In
this post I explained that I had very recently changed my position from theist (specifically Christian) to atheist. In that thread, I promised to make another post that explained in detail why I changed my mind. If you'd like to comment on my reasoning or on the general God vs no God discussion, this is the thread. If you'd like to comment on how this change has affected my life, or anything of that nature, please make such posts in the other thread. Sorry in advance for the length, I just couldn’t fully explain myself and keep it any shorter.
Okay. First, a brief history. I was born Christian, raised Christian, and throughout my life all my major friends and family have been Christian. Growing up, it was enough to take other (smart) people's word for it that the evidence for God's existence is overwhelming. After all, any kid can look around him and know that the world didn't come about by random chance. (I didn't understand at this point that natural selection is anything but random.)
As a senior in high school ('99/00) I was taking some classes at a local community college (not a brag, it's a pretty common program in WA), and I encountered very smart, very educated professors who were very unwilling to take God's existence for granted. And as a result of their teaching, I became convinced of the thought (my own, not by their comments) that if God does exist, the evidence should be there to support it. I read Dr Behe's
Darwin's Black Box, and the concept of irreducible complexity was overwhelmingly convincing. The bio-chemistry involved in the processes of life are so complex that, if you were to remove
any of the steps in the process, the whole system fails. And if Darwinian evolution can't explain how life got to be so complex (or even exists at all), the only other viable solution is Intelligent Design.
So at that point, I was logically convinced that the most likely explanation for the origin of life was God. If I had to put a number on my confidence, let's say I thought it was 97% likely that a Supernatural God designed life (and, most certainly, the universe too).
Fast forward a couple years to my senior year at Azusa Pacific University (the largest Christian university on the west coast). I took a philosophy class and an ethics class, and began discussing with very smart Christian professors things like ethical models and formal arguments for/ against the existence of God. By going through ethical models (and applying some personal experience with very respectable non-Christians I had gotten to know), I became aware of the fact that it is very possible to hold a solid, respectable ethical framework completely devoid of God's existence. In fact, people don't really get their values from the fact that God exists at all. (This is undoubtedly going to be disputed by theists in this forum, but ultimately it's true.) Also, in Philosophy class, we began discussing the "Problem of Evil," which centers on the incongruity of the existence of evil and suffering in a world created and controlled by an all-loving and all-powerful God. While I certainly don't believe the existence of the Christian God and evil are mutually exclusive (the issue of evil being the price for free-will is a logically acceptable explanation), it does, in my mind, decrease the likelihood of their coexistence being the case. At this point, you could say my confidence was down to 92%. (But in a sense, my faith was stronger because I had a stronger grounding for my reasoning.)
Well, through discussion on these forums, I came to the conclusion that the fire-and-brimstone model of hell and total-paradise model of heaven was certainly not logically defensible. David Sklansky has covered this in great detail in the SMP forum, so I won't explain it in detail here. But ultimately I couldn’t reconcile the idea of a loving and just God eternally punishing somebody for not believing when 1) the evidence of his existence isn’t
overwhelming (it is fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s educated elite don’t believe in His existence, and 2) something like 80% of people believe what their parents believe (I can’t find anything ‘just’ about winning the eternal-destiny lottery.
So, in light of specific doctrines that made no sense, I simply adjusted my theology, since a wrong theology was a more likely explanation for me than a wrong worldview. After all, I was still convinced that Darwinian evolution could not explain life as we saw it.
Well, it was about this time I started reading some Bonhoeffer (the Christian ethicist that attempted to assassinate Hitler). He argued that Christians should not place stock in fossil gaps as evidence of God’s existence, because 1) if those fossil gaps were one day filled, it would weaken the theist position, and 2) it didn’t matter anyway. A complete fossil record doesn’t disprove God’s existence. (Many Christians, mostly Catholic, don’t find any inherent conflict between evolution and God. At this point, neither did I.) I also read some convincing rebuttals of Dr Behe’s arguments. I knew I wasn’t educated enough in biology to trust my own conclusions over those in the field, but I at least became aware that Behe’s arguments were nowhere near convincing to his peers, and thus shouldn’t be to me either.
In addition to the issues listed above, other minor issues (i.e. historical inaccuracies in the Bible – which I adapted to by letting go of my need to read the Bible as historical fact), had brought my confidence in God’s existence down to, I don’t know, 70%. That is to say that I would not have considered myself “on the fence,” on the issue, but I also wasn’t as confident as I had been earlier. A Supernatural God was still the most likely explanation for the existence of the universe, and as such, I maintained my Christianity.
I don’t really think it’s necessary for me to explain why I never considered any form of Polytheism; they’re all nutty. I couldn’t consider Islam a viable option, because (I think) there is no reconciling a no-hell theology with Islam. Judaism and Christianity were thus my only real options as a theist. I held to my Christianity. (I had reasons, but they’re all the common reasons, so there’s really no need to explain them.)
Finally, this brings me to last week, and my reading of Richard Dawkins’s
The God Delusion. Well, the first 100 pages were drivel. Rhetoric, poor attempts to explain the arguments for God’s existence, and countless quotations from hateful theists – basically exactly what you’d expect from someone not really making an honest debate. Well, I had read through the table of contents enough to know that there were sections I was interested in reading, so I forced myself to continue reading. I came to his first argument as to why God doesn’t exist (not to be confused with his rebuttals of the arguments for why God des exist), which he called “The Ultimate 747 Argument.” I will do my best to summarize, but I recommend reading the book for the full argument.
Many theists use the “747 Argument,” which basically states “the likelihood of modern life arranging itself through random chance is about the same as a tornado going through a junk yard and leaving behind a Boeing 747.” Well, that’s not quite how it is. The mutations that drive Darwinian Evolution may be driven by “random chance,” but the natural selection process is nowhere near random, and in fact gives an adequate explanation for how a simple, single-celled form of life could, over hundreds of millions of years, turn itself into what we see around us. (Dawkins calls evolution a “crane.” A tool by which we can, using incremental steps, build a model of something that, upon first glance, appears to defy scientific explanation.) The mere discovery of evolution should encourage us that other “cranes” will be discovered as well (to help us explain things like the cosmos).
Now consider that – even using the most stringent guidelines for environments in which life could develop – life had billions of billions of opportunities (not several billion, billions of billions) to arise in our universe (not to mention the opportunities if the multi-verse model is better than the universe model), and you have a plausible scenario for how life could have come to exist from a very simple, already existing mass.
So, how does this make God unlikely to exist? Well, it’s a simple probability comparison. One of two things existed without a cause: a non-complex mass, or a being that has the power to create, control, and know the entire universe. That being, by definition, would have to be almost infinitely more complex than the simple mass, and therefore, almost infinitely less likely.
In closing, I’d like to say two things. First, again, sorry for the length. Even as it is, it is very incomplete, and I got a little rushed toward the end and don’t feel like I did the “Ultimate 747 Argument” justice, but it is what it is. Secondly, this is not the full story. That would be very long. Some more of the story may come out in discussion, but bear in mind after reading this that it is only a summary.