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Atheists are Irrational
Study after study shows that religious Jews and Christians are happier, more stable, more charitable, have happier families and children… the list goes on. In my case, religion gives me enormous confidence, a strong purpose and a sense of fulfillment when I work toward that purpose.
So if Atheists really were interested in the best outcomes, shouldn’t they choose religion based solely on the results regardless of whether or not there is underlying proof of the existence of a deity? After all, a truly hard-data-driven approach leads to a seemingly-inevitable conclusion. Or do atheists not really care about empirical results?
Note, of course, that religious people often shy away from my argument as well. Believers, like atheists, like to wallow in the well-trodden and fruitless muck, trying to prove or disprove the existence of a god. Yet most of our lives are occupied doing things for practical, utilitarian reasons, like “Does it work better if I do it this way?” When we choose to wear clothes or use table manners or treat other people with respect, we are not doing so out of a deep conviction about The Truth, but because we get better results when we act that way.
Well, we clearly get better results when people act as if they believed in religion, even if, when pressed, they may well admit that they have profound doubts. So if we really want better lives, then why not act accordingly and follow the data?
Published in General
Would such a person stick to their guns and resist doing something that they would normally think bad even though it becomes convenient?
The Passion of the Christ was roundly criticized (by folks who hadn’t seen it) because they feared that it would inspire antisemitism. In the movie, Caiaphas is depicted as a good man who does an evil thinking it is good. Pilate is a man who is just good enough to see that what he is doing is evil, but he does it anyway because it is safer and more convenient to do so. Who was the better person?
If your morality is entirely up to your reasoning facility, will circumstance modify it? Should it?
But as iWe pointed out in #14, there is a certain peace to be found in only being along for the ride. Nothing can ever be your fault.
I consider you to be a rational man, @iwe. If a couple studies came out that demonstrated that on average Mormons were happier than Jews, would you convert? Would you set aside what you have believed for decades and try to persuade yourself that a different religion is correct, because some studies suggest you would be happier?
I am not convinced there is a God, but that does not mean that I reject the moral philosphy of Jesus Christ. Here’s what I do reject. I reject the authority of anyone who tells me what I must believe. My parents accepted their faith just as they accepted the rhythm of the seasons, the authority of government, the sun rising every morning. But I was not blessed with that kind of faith in religion or government. I wanted to dig deeper, to test belief, to understand whether and why God would construct such a convoluted, unreliable system of belief. Plus, the payoff, eternal life, has never seemed that appealing to me.
The internet is a strange thing. I followed a recent thread and discovered that Father Breton, a Catholic priest and a sometimes basketball coach, was one of the more notorious Boston area paederast priests. I was not a member of his church, but my CYO friends recruited me to help their team. Coincidentially, I received several obscene phone calls on game days. The voice was familliar. I found this all very disturbing and when I told the caller I recognized his voice and threatened him with physical harm (I thought it was a teammate) the calls ended. Now I know it was Breton.
That, for me, confirms my skepticism.
For me the irrational are those who surrender to belief.
You’re still doing the whole “spring, summer, autumn, winter” thing though, right?
I could not agree more. And I´ll go one step further: Only theists have a logically sound reason for expecting the universe to behave according rationally comprehensible laws and law-like regularities. The atheist – or rather, philosophical materialist position- should not expect this, but ought to expect wood to be a drink tomorrow, broken glasses to occasionally spontaneously reassemble and rain to fall up at random intervals. To do science, at all, is to borrow tacitly or rely explicitly on theistic assumptions, specifically those of Biblical theism.
Please help me out. What religion should I pretend to believe in in order to maximize the benefit to myself?
Excellent question!
For me, given that I don’t know anybody who considers themselves more productive and fulfilled than I do, this is an easy question to answer: I am already very blessed, thank you. (Note that “happiness” is not the metric I would use – since for me, happiness is merely the byproduct of a life well lived: it is not (and should not) be an end in itself.)
But for people who are NOT finding their life to be positive, I think the question has teeth. There is nothing wrong with trying to better oneself, and that would include changing one’s practices in order to do so.
Review the data, and pick one accordingly. YMMV.
Palms 34:8 NLT
Because statistics do not determine outcomes. They only predict them. Statistics is voodoo math, and statistics are only accurate when all relevant data is included. Each individual will vary much more than one binary choice of being theist or atheist will account for.
One can’t choose to believe something that they really don’t believe based on what is good for them & good for society.
Arthur Koestler’s character Hydie (a formerly-devout Catholic who has lost her faith) in his novel The Age of Longing:
Her thoughts travelled back to Sister Boutillot standing in the alley which led to the pond…Oh, if she could only go back to the infinite comfort of father confessors and mother superiors, of a well-ordered hierarchy which promised punishment and reward, and furnished the world with justice and meaning. If only one could go back! But she was under the curse of reason, which rejected whatever might quench her thirst without abolishing the gnawing of the urge; which rejected the answer without abolishing the question. For the place of God had become vacant and there was a draught blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.
Of course, one could advocate religion for *other* people, while not believing oneself. This strategy is reminiscent of C S Lewis’s contrast between the mother bird, who raises chicks for purposes of bird-dom, and the farmer, who raises chicks for purposes of his own.
That’s just a bizarre thing to say.
I’ve never met a Mormon that wasn’t the nicest of people, and happy, too.
Why, Evangelical Christianity, of course, although the way that you phrase the question does present a problem. It is actually not admirable to act in a way to maximize the benefit to yourself. It turns out that if you de-emphasize yourself, and act so as to follow the example and teachings of Jesus, you receive the maximum benefit to yourself. The benefit will probably not be what you expect, which explains the whole “the last shall be first” thing.
I had a similar story. At the youngest ages I just was baffled why god was any more real than Santa Claus, but I accepted the authority of parents, priest and society that it might be true, but not definitely true, because I never took leave of my senses. In college my skepticism became much greater, until one day Father George Wiskirchen my jazz instructor, probably drunk again, responded to my friendly greeting on the quad with a “f—- you.” That incident took me off the fence. Not his swearing; I’ve been sworn at by better men. But the understanding that “authority” for the idea that there is a god is meaningless. No man can know more than I about whether there is a god, because no one can know. Wishful thinking doesn’t make it so. People who preach about god are either dupes or humbugs.
The turbulence at the boundary between faith and reason makes for long and interesting conversations.
There are two very different interpretations of the post title: one, that atheism itself is an irrational intellectual position, the other that choosing to live like an atheist is irrational, regardless of what one believes. I think our first person singular/plural friend is asserting the latter.
Some thoughts.
First, as Kent observed in his comment #26, there’s a problem with language. If I had my druthers, “atheist” would refer only to those who make a strong claim about the non-existence of deity; it would be the opposite of “believer.” That would leave what I think of as the truly rational position, that of saying that the metaphysical realm, if it exists, is by its nature unknowable, to the agnostics. Unfortunately, the word “atheist,” by popular usage and by definition, spans everything from agnostic to hard-core anti-theistic denier.
Under that lexical regime, I would argue that both believers and atheists are irrational — the latter more so than the former. Believers, many of them at least, can cite their own personal testimony as a kind of evidence; hard atheists have not even that personal and subjective evidence, and so inevitably (I believe) press their case too hard, claiming sure knowledge of what they can only suspect is true. The more strident the atheist, the more hypocritical seems his claim.
As for the believer’s “evidence,” I think that a rational person should be just a tiny bit wary of his own senses when it comes to personal brushes with the numinous. However compelling such an experience may be, we all know how vulnerable is the human mind to suggestion and delusion, and a truly rational person would never entirely exclude that possibility when considering his personal testimony.
Secondly, Poindexter’s rather pugnacious challenge in comment #1, while admittedly reading too much into the original post, brings up an interesting point. There are those who argue that we can’t be “good” (in a sense to which those of us here might generally agree) without G-d; there are those who argue that we certainly can. While I’m firmly in the agnostic camp, I’m inclined to the first position, with this proviso: essentially no one in America grows up without G-d. We are a nation so steeped in the Judeo-Christian traditions that, even if our children are raised with no formal exposure to theology, they are nonetheless part of a society shaped by those traditions.
I am yet to be convinced that any non-Judeo-Christian culture approaches the west in its humanity, compassion, tolerance, and grace. If those are aspects of the “good” (and I think they are), then I’ll continue to argue that a Judeo-Christian cultural foundation appears to be practically essential in achieving it, whether or not any particular individual subscribes to those beliefs.
Lastly, to the extent that the original post is making a utilitarian argument, as it seems to me it is, I think it is susceptible to fallacies springing from post hoc ergo propter hoc assumptions. The assertion is that non-believers would enjoy the benefits of religious belief if they adopted the external forms of religious worship. The benefits the author cites for himself/herself — confidence, purpose, fulfillment — may well spring from the belief, rather than the participation in or compliance with religious institutions.
Having said all that, I have to admit that, as a deeply agnostic individual, I have derived a great deal of personal enrichment from participation in religious organizations and communities, and I’m a firm believer in the value of such communities. We’ve all heard the phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious.” I routinely describe myself as the opposite: I’m religious but not spiritual — in that I value religion highly, but experience no sense of the numinous that I would ascribe to metaphysical inspiration.
Thank you, iWe, for an interesting topic.
“Voodoo math,” what a wonderful phrase! It also embodies my inchoate feelings about statistics. Can statistics be a useful guide? Sometimes, to some extent. But we don’t live statistical lives; our lives are the actual data which only can be looked at in hindsight. The future remains unknown, subject to forces of which we are often unaware.
I completely agree.
You are absolutely correct in this as well. It is probably impossible to separate “benefits from True Belief” from “benefits from going through the motions,” but I also accept that it is reasonable that the benefits are going to track with conviction. Which certainly trims my sails!
Mark Steyn shares this position: he is a non-practicer, but a keen defender of what Judaism and Christianity bring to people and families and civilization.
Hey hey without statistics, I wouldn’t have the foundation of my thesis or a job now.
I don’t have anything too meaningful to add here except that I consider myself a very happy atheist and I believe I lead a meaningful life. Sure, I was raised Buddhist, but that is a philosophy not a religion in my family. (And really it was just the first 9 years of my life that I was raised that way. It’s only my grandma that actually practices anything particularly Buddhist.) We weren’t raised to pray or believe in a higher being. I think religion can be fulfilling for lots of people and a healthy religion is healthy for a society, but I think there are loads of people like me also.
And to reply to an earlier comment, in the cosmology community, we believe in a stochastic universe. However, there’s no reason to believe we can’t have a comprehensible standard model.
I don’t see that X implies Y. A corrupt religious person does not mean that God doesn’t exist. You assume that you have a lot of knowledge.
Do alcoholics believe in a Scotchtastic Universe?
People are currently voting with their feet to move from places where belief in God is strong (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, El Salvador, Columbia) to places where belief in God is much less strong (Denmark, France, Germany, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada).
I’m an agnostic-atheist. But I’m okay with religion as long as peoples’ religious ideas are subject to criticism and cross-examination just like non-religious ideas are.
If I tell you that I have some rabbit urine to sell you and if you drink the rabbit urine, it will cure your athlete’s foot and your colon cancer, you might want to bring in the doctors and the scientists (“the experts”) to find out if what I am saying is actually true before you take a drink of rabbit urine.
Similarly, if someone tells you that if you have faith in Jesus you can consume poison and it will not hurt you, you should bring in “the experts,” the scientists and the doctors.
Whenever some guy starts telling me that I must believe in Jesus to get into heaven or that I must be a good Muslim to get into heaven, I say, “Those are strong claims. But your evidence is weak.”
Sure, sometimes “the experts” are wrong. But that’s the great thing about science. Science is constantly building on prior knowledge, trying to separate mere assertion from fact.
In religion, some charismatic guy starts talking and people believe. To question is to be unholy.
You understand, don’t you, that that’s an observation about, among other things, god?
Preach it, brother.
It wasn’t the “corrupt” religious person. It was the realization that Fr. George was no different than any other human. He’s someone that can’t possibly have any insight into some other reality, nor can anyone else. Religion is a fraud, it’s no different than telling your kids to believe in Santa Claus, except that when you get older there’s no one but yourself to tell you it’s just a fairy tale. People want for there to be a god for many reasons, but wanting is not sufficient to make something true that can’t be true. And anyone trying to tell you that they know an unknowable truth is a dupe or a fraud.
I remember one atheist philosopher put it this way:
Suppose you have 5 thermometers placed in buckets of water. All 5 thermometers say 212 degrees F, the boiling point for water. Yet you look at the water in those buckets and the water doesn’t appear to be boiling.
You stick your hand in each of the buckets of water. The water appears cold.
You could conclude that the thermometers are defective and the water isn’t at 212 F or you could conclude that you are witnessing a miracle because the water is at 212 F and yet you can stick your hands in the water without getting your hands burned.
The skeptical person would say that the thermometers are defective. The “believer” would believe that the thermometers are accurate and it’s a miracle.
Analogies are wonderful, but dangerous when used incorrectly — as in this case.
You’ve presented an example of conflicting evidence: a thermometer that reads boiling, and water that is clearly not boiling.
What contrary evidence — what positive evidence for the non-existence of a god or gods — does your atheistic philosopher bring to the table?
I assume if studies showed that gay men were happier/more fulfilled than straight men you would start being gay in order to stay logically consistent, yes?
As long as the proposed god or gods are vague and undefined, the atheistic philosopher will have a difficult time presenting positive evidence for non-existence.
It’s sort of like asking Brett Kavanaugh to prove that he didn’t rape Christina Blasey Ford at a party decades ago where the time and date isn’t known and the location isn’t known.
Kavanaugh, like Clarence Thomas, can’t prove the negative. But that doesn’t mean a reasonable person thinks either of them is guilty.
Same with God. Put it this way. Just because I can’t prove that a tooth fairy doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that I must believe that the tooth fairy does exist.