From Agnosticism to Atheism

I am nearing the end of what I have to say about atheism.  I have ideas for six additional posts, but in a general sense, this post is the culmination of what I have to say about atheism and belief in God.

I had doubts about the existence of God and souls from my early teens.  As I grew older, married, and had a family, I kept my doubts to myself.  I went to church with my family, worshipped and prayed as a practicing Christian.  As the children grew older, we stopped attending church and I stopped praying.  I returned to my earlier doubts and considered myself an agnostic.

Being agnostic implies uncertainty.  As it is often used, being agnostic incorrectly suggests something of a 50 – 50 proposition – “Eh, maybe it’s so, maybe not”.  Even if evidence or lack of evidence leads you to an opinion, at the end of the day being agnostic means giving a shrug and saying, “I really don’t know.”  This post is about how I moved away from a mindset of uncertainty, to decide with reasonable certainty that there is no God.  This is the path to atheism.

About a decade ago I read a short passage in an essay which radically changed my thinking.  The essay is “A Dream of Socrates”, in the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.  In the essay, Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes in the style of the dialogues of Plato.  Hermes and Socrates have been discussing the virtues of Athenian society. 

“Hermes: ‘Most Athenians would indeed call those virtues.  But how many really believe it?  How many are willing to criticize a god by the standards of reason and justice?’
Socrates: [Ponders.] All who are just, I suppose.  For how can anyone be just if he follows a god of whose moral rightness he is not persuaded?  And how is it possible to be persuaded of someone’s moral rightness without first forming a view about which qualities are morally right?’”

The notion that people should judge gods (or God) was revolutionary to me.  But why shouldn’t we judge God?  We are intelligent beings and we can appraise justice and reason.  We should expect God to be reasonable and just.  Being reasonable and just should be something intrinsically part of how we define God.  If the world does not show evidence of God’s reason and justice, we can logically conclude that God doesn’t exist.  And if God is not reasonable and just, we’re talking about a demon, not God.  I will not believe in an unreasonable, unjust or capricious God.

Some people would tell me that God doesn’t want to be judged.  We are told, without proof, that we are lower beings created by God, and therefore we have no right to judge God.  But isn’t that unreasonable and unjust?  

On social media, I’m frequently told that I will suffer eternal damnation if I don’t repent and worship God.  If God demands worship under the threat of eternal pain and suffering, isn’t that extortion?  Is it reasonable?  I’ll answer for you.  No.  Is it just?  No.

Much of this blog has been an exploration in the ways in which God is apparently unreasonable and unjust.  My essay “God as Sustainer of All Things”  (https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/10/god-as-sustainer-of-all-things.html) contains a list of dozens of rationalizations that religious authorities use to excuse God’s apparent injustice toward humans.  If God exists, we have to twist logic like a pretzel to justify God’s apparent indifference and cruelty towards humankind.  Occam’s Razor gives us a better resolution of the paradox.  It is simpler, and therefore logically correct, to conclude that God doesn’t exist.

Agnosticism
Dictionaries define agnosticism as a belief that any ultimate reality, including the existence of God, is probably unknowable.  (It’s funny that agnostics are even agnostic about agnosticism.  “Is reality truly unknowable?”   “Eh, I’m not so sure.  Maybe not.”)  It’s appropriate that I am an atheist, not an agnostic, because I believe that objective truth does exist and is generally accessible to everyone.

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Carl Sagan 1984, after others circa 1890.

A list of famous agnostics includes many smart people whom I greatly respect.  Presumably they thought about the problem, doubted the existence of God, but could not bring themselves to the point of denying that God exists.

Agnosticism.

Famous agnostics:

Thucydides, Confucius, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Erico Fermi, Alexander Von Humboldt, Mark Twain, Edwin Hubble, John Tyndall, Marie Curie, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Karl Popper, David Attenborough, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jacob Bronowski, Neil Gaiman, Noam Chomsky, Matt Groening.

Part of the rationale for agnosticism lies in the fact that knowledge is always incomplete.  There are always unknown aspects of reality.  The progress of science has been a bit like the process of peeling an infinite onion.  After we began to understand the elements as the fundamental building blocks of matter, we learned of fundamental sub-atomic particles – the proton, neutron and electron.  Then we learned that protons and neutrons are not elementary particles, they each consist of three quarks.  Seventeen elementary particles have been recognized, including six varieties of quark.  Similarly, Newtonian ideas about gravity and mechanics were replaced by Einstein’s gravity and  others’ quantum mechanics.  Dark matter and dark energy are additional mysteries; the early evolution of the universe contains paradoxes, etc.  Each layer of reality peels away to reveal a new mystery.  Could the next scientific discovery reveal the face of God?  Agnostics believe so.  They would say that don’t know what we don’t know.

However, the notion of the “unknown unknowns” has limits of reasonable conjecture.  Edward Abbey expressed the reasonable limit of "unknown unknowns" in this aphorism:

“Is there a God?  I don’t know.
Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?  I don’t know.”
Edward Abbey

Isaac Asimov's “The Relativity of Wrong” is a brilliant essay on incomplete knowledge.  He shows that incomplete knowledge is not the same as not knowing anything.  The discovery of general relativity does not invalidate Euclidean geometry; it simply expands the domain of geometry to include new truths about non-Euclidean space.  New subatomic particles don’t change the composition of salt from sodium and chlorine.  And uncertainty about the existence of God is something that we can address using logical principles and then reason to a logical conclusion.  

Atheism
In contrast to Agnostics, Atheists actively assert that God does not exist.  Through various processes of reasoning, atheists conclude that there is evidence of absence; i.e., that God does not exist.  Here’s a list of well-known atheists.

Famous Atheists:

Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Anton Chekov, Dave Barry, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Terry Pratchett, Salman Rushdie, Maurice Sendak, H.L. Menken, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Kahneman, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Andrei Sakharov, Irwin Schrodinger, Alan Turing, Charles Richter, Henri Poincare, Ayn Rand, Linus Pauling, Richard Leakey, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, James Watson, Orson Welles, Karl Marx, Oliver Sacks, Kurt Vonnegut, Kenau Reeves, Lisa Randall, Tim Berners-Lee.

The Atheism symbol is derived from a simplified
schematic of atomic structure and the letter "A".

Standards of Proof
Standards of proof depend on why we’re trying to prove something.  Let’s consider four different standards of proof commonly used in society.

• Preponderance of Evidence: Civil suits in the United States, regarding damages due to a negligent or improper act, are decided according to a lower standard of proof than a criminal case.  A jury in a civil suit must decide their judgment on the preponderance of evidence.  If 51% of the evidence supports the plaintiff, and 49% supports the defendant, the judgment should be decided in favor of the plaintiff
• Reasonable Certainty:  A higher standard of certainty is required in judicial criminal cases in the United States.  This standard is also called certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.  A defendant in this country is presumed innocent until proven guilty by an overwhelming weight of evidence, such that no reasonable doubt remains about the defendant’s guilt.  Reasonable certainty suggests that no reasonable doubt remains.  This standard is unquantified, but is generally understood by ordinary citizens in society.
• Unequivocal determination:  Scientific meta-studies aggregate all of the relevant research on a topic.  Examples include the IPCC climate assessment reports and the National Climate Assessment.  After integrating the findings of many studies, the reviewing organization may issue an unequivocal determination on a finding.  This standard requires that the likelihood of the finding is significantly greater than 99%.  (A finding of >99% likelihood, but with reasonable remaining uncertainty is assigned a grade of “virtually certain”.)  When all reasonable objections to the finding have been removed by evidence, the finding is judged to be unequivocal.
  
• Mathematical certainty:  A mathematical proof is an even higher standard of proof.  A mathematical proof of an assertion requires that there is no possibility of contradiction within the domain under consideration, reasonable or unreasonable.

In becoming an atheist, to make my assertion that God does not exist, I chose the standard of reasonable certainty.  On the basis of the preponderance of evidence, we would easily conclude there is no God, because there is no rigorous evidence that God exists.  On the other hand, it seems unlikely that atheism could provide mathematical certainty that God doesn’t exist.  However, we do not live our lives according to mathematical certainty.  The standard of reasonable certainty allows us to reason to a conclusion, and would rebut all reasonable (that is, evidence-based) objections.

Proof
It’s easier to prove something exists than that something doesn’t exist.  Still, there are tools we can use.  We can look for internal inconsistencies to disprove an assertion, or inconsistencies between reasonable expectations and reality.  In formal logic, the first is reductio ad absurdum, and the second is modus tollens.  In the first method, if you can reason from a proposition to a contradiction, the proposition is disproved.  In the second, if you can disprove a consequence of the proposition, the proposition is disproved.  (Given the proposition: If P, then Q.  If Q is not true, P is disproved.)  Let’s use the second method and consider the logical consequences if God exists.  

As an aside, I have added a step to modus tollens.  I first consider our expectations of God in terms of character, and then what interactions logically follow from those traits.  Logicially, if P, then Q, then R.  If R is disproved, then Q and P are also disproved.

Please take a moment to think of things that logically follow if God exists.  Find a piece of paper and make a list.  Be serious.  Begin with the assumption that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere, as is the general assertion of Abrahamic religions.  First write down characteristics of God that logically follow from being all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere.   Second, write down conditions or events in the world that logically follow from the characteristics that you assigned to God.  You may think of things that are in the world we know, and also things that are not.  Go ahead, take your time.  I’ll wait.

Here is my list of God’s characteristics which logically follow if God really exists.  Given that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere, I expect that God would have developed empathy and responsibility.  God knows and understands suffering of living things, and from empathy, should care enough to develop the characteristic of responsibility and fairness for the outcomes in the living world.  From empathy, responsibility, and fairness, God should become caring, reasonable and just.  Here is my list of God's characteristics, if God exists.

• Empathetic
• Caring
• Responsible
• Reasonable
• Fair
• Just

If God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just, I would expect that the following conditions would exist in the world, representing the interaction between God and humanity.

• God would communicate to all of humanity clearly, consistently, and continuously about God’s plans, purpose, desires and instructions for humankind.
• Revelation of God would be given equally and fairly to all societies, as soon as each society was capable of understanding God.
• Sacred texts would be consistent across all cultures and times.  Sacred texts would also be complete from the first version, not subject to revision and without internal contradictions.
• Clear indications of God’s divinity would be given through demonstrable miracles in modern as well as ancient times, meeting scientific standards for observation.
• God would show reason and justice in God’s own actions or inaction.
• Sacred literature would also exhibit clear standards of reason and justice.
• God would mitigate the suffering of innocents.
• God would clearly answer prayers.  (Note that “answer” does not mean “fulfill”, but instead means “respond”). 

None of those things happen in reality.  They are contradicted by lived experience and all credible reported experience.  They are not true.  How does your list compare?  Does your lived experience and the experience of others confirm or disprove the existence of God?  

This is what David Deutsch means when he says that we should judge God.  Does the world we live in reflect our logical expectations of God?  To me, the logical consequences that should follow from the existence of God don’t exist.  If God existed in the form that human religions have proposed, as an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good being, creator of the universe and humankind, we would have a fundamentally different world and different human experience.

Conclusion
If the Abrahamic God exists, then God is empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable and just.  God would interact with humans in ways that are reasonable and just.  But God does not communicate clearly and consistently with humanity.  God did not give his revelation to all societies fairly and equally.  Sacred texts across cultures are wildly inconsistent, and contain revisions and corrections to earlier texts (i.e., the New Testament).  There are no modern miracles meeting suitable standards of observation.  God’s actions, as recounted in the Old Testament, are cruel and unjust.  God does not mitigate the suffering of innocent victims of either human or natural misfortune.  God does not clearly respond to prayers.  

God’s interactions with humanity are not empathetic, responsible, caring, reasonable or just.  We should judge God not only on the basis of our own experience, but also the lived experience of others.  We might think about those drowned in the Titanic, victims of Nazi gas chambers and slaughters, Native Americans accepting missionaries and dying of smallpox, victims of famine and war, non-viable babies, and all the tragic events suffered by all of humanity.  We should think about prayers which were met with silence.

The lived experience of humanity contradicts the care that we should expect from an all-powerful being.  Therefore, we must logically conclude that God does not exist.
QED.

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