Apr 3, 2007

Why I am an Atheist
David J. Venable E-Mail: davidjvenable@yahoo.com

Apr 3, 2007

Introduction
This paper is the result of several years of study and thought, and several days of writing. I hope that you will all read it and consider what I have to say. I have written the paper in the format commonly used by those in my field, as that is comfortable for me. I hope that this is not an obstacle. I have divided this paper into three primary sections, followed by two appendices. Appendix 1, A Brief Explanation of Evolution by Natural Selection by Richard Dawkins, is an impressively brief explanation, and I ask anyone not intimately familiar with the ideas of both evolution and natural selection to skip to this section first (its only six paragraphs). 1.0 How I Became an Atheist.......................................................................................................... 1 2.0 Why I Became an Atheist.......................................................................................................... 2 2.1 The Bible.............................................................................................................................. 2 2.2 Evolution............................................................................................................................... 3 2.2.1 Common Misconceptions about Evolution..................................................................... 4 2.3 Ok, So Why Isnt There a God?............................................................................................ 4 2.4 Why Not Agnosticism?.......................................................................................................... 6 2.5 So Why Does Religion Exist?............................................................................................... 6 2.6 Common Arguments against Atheism.................................................................................. 7 3.0 Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 8 A1. A Brief Explanation of Evolution by Natural Selection by Richard Dawkins............................. 8

1.0 How I Became an Atheist

I've recently been asked a surprisingly large number of times just how it is that I became an atheist. So, instead of explaining it several times, I decided to write this essay. As many of you who have known me for some time will undoubtedly recall (much to the surprise of my newly-acquired friends, I suspect), I was actually quite religious for some time. In fact, I even planned to become a priest. "So what happened?" seems to be the question. Unfortunately the answer is not so succinct. After many years of scientific education I still believed in God, and had several "good" arguments to support this stance. Some of you may recall debates lasting late into the night on a variety of porches, where I strongly opposed the atheist view (Cort). Over time, more and more questions came to mind (I'll list a few later), and I asked large numbers of people, but have yet to find reasonable answers. By and large, there came a distinct moment (and I remember it quite well) I finally set aside my beliefs. I was sitting outside of a coffee shop in San Antonio, Texas one evening. I had spent quite a bit of time over the previous years honing my knowledge in a number of areas: evolutionary biology, probability, history, religion, and systems theory to name a few. It suddenly dawned on me that I essentially believed in a god for the same reason that I had once believed in Santa Clause: it's what I had always believed (not to mention what I'd been taught to believe from a very early and impressionable age).

Apr 3, 2007

Belief in a god is terribly comforting. There's someone up there looking out for us, intervening on our behalf in ways that we can only imagine (no pun intended). Death is not final. All of the bad things that happen to us happen for an explicit purpose: to learn a lesson or to better us in some way (on the other hand, another common belief seems to be that bad things happen to us because we deserve them despite The Bible containing the Book of Job). It all came crashing down around me. Why did I still believe in a god? I could reasonably explain everything that I had previously needed a god to explain (existence, complexity, etc). I had to put aside my age-old beliefs that I'd essentially been born into (had I been born in the middle east, I'd have probably planned to become either a Rabbi or a Mullah), and weigh them against my current knowledge -- objectively. This is a difficult and painful process, but one that I highly recommend. Even if you come out of it with unchanged beliefs, youll have a better understanding of why you believe what you do.

2.0 Why I Became an Atheist

So now that the story is out of the way, I'll get onto why it is that I became an atheist, and more specifically, what I learned over the years that led me in that direction.

2.1 The Bible

I always believed that The Bible was the word of the Christian god: written by man, but inspired by God, and wholly inerrant. After many years of studying not only The Bible, but also the history of The Bible, I learned many interesting things:

The gospels were written well (2-3 generations) after the death of Jesus (not to mention well after the deaths of the apostles who supposedly wrote them)1. Interestingly enough, it's likely that most of the apostles were illiterate2. Modern day Christianity is so very different from Christianity during the time of Christ that it would largely be unrecognizable3. The protestant idea of salvation or "getting saved" is only about 200 years old4. What happened to all of those poor Christian souls prior to that time? The "supposed contradictions" in the Bible that are glossed over, or explained away, by the clergy are actually rather significant. Most people are largely unaware that two vastly different (and conflicting) creation stories exist in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, yet they insist that it be taken literally. The Christian creation myth is almost entirely based on the creation myth from the Babylonian Enuma Elish.5 While, the biblical flood story is almost entirely based on the Epic of Gilgamesh6 -- the oldest writing known to man. One rather humorous note is that the Bible often implies that the earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around the earth7. Of course, these contradictions with what we know to be fact are never taken into account when discussing literal interpretation of the creation myth.

Apr 3, 2007

According to mainstream protestant Christianity:

God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same entity: God God created the world, and made up a bunch rules that we should, but could not possibly, follow Not following these rules is sin, which results in eternal damnation Luckily, God took the form of man and sacrificed himself to himself in order to forgive us of breaking rules that he put into place to begin with

This entire situation is so ridiculous that it would be laughable if it didnt affect so many peoples lives.

The story of Christ (and the way he's often worshipped) is a conglomeration of myths about other gods, and almost wholly unoriginal8: Mithra (a roman god), the son of the Sun, was born of a virgin on December 25th, died, came back to life 3 days later, was known as "the way the truth and the light", "savior", "the good shepherd", etc. Mithra religious ceremonies involved baptisms, a sacred meal of bread water and consecrated wine, and anointments. He was also worshipped by three Magi when he was born. 9

Attis (a greek god), who was both the "Divine Son" and the "Father", was born of a virgin on December 25th, died for the salvation of man, came back to life 3 days later, his body as bread was eaten by his worshippers, his priests were celibate, he was crucified and his blood redeemed the earth.10 Dionysus (greek and roman god), the son of Zeus, was born of a virgin on December 25th and was placed in a manger, performed miracles, died by hanging on a tree and rose from the dead, his body was eaten by his worshippers, was called "alpha and omega", "redeemer", and "king of kings".11

Note that all of these gods came centuries before Christ. Interestingly enough, Christian apologists have claimed that these early pagans had mystical or prophetic foreknowledge of Christ, and incorporated Christian ideas into their deities. Not surprisingly, an explanation is not provided for how or why this occurred.

2.2 Evolution
Granted, a god could have created things via evolution. However, many fundamentalists don't believe in the scientific fact of evolution. This seems to come from a few misunderstandings. In fact, if evolution consisted of what most of the creationists Ive talked to think it consists of, I wouldn't believe it either. The funny thing is that evolution is very well documented, and believed by non-evolution-believing people everywhere: dogs. Dogs are a great example of evolution (and, in fact, "intelligent design" by humans). Different species of dogs have been "designed" by man, by breeding for certain characteristics, for centuries. The only difference is that in the Theory of Evolution, the process is led by natural selection rather than some intelligent designer. This results in the process taking place over much greater periods of time.

Apr 3, 2007

2.2.1 Common Misconceptions about Evolution

It's "just" a theory. Misleading. This mischaracterizes what a scientific theory is12. You never hear that its just a theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but it is. And the Bible disputes that as well. Note that God and creation (or intelligent design) are merely hypotheses untested, unverifiable hypotheses. Man came from monkeys. Wrong. Primates, with whom we share over 99% of our genetic material, are our closest relative, and we clearly share a common ancestor. Evolution is a random process. Wrong. Evolution occurs via the entirely non-random process of the natural selection of randomly varying replicators13. Organisms evolve in response to their environment. Wrong. Natural selection, the fact that the most fit individuals survive and produce the most offspring, dictates that the most appropriately equipped individual organisms have a greater chance of passing on their genes, whereas the less-fit organisms do not (either via failing at the mate selection process, or a lack of surviving). This process occurs over huge periods of time, and demonstrably results in speciation. Evolution has never been observed. Wrong. It's been observed many, many times... why do you think we keep coming up with new antibiotics (and flu shots) to fight the same illnesses? Because they evolve. There are no transitional fossils (missing links). Wrong. There are thousands of them. Evolution violates the laws of physics. Wrong. The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of disorder in a closed system never decreases. The people who make this claim (who never happen to be physicists) may one day discover the sun... hopefully that day will be soon. Even Darwin said that evolution couldn't explain the eye. Wrong. This is, in fact, a horrible misrepresentation of what he wrote. It was a rhetorical device, and the rest of that paragraph explained much about how eyes form. The following three pages went into much greater detail. Even if he had meant it in the way it is often misrepresented, science relies on evidence, not the word or beliefs of any particular person -- and the various stages of eye development exist all throughout nature14. Darwin recanted on his deathbed. Probably wrong. There is no evidence to support this, and there is, in fact, an eyewitness account to the contrary. Even if he had, it doesn't matter as I pointed out in the previous item.

2.3 Ok, So Why Isnt There a God?

The god idea has been with humans for quite a long time, and there have been several types of gods over the years. Each culture has had their own god or gods, often based on those of previous cultures (as I showed Christianity is). And then there have been more vague gods. Einstein, an avowed atheist, often used the word god to refer to the laws of the universe 15 this

Apr 3, 2007

often led to confusion regarding his beliefs, although a careful reading of his work leaves no question. Science has done an excellent job of explaining how things got to be the way they are. Granted, there are gaps in knowledge here and there, but those gaps are rapidly filling. Many theists take the God lives in the gaps approach, invoking God to explain what is currently unexplained; however this has a long history of not working out well. In the last 300 years alone, the gaps of knowledge where God has long hidden have become vastly smaller at a much more rapid rate than at any other time. As science has explained more and more, these gaps are often boiled down to nothing more than constants in physics. If these constants were off by a fraction, then we would not exist because the entire universe would be vastly different, and likely unable to support life. The problem with assigning this to God, is that given a highly improbable likelihood of the universe occurring in this way, when taken over a near-infinite amount of time and number of formations, you are 100% guaranteed that it will come out the way it has at some point. And, we wouldnt be here considering these questions any of those other times. So, while the entire explanation is far beyond the scope of this paper, science has given us a reasonable explanation for how we went from nothing but chaos to where we are today. While there are still questions, those questions are likely to be answered, and without invoking a supernatural being. Explanations are tricky things sometimes. And sometimes using an explanation that only compounds the problem feels more comfortable than saying we dont know yet. The fundamental problem with the God Hypothesis is that it does just that, it compounds the problem. Once the God Hypothesis is invoked, it creates more questions than it answers: How can God speak things into existence? and where did God come from? to name a few. Weve been conditioned into thinking of these as two separate things. Stephen Jay Gould proposed the idea of Nonoverlapping Magisteria (NOMA), saying that science didnt touch religion and that religion didnt touch science16, and this has become the accepted view for many years. However, as Dawkins points out, religious claims are, in fact, scientifically testable 17. Either there is a God or there is not one. Either God spoke things into existence or he did not. These are testable claims. Unfortunately for the religious, all of the evidence (and there are mountains of it) point towards unguided evolution. Using god to explain the unexplained (and just because something is unexplained, doesnt make it inexplicable), is an exercise in futility. While we may not have enough data to form a concise, accurate explanation for a problem, solving that problem is significantly easier than solving the who created God, and who created the thing that created God question. Occams Razor, all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one, is one of the primary foundations of critical thought. Needless to say, the simplest explanation in these cases is the scientific one. While I am not saying that there is no god, I am saying that the likelihood of a god existing is so horribly small that it is negligible.

2.4 Why Not Agnosticism?

All atheists are agnostics. Agnosticism merely says that there is not enough information to absolutely know whether there is a god. No reasonable person would ever say that there is

Apr 3, 2007

absolutely no god (or that gravity absolutely and always exists, for that matter). Atheism is the belief that there is no god based on the overwhelming evidence to support that belief. The funny thing is that we are all atheists. There are many gods that no one believes in anymore: Zeus, Mithra (although, arguably Christianity is nothing but a continuation of Mithra-worship), Odin, Thor, etc. As Dawkins has said, some of us just take it one god further. Importantly, there are many other things that we have believed over time: fairies were commonly believed to exist up until the 19th century, leprechauns, even dragons. As we have learned more and more about the world around us, we have all become atheists to all of these things. And they all meet the same criteria for disbelief as our current god or gods. Bertrand Russell once proposed that there was a small teapot orbiting the sun. The teapot was so small that it couldnt be seen with even our most powerful telescopes, and there was no evidence to support this belief. Furthermore, everything worked exactly as it would be expected without the teapot existing. So why believe in such a strange thing? Occams Razor would dictate, as would the complete lack of evidence, that belief in a sun-orbiting teapot would be ridiculous. The same is true of fairies, Odin, and of course, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim god. (It saddens me to think that so many lives have been lost over the years to fighting over something even remotely like Russells teapot.)

2.5 So Why Does Religion Exist?

If there really isnt a god and Darwinian Natural Selection is correct, then religion must have an evolutionary benefit, right? Its succeeded over time and despite evidence that directly disproves religious claims, right? Unfortunately, thats not quite the case. According to Dawkins, religion is a meme that propagates in much the same way that computer viruses do18. The mind is very much like a computer, we process information and make decisions based on the information that we have. The brain has developed in such a way that humans are able to do things that no other species has been able to do, and it has many mechanisms that ensure our success. One of those mechanisms is that when we are small children we believe our elders, as they are able to protect us and keep us alive. Those children who did not have such a mechanism were probably unable to reproduce as they likely would not have heeded the warnings of their elders, i.e. dont go in the river because the alligators will eat you. Unfortunately, children do not have the critical thinking capability to determine which of these things are correct and which are not. Therefore the following statements would be indistinguishable: Dont put your finger in the light socket Dont swim in the alligator infested river Plant crops during a particular season or they wont grow Drought is caused by the gods being mad at us, but we can fix it by sacrificing something or performing a dance Fairies will come into your room and replace the tooth under your pillow with money Some guy came back to life after sacrificing himself to himself in order to forgive us for breaking rules that he put into place despite the fact that he could have just forgiven us anyway, seeing as hes the one that decides that sort of thing But some people become religious later in life. So, this doesnt account for all cases of theism. Unfortunately, the primary answer to adult conversion to theism is accounted for by lack of

Apr 3, 2007

understanding of science and probability. Much of science is counter-intuitive. No one is born with a scientific education or critical thinking skills. And it takes many years to acquire both. Without a scientific education, and without learning how to think about problems, we are left to be convinced by whichever religious group happens to cause an emotional stir.

2.6 Common Arguments against Atheism

Atheists have no morality (i.e., so what prevents you from killing, raping, and stealing then?). This is not only wrong, its also very telling. Personally, I dont do those things because I dont want to do them. Not out of fear of eternal torment. It frightens me when people even think to ask this, because it tends to make me think that they do want to do those things. Interestingly enough, atheists make up around 10% of the population, while less than 1% of the prison population is comprised of atheists19. This argument often reminds me of Matthew 7, where Jesus asks and why do you look at the speck in your brothers eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? The downright frightening part of all of this is that religion seems to be the cause behind numerous crimes: countless wars, terrorism, torture, deprivation, and innumerable other crimes against humanity. Newton, a brilliant scientist, believed in God. Correct, but missing some information. Prior to Darwins discovery of natural selection, the god hypothesis was the best explanation that we had to explain existence. Anyone who was an atheist prior to this point, would have been, much like a theist living in todays world, basing their beliefs on what they want to believe rather than what evidence would show to be truth. Whats wrong with faith? Several things. Faith in and of itself is harmless, however encouraging the act of believing things despite contrary evidence, or despite a complete lack of evidence encourages the sort of thought patterns that allow fundamentalist thinking to occur, which often leads to things like flying airplanes into buildings or blowing up abortion clinics. It seems that within religious institutions, believing things that are even harder to believe than the run-of-the-mill hard to believe doctrines is a more saintly act. It requires more faith to believe in the big bang/evolution than it does to believe in god/creation. Ridiculous. The people who make this claim inevitably have almost no scientific education (high school at best) and no understanding of science whatsoever. The word faith in this context refers to belief without evidence, or despite evidence to the contrary. A common example seems to be that people have faith that a chair will support them. This is nothing more than a misuse of the word. People observe chairs supporting other individuals weight, they have tested the hypothesis several times by sitting in a chair, and by the time they plop down in the chair themselves (even if its a new chair), its a fullfledged scientific theory. Just like evolution. People become atheists because they dont want to be accountable to God. Possibly. There are undoubtedly some people who become atheists for this reason. However, it would seem that they havent yet learned that what they believe has no impact on how things are. People become atheists because they were forced into religion. Certainly. Ive witnessed this many times, and its unfortunate. Ive also witnessed people staying religious because they

Apr 3, 2007

were forced into it, which is also unfortunate. These are both horrible reasons to do anything. To me, the only valid reason to possess a belief is because you have considered it, considered the alternatives, weighed the evidence, and made an educated decision. Anything less is no better than the very thing that the people who make this claim are complaining about. Not to mention that it bears no relevance to what is actually true.

3.0 Conclusion
My goal in writing this paper is not to attack others beliefs, nor is it to attempt to convert anyone to my own. It is merely to be heard. Most people, despite asking the question, dont want to take the time to hear the answer, and most dismiss it as hearsay (which is why Ive cited references) or arrogance (despite the fact that they are the ones insisting that they know the absolute truth without hearing what you have to say). So, this is why Ive become an atheist. I welcome evidence and rational debate against any of the claims I have listed. Below is a brief explanation of what evolution actually is, by the man who probably understands it better than anyone alive: Dr. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the founder of the field of memetics, and discovered the gene-centric view of evolution.

A1. A Brief Explanation of Evolution by Natural Selection by Richard Dawkins

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly. Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant. So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection. Every living creature has ancestors, but only a fraction have descendants. All inherit the genes of an unbroken sequence of successful ancestors, none of whom died young and none of whom failed to reproduce. Genes that program embryos to develop into adults who can successfully reproduce automatically survive in the gene pool, at the expense of genes that fail. This is natural

Apr 3, 2007

selection at the gene level, and we notice its consequences at the organism level. There has to be an ultimate source of new genetic variation, and it is mutation. Copies of newly mutated genes are reshuffled through the gene pool by sexual reproduction, and selection removes them from the pool in a way that is non-random. What makes for success in the business of life varies from species to species. Some swim, some walk, some fly, some climb, some root themselves into the soil and tilt green solar panels toward the sun. All this diversity stems from successive branchings, starting from a single bacterium-like ancestor, which lived between 3 and 4 billion years ago. Each branching event is called a speciation: a breeding population splits into two, and they go their separately evolving ways. Among sexually reproducing species, speciation is said to have occurred when the two gene pools have separated so far that they can no longer interbreed. Speciation begins by accident. When separation has reached the stage where there is no interbreeding even without a geographical barrier, we have the origin of a new species. Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the sceptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.

1 2

Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (Anchor Bible Reference), p. 216-217 Kraus, Thomas J., New Testament Studies (1999), 45: 434-439, Cambridge University Press 3 Various Contributors, Early Christianity, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity 4 Swedenborg, Emanuel, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine (1758), para 159-162 5 Tobin, Paul N., Babylonian Origins of the Creation Myth 6 Tobin, Paul N., The Flood Myth: Babylonian Origins 7 Steidl, Paul, The Earth, the Stars, and the Bible (1979) 8 Ancient Paganism and the Dangers of Compromise 9 Weigall, Arthur, The Paganism in Our Christianity 10 Frazer, Sir James G., The Golden Bough (1922) 11 Aletheia, M.D., The Rationalists Manual 12 In science, a theory is a mathematical description, a logical explanation, a verified hypothesis, or a proven model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation. From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory) 13 Dawkins, Richard The Worlds Ten Biggest Ideas, New Scientist 14 Darwin, Charles The Origin of Species 15 Dawkins, Richard The God Delusion 16 Gould, Stephen J. Nonoverlapping Magisteria, http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html 17 Dawkins, Richard The God Delusion 18 Dawkins, Richard Viruses of the Mind, http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html 19 Rice, Frederick L., Atheists Supply Less than 1% of Prison Populations, http://www.skepticfiles.org/american/prison.htm