In many of my writings about religion, I take my atheism as a given. When I critique religion, or gas on about atheist philosophy, I generally start with the assumption that religion is a mistaken idea about the world and that atheism is a correct one, and go from there.

Which is generally fine with me. If I always had to start with first principles — on any topic — I’d get nothing written. (Nothing interesting, anyway.)

But it occurred to me recently that a newcomer to my blog might think that I hadn’t carefully considered the question of God’s existence. My arguments against God and religion are scattered all over my blog, and I don’t expect even my most devoted readers to read every single piece of my Atheism archives just to dig them all up.

So here — largely for my own convenience, and hopefully for the convenience of readers both atheist and not — is a summary of the Top Ten Reasons I Don’t Believe In God. Or the soul, or metaphysical energy, or any sort of supernatural being(s) or substance(s). Something I can point to, and that maybe other atheists can point to, when theists ask, “But have you considered…?” (And since I’ve probably missed some good ones, I’ll be asking for your own favorite arguments at the end of the piece.)

And no, I don’t think any of these arguments provide a 100% conclusive airtight case against God. Not even all of them together do that. And I don’t think they have to. I’m not trying to show that belief in God’s existence is absolutely impossible. I’m trying to show that it’s implausible. I’m trying to show that it is — by far — the least likely hypothesis for how the world works and why it is the way it is.

Oh — and for the sake of brevity, I’m generally going to say “God” when I mean “God, or the soul, or metaphysical energy, or any sort of supernatural being(s) or substance(s).” I don’t feel like getting into “Well, I don’t believe in an old man in the clouds with a white beard, but I believe…” discussions. It’s not just the man in the white beard that I don’t believe in. I don’t believe in any sort of religion, any sort of soul or spirit or metaphysical guiding force, anything that isn’t the physical world and its vast and astonishing manifestations.

And here’s why. (Divided into two parts, to keep it from being insanely long.)

1: The consistent replacement of supernatural explanations of the world with natural ones.

Why the sun rises and sets. Where thunder and lightning come from. Why people get sick. Why people look like their parents. How the complexity of life came into being. I could go on and on.

All of these things were once explained by religion. But as we understood the world better, and learned to observe it more carefully, the religious explanations were replaced by physical cause and effect. Consistently. Thoroughly. Like a steamroller. The number of times that a supernatural or religious explanation of a phenomenon has been replaced by a natural explanation? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands.

Now. The number of times that a natural explanation of a phenomenon has been replaced by a supernatural or religious one? The number of times humankind has said, “We used to think (X) was caused by physical cause and effect, but now we understand that it’s actually caused by God, or spirits, or demons, or the soul”?

Sure, people come up with new supernatural explanations for stuff all the time. But explanations with evidence? Replicable evidence? Carefully gathered, patiently tested, rigorously reviewed evidence? Internally consistent evidence? Large amounts of it, from many different sources?

Again — exactly zero.

Given that this is true, what are the chances that any given phenomenon for which we currently don’t have a thorough explanation — human consciousness, for instance, or the origin of the universe — will be best explained by the supernatural?

Given this pattern, it seems clear that the chances of this are essentially zero. So close to zero that they might as well be zero. And the hypothesis of the supernatural is therefore a hypothesis we can comfortably discard. It is a hypothesis we came up with when we didn’t understand the world as well as we do now… but that, on more careful examination, has never — not once — been shown to be correct.

If I see any solid evidence to support a religious or supernatural explanation of a phenomenon, I’ll reconsider my disbelief. Until then, I’ll assume that the mind-bogglingly consistent pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones is almost certain to continue.

More on this:
The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely

2: The inconsistency of world religions.

When different people look at, say, a tree, we more or less agree about what we’re looking at: what size it is, what shape, whether it currently has leaves or not and what color those leaves are, etc. We may have disagreements regarding the tree — what other plants it’s most closely related to, where it stands in the evolutionary tree, should it be cut down to make way for a new sports stadium, etc. But unless one of us is hallucinating or deranged or literally unable to see, we can all agree on the tree’s basic existence, and the basic facts about it.

And if God existed, he’d be a whole lot bigger, a whole lot more powerful, with a whole lot more effect in the world, than a tree. Why is it that we can all see a tree in more or less the same way, but we don’t see God in even remotely the same way whatsoever?

The explanation, of course, is that God does not really exist. We disagree so radically over what he is because we aren’t actually perceiving anything that’s real. We’re “perceiving” something we made up; something we were taught to believe; something that the part of our brains that’s wired to see pattern and intention (even when none exists) is wired to see and believe.

More on this:
The Cosmic Shell Game, by Ebonmuse, on the Ebon Musings website.
The Argument from Divine Hiddenness, ditto.

3: The weakness of religious arguments, explanations, and apologetics.

The argument from authority. (Example: “God exists because the Bible says God exists.”)

The argument from personal experience. (Example: “God exists because I feel in my heart that God exists.”)

The argument that religion shouldn’t have to logically defend its claims. (Example: “God is an entity that cannot be proven by reason or evidence.”)

Or the redefining of God into an abstract principle — so abstract that it can’t be argued against, but also so abstract that it scarcely deserves the name God. (Example: “God is love.”)

And all these arguments are incredibly weak.

Sacred books and authorities can be mistaken. I have yet to see a sacred book that doesn’t have any mistakes. (The Bible, for just one example, is shot full of them.) And the feelings in people’s hearts can definitely be mistaken. They are mistaken, demonstrably so, much of the time. Instinct and intuition play an important part of human understanding and experience… but they should never be treated as the final word on a subject.

I mean, if I told you, “The tree in front of my house is 500 feet tall with hot pink leaves,” and offered as a defense, “I know this is true because my mother/ preacher/ sacred book tells me so”… or “I know this is true because I feel it in my heart”… would you take me seriously?

As to the “We don’t got to show you no stinking reason or evidence” argument… that’s just conceding the game before you’ve even begun. It’s basically saying, “I know I can’t make my case, therefore I’m going to concentrate my arguments on why I don’t have to make my case in the first place.” It’s like a defense lawyer who knows their client is guilty, and thus tries to get the case thrown out on a technicality.

Ditto with the “redefining God out of existence” argument. If what you believe in isn’t a supernatural being(s) or substance(s) that currently has, or at one time had, some sort of effect on the world… well, your philosophy might be a dandy and clever one, but it is not, by any useful definition of the word, religion.

Again: If I tried to argue, “The tree in front of my house is 500 feet tall with hot pink leaves — and the height and color of trees is a question that is best answered with personal faith and feeling, not with reason or evidence”… or, “I know this is true because I am defining ‘500 feet tall and hot pink’ as the essential nature of tree-ness, regardless of its outward appearance”… would you take me seriously?

More on this:
Oh, all over the place. But probably most succinctly:
A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside
The Argument From Design, Part One and Part Two
“A Different Way of Knowing”: The Uses of Irrationality… and its Limitations

4: The increasing diminishment of God.

When you look at the history of religion, you see that the perceived power of God himself, among believers themselves, has been diminishing. As our understanding of the natural, physical world has increased — and our ability to test theories and claims has improved — the domain of God’s miracles (or other purported supernatural/ metaphysical phenomena) has consistently shifted, away from the phenomena that are now understood as physical cause and effect, and onto the increasingly shrinking area of phenomena that we still don’t understand.

Examples: We stopped needing God to explain floods, but we still needed him to explain sickness and health. Then we didn’t need him to explain sickness and health any more… but we still needed him to explain consciousness. Now we’re beginning to get a grip on consciousness, so we’ll soon need God to explain… what, exactly?

Or, as Ebon Muse so eloquently put it, “”Where the Bible tells us God once shaped worlds out of the void and parted great seas with the power of his word, today his most impressive acts seem to be shaping sticky buns into the likenesses of saints and conferring vaguely-defined warm feelings on his believers’ hearts when they attend church.”

This is what atheists call the “God of the gaps.” Whatever gap there is in our understanding of the world, that’s what God is responsible for. Wherever the empty spaces are in our coloring book, that’s what gets filled in with the blue crayon called God.

More:
The Incredible Shrinking Deity, by Ebonmuse, on the Ebon Musings website, from whom I stole this idea outright.
The Shrinking Deity and the Empty Coloring Book

5: The fact that religion runs in families.

Very, very few people carefully examine all the religious beliefs currently being followed — or even some of those beliefs — and select the one they think most accurately describes the world. Overwhelmingly, people believe whatever religion they were taught as children.

Now, we don’t do this with, for instance, science. We don’t hold on to the Steady State theory of the universe, or geocentrism, or the four bodily humours theory of illness, simply because it’s what we were taught as children. We believe whatever scientific understanding is best supported by the best available evidence at the time. And if the evidence changes, the understanding changes. (Unless, of course, it’s a scientific understanding that our religion teaches is wrong…)

Even political opinions don’t run in families as stubbornly as religion. Witness the opinion polls that consistently show support of same-sex marriage increasing with each younger generation. Even political beliefs learned from youth can and do break down in the face of the reality that people see and live with every day. And scientific theories absolutely do this, all the time, on a regular basis.

More:
I haven’t written about the “religion running in families” argument at length before, and while I’m sure it must have been addressed in the atheosphere, offhand I don’t know where. But Richard Dawkins addresses it in The God Delusion. You can look it up there if you like.
I have, however, discussed religion as an idea perpetuated largely by fear, intimidation, tradition, and social pressure… and the ways religion armors itself, not only against criticism, but against the very idea that religion is a legitimate target for criticism. That discussion: Does The Emperor Have Clothes? Religion and the Destructive Force of Asking Questions.

End of Part One. I’m breaking this up into two parts, since it’s already ridiculously long; Part Two will appear tomorrow. I realize this will probably be a fruitless plea, but if you can stand it, please hold your comments until Part Two is posted: I may have already addressed your ideas there, and anyway, that way all comment threads can be in the same place. Thanks.

“Atheists have no hope.”

Of all the slanders and misrepresentations told about atheists and atheism, this is… well, this is the one I’m thinking about right now.

“I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, she is a restaurant manager and we’d never really talked about politics at all, but something came up and she said, ‘Atheism and anarchist theory were the first things that gave me any hope in this world. They were the things that said we had the power within us to make things better. Everything else said we were either evil or helpless to fate.'” (Emphasis mine.)

And I’ve always felt a rumble of both irritation and pity when I hear this no-hope accusation, a rumble that sounds something like this: “Do you really have no hope for anything other than eternal life? Is your life really so pathetic that you have no hope for anything other than Heaven? Does your life — the actual life that you’re living right now — have so little joy and meaning that you can’t imagine any hope without the promise that, when it’s finally all over, you’ll get to have another, better, permanent life at the end of it?”

But then I remember:

Maybe the answer is Yes. That’s true. They really do have no hope for this life.

Now, if the person making the accusation is some yahoo on the Internet, then I feel perfectly free to indulge in my irritation and snark. If you have the time and leisure to be reading atheist blogs, then you have the time and leisure to make something of your life. This life, I mean. The one you actually have.

But for many people, it’s not so easy.

Which is why I was so struck by Cindy Ovenrack’s comment above.

And I am reminded:

For many people, religion does not offer hope.

For many people, religion offers helplessness, and self-hatred, and despair.

And for many of those people, atheism offers a way out of it.

And that’s a pretty big hope.

Today, I want to point something out I would have thought was obvious:

This is a blog.

And every single blog post in it is… well, a single blog post.

It’s not just me, either. Almost every atheist blogger I’ve known has been called to task for this shockingly lax behavior.

In the past, I’ve pointed out a contradiction in this sort of thinking — namely, the fact that religious believers do not hold themselves to the same standards of rigorous study they hold atheists to. They don’t read every word of Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson before rejecting occultism; they don’t read every word of Scientological thought before deciding that L. Ron Hubbard was either a charlatan or a wackadoodle. And they certainly don’t read every word of Richard Dawkins and Julia Sweeney, Bertrand Russell and David Hume, Ebonmuse and Hemant Mehta and PZ Myers and my own bad self, before deciding to reject atheism.

So having said that, today I am going to point out what I thought should have been obvious:

This is a blog.

And among other things, a blog is a literary form in which brevity is key.

In fact, if every single post were even to include spelled-out disclaimers — like, “This critique only applies to this one particular form or aspect of religion,” and, “I haven’t studied every variety of religious thought that exists, so I can’t be positive that there isn’t one out there that I’d be convinced by” — again I’d never get anything written, and none of it would get read. I do usually include a shorthand version of this — I say things like, “I think religion often acts as a form of ethical misdirection,” “There’s a common trope among many progressive Christians,” “the way so many religious believers…” But I will have to beg forgiveness for the sin of not always letting my argument get bogged down in disclaimers.

And I must beg forgiveness for this as well: This blog is not an encyclopedic compendium of atheist thought. It is not the Single Work Of Writing That Discredits Religion Once And For All. And it’s not intended to be. I am one person, criticizing religion as I see it in the real world around me. I am trying to critique religion as a whole… but I’m doing it in small pieces, critiquing one form or aspect of religion today, another form or aspect of it tomorrow. I am not trying to set thousands of tons of explosives under the foundation of religion. I am trying to chip away at it with an icepick.

And I’m doing it in tandem with hundreds of other atheist bloggers.

And we are to address every single one of those religious thoughts in every single piece of atheist writing that we do.

Just to be 100% sure that we didn’t miss anything.

Okay. To be fair, nobody to my knowledge has actually said that. Nobody has accused me, or any other atheist writer, of being bad people and bad atheist writers simply for having a life. But I’m really and truly not sure what it is these critics expect of us. Do they think it’s okay for us to reject other religious ideas and experiences… as long as we give long, careful consideration to their own? Or is it simply, as OMGF recently wrote, that we are not to stop considering religious ideas until we have accepted them? That once we’ve accepted them, then that’s the point at which it’s okay to stop considering?

But it’s also the case that, while I do still get a brief moment of doubt in the face of religious arguments, this experience has diminished considerably over the months and years that I’ve been writing about this stuff. Because the arguments are never, ever any good. They’re always the same — it’s always some version of the argument from authority or the argument from personal experience — and they’re never even remotely convincing. So having considered approximately 876,362 religious arguments in my life, I find myself both aggravated and amused when a believer says, “But you haven’t considered Argument #876,363! How can you be so close-minded?” And I always want to ask these people, “At what point is it okay for me to stop? At what point is it okay for me to say, ‘I have considered the possibility of religion at great length, and I have rejected it, and until I see some seriously excellent arguments or evidence in its favor I am going to continue to reject it and to argue against it”?

I find this especially aggravating — and at the same time, especially amusing — since when commenters say things like, “There are lots of good modern arguments in favor of God!”, they almost never say what those arguments are.

You know, if you have a religious belief that you think is not only true but rational and defensible, then by all means, tell me what it is. But don’t say, “You didn’t address my particular form of religious belief… therefore your critique of religion is invalid,” unless you’re prepared to say what that particular form is, and offer some arguments and evidence in support of it.

And for the sweet love of Loki, don’t say, “You didn’t address (X) form of religious belief… therefore your critique of (Y) is invalid.” That’s not only an aggravating argument — it’s a silly one.

Truth to tell, though? I honestly don’t care all that much about advanced modern theology. If you have an argument to make, I’ll certainly read it. But for the most part, I’m just not all that interested in religion as it’s believed and practiced by a handful of theological scholars. I am primarily interested in religion as it overwhelmingly plays out in the real world.

Finally, I want to point out some — well, “hypocrisies” is probably not the right word, let’s say “serious contradictions” — in this sort of argument.

When atheist bloggers write about extreme, hard-core, fundamentalist- type religions, we get scolded for picking easy targets, and we almost inevitably have it pointed out to us (as if we didn’t know) that “not all religion is like that.”

But when we criticize progressive religions, we get scolded for being mean and divisive and going after people who should be our allies.

What’s more: When we criticize the overall concept of religion in general, we’re accused of over- generalizing, of not understanding the rich variety of religious belief and thought.

But when we criticize one particular form or aspect of religion, we somehow, once again, get accused of over- generalizing — of not seeing that the one form or aspect we’re talking about today doesn’t apply to every form or aspect of religion that exists or has ever existed.

So what on Earth are we supposed to do?

Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:

I’m not going to give a damn.

I’m going to continue to critique both religion in general and specific religious beliefs and practices, as they cross my path and grab my attention.

I’m going to continue to try to be fair when I do so. I’m going to continue my practice of (usually) critiquing beliefs and practices rather than insulting people. But I am not going to stop critiquing any given aspect of religion whatsoever simply because I am not able to single-handedly dismantle the entire body of religious thought in a single thousand-word blog post.

And the next time someone responds to my critique of the Fundamentalist Wackadoodle of the Week by saying, “But what about the subtle shadings of modern progressive theological thought?” I am going to point them to this piece.