efforts, I had to sit by and watch the slow, excruciating death of an incredible mind, of the man I loved transcendentally. It’s a horrendous thing, to watch a mind tear itself apart. In the end, we broke up and he killed himself in March.
Through all this, I felt incredibly alienated from god, and had some bones to pick besides. I couldn’t understand why something so shitty should happen to such a good person - my boyfriend or the troops overseas, or to me fighting the good fight all by myself. It boiled down to the problem of evil, which intellectually was not a new problem to me. I mean, I went to Notre Dame; they make sure they cover that stuff in your theology classes. So I was grappling with it anew, but at the same time I didn’t feel that all this was sufficient to chuck god and Catholicism, which has been important to me for a long, long time. I’m a very patient person, in my work and my relationships with men and with God; I’ll grind myself into the ground before I give up. For most of my life, I’ve been a real, conscientious Catholic, not just one of the people that pay it lip-service and go to mass on Easter. I felt things incredibly strongly, and at times had a visceral knowledge of god’s existence.
To help me get through some of the worst times with my boyfriend, I picked up one of my favorite books - Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I’d read it some years before and loved the story. This time I read it for the "you can do it" message just so I could make it one day to the next. At that point I was in a deep depression with severe anxiety from the stress of living with an abusive, suicidal man, and therapy wasn’t enough to override the downward spiral of his health and my feelings. Atlas did the trick. Needless to say, I pretty much maxed out the depression scale when I first went in to the doctor’s for treatment. After two weeks of reading Atlas, I felt alive, and confident, and *strong* for the first time in months. My depression scale score went from a 37/40 to a 2 before the meds could have any effect. The enthusiasm from the book did wear off slowly, but it gave me a shot in the arm when I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and there’s a good chance it saved one or more lives at least once.
The crazy thing about that book, beyond its message, was how accurate it was in its portrayal of people, and the relationship between thoughts and feelings in those different types of people. I don’t know about you, but I had never been closely associated with someone as ill and as tormented by his feelings as my boyfriend was. I saw that Rand understood the internal conflicts in a way that neither of our families nor our therapists (nor anyone else I knew) could grasp. Whether or not she had had a similar experience as me was irrelevant. However she came upon her knowledge, she knew what I knew, and I wanted to know how she knew it. So, in the spring, I read Atlas again, this time for the philosophy. And it jumped out at me and grabbed me. There’s a notorious 50 page speech in that book that, admittedly, I skipped the first time around. I mean, 50 pages of preaching, come on. It’s now my favorite part of the whole book, because I finally get what she’s driving at and, given my experiences, I’ve seen why these issues really are life or death matters. I used to criticize her for exaggerating. Now I gently reproach myself for not having had a larger view of things (gently because for me it would have been difficult to come to that perspective without a trying experience). I’m a rational person, and I am extraordinarily tough with ideas - I want to see that something can go through the inferno of rigorous testing, that I can do my utmost to tear it down - and if it still stands, then it’s the most beautiful and powerful thing I can conceive of, because it’s essential and fundamental and motivates all my more concrete experiences of beauty, inspiration, etc. whether in my personal life (as here), or something with little or no application outside my work.
After that, I delved into her non-fiction writings and, honestly, they made my heart race more than the book ever did. I distinctly remember forcing myself to put down "Philosophy: Who Needs It", and go for a walk to let my heart rate slow down and my adrenaline recede. Mostly though, I knew I had found what I’d been looking for or trying to create for some years - an integrated, rational system of knowledge to inform my values, and therefore the rest of my life. I had looked for it many years ago, and couldn’t find it, and had resolved to make it myself - my own system of philosophy that made sense from the bottom up, examining and choosing the most fundamental tenets of my worldview, and making the relationships between all derivative things explicit for myself. It really bugs me when I know that I value something but I can’t explain *why*; saying "I just do" or "It just feels right" is thoroughly insufficient. It’s a place to start, to be sure, but I see feelings as indicators of implicit knowledge that, with sufficient effort, can be made explicit. I like Margaret Thatcher’s definition of intuition: Reason in a hurry. Anyway, I couldn’t do that with my values. All the reasons I could enumerate for being a good person were concretes, particulars, derivative answers - I couldn’t nail down the fundamentals motivating those concretes.
So I tried to make my own philosophy, but got stuck on physics and the universe - I didn’t know enough. So I started reading, and realized it would take me years - if not decades - to make my philosophy. So I said ok - it’ll take me a long time, but I’ll do it eventually. And the idea - that goal - had been on the back burner of my mind ever since. Till I found Rand. I saw what I was looking for, what I was unable to do at the age of 22. So I read her stuff. And I saw the fundamentals, the axioms, the relationships between them and their derivatives, and I saw that there was no need for god. And it made perfect sense - internally (as presented, regardless of my experiences) and externally (compared to my experiences and the world around me); to the very best of my knowledge, she’s hit the nail on the head. And it freed me. I was able to throw off the myriad of conflicting "should’s" and the guilt and confusion that come from giving validity to something you haven’t validated (god, in this case), and just like that, I was able to integrate my whole life, without even trying. My beliefs, my personal relationships, my work and my science, and my sense of life all stem from the same values for the same reasons, and there are no contradictions, no compartmentalizations, no exceptions. I’m able to live my life fully, joyously, morally, *to the hilt* in everything I do. I’ve never had more integrity, honesty, or justice (in my definition of those words, or in anybody else’s - everyone describes me as a "good" person, but I think I’m the only one who knows how "good" I am - and how far I still have to go). I’m more moral and more happy than at the peak of my religiousness. I embrace the fact that when I die, that’s it. No pearly gates, no heavenly here-after - and the absence of such things is what makes possible the "aliveness" and the morality of my life now. Suffice to say, my view on god (and a myriad of other things) allows me to move on with my life - these views make possible all my subsequent endeavors. As you can see, I was willing to set aside a good chunk of the time and energy of my life just so I could have an integrated and rational worldview. It’s that important to me. I just got it a lot earlier than I had expected, and now I’m able to get on with the things that interest me - macroevolution, macroecology, philosophy of science, the history of life, etc. All things living, myself and people included. That’s why my interest in philosophy, biology, physics, business, politics, and many forms of art are all variations on a theme for me. They have different names, but it’s all part of the same thing. I’d sound mystic if I didn’t know that I reject all things mystical :o).
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This post was linked to the blog carnival Mental Health Update: http://mental-health.blogcarnival.com/archives/2006/03/on_atheism.html
Comment by praxical — March 15, 2006 @ 9:49 pm
Um… While I normally want to jump and devour everything you write. You have hit a few sore points and you have torn away the scabs of a few wounds that I did not want to revisit.
I have something to say here, but I need to gather my thoughts.
I’ll get back with you.
I’ll get back to you.
Comment by FIDO — October 27, 2006 @ 9:16 pm
success is in life itself…if god did not exist then God wouldnt be a subject of interest or discussion…the universe deserves some credit…because man certainly didnt create it…
Comment by chris — November 21, 2006 @ 11:33 pm
“Success”, meaning the achieving of something that didn’t have to be, does not apply to life as a physical phenomenon. It’s a self-selecting probablistic process, acting against the alternative of disintegration and inaction (i.e. death), and requires no more explanation or credit than a seive retaining rocks but not flour. Organisms are, at minimum, chemical machines programmed to achieve something that must be actively maintained - life.
Santa Claus doesn’t exist but he’s a multi-billion dollar economy, and damn-tootin if people don’t think about him a helluva lot at least one month of the year. Or, to take a more “adult” and “serious” example, what about a coming ice age? Not in 100,000 years, but in 100 years! Leading scientists have shown this to be not only possible, but probable! The media is filled with scare-stories and testimonials, and politicians and local leaders are urging citizens to change their activities that contribute to ths coming horror, and make their plans accordingly, including moving away from colder areas, storing food, and investing in the power generation industry so we have more, newer, better power plants to heat our homes and prevent mass casualities, especially among the economically marginalized.
“But wait,” you say, “I’ve heard no such thing. The opposite is true! We’re headed for global warming and melting ice and higher sea levels and more hurricanes! All the talk you hear today says that!” True enough. And the ice age scare was all the range in the media and intellectual circles some 60-80 years ago. And prior to that, it was global warming. And, as a graduate student in integrative biology, I have a fair view of both recent ecological and climatological studies, as well as the “long haul” view from paleoclimatology and paleoecology. Facts are one thing; inference, conclusion, hype and scare are a totally different matter. If we assume that mean global temperature has increased in the last 100 years (which I am wary of; what I understand of the data collection on that point is HIGHLY sketchy, not well done) - so what? (gasp! yes! I just said that!) The chain of causal events stemming from increased temperature are conjecture at best. I cannot begin to tell you *how little* we understand about the long-term, global effects of more temperature - on physical systems (like weather) and on biological systems. Sure, tinker with X, get Y effect. But do X and Y have any significant impact on the longevity or health of a species? An ecosystem? How resilient are such systems? Given that prior to humans, *nothing on earth remains static* - plus ca change, my friends - is an insistence on *as little change as possible* 1) realistic 2) a good idea, in terms of biological health? There are time scales of cause and effect that are critically important, and are not even on the radar of most conservationists. But that’s another rant. Back to point:
Human interest, credulity, or discussion is no criterion for existence or even probability of existence. For God, for aliens, for poltergeists, for government conspiracies, for Nessie, or for the contents of Billy Graham and George Bush’s minds. Whatever scraps of facts standing at the base of that tripe are legitimately considered by more competent minds, which integrate those facts with the whole of known reality, and rationally conclude otherwise. Please. Polls don’t determine the existence of anything except public opinion.
The notion that because something exists it requires a thing to create it is a stolen concept. In fact, humans are the only things capable of “creating” anything (all else is blind physical process), and in fact that creation is just a rearrangement of stuff that already exists physically. In the absence of human creation - reality still exists, the universe still exists. To think that the universe requires something to create it is to switch the metaphysically-given with the man-made. Just because some things did not have to be (i.e. all the things resulting from human choice and action) doesn’t mean that we wield creative power, OR that all non-man-made things require “someone” or “something” to create them. They simply are. You’re anthropomorphizing a universe that frankly doesn’t give a rat’s ass about humans. We need IT, it doens’t need us.
As for the Big Bang - “What came before the Big Bang? Clearly that must be the work of God!” - let’s clarify that concept and conclusion:
1. The facts on which the Big Bang hypothesis is based simply are what they are. So the universe is expanding. Rewind the tape, does that make the Big Bang? Let’s just say that it’s as simple as that, and the universe started out much smaller than it is now. *Even if* the idea that “all this” exploded out of nothing, or virtually nothing, was a legitimate concept (which it’s not) - that in itself doesn’t have anything to say about God. Maybe the universe is, at the 100-billion year time scale, like a fire cracker, and just goes pop-pop-pop with repeated Bangs and collapses (string theory has a Big Bounce hypothesis). No reason to invoke God. It could just be a property of the universe/matter/all the stuff that is. Matter can do some really strange stuff. But that’s not God. Pin god to matter, or energy, and he becomes experimentally tractable and subject to the laws of physics. D’oh!
2. But - hold the phone. What about the recent observations that the universe is not just expanding, but the universe’s expansion is actually *accelerating*? That suggests that *even if* there was a Bang, things are way more complicated than that - because if it was just a Bang, then the fastest velocities occur closest to the site of explosion, and then slow down as things travel away and spread out. Physicists (cosmologists, more specifically) are taking this acceleration as evidence for other matter or energy-types or forces (I think they’re calling it dark matter, since we can’t observe it directly), thinking its force acts opposite of gravity - it shoves stuff apart.
3. If this is correct, not only is the Big Bang more complicated than we thought - but it makes the Big Bang an unwarranted conclusion at all. The simplest explanation for the expansion of the universe is that this dark matter anti-gravity force is pushing things apart in the areas we can observe. Clearly gravity still works (we wouldn’t have a solar system without it), so maybe the structure of the universe is a big tug of war between these opposing forces.
Still no God.
“God” is a broken concept (in terms of reality) that has a boatload of cultural currency. Human fallibility doesn’t decrease in fact or potency when lots of people are wrong. If anything, it’s one of the best examples of it, and increases in potency because guileless crowd-followers like yourself look at “public opinion” and jump on the bandwagon without evaluating the concept or what it could possible refer to in reality. Human fallibility is (presently) not just a fact, but a density-dependent, self-reinforcing exponential phenomenon. Unless people take the helm of their minds (which means evaluating concepts and rationally choosing the ones they retain), the phenomenon of mass error and detatchment from reality will change direction (fads, anyone?) but never alter the process producing that error. Things will reach a head, scads of people will die while two tribes duke it out over whose opinion is right. [Aryans vs Jews, blacks vs whites, aristocracy vs socialism, theocracy vs fascism, Christianity vs Islam, West vs East, altruism vs exploitation, whim vs faith, humans vs the environment, shall I go on? These are all false alternatives, meaning no one has identified the real causes of the problems, and therefore no one has identified any tractable solution to those problems]. Onlookers to the slaughter will experience massive disillusionment and nihilism until someone comes around to fill in their spiritual and moral void, people start jumping on that bandwagon and it all starts again.
What are the real alternatives? Fundamentally: to think, or not. To make reality your reference point, or not. To make reason (thinking about reality) the standard, or not. Reason vs un-reason (which includes faith, whim, inconsistent rationality, and purposeful, systematic irrationality). Choice vs force (by theives, the mob, or the taxman). Capitalism vs political collectivism (which subsumes fascism, totalitarianism, communism, socialism (including the National Socialist Worker’s Party, i.e. the Nazi party), theocracy, dictatorships, democracy (which is just unlimited majority rule, no constitution), and aristocracy). Individuals vs. groups (i.e. racism, sexism, classes, tribalism, nationalism). Human life vs non-human life. Human life vs non-human life. Life vs non-life.
Comment by praxical — November 22, 2006 @ 10:58 am