Religion

This is not an entry into the religion debates so much as a bit of personal history.

I was raised Roman Catholic and religious, but started questioning it near the end of high school. I wrestled with the evidence for a few years. By 20, I saw myself as firmly agnostic. I couldn’t rule out the existence of God, but it seemed unlikely.

Since then, I’ve drifted further toward atheism, and I assign a probability of less than 10% to the existence of a God that resembles the one in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Still, unlike a lot of atheists I know, I don’t dismiss religion out of hand. Atheism leaves us with a lot of questions, and religion at least attempts to provide answers.

This is an account of why I changed my mind fifteen years ago. I recognize that there are strong arguments both for and against God that I’m not including here. It’s focused on Catholicism, but much is applicable to other mainstream religions.

Miracles aren’t convincing

The majority of empirical evidence for classical Christianity is accounts of miracles that aren’t much different from accounts of other phenomena that we routinely dismiss, like aliens coming to Earth or ghosts or the Loch Ness monster or the Greek gods. Some people saw something that can’t be easily explained within our existing understanding of natural laws, and they suggest it’s irrefutable evidence for something beyond natural laws.

While some of these stories seem compelling in isolation, they’re less compelling when viewed as the strongest evidence we have. There are billions of people out there; strange coincidences (and bizarre hallucinations) are bound to happen sometimes. Some are strange enough to seem inexplicable without the existence of God/aliens/ghosts/monsters/Zeus. Even so, I think aliens/ghosts/monsters/Zeus are very improbable; are the stories of miracles so much stronger that I’m willing to put God in a separate category?

Introspection tells us little

A non-empirical case for God is that we can look inside ourselves and “feel” His presence in some way. Okay, say that God gave humans a sixth sense–a religion-detector–as a way to steer them toward Christianity. And yet it seems that many Hindus feel the truth of Hinduism within themselves and many Muslims feel the truth of Islam. These religions make claims that are in conflict with each other and with Christianity, so somebody’s sixth sense is wrong. Whose? Probably everyone’s. The religion-detector is very susceptible to suggestion: when it fires at all, it leads people to affirm the truth of whatever faith they’ve been raised in (except for some rare cases of cross-religion conversion).

God doesn’t intervene, and we can’t explain it (well)

Is God messing with us? The evidence of His existence is murky at best, but Christian teaching emphasizes the importance of believing in Him. If He’s both powerful and benevolent, why is He not just popping up and explaining the actual nature of the universe–or at that He’s real–to us? It seems cruel, or at least odd.

I met a lot of devout and academic Catholics in college, and some had answers to the God-messing-with-us critique¹. But the answers were complicated, and left me with the strong feeling of “working backwards”: starting with a conclusion and massaging arguments until they could support it. Yes, we can tell a story about how God is omnipotent, benevolent, and extremely determined to only work in mysterious ways. But is that really a plausible story? Or is it more plausible that smart religious people are searching for a chain of reasoning to justify His unwillingness to give us any obvious signs? That’s not a search for the truth.

The Problem of Evil is much the same. If God is both omnipotent and benevolent, why would He allow such terrible things to happen? Choose your own example here, but why let people suffer so greatly? Why allow humans in the world to literally be tortured to death? All explanations seemed contrived, and this is a big deal. A good God should be very serious about making the world good, or at least not horrifying.

Falsifiability

Religion is almost tailor-made to be unfalsifiable. It rests on a few key events that are very hard to verify, many of which happened thousands of years ago, and makes almost no other falsifiable claims². That doesn’t disprove it, but it’s difficult to accept. To me it really feels like cheating. If you’re earnestly searching for the true nature of the universe, shouldn’t you have a theory that makes at least a few testable predictions?

Where that leaves me

Many arguments for atheism are bad too. The nature of knowing plenty of atheists is that you hear a lot of half-baked takedowns of religion. Some even resemble the “working backwards” nature of religious arguments, like disliking some conclusion that religion leads to and thus concluding its premises are incorrect.

But the real case for atheism is that it’s just simpler than having to justify all the weird things about God’s existence.

The development of religion still makes sense without God: Humans have been searching for meaning for eons, and social groups that developed useful myths were able to survive and propagate. Modern religions all had some aspects that made them adaptive, and so they survived. Believers are primed to expect religious miracles, so they occasionally notice coincidences (or hallucinate) and report that they saw a religious miracle, and that helps sustain religion to this day.

A world with a traditional conception of God requires more explaining. New evidence could change my mind, but I consider religion improbable.

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