Proving negatives?

Apologetics: n. process by which the religious make up excuses for still believing in their religion when there are absolutely no good reasons at all to still believe in it. Typically, these excuses range from bad to piss fucking poor to completely ridiculous lies.

Talking to the religious can be an interesting excercise in teasing out tangled lines of thought.

For example, when someone asks me why I don't believe in god, it seems they're actually asking me two questions at once and I'm sometimes not sure which one they want me to answer.

The first question they're asking is 'why don't you believe in an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit that is the author of the cosmos?'

My answer to that is simple: because there isn't one.

This simple, direct, and rather self-evident answer usually flusters the religious.

The following dialogue may result:

"But you don't know that for sure."

"I don't have to. I don't know for sure that unicorns don't exist and I have no problem disbelieving in them and no one else would object to my disbelief. The reason is because there aren't any unicorns."

"You can't compare god and unicorns."

"Sure I can. There really isn't any difference between an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit and an imaginary white horse with a narwhal horn sticking out of its forehead. In fact, at least the unicorn has a real life counterpart which is easy to visualize--a horse. The point is, you can't really give your 'god' privileged status as an intellectual artifact just because you've chosen to believe in it. In reality, both god and unicorns are human inventions and because neither are real, they are most definitely comparable as non-existant things. But I'll try to make this a little easier to understand. I don't have to know for sure that Zeus doesn't exist to disbelieve in him. Why? Because there is no such person. And you would not object to that reasoning. I disbelieve in your Abrahamic mammalian creator spirit for same exact reason you don't believe in Zeus, Aphrodite, Hades or any Greek god."

"Okay, but you still don't know for sure."

"Like I said, I don't have to. Until someone can show me some evidence that your creator spirit is real or that unicorns are real or that Zeus is really hanging out on Mt. Olympus, I don't have to believe in any of those things because all we really know them as is human fabrications. If you want me to withhold my disbelief, you have to show me some evidence. I don't have to prove something doesn't exist. That's ridiculous. It's a complete mistake in thinking, and a totally counterproductive exercise. Every human being who has ever lived could each spend their entire lives trying to prove the nonexistence of a single nonexistant thing and still never be able to. It's a metaphysical goose-chase. Instead, if I am confronted with an intellectual invention, like gods, who are very very unlikely to exist based on what we know about the world, I look for some evidence to support the claims of those who posit their existence. When no evidence is forthcoming, I conclude that these very unlikely ideas must not be real. Quite simple. It works for unicorns, it works for leprechauns, it works for pink elephants, it works for fairies, it works for Quetzocuatl, Horus, and Asshurbanipal, it works for Ahura-Mazda, it works for Santa Claus, it works for King Kong, it works for Zeus, and it works for your mammalian creator god."

"Yeah...but...we don't know everything about the universe..."

"But we know some things. And those things don't really seem to support your claim that a mammalian creator spirit is behind the cosmos. Yes, there are gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps represent things we don't know, as you said. Unfortunately, when we don't know something, we just don't know. We can guess, or speculate, or hypothesize, but even then only if there is some evidence off of which to base our guesses, speculations, or hypotheses. When it comes to what we don't know, we just don't know. We can't really say anything valuable about what we don't know. So, you can't fill in the gaps in our knowledge with wishful thinking about a creator intelligence that made you specially. You can't fill in the gaps with anything. The gaps stay gaps until we know what fills them. Until then, you can't take something we don't fully understand, claim with certainty that we'll never understand it, and then claim that your imaginary mammal deity is behind it. Why? For precisely the same reason you were trying to claim that I couldn't fully disprove the existence of your god earlier--because you don't know. In point of fact, you don't know for sure any more than I do."

"But god works in mysterious ways."

"That's a copout and you know it. Saying god works in mysterious ways is essentially the same thing as saying the universe is godless and indifferent to human beings. From what we humans can tell, a universe without a god seems to behave in the exact same way as a universe run by a god whose plan is mysterious and incomprehensible. If the outcomes are the same, why posit the extra object for which we have no evidence? If god's existence is such that his role in the universe is reduced to something we can neither experience, measure, or observe, then what use is the god as an idea? We simply don't need the god. We have no evidence for the god. So, we can safely set the idea aside. Quite simple. There isn't a god. The universe works exactly the way we would expect a universe to work if there was no god running it. The incomprehensible plan idea is like a retrofit of some earlier notion of monotheism in order to fit that observed behavior of the universe. It's a copout."

"Yeah, well...you can't know everything. You have to come to god through faith."

Here is the point where we can discern the second question the religious person was actually asking.

That second question is 'why don't you believe in the god of my particular religion?'

That question, I think, is a little more complicated. I mean, aside from the fact that I already don't believe in any gods, why I find a particular system of belief objectionable is multi-faceted. My reasons for finding Christianity utterly worthless as a mental construct are somewhat different than my reasons for rejecting Islam as a complete pile of human thought-garbage. The same goes for Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or whatever.

The fact remains, I don't believe in any gods. But each religion has its own different pile of extraneous brain-excrement that they have fastened onto to the more-or-less easily dismissed concept of a universal creator intelligence. For each set of ridiculous truth-claims each religion makes I have my own moral, political, philosophical, and scientific objections. That conversation gets a little longer.

The idea of faith, however, is the most distressing. From what I've gathered in my experience as a living human part of a large human society, the notion that believing in something unquestioningly with no evidence is one of the highest human virtues is pretty disgusting. Far from being a virtue, I would say the human capacity for completely unwarranted assent to the ridiculous claims of others, made from totally unearned positions of authority, is one of the worst flaws in our psychological makeup that can be acknowledged. It goes entirely against every rational thought process we have at our disposal. I'm talking about our capacities for reason, skepticism, systematic questioning, curiosity--all traits which have allowed us to become not only more knowledgeable about the cosmos and more advanced and sophisticated technologically and culturally, but traits that have allowed us to achieve the mental and social progress necessary for more progressive, more ethical, and more just treatment of other human beings, politically, and economically.

And I might point out that even with the progress we've made since the stone age, we still have a very very long way to go as a species. So the idea of faith, which contradicts and often renders null those important human traits, bothers me a bit.

Faith is not a virtue to be lauded but a chink in our mental armor which can be exploited--a mental weakness by which people are manipulated for the agendas of others at best and turned to totally corrupt fanatical shitbags at worst.

I've come to despise the entire idea of faith because of what it does to people. It's a poison, something that seeps into and rots out every functional mental process in a person, something that eventually destroys the basis for all of their reasoning. In my opinion, without a strong, implicit rational basis for our behavior, morality becomes an arbitrary construct--something that can manipulated and rearranged at whim by whatever demagogue or power freak controls the faith that has its intellectual tentacles around the notion of morality. When the use of objective, rational thought becomes unfashionable for analyzing the world; when the need for employing systematic and rigorous scientific-questioning is contradicted; when our natural skepticism becomes unneccesary for decision-making--then faith becomes a basis for knowing the supposed basic truths of the universe; then faith becomes the basis for acknowledging the rights of other human beings--and then the entire implicit notion of cooperation, compassion, and justice becomes extraneous and arbitrary. Those ideas become things that come from outside of us, and as such, become subject to manipulation.

If morality comes out of a stupid sacred book instead from a rational standpoint inside of us, what's to stop faith-muddled fanatics from changing the book to fit their bizarre prejudices? The prevailing morality will change as often as the book is reprinted, and that is something we have in fact seen if you look at any biblical history. The book itself doesn't even need to change one iota, all people have to do is make claims about what the book actually means and there you go, the result is the same--morality has been manipulated to fit the xenophobic agenda of some spiritual oligarchy--once again, something we have seen historically.

I think this trend has had a pretty disturbing effect--it seems like in a lot of faith-communities, the entire notion of fact-based-discourse is reviled. Facts have become the enemy of the religious, even where the facts don't necessarily condemn their religious beliefs. Facts have become the philosophical problem of the apologists because in any situation facts can snag their attempts to manipulate not just morality but reality. So all facts should be regarded with contempt, just in case some aspect of reality needs to be manipulated in order to goad the faith constituency. This is, of course, already a problem in media and politics to a degree, but I think it has taken on its most comprehensive, sophisticated, and virulent cast with the evangelical and fundamental religions. As religious zealouts, spiritual leaders, and evangelizing public figureheads have inserted themselves deeper and deeper into media, politics, education, and the public eye, there emerges a pretty frightening likelihood of further poisoning and degrading the intellectual discourse at ALL levels in our society.

And I mean our global society.

And that is pretty fucking gross.