Michael Brown's Questions for Atheists

 Evangelical Christian Michael Brown recently posed several questions to atheists. These were framed as an 'honest' attempt to understand atheists.

I have provided my answers below.

Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?

First, would you say that you are (or, were) an atheist based primarily on intellectual study or based on experience? Or did you never believe in God at all?

I have never believed in your deity, or any other deities. I am old enough to be exposed to the arguments for the existence of your deity, and found the answers ranging from unconvincing, to fallacious, to downright dishonest.  

 

Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?

Second, would you say that even as an atheist, you still have a sense of purpose and destiny in your life, a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish? Or is it primarily people of faith who feel like this, since we are simply the products of an unguided, random evolutionary process?

Your leading question with evolution in it, belies your claim to honesty. The powerful and well-researched forces of evolution are not a synonym for random. I have a purpose, and it is a product of my own worldview and my indigenous culture. For example, kaitiakitanga drives the work I do in wildlife conservation, and affirms that I share a kinship (whakapapa) with all these animals. This is part of the legacy I leave for the future. 

The Christian idea my purpose is to end up, joyfully spending an eternity kissing your deity's butt while my unsaved friends and whānau are being tortured, actually fills me with utter disgust and horror. 

Does God Exist?

Third, would you say that you are 100% sure there is no such being as God — meaning, an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing being? Or would you say that, for all practical purposes you have concluded that this God does not exist, although it is impossible to prove such a negative with absolute certainty?

I have concluded that deities are an outgrowth of our hunter-gatherer animistic beliefs, that evolved into focus points of these, first as nature gods and in some cultures, gradually evolving into High Gods and finally, Morally High Gods. Your deity is a very recent, in human terms, species of Moralising High God. Gods don't exist. They are the fantastic creations of the ancient era.

Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?

Fourth, do you believe that science can provide answers for many of the remaining mysteries of the universe, including: how the universe began (including where matter came from and where the Big Bang derived its energy); the origin of life; and DNA coding?

That's an odd question. Research on the origin of life has advanced from showing some early chemical pathways for amino acids to form in the 1950s, to peptide chains (proteins), sugars, nucleotides, lipid membranes and protocells, and self-replicating macromolecules today. The explanation is incomplete but much more powerful than the idea a virgin-mating bloodgod did it instead.

What science gives us is the most reliable method we have for discovering how things work. It does so by setting up ruthless contests between competing hypotheses, that are resolved by seeing which are wrong (falsification). Theistic claims that knowledge can be acquired instead by revelation is patently false, and the fact you simply have no reliable way to tell if your beliefs on origins are false, rule out your alternative explanations.

Have You Questioned Your Atheism?

Fifth, have you had any experiences in life that caused you to question your atheism? Has something happened to you that seemed genuinely supernatural or otherworldly? Or have you been confronted with some information that shook your atheistic foundations, such as a scientific argument for intelligent design? If so, how have you dealt with such doubts about your atheism?

No. The longer I live, the more confident I am in my atheism and the more appalled I am at the damage generated by your religion.  And there are no scientific arguments for intelligent design. What we have instead is a litany of falsehoods about genetics, molecular biology, statistics and the fossil record concocted by a small cadre of glib zealots. They have undertaken no original research to establish ID as a science. If anything Creationists (including Intelligent Design proponents) confirm how unscrupulous, how dishonest and untrustworthy your arguments are. I don't think you appreciate how badly Creationism discredits the your religion. 

Are You Materialistic?

Sixth, are you completely materialistic in your mindset, meaning, human beings are entirely physical, human consciousness is an illusion, and there is no spiritual realm of any kind? Or are you superstitious, reading horoscopes or engaging in new age practices or the like?

That's such a list of leading questions I'm not even going to bother answering it.  

Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

Seventh, if you were convinced that God truly existed — meaning the God of the Bible, who is perfect in every way, full of justice and mercy, our Creator and our Redeemer — would that be good news or bad news? And would you be willing to follow Him and honor Him if He were truly God?

If you could convince me the Abrahamic deity existed, I would accept it existed. The god of the Bible however, gave its followers instructions for beating slaves or executing non-virgin brides, but none for using soap. It promotes collective and inherited guilt, blood sacrifices and scapegoating, thought-crimes and threatens horrific torture with no chance of rehabilitation. That's not what a perfect or just entity looks like. 

 

Atheism and the meaning of life

I had a recent conversation on Twitter with a Christian on whether my life has meaning.  Many such theists seem to believe that life can have no meaning for atheists.  The fact that we can be out there, enjoying life and the experiences it offers, seems impossible for some to grasp.

Problem 1: The Permanence Assertion

The first problem is that argument is built on an assertion. The assertion is that an experience has to be permanent for it to have meaning.  The assertion is never proven, it is obstinately accepted by fiat by the theist.  Yet, I know that holding my daughter the moment she was born, was an extremely meaningful experience. It still provokes a powerful reaction in me. That eventually I'll be dead, does not alter the fact that I felt something real, that it did have meaning for me. It doesn't have to be a permanent experience to have meaning.

If I don't have the belief that permanence is a prerequisite for meaning, it's not enough to keep repeating that assertion. You need to produce a strong argument, not insults, to establish it.  I've never heard such an argument.

Problem 2: An eternal afterlife makes this life meaningless

This can be established by comparing the different outcomes under different assumptions about an afterlife.

Lets suppose however, that each experience in Heaven gives a payoff of B, you average an annual level of happiness of b when you're alive in the mortal realm, and that each torment in Hell gives you a payoff of -H. With Heaven being superior to this life, and Hell being worse, let's simply say the B > b > -H.

Both Heaven and Hell are eternal, and thus provide you with an infinite benefit (or harm) stream.
Hence the actual payoff to being in heaven is ∞B and the payoff to being in hell is ∞(-H). With these being infinite streams, then the B and and -H is not really relevant. Heaven has an infinitely positive good payoff, Hell an infinitely negative payoff.  This is largely the logic behind Pascal's Wager. In that wager doesn't matter how unlikely you think Christianity is true, you will always win by being a Christian (or feigning being one).  The size of the payoff completely dominates the probabilities.

Your earthly existence, assuming you generally enjoyed life, has a payoff of tb, where t is the number of years you lived.  This has to be finite. Nobody is immortal.

So the ratio of payoffs of of your mortal life to heaven is tb/∞, or zero (0). In short, your mortal life is such a tiny fraction of your total existence that all your earthly experiences vanish to nothingness. You may as well shuffle off to the afterlife as fast as you can.

If we change the assumptions to an atheist one, then there is no afterlife. All the afterlife payoffs drop to zero. Which means the ratio of payoffs to a mortal life, to the after life, is tb/0. With denominator being 0, the ratio is ∞.  In short, every experience now is of profound value when we recognise its finite. The only way life can have meaning, is if it is finite in nature.

Problem 3: the Omniscience Dilemma

It gets worse if the deity is omniscient (all-knowing) as is attributed to the Abrahamic god Yaweh. Now its not just short, finite life you face that produces meaningless. Because this deity knew before you were born, where you would end up after death. If you're Hell-bound, because say you voted for Hillary Clinton or had some gay friends, Yaweh knows you can't change anything to escape Hell. You'll exist for an insignfiicant fraction of time, before suffering horrible torture. The same argument applies to heaven. Life isn't really a test if your deity already knows you're going to pass and get to Heaven. What possible meaning can life have, if there's not a single thing you can change to avoid your eternal fate?

Summary

The argument atheists can have no meaning to their life is not based on rational deliberation. I suspect rather, it's based on being intimidated by mortality and hoping a pact with an ancient god will allow the theist to escape this. People do derive however, meaning from their lives in varied ways. Living according to the values of some ancient Near Eastern pastoralists doesn't really satisfy the goals of all.  Indeed, I'm surprised anyone finds it satisfying.