What Possible Harm...?

Ok, so I don’t believe in any gods.  Who cares?  Why even talk about it?

I don’t consider myself to be a “militant” atheist.  I’m not particularly out to change anyone’s opinion.  In fact, most of my goal is to educate and illuminate my own thoughts on the matter, and see if and where I’m misunderstanding something, or just flat out wrong.

But there are those who think religion is necessarily a bad thing.  There are two major points that I tend to agree with.

The first is that religion stifles exploration and discovery and masks the true nature of reality.  There’s an old joke that you always find your car keys in the last place you look.  The joke being that once you find your keys, there is no reason to keep looking anywhere else.  Religion (generally speaking) claims to have answers to many damn difficult questions.  Where did the universe come from?  Is there life on other planets?  Where did humans come from?  What happens after we die?  From what I understand, theists claim to have the answers to these questions.  God spoke the universe into existence, created humans (and the sun and the moon and animals and plants) in our current form.  When we die, we go to heaven or hell or somewhere else.

These answers very well might be true, but I’m not convinced that anyone KNOWS they are true.  And some of these questions (what happens after we die) might never be able to be adequately answered.  My point, though, is that believing that you know the answer when, in fact, you may be wrong is bad.  It hides what could very well be the truth.

My understanding of science is that you’ll never fall into this trap.  I don’t think there’s any scientific theory or principal that isn’t rigorously tested and questioned all the time.  Think about it:  If someone discovered that gravity worked differently HERE than it does THERE, that would be an immense discovery.  Evolution has been demonstrated and is generally accepted to be accepted as the reason why life is the way that it is.  But imagine if a mammalian fossil was discovered in rocks that were older than a certain age.  Or if we discovered that DNA doesn’t replicate and mutate the way we always thought it did.  Those would turn evolution on its head.

The point being:  I’m not convinced that theists do anything to question their own beliefs with any real honesty.  They’ve been told that God created humans in their current form, so that’s good enough for them (regardless of whether that’s actually true or not).

Eric Hovind: We stick one hundred percent with God’s Word and what He says because that is the revealed word to us. That is where truth comes from. It is, as you said, our presupposition.  And so their fear in any argument is that you stick to God’s Word, because soon as we leave God’s Word, we have lost the debate, haven’t we?

There it is.  Suppose the Bible is true, and then try to fit reality into that world view.  That strikes me as backwards thinking.  Rather, we should take evidence from the world, and use that to formulate our concepts of reality.

The second concern is that peoples actions are a result of their beliefs.  If people believe nutty things, than they tend to do nutty things.  People who believe the voices in their head instructing them to shoot people are dangerous.  People who believe that they should kill others who don’t believe in their god are dangerous.  I’ve personally heard (and heard of more) Christians who admit that if they believed that they got a message from God instructing them to kill their child (a la Abraham and Isaac), that they would do it.

Your beliefs inform your actions, and your actions frequently affect other people.  Shouldn’t we take care to make sure that we believe only things that are true, and throw out as many false (or even absurd beliefs) as possible?  Shouldn’t our beliefs closely align with reality as possible?  I think everyone would agree with this, of course.  It’s obvious.  To that end, we should all question and verify what we believe to be true with a skeptical eye.  If we believe something for which we have no proof, or indeed for which we can’t explain or demonstrate or have evidence for, we should strongly consider changing our minds.  This is called being a skeptic, and is the opposite of faith.  I believe it is the best way to most closely align our beliefs with actual reality.

None of this is to say that all religions are wholly evil.  Obviously religion (and for the most part I’m speaking of evangelical Christianity) has many benefits, and helps many people.  But I’d go on a limb to say there are NO social benefits that religion provides that couldn’t also be provided through purely secular means.

In summary:

Religious claims are usually taken to be absolutely true with (at best) tenuous evidence, and therefore are in danger of masking real truth.

Beliefs inform peoples actions.  If you believe absurd things, you’re more likely to do absurd things.  We should all try to believe the most true things as possible, and throw away as many false beliefs as possible.