Suspension of Non-belief

In a few days time (or a few days ago depending on when you’re reading this, or even months ago!), atheists from around the world will gather in Melbourne for The Global Atheist Convention. Given that I don’t believe in God you would assume that I would be in support of a meeting of atheists from around the globe to send a signal out to religious people that atheism is a strong and growing movement. You would be wrong. The Global Atheist Convention may well do more harm than good to atheism as a concept because it will lead to a misunderstanding of what atheism is, probably because the people attending the Convention have the same misunderstanding.

Atheism is a meaningless word. It describes a non-belief; an absence of dogma and faith. An ‘atheist’ is simply someone who does not believe in God, just as someone who doesn’t believe in astrology is an ‘a-astrologist’, or someone who doesn’t believe in alchemy is an ‘a-alchemist’. We do not have words for people who reject most spiritual non-scientific practices or beliefs, why do we have one for religion? For both astrology and alchemy we have more scientific, rational approaches to the same issues; astronomy and chemistry respectively. These are positive, rational, scientific positions which have long since shown both astrology and alchemy to be absurd (although astrology does still have a worrying amount of popular appeal). Perhaps a better way of showing religion to be absurd (and much of it is) is to focus on the alternative, rationalist approach, or approaches should I say.

The problem here is that, aside from the very theoretical and minority debate about God’s place in science as the creator and sustainers of the universe (a possibility which I am open to, but don’t understand enough about to make a worthwhile judgment), religion focuses on morality. Morality is a slippery issue with so many competing ideas, most, if not all, of which are fundamentally flawed, that it is difficult to present a credible alternative to religion’s very strong and usually pretty sensible rule. There is also so much debate within religion about morality and so many of our assumptions and values come from religion, that it can be difficult for a secular point of view to penetrate and make much of an impact on moral discussion.

Nevertheless it seems that the incredible intelligence and articulation of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would be put to better use in support of a secular philosophical system which tries to play the same role as religion, rather than simply trying to destroy the credibility of the claims of religion without suggesting an alternative. Religion is more than just a pseudo-science which claims to provide answers to scientific questions using God to fill the vast gaps in our scientific knowledge. ‘Atheists’ have spend far too much time to date trying to discredit religion on this point, unsurprising given than people like Richard Dawkins are mostly scientists and so that is what they are interested and knowledgeable about. The fact is that most religious people don’t really care about the scientific claims of their faith and that is certainly not why they hold that faith. Faith is something which goes far beyond scientific claims; religion is a way of life. Religion makes claims about morality, it gives purpose and meaning to people’s lives, it makes moral statements and gives people a clear way in which to live their lives. This is not going to be destroyed simply by showing people that their belief is a nonsense; it cannot be destroyed per se, only replaced by something based more on reason and science.

This is where I believe that movements like Humanism and Utilitarianism are far more valuable than Atheism. They do not exist for the simple purpose of discrediting religion, but for the purpose of offering a secular alternative to the claims that religion has on people’s lives. They don’t even do this directly, but simply by existing they offer an alternative in the same way that chemistry offers an alternative to alchemy. Atheism does not offer an alternative, it is a non-movement of a non-believe which is deeply damaging because is portrays atheism as an equal and opposite faith statement to religion. It is not. Atheism is a meaningless word which needs to be dropped. Events like the Global Atheist Convention present to the world a false impression of what it actually is to not believe in God.

I personally do not subscribe to any particular believe system, like Humanism or Utilitarianism, the best way to describe my belief system would be ‘me-ism’. Obviously I think it would be ideal if everyone subscribed to their own personal ‘me-ism’, but I don’t think that is ever going to happen; the popularity of mass movements such as religion proves that. Atheism is not a believe system that anyone can subscribe to because it does not put forward any belief, so what is there to have an international convention about? Richard Dawkins is vice president of the British Humanist Association and I’m sure most of the people both attending and speaking in Melbourne belong to the same or similar organisation. At the very least they have constructed their own believe system based on their lack of belief in God. It would serve the cause of replacing religion with a secular viewpoint (or several secular viewpoints) much better if these intelligent, influential and committed people spend their time and energy trying to put forward those viewpoints, rather than continually putting down religion, usually on the grounds of science.

The Global Atheist Convention, and the work of people like Dawkins and Hitchens has done much to put Atheism on the map. While I am glad that this has happened, I can’t help but feel that self-professed Atheists are missing the point somewhat. They should stop gathering to slam down religion again and again, but instead start putting forward alternative, secular ways of life which replace, rather than destroy religion.

The Dragon in my Garage

While I was surfing reddit looking for something to write about for this week’s blog I found a quite interesting story-essay from the Atheists of Silicon Valley called The Dragon in my Garage by Carl Sagan. If you want to understand the rest of this blog and indeed read something both very well written and thought provoking, I suggest you read it now.

For the slow ones the invisible, floating, heatless, incorporeal dragon is a metaphor for God. To begin with Sagan seems to imply that not believing in the God-dragon is reasonable; as indeed it would be were the dragon completely undetectable. However at the end of his first scenario he proposes a case where, while the dragon is not directly visible, a number of alternative ways of detecting it seems to strongly suggest that it exists. As he correctly says

you must now acknowledge that there is something here.

It seems to me that Sagan is implying that there are enough pieces of evidence of God’s presence to mean that it would be reasonable to believe in him despite not being able to directly experience him.

However by listing a series of ways in which a dragon is someone’s garage may be detected, he assumes that the evidence for God is as convincing without ever explaining why. By using the mysterious dragon as a metaphor he allows himself to invent proof for the dragon and then transcribe those proofs onto God without ever making it explicit. It is up to the reader to make the connection, but in essence what Sagan has done is played a clever little word trick. He never tell us what the corresponding evidence which god leaves us is, he simply implies that it is there.

His second scenario muddies the waters further because he seems to disagree with the conclucions of his first scenario. In this case he says that

the only sensible approach is to tenatively reject the dragon hypothesis 

on the basis that there is some evidence, but it is not compelling. In this scenario Sagan widens the perspective of the metaphor to include multiple dragons inhabiting the garages of multiple people. This would seem to widen the base of evidence, but he now seems to reduce the amount of evidence we are getting from each individual dragon, making the essay seem a little confused. But who am I to criticise the writing of one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century?

Anyway, to cut through the dragon bullshit because it is getting rather tiresome, Sagan is essentially saying that there is some rather unconvincing evidence for the existence of God which leads seemingly sane people to believe in him. What he neglects to account for is the fact that much of the evidence is mutually excusive; you cannot have a god which exactly fits the profiles created by both Muslims and Christians. While we may be able to pick out certain key themes between theses two faiths, it is hard to see how evidence which is so far from these key themes and so contradictory in the specifics can point towards the same God.

Further research (read Wikipedia) tells me that Sagan was an agnostic and the conclusions of his essay point to this. It would be interesting to know exactly what Sagan understood by the term ‘agnostic’ because for me the term is almost meaningless; it literally means ‘without knowledge’ and it would defy intellectual honesty for anyone to claim that they ‘knew’ god did or did not exist. It seems to me then that we are all ‘without knowledge’ one way or another about god, so are we not all agnostic? If we are all agnostic then the term is meaningless as a distinguisher; both the theist and the atheist will be agnostic by virtue of the fact that they cannot know that they are right. It seems to me from his essay that Sagan does not believe in God, but is open to the possibility that He does exist. As yet the evidence is inconclusive, but that, as always, is subject to change. By my understanding that makes Sagan an atheist, maybe not as convince an atheist as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, but an atheist nonetheless.

Atheism literally means ‘without belief in god’. It seems to me that this is a default position; everyone who is not a theist is an atheist by virtue of the fact that they do not believe in god. Atheism is often touted as an opposite and equal faith position to theism but this assumes that there is some positive statement about the nature of the universe inherent in atheism; there is not. It is simply a rejection of the statement made by theists that the universe somehow depends on a metaphysically being which we cannot directly experience; a dragon living in the universe’s garage. People often ask me to prove that god does not exist, but I content that this is impossible; you cannot prove that there is not a dragon living in my garage, this does not meant that it is any more reasonable to believe in the dragon that not to. It need not be proven that there is no dragon living in my garage for me to believe that anyone who thinks there is one is batshit-bonkers.

So, to return to the original topic, Sagan builds up a picture of an elusive dragon (or collection of dragons), living in a garage, leaving the odd piece of inconclusive evidence. Because of this barely palatable evidence, which he neglects to say is somewhat contradictory, he seems to imply that it is reasonable to reserve judgment on the existence of the dragon, refusing to even concede the default position of disbelieve until proven; innocent until proven guilty. While it is an incredibly perceptive and thought provoking essay, it is not a complete picture. Nonetheless it provided an interesting platform for something that I’ve wanted to write about for a while, but never been able to find a good way of getting into to.