The one with a cat's eye

Several years ago, before my believer friends stopped trying to reconvert me, I was in a conversation about religion and atheism. Of course, there are hardly any believers who really know what atheism is beyond the rhetoric spewed out of their not-so-friendly neighborhood pulpits. Consequently, when you have a conversation about this subject with a religious person, you have to set the vocabulary parameters before you can proceed. Atheism is simply the following: “There is no demonstrable evidence that any gods exist.” That's all. If you were to produce evidence, the atheist would change his mind. It's that simple. The believers deride that by saying 'the evidence is all around us.' You can even find a passage from the letters of Paul in the New Testament that agrees with that statement, so it's not a new idea. However, it is a reckless idea all the same.

When I look around me, I see a marvelous world full of life, a huge magnificent universe full of physics to boggle the mind, but I do not see anything that demonstrates whether a god, or gods, did any of it. A believer will ask, “How else could it be?” a question that a wise person cannot answer. The believer will foolishly take the atheist's inability to answer the question as tacit consent that a god produced everything we see around us. A wise person cannot jump to that conclusion, however. It doesn't follow that because nobody knows exactly how something happened that your guess is necessarily correct. Your guess might be wrong. An atheist is quite willing to say that a god or gods might very well exist; we just don't have any evidence of that. Conversely, a believer is quite unwilling to say that a god might not exist. It is here that any conversation with a believer will begin to fall apart. The atheist is expected to be yielding and open, but the believer is not. Maybe with that in mind you can understand the frustration that atheists express when trying to talk to believers about this subject. The believers say these “new” atheists are angry, when in fact it is the double standard believers apply to the two sides that create significant aggravation on the part of atheists.

For me, a universe without any gods is neither good nor bad. If there are gods or a god or a great intelligent force, so be it. Apparently whatever is out there, if it is out there, is unconcerned with us, so neither belief nor disbelief merits you anything. I live my life in the reality of the observable universe, not what I wish or hope there to be to satisfy my need for some “deeper meaning” to it all. So what if there's no meaning to life beyond living it? How could that knowledge possibly harm you? So there is no over-arching Lord of the Heavens to praise and worship. So what? What could be more awe inspiring than to know for a fact that every living thing on earth descended from one solitary cell billions of years ago? I can look at the lemon tree growing in my living room, my cat, hear a bird out the window, and taste the mold growing on my cheddar cheese and know for a demonstrable fact that all these manifestations of life are related to me, intimately. We all have a common ancestor, a fact proven over and again by genetic science and simple biological principles. Did a god start that first cell? I don't know, but why out of all the wonderfully natural elements that have arisen in this vast universe would this solitary item need the touch of divinity upon it when nothing else does?

Belief in gods, or even a single god, doesn't make you a better person in and of itself. The group you share belief with is what makes you who you are as a believer, not the belief itself. Lack of belief doesn't make you innately good or bad either. Neither you nor I know exactly how the universe started, and if there was a reason, we haven't the slightest clue what that reason might be. Therefore, it is only wise to default to atheism since there is no demonstrable reason to believe any gods exist. With atheism as the default position, there is no need to try to force others to adopt religious doctrines and dogmas as public policy since such doctrines and dogmas are tacitly meaningless. There is no reason for religious groups to expect and receive favors from the government since the government is designed to serve all citizens equally, believers and unbelievers alike. There is no reason to pin our national or planetary hopes for the future on ancient religious literature since the bible is ludicrously in error on more topics than I have time to list, and the quran is nothing more than the incoherent ramblings of a self-proclaimed prophet. I live quite contentedly in the default position, because it is the only one that makes sense. What is, is. What is not, is not. There is nothing beyond these two propositions as far as we know.  Live with it.

Photo: Nasa Hubble, Cat's Eye Nebula, as it was about 3000 years ago.