For Atheists and Agnostics

God made man, the universe, and everything in it. No other explanation suffices. Perhaps He used an evolutionary method during His creation, and a “day” in the Torah really means a million years. Who knows. I am not troubled by any issues relating to reconciling a religious view vs. a scientific view as to the origins of man and the universe.

As for man’s nature — man is not born in sin. A child is born pure according to Jewish beliefs, but we are all given a yetzer tov (inclination toward good) and a yetzer hara (inclination toward evil). Our lives reflect a constant battle between our yetzer tov and our yetzer hara. We must stay close to God, follow His laws, and study His Torah in order to develop a stronger yetzer tov and to overcome our yetzer hara. We don’t speak of Satan per se, but rather, of “the satan.” The satan is one who encourages our yetzer hara, and he also is the spokesperson against us in the heavenly courts, referred to as “the accuser” — a sort of “prosecuting attorney” who puts forward all our misdeeds to God. Nice, huh? Kind of like the kid who lures you into stealing from the local candy store and then goes and tells your father what you did. Eh. He’s a real bad guy and we aren’t supposed to hang out with him.

Our redemption is entirely on our shoulders. We are punished for our sins and weaknesses, and rewarded for our merits and good deeds. The idea of another person taking the fall for our sins is very foreign to us, very antithetical to our notion of justice and morality.

I agree with the previous comment: I don’t have a “belief system” insofar as it pertains to the origins of man.

That said, my views about the origin of man are not based on tenets of a religion or a philosophy, but on science. Man “came to be” because man evolved.

What does that reveal to me about the nature of man? Well, not a lot except for the obvious similarities we share with other evolved species (”animals”). For example, we all have survival instincts which cause us to dominate or use the environment (for food, shelter, etc.). We respond to threats to our existence; we protect and care for our offspring. Man is much better at these things because he possesses a higher developed brain, but he still is characterized by those “animal instincts” that he shares with other living creatures.

I’ll take the agnostic angle. For the record, I’m an extremely analytical person. I don’t buy into everything I read in the Bible for the same reason I don’t buy everything I hear from Atheist leaders/icons – it just doesn’t stand up to logical analysis.

My answer to question #1: I don’t know. I do believe that we were created. College physiology classes ended any doubts about that issue for me. I consider it to be self-evident. I don’t think we are a perfect creation, but we (and all life forms on earth) are too complex to have come into existence by accident.

My answer to question #2: The nature of man is as diverse as man himself. Man is capable of great charity and kindness. At the same time, Man is capable of the most horrible atrocities. Both frequently exist in the same people. Examine the Italian mafia. They were kind, loving, and generous to their families. They were brutal and ruthless to their enemies. Each one of us has the capacity for either and we show what side we want to and justify it after the fact. People of every gender, sexual orientation, race, creed, and color have shown both horrible evil and wonderful kindness throughout history.

The bottom line, I believe we were created, but have no idea why or for what purpose. I also believe there is some form of existence after we die, but I don’t know what that might be. Science has pretty well proved that one. We’re composed of energy and matter. Neither energy nor matter can be destroyed (as a general rule), only transformed. So, upon physical death, the energy and matter have to go somewhere and do something, but what that might be is still open to debate, IMO. I also believe that there is good in everyone. And evil. And I should be prepared to deal with either from anyone.

Actually, it does require a “belief system” to reach the conclusion that 2+2=4. You must believe in the concepts of 2, 4 and addition. If you believe only in what you find “overwhelming tangible evidence for”, then your belief system is materialistic (based on the physical world), and defined by your senses.

Assuming you believe things that you have not personally experienced, then you must have some system of identifying who/what you believe and do not believe. For example, while you may turn on the light and “prove” the existence (or not) of a pink elephant in the room, can you do so with atoms? electromagnetic radiation? love? souls? gravity? time?

1) The evidence strongly suggests that humans evolved from earlier primate species.
2) Nothing.

Well I’m what was once called, “a lapsed Catholic“…

None the less I do believe that God made the universe and all that’s in it, us included…

Now whether God made us as described in the Old Testament or let ‘nature‘ do it in its own way I don’t know or care really…

It changes nothing…

Poster #4: Holy cow. I went to look up what an “existential viewpoint” might mean, and this comment thread popped up on the first page in Google.

I did a quick read on it from the Wikipedia, and I guess I do live my life like that. But what I went over isn’t “Beliefs”. Every point I went over doesn’t require any kind of belief or faith. It’s the truth:

There are things we don’t know.
There are things we can never know.
Some things we can figure out and know.
We will never figure out the new things without sitting down and trying to figure them out.

That’s pretty much it.

It would be nice to be religious I think. But faith just isn’t in me.

Huh. When I read it, I interpreted it as “For those who don’t believe in a God or higher power” That’s usually what people mean when they lump together Atheists and Agnostics.

But if we were to read it more strictly, it would mean “Everyone who doesn’t believe in Christianity”. I don’t think she meant that. Mostly because it’s easier to write and you don’t have to look up how to spell Atheists and Agnostics.

Ah well. We’ll find out Monday. See? This is why no one talks about religion or politics. 80% of the conversation is trying to figure out what you’re talking about.

Dooz and ErikZ, LaShawn already specified “atheist” and “agnostic” in her title; the rest of her comment stated “or OTHERS who don’t believe in Christianity.” If one is neither atheist nor agnostic, but not Christian either, then they would fall into the latter category. Otherwise, I don’t know why LaShawn would have added on that last part of the sentence. I interpreted it to mean that she is interested, in general, in how non-Christians see the world and human nature.

Aloha and a merry Christmas, La Shawn Barber and readers,

Atheists define themselves by their opposition. I’m a materialist. That is, the only things which require explanation are observations and the only things which count as explanations are observations.

How did humans come to be? In broad outline, Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, Gregor Mendel, and Charles Darwin laid it out.

1) The Earth is very old (Lyell).
2) Offsprig resemble parents but not exactly (Mendel).
3) More are born than can survive and reproduce (Malthus).
4) Differences in parents’ hereditary bequests influence differences in survival rates, and so differences in the representation of characteristics in the next generation (Darwin).

Given that, you’d need divine intervention to keep evolution from happening.

What does this say about the nature of man?

That’s a large and open question. Evolutionary psychology is a new field. One useful conclusion is that human nature is not infinitely plastic. People vary in their hereditary predispositions and training will move them only so far. Another conclusion is that the normal distribution has a tail. Conception is a crapshoot. Parents roll dice when they put their kids together and some kids come up snake-eyes. Tigers in human form walk among us.

If this sounds banal, it’s because humans had to deal with the facts of human nature for millenia. Customs and religions evolved to deal with human nature, and have already arrived at the prescriptions which evolutionary psychologists will likely eventually reach, just as drug companies find cures in the traditional practices, such as willow bark (salicylic acid, aspirin), of shamans.

I believe in a God or extreme intelligence or whatever you choose to call it because of the organization of our world, our earth. Suppose I enter a room with strings of thread and beads…and they are just lying randomly on the floor. I might consider that they’d been there forever or had been cast there by chance. However, if I enter the same room and see the beads strung on those threads in complicated and replicated patterns, then I must assume that some intelligence or force organized those beads on those threads. Where there is organization, especially to produce myriad complicated forms of life, there must be a guiding intelligence. I do not believe in chance.

Good comments all, but I would assert that it takes an incredible amount of faith to be a materialist, that belief matters, even to the atheist, and that belief is not tantamount to superstition.

In fact, I’m soundly in the camp that the average atheist exhibits far more faith than the average Christian.

Kman, I’m going to jump in here: The atheist does not believe there’s a god, thus, s/he believes that there is no god. The dilemma of the atheist, as I see it, is that s/he has to have faith in nothing, or, faith in a lack of faith. The atheist believes in nothing-to-believe-in. Real problem, because this position is internally contradictory.

Note that the atheist has no more tangible/factual/evidentiary basis than the theist, and this problem is compounded by the fact that logically, the atheist’s argument is unprovable (a negative statement can never be proven [which in itself is a negative statement, which will be disproven if ever a negative statement is proven]).

So if Daniel can provide even one tiny bit of evidence that there is a god, he stands in a very good position in this argument, in contrast to the atheist, who can never have evidence of his/her negative.

Malcolm suggested:

1) The Earth is very old (Lyell).

No, Lyell did not prove this. He assumed uniformitarianism is true with out question (the working presupposition of most current materialists) and interpreted his observations regarding his geology accordingly.

Some will argue that modern dating techniques vindicate Lyell’s notions, but the general public is more often left in the dark about the fact that dating methods are not always conclusive, but yield multiple ages and the one age recorded for the journal article is chosen from the particular bias of the scientist.

And

4) Differences in parents’ hereditary bequests influence differences in survival rates, and so differences in the representation of characteristics in the next generation (Darwin).

Darwin’s ideas were not unique to him. Others before him suggested similar understandings of natural selection and survival rates, but they understood those hereditary characteristics to be nature’s way of preserving the health of the group. No one suggested a descent with modification from lesser life forms to greater. Darwin thought the building blocks of life, like living cells, were simplistic blobs. Our discovery of DNA and our ability to see that so-called simplistic life through microscopes is really more complex than we could ever had imagined totally debunked his working theory.

Fred

Ralph,

Are those “normal, common sense techniques” you use to supposedly determine God’s existence material or immaterial? If they are immaterial, as a materialist, what “techniques” did you use to determine their value and why?

Fred

There’s a couple of Gregory Bateson quotes I’ve wanted to throw out, and just now found. They’re both from Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. This, along with Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, have some of the best answers I know to La Shawn’s second question.

“Two things, however, are clear about any religion that might derive from cybernetics and systems theory, ecology, and natural history. First, that in the asking of questions, there will be no limit to our hubris; and second, that there shall always be humility in our acceptance of answers. In these two characteristics we shall be in sharp contrast with most of the religions of the world. They show little humility in their espousal of answers but great fear about what questions they will ask.”

“Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby
materialists hope to escape from their materialism.”

Bateson called evolution “the pattern that connects”, which is what I was getting at by calling it “the underlying mechanism of all self-organizing information systems”.

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Fred: “Kman, every person, religious or non-religious, has faith in some ‘authority’”.

Here’s the thing: in science, that faith is provisional. It’s based one’s own observations, and on building up a coherent view of reality. I know Newton is right (at least in the classical domain) because in physics class I did the experiments, not because I memorized catechisms. That coherence, or consilience, then helps us to judge how reliable an authority is. That’s necessary because it is simply not possible to do all the experiments yourself.

However, we are always ready to throw over even our most cherished authority when we are faced with new observations his theories cannot explain.
The fastest path to scientific fame is to prove your teachers dead wrong.

Or as someone once put it, the most important moment in science is not when we say, “Ha! I thought so!” It’s when we say, “Hm. That’s strange….”

It’s interesting to me that you declaim the Bible and then offer as proof of the Bible’s lack of authority the rantings of three men who didn’t believe the Bible.

Please reread. I cited the rantings of those men as evidence of the bible’s positive value, and I do believe it has positive value, whatever its provenance.

Re #31: DJ, your assertion that in science, faith is provisional is a good point, and in fact, gets to the core of the problem. Your explicit statement, I’ll agree is true in theory, exactly as you state it: We believe what is demonstrated empirically to seem to be true, but hold that belief tentatively, subject to further empirical evidence.

Unfortunately, in actual practice in many academic circles and in not a few scientific circles (which, btw, seem to be typically embedded within academia), evidence exists that one is not free to believe what the empirical data suggests, but is politically compelled to “maintain the party line”. This seems to be especially evident in the hypothesis of evolution, which is called a theory (though never empirically established with the strength of evidence which the scientific community normally requires for theory status), and is taught in schools and cited as an basic assumption as if it were a scientific law. Further, scientists, academics, and some others have appealed to the legal system to block the serious presentation of the alternative of intelligent design.

As to your implicit assertion (or more correctly, the assertion I infer), that in religion there is no room for provisionality, I disagree, based on 42 years of personal experience and observation. For those whose religion is a form handed down, it may in fact be dogmatic. However, in what I hold to be true Christian faith, faith and beliefs are 1. subject to examination and 2. capable of standing up under the scrutiny. I can tell you that from the time I was first shown in the black and white of the Bible the message that one can personally experience a relationship with God (an assertion which conflicted with my prior religious teaching), I have consistently questioned everything. (In one church experience in which I was challenged by the tweens to help them examine “what we believe”, the pastor said to me, “You’ll lead them to the right answers [what the church believes] won’t you?”, and I replied, “I can’t promise that. We’ll see what the Bible says.”) I have always abhorred the phrase, “Well, our church believes…”, and have relied on the Bible as the final authority.

Now having said that, I acknowledge that there are, in fact and myth, “gray areas”, or more correctly, unclear areas in the Bible, and also that there is controversy about the authenticity of the Bible. I will only say here that there is plenty of empirical proof of the Bible’s authenticity (there are whole books–indeed, whole libraries–dealing with that subject). And as to the gray areas, I’ll quote a preacher I once heard about being asked if he wasn’t bothered by the parts of the Bible he didn’t understand, who replied, “I’m a whole lot more bothered by the parts I DO understand.”

But I digress. I accept/believe in the authority and authenticity of the Bible, but my belief, while it started as a step of faith, has been firmly established by my “empirical research”, that is, my continual reassessment of the Bible’s content as evidenced in my personal experience and my direct observations of events and lives around me, and of the Bible’s authenticity by my frequent revisits to the evidences of history and archeology as to the origins of and preservation of the Bible. For 42 years, my stream of incoming data has consistently reinforced my provisionally-held beliefs. I don’t consider that dogmatism.

The first question is dishonest-even for a Christian. It implies that absent a definitive answer on man’s origins that a God of some type is THE answer. Like I said. Dishonest.

As to the second question, people make stuff up to control other people. Just like the movie Marjoe we see over and over again that the heads of the religions have little belief and mostly use their religion to control people.

Religion is child abuse.

It has been my observation over my lifetime that there seems to be an inverse relationship between one’s confidence in his/her position and the amount of anger, yelling, etc. in his/her argument.

Desmond Tutu quotes his father’s advice: Don’t shout louder; improve your argument.