Y’know, I love this guy more every time I hear him talk (or in this case, read something he wrote). Quoted here in its entirety:
I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The Atheism part is easy.
But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Lack of evidence isn’t evidence of a lack. We can’t prove love exists either. Like god, it can’t be measured or observed (except perhaps if we argue that we’re observing its effects, but then we open the door for allowing others to argue that certain things are the effects of god, whether we can see/measure him or not). We can say we feel love – but I bet there are lots of people who say they feel god. I’m not one of them. Notice that your guy here has to say he *believes* there is no god – he doesn’t know, and he can never know. I also don’t believe in god, but really, we’re both just asserting a “faith” of a different kind: anti-god faith.
Sorry Pinky, but that’s bollocks. Love is an emotion that can be tested for not directly but by its effects, much like we can’t actually “see” a black hole but the theory regarding them fits with observed phenomenon and behaviours that would be present if they did exist.
God isn’t some ephemeral hard-to-test emotion, at least to people who believe in Him. God is an omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful being who created everything. When you have a lack of proof you have to look at the “Dragon in the Garage” argument that Carl Sagan put forth which asks this question: “Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?”
What’s the difference between a world with a God and one where people just think one exists? Nothing! Assuming that the more likely of the two possibilities (God/No God) is an all-powerful being that knows everything but influences it in no testable way is ridiculous.
Read my comment above more carefully. Just like you can “prove” love exists by measuring its effects, many would say you can prove god exists by measuring his effects (ie the existence of life, human morality, what have you). And once again, Carl Sagan notwithstanding, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. There are many things which current science cannot prove or explain, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means we don’t have the right tools to measure them yet. Maybe they don’t exist – that’s definitely a possibility. But there was a time when we couldn’t observe, measure, or prove the existence of molecules. But they were there alright.
I think there is a problem with positing that god exists because of what I believe to be an absence of proof – but I must also acknowledge that I cannot prove that he doesn’t exist either. In a lovely twist of irony, I (and all other athiests) are reduced to insisting we don’t believe in god, not that we absolutely, positively, certainly *know* he does not exist. Your friend Sagan has demonstrated that nicely – we can’t disprove the dragon’s existence.
The boundaries between science and religion are much fuzzier than most people would like to admit. Even our current level of knowledge and success doesn’t interfere much with faith. This is because explanations in terms of secondary causes need not exclude ultimate references to a primary cause – just because we can demonstrate that evolution is likely, doesn’t preclude the existence of an intelligent creator who set things up that way.
As you know I don’t believe in god, but until someone proves to me that he really doesn’t exist, I’ll be quiet and respectful of people who do believe. Who knows which one of us is right? Not me. If you have absolute proof of his nonexistence, I’d love to hear it.
Are you respectful of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster too?
If love doesn’t exist, then neither does hate.
You should see Bullshit. I have both season. Highly entertaining.
Yeah, I’ve seen Season 1. Great stuff! I’ll have to watch Season 2 some time.
It is amazing to me the reasons people give for not believing in,
or in essence, hating God. From these I have gathered that those
people have a very crude understanding of God and His nature. I
blame this on the evangelicals of the past 40 years who shoved
this image of a “morality warden” down everyones’ throats. It is
unfortunate that these people were mislead by the so called Church.
I hope that if one day they so choose, they may come to know the
truth of God; understanding that God is a relationship of mutual
content and service that uplifts people and does not hold them down.
Coyote, you’ve said nothing that has anything to do with reality at all. Your comment was rhetorical feel-goodism that merely attempts to lure those who are having a hard time towards religion and the church.
“A very crude understanding of God and His nature”? He’s the omnipotent, all-seeing creator of the Universe. He explains the age-old question “where did we come from?” but unfortunately begs the question “Where did He come from?” Of course, that’s answered with “He has always been and He always shall.” Me, I skip the “God” bit and tend to think that about the Universe itself. Occam’s razor supports that decision. “Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler.”
I also don’t believe in other Gods. I don’t believe in Odin, nor Zeus, nor Shiva, nor Marduk, except perhaps that some of them may have been based on real people at some point before the stories about them grew. Perhaps in a thousand years one of your decendants will be amazed at “the reasons people give for not believing in The Almighty Elvis”.