Since 2003, the online home of Jordon Kalilich, software engineer in Seattle, Washington, USA.
I was raised to be Roman Catholic. When I was a teenager, I became an atheist.
A theist is a person who believes in a god or gods; the term theism refers to this belief. Similarly, an atheist is someone who does not believe in a god or gods. Atheism is the lack of belief in gods. (It's hardly worth being called an "-ism," but we're stuck with the name.)
Sometimes, people make a distinction between atheists who simply do not believe that gods exist ("weak atheism") and those who also believe that gods do not exist ("strong atheism"). Both kinds of people are atheists because they do not hold a belief in gods. Atheism does not require belief.
Atheism is more common than most people think. It's the default position; everyone is born an atheist. What's more, everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods; no one believes in every god ever worshiped by man. So, in a way, it makes more sense to ask people why they're not completely atheists, but in a world where all-out atheists are a minority, we are left having to defend ourselves.
There are arguably some atheistic religions (Buddhism, for example), but most self-described atheists are neither spiritual nor religious. I became such an atheist after thinking critically about religion.
Since the dawn of human history, people have used religion to explain the world around them. Religions often give supernatural explanations about the nature of reality. A common claim is that an invisible, all-powerful god or gods created the universe and influence people's lives.
To prove that this is true, we would have to be able to test for the existence of a god. But according to theists, gods exist outside the universe, or they're not bound by the rules they created for it. So it would be meaningless for us humans to test for gods in this universe. After all, they could just be hiding.
It doesn't stop with gods. Religions often make untestable claims about the existence of spirits, afterlives, reincarnation, and so on. Each religion's claims are similar to, but usually incompatible with, others'. Once I realized this, I decided that no religion's claims are especially convincing. After all, they are all unprovable.
What are the odds that one religion is right and all of the others are wrong? Belief systems that many people once took seriously—Greek mythology, for instance—are now universally dismissed as nonsense because, well, they don't make sense. Why should religions that people currently believe in be any different? They don't make sense either.
I could have just chosen to believe in whatever religion sounded good to me, but I wouldn't be satisfied. Religion deals with weighty subjects: Who are we? How did we get here? How should we live? These kinds of questions have profound implications in real life, and many of them have answers based in fact.
Given the choice between unprovable speculation and facts based on evidence, I would choose the latter any day. The world is too important for us to base our existence on anything else.
While religion explains what is known by ascribing it to the unknown, science explains the unknown with what is known. And that method has brought us a long way. Scientific progress has allowed you retrieve a copy of this essay from anywhere in the world in an instant. Think about that: the technology all around you has been made possibly due to the scientific method, a trial-and-error process based on observation.
Long ago, everyone agreed that gods were responsible for natural phenomena like illnesses and the weather. Over time, science showed us that germs are directly responsible for disease and that differences in air pressure are directly responsible for the weather. It is with this knowledge that we've been able to save lives by eradicating smallpox from the earth and predicting the paths of hurricanes days before they strike.
Scientific progress has rendered gods increasingly unnecessary. And if gods are supposed to be the creators and overseers of the universe, why would an unnecessary god exist at all? To paraphrase Douglas Adams, gods are no longer explanations of anything; instead, they themselves need an insurmountable amount of explaining.
Science makes it reasonable not to believe that gods exist. Of course, we can never be absolutely sure of anything in science—theories can be overturned by new evidence—but look where being almost exactly sure has brought us. It's better than not being sure at all.
As much as people try to reconcile religion and science, the fact remains that they are two competing ways of viewing the world, and only one has any merit. If today I made up a religion that said that the earth was expelled from the nose of a sneezing cosmic giant, no sane person would argue that my fanciful tales are just as valid as the work of geologists and astrophysicists using observations and rigorous testing to obtain actual data.
Science has helped me see all religions for the sneezing cosmic giant stories that they are. That's why I am an atheist.
Created December 25, 2009
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