Non-Belief, Pt. 3: Evidence

In Part 1 of this series, I told how, when I was a child, I could see no evidence that any gods existed. Well, that's still basically why I'm an atheist. Of course, these days it would take a lot better evidence to convince me than when I was a child, but that hardly matters, since there's really no evidence at all.

I've heard some people argue that religion is a matter of faith, not evidence. OK. But you surely can't expect to convince me that you're right that way, can you? Since I don't have faith that there's a god,... that's it, end of story? Heh, heh. (Also, of course, countless other believers have equal faith that their own religion is true and yours is false.)

Actually, the idea that religion is entirely about faith, not evidence, doesn't seem to stop people from trying to argue - badly - that there is evidence, too. The argument from faith seems to come up only when believers are losing the evidence argument. Well, whatever you are willing to accept in order to believe what you want to believe, I need evidence.

And usually, I'm astonished at what believers consider to be evidence. For example, "I feel it in my heart" is not evidence. In fact, it's indistinguishable from wishful thinking. If that's your idea of "evidence," how can you possibly tell when you're wrong? After all, you're not infallible. None of us is. So it's clearly possible that you're wrong. But how would you be able to tell that? Note that you'd never accept "I feel it in my heart" from me, as evidence that God does not exist, would you? Of course not, and rightly so.

Many Christians point to the Bible as their "evidence," but that's not evidence of anything. It could have been evidence, I suppose, if it had contained specific knowledge clearly unknown at the time - such as the germ theory of disease. Included in the Bible, the germ theory of disease could have saved millions of people - including countless children - a great deal of suffering and early death. But the men who wrote the Bible had no special source of knowledge. In fact, they knew far less than we do today.

No, the Bible is clearly a product of its time, full of slavery, misogyny, child-beating, genocide, witches, a stationary Earth at the center of the universe - all primitive ideas of a tribal, and very human, society. Since the Bible contradicts what we've learned about the world in recent centuries, contradicts the more advanced moral codes of modern times, and even contradicts itself, the evidence pretty clearly indicates that it was not written, dictated, or even influenced by a benevolent god. (A quick look at the Old Testament should clearly show you that! And the holy books of other religions are little different.)

OK, the Bible is not literally true, but maybe it's just an allegory. Maybe the "truth" is there, but it's disguised, written in the only way that primitive people would accept. Yeah, I hear that, sometimes. But it's obvious that the writers of the Bible meant to depict the literal truth, and that's certainly how people have taken it for centuries. In fact, through most of that time, you would have been tortured to death if you'd dared to suggest otherwise.

People who claim that the Bible contains allegorical truth simply recognize that it's crazy to argue it's literally true these days, while being unwilling to give it up entirely. It's just a fallback position, common among believers, when initial arguments fail. And really, if you actually read the Bible, God comes across as a vicious, jealous, vindictive horror, a genocidal maniac, the world's biggest mass-murderer. If it's supposed to be just an allegory, how does that make it any better?

But usually the arguments I hear are variations of the God of the gaps argument, combined with personal incredulity. "I don't believe all this could happen by chance" is one common phrase, combining ignorance about evolution with a misunderstanding of probability. But your lack of understanding isn't evidence. In ancient times, the idea that the Earth was a giant ball, spinning rapidly in empty space, would have seemed ridiculous. How could we be standing on a round, spinning surface? But we know that it's true, because of scientific evidence. And you have no problem believing it today, only because you grew up with that knowledge.

"I don't know what the sun is. Therefore, it must be God driving a fiery chariot across the sky. After all, what else could it be?" But as we slowly learn more about the natural world, God retreats from those areas. He retreats to the gaps where our knowledge is still incomplete. Note that we have never thought something had a natural explanation, only to discover that the real cause was supernatural. It's always been the other way around. Over and over again, we've discovered that our first explanation, a supernatural explanation, was wrong, that a natural explanation was actually true. It's been a consistent pattern throughout human history.

Compare religion with science. Creationism (renamed "Creation Science," and then "Intelligent Design," in a continuing attempt to get religious beliefs taught in public schools) has a long history of attacking evolution, looking for something - anything - that might disprove the theory. After all, if evolution is wrong, then Intelligent Design surely must be right, don't you think? But that's just not true. Even if they could find valid evidence against evolution (which they have not), that still wouldn't be evidence for creationism.

Scientists, on the other hand, have plenty of evidence that Intelligent Design is wrong. (Very briefly, good designs could theoretically be explained by either an omnipotent god or by evolution, but poor designs, sub-optimal designs, while easily explained by evolution, are clear evidence that an intelligent designer had nothing to do with it. The panda's thumb is the classic example of this, although there are many more.) But scientists don't accept evolution simply because of the overwhelming evidence against Intelligent Design (and "what else could it be?"). Instead, biologists required clear evidence for evolution.

You see the difference? Scientists don't point out the good evidence against Intelligent Design and then say that evolution must be true by default. But creationists never even attempt to find evidence supporting their beliefs. They spend all of their time attacking evolution (and failing, in scientific terms, though having some success in convincing the ignorant). That's just more evidence that Intelligent Design is not, after all, science.

If you want to convince me that there's one or more gods, I need to see some good evidence. I need evidence that backs up your belief and that can't be explained in other ways. (People claim to see ghosts, but that's not good evidence for the supernatural, since there are many other possible explanations. And those other explanations are known to exist. They don't require postulating anything new, let alone a whole new type of existence.) I don't need to show you evidence that God does not exist, because it's the person making a claim who must back it up. After all, do you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the the Invisible Pink Unicorn, or Russell's teapot, just because you can't prove they don't exist?

As a child, I could never see any direct or even indirect evidence that a god existed, and I still can't. If you want me to believe, show me the evidence.

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Note: The rest of this series is here.