One of the first questions Atheists are asked by true believers and doubters alike is, “If

you don’t believe in God, there’s nothing to prevent you from committing crimes, is
there? Without the fear of hell-fire and eternal damnation, you can do anything you
like, can’t you?”

Introduction
It is hard to believe that even intelligent and educated people could hold such an
opinion, but they do! It seems never to have occurred to them that the Greeks and
Romans, whose gods and goddesses were something less than paragons of virtue,
nevertheless led lives not obviously worse than those of the Baptists of Alabama!
Moreover, pagans such as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius – although their systems are
not suitable for us today – managed to produce ethical treatises of great sophistication,
a sophistication rarely if ever equaled by Christian moralists.

The answer to the questions posed above is, of course, “Absolutely not!” The behavior
of Atheists is subject to the same rules of sociology, psychology, and neurophysiology
that govern the behavior of all members of our species, religionists included. Moreover,
despite protestations to the contrary, we may assert as a general rule that when
religionists practice ethical behavior, it isn’t really due to their fear of hell-fire and
damnation, nor is it due to their hopes of heaven. Ethical behavior – regardless of who
the practitioner may be – results always from the same causes and is regulated by the
same forces, and has nothing to do with the presence or absence of religious belief. The
nature of these causes and forces is the subject of this essay.

Psychobiological Foundation
As human beings, we are social animals. Our sociality is the result of evolution, not
choice. Natural selection has equipped us with nervous systems which are peculiarly
sensitive to the emotional status of our fellows. Among our kind, emotions are
contagious, and it is only the rare psychopathic mutants among us who can be happy in
the midst of a sad society. It is in our nature to be happy in the midst of happiness, sad
in the midst of sadness. It is in our nature, fortunately, to seek happiness for our fellows
at the same time as we seek it for ourselves. Our happiness is greater when it is shared.

Nature also has provided us with nervous systems which are, to a considerable degree,
imprintable. To be sure, this phenomenon is not as pronounced or as ineluctable as it
is, say, in geese – where a newly hatched gosling can be “imprinted” to a toy train and
will follow it to exhaustion, as if it were its mother. Nevertheless, some degree of
imprinting is exhibited by humans. The human nervous system appears to retain its
capacity for imprinting well into old age, and it is highly likely that the phenomenon
known as “love-at-first-sight” is a form of imprinting. Imprinting is a form of
attachment behavior, and it helps us to form strong interpersonal bonds. It is a major
force which helps us to break through the ego barrier to create “significant others”
whom we can love as much as ourselves. These two characteristics of our nervous
system – emotional suggestibility and attachment imprintability – although they are
the foundation of all altruistic behavior and art, are thoroughly compatible with the
selfishness characteristic of all behaviors created by the process of natural selection.
That is to say, to a large extent behaviors which satisfy ourselves will be found,
simultaneously, to satisfy our fellows, and vice-versa.

This should not surprise us when we consider that among the societies of our nearest
primate cousins, the great apes, social behavior is not chaotic, even if gorillas do lack
the Ten Commandments! The young chimpanzee does not need an oracle to tell it to
honor its mother and to refrain from killing its brothers and sisters. Of course, family
squabbles and even murder have been observed in ape societies, but such behaviors
are exceptions, not the norm. So too it is in human societies, everywhere and at all
times.

The African apes – whose genes are ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent identical to
ours – go about their lives as social animals, cooperating in the living of life, entirely
without the benefit of clergy and without the commandments of Exodus, Leviticus, or
Deuteronomy. It is further cheering to learn that sociobiologists have even observed
altruistic behavior among troops of baboons. More than once, in troops attacked by
leopards, aged, post reproduction-age males have been observed to linger at the rear of
the escaping troop and to engage the leopard in what often amounts to a suicidal fight.
As the old male delays the leopard’s pursuit by sacrificing his very life, the females and
young escape and live to fulfill their several destinies. The heroism which we see acted
out, from time to time, by our fellow men and women, is far older than their religions.
Long before the gods were created by the fear-filled minds of our less courageous
ancestors, heroism and acts of self-sacrificing love existed. They did not require a
supernatural excuse then, nor do they require one now.

Given the general fact, then, that evolution has equipped us with nervous systems
biased in favor of social, rather than antisocial, behaviors, is it not true, nevertheless,
that antisocial behavior does exist, and it exists in amounts greater than a reasonable
ethicist would find tolerable? Alas, this is true. But it is true largely because we live in
worlds far more complex than the Paleolithic world in which our nervous systems
originated. To understand the ethical significance of this fact, we must digress a bit and
review the evolutionary history of human behavior.
A Digression
Today, heredity can control our behavior in only the most general of ways, it cannot
dictate precise behaviors appropriate for infinitely varied circumstances. In our world,
heredity needs help.

In the world of a fruit fly, by contrast, the problems to be solved are few in number and
highly predictable in nature. Consequently, a fruit fly’s brain is largely “hard-wired” by
heredity. That is to say, most behaviors result from environmental activation of nerve
circuits which are formed automatically by the time of emergence of the adult fly. This
is an extreme example of what is called instinctual behavior. Each behavior is coded for
by a gene or genes which predispose the nervous system to develop certain types of
circuits and not others, and where it is all but impossible to act contrary to the
genetically predetermined script.

The world of a mammal – say a fox – is much more complex and unpredictable than
that of the fruit fly. Consequently, the fox is born with only a portion of its neuronal
circuitry hard-wired. Many of its neurons remain “plastic” throughout life. That is, they
may or may not hook up with each other in functional circuits, depending upon
environmental circumstances. Learned behavior is behavior which results from
activation of these environmentally conditioned circuits. Learning allows the individual
mammal to learn – by trial and error – greater numbers of adaptive behaviors than
could be transmitted by heredity. A fox would be wall-to-wall genes if all its behaviors
were specified genetically.

With the evolution of humans, however, environmental complexity increased out of all
proportion to the genetic and neuronal changes distinguishing us from our simian
ancestors. This partly was due to the fact that our species evolved in a geologic period
of great climatic flux – the Ice Ages – and partly was due to the fact that our behaviors
themselves began to change our environment. The changed environment in turn
created new problems to be solved. Their solutions further changed the environment,
and so on. Thus, the discovery of fire led to the burning of trees and forests, which led
to destruction of local water supplies and watersheds, which led to the development of
architecture with which to build aqueducts, which led to laws concerning water-rights,
which led to international strife, and on and on.

Given such complexity, even the ability to learn new behaviors is, by itself, inadequate.
If trial and error were the only means, most people would die of old age before they
would succeed in rediscovering fire or reinventing the wheel. As a substitute for
instinct and to increase the efficiency of learning, mankind developed culture. The
ability to teach – as well as to learn – evolved, and trial-and-error learning became a
method of last resort.

By transmission of culture – passing on the sum total of the learned behaviors common
to a population – we can do what Darwinian genetic selection would not allow: we can
inherit acquired characteristics. The wheel once having been invented, its manufacture
and use can be passed down through the generations. Culture can adapt to change
much faster than genes can, and this provides for finely tuned responses to
environmental disturbances and upheavals. By means of cultural transmission, those
behaviors which have proven useful in the past can be taught quickly to the young, so
that adaptation to life – say on the Greenland ice cap – can be assured.

Even so, cultural transmission tends to be rigid: it took over one hundred thousand
years to advance to chipping both sides of the hand-ax! Cultural mutations, like genetic
mutations, tend more often than not to be harmful, and both are resisted – the former
by cultural conservatism, the latter by natural selection. But changes do creep in faster
than the rate of genetic change, and cultures slowly evolve. Even that cultural dinosaur
known as the Catholic Church – despite its claim to be the unchanging repository of
truth and “correct” behavior – has changed greatly since its beginning.

Incidentally, it is at this hand-ax stage of behavioral evolution at which most of the

religions of today are still stuck. Our inflexible, absolutist moral codes also are fixated at
this stage. The Ten Commandments are the moral counterpart of the “here’s-how-you-
rub-the-sticks-together” phase of technological evolution. If the only type of fire you
want is one to heat your cave and cook your clams, the stick-rubbing method suffices.
But if you want a fire to propel your jet-plane, some changes have to be made.

So, too, with the transmission of moral behavior. If we are to live lives which are as
complex socially as jet-planes are complex technologically, we need something more
than the Ten Commandments. We cannot base our moral code upon arbitrary and
capricious fiats reported to us by persons claiming to be privy to the intentions of the
denizens of Sinai or Olympus. Our ethics can be based neither upon fictions concerning
the nature of humankind nor upon fake reports concerning the desires of the deities.
Our ethics must be firmly planted in the soil of scientific self-knowledge. They must be
improvable and adaptable.

Where then, and with what, shall we begin?

Back to Ethics
Plato showed long ago, in his dialogue Euthyphro, that we cannot depend upon the
moral fiats of a deity. Plato asked if the commandments of a god were “good” simply
because a god had commanded them or because the god recognized what was good
and commanded the action accordingly. If something is good simply because a god has
commanded it, anything could be considered good. There would be no way of
predicting what in particular the god might desire next, and it would be entirely
meaningless to assert that “God is good.” Bashing babies with rocks would be just as
likely to be “good” as would the principle “Love your enemies.” (It would appear that
the “goodness” of the god of the Old Testament is entirely of this sort.)

On the other hand, if a god’s commandments are based on a knowledge of the inherent
goodness of an act, we are faced with the realization that there is a standard of
goodness independent of the god and we must admit that he cannot be the source of
morality. In our quest for the good, we can bypass the god and go to his source!

Given, then, that gods a priori cannot be the source of ethical principles, we must seek
such principles in the world in which we have evolved. We must find the sublime in the
mundane. What precept might we adopt?

The principle of “enlightened self-interest” is an excellent first approximation to an

ethical principle which is both consistent with what we know of human nature and is
relevant to the problems of life in a complex society. Let us examine this principle.

First we must distinguish between “enlightened” and “unenlightened” self-interest.

Let’s take an extreme example for illustration. Suppose you lived a totally selfish life of
immediate gratification of every desire. Suppose that whenever someone else had
something you wanted, you took it for yourself.

It wouldn’t be long at all before everyone would be up in arms against you, and you
would have to spend all your waking hours fending off reprisals. Depending upon how
outrageous your activity had been, you might very well lose your life in an orgy of
neighborly revenge. The life of total but unenlightened self-interest might be exciting
and pleasant as long as it lasts – but it is not likely to last long.

The person who practices “enlightened” self-interest, by contrast, is the person whose
behavioral strategy simultaneously maximizes both the intensity and duration of
personal gratification. An enlightened strategy will be one which, when practiced over
a long span of time, will generate ever greater amounts and varieties of pleasures and
satisfactions.

How is this to be done?

It is obvious that more is to be gained by cooperating with others than by acts of
isolated egoism. One man with a rock cannot kill a buffalo for dinner. But a group of
men or women, with lots of rocks, can drive the beast off a cliff and – even after dividing
the meat up among them – will still have more to eat than they would have had without
cooperation.

But cooperation is a two-way street. If you cooperate with several others to kill
buffaloes, and each time they drive you away from the kill and eat it themselves, you
will quickly take your services elsewhere, and you will leave the ingrates to stumble
along without the Paleolithic equivalent of a fourth-for-bridge. Cooperation implies
reciprocity.

Justice has its roots in the problem of determining fairness and reciprocity in
cooperation. If I cooperate with you in tilling your field of corn, how much of the corn is
due me at harvest time? When there is justice, cooperation operates at maximal
efficiency, and the fruits of cooperation become ever more desirable. Thus, enlightened
self-interest entails a desire for justice. With justice and with cooperation, we can have
symphonies. Without it, we haven’t even a song.

Let us bring this essay back to the point of our departure. Because we have the nervous
systems of social animals, we are generally happier in the company of our fellow
creatures than alone. Because we are emotionally suggestible, as we practice
enlightened self-interest we usually will be wise to choose behaviors which will make
others happy and willing to cooperate and accept us – for their happiness will reflect
back upon us and intensify our own happiness. On the other hand, actions which harm
others and make them unhappy – even if they do not trigger overt retaliation which
decreases our happiness – will create an emotional milieu which, because of our
suggestibility, will make us less happy.

Because our nervous systems are imprintable, we are able not only to fall in love at first
sight, we are able to love objects and ideals as well as people, and we are able to love
with variable intensities. Like the gosling attracted to the toy train, we are pulled
forward by the desire for love. Unlike the gosling’s “love,” however, our love is to a
considerable extent shapeable by experience and is capable of being educated. A major
aim of enlightened self-interest, surely, is to give and receive love, both sexual and
nonsexual. As a general – though not absolute – rule, we must choose those behaviors
which will be likely to bring us love and acceptance, and we must eschew those
behaviors which will not.
Another aim of enlightened self-interest is to seek beauty in all its forms, to preserve
and prolong its resonance between the world outside and that within. Beauty and love
are but different facets of the same jewel: love is beautiful, and we love beauty.

The experience of love and beauty, however, is a passive function of the mind. How
much greater is the joy which comes from creating beauty. How delicious it is to
exercise actively our creative powers to engender that which can be loved. Paints and
pianos are not necessarily prerequisites for the exercise of creativity: Whenever we
transform the raw materials of existence in such a way that we leave them better than
they were when we found them, we have been creative.

The task of moral education, then, is not to inculcate by rote great lists of do’s and
don’ts, but rather to help people to predict the consequences of actions being
considered. What are the long-term as well as immediate rewards and draw-backs of
the acts? Will an act increase or decrease one’s chances of experiencing the hedonic
triad of love, beauty, and creativity?

Thus it happens, when the Atheist approaches the problem of finding natural grounds
for human morals and establishing a nonsuperstitious basis for behavior, that it
appears as though nature has already solved the problem to a great extent. Indeed, it
appears as though the problem of establishing a natural, humanistic basis for ethical
behavior is not much of a problem at all. It is in our natures to desire love, to seek
beauty, and to thrill at the act of creation. The labyrinthine complexity we see when we
examine traditional moral codes does not arise of necessity: it is largely the result of
vain attempts to accommodate human needs and nature to the whimsical totems and
taboos of the demons and deities who emerged with us from our cave-dwellings at the
end of the Paleolithic Era – and have haunted our houses ever since.
Religious people are less intelligent on average than atheists because faith is an
instinct and clever people are better at rising above their instincts, researchers
have claimed.

The theory — called the 'Intelligence-Mismatch Association Model' — was

proposed by a pair of authors who set out to explain why numerous studies over
past decades have found religious people to have lower average intelligence
than people who do not believe in a god.

A 2013 analysis by University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation

between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 historic studies.

“If religion is an evolved domain then it is an instinct, and intelligence — in

rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming
instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive
possibilities,” explained Mr Dutton.

They argue that being intelligent helps people during stressful times to weigh up
their options and act rationally rather than give in to knee-jerk responses.

“If religion is indeed an evolved domain — an instinct — then it will become

heightened at times of stress, when people are inclined to act instinctively, and
there is clear evidence for this,” said Mr Dutton.

“It also means that intelligence allows us to able to pause and reason through the
situation and the possible consequences of our actions.”

The researchers believe that people who are attracted to the non-instinctive are
potentially better problem solvers.

“This is important, because in a changing ecology, the ability to solve problems

will become associated with rising above our instincts, rendering us attracted to
evolutionary mismatches,” said Mr van der Linden.
 Researchers may believe in theories, but seldom in miracles. Thus conflicts with religion may seem
inevitable, whereby questions of faith already keep researchers occupied amongst themselves.
Some researchers believe in economic models for predicting developments in the world economy and international
markets. Some believe that one day someone will manage to prove the string theory, which could be along the lines
of general operating instructions for the universe and everything that happens in it. The famous American
astronomer, Carl Sagan, believed that sooner or later humanity would receive signals from intelligent extraterrestrial
life forms, and spent decades listening to outer space with the help of enormous radio telescopes. And his
compatriot, the highly-decorated astrophysicist, Thomas Gold of Cornell University, believed that oil is not actually a
fossil fuel based on biomass but a metabolite of bacteria living in the earth’s crust that process hydrocarbon.
Anyone who looks at science as being essentially a business of rationality, hard facts and empiricism underestimates
the role of fixed ideas and intuition, not to mention the conviction that you are on the right path even if you cannot
prove it. However, in the end, faith is supposed to turn into proven knowledge. It is not enough just to believe in the
existence of extraterrestrial life – it all depends on what you are able to prove. This consensus amongst researchers
sounds trivial. But it is the root of conflicts with religions that are based on faith without evidence. In the world of
religion miracles are certainly possible, in the world of research they are not. Here we are dealing with the maxim of
the Scottish philosopher, David Hume: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of
such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” The fact that
some researchers are prepared to believe in divine miracles nonetheless, does not make the conflict any clearer
The urge to plumb the depths of the inexplicable and miraculous leads science almost in passing – and sometimes
even intentionally – onto religious territory. Progress in modern brain research, for example, has made the topic of
faith even more fascinating to science. Researchers push Tibetan monks or Catholic nuns into a magnetic resonance
to mograph to investigate which regions of the brain are active during meditation or prayer. Th e discovery of an in
crease in the blood supply to the front tem poral lobe even prompted the American neuropsychologist, V.S.
Ramachandran, to declare this region of the brain to be a so-called God module. This region of the brain, which
seems to be responsible for religious experience, also works the other way round. If the respective area is stimulated
with magnetic waves or affected by an epileptic attack, this can trigger a sense of transcendental enlightenment or
religious experience in subjects and patients.
In the last resort, is God perhaps nothing more than a storm of neutrons in the human brain? Ramachandran chooses
not to answer this question. Like many neurologists he is not simply prepared to exchange belief in God for belief in
the brain. After all, the existence of a God module does not contradict the existence of God. Perhaps creation has
specifically earmarked it as the receiver designate of spiritual messages and experiences? Another theory explains
mankind’s predisposition to the religious by evolution: Selection has favoured people with the relevant area of the
brain because religious experience can strengthen social bonds within a community.

The brain as belief engine

Another explanation as to why human beings both wish to and have to believe in something is provided by the British
developmental biologist, Lewis Wolpert. His reasons for the positively compulsive human search for answers not only
explain the drive for religion and belief in miracles, but for research as well. Wolpert sees the brain as a belief engine:
In the search for understanding it drives human beings at least to believe, even if they do not actually know – be it in
God, astrology, extraterrestrials or string theory.
According to Wolpert, the reason for this is the human ability to link cause and effect. In the dim and distant past, it
was this that allowed us to invent the first primitive tools. Without this insight, even combining a biface with a simple
stick for a handle to invent an axe would not have been possible. This ability set off a cognitive chain reaction. Once
you have understood the connection between cause and effect you cannot stop searching for reasons why the world
is as it is. Once you have understood that you only have to rub two sticks together vigorously to create fire, you want
to know the causes of other things, such as disease and death. But it proved impossible to apply the principle of “no
effect without a cause” to strokes of fate of this kind without resorting to the supernatural. When our ancestors
reached the limits of their understanding they almost inevitably came to the conclusion that an invisible God must be
responsible – a solution that was so compelling, and has remained so for many to this day, that a lot of societies
developed it quite independently.
However, with every puzzle that research manages to solve the scope for supernatural explanations is reduced.
Since Darwin and the triumph of science the claim to universal validity made by religious dogma has diminished
constantly. Eventually people will be asking whether there is a God at all if everything can be explained without him.
The defensive reactions of the religious are concomitantly strong. In the spectacular debates between creationism
and evolutionary theory in the USA religious adherents of intelligent design, who consider Darwin’s teaching
fallacious and the Bible to be the definitive tool for explaining the origins of the world, are pitted against radical
atheists like the biologist, Richard Dawkins, who reject any thought of a divine plan of creation as complete rubbish.
Faith without evidence is the aspect of religion that fires on opponents like Dawkins. If being religious means
believing in something without evidence, anything is justifiable – no points of argument, no evidence, the only
justification being that one simply believes in it, as Dawkins claims in his international bestseller, “The God Delusion”.

Long before the current debate on science and religion started in the USA, the issue of God and his role in the world

view of research was discussed with reference to Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. But as the chief witness

for scientists who believe in God Einstein is not much use. His famous remark about God not playing dice was not

so much a profession of faith as an allegory indicating that the universe, too, must be governed by fixed laws. In one

of Einstein’s letters written in 1954, which was only discovered recently, he wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind,

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection

of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how

subtle can (for me) change this.” Nevertheless, Einstein did not describe himself as an atheist and claimed, “What I

see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking

person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”
The claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a
Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is
typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian
Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since.

As a result, the study challenges two assumptions that prop up current debates between atheists and
believers: Firstly, the idea that atheism is a modern point of view, and second, the idea of “religious
universalism” – that humans are naturally predisposed, or “wired”, to believe in gods.

“We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies,”
Whitmarsh said. “The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far
more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered
normal.”

“Rather than making judgements based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what
seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to
accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of
years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.”
Recently, I have had a lot of conversations with atheists. Many express a
strong hatred of God. I have been at a loss to explain this. How can you
hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility? If God does not exist,
shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant
food? Why should it matter if people believe in God? Nothing matters if
atheism is true.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), the brother of the atheistic evolutionist Sir

Julian Huxley, advocated a drug-fuelled utopia. He gave the reason for his
anti-Christian stance:

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning … the philosophy
of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and
political.”1
Like Huxley, some people don’t like God because they don’t like moral
constraints—you can make up your own rules, or have none at all, if God
does not exist. They hate God and Christians because they are actually not
confident that God does not exist and seeing Christians may remind them
that they are ‘suppressing the truth’ (Romans 1:18).
What about atheists who had a church/religious upbringing? Some of them
hate God because of evil things done to them by teachers in religious
schools or by church leaders—people who on the face of it represented God.
Antipathy towards God is an understandable reaction, sadly (although
illogical).

Many complain about hell; they are angry at God because of hell. I
understand that teachers in certain church-based schools, and parents in
some ‘religious’ homes, commonly used the ‘fear of God’ to make children
behave. “You are bad; you will burn in hell if you don’t behave.” But such a
simplistic works-oriented approach not only trivializes this most serious of
subjects, it negates the Gospel of God’s grace. (We are all ‘bad’ in God’s
eyes, and ‘behaving properly’ will not save us—only Jesus can.)

A child who is having difficulties may well conclude that there is no way out
for them, leading to years of nightmares about suffering in hell. Such a
troubled teenager hearing an atheist say that evolution explains how we got
here and that God is a myth2 could find this to be a liberating message, a
release from their fears.
The Gospel (good news, see p. 41) is missing from all this. The Bible tells us
that God is in the business of salvation. Though His wrath regarding sin is all
too real (as seen in the Fall and Flood judgments; pp. 12–14, p. 15), we
need not suffer it. Those who come to Him in repentance and faith will not
be turned away (John 6:37). See also pp. 32–34.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John
3:16)
It is strange that people hate God, who loves so much.

Some atheists complain of Christian ‘intolerance’ in speaking about hell. But

if those who spurn God’s forgiveness will suffer God’s wrath, shouldn’t we
Christians be warning everyone about the danger and how they can be
saved? How is that ‘intolerant’? It would be extremely unloving not to tell
others of this. A gift of Creation magazine might be a good place to start.
More than 30 Christians arose early Sunday morning to listen to an
atheist explain why he thinks Jesus Christ was a bad person.

"I'm very, very grateful for them allowing me to speak to them and for
how open-minded they are," Hector Avalos said. "I've been invited to
speak at other churches, but not at this level of discord."

Avalos, professor of biblical studies at Iowa State, was invited to

Collegiate Methodist Church to speak on April 15 about the perceived
unethical teachings of the Christian messiah.

Having an atheist here is something we welcome,” he said. “We like

the intellectual give-and-take that comes with mixing opinions. There
were questions that were probing, challenging sometimes, but always
respectful."

Avalos wrote a book about what he sees as Christ’s wrongdoings.

“The Bad Jesus” argues that there is a bias in contemporary biblical
studies which favors Christ. Avalos presented that thesis along with
scriptural evidence for his claims.

“Modern biblical scholarship still portrays Jesus as superhuman,”

Avalos said. “I wrote my book as a way of mitigating that, and instead
analyze him ethically as a human person.”

Avalos said this trend is nearly universal, and can be seen within the
works of Christian, Jewish and secularist scholars alike. However,
Avalos is an expert in the Ancient Near East and used the Bible, as
well as pre-Bible literature, in support of his points.

For example, John 2:14 famously tells the story of Jesus brandishing
a whip in the Jewish Temple and pushing over tables because people
were selling their cattle and otherwise exchanging money.

“If a man entered a church while you were playing Bingo, took out a
whip and started tipping over the tables, would you say, ‘Gee, he’s
really challenging the church’s view of commerce’?” Avalos said. “No,
you wouldn’t find anything about that ethically okay, but because it’s
Jesus, nobody thinks it’s bad.

“We don’t want people vandalising temples because they don’t think
people are worshipping correctly.”

While some certainly disagreed with Avalos, there were no negative

interactions between he and the audience.

“I’m surprised he escaped with all his limbs,” joked Madison

Harrington, junior in aerospace engineering. “The lecture was really
good, and everyone was very respectful.”

Vandalism is one thing, but some of Jesus’s actions would bring about
grave repercussions, Avalos said. His words were even used by Nazis
in anti-Semitic propaganda.

In John 8:44, Jesus charged Jews with being the sons of the devil.
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to bring about your
father’s desires,” the scripture reads.

“This had an effect on history,” Avalos said and showed the audience
black and white photos of signs with German writing. “They put this
verse on road signs in Nazi Germany. People acted on this throughout
Christian history, and a lot of scholars know it.”

He may have said to love your enemies in Matthew 5:44, but in Luke
14:26 Jesus commanded his followers to hate their families, Avalos
argued.

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and
children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my
disciple,” reads the scripture.

“If anyone else in history said this it would be viewed as hate speech,”
Avalos said.

This verse is subject to such varying interpretation that Avalos

dedicated a whole chapter in his book to it. For the lecture he broke
down the arguments using Greek, the original language of the New
Testament.

“People might say Jesus meant you should leave your family, or that
you should love Jesus more than your family, but there’s no linguistic
evidence for that,” Avalos said. “The word used for hate is miseo...
which can be seen later in Luke 16:13.”
The verse Avalos mentioned reads “No slave can serve two masters;
for a slave will either hate the one and love the other….”

“Nobody suggests this means you will love one master and love the
other a little less,” Avalos said. “It’s zero sum, you’re to love one and
hate the other.”
Editor's note: Monsignor Professor Tomas Halik worked as a psychotherapist during the
Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In 1978, he was clandestinely ordained as a
priest in the Catholic Church and was instrumental in organizing the Czech underground
church. Since the fall of Communism, he has served as General Secretary to the Czech
Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to Vaclav Havel. He is currently Professor of
the Philosophy and Sociology of Religion at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles
University in Prague. On Thursday, 13 March 2014, he was announced as this year's
winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize.

I
Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists have one thing in common: they don't believe
in gods. Indeed, as Cardinal Tomas Spidlik liked to say, "Christians were atheists for the
first 400 years." What he meant was that, for the Roman and Greek pagans, the Jews
and the Christians of the first centuries were pagans. They had no God whose name
others recognized. They were "without" gods. Even now, we Christians may seem like
atheists in the eyes of people of other religions.

It is very important to recognize that our God is not merely one exemplar of a group of
beings called "gods." He is a great Mystery. Sometimes I find myself agreeing with
atheists when they say there is no God, if by that they mean there is not a God who is
"a thing among other things." In this they are correct.

That is why I like to begin my dialogues with atheists with the question, "What does this
God, in whom you do not believe, look like?" and sometimes, after my partner in
dialogue tells me about his image of God - as a heavenly policeman or a big daddy
behind the scenes of our world - I say, "Thank God you do not believe in such a God! I
don't believe in such a God either."

But then, quite often, this partner in dialogue will admit, "But you know, I am not an
obtuse materialist either. I also know there is 'something' beyond us." This is why I say
that the most influential religion in the Czech Republic today is not atheism, but
"something-ism": People believe that there must be something, even though they will
not call it "God." And this is a challenge for the theologian, to continue this dialogue and
to interpret this "something."

Atheism is an important partner in dialogue for Christian theologians because some

kinds of atheism - and we must be aware that that there are many different sorts of
atheism - could be a great help for us. They can purify our image of God, because
sometimes - and this is true for many Christians - our concept of God is a projection of
our wishes and our curiosity and our fears and so on. In this regard, Feuerbach was
quite right to call God a projection of human fantasies and wishful thinking. We should
purify our vision of God from this too-human image. Atheist critics can help us with that.
II
Atheism strikes me as an absolutization of negative (or apophatic) theology - theology,
in which we try to describe God by talking about what can not be attributed to Him. This
was, for example, an important method for St. Thomas Aquinas.

On the road of negative theology, we can travel a long way hand in hand with agnostics
and atheists. But at a certain point we come to a crossroads: at this place, dogmatic
atheists turn away to their own certainties and dogmas. The agnostics stay standing at
the crossroads with their doubts. Fundamentalist Christians suppress their own doubts
and critical questions.

But people of mature faith, when they come to this crossroads, are able to move
forward. They move forward as believers, in spite of their doubts. Their main trait is the
courage to enter into the mystery of God, into unknown territory, and not become
exasperated. They can withstand the mystery of the unknown and they can withstand
their own uncertainties. In this life, as St. Paul told us, "we see though a glass darkly" (1
Corinthians 13:12). It is only in the final eschaton that we shall see God face to face.

To be sure, sometimes this first naive stage of religious life is verified by a personal
crisis caused by difficult experiences in someone's life. There are always moments in
our own story when we realize that things are not simple: we live with many paradoxes,
and this is a test of our faith. In this test, if our faith is too closely identified with simple
religious notions, then we may turn to atheism.

But it is also possible to come out of such a crisis with a stronger faith. Crises can be
like the dark night of the soul, in which we are confronted with the silence of God, with
the hidden God, and we sense we are going through a valley of shadow - a desert. In
such times, we need somebody who can serve as a spiritual guide; someone who can
accompany us and give us an alternative interpretation to the atheist, one that will help
us process our experiences. There are classical books that can help here, like the
works of the Spanish mystics.

When I meet with people in these critical situations, I try to catch the so-called "second
wind" of faith. Sometimes difficulties in our personal life shake our old certainties. But
once we rid ourselves of naive illusions we can, with a naked faith, "a little faith", move
forward into the future. We know that what is little in our own human eyes can truly be
great in the eyes of God. A faith stripped of its certainties and religious imaginings and
projections is a small, naked faith. But sometimes it may be very great in the eyes of
God. The small things of God are greater than the things of man, as Saint Paul writes
(see 1 Corinthians 1:27).

III
We really must examine this label atheism and discern that it is used to indicate many
different things, including agnosticism and what I call "apatheism" in which people are
simply apathetic and have no interest in religious questions. Then there are those who
are merely critics of religion, or who have a critical approach to the Church and the
traditional language of religion.

These are all phenomena that we sometimes call "atheism" - but, in fact, I do not
believe that pure atheism can exist. What seems like utter unbelief is really just a limited
period in a person's development.

The opposite of faith is not atheism, but idolatry. When a religious person experiences a
crisis of faith, they have the opportunity to go deeper in the development of their
relationship with God. But there is also the strong temptation in such moments to put
something else - a relative value - on the throne of God, who is absolute. Every artificial
god, religious simulacrum of God, or idol, begins with the absolutization of a relative
value. It could be a nation, a political leader (Fuhrer) or a political party, career, sex, or
money: there are many different pretenders to the throne of God in our lives.

The consumerist mentality is connected with idolatry and so is narcissism: if our ego is
on the throne of God, it can be very dangerous! A conversion to true faith is a real
revolution: the ego is thrown out of the place of God in our life. Yet, this is the greatest
kind of liberation: to be free from our own ego. This liberation gives us a freedom we
call love.

Love is not just an emotion - it is a great inner evolution of transcendence, in which we

recognize that somebody is more important than ourselves. When we love, we can
transcend our own interests and our own egoistic perspective and see our lives from a
higher perspective. And in fact any sort of genuine love can cause transcendence,
because through love God is always present, even if only namelessly.

IV
The struggle between faith and atheism is not a struggle between two teams, like in
football. The struggle between faith and atheism runs through the heart of every human
being. Believers have an unbeliever inside, and the so-called unbelievers have also a
believer inside of them.

I am very excited when I have the opportunity to try to communicate with the believer
hidden inside those who declare themselves to be unbelievers. I use the Socratic
method in such encounters. I think that this spiritual dimension of life is part of
everyone's personality, even though it is sometimes uncultivated and underdeveloped. I
am always intrigued by the fact that I am often able to communicate with someone who
proclaims himself to be an atheist more readily than I can communicate with many
believers.

Yet, when we think about it, if the human psyche is structured as Jung says, where 90%
of our personality is subsumed by the unconscious, then faith is not dependent on the
ideas we consciously entertain. We have both reason and heart - we might also use the
terms conscious and unconscious or, in Augustine's language, reason and memory.
There is something deeper in us than merely our rationality.
I am frequently surprised that somebody who calls himself an atheist has a heart which
is full of God and open to the mystery of love. For various reasons, his faith is not
present in his conscious mind, in his rational thinking. This may be due to cultural
influences or because of his upbringing or a traumatic experience with the Church, or a
real lack of experience with the living Church and spiritual culture, authentic Christianity.
Many such people have "an implicit faith" and we can call them with Karl Rahner
"anonymous Christians."

There is also the opposite situation: some people may have God in their minds and their
mouths, but you can feel that their heart is absolutely cool and closed, and that their
words are merely the echo of years of religious education. There exist, then, both
"implicit religiosity" and "implicit atheism." I think we have to be very slow to judge
individuals from the outside, just as we should also refrain from passing judgment on
the culture of a nation from the outside.

V
There are people whom I describe as "sorrowful atheists." They are those who say, "I
would like to believe but I cannot." Sometimes they have some sort of trauma or they
have some wounds of evil and of tragedy, sometimes in their personal life, or they may
have trouble understanding the evils of history - wars, concentration camps and so on.

But sometimes, someone whom we might classify as a "sorrowful atheist" is actually

participating, in a mysterious way, in the moment during the passion of Jesus Christ
when our Lord cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" I tell these
people that faith is not just some kind of enthusiastic feeling. The subject of our faith is
the story of Jesus, and in the story of Jesus as well as in the personal story of every
believer, there are dark moments.

I can understand this feeling of emptiness and loneliness. But we must put it in the
broader context: there is the fact of Good Friday, but there is also more to the story.
Therefore, it is not good to sink into sadness with no sense of hope. Sadness and pain
must not be the last word. Sometimes, we must be patient - patient with God.

The Old Testament and the Jewish tradition know the expression hester panim (God
turned His face away). I call atheism a hot-headed fore-judgement, a premature
interpretation of hester panim, the shyness of the hidden God. As I wrote in one of my
books, faith, love and hope are three kinds of the patience with God.

I think all types of atheism are a challenge for theology. So, for example, the type of
atheism called "scientific atheism," popular in the Enlightenment, was a challenge that
caused Christians to examine their fundamentalism and consider the deistic concept of
God. There were also those who claimed, in effect, that there should not be a God,
because if there is a God, how could it be possible that I am not a god? That was
Nietzsche's attitude. Here is a challenge for the theology of human freedom: we are
being challenged to show how Christian life is the way to freedom and not to slavery.
We should demonstrate, that servire Deo regnare est - to serve God offers more
freedom and dignity than to play a role of God.

I am now writing a new book in which I try to argue something very provocative - namely
that, for God, it is perhaps not so important that we "believe" in Him, that we hold some
ideas concerning his "existence." As St. Thomas asks, how can we even know what it
means that God "is"? But what is very important is that we love God. I am inspired by
the pseudo-Augustinian formula Amo, volo ut sis, which appears in Martin Heidegger's
and Hannah Arendt's works: "I love you: I want you to be."

There are some people who "believe" in God and are quite certain there is a God, but
they have such a bad image of God that they are not happy He exists. They suffer
under their image of God, because He seems like a disapproving parent to them. There
are other people who are not able to accept the existence of God but would like to
believe; they have the spiritual desire to believe - they want God to be.

I think that this second group of people, even though they may call themselves
unbelievers, is actually nearer to God than the first group. They have a deep desire that
God exist, even though they do not have certainty. And this desire is a true act of love,
since love always leaves some space for the mystery of the other.

Monsignor Tomas Halik is Professor of the Philosophy and Sociology of Religion

at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague, and recipient of
the 2014 Templeton Prize. Among his bestselling books are Patience with God:
The Story of Zaccheus Continuing in Us and Night of the Confessor: Christian
Faith in an Age of Uncertainty.
Different reasons for being an atheist

Intellectual

Most atheists would offer some of the following arguments as their reason for deciding that
God doesn't exist.

Non-Intellectual

Many people are atheists because of the way they were brought up or educated, or because
they have simply adopted the beliefs of the culture in which they grew up. So someone
raised in Communist China is likely to have no belief in God because the education system
and culture make being an atheist the natural thing to do.

Other people are atheists because they just feel that atheism is right.

Note for philosophers

The arguments and counter-arguments are presented in this article in an extremely

simplified way and are intended only as a starting point for further reading and exploration.

Reasons focussing on lack of evidence

Law of probabilities

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence
W. K. Clifford (1879)
Many people are atheists because they think there is no evidence for God's existence - or at least no reliable
evidence. They argue that a person should only believe in things for which they have good evidence.

A philosopher might say that they start from the presumption of atheism.

The presumption of Atheism

This is an argument about where to begin the discussion of whether or not God exists.

It says that we should assume that God does not exist, and put the onus on people who believe in God to to prove
that God does exist.

The philosopher Anthony Flew who wrote an article on this said:

If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so.
Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that
situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic.
So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition.
It must be up to them: first, to give whatever sense they choose to the word 'God', meeting any objection that so
defined it would relate only to an incoherent pseudo-concept; and, second, to bring forward sufficient reasons to
warrant their claim that, in their present sense of the word 'God', there is a God.
Top

Reasons that treat God as unnecessary

Science explains everything

Atheists argue that because everything in the universe can be explained in a satisfactory way without using God as
part of the explanation, then there is no point in saying that God exists.

Occam's Razor

The argument is based on a philosophical idea called Occam's Razor, popularised by William of Occam in the 14th
century.

In Latin it goes Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate or in English... "Entities should not be multiplied
unnecessarily".

This is usually simplified to say that the simplest answer is the best answer.

Therefore atheists might argue that since the entire universe, and all of creation can be explained by evolution and
scientific cosmology, we don't need the existence of another entity called God.

Therefore God doesn't exist.

What would William have said?

William of Occam would not have agreed; he was a Franciscan monk who never doubted the existence of God.

But in his century he wasn't breaking the rule named after him. 14th century science knew nothing about evolution
or how the universe came into being. God was the only explanation available.

What William would think if he lived now is another matter...

Top

Arguments for God aren't convincing

Weakness of the proofs that God exists

There are a number of traditional arguments used to prove that God exists; however, none of them convinces
atheists. Here they are:

The Argument from Design

 The universe is such a beautiful and orderly thing that it must have been designed. Only God could have designed it.
Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist.

An atheist might refute this by saying that, actually, the universe is not particularly beautiful and orderly. And even
if it was, why should there be a designer? And modern science shows that most of the natural things we think of as
designed are just the products of processes like evolution.

The "Ontological" Argument

We think of God as a perfect being. If God didn't exist he wouldn't be perfect. God is perfect, therefore God exists.

Most atheists think this argument is so feeble they don't bother dealing with it.

Professional philosophers usually reject it on the grounds that existence is not a property of beings.

The First Cause Argument

Everything that happens has a cause. Therefore the universe must have had a cause. That cause must have been God.
Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist in order to have caused it to exist.

An atheist might respond by asking what caused God. (And what caused the cause of God, and so on.) The argument
might proceed that if God didn't need a cause, then maybe the universe didn't need a cause either. If God was
already perfect before he created the universe, why did he create it? How did it benefit him? Why would he bother?
And if the universe was caused, perhaps something other than God caused it?

Top

The problem of evil

The Argument from Evil

The existence of evil seems inconsistent with the existence of a God who is wholly good, and can do anything.

The argument goes like this:

Most religions say that God is completely good, knows everything, and is all-powerful. But the world is full of
wickedness and bad things keep happening. This can only happen if...

 God is unwilling to prevent evil, in which case he is not good or

 God doesn't know about evil, in which case he does not know everything or

 God can't prevent evil, in which case he is not all powerful or

 Some combination of the above

And so there is no being that is completely good, knows everything, and is all powerful. And so, there is no God.
Theologians and philosophers have provided various answers to this argument. They all agree that it gives useful
insights into the nature of God, evil, and belief.

Top

Reasons to do with science and the history of thought

The best explanation

For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe.

But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed solutions that are much more logical, more consistent,
and better supported by evidence.

Atheists say that these explain the world so much better than the existence of God.They also say that far from God
being a good explanation for the world, it's God that now requires explaining.

Before science

In olden times - and still today in some traditional societies - natural phenomena that people didn't understand, such
as the weather, sunrise and sunset, and so on, were seen as the work of gods or spirits.

Bible times

The Old Testament portrays the world as something controlled by God.

Where we would see the weather as obeying meteorological principles, people in those days saw it as demonstrating
God at work. And it was the same with all the other natural phenomena, they just showed God doing things.

The Greeks

Everything is full of Gods

Thales (624-546 BCE), Greek philosopher
The Greek philosopher Thales moved things on by suggesting that the gods were actually an essential part of things,
rather than external puppeteers pulling strings to make the world work.

Myth and magic

But there was more to these ancient explanations than gods doing things in or to the world. People saw the whole
universe in a religiously structured way; they had no other way to see it at that time.

For the ancients, God provided the power that made the universe work, and God provided the structure within which
the universe worked and human beings lived.

Astrology
Ideas like that survive in modern astrology. Many people believe that their lives are in some way influenced by the
movements of heavenly bodies. And the heavenly bodies concerned have names taken from mythology and religion.

Modern religion

And you'll find similar ideas in most popular religious thinking. Many people still believe, or want to believe, in the
idea of God as puppeteer.

They believe that God is able to do things in the world: he can divide the waters of the Red Sea to save the Israelites
from Pharaoh, he can respond to prayer by healing an illness or getting someone through an exam.

Cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe.

Nowadays it's a branch of astronomy and physics, but in pre-scientific times it was a religious subject, organising
the universe in terms of almost military ranks of beings. God was at the top, and human beings came pretty much at
the bottom.

In some cosmologies there was also an inverted hierarchy of evil beings going down from humanity to the source of
wickedness, the devil, at the bottom.

Power

These religious cosmologies were rigid; each being had its place worked out for it in the structure that God had
provided, and that was where it stayed.

Looking at the universe like this provided great support for the hierarchical power structures of earthly nations and
tribes: Everyone in a nation or tribe had their place, and the power came from the top.

And if God had decided to organise the universe in such a hierarchy, this provided a strong argument against anyone
who wanted to suggest that society could be organised in a fairer and more equal way - God had shown us the
perfect way to organise things, and those who were ruling did so by a right given by God.

It was also very good news for whichever religion was followed in a particular nation: since the power all came
from God, religion was bound to be given high status.

The mechanical universe

The idea that God steered everything in the universe as he saw fit was demolished by the discovery that there were
natural laws obeyed by objects in the universe.

Galileo, for example, discovered that the universe followed laws that could be written down mathematically.
This suggested that there was logic and engineering throughout creation. The universe behaved in a consistent
manner and was not subject to gods pulling a string here and there, or some unexplained influences from astrological
bodies.

This didn't give Galileo any religious problems (although it annoyed the church greatly and they eventually made
him keep quiet about some of his conclusions) because he believed that God had written the scientific rules.

And around this time scientists began to come up with new ways of assessing whether certain things were true.
Things were expected to happen in a repeatable, testable way, that could be written down in equations.

God the engineer

Although scientific discovery began to explain more and more, it didn't cause large numbers of people to become
less religious.

Even many - probably most - scientists still had a place for God in the universe. At the very least, he had started the
whole thing going, and he had created the rules that his universe was shown to obey.

This half-way house between religion and science still had problems for the faithful, since it didn't seem to leave
much room for God to intervene in the universe - and certainly it didn't need God to keep things ticking over.

God the creator

But the half-way house also provided some support for the faithful. They could look at the universe and see how
beautifuly made it was, and be reassured that God had demonstrated his existence by creating such a wonderful
place.

And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn't produced any good explanation of how things
began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was.

God takes a back seat

God's role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution.

Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6,000 years old as was
generally believed at that time.

They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer (by
and large) came from an earlier time than a shallow layer.

In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras. Not only were
many no longer in existence but some didn't appear until relatively recent times.

This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith
came up with another compromise - the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of
millions of years during which God worked on the world.
The theory of evolution

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God.

It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection (i.e. new forms of life keep
appearing, and some forms of life don't survive and become extinct), working for hundreds of millions of years,
generated the range of plants and animals that exist today.

These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary.

The result of this for God has been explained by Stephen Jay Gould:

No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature (though Newton's clock-winding god might have set
up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run). No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And
whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.
Top

Reasons that treat God as meaningless

Relative philosophy

Some philosophers think that religious language doesn't mean anything at all, and therefore that there's no point in
asking whether God exists.

They would say that a sentence like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is neither true or false,
it's meaningless; in the same way that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is meaningless.

Logical Positivism, or Verificationism

Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn't either true or false, and they said that a
sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition.

A more accurate version of this idea can be found here:

Since you couldn't verify the existence of God by any sort of "sense experience", and it wasn't true by definition (eg
in the way "a triangle has 3 sides" is true), the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question
since it could not be answered true or false.

These particular philosophers didn't only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of
philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too. This philosophical theory is no longer
popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what "God" means and whether "God" exists.

Note for philosophers

This is how one prominent philosopher put it:

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the
proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain
conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
A. J. Ayer
Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive,
almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless.

A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively
established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable.
And this led Ayer to dispose of the God question rather brusquely:

...There can be no way of proving that the existence of a god...is even probable.
For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical
hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain
experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.
But in fact this is not possible...For to say that "God Exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be
either true or false.
A. J. Ayer
Top

Reasons that treat God as a psychological factor

Psychological explanations of religon

Psychologists have long been fascinated by religion as something that exists in all societies.

They ask whether 'religion' is actually a name given to various psychological drives, rather than a response to the
existence of God or gods.

Such a belief is clearly atheistic.

Religion, to the common man, is a:

system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable
completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate
him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here.
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Religion comes from emotions

Human beings believe in God because they want:

 A father figure to protect them from this frightening world

 Someone who gives their lives meaning and purpose

 Something that stops death being the end

 To believe that they are an important part of the universe, and that some component of the universe (God)
cares for and respects them
These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears.

Atheists argue that since religion is just a psychological fantasy, human beings should abandon it so that they can
grow to respond appropriately to deal with the world as it is.

Freud

Sigmund Freud tackled religion in great detail and had several ideas about it.

One of his theories was that religion stems from the individual's experience of having been a helpless baby totally
dependent on its parents. The infant sees its parents as all-powerful beings who show it great love and satisfy all its
needs. This experience is almost identical to the way human beings portray their relationship with God.

Freud also suggested that childhood experiences caused people to have very complex feelings about their parents
and themselves, and religion and religious rituals provide a respectable mechanism for working these out.

Freud also described religion as a mass-delusion that reshaped reality to provide a certainty of happiness and a
protection from suffering.

Top

Reasons that treat God as a social function

Sociological explanations of religion

Some people think that religions and belief in God fulfil functions in human society, rather than being the result of
God actually existing.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century German philosopher who proposed that religion was just a human being's
consciousness of the infinite.

He said that human ideas about God were no more than the projection of humanity's ideas about man onto an
imaginary supernatural being.

Emile Durkheim
 Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French sociologist, thought that religion was something produced by human
society, and had nothing supernatural about it.

Religious force is nothing other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan.
Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
He believed that religion existed, but he did not agree that the reality that lay behind it was the same reality that
believers thought existed.

Religion helped people to form close knit groups, in which they could find a place in society. Religious rituals
created mental states in those taking part which were helpful to the group.

To put it another way; religious rituals do not do anything other than strengthen the beliefs of the group taking part
and reinforce the collective consciousness.

Religion fulfilled the functions of:

 Giving a meaning and purpose to life

 Binding people together in groups

 Supporting the moral code of the group

 Supporting the social code of the group

Durkheim thought that this was enough to give people a feeling that there was something supernatural going on.

Since it is in spiritual ways that social pressure exercises itself, it could not fail to give men the idea that outside
themselves there exist one or several powers, both moral and, at the same time, efficacious, upon which they
depend.
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Durkheim said that religious beliefs divided experiences into the profane and the sacred - the profane were the
routine experiences of everyday life, while the sacred were beyond the everyday and likely to inspire reverence.

Objects could become sacred, not because of any inherent supernatural resonance but because the group fixed
certain 'collective ideals' on an object.

Top

Karl Marx's criticisms of religion

Marx's view of religion

Karl Marx thought that religion was an illusion, with no real God or supernatural reality standing in the background.
Religion was a force that stopped human societies from changing.

A social institution
Marx believed that religion was a social institution, and reflected and sustained the particular society in which it
flourished.

He went further. Religion was a tool used by the capitalists to keep the working-class under control.

Religion provided the working-class with comfort in their miserable oppressed circumstances, and by focussing
attention on the joys to come after death, it distracted the workers from trying to make this life better.

Religion cheats human beings

Furthermore, it took the noblest human ideals and gave them to a non-existent God, thus cheating human beings of
realising their own greatness and potential.

Religion disguises the true wrongs

Marx argued that the illusory happiness provided by religion should be eliminated by putting right the economic
conditions that caused people to need this illusion to make their lives bearable.

Religion was like a pain-killer (hence Marx's famous reference to it as "the opium of the people"), but what was
needed was to cure the sickness, not sedate the patient.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual
conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Target: Christianity

The Marxist analysis of religion was principally aimed at Christianity as Christianity was the dominant faith in the
industrial societies which Marx was criticising.

Top

God is not apparent

God is Loving

This is one of the more unusual arguments used to show that God can't exist:

God is perfectly loving

God knows that human beings would be happier if they were aware of the existence of a
loving God

So if such a God existed, he would make sure that everyone knew it

There are lots of people who aren't aware of the existence of a loving God. Therefore such a
God does not exist
For more than 50 years, death was a poignant part of Stephen Hawking’s
remarkable life.

The physicist, who died Wednesday at age 76, wasn’t expected to see his
25th birthday, after being diagnosed with the incurable neurodegenerative
condition ALS at age 21. Though Hawking beat the odds for more than five
decades, the scientist told the Guardian in 2011 that death was never far
from his mind.

“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years,”
Hawking said. “I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so
much I want to do first.”

Here are some of Hawking’s most interesting thoughts about death, the
afterlife and God.

Hawking didn’t believe in heaven

The scientist took a pragmatic view of what happens to the brain and body
after death.

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its
components fail,” he told the Guardian. “There is no heaven or afterlife for
broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

He believed in an ‘impersonal God,’ but not a creator

Hawking invoked the name of God in his seminal book A Brief History of
Time, writing that if physicists could find a “theory of everything” — that is,
a cohesive explanation for how the universe works — they would glimpse
“the mind of God.”
But in later interviews and writings, such as 2010’s The Grand Design,
which he co-wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking clarified that he wasn’t
referring to a creator in the traditional sense.

“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing,

why the universe exists, why we exist,” he wrote in The Grand Design. “It is
not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the
universe going.”

Using language about God, Hawking told TIME after the book’s release, is
more figurative than literal.

“God is the name people give to the reason we are here,” he said. “But I
think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one
can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.”

Hawking considered himself an atheist

Hawking spoke more plainly about his thoughts on God in an interview

with Spanish publication El Mundo.

“Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the

universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanati on,” he
said. “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know
everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m
an atheist.”
But still thought the universe had meaning

Though Hawking rejected the conventional notion of God or a creator, he

fundamentally believed that the universe and life have meaning, according
to the New York Times.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make
sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,”
Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life
may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”
Recently, Gary Gutting interviewed Alvin Plantinga for the Stone (The New
York Times philosophy column). “Is atheism irrational?” the title asked, with
the implied answer: “Yes.” Yet among philosophers, a supposedly rational
group, 62% are atheists (compared to about half that among all academics
and 2% in the general population). When asked why this is so, Plantinga
suggested their motivations were psychological, not philosophical. Maybe they
are like Thomas Nagel, he suggested, and don’t “want there to be any such
person as God” because that means they are constantly being observed,
judged and evaluated. Or perhaps, like Heidegger, they desire autonomy and
think God’s existence threatens it.

None of these philosophers, however, specialized in studying religious belief.

On the other hand, there are numerous philosophers of religion who argue
directly and philosophically for atheism and whose motivation Plantinga
seems to completely ignore (e.g., A. C. Grayling; William Rowe; John Leslie
Mackie, who argued that theism is irrational; and Michael Martin, who has
written an entire philosophical defense of atheism). I know my own atheism
has nothing to do with worries about autonomy or being watched or judged.
It’s simply because I am not keen on taking things on faith—i.e., believing
without sufficient evidence or pretending to know what I don’t) or committing
logical fallacies. And it seems that to believe in God based on anything
besides faith simply involves motivated reasoning that tries to justify theistic
belief—reasoning that is rife with logically fallacious arguments.

As a logician, what I found interesting about Gutting’s interview is that,

although unwittingly, it helps make this point. And since Gutting’s article will
no doubt start making the rounds on Facebook (a New York Times article that
argues against atheism!), I thought it was an appropriate topic for this blog. So
I set out to highlight the logical mistakes that Plantinga makes in this
interview. But once I was done writing, I had written almost 8000 words. (It
takes much longer to point out what is wrong with a bad argument than to
make a bad argument.) So I have divided it up my response and will post my
reply in separate segments.

But to be clear, although I’m an atheist, it is not my goal here to prove that
theism is irrational. My goal is to show that, contrary to article’s implied
conclusion, atheism is not irrational, and to point out the logically fallacies
employed by the argument that says so.

Gutting, like Plantinga, is a Notre Dame professor and essentially spends the
article setting Plantinga up with a series of carefully worded questions that
enabled Plantinga to very quickly summarize a number of pro-theistic
arguments he is famous for. Although I will be quoting these summaries, I will
do my best not to strawman Plantinga’s arguments (make them weaker than
they are in the literature). I know the literature very well myself and I believe
that every criticism I make applies equally to the more developed arguments
he makes in the literature.

The first question Plantinga addresses is:

Should philosophers be agnostic?

Gutting suggests that perhaps philosophers are atheists because they think
the arguments for God fail, but Plantinga argues that the failure of all
arguments for God’s existence would merely justify agnosticism (remaining
neutral about God’s existence), not atheism (believing that God does not
exist). Believing God doesn’t exist would require a sound argument in its
favor, Plantinga suggests. If we were considering whether or not there are an
even or odd number of stars, we would need some kind of conclusive
evidence in favor of one answer to embrace one over the other. Without any
evidence either way, we should simply say “I don’t know.” The same holds if
the evidence for God’s existence is inconclusive either way.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

What logical fallacy is committed here? Shifting the burden of proof.
Plantinga’s argument ignores a basic notion, well known among logicians,
regarding where the burden of proof lies in existential debates—debates
regarding the existence of something. Simply put, if you are the one who is
suggesting that something exists, it is your job to provide the evidence that it
does. Your belief that the thing in question does exist is not justified simply
because no one else can prove it doesn't. If you think Bigfoot exists, you have
to provide the evidence that he does, and until you do I am justified in
believing that he doesn't. Of course, if we are talking about a non-existential
hypothesis – like whether the number of stars is even or odd – that is a
different matter. But if you are hypothesizing the existence of an entity, a lack
of evidence for that entity justifies nonbelief in the entity. (To think otherwise
commits the fallacy of appealing to ignorance, taking a lack of proof that
something is false as evidence that it is true.) Where the burden of proof lies
in existential debates is well established in logic and is usually only challenged
(usually by non-logicians) when someone wants to believe in something but
finally has to admit they have no evidence for it.
Bertrand Russell made this point famously with his celestial teapot example.
Someone might suggest the existence of a teapot orbiting the Sun between
Earth and Mars that, because it is so tiny that no one could ever see it, no one
could ever prove doesn’t exist. Yet belief in such a teapot, clearly, would
never be justified.

Plantinga actually addresses Russell’s example, suggesting that it’s not the
case that we’re “ateapotist” because we lack evidence, but because “we have
a great deal of evidence against teapotism.” The only way such a teapot could
exist is if a nation with rockets put it there, yet there is good evidence that this
has not occurred. Plantinga thinks that if the evidence really was a wash,
being agnostic about the teapot would be the rational response.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

But Plantinga is completely misunderstanding Russell’s argument. Russell
was writing in 1952, five years before Sputnik and humans ever put anything
into orbit. Russell wasn't concerned about whether or not there was some
way the teapot could have gotten into space, and whether such a thing
happened. And he didn’t think that the fact that humans did not yet have the
ability to launch something into orbit was the reason we were not justified in
believing in such a teapot. He was simply concerned with the rationality of a
belief that such a teapot existed, regardless of whether one thought it was
placed there by us, by aliens, or whether it was just there inexplicably. The
fact is, since the evidence is a wash, the rational default is to not believe.

What’s more, Russell is not even arguing for where the burden of proof lies in
existential debates. That it lies on the side of the one making the novel
claim—that something exists—was already established. He is simply
supplying an example of that already established rule of reason in action to
show that it is intuitive.

To make the point clear, consider a similar example of my own invention: the
belief that there is a tiny diamond (too small to be detected) orbiting the Sun
between Earth and Mars. There actually is a possible explanation for this
being true: the asteroid that collided with the Earth and killed the dinosaurs (or
any other large asteroid for that matter) could have ejected one into space in
such a way that it began to orbit the sun as stated. We have no evidence that
this did happen but of course have no evidence that it didn't happen either.
Should I thus be agnostic about the existence of such a diamond? Of course
not. Clearly the rational default position is “a-diamondism.”
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT
Interestingly, Plantinga’s response to Russell is strikingly similar to that of
another Notre Dame professor, Peter van Inwagen. I saw van Inwagen deliver
his response to Russell to the Society of Christian Philosophers in 2011 (it has
since been published). Professor van Inwagen argued that, since the
existence of such a teapot would need an explanation, yet it has none,
ateapotism is justified. However, God's existence does not need an
explanation because God is, by definition, unexplained (or explains himself).
So the fact that “ateapotism” is justified in the absence of evidence doesn’t
mean that atheism is justified in the absence of evidence. The fact that God
existence lacks an explanation can’t be evidence against it since it can’t have
one.

The reply to van Inwagen, however, is two fold: First, theists have defined
God in this way to get out of the responsibility of providing an explanation for
him, but saying that he doesn’t need an explanation doesn’t mean that he
doesn’t need one. Many atheists contend that if the singularity from which the
big bang exploded—which, literally, is the simplest thing possible, given that it
exists for no time, is as small as anything can be, and is governed by no
laws—needs an explanation (as theists suggest), then certainly God, who is
infinite in all respects, knows everything, can do everything, and is about as
complicated as anything can be, would need an explanation too.

Of course, theists will likely reply that they are not just saying God doesn’t
need an explanation, but that by definition he doesn’t because by definition he
is the greatest being, and the greatest being can’t have an explanation.
(Anything that explains God would be greater.) It’s not clear to me that this is
the case; but even so, the basic rule of logic that, in debates on existential
matters, the burden of proof lies on the one making the positive existential
claim is true regardless of whether the entity in question is unexplained or
self-explained. For example, if someone suggested the existence of an alien
race that created itself through time travel (by traveling back in time and
seeding its own race), I would still demand they provided evidence for such
beings before I believed. In addition, I could maintain that there is an infinite
number of universes, each of which exists inexplicably—without cause or
explanation. Yet to rationally believe that any other such universe exists, I
would demand evidence.

All in all, atheists are not being irrational by justifying their atheism simply in a
lack of evidence for God’s existence, any more than I am being irrational in
justifying “a-bigfootism” in a lack of evidence for Bigfoot.
Gutting and Plantinga’s second topic of conversation centers around the fact
that some atheists will not only claim that the arguments for God's existence
fail, but that the arguments against God's existence work, and that this is why
they don't believe. Plantinga reduces these arguments down to one—the
problem of evil (“why is there evil if God exists?”)—and says that although it
does have some "strength," the evidence it provides against theism is
balanced out by the arguments for theism. There are, Plantinga claims, "a
couple of dozen" good theistic arguments—none of which taken by itself is
"good enough to convince any rational person," but when taken together,
constitute a single philosophical argument that is "as strong as philosophical
arguments ordinarily get.”

There are a number of things to point out here.

First of all, Plantinga is ignoring a large number of deductive philosophical

arguments against God's existence that point out that the very definition of the
perfect being that Plantinga worships is inconsistent. How is it, for example,
that God can have the ability to do anything, because he is all-powerful, but
be unable to do any evil action, because he is all good? Michael Marin and
Ricki Monnier have devoted an entire book to the notion that a perfect being is
impossible, and an entire section to such arguments. Theodore Dragne
mentions ten in one article. Although a few such problems have a decent
response, most do not, yet Plantinga ignores such arguments completely.

Secondly…24 good theistic arguments? Traditionally there are four: the

ontological, teleological, cosmological, and moral argument. It seems the only
way that Plantinga can get to 24 is if he counted every variety or version of
such arguments as a separate one. (If he is counting other kinds of
arguments, they are not “good.”) But I lecture publically about such theistic
arguments, trying to cover every major variety that any philosopher takes the
least bit seriously, and I don’t mention anywhere close to 24 arguments.

Incidentally, I could do the same with the problem of evil—there is the logical
problem of moral evil, the logical problem of natural evil, the evidential
problem of moral evil and the evidential problem of natural evil, each of which
has been articulated and defended many ways. In addition, I could formulate a
separate argument against God’s existence using every instance of evil that
has ever occurred in the world. Yet Plantinga just lumps all of this into one
single "problem of evil" that he can counteract with "a couple of dozen" theistic
arguments. He seems to simply be “selectively counting” so that the numbers
look more convincing for his case.
But the main error here is a logical one. Even if there are 24, you can’t stack
up a bunch of arguments that don’t work and get one that does. Argument
simply doesn’t work that way.

Certainly, you can’t stack up a bunch of unsound deductive arguments and

get one good one, and most of the arguments for God’s existence are
deductive—like the ontological argument, which suggests that God exists by
definition, and the cosmological argument, which suggests that God must be
“the first uncaused causer.” Since these arguments are deductive, if they
work, they prove God’s existence and no other argument is needed. But if
they fail, it’s because they are invalid, have a mistake in form (many, for
example, are thought to beg the question) or have false premises. If they fail
for these reasons, then they provide no reason for believing that God exists,
and cannot be “stacked together” to provide a better argument. No Proof + No
Proof = No Proof.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

It is true that inductive evidence can be stacked up. Four double blinded
controlled experiments that show that a medical treatment works is more
convincing than one. But none of the inductive arguments for God provides
anything like scientific proof. Besides, if an inductive argument is going to add
to a cumulative case for something, the inductive argument has to provide
pretty good evidence in the first place; yet no theistic argument does this.
Most fall prey to an informal logical fallacy—such as an appeal to ignorance,
mistaking the odds, or the fallacy of division. The rest have highly
questionable premises. In other words, the criticisms of these arguments
wouldn’t just make them a little less convincing; they would derail them
completely. And you can’t stack up a bunch of logically fallacious, highly
questionable, arguments to make one good one, even if they are inductive.
Weak Argument + Weak Argument = Weak Argument.

This is like claiming that the abundance of reported UFO sightings is good
evidence that aliens are visiting in UFOs. Of course, taken individually, the
evidence each such sighting provides is underwhelming. About two seconds
of research reveals a better, simpler, non-alien explanation —everything from
hot air balloons to military testing, from airplanes to the planet Venus, from the
powers of our senses to fool us to vague stimuli and human stupidity. "But
there are thousands of such sightings,” one might suggest. “Taken together
don't they constitute good evidence for aliens?" No. Again, you can't stack up
a bunch of bad arguments and get one good one.
This is not to say that there are not other ways of responding to the problem of
evil. But trying to combine a bunch of unconvincing arguments into one
convincing one isn’t going to work.