Weblog
In the first installment of this post, I started to talk briefly about the cognitive differences between atheists and people of faith (whom I will henceforth refer to as Christians, given their clear majority in the world), and I finished by asking a question that I feel I am obligated to investigate. Essentially, I asked:
What virtues have I, an atheist, been denied by not accepting God’s love?
I have witnessed the joy that religious fellowship and worship bring into people’s lives, but no part of me ever has felt like I’ve suffered severely by not being religious myself. Granted, being atheist has cut a noticeably wide social gap between me and my Christian friends (Asians are notoriously Christian), and I can definitely recall struggling with confusion and uncertainty, but never have I felt like I was being denied some higher, divine quality. Maybe there’s an ultimate tragedy to be found in being blissfully ignorant of God, or on the other hand, since everyone hates that blissful ignorance crap, maybe it is the case that the other atheists of the world and I are just a bunch of genetic anomalies who were spared what is argued to be man’s natural tendency to fabricate answers for the universe’s most obscure questions.
Empiricism, you see, is so basic. It is the framework upon which everything you are taught in school is built. It is how the contemporary standards of education train you to think. Research. The scientific method. “Challenge everything,” they say. No one ever learned anything by taking every new idea for face value. The only thing that that ever really amounted to was modal comfort.
And yet, conversely, I am compelled to acknowledge the fact that the problem here is regrettably ambiguous, since as I hinted before, it is epistemological in nature. As much as I claim to extract all of what I truthfully know from observable evidence, there’s no way I can say for sure without a single doubt that tomorrow, the sky will be blue. Although years of consistent, unfailing evidence have demonstrated to me time and time again that a blue sky is the most likely possibility tomorrow morning, I am at a loss for a total guarantee.
But what chance do I have of being wrong?
Thus, while I am incapable of denying the existence of God absolutely, I can say alternatively that based on the events in my life to which I can pragmatically attest, the chance of him existing is convincingly low. So low, in fact, that I may justifiably have reason to believe that I am correct, just as I have reason to believe that the sky will be blue tomorrow morning. For me, the line of reasoning in these two cases is practically one and the same, and as I imagine that no Christian could ever sustain a remotely similar perspective, I am led to hypothesize that I differ from a Christian in some materialistically fundamental way. Whatever mental construct it is that imbues humans with the ability to practice faith, inherent or acquired, I simply don’t have it.
I would readily yield to the idea that practicing faith is less a matter of knowing than it is a matter of believing, but it’s no secret how passionately Christians swear their lives to the unquestionable existence of God. And few people are ever comfortable swearing anything on the basis of belief.
There has been some recent attention paid to a scientist — a geneticist — who underwent a complete conversion from adamant atheism to devout religious faith (that I share the first article’s title is coincidental). I find the story of his reversal pretty amazing. It’s conceivable that he was always capable of faith from birth, but somehow, something about the first few decades of his life allowed him to perceive the universe almost exactly like I do now. I make no attempt to reshape his case in agreement with mine, nor will I try to refute his points (honestly, I think it would be unwise to openly trample on the words of an established scientific professional). The truth of the matter is this: as clear and lucid as his reasons are for believing that science is compatible with God, I just cannot make sense of them. Not because I think they are blatantly wrong. Not because a close examination has reported them to be logically flawed. But because I, myself, am mentally unfit to make the necessary jump from purely empirically based knowledge to a being that exemplifies all the qualities I cannot fathom.
If there exists a notion so supernatural that it is completely incontestable and invulnerable to dispute, then I must declare that it is either false or simply unknowable all together.