Faith versus Reason?

With some recent exchanges in mind, I thought I would do a blog on the subject of my atheism and, if possible, briefly touch on why I have some reservations regarding the assumption that faith should not be held up to questioning and logical analysis. I do not, however, wish to spend an inordinate amount of time on the subject of atheism, as there is more to my life than what I don't believe in, and I have noticed that once you open this can of worms, it tends to simply devolve and regress, with little being accomplished. On the other hand, I am always aware that there are people out there who are genuinely using their minds and thinking, and do benefit, possibly, from these ideas.

To begin with, it is important that the increasingly touted claim that atheists are rival fundamentalists is disregarded. First off, atheism, as I have argued before at great length, is not a positive belief system. It has no cognitive or truth content per se. In fact, the only way in which atheism has a 'truth content' is to the extent that it does not accept the truth claims of theists and those believing in supreme beings and gods and all that sort of thing. However, the obvious jump that the mind makes is to associate atheists with atheistic scientists. But, no, this is not, strictly speaking, acceptable.

I have known atheists who were not even familiar with the basic tenets of evolution, and who had some very strange reasons for their atheism. That being said, there is no doubt that evolution and science have convinced many of us that, critically speaking, religious belief crumbles at the first touch of common sense or empirical evidence. Yes, science does tend to destabilize one's religious belief, and, if it doesn't, I have some sincere doubts about your intellectual honesty and/ or rigour of thinking.

I can at this point venture into the well-trodden fields of Natural Selection versus Intelligent Design to provide a rational and factual basis for why science discredits religious belief in a creator God, but I do not wish to spend too much time giving a technical explanation yet again, especially since people are usually not interested in thinking about empirical evidence. If it becomes apparent that I do need to go into a technical diatribe on Natural Selection, then I shall gladly rehash it for the umpteenth billionth time, and I'll continue to do so if people genuinely want to talk about it. For this blog, I shall skip over it though.

So, if science does indeed challenge faith, then is it a rival fundamentalism or belief structure of its own? I would say no. Firstly, science must not be understood as absolute. It develops all the time. Just recently, I amended, not discredited, a scientist's research from a few years earlier. I have also had to revise my own work when evidence to the contrary arose. In other words, science will never give you an absolutist sense of the universe. It is not an immutable, unchangeable body of information (such as certain religions' holy books). In this sense, you can't look to it for comfort in the same way that you look to religion. It will not allow you to be content with taking the day off from thinking (an easier, but not necessarily desirable option for a number of reasons).

Most importantly, if evidence to God's existence or to disprove evolution came along, I would change my position, and I would not feel like an 'atheist apostate' for doing so, as there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind when rational evidence compels one to do so. Indeed, that is entirely my point. Atheism is a rejection of a set of beliefs, and scientific inquiry is not the antidote to religious belief. It cannot really fill that sort of gap. However much it may appear that it does, this is a complete misunderstanding of science.

Scientific research is understanding and seeking to understand natural phenomena and the monist reality of the universe, mainly in the effort of improving life on earth, which relates it to secular humanism. But this humanism is an ethos, not a religion, and should not be confused with religion, unless we give people a destructively misleading idea of science and secular humanism. It is destructively misleading because it makes people think they are believing in a theory of ultimacy or some absolutist ideal. This is patently untrue. If anything, atheism and science discourage and stand in the face of absolutist visions of reality and view them as deeply harmful. Even those things that are largely substantiated by mountains of empirical evidence are not absolute in the sense that there is, however highly unlikely it may be, the possibility for evidence to the contrary to emerge.

I do not believe in God because there is no evidence and there is a good deal of evidence for Natural Selection. I, however, am strongly invested in the idea of evidence and validation. I distrust faith because it is not subject to proof and validation. To call atheism a form of faith is absurd, as it would suggest that such things as empirical proof and logic do not exist in it.

No Christian, Muslim, or Jew, members of the three religions of the book, would ever say if evidence to the contrary emerged he or she would stop believing in God or Allah. Of course, they would not. As it says in Hebrews 11:1, 'Now FAITH is the substance of things HOPED for, the EVIDENCE of things unseen.' Well, this sentence should be all the evidence of the chasm between reason and faith one could ever need. What is the 'substance' of faith? 'Things hoped for' (i.e. God, afterlife, spiritual realm), and faith is here cited as the 'evidence' of that which can't be seen (the immaterial, spiritual realm). Faith is what we hope exists, and this faith stuff is evidence for the unseen / unknowable stuff (that stuff we really wish existed). Does the term 'circular reasoning' come to mind? Faith=things hoped for=evidence of things hoped for=faith.

In other words, and this really does touch the core of religious thinking, wanting something to be true and making it true are one and the same. This is why belief is so terribly powerful and central to religious faith (to the point that they had to come up with eternal torture as a means of convincing people to believe). When belief ends, so does the evidence for why you believe. In effect, your faith collapses.

Okay, okay, so many people ask me at this point why I should care one way or the other. If people want to believe what they want to believe, why not just allow them to do so, and leave it at that? Well, I agree to the extent that I am not ever going to try and actively persuade or force someone to leave their faith, although when questioned I will explain my positions to them (and even get somewhat passionate and angry if I am having a bad day). However, nonetheless, it concerns me, because like it or not, if you can't argue logically with people, then there is nothing —except perhaps some very interpretable and contradictory passages in holy books—to keep them from doing whatever they want to do in the name of their faith. If someone truly believes what she or he believes, and therefore feels no need to use logic to analyse it (i.e. that homosexual act done in private hurt no one, nor did it harm anything but our faith's moral prescriptions), then how can we argue when a fascist Islamic state does things like this to homosexuals?

It might seem barbaric, but if you have faith and believe, then it is perfectly 'reasonable'. And please don't think I am saying that people don't do equally atrocious things without religious motivation, because they do. The point is, rather, that when people do things in the name of politics, money, power, sadism, then we denounce it and argue against it. But faith has this wonderful way of claiming exemption. More frustratingly, how can we say religious violence, intolerance, bigotry, and religion's obsessive tendency to meddle in other people's private lives is wrong when faith lacks any sort of objective criteria to judge it by (save its holy books and less said about that the better)? I can't argue with them using logic, so what am I supposed to do? Respect their right to hang homosexuals? And on a side note, I am not picking on Islam. I have no doubt the Christians would do the same if they could realise a Christian fascist state.

In the end, since it would be utterly oxymoronic to try and force someone to use reason, what do you do? I tend to think there has to be a massive movement towards reaching my age group and younger with rationalism and secular humanism. I am fairly certain that this is the most suitable way of avoiding the proliferation of faith-based thinking and politics.