Understanding Atheists
Nov 8th, 2007 by Amanda
Berlzebub has posted an article about Understanding Atheists that I think does a good job laying it out for us believers.
Update: I’ve been asked to provide my views of the post. I forget that people who don’t know me may stumble onto the blog and not understand where I stand. 
I do understand atheism. As any of my regular readers know, I came pretty close to crossing over. I definitely see the appeal of not believing. Berlzebub didn’t say anything in his post that surprised me or that I didn’t already know about atheism. Pascal’s wager has nothing to do with my choice to believe - in fact, I didn’t even know what it was (like Berlzebub) until recently. I’d heard the general idea before, but didn’t know it was “Pascal’s Wager.” I personally think it’s silly. If you believe because you’re afraid of not believing, then you’re not really believing at all - at least not in the way that matters.
And I definitely don’t believe that morality and religion are tied to one another. I used to. But I know some non Christians who are more moral than Christians!
I think Berlzebub makes some good points. I have reasons for believing; he doesn’t see any. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that we can agree on. Clearly, there are.
As an atheist, I was interested in hearing your reactions to his post, but you didn’t provide any.
One little nitpick….
I dont think most atheists would say that there is an ‘appeal’ to not believing. Its not why we don’t believe. I think we would even agree that there is an appeal to trusting faith. I dont think you can choose to believe or not believe. You do and feel you have enough evidence, or you don’t because you haven’t been provided with anything compelling. Much like your very astute reaction to Pascal’s Wager, we aren’t atheists because we think the concept is nice. In fact, in our current (and historical) climate, there are tons of reasons to find it unappealing.
Atheists are atheists because we generally set a very high bar for what constitutes evidence for a God hypothesis.
It can not be anecdotal
It can not be a fallacious argument
It should show cause and effect
It should be repeatable
and really, it should disprove the statement “there is no god”
Without any of this, we just don’t see a reason to believe in god, just like you don’t see a reason to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This does NOT mean that people who are not atheists are stupid (by any means), or that they do not have very strong personal experiences which reinforce personal belief in god, especially in the face of the fact that the God hypothesis can not be disproven (you can not prove a negative).
I have a friend who, much like you, was raised fundie. His father literally has “Conversations with God” (yes, the same way, pen and paper, like that other schizophrenic). My friend is trying to ‘choose’ to not believe in god, because, again like you, he realized the fundie system is utterly bizarre (to put it nicely).
But he can’t do it. It’s interesting to see him try. 27 years of being taught from a perspective of incredulity leaves a mark. He is now theist, he just needs to get comfortable with theism.
BTW… what does ** mean in your blog roll?
The ** means that blog has pinged blogrolling and has updated content. It’s not full proof, because not all blogs ping.
And… you’re seriously nitpicking on my word choice?
In my case there IS an appeal to not believing. And I was giving MY perspective. Life would be so much easier (parts of it, anyways) if I could just give up this belief. Sometimes I really want to.
But I really do believe - which is why I can’t give it up.
Hey, he did say it was a little nitpick
I confess I was kinda glad he raised it, because that was the thing that jumped out at me when I read your post. It’s good to have it cleared up.
I’m trying to remember: did you ever describe for us why it is that you believe in God? I seem to recall that at one point you said you were going to. Have I overlooked it, or is it still in the pipeline?
Most of what we’ve covered in the “Letters from a Skeptic” posts has been about belief in Christianity specifically, and that can get quite technical. The God question is a bit more general, so it’d be interesting to discuss.
Amanda, would you like to add me to your blogroll? (wink wink). Techskeptic and Lifewish as well but it’s probably not best to request this on someone else’s blog. (Oops, too late).
Back to the subject at hand. I was raised a Christian and didn’t leave the faith until my mid-20’s. It was a long, hard process filled with a lot of heartache and wrestling with myself for years.
I’ve heard that most others who arrive at their atheism after having been evangelical believers (and active ones like myself at that) do so with much “sweating of blood”. There’s no reason to do so at all unless one becomes absolutely convinced that the search for truth is more important than clinging to the beliefs one was raised with and who can accept the possibility that the two are likely not to be one and the same.
I would love to hear more of your back story Amanda and please simply send me to the appropriate archive post if I’ve missed it. (At the moment I’ve got a bicycle tour going on and will be on the road for the next two days so I don’t have a lot of free time to scour through them freely).
I also encourage you and applaud your interest in pursuing truth and just hope that you’ll never let it rest until you are satisfied with the answers and have fully assuaged your doubt.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually written why I believe in God - at least not recently in a way that’s relevant to where I currently am.
I’ll work on that today.
Although - I have posted the best explanation for God that I’ve ever seen here.
Although Lifewish is correct - it’s more technical than anything. I fear if I post my reasoning, I’m going to break every single one of tech’s qualifications listed above. It will more than likely be anecdotal because it rests on my personal experience.
I’ll work on it, and get it posted.
Oh - and of course I’ll add you guys to my blogroll.
Thanks for the recognition, Amanda.
I think this is the most important part of your post (not the word “appeal”), because it’s our similarities that open the lines of communication.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to your post about why you believe, now.
eek! Of course you will break the qualifications, that is why this discussion exists. That doesn’t make you stupid, or a horrible person, or anything else. There is no need to fear a post (or if you do, don’t post it).
Most atheists acknowledge, that God is not provable, nor is it disprovable. Its why we admire (or perhaps ‘value’) cultless theism and deism more than any religion. The hypothesis is not disprovable, while the religion (which ever one you want to discuss) is so full of holes, in the texts, historically, ethically, scientifically, etc etc) its really hard to take seriously.
Its why atheists are grouped with scientists (even though only a minority of atheists are actually scientists), we just believe in things we can measure and verify, and see no reason to believe in things that are outside of verification, it isn’t a choice. you can’t just say “OK now I believe in God”.
I think you (I mean you and other god believers) are compelled to believe in something. I really don’t think you can help it. I think it would take a number of years of questioning your faith, and researching to be able to not believe in god. I never did. There are a great many reasons for this. Some have found a set of genes that make you more prone to belief, others find that religion is a side effect from other things that help us survive (trusting authority), and so forth, some have found that we make chemicals (DMT) in our brains that produce religious experiences (as opposed to acid trips). Some is probably due to a great many years of being convinced that something exists, our brains hate to jump off stable plateaus of reality. Whatever the reason, most people have it.
Atheists just don’t have it , or dont have it as much, or were raised in an environment where it didn’t matter.
This is just my thinking on it. I dont stand for all atheists.
During the span of years that I was deist/agnostic, when someone asked I said I was “non-denomonational”. Of course, I still am but to a much greater degree.
The is commenter may or may not be in accordance with other commenters on views of religion, non-religion, race, sexual orientation, or cilantro. Cautionary reading where prohibited by law. If symptoms persist, please see your doctor. Oh look! A penny.
Good thoughts, Amanda. It’s good to hear a Christian understanding that belief and morality do not have to coincide. It really ticks me off when Christians say that one has to have faith in order to be moral. That just makes me wonder what they would be up to if they weren’t believers.
I’d tend to disagree - atheism is extremely disprovable, for example by swarms of angels emerging from the heavens and the Last Trump sounding.
I think what you mean is that it’s impossible to distinguish between a sufficiently evasive God and no God at all. The technical philosophy-of-science term for this is underdetermination, which is very different from untestability: it’s a problem for every scientific hypothesis, not just atheism. For example, palaeontology is underdetermined because maybe God just laid down those fossils to make the Earth look like it was billions of years old.
I thought this article provided a very neat possibility: people with a natural inclination towards skepticism seem to be less inclined to spot patterns in data:
In one study, two groups of people, either believers in the supernatural or skeptics, looked at quickly displayed images of faces and scrambled faces, real words and nonwords. The goal was to pick out the real ones. Skeptics called more real faces nonfaces, and real words nonwords, than did believers, who happily saw faces and words even in gibberish. But after the skeptics were given L-dopa, a drug that increases dopamine, their skeptical threshold fell, and they ID’d more faces and words as real. That suggests that dopamine inclines the brain to see patterns even in random noise.
I’m rather worried by the thought that theism or atheism could be “cured” in this way. But this idea is interesting for me because it suggests what the practical trade-offs are likely to be for belief vs. unbelief.