Is belief in a higher being hard-wired into the human psyche? It’s something I ponder a lot because, even though I’m an atheist, I find my mind appealing to ‘God’ in times of stress. It’s a coping mechanism. So would a child raised with no concept of a god or religion invent it anyway?
I remember the exact moment when I questioned my religious beliefs. My family and I were taking a road trip through Western Australia and I was 17 years old. We visited an historic church and I sat in one of the pews, admiring the colourful stained glass and ornamental architecture. Up the front of the church, on a large board, were the Ten Commandments.
I’m sure they had been spelled out for me before – I was among the last generation to receive ‘scripture’ at a public school – but I had never considered them on my own and with a mind approaching the dawn of adult thought. The simpler commandments made sense (don’t kill, don’t steal), but a phrase jumped out at me and changed the way I viewed the world forever.
for I the LORD your God am a jealous God
I stared at that line for a while. Something about the words unsettled me. Why would an all-powerful, omnipotent being get jealous? That was a human emotion, a human failing. It stood to reason, then, that a human had probably written it.
From there, my belief in God and religion began to unravel. I could (and still can) see the value in Christianity as a guidebook for life, but the blind faith religion required did not sit well with me. It’s probably no coincidence that around the same time as that holiday I was taking senior high school biology and chemistry and my eyes were opened to the way science, if given enough time and manpower, could almost always explain the inexplicable.
Theism encourages intellectual apathy, at least where the progress of humanity is concerned. Statements like ‘All things serve God’s purpose’ and ‘It’s God’s will’ just translate to “We don’t know how, but we’ll pretend we do.” I find the possibility of a god far more pedestrian than the idea that humanity has only managed to reach the moon (384,000km away), when the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centaury, is roughly four light years or 37 trillion kilometres distant. To get to the nearest galaxy, you start talking about millions of light years, or millions of trillions of kilometres.
In other words, humanity still has some exploring and learning to do. So why would we shrug our collective shoulders and say, “Ah, let’s just pretend God made it all”?
Now, I’m not a hard atheist. Maybe some force, which we have come to call God, did create the universe (and other universes, if you accept the theories of physicists). But if we don’t try to find out, we’ll never know for sure, will we?
Which brings me back to my opening statement. Atheism, at least at this point in human development, is still something of a faith. It has far more evidence in its favour than theism, true, but the science behind it is not irrefutable. The mathematical formulae underpinning the various branches of theoretical physics are based on an awful lot of assumptions. The Big Bang Theory is just that – a theory. One based on observable evidence and mathematics, sure, but not an indisputable fact. Scientists don’t know for certain how the universe was created, any more than the peddlers of religion do.
This might sound strange coming from an atheist, but I think an awful lot of atheists are unpleasant people. They have a cocksure rudeness that is every bit as misguided as the penchant religious nutters have for telling non-believers they are going to burn in hell. Many such atheists are, I suspect, young, and have never been through experiences that might force them to question their faith in the non-existence of a deity. Others, like Richard Dawkins, are too arrogant to broach the possibility of self-doubt and therefore spend their time mocking those who disagree.
To hard-line atheists I would say this: It’s easy to be an atheist when things in your life are going well. The true test comes when things are going bad. When you are diagnosed with aggressive cancer, say, or when your teenage daughter is two hours late home and not answering her phone. I can’t speak for other atheists, but I find my mind reverting to the old “Please, God” line, as in, “Please, God, let her be okay.” Not because I believe there is a God and he will listen to my prayers, but because it’s comforting and it makes the situation a fraction easier to deal with. Maybe it’s just another evolutionary tool (like the fight-or-flight response) that aids in self-preservation, but I do wonder how many atheists secretly repent of their unbelief when their shuffle off the mortal coil is imminent. I’m willing to bet even Richard Dawkins will be afraid when his time draws near.
Until science can explain consciousness and what happens to it after death, atheists are no more clued in than Father Bob at the local suburban church. Any claims to the contrary are just bluster.