Is Science My Religion?

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This is an issue that arises often in discussions between religious and non-religious people or in the traditional debate between science and religion. Sometimes during a discussion those with religious beliefs will tell me that everyone has faith in something: they have faith in god, I have faith in science. Science has just become my religion, perhaps without me realizing it. Or, to look at it from a religious point of view, science has replaced religion in my life. That is to assume that one had religion or a need for religion in one’s life before. In my case, of course, that is true, but science only replaces religion is it fills the same needs as a religion. But does it? I suppose the answer to that question lies in how one views both science and religion and their influence on one’s life.

I believe in and have trust in the scientific method. Science is mostly responsible for bringing humanity to where it is today. Without science we would all be clustered in little groups on the African savannah gathering food (we wouldn’t even be hunting and we certainly wouldn’t be growing crops since the process of trial and error and the observations and conclusions required to develop these two skills is a form of science). As my high-school chemistry teacher told our class, if you want to live without the effects of science you will need to go and lie naked in the forest and be very careful not to think about most things. I also believe that everything that exists is theoretically knowable and understandable by science. That does not mean that the process of scientific discovery will eventually give us knowledge on everything. That is not practical given the various limitations (technological, financial, time and other resources) involved in putting scientific discovery into practice. But, I do believe that everything is knowable by science. Given enough time, resources, and technology, everything that exists is discoverable by the scientific method. That is also not to say that science can answer any question. Some questions are inherently unanswerable since they deal with abstract ideas (see below). For example, science will never answer the question of how tall tooth fairies are. The question of whether god exists, on the other hand, can be answered fairly well by science, just as the question of whether tooth fairies exist can be answered. However, my view that science has the ability to discover everything is in contrast to the views of many religious people (and agnostics) who accept that some things that do (or might) exist cannot be discovered by science. But, this is not be confused with my view that some questions are inherently unanswerable (see below). By contrast, what I am saying is that everything that actually exists can potentially be explored and explained by science.

All of this is to say that I clearly have a great deal of respect for and trust in science. Some would say that I put my faith in science. But is it faith that I have in science? Faith can be defined as believing something for which there is no evidence. I don’t think my trust of science is defined that way. Further, is science my religion? I guess I need to first examine what religion is.

To me, religion is an entirely human-made entity that satisfies a few needs in many humans’ lives. Firstly, it provides an explanation for the unexplained. Actually it does not technically do this, but it provides a substitute for an explanation for the unexplained. It provides an explanation to those who are satisfied without an actual answer. Religion in primitive societies provides a reassurance or explanation for things that cannot be explained. Ancient civilizations blamed the gods for things like lightening, thunder, eclipses and other natural phenomena that they had no scientific explanation for (some in today’s societies continue to do this with suggestions that earthquakes and hurricanes result from god’s wrath against the sinful rather than from plate tectonics or naturally occurring weather patterns). Even today, religion continues to provide an answer of sorts for questions that we as a species cannot answer. We do not have the complete answer to how the universe began (though we do know a lot about it), how abiogenesis occurred, and so on. The answer that god did it is a neat way of taking care of those difficult questions. As I explained above, I have no doubt that, given enough time and resources, science will provide all the answers to those questions (though I do not have faith that science will do so). Some though, clearly believe that since science has not yet answered those questions it is incapable of doing so, and that therefore god is the only plausible explanation. I hope you see the fault in this logic. Further along this line of thought, religion also provides answers for inherently unsolvable questions. There are some questions which humanity will never answer, no matter how scientifically advanced we become simply because they are not answerable through traditional research methods. For example, the questions “Why do I exist?”, or “What greater meaning does my life have?” are inherently unanswerable questions. While I believe we can answer scientifically the question about how humans came into existence, the question of why we came into existence does not have an answer. Yet, for those who accept religion, this inherently unanswerable question becomes answerable: we are here because God created us, loves us, and has a plan for us. In addition, I believe that a very large role of religion is to assuage the fear of death. Though I know many religious people who adamantly deny that they would still be religious if they knew there was no afterlife (and indeed I think they are so zealous about their religious convictions that they do believe that statement on a superficial level), I believe that religion would not have a firm grasp at all were it not for the promise of a pleasant and eternal afterlife (or the threat of an eternally painful one). Indeed I believe that the fact that we as humans are aware of death is one of the very factors that lead to the development of religion in the first place. This topic is of interest to me, and I hope to write more about it in the future, but in the meantime, suffice it to say that Pascal’s wager is alive and well in many church goers. Other, perhaps lesser, roles that religion plays is as a social club, or simply as something passed on from parents with no questioning of its validity or value. In short, many of the roles and reasons for religion is that it is a comfort.

None of these reasons for religion fit with my understanding of science. Science does not fill any of these needs for me. Science does not offer me a quick and easy answer for the things we cannot as a species yet explain. It holds promise that we shall understand them in the future, but that promise is not faith. Science does not take away any fear of death, nor does it provoke a fear of death. Death, from a scientific point of view, is simply the end of one’s existence and therefore there is no reason to believe it will be any different of an experience than what one experienced before birth. The process of dying may be awful, painful, or frightening, but neither religion nor science necessarily takes that away. And if we are talking about the more gruesome and painful factors in the process of dying then I will take science and medicine over religion any day for its ability’s to provide comfort through that process. Science does not act as a particularly good social club. Scientists are like anyone else – some of them are nice and interesting people and some are not. On balance, if I were to spend a social occasion with a group of people, I would prefer it to not be with only scientists, given my propensity to dislike egomaniacs and scientists propensity for a healthy ego.

Some people, usually religious ones, seem to assume that all humans need to believe in something “greater than themselves”. That we could not have come to exist by chance. That there is some greater reason or purpose to our lives, or that there is something eternal about us. But some of us, mainly atheists I would assume, have come to accept that our lives are nothing more nor less than biological. We are not eternal. There is no greater purpose to our lives than that which we find meaning during our lives (or perhaps the meaning we pass on after our deaths). Some of us atheists, myself included, believe that, while evolution is not a random process (more on this later), our species does exist more or less by chance. We feel no void that needs filling in our lives. The assumption that science is my religion stems from the assumption that all humans feel this “deeper” need for meaning and purpose in humanity’s existence is what leads some to believe that all humans need a religion of some sort and that science is mine. But, I feel no such void. I feel no such need for meaning to humanity’s existence (this is quite different, understand, than wanting or searching for meaning to one’s own life – a process that many if not most atheists take quite seriously).

So, science is not my religion. I do not have faith in science. I do not worship it. I do not look to science for answers to inherently unanswerable questions. For me, no question that is inherently unanswerable is worth asking. Most importantly, though, I do not look to science for comfort.

The Shack - A Review

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The Shack, by William P. Young, is a book that made waves a couple of years ago. It seemed particularly popular amongst Christians, and was perhaps viewed as a way to present the Christian god in a more palatable way. I got the feeling that many Christians thought that finally, here was a book that described the loving personality of their god, and that if only you would read it with an open mind you too might understand how wonderful their god is. (Which of course dodges one of my main concerns with religion: a lack of evidence. Describing a wonderful deity and religion is a nice story, but it doesn’t mean anything until there is some evidence to support one’s claim that it is true). I read the book carefully after having been given a copy by a Christian. I found it disturbing on a number of levels, and when I sat down to write a review of it, the following is the most honest and factual review I could come up with that actually fit with the facts of the story:

The Shack is a gruesome and twisted story of familial murder, written with deep psychological undertones. The protagonist, Mackenzie Philips (“Mac” as he is known), murders his young daughter, Missy, though throughout the book he fails to recognize his guilt or acknowledge his crime due to his severe psychoses. Initially the reader is also misled to believe Mac’s innocence and the story unfolds as an abduction-murder mystery. But it soon becomes apparent that Mac himself is the perpetrator, as his psychoses become apparent. Young brilliantly leads the reader through Mac’s tormented schizophrenic mind as he deals with his genuine grief and subconscious guilt. Written with a sympathetic tone towards the protagonist, and with a detailed journey through his warped mind, Young almost manages to convince the reader of Mac’s innocence, such is his own deranged conviction. During the story Mac proceeds through several stages of grief, becoming stalled in bargaining during which he endures a lengthy delusion of a personal relationship with a deity who him/herself suffers from multiple personality disorder. He revisits the scene of his daughter’s murder, and eventually leads authorities to her body as he slowly comes to terms with her loss. Eerily, Young leaves the reader with no resolution of Mac’s tormented mind. Indeed Mac even finds acceptance and resolution about the loss of his daughter, while still deluding himself that he was not the killer. The authorities lack enough evidence for a conviction and the story ends in suspense of anticipating Mac’s future violence as his psychosis remains unresolved and unrecognized.

A Former Christian?

One of the issues that I, as a former Christian, often face in conversation with Christians is the notion that I could not have ever really been a Christian if I have now left the faith. A common attitude amongst Christians is that no one, once they had truly been a Christian, could leave it behind and become an atheist. I find this attitude arrogant and cowardly.

Arrogant because it assumes that Christianity is the truth, and the only truth. This is nothing new amongst Christians. Anyone who has had even an elementary discussion about religion with a Christian will almost invariably have found them to assume that they are right and you are wrong. The prevailing attitude is often one of reluctant willingness to engage in a discussion, but only with the pre-arranged understanding that they can't change their mind because they are already right. I suppose on some superficial level I can understand this attitude. If I think about something that I am almost certain about -- gravity for example -- I suppose I would have a hard time keeping an open mind in conversation with someone who didn't believe in gravity. Perhaps even with my belief of atheism I could relate. Do I think it is possible for someone who has truly understood atheism to then become religious? I think it's unlikely, but I certainly have an open mind to the possibility. I don't think that an atheist who becomes a Christian automatically and retroactively becomes someone who never truly understood atheism in the first place.

Cowardly because it is a convenient way of avoiding an inconvenient confrontation. If a Christian meets someone like myself who was a true Christian for many years and then left it behind, they have to start facing some very difficult questions. Such as: Why did you stop believing? Aren't you afraid of hell? What questions did you ask about your faith that lead you to realize it was false? Instead of facing these questions, it is easier (and less scary) to simply state that I could never have been a Christian to begin with. That solves the problem in one easy statement. Someone who never was a true Christian didn't really understand Christianity and so could not have asked some uncomfortable questions about the religion. Instead, they must have just drifted away through laziness or selfishness (the Christian assumption that all atheists are inherently selfish is a whole other topic, worth discussing).

Ultimately perhaps the issue is best resolved by examining how you define a Christian. Christians often define themselves as people who believe that Jesus is the son of God (the specific Biblical Yahweh, though of course many Christians don’t know their god by that name), that Jesus died to save them personally from sin and death, and who rose from the dead following his death. Of course, there are many other things one associates with the definition of a Christian, including changes to their life and an attempt to live their life a certain way. But ultimately I think most Christians would define their faith as a relationship. A relationship with Jesus.

So, by this definition, I think I qualify as a former Christian. I was a Christian by the very definition that Christians themselves use to define themselves: I believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he died to save me from my sins. I didn't just say I believed it, I really did believe it. I also had a relationship with Jesus. Or so I thought. Now, of course I recognize that it was all in my head, and there was no relationship since a relationship with someone who no longer exists is not possible. Perhaps this is the loophole Christians will grab onto to insist that I never was a Christian: you never actually had the relationship with Jesus, otherwise you could never come to the point that you think it was all in your head. But the reality is that all relationships with Jesus are imaginary, so I fit the definition of having that relationship in the same way as anyone who has ever claimed to be a Christian. Now I no longer believe in Jesus, nor do I claim to have a relationship with him, which puts me in that most awkward category of persons that Christians must face: a former Christian.

My (de)conversion to atheism - part 1

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Why am I an atheist?


This question requires a fairly lengthy explanation and some background. I was born into a Christian family. While we were less fundamental or fanatical than some, we were very active in our church, our family life focused on Christianity, and we were brought up to believe that the Biblical God is the truth, and that following Jesus was the only way to happiness in life and to an afterlife in heaven.

[I should pause here and explain my etiquette when using the term "god". To me, the word god is not generally capitalized because it refers to an improper noun like any other item in our lives: table, cat, car, banana, etc. But, occasionally I need to capitalize the word when it refers to a specific proper noun, the Biblical god who Christians often think is named God. In fact this god's name is Yahweh, though one could make the case that the god has evolved over time to actually be quite distinct in personality from Yahweh, so perhaps he does deserve an individual identity and the name God after all. However, if it seems like I am inconsistent in my use of the terms god and God, please remember that they each have very specific and different meanings.]

As a child, there was no doubt in my mind that God existed and that I had a personal relationship with him and his son Jesus. I believed that this man, who was also God, had lived on earth as described in the Bible, had been executed by the Romans, and then had risen from the dead as part of a divine plan for human salvation from eternal death. It is likely safe to assume that most who read this will be familiar with the sorts of things I believed. My actual belief in the existence of God went on for a very long time, well into adulthood. But even as early as my teens I started to have big problems with the way Christianity was presented to me. For one, I was embarrassed about Christianity. (In retrospect, of course, this likely reflects my sub-conscious disbelief. After all, why would someone be embarrassed to believe something that they know is true). In any case, questions started to arise. Difficult questions for which I had no answers. In addition to that, once I was an adult and responsible for my own life, I stopped attending church on a regular basis, which likely provided me with the distance from Christianity that I believe is necessary for anyone to make the move away from their religious upbringing. Christians often view this sort of thing as a weakness of faith, or a drifting away due to apathy, and in my experience they tend to guard against it fervently and shun those who explore outside the faith. This is the very reason it is so difficult to leave a religion behind, because most people don't ever give their mind time and space enough to consider their religion objectively.

But, for many years as an adult, even though I no longer attended church, even though my friends were all non-religious, I still actually believed in all the pillars of Christianity that I grew up with. And I often worried about my future death and the chance that I would spend an eternity in hell if I didn't get my spiritual act together. Occasionally, usually when I was with family, I felt guilty about my lack of religious zeal and made some sort of half-hearted self promise to change. This went on for some years in my early adulthood.

Not much changed for quite some time in my religious beliefs, and it is possible that I could have drifted along like that for the rest of my life. But some factors in my life precipitated further change.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I think I have an inquisitive mind. I want to know the truth. I am not satisfied just telling myself that no one really knows the answers to certain questions such as the existence of god. I think that, ultimately, anyone who is very inquisitive (and honest with themselves) must in the end have a problem with their religion. I found that Christianity demanded that I ignore a number of difficult questions. Or, if not outright ignore them, eventually come to an acceptance that the answer to them might entail some sort of magic, handily taken care of by our God. In any case, this natural curiosity spurred on a number of questions about my religion that I had difficulty answering logically. A major question I had was why were Christians (and people of many other religions as well) not encouraged to really examine their beliefs objectively? Why not "step outside" of Christianity and look at it rationally? Surely any truth will stand up to rigorous examination, so what are Christian authorities afraid of? Why were we as Christian children taught that to even question our faith could be considered sinful and therefore deserving of death? Surely if god did exist, he would want followers who had examined their belief in him carefully. Yet Christian (and other religious) doctrine is full of suggestions that weak faith (really another term for questioning things) came from the devil. One should guard against it and stand firm when those doubts (questions) arose. Another difficult question was the one of the afterlife. If we were to "go" to heaven or hell, then there would have to be some part of us that actually survived death in order to be there. So, which part of us would that be? Much of our personality is mapped out through neuroscience. Indeed people's personalities do sometimes change as a result of brain trauma, indicating that our very persona is only an expression of the physical structure of the brain. Our ability to feel pleasure or pain depends on the physical existence of a nervous system. So then, isn't the description of who we are dependant on our physical existence? Wouldn't god have to magically re-create us physically in order for us to exist, with some recognizable facets of our current persona, to be able to exist in an afterlife? Sure, a magical god could do that, but that model was neither logical nor rational. As soon as I permitted my god to be a non-rational being, then ANYTHING was possible. Why, the world could have been created yesterday by a god who uploaded all our memories. Wasn't that just as rational and likely as a god who would re-create us after death (rather than leaving us non-existent for eternity of course) just so we could either enjoy heaven or suffer in hell?

Secondly, I studied science in university. During many years of university scientific education, I was forced to look at the world more and more rationally. I was trained to try to put aside my biases, to examine the evidence around me and then to draw a conclusion based on the observed evidence, rather than to start with a conclusion (or even a pet theory) and try to examine the evidence in light of that conclusion (or try to make the evidence fit the pre-conceived conclusion). More and more I realized that this was the process that allowed humans to gradually leave behind superstition, and examine the world objectively and actually understand the reason for natural phenomena. This seemed to be in complete contrast to the religious indoctrination I had received as a child. In that case I was encouraged to hold strong to my faith no matter what evidence came to light. If it appeared from time to time that god had abandoned me, then that was only a test of my faith. I should stubbornly hold firm in my beliefs, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and I would eventually be rewarded. Imagine where we would be scientifically if scientists practiced that way.

Thirdly, I started to encounter more and more Christians who believed all of the Bible literally. Though I grew up in a religious environment that was fully supportive of the authority of the Bible, much of it was taken figuratively. But now I started to engage with people who actually believed that the earth was created in six days less than 10,000 years ago, and who believed that a global flood to the height of Mount Everest happened within the past few thousand years. I knew this things to be untrue, given the scientific evidence to the contrary, and I've never been tempted to take those parts of the Bible literally. But, for the first time I started to ask myself why some of the Bible should be taken seriously if other parts of it were clearly complete fabrications? Why should I believe the parts of the New Testament that were critical to the Christian faith if much of the rest of the Bible could be discarded as allegory? Could it be that the whole thing was just fictional writing very loosely based on some events that bore little resemblance to the Biblical descriptions of them?

Fourthly, I began to read a number of books that looked at religion in a different way than I was used to. I read all the usual atheist-written best sellers such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. In addition I read In Defense of Atheism by Michel Onfray and Why God Won't Go Away by Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause. All of these books helped me examine the religion of my upbringing much more objectively. But a couple of other books had the most profound effect on my religious thinking. Jared Diamond has written a couple of books called Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Third Chimpanzee which are relatively scientific examinations of the history of the human species. In these books Diamond describes some of the processes of human evolution and development that lead to differences in agricultural and technological advancement that occured in different places around the globe. By examining human history so carefully, one is forced to either reject the science outright and cling to the creation story in Genesis, or to accept that no god played any sort of role in human development over the past few tens of thousands of years. This, of course, doesn't rule out gods altogether, but it does very much weaken the meddling, prayer-answering god of the Bible. I also read a book called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. The book basically follows two stories: a general history of Mormonism and a specific case of murder in the 1980s by two Mormons who believed they were instructed by God to perform the murders. I knew virtually nothing of Mormonism prior to reading the book, but it served as a striking example of how religion can cause people to believe the unbelievable. The religion is clearly a fabrication from 19th century America, with roots that are distinctly American in culture. Yet, there are millions of followers around the world, in what I can only understand as blind faith. The book illustrated the strength of religious influence, and how humans clearly yearn for some meaning to their life, which often seems to be filled by instructions and commands by a person in power – or a religion. I had met a few Mormons, and they seemed as convinced that their religions was true as any other religious person, including the Christians I had grown up with. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that the entire religion was a fabrication. If a religion could essentially be constructed by one man in the relatively modern times of the 19th Century to a point that millions of people worldwide were followers, how much more possible was it that a religion could have developed 2,000 years ago in a time when the availability of information was incomparably lower than in the modern era? (Literacy was lower, formal education was rare, books (at least as we know them now) and newspapers were non-existent).

Eventually I began to consider the possibility that there was no god. Though I had of course considered the question before, I had never really opened myself up to the possibility and considered the consequences. Like a child taking the butterfly wings off for the first time in the deep end of the swimming pool and realizing that it can indeed float without them, I considered that the world might work just fine without a god. Julia Sweeney has described a similar experience in her book Letting Go of God:

…as I was walking from my office in my backyard into my house, I realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. It whispered, ‘There is no god.’

And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. ‘There is no god. There is no god. Oh my god, there is no god.’…

And I shuddered. I felt I was slipping off the raft.

And then I thought, ‘But I can’t. I don’t know if I can not believe in God. I need God. I mean, we have a history’…

‘But I don’t know how to not believe in God. I don’t know how you do it. How do you get up, how do you get through the day?’ I felt unbalanced…

I thought, ‘Okay, calm down. Let’s just try on not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off.’ And I put them on and looked around.
I’m embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, ‘Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean, we’re just hurtling through space? That’s so vulnerable!’ I wanted to run out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands.

And then I remembered, ‘Oh yeah, gravity and angular momentum is gonna keep us revolving around the sun for probably a long, long time.'

I can relate to some of this description quite well. In addition to what she describes, my situation was complicated by the fear that I might die while I had the not-believing-in-God glasses on and go to hell for eternity just because I happened to die while I was trying out atheism for 30 minutes. It was a bit like coming up to a train track and thinking, ‘I need to cross the tracks, but what if the train comes along out of nowhere and mows me down just at the moment that I step across?’ When I finally overcame my fear of being annihilated in a moment of fury like an Efrafan rabbit, and stepped gingerly onto the tracks, my whole perspective changed. Instead of looking up the track in fear of an oncoming train, I looked down at the tracks in detail for the first time and realized they were decrepit and could not possibly bear a train. No train would ever be coming along those tracks and I could linger as long as I like quite safely. Once that was established, the opportunity to really open up my mind to some serious questions availed itself and it was not long before the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Indeed, once I had my Julia Sweeney moment, the whole ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. I was through with God instantly as I realized that the whole game was a farce. There was no desire at all to cling to a false god for comfort. I simply set god aside and moved on.

It is probably hard for someone who has never believed in god to understand this defining moment for a new atheist. Ironically it is very much like the term that Christians use to describe their own conversion experiences: like being born again. Born into life again, only this time recognizing the world that you are born into for what it is. When I look back now on the years that I actually believed a god was there listening to prayers, intervening in human lives, meddling with nature and so on, I almost feel embarrassed that it took me so long to overcome. Yet, the relief that I haven't gone through my whole life that way is overwhelming. How close I came to wasting the only life I will ever have. The reasons why religion is so very difficult to overcome for someone who has been properly indoctrinated are very interesting and belong elsewhere in another post.

Ultimately I have come to a point where my position towards religion is that the onus is firmly on religion to show evidence of its truth. Now that I have recognized that personal experience is not evidence, and that there really is no objective, verifiable evidence for god, there is simply no reason to try to believe in any religion anymore. Reason is the the key word in that statement. Religion for me has become wholly unreasonable. And this has been confirmed in conversation after conversation with Christians who try to convince that their religion is true, yet often stretch the boundaries of reason to do so. Most (not all) Christians that I now encounter seem less interested in really finding out the truth, but rather in defending their faith no matter the cost. Even if the cost is reasonable, rational, logical thought.

That is the first part of why I am an atheist. It is an abbreviated description of the process I went through. I will likely add more details in the future.