Why I am a Hell-Bound Atheist

A friend of mine asked me about my belief system and when I finished writing up my email to her, I found that I had a nice little stream of consciousness post. Hope it strikes a chord.

Why I am an Atheist - (Besides the fact that the burden of proof is on the theists)

Atheism has traditionally been defined as “the absence of a belief in any gods.” Side note: you will note from this definition that an ‘agnostic’ (one who doesn’t know what to believe or one who says that we can never know either way) is merely an atheist since the agnostic, by definition, does not believe in any gods. Within Atheism, however, there are two main current schools of thought: weak atheism and strong atheism. Weak atheism is the traditional absence of belief in any gods whereas strong atheism is the active belief that there are no gods. It is a subtle distinction, but an important one in some cases. I tend more towards the strong atheistic view.

Essentially, the strong atheists point out two observations. First, we find so much evidence against the existence of any god. Second, there is no evidence that supports the existence of a god. I shall discuss each claim in turn.

EVIDENCE AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GODS

As for the evidence against the existence of gods, there are many arguments in this vein. The simplest example of which is the “Problem of Evil.” Epicurus first raised this problem by asserting the truth of the following syllogism:

1. If a perfectly good god exists, then there is no evil in the world.

2. There is evil in the world.

3. Therefore, a perfectly good god does not exist.

Another way of putting it is by asking someone to attempt to reconcile the following three assertions:

1. God is all powerful

2. God is all loving

3. Innocent people suffer

I have found in my journeys that it is important to focus on the suffering of innocents at the hands of natural forces such as the thousands of infants drowned in the 2004 tsunami. This is because one of the theodicies (an attempt to provide a logical justification for the existence of evil) is that of free will. “God must give man free will,” claim the defenders of the gods, “because free will is such a valuable thing. God could not eliminate evil and suffering without eliminating free will as well.”

This argument falters in several places.

First, if God is all powerful, why is he constrained by this “either-or” choice? We couldn’t he make man have free will and just remove evil as a choice? It seems illogical to ask that. But God presumably created the very rules of logic and could have chosen to create this universe with a different set of logical rules, even if only in the area of evil. If he chose not to, he chose to allow evil which means he is not all-loving or all-good. If he could not make such a choice, then he is constrained by the laws of the universe and not all-powerful. Which begs the question, “Who is God’s God?”

Another related argument is the question, “Then why didn’t god make doing evil things so much more distasteful and doing things more pleasurable?” The apologists argue that this soon becomes a “toy world” where free will has no real value. This is shown to be a hollow argument by asking, “Then, if increasing the pain experienced when doing evil and increasing the pleasure experienced when doing good is something that God doesn’t want to have happen for fear of lessning the value of free will, then shouldn’t humans avoid trying to do the same thing? By passing laws that do just that, aren’t we subverting God’s will?” No one seems to agree with this.

Another problem with the free will argument is that it denies the free will of the victim. The victims of rape, murder, torture, slavery, etc., presumably want to exercise their free will to remain free of such evils. How is it that the criminal’s free will wins out in so many cases? In the case where infants are murdered, it appears that they had no free will at all.

Finally, if one believes that god knows the past present and future, and has always known them, then he must have known that people would sin and not ask for forgiveness and would therefore burn in a lake of fire for all eternity. Two problems arise here. First, many argue that this means that there is no free will. Basically, if god knows what I will do in the future, that means I am powerless to do otherwise when the time comes. If I cannot choose to do anything other than what god knows I will do, I have no free will.

Second, why did god bother to make people who will burn in hell? He essentially just made a bunch of people (six or seven billion if you count up all the past and present non-Christians in the world) who would live for a few years and then burn for eternity. Why? It’s not like he was running an experiment and wanted to see what would happen. He *knew* what would happen before he started. He knew who would go to heaven and who would go to hell and he made those whom he knew would suffer for eternity anyway. Basically, as an atheist, he made me just to torture me forever. For those who would next argue that sinners are needed to teach people to believe in god. To that I reply, “Is that the best way god has of teaching people to believe in him? Make billions of people and burn them forever AFTER the people you are trying to teach something to have died anyway?” Why not just make people with the belief switch turned on? Why the eternal torturing of billions of people? Besides, the only thing that the faithful see here on Earth is that evil people get away with their evil the vast majority of the time. It is only when they are in heaven that they can hear the screams of the damned, a fact which the Bible makes sure to point out. (If that is true, how could heaven be a pleasant place? You hear the screams of burning men women and children for all eternity? Are you supposed to feel good about that?) It seems the mere fact that earth-bound humans see evil people get away with so much would tend to make fewer believers not more. How does the torture of hell help other than to give the saved in heaven something to be smug about?

The final answer, and other the first that evangelicals cite, is that of "original sin." This is one of those pat answers that the believers spout out without really thinking about it. Original sin is actually a LESS moral answer than a pure free will argument. The theory behind original sin is that because Adam and Eve broke a rule made by god, that god knew that they would break, (I smell a set up) then god had to damn everyone to experience evil. Damn me for the actions of another? How does this make logical or moral sense. (I won't belabor the point that god KNEW that A & E would bite the fruit when he made the world and he decided to do it anyway. It still comes down to god;s choice of creating evil and suffering and torturing people whom he created, knowing that they would inevitably be tortured for all eternity.)

But I digress. This is but one line of evidence, logical and not physical, that tends to show an absence of god. There are many more. (E.G. If the Bible is the inspired 100% true word of God, why put trillions upon trillions of pieces of evidence around to try and trick us to believe that the Earth was 14 billion years old instead of the 6,000 years old that the Bible says it is? Etc.)

LACK OF EVIDENCE FOR GOD

Even if god exists, he made me a rational being that has found great value in the scientific method. No experimental system has proven the existence of god. Experiment after experiment has shown that prayer has no effect whatsoever on the recovery of the sick or that the results for prayer targets and non targets are equivocal. (Some even show harmful effects.) Every scripture is manifestly man made and a document of its time. Prophecies are all written eons before the later scriptures that purport to fulfill them. Prophesies are as vague as horoscopes because they need to always apply to reader’s present time. (All it would take for me to believe in a higher power would be a copy of a scroll dated to the time of the gospels that says something like “In the year 1998 a series of computers will be hooked together using the TCPIP protocol and will be known as the Internet.” Or perhaps it could include a complete genetic sequence that matched that of the human genome. Or perhaps the Ten Commandments writ large across the face of the moon. Nothing like this exists anywhere we have looked. The Bible is filled with figs and farming tips™, nothing more. Evolution is now fact and it is one of the worst ways to develop a human we can think of. (It also goes against Genesis 1 and 2. While Gen 1 and 2 contradict each other in many places, neither of them support evolution.)

We readily acknowledge that one can never prove a negative. You can no more prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn (blessings be upon her holy hooves) doesn’t exist any more than I can prove that God doesn’t exist. However, the evidence indicates that the chances of any gods existing is equal or less than the chance of gravity stopping to work tomorrow. Since I “believe” in gravity, I should also, on evidence of equal or greater strength, “believe” that there are no gods.

Ergo, I do.

UPDATE: After a technical issue and an absence, I have had to re-post all of my old posts. As a result there will be many posts listed as published today, Dec 3, 2009, that were posted sometime earlier in the year, but I do not know the exact date. this post is one of them.