It's really barely a draft

Some random thoughts on a few of the reasons I don’t believe in God (English)

May 11th, 2009 Posted in book, rant, review

I recently finished reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. It is a book about religion and why you should not believe in it (not just Christianity, all religions who believe in a supreme being, so Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., you get the and the idea). Simplistically said (and I don’t do the book justice here), it uses reason, logic and scientific evidence to showcase the ridiculousness of believing in religion over the theory of evolution (as those two theories, if you can even call religion a theory, are mutually exclusive).

The book was actually a very good read. It frames a lot of thoughts I have had on religion really well and explains them much better than I ever could. Of course lix count in the book is quite high and as a non-native speaker it’s not a book I just breezed through while listening to music and doing dishes, no – I had to read it thoroughly. Of course, maybe I felt it was like that because I am not used to reading about the subject of religion, but at any rate, some pretty unusual words I you don’t come across in normal conversations (at least, in conversations with me…) are present in the book . Luckily it was easy to get drawn into the book, and most of the time I felt like I couldn’t put it down. Julie must have had a hard time with me being so enthusiastic about the subject. Sorry honey!

Overall, you can categorize people into three categories:

1. Those that believe in the existence of God (theists)
2. Those that are not sure whether God exists (agnostics)
3. Those that do not believe in the existence of God (atheists)

Concerning those that believe in God, I cannot understand why as I haven’t seen irrefutable proof that any God exists at all. All I see is some old texts that people have taken as “truth” and started living by them. Holding e.g.  The Bible or the Qua’ran up to scrutiny, there are so many errors, contradictions that, to me, it becomes ridiculous to believe in. But even if I were to concede that a God exists, the next question is even more difficult, because which religion? If you’re Christian, you are probably going to say “<whichever brand of Christiantity you subscribe to>“, but why? Why not one of the other religions? why should you believe in your particular brand. Many claim to be the only true religion, and they therefore can’t all be right. Which is the right one then?

One of the common arguments I experience when discussing the subject (which is seldom because people become very touchy talking about religion – I suspect because deep down they know it’s not right. They probably, to quote the X-Files, WANT TO BELIEVE, and they can only keep doing that if they don’t scrutinize the texts or discuss the arguments because unless you ) is the use of anecdotal, or “personal” experiences. Recently I discussed it with a stranger, and her anecdote was typical. She had recently lost someone special (her grandmother) to her and sent a thought to God that, if he existed, to give her a sign that her grandmother was ok in heaven. Just then a shelf fell down from the wall, and she concluded that God existed and her grandmother way ok.
So what is wrong with that conclusion? Couldn’t that have been God? Yes it could, but if it were, God should be able to do so consistently and it should be possible to measure it, scientifically, because God wouldn’t stop doing his good work just because some humans were trying to measure what he did. God might work in mysterious ways (*sigh*), but given a large enough study sample, it should be possible to show God exists, should it have been him who made the shelf fall down in the example above. A bunch of people have tried to prove that God exists by having people pray for some patients in a hospital and another group of patients  not being prayed for and studying their outcome. To my knowledge, none of these studies have concluded God exists (but I have also only seen studies trying to prove The Christian God’s existsence, so maybe their trying to study the wrong God?).

Another common argument I experience is the “that shouldn’t be taken literally, it’s symbolic”. An argument I can understand someone who believes in God needs to take, as their “proof  of God’s existence” typically rely on texts that are thousands of years old, and thus pretty irrelevant to the way we live our lives today. But what I don’t like about the argument is my questions of “who decides what is to be taken literally and what is symbolic?”. Walking on water? living to be 1000 years old, separating the seas for people to walk across? the earth is 6000 years old? Maybe God is also only something symbolic then?

Anyway, I’m rambling, and I will likely ramble some more on the issue in the future, because I honestly cannot grasp why people can believe in that stuff other than denial of facts OR they are holding religion to another standard than they hold everything else to, which I cannot see why anyone should? Why should me saying “I can walk on water” be held to another standard than “Jesus walked on water”? Or how is it that religious people would probably answer differently when faced with the statement “barelyadraft is the son of God” where most probably would choose “false“, whereas when faced with “Jesus was the son of God” religious people (well to be fair, probably only Christians) would be more inclined to choose “true“?

If someone has read through this post and is a believer in God (any God – or Gods!), and knows of the some good literature that tries to prove the existence (or just make the most likely scenario the existence of God instead of the non-existence), I will be very interested in reading about it. I find it hard where to begin with the “pro theism” or “pro religion” books, because I don’t want to spend my time reading a mind-numbing book which basically states that “I’ve explained everything in the world except God because he cannot be explained”, because every idiot can do that – that is just another way of calling ignorance God. From my limited knowledge on the subject this is how many of the books go about exploring the subject (but I might be biased given my references).

Alright so I doubt the existence of God or Gods, so why not just be “agnostic” about the whole thing and say “we don’t know – we can’t be sure” and everybody is happy? Sure, it’s the diplomatic way to do it and everybody can walk away with their beliefs intact, but that does not make it right. Agnostics usually take the argument that we cannot be 100% certain. But when can we be 100% certain about anything? I found the following commentary quite useful to illustrate the issue of 100% certainty, from Erik Rasmussen’s blog

What are you really certain of? Anything that you can say you are certain of, I can claim that “I don’t think we can know for sure.” Do you think that the force of gravity will work tomorrow as it has so far today? Are you 100% certain? I think you are really only 99.999999999999% certain. You have no evidence that gravity has ever not worked, but anything could happen, right? How certain are you that you won’t die immediately after reading this sentence?

Still here? Good, let’s do some calculus. One of the things that surprises most calculus students is that 0.99999… = 1. How can that be? Well, the simple proof is that, if you agree that 1/3 = 0.33333…, which it does, then what do you get if you multiply both sides of the equation by 3? My point is that arguing the difference between “really quite sure” and “absolutely certain” is pointless and you’ll only end up in the big sticky semantic tar pit that’s called philosophy. When I say I am certain that there are no gods and that gravity will function tomorrow, I mean that I am as sure as anyone can really be about anything without being dogmatic. (from this post on Erik Rasmussen’s blog)

So yes, certainty is relative, but regarding religion there should be no uncertainty in the conviction that being agnostic seems like another way of avoiding conflict, which is just plain wrong. What’s left? Atheism, it seems like the only reasonable position to take given the evidence on the matter! Right?

Hehe, looking back at this post, two things strike me. One, this post was started back in October 2008, and I tried writing and revising it again in March this year, but not until now have I have finalized it…weird! I think I just find it very difficult about what to include and what not to include, because I find religion, and belief in religion, so incomprehensibly absurd, so I don’t know where to begin or end. What to include and what not, and that is why this has been difficult to write. The second point that strike me is that this post started out to be a review of The God Delusion, but turned out to be a mix of that and something else, which is why I chose not to call it “a review of The God Delusion”.

PS. I use “he” to describe God in this post, but that does not mean I see God as a Man. I only use the term as most bigger religions like the Abrahamic religions describe God in this way. About 3.8 billion people people belong to those religions.

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