Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 12/21/2009

Question
Without delving too deeply (for now) into the specifics of some of my objections to your atheistic apologetics (I am actually at work I shouldn't even be doing this :) I am curious to your response to the extensive volume of personal testimony in support of the reality of the Christian God, and His effect on their lives emotionally, mentally, and physically etc. Beyond the vast quantity of testimony, the quality and the breadth of the sample size is hard for even the most adament skeptic to ignore.

I wouldn't be hard pressed to find a passionate declaration of the reality of the Christian God from a representative of every demographic, gender, race, vocation, past or present. What's more, history is littered with passionate Christ-followers, whose intellect far exceeds yours and mine. I am often confounded as to how easily Christians are dismissed as a group of uneducated, superstitious hillbilies who undermine logic and scholarship and respond to all objections with "the bible says so...so I believe it..." While, I am not saying that millions of testimonies, past and present,(and believe me there are out there)prove indeniably the existence of God, isn't supremely arrogant to assume that atheist must be in an elite class of individuals who use their brains and therefore easily disprove God's existence. I can't prove God by pulling Him out of a hat as you would like, that's where faith comes in, a necessity you live by aswell in assuming there is no God without being able to prove it either. Truth is, millions of people from every sect of society past and present have concluded that God is real and have shaped there lives accordingly. If a million people arrive at the same destination (the Christian faith) by a different road don't you think its worth humble consideration? Or do you simply assume that Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, and Louis Pasteur (to name a few) simply dismissed logic and blindly followed a religion that, if wrong, would morally tether them to a eternally judging force for no reason. A little humility in light of all the brilliant minds that have pondered the existence of God would be refreshing from an atheistic camp who all too eagerly dismiss Christians as brainless hicks. If you could sit down and discuss your atheism with Isaac Newton I suggest you would be a great dear more humble then your 'expert' assertions posted on this site.  

Answer
Alright, so you are looking for a response to your description of the testimony (passion, prestige, variety, and abundance) of the Christian God. The implicit questions I will try to focus on in my response are the following: "Why doesn't the testimony of Christians suggest to the existence of God?", "How do I account for the testimony of the Christian God?", "Given the minority status of atheism, especially compared to the testimony of the Christian God, what do I think about Christians relative to myself and other atheists?", and "How do I justify the tone that I take on the subject of religion, in like of the testimony of the Christian God?" I'll skip around, but that is roughly in the order I should address the topics.

I don't find that the testimony of the Christians convincing evidence for the existence of the Christian God or an argument to practice Christianity for the same reason you don't think the testimony of the Muslims implies that you should become a Muslim. If you don't think there are many Muslims (ditto Buddhists, Hindus) who feel as passionately about their religion, and have the same characteristics of religious testimony that you praised about Christianity, than I think that you can learn a lot from visiting interfaith communities, studying human geography or history, or traveling the world. Similarly, you wouldn't have had me worship Zeus in 100 AD, and if there came a time when Christianity was the minority I don't think you would find that sufficient reason to reject it out of hand. Whatever is true about the universe, testimony is apparently not how we can know that it true. If you contend that one should pick a religion that he/she likes and you like Christianity, than I reserve the right to pick Pantheism, Buddhism, or some other religion in which spirituality is practiced, philosophy is discussed, and beliefs are held but with little superstition about natural universe.

The reason why I suggest you and I can't covert because of what someone else thinks is that you have to be honest with yourself. If this is the best way you know how to make sense of the world than you have to be go off your best shot. You have to have the courage of your convictions as a matter of personal integrity. There is no way I can make any sense of a casual mechanism for which individuals can receive revelation, and I don't think success, sincerity, passion, or happiness lends credibility to a point. We have more than a couple of examples of individuals who felt compulsion or heard voices in their head and were convinced horrible things were good ideas. I think at the very least a grain of skepticism is in order here, even if most ideas are much more benign. Imagine who unconvincing an enthusiastic supporter of the Communist Party and/or Laisse Faire Capitalism and/or a Conspiracy theory is to you, and I think this point that I am making would become readily apparent to you as is to me. The idea that things that are true and enlightening ought to stand for itself regardless of who is speaking is not a controversial one but it is a powerful one (why is it that believers find it so necessary to believe Jesus literally had supernatural powers in order to validate his moral teachings anyway?)

"I feel for [religious] individuals because I completely identify with the sorts of experiences that believers talk about and I understand how tempting these non-sequiturs really are. I find myself filled with a sublime peace when I sit in the quiet and think about the universe. So many unexpected good things pop up on a regular basis that I feel truly blessed. I find it amusing to suppose that there is in fact a God and all of this means that he is calling me to continue my good work as an atheist (of course what I am really surprised at is the human ability to overestimate the predictably of the future and find patterns where there are none). While I mean what I said, if you think that I can't really have such sensations because I am an atheist or if you think I'm just pretending for the sake of argument than clearly you understand that personal feelings of revelation are not helpful as evidence for (or against) a deity." - this is a paragraph from a previous AllExperts point in which I talked about what the existence of other religions tell us about any particular one[1] (you'll want to scroll down to the Argument from Symmetry heading, unless you are interested in hearing unrelated dialogue on the Problem of Evil).

We actually know enough about the psychology of religious beliefs that we don't need supernatural explanations to account for them. Now I am not saying the existence of psychological processes that lead people to God nullifies anything religious people have to say on the subject, that would be an example of the genetic fallacy, but rather God is not the only mechanism which would give rise to the belief in God. Briefly, people find miracles and the power of prayer effective through confirmation bias, post-diction, false-pattern recognition, and anthropomorphic of patterns (I discuss the subject in context of claims of psychic phenomenon here [2]). People believe in God as an abstract concept because of appeals to emotion and authority and people defend him through cognitive dissonance. These phenomenon have been well-established within multiple branches of Psychology for quite some time (the application to religion in specific is somewhat more controversial, but not any less valid). Now my personal experience in Psychology is just two semesters in College and a personal interest in the subject, but I think I have dropped enough leads to show that supernatural origin of religion is unwarranted in light of credible naturalistic origins.

To add my own thoughts on subject of the psychology of religion, I propose two other mechanisms with which belief in religion arises. The first is that religion attempts to resolve the philosophical/psychological crisis that comes about when there is something you care about but there is nothing you can do (prayer) or when you must face an unfortunate truth (faith). To me, I can definitely see the motivation to go to religion but I feel that both problems are better resolved through Absurdism (short essay on what Absurdism is here [3], in which one accepts the truth and moves on from there. The second mechanism in my own thoughts is what happens during meditative or contemplative experiences. To me, the sensation reminds me exactly of the sensation I get when I learn a new thing (any sensation humans crave). I think religious people go one step further and infer that they actually did learn a new thing and whatever they were thinking about must somehow be unjustifiably, but irrefutably true.

Now you may think that I am setting up to call all religious people stupid, gullible, or weak. And I don't think that is the case, because for one thing I haven't seen any literature show this convincingly. There is moderate evidence of some things that correlate with the lack of religion - wealth, education, living in an economically developed country - but nothing conclusive on intelligence (IQ as a measure of raw intelligence is a little sketchy anyway). I think the fair conclusion would that be people turn to religion in hard or uncertain times, that idleness leads to the level of freethinking that permit someone to diverge from the religion of their birth, and/or that education dispels a number of unwarranted claims that religious make. But to be honest, I think that it is not only true that there is no God, but true in a rather obvious manner (so long as your highest priority is truth). So how do I reconcile this? I think the real common element in religious people is that they have all made an error in their judgment on just this subject.

Many people are surprised to find out how someone can be so reasonable in one are and so unreasonable in another area. For example, before the 1900s women did not have the right to vote in any country and even our most enlightened thinkers were not only racist, but shockingly and unabashedly so (for example, all those famous Christian thinkers on your list are racist). Isaac Newton, in addition to being a scientist and a believer (and a racist), also believed in Alchemy (to a degree of superstition excessive even in his day). I can't say I have any personal knowledge of the matter, but I would warrant that there was many a Nazi who yelled heartless and bigoted things about the Jews during the workday, but came home and acted as a model father and husband (not so much wrong to oppose evil beings that infest society, but rather, mistaken in his belief that human Jews were evil beings that infest society). And there was also a number of famous atheist and deist thinkers who I would be arrogant to say that I was smarter than (just a partial list in the sciences[4]). Even if you think I am telling a skewed or untrue version of history, consider politics. Presumably you know someone who is very smart who is a strong Democrat and someone who is very smart who is a strong Republican (if not in person, recognize for example the stellar academic record necessary to jump into politics), or you can even focus on one issue like Global Warming or economic stimulus strategy. In fact, there has been some studies that show that intelligent people are more reluctant to change their minds when they are wrong because they are used to being right (whether or not they have an ego big enough to recognize it). The point is that you being right about something doesn't make you better than someone else. What is important however, is that everyone help each other figure things out and I would ask for nothing less in the case where I would be in the wrong. In fact, I have recently had my mind changed about a number of things on the subject of global warming (no, I won't tell you from what to what :P).

Have I ever considered that I might be the one wrong and everyone else is right? Well, to be absolutely honest with you, when I first became an atheist I thought exactly that. I didn't realize how many of us there actually are or how atheism is actually all the horrible things (religious) people said it was. On the one hand God seemed to be an idea people didn't have any reason to suppose was true and flatly contradictory if it was. On the other hand, with some many religious people and starting thinking about this at such a young age, I wasn't sure I could trust myself as a reliable judge of reality. There had to be something wrong with me, I had to be insane or empty or illogical or some other major flaw of character. But yet if there was something so obviously wrong with myself I couldn't trust myself than I had no bearing with which to work from and I would be turning against my own conscious. In order to find out what is right I had to find out what is true and I couldn't let my personal discomfort get in the way of doing what was right. Furthermore you just can't will yourself to believe something is true - you couldn't believe that a rock would let go from my hand would float up to the ceiling if I gave you a million bucks to believe it. I raked my mind again and again trying to figure out what I could have gotten wrong or what broken part of myself I must by relying on. So I moved forward the only way I could - I resolved to get wiser, to learn more about the subject and to always think everything through thoroughly. I spent the next several years looking up all the arguments for and against the existence of God that I could find and of trying to think of any rational argument which promotes him. What I found out was the more that I learned about the debate about God the less it turned against God. But if God was the answer, I could only do better by learning more and so I did. I only slowed down when I could watch a debate on the existence of God and come up with the arguments for both sides better than and before the speakers could. Although I see it more now as a lesson in how to explain what I have learned to others, I still do keep up with the apologetics from time to time just to see what crops up.

Still, I always appreciate new ways of looking at things and occasionally I find something valuable even among people I disagree with. For instance, I have found the Quaker concept of "creatureliness" to be one of the more illuminating ideas I have come across in religion even while thinking the religious context which came up with it is patently false. The nice thing about atheism is you are allowed to listen and judge for yourself with an open mind without fear of punishment. I furthermore seek to expose myself to as much collective wisdom as possible by being honest and upfront about what I think about the universe. After all, if I am wrong in a big way than someone has to know about it to correct me. If I am so completely wrong as to have nothing to contribute to the dialogue than nothing I have to say will stick or resonate with the more enlightened to whom I am speaking. I call this the "Jeffersonian Process" after the high confidence Thomas Jefferson placed in the freedom of speech to propagate truths and dispel lies necessary to guide our society (I wouldn't expect you to believe it, but Jefferson was a deist[5] as were most of America's Founding Fathers[6]). I really do believe that honesty is one of the most highest values for a person and for a society at large. I will stand by the New Atheists in this regard (here is a talk by a friend of mine, JT Eberhard, on the subject[7]). Ultimately right or wrong about the existence of God, I believe it is this unwavering commitment to truth and personal honesty that has gotten me to where I am and it is this culture of truth and honesty that I most hope to contribute to the conversation.

Links:
[1]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best-1.htm
[2]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/7/intuition-predictions-1.htm
[3]http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm
[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nontheists_%28science_and_technology%29
[5]http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/
[6]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfpJRVdWB1w
[7]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuFjhz2QFEY (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58B6QdXA6eM (part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSFQR8dvUT8 (part 3)