I was contacted on Twitter by a very open-minded and accepting college student who is doing research on atheism. She is not an atheist, herself, but wanted to address some questions she had before working on her project. I am going to go ahead and assume that the more people who answer these for her, the better, so please, add your answers in the comments.
These are my answers:
1. Why are you an atheist?
I’ve never had a good enough reason to believe in a god.
2. Have you ever believed in a Higher Power?
No.
3. If so, Did something traumatic happen to make you stop believing?
No. I never believed.
4. If not, why did you stop believing?
I never believed.
5. What do you think happens to us when we die?
We decompose. Our stardust goes back to dirt in the ground and feeds the flora which feeds the fauna, which then decomposes when it dies and the cycle continues. I believe consciousness is a direct result of our physiology and once the physical part of us is gone, much like how a cell phone will no longer light up and take calls when it’s smashed to pieces, neither will we. I’m perfectly fine with this. I don’t desire eternal life. In fact, I think it would get quite tedious pretty fast.
6. Without believing in a Higher Power, where do you think we get our morals from?
The same places people who do believe in a higher power get their morals from. Conscience, consequences, empathy and compassion. A believer never follows their holy book to the last letter. Something inside of them allows them to pick and choose the parts of it that are relevant to their own life. That process is a result of your conscience. It’s a result of your innate compassion, your desire to avoid the here-and-now consequences instead of worry about expected eternal ones. You and I get our morals from the very same place and the very same process. The only difference is that I give myself credit for it.
7. Where do you think the universe came from?
No idea.
8. What’s your views on Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens?
While I don’t agree with everything each of them has said, they are each very important thinkers and speakers in our world today and are making (or have made) such significant changes in the world with their work, that I have no choice but to admire them. I think they are demonized and often their words are taken out of context and misunderstood, which is to be expected. Each of them are human beings and fallible and may not articulate every last thought they have as they might have wished to. There is an easy way, however, to verify that the criticism of the things these men said is true, and that is to seek out the bit of writing or speaking that the comment in question was taken from, and look at it in the context of the whole piece. In other words, do your own research and go right to the source. Often, these things are blown way out of proportion.
9. Do you consider yourself a weak atheist or a strong atheist?
I am almost a strong atheist. The only thing that keeps me from being a strong atheist, is that I think it’s kind of arrogant to say you know for sure there either is or is not a god. While I find the entire idea of a god absurd, and I think that certain accounts of a god are not possible, I still can’t know for certain that there is no god at all, of any sort. So, I am an agnostic atheist, on the cusp of strong, but without demonstrable evidence, either way, that won’t change.
10. How can you prove that God doesn’t exist?
You can’t. However, you can’t prove God does exist, and, as Christopher Hitchens once pointed out,
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
If someone approached you and told you that if you didn’t go to work naked 3 times a week, your car would be whisked off to space by a flying Plutonian turtle named Click, would you believe them off the bat and go to work nude 3 times per week to avoid such an outcome? No. Can you prove there is no car-thieving turtle named Click on Pluto? No. You don’t believe in the turtle, do you? Even though you can’t prove he’s not there on Pluto plotting to take your car.
11. Do you believe in miracles?
No. I believe that people truly believe they have witnessed and experienced them, but I don’t think common lay-people are skilled enough to make the call after one occurrence that there is no other explanation for the event. Unfortunately, many of these events cannot be repeated, so they cannot be studied under the scrutinizing eye of the scientific method. In order for me to believe there is no natural explanation for something, all-natural explanations would have to be systematically ruled out as a possibility in a controlled environment. Until then, I have no problem saying I don’t know and quite frankly, I find that a more honest approach, because witnesses to miracles really don’t know either.
12. Do you have a support group/system?
Yes, my family and friends and this growing atheist community on the internet. There are some very, very special people out there.
13. Do you try to get others not to believe?
No. My Twitter feed, Facebook page and blog is all for atheists. However, believers, such as yourself, often find their way there and are compelled to ask questions, as you did. A lot of times they are rude about it. Sometimes they are kind like you. Either way, I answer them as honestly as I can and I try to be nice, even when faced with someone being an asshole. Through this process, I have had 4 people tell me I played a role in them finding freedom after they left religion. This was not intended, but being as each of them was ecstatic about it, and thanked me, I am happy that it turned out that way.
14. Do others tend to view you differently when they discover you’re an atheist?
No. I live in Canada. No one really gives a shit about which religion you are or if you lack it.
15. Do people tend to try to convince you that your views are wrong?
Oh, yes. Every day of my life, these days. Not only do I get religious trolls around all my online spaces, but I get Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door 2-3 times per week. This is why I make videos on YouTube – to respond to some of the more humorous comments and tweets I get.
I do still try to keep my cool, though, even when they are being rude. I do have my moments and I have lost my cool. Not proud of that.
16. How does your family view your beliefs? Are they supportive?
My immediate family are all atheists. My extended family is made up of atheists, a couple of Wiccans, disenfranchised Catholics and some people who identify as Christian but who don’t go to church or take it very seriously. They are all supportive. I have the best family, extended and otherwise, in the world.
17. What are your views on Madalyn O’Hair?
I don’t know a lot about her, other than her role in American Atheists, her murder and her activism. I have heard that she was an unpleasant person. Some of the stories I read paint her as such, and I am in no position to disagree or doubt that. The thing about atheists is, we are human, just like you. Some of us are assholes. Some of us are amazing. Some of us are just regular people trying to make the most of life. If O’Hair was an asshole, then she was an asshole. I know there are plenty more atheist assholes out there now.
However, asshole or not, her activism should not go unnoticed. If it weren’t for her, my blog likely would not be all that possible yet. I have to respect that if nothing else.
These are my answers. I need to mention here that the asker preceded these questions with the following:
I do believe in God so I thought to do my research on atheism since atheism is stigmatized in a negative way by believers. I will not in any way judge you for not believing in what I believe in. I did some research on atheism & I just wanted to talk to an atheist so I can get more information as well.
So, if you do choose to answer these questions, I would ask that you return the consideration she gave us. Post your answers in the comments or send me the link to your answers and I’ll pass it on to her.
If you like what I do here and want to support my work, you can chip in here or become a member here.
Comments
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1. Why are you an atheist? (TL;DR: Not good enough arguments/enough evidence) Because it’s an epistemological question and like all epistemological questions answering that something “is” requires an amount of evidence or strong (a good inductive argument with all true premises) argument that if it were quantified it would exceed the threshold that would relieve my doubt.
2. Have you ever believed in a Higher Power? I think so. I remember having a crisis of faith when I was about 8, there wasn’t a presence of God that I could feel like people talked about but I was also a really literal kid so I’m not actually sure if I just missed the metaphor or if I just didn’t have that whatever factor that people are talking about when they say that. Presumably before then I did but growing up it was a lot of questioning and soul searching and trying to force myself to believe so I wasn’t an evil, baby sacrificing, murdering, thieving, hellbound, Satan loving, atheist (I came from a pretty hard right, fundamentalist family).
3. If so, Did something traumatic happen to make you stop believing? Nope. That’s mostly a movie thing.
4. If not, why did you stop believing? Self-reflection that happened after I did the worst thing I have ever done. I started looking at why I did it and examining my beliefs and rediscovering my love of philosophy and started looking at the moral luck of it, and how I formed my beliefs, and whether that made sense and after isolating everything that fed into the beliefs that made those actions seem like a reasonable thing to do I was left with existentialism in the style of Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus (Jean-Paul Sartre was just the popular one, Camus and de Beauvoir were the brains of it). I exist, I need to find the meaning in my life because the search will be beneficial at the very least, and if god does exist it doesn’t really change how I’m going to do that. Concurrently I found that the reasons I said I believed in this book and this thing were based on less evidence than I had for Santa Claus, and also had things that could be explained better, more coherently, and with fewer steps.
5. What do you think happens to us when we die? The way I explained it to my kid is that when you die it’s like when you go to sleep and then wake up and you’re not even aware of the fact that you were asleep at any point but forever. Meanwhile our bodies are broken down and recycled into whatever components the state of our bodies are left the same way any body would be, person, horse, dog, goat-pig monster. For me personally if my wishes are followed I’ll be donated to a research facility and what they don’t use will be cremated and pressed into a vinyl of Kelis’ “Milkshake” to be put on my wife’s mantle because I think it’s funny to get that song stuck in her head and I want her to remember me.
6. Without believing in a Higher Power, where do you think we get our morals from? We have studied the field of ethics, as a species, for about 2500 years that we have record of. We more or less have an agreed upon target which is that people should be able to flourish and be unharmed as much as possible so the rest is figuring out better ways to do that as a species. The specific field being applied ethics (what is good to do) rather than metaethics (philosophizing about what even are ethics and why?) or normative ethics (how should we structure our lives).
7. Where do you think the universe came from? Honestly, I think this a bad question. It would first have to be established that the universe did come from somewhere and I don’t think that science has found particularly good evidence that it did, although I’m not a cosmologist, I’m really not qualified to answer so I’m just agnostic on it.
8. What’s your views on Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens? Dawkins is a great biologist from what I understand and a bad philosopher, although a good science communicator when he doesn’t have people saying stupid things to him while he’s trying to talk, Harris strikes me as a mediocre philosopher but from what I understand a pretty good neuroscientist, and my unpopular opinion is that Hitchens did more harm for atheists than he did good by being the most popular and making it seem like all an atheist needs is a fun quip and an anecdote to win an argument and popularizing a form of debate that’s really just competitive oration instead of making and addressing arguments, and I disagree on some very key points on beliefs he had that fall outside of religion. I won’t say anything about him as a journalist though because he had an amazing record as a journalist and it speaks for itself. To round it out if I can shove Dennett in here, he was my favorite of the horseman once I got past my Hitchens/Dawkins phase (most atheists seem to have one) and his work philosophically with religion and consciousness and the intersection of them and the relationship between science and religion is fantastic, and he looks like Santa Clause.
9. Do you consider yourself a weak atheist or a strong atheist? I don’t like the distinction, but I will assert that god doesn’t exist so that would make me a strong atheist.
10. How can you prove that God doesn’t exist? (TL;DR: You can’t with facts because there aren’t any to work with, but the logic for believing in god gets super iffy on inspection.) The fact that any claim made about how one would know god exists applies equally well to that god plus at least one other god, and while multiple gods cannot exist simultaneously when we are dealing with monotheistic religions means that they are equally likely to not exist whereas we’d have to find some separating factor to make it so one would and the others don’t and believing in something doesn’t make it more true, just more believed in per capita than if you didn’t believe it. This is easiest to demonstrate with Allah and Yaweh. Allah and Yaweh have books that say they exist and they’re 66% the same books depending on which camp you ask, that they performed miracles of pulling people up to heaven (Elijah, Jesus, Muhammed), their followers claim to have seen them and to have interacted with them, there’s historical records that lend credence to the fact that at the very least people were aware of the time they lived in, a lot of people believe in them, etc. But Islam says that Jesus isn’t the messiah and Christianity says he is. They can’t both be right, but they can both be wrong and when you have competing metaphysical theories with the kind of evidential overlap that Islam and Christianity have the issue is probably the metaphysics and belief structures that gave rise to believing in them. For empirical evidence, there isn’t any that they do exist and so it’s epistemologically irresponsible to assert they do is as close as I can get. I can go more in depth but that’s really pushing being an essay already.
11. Do you believe in miracles? Nope.
12. Do you have a support group/system? Sure I do! I have a wife and family and a few friends, and a therapist and I use my podcast listeners as a support system because sometimes I just have to get stuff off my chest.
13. Do you try to get others not to believe? Only when they don’t respect the fact I don’t believe.
14. Do others tend to view you differently when they discover you’re an atheist? Yes, because I live in America where atheists are the least trusted minority (according to pew research). People assume I have no morals and there’s no reason I don’t just run around raping and pillaging (which says something more about them than me I think) instead of asking questions like these, which except for 7 are really good questions.
15. Do people tend to try to convince you that your views are wrong? We call those family get togethers or any time I wear anything too atheisty in public or put “atheist” in my Twitter bio because America, although honestly my pagan friends trying to convince me we’re all just electricity and energy and not carbon are the worst offenders.
16. How does your family view your beliefs? Are they supportive? They say they pray for me, I don’t know if they do and the fact that people pray for atheists but we’re still here kinda raises questions about the efficacy. The ones who know are not at all supportive but when they press me on it I start referring to things in the very small amount of Latin you pick up in philosophy classes and they quit pressing me on it.
17. What are your views on Madalyn O’Hair? What views are there to have? Killing someone is wrong, and it’s on the list of things I’ll always claim are always wrong. Don’t kill people, regardless of why, those are my views.