The Prodigal Atheist

"[O]ld beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false."  Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge , p. 256.   Argue with a Christian long enough and eventually they will try to support their claims about God being the author of all absolute truth with the example of 2 + 2 = 4. In doing so, they are using the existence of objective mathematical truths as evidence of the existence of objective divine truths, and thus an author of those divine truths they called God. But this is to equate one for the other, even though the two are very different. One is held “in faith,” which is to believe something in the absence of evidence, while the other requires proof.  Imagine doing math without needing evidence to support ones conclusion, so that 2 + 2 can equal, well, whatever one's sacred scripture says it equals, or whatever anyone wishes to "believe" it equals, with both being equal acts of pure faith. Faith of the religious variety does not give you th...

"All Bibles are man-made."  Thomas Edison   When Edison observed that "all Bibles are man-made," by "Bible" he meant that  "All claims to inerrant infallible truths are man-made." No matter how smart we think we are, nor how convinced we are of having received a divine message from a god about the "truth" of God or the universe, such claims can never be demonstrated to be anything but "man-made." And a person's conviction for believing something is true, far from being evidence for the veracity of the claim, is actually only evidence of their innate suspicion that it may be false. Fanaticism, as Carl Jung observed, is always a sign of repressed doubt. If there is a flaw in being human it is not our need to doubt, however, which ever believer relies on exclusively to doubt the claims of all other religions but their own.  Instead, our biggest flaw is that we are all born to be natural believers rather than natu...

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light. but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.  Max Planck       A large part of why we tend to “believe” so easily in things that we later stop believing in is the result of three aspects of human nature. The first is that we come with a brain that has an insatiable need for meaning, which means it is always seeking a deeper understanding of anything and everything. In a sense, rather than our brain being a glorified calculator, it is more of a meaning generating machine. And that desire for ever more meaning that led the Adams and Eves of our species to seek knowledge and, in the process, explain the mysteries they encountered with stories and myths. The second is that we have an incredible knack for recognizing patterns, which happens to be an innate ability of the most evolved part of our brains. In fac...