Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (17 page)

Science has answered many of these questions — not all, but quite a lot. And in every case, a natural explanation has replaced a supernatural one.

If scriptural claims are valid, it seems that scientific inquiry should be constantly confirming those claims. Instead, they’re found to be incorrect, one after another, and there’s a steady retreat of supernatural explanations into the remaining gaps in human knowledge — an approach sometimes called “the God of the gaps.”

Getting humble about humanness

Christianity was the religion I was born into the middle of, so Christian ideas were naturally some of the first I wrestled with, Jacob-like. And one of the defining Christian ideas is that humans are special, created separate from animals and endowed with immortal souls. Now that science has determined this isn’t the case — that humans are in fact animals, and that they share common ancestors with other animals living today — the very idea of the soul and human specialness deserves another look. And when people take that look, many find that the central narrative of Christianity no longer works.

Astrology took a similar blow when it lost one of its central, foundational principles — that Earth is in the center of the universe — about 600 years ago. But that hasn’t hurt horoscope sales too much.

Humans weren’t here from the beginning — in fact
,
Homo sapiens
have only been on the planet for less than one tenth of one percent (0.1 percent) of its history. (More on that in the next section.) If other animals are without souls, God must have chosen a moment in evolutionary history when humans were “human enough” to merit souls. Because evolution happens by achingly tiny steps, no single moment happened when humans crossed a line from “prehuman” into “fully human.” Among other problems, such a sudden transition would result in a generation of children who are ensouled but whose parents aren’t — a very weird prospect, I’d say.

Go the other way, declaring that yes, animals also have souls, and I’ll have to follow that down the tree of life, ensouling bacteria and my front lawn at the same time. A lovely idea in its way, but it does challenge the very heart of the Christian narrative.

No matter how you spin it, the idea that I have a soul and my dog doesn’t have one is an enormous problem, one that many find fatal to the idea of the soul and salvation.

It is important to note that not everyone finds evolution and Judeo-Christian belief incompatible. I’m glad they find that possible. I (and most atheists) don’t quite see how they manage it, but it’s nice to have their support for evolution education.

Coming (really, really) late to the party

One discovery that deals an especially strong blow to the idea that humans are at the center of creation is how very recently humanity has arrived on the scene. The following example puts the human animal in humbling perspective.

Spread your arms out to your sides, like a plane. Your wingspan is a timeline. Your left fingertip represents the time of the first single-celled life on Earth, and your right fingertip is right this minute. Between the two is 3.7 billion years of time, the history of life on Earth. At what point in that span would you say the dinosaurs enter the picture? And what about humans?

When I was young, I’d have put the dinosaurs somewhere around my left shoulder, and then people somewhere in the middle of my chest. Then I spent some time with Carl Sagan, one of the great popularizers of science, and learned that I was off by . . . well, kind of a lot.

From your left fingertip, all the way up your arm, past your left shoulder, across your chest, and past your right shoulder, life on Earth is nothing but bacteria. By the time you reach your right wrist, the most impressive form of life on Earth, the king of the beasts, is the worm. In the middle of your right palm you finally get your dinosaurs, and they’re extinct by your last finger joint.

Run your eyes along that history again so far. All that history, all that life, and still no appearance by the Main Attraction, the species for whom everything is supposedly made — humankind.

So when
do
humans finally show up at the party? Well, it’s more than fashionably late.
Homo sapiens
fits in one small fingernail clipping.

Realizing that the human species has only arrived on the scene in the last
one tenth of one percent
of the history of life on Earth . . . well, it’s a humbling earthquake of perspective, one of several that seriously cracked the foundations of traditional religion.

Grasping the size of the universe

In the first millennium BCE (1000 BCE to 1 BCE), when most of the major religions were born and most scriptures got themselves written down, Earth was believed to be the center of a really small universe, one that could fit inside what now is known to be the orbit of the moon. You can easily see why humanity was pretty cosmically important when the stage was that small.

Fast forward about 2,500 years, and science now recognizes the sun as one of about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe. To take a single step into that immense scale, drop a penny on the ground, and call it the sun. At this scale, the nearest star — the very nearest one — would be another penny 350 miles away. And it goes from there, trillions of times over. Earth is a speck in space and a blink in time. That makes it pretty unlikely that humans would be the central concern of the creator of all that, but people can still be the central concern of each other. All of humanity is in the same itty bitty boat.

It’s not surprising that religions born prior to the Scientific Revolution put humanity at the center of creation and at the core of God’s concern. The universe as humans understood it then made it possible to do so. Making such a claim with a straight face today is much more difficult, and many people find it impossible.

Seeing that the universe is just as you would expect it to be without a God

Some religious answers to challenging questions about God are worth considering carefully. Others require some Olympic-quality back bending. If the judges place no limit on the amount of back bending allowed, reality can indeed be made to conform to the God opinion. But to meet the world honestly, I’d rather conform my opinions to reality.

One of the best ways to do this is by applying a principle called Occam’s Razor. When deciding between two possibilities, the one that requires the fewest assumptions — the least back bending — tends to be the right answer. An all-powerful, all-good God can be made to fit into this universe, explaining away evil and catastrophe and death and uncertainty like a game of cosmological Twister —
Left hand blue! Right foot red!
— or a person can notice, at long last, that the universe is just as one would expect it to be if no supernatural God is at the wheel.

I can like the fact or I can dislike it, or some combination of the two. But as soon as I decided to disregard my preferences and instead to discover reality as honestly as I could, there was little left to do. I was an atheist.

The next step was deciding what that meant and what to do with it.

Knowing What Most Atheists Actually Do Believe

A lot more is worth knowing about the atheist point of view than the fact that atheists don’t believe in God. Many other beliefs and values tend to come along with that disbelief. These sections look at a few of the more important ones.

Seeing the natural universe as all there is — and enough

After a talk in Northern Ireland in which writer and gay icon Quentin Crisp described himself as an atheist, a woman stood and said, “Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?”

It’s a funny story, but it also reflects the general feeling many believers have that atheists must be rejecting just one
particular
concept of God. Often people assume that I don’t believe in the “old man with the white beard,” so a religious friend will rush to assure me that she doesn’t believe in that God either. It’s a well-meaning attempt to find common ground, but it misses the mark. I do share an awful lot with my religious friends — see
Chapter 16
— but I promise we’re not going to find any of that common ground under the feet (or hooves, or wheels, or swirling pink vapor, or imperceptible, immaterial spirit) of
any
kind of God.

Most atheists believe that this natural, physical, material universe is all there is. That doesn’t mean everything has been explored, understood, or even perceived. But if we as atheists ever could explore to the far reaches of that universe, and into every plane of existence there is, I think our explorations would continue to find a natural, physical, material universe.

No good reason exists to believe a supernatural realm of any kind exists — no gods, ghosts, or spirits of any sort. I may be wrong about that, and that wouldn’t bother me a bit. As a matter of fact, it would be entirely awesome. But right now, everything that’s been suggested as evidence of a supernatural realm has a better, more likely natural explanation. And that’s the position of most other atheists as well. They aren’t just disbelieving in a particular idea of God, but in the whole idea of gods. And disbelief in all other supernatural entities and realms tends to be part of the package.

Some atheists wish God did exist. Though I could do without some of his advertised qualities, an all-powerful, entirely good God would solve a lot of real problems. But I’m fully satisfied with the universe however it is, with or without God, and I feel privileged to be awake in it, if only for a moment or two. More astonishing wonder and meaning and sheer delight exists in this natural universe than I can wrap my mind and arms around in a single lifetime. Oh, but I plan to wear myself out trying.

I bang on about this at some length in
Chapter 16
, but for now, let me just say that most atheists share my feeling that this natural universe is not only all there is, but it’s also more than enough.

Accepting that this is our one and only life

Aside from some Eastern atheistic religions that include a belief in reincarnation, like Jainism and some departments of Buddhism, you can safely say that atheism includes the opinion that this life is your one and only. Religious believers often recoil in horror at the thought, saying it’s an unbearable idea that drains life of all meaning.

I’ve never understood that. Why would added time add meaning, even if that additional time is infinite? If I live to be 80 instead of 40, is my life automatically more meaningful? Most people would probably agree it’s not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These changes in quantity don’t seem to budge the meaning meter at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic question remains in place. (In fact, the novel and movie
Tuck Everlasting
does a great job making the opposite claim — that immortality actually
robs
life of its meaning.)

That life ends, and ends for good, should give what time you do have an extraordinary preciousness. If this moment is only one of an endless parade of moments,
that
seems less special to me. But knowing that this moment is part of a limited life, one with no do-overs, can lend a whole new depth, intensity, and meaning to that moment.