Does Naturalistic Atheism Equal Nihilism? In short: No.

Does Naturalistic Atheism Equal Nihilism? In short: No.

Atheism is simply the lack of, or rejection of, a belief in supernatural beings such as god(s) or a personal God, i.e. in the strictest sense atheism is the absence of theism. 

In fact, contrary to what some have espoused, atheism isn't the claim that theism is false, since this would be a positive statement and is incorrect for the following reasons. Atheism isn't a positive truth claim, it's the rejection of one which fails to stand up to scrutiny, therefore atheism doesn't claim anything is 'false' because this would be presupposing said thing has the possibility of being 'true' in the first place. Atheists merely look at the available evidence of theistic "truth" claims and find them to be lacking in all the areas that matter, and as a consequence are completely unjustified, and so, must be rejected on the basis of intellectual honesty. To accept something at face value which is virtually lacking in any support whatsoever would be a position of faith. Hence the rejection of theistic claims is predicated on the fact that they lack support, so are not trustworthy, thereby cannot just be assumed without further validation. 

What follows then is that atheists do indeed reject the supernatural for the very same reason they reject theism. There is no verifiable evidence to support theistic claims about God or the metaphysical claims about the supernatural. Atheism does not arise out of one's stubbornness to accept the theist proposition (which is what one must tacitly assume if one is to believe that atheists don't reject the supernatural), rather atheists must reject the supernatural for the very same reason they reject God, otherwise they would be in danger of cognitive dissonance. 

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, nihilism is: a theory promoting the state of believing in nothing, or of having no allegiances and no purposes. The term is incorrectly used to characterize all persons not sharing some particular faith or particular set of absolute values.

When theists accuse atheists of being nihilists and incidentally conflate atheism with nihilism they are confusing their terminology. They may be getting it wrong on purpose to further disparage atheism, a detectable apologetics ploy, but sometimes they just lack the proper understanding of the terms. Nihilism stems from the doctrine of the extreme Russian revolutionary party c.1900, which rejected all authority exercised by the church, the state, and/or the family—and consequently, in so doing, rejected all religious and moral principles in total. Nihilism is unjustifiable, even by naturalistic terms, since as Lao Tzu revealed in the Tao Te Ching that:

If people do not revere the Law of Nature,
It will inexorably and adversely affect them.
If they accept it with knowledge and reverence,
It will accommodate them with balance and harmony.

Naturalism cannot be nihilistic for this reason, as it would not revere the laws of nature, and this is contradictory to the very definition of naturalism, which is predicated on the laws of nature! Yet theistic thinkers continue to improperly conflate atheism and naturalism with nihilism because they feel justified in claiming the two equate nihilism, and so are one and the same, ergo the religious apologist claim becomes that naturalistic atheism is equally as senseless and unjustifiable as nihilism. But they would be wrong to say so.

Those theists who conflate atheism and naturalism with nihilism are chiefly mistaken. They have misconstrued the definitions for reasons which, more often than not, fit with their propaganda to make the former concepts appear just as profane as the latter or sponsor their proselytizing agendas to make their faith seem more appealing than the misrepresentation they pawn off as naturalistic atheism. But we might ask why this is. Why is this semantic word play so common among devotional apologists? I would venture three main reasons: 1) they have misunderstood atheism and naturalism and don’t have a clear understanding of what either definition entails, 2) they are trying to force natural philosophies into a religious worldview and must adapt the definitions accordingly, 3) or they are simply rehearsing apologetic rhetoric.

Atheism, meanwhile, is clearly not even close to nihilism. Anyone who can read a dictionary should know this. Atheism only rejects one positive claim—namely that the supernatural god(s) of religion are real. Nihilism, on the other hand, rejects all claims by assuming that since everything is ultimately meaningless then holding any positive claim would, in turn, be just as meaningless. But such a position is indefensible.

True enough, atheists often tend to be naturalists also. The reason for this is because once you’ve rejected supernatural explanations all you are left with are the natural explanations. To define naturalism more clearly, it is: the view that ultimately nothing resists explanation by the methods characteristic of the natural sciences. Moreover, Keith Augustine proposes that “the de facto success of methodological naturalism provides strong empirical evidence that metaphysical naturalism is probably true.”

Recently I came across a Christian who had conflated naturalistic atheism with nihilism, but this is incorrect, not to mention a strong semantic confusion, since the manipulation of the terminology makes the concepts that much more complicated to grasp (this is frequently a sign of a poor definition or else an improper understanding of the primary definitions in the first place).

According to his definition (seen in full HERE), naturalistic atheism equals nihilism because:

The current narrative of Naturalistic Atheism is that the universe is all there is…. There is no purpose to our creation…. No purpose, no plan, just matter doing what matter in motion does…. Eventually we die… and than [sic] everyone dies extinguishing all memory of the human race, and then the universe will eventually die…. Does this concept entail Nihilism? Yes. There is nothing in this narrative to suggest otherwise.

Right off the bat I must raise several objections. First, this definition is misleading, as often is the case, I feel, when Christians try and supply definitions to concepts they haven’t studied or looked into thoroughly enough. Secondly, as is the case with most Christians, they simply assume creation denotes purpose because in one of the thousands of religions on the planet, in one of the tens of thousands of creation myths which exist or have existed, they think that they have stumbled upon the correct one, and moreover, that it just happens to (coincidentally enough) be the predominant one in their culture which they were likely raised in.  What are the odds that the Judeo-Christian version of creation is the correct one and that it actually denotes purpose? Not very likely, I’d assume. This belief in Creation, let alone one obscure creation myth among a plethora of creation myths to choose from, seems to an outsider and a skeptic like me overly ethnocentric not to mention rather strained.

As far as anybody is concerned, whether you’re religious or not, there was a moment of creation which we can discernibly know about as we have the exacting tools of modern cosmology which confirms this in the well supported (albeit incomplete) big bang theory. Regardless of whether you attribute a supernatural cause or a naturalistic cause to creation, that’s all any of us can assume—that creation occurred.

To posit intent behind creation takes us outside of what the evidence allows for and changes the argument from a scientifically observable phenomenon to a philosophical consideration about the nature of the first cause. From here a rudimentary cosmological argument can be argued, but only hypothetically, since it has the problem of assuming what it wishes to prove, which I find fault with. It basically goes something like this: the universe exists, thus we know that the universe was created, which we can detect and reasonably know about, therefore creation denotes causality, causality denotes intent, intent requires an intelligence with purpose in mind, thus the conclusion becomes God created it, and so God must exist. If you’re wondering whether this line of a priori reasoning is valid—it’s not. I’ve raised several devastating objections to the cosmological argument, in particular William Lane Craig’s kalam cosmological argument which I take down once and for all (although I don’t see a reason to repeat it now since you can read it HERE).

At any rate, assuming that which you wish to prove is faulty causality, a known logic fallacy. It does us no good. This is why naturalistic atheists like myself deny the cosmological argument for the existence of God. There is just not enough evidence to say it is so. It’s purely a priori reasoning, theological conjecture, and as such, purpose cannot just be tacitly assumed.

This is the third difficulty with trying to force naturalism or atheism to equate nihilism. Basically the theist assumes God is real and building on this assumption proclaims that God had purpose for creating the universe. These are lofty, and completely unfounded, suppositions and so are inadmissible as evidence.

Even so, for fun we might wish to momentarily give Christians the benefit of the doubt and ask what would that “purpose” look like if God did supposedly create the universe with intent? Namely life, or more specifically, sentient life (which would be capable of detecting God). Another rather stupendous assumption, if you ask me. But let’s grant it for the time being. What does such a consideration entail? It seems to me that it would entail that God deliberately intended there to be life for reasons mysterious to us, and so, in tune with theistic creationist claims God made the world and the heavens, animals, plants, and people too—never mind the Bible difficulties surrounding the unscientific and incomprehensible cosmology found in scripture—if we grant all this we can readily assume that somewhere in all this apparent design, God has a master plan.

However, there is a huge gaping hole in this line of reasoning. Richard Carrier elucidates: 

Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed "finely tuned" it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life--in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the comparably microscopic speck of area that sustains life. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this—while atheism predicts exactly this.  

If you’ll observe, granting the Christian claim it seems as though God’s design denotes that life is, in actuality, rather unimportant.[i] This contradicts the Creationist claim that there was purpose in God’s creating agency in the first place, and brings us back to where be began, squarely in the house of Naturalism.

Understandably, naturalism does paint a grim scenario, but that’s simply because most living creatures are disturbed by pain and suffering and humans, who have sentience and can reflect upon their own mortality, subsequently also have a fear of death. But as the ex-Evangelical minister Dan Barker has reassured, “It shouldn’t matter what any of us wants to believe. The fact that life is ultimately meaningless does not mean it is not immediately meaningful.” I personally find consolation in this thought. Contrary to what nihilism espouses, we do and can find meaning in life.

Philosophically speaking, naturalism may ultimately mean non-existence, but meanwhile it doesn’t have to mean the existence we have is meaningless or trivial. As a result of this understanding we can precisely maintain that naturalism should not be confused with nihilism. Additionally, nihilism is the rejection of everything meaningful while there is nothing to suggest a naturalistic worldview would necessarily cause us to reject anything other than the supernatural.

Extra support, which makes the distinction crystal clear, is found in the principle of double effect. The principle of double effect states that an action that has both good and bad results may be morally permissible, and that such acts are permissible if:

    

1.     The action is not wrong in itself, (ii) the bad consequence is not that which is intended.

2.     The good is not itself a result of the bad consequence, and

3.     The two consequences are commensurate.

Consequently, when the principle of double effect is applied to both naturalism and nihilism we find that naturalism (according to its proper definition) is morally permissible where nihilism is not. This distinction should settle once and for all whether naturalistic atheism equals nihilism. It does not.

In summary, does Naturalistic Atheism entail Nihilism? No it doesn’t. There is no reason to believe it goes that far, and to assume so is a stretch of the imagination which goes too far outside of what is reasonable to believe.

A Short List of References

Ideas that Matter by A.C. Grayling

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism by Richard Carrier

Godless by Dan Barker

Infidels.org

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/whynotchristian.html#tuning   

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[i] Life may not be God’s ultimate purpose if we find that death and oblivion do, in fact, constitute the physical reality. Such a cruel design seems to denote a capricious or malevolent deity. The problem here being that such a God is recognizably not benevolent, as Christians claim on behalf of their God, and so could not be the Christian God—unless, of course, Christians are mistaken as to God’s true nature. Undoubtedly, however, a confirmation bias always dissuades Christians from taking this consideration seriously.

Does Atheism or Secular Belief Entail Faith? In Short: NO.

Does Atheism or Secular Belief Entail Faith? In Short: NO.

Christians often times state that atheists rely on faith too. Not that we have faith that God isn’t, since it requires more faith to believe that God is, but rather that secular beliefs and ideologies in general are dependent on our faith in them in order for us to believe them. This is two things really, one it is a question about the nature of the ideologies we hold, and second it is a question about the beliefs we hold. I would agree that any involved ideology may require a certain amount of faith in the soundness of said ideology, but can the same be said of our beliefs? No, I don't think so. Belief comes down to what is justifiable and what isn’t. For example, Christians sometimes claim that we rely on our faith in science, that we have faith in physics, and basically that we have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow as it does everyday and that it will continue to do so. See, they cry out victoriously! You atheists, skeptics, and non-believers require faith as well!

Yet this is not entirely correct, as such isn’t faith, per se. This is knowing. Knowing comes down to what we can prove and verify thereby authenticate as a discernable fact because we have reliable evidence that, whatever it should be, is sound. Likewise, we know that science is trustworthy, and the laws of physics steadfast, because these things are provably true, not just assumed, and so I must correct those people of a religious stripe who claim we rely on faith in the same way as they do. This is certainly not the case.

Atheists and non-believers don’t have “faith” in such things as the physical constants of the universe and the scientific method so much as we place our trust in their dependability because they happen to be true, not in spite of it. Whereas religious belief, I might point out, is faith dependent. There is a slight, yet pertinent, difference here not to go overlooked.

What’s the difference you might ask? Faith is, by its very nature, an affirmation of belief despite of, or sometimes even because of, a distinct lack of evidence. Where there's evidence, however, "faith" doesn't even enter the equation. We simply accept reality as it is presented to us, and because this presentation is accurately described by science as it describes the nature of the universe to us, we find science and the laws of physics trustworthy. How do we know this? Because we can test them repeatedly and thereby determine a level of consistency and accuracy which would validate our trust in science and justify our placing trust in it. Religion lacks such testability and therefore can never be properly validated, and as a consequence, never truly vindicated. Without faith, religious belief would crumble away to nothing.

Knowing, on the other hand, only comes with empirical evidence where beliefs can be substantiated, confirmed, and proved beyond a reason of a doubt. Science corroborates, supports, and upholds the reality of nature and demonstrates that there is a discernable, indeed quantifiable, truth to be had. Religion just assumes its own truths.

On the other hand, if science made the wrong predictions, frequently came out with incomprehensible suppositions, and explained things in a way which is contrary to what we observe daily, then it would cease to be trustworthy and it would lose all validity. Luckily for us, this is not the case. Religion, on the other hand, well that requires a stunning amount of mental gymnastics and constant harmonization to maintain belief in. After all, belief in belief is all you have left when the facts are lacking, or else, non-existent. Therefore, for a religious person to take the tenets of his faith seriously they must exercise an excessive sort of faith that is, simultaneously, void of knowing and horribly strained.

Additionally, religious faith requires a plethora of fallacies to go unquestioned. To add even the smallest amount of skepticism to religious faith would start to erode it with constant doubt and grating inquiry as certainly as it would lead to a demand for better answers. Where the lack of evidence should lead critical thinkers to dismiss the claims outright, people of faith can rationalize away such deficiencies by finding theological premises which harmonize their problems away. For ardent skeptics, free-thinkers, and rationalists this excuse making simply won’t do. When it comes to empty claims and untestable unverifiable hypothesis we must simply dismiss the claims as either untenable or unknowable, at least until better evidence if forthcoming.

In the atheist community there is no such thing as groupthink. Often likened to trying to herd cats, atheists are notorious for holding dissenting views and not wanting to conform. Even so, skepticism and questioning everything is encouraged. As a matter of principle most atheists do not take anything on blind faith because to do so would undermine the very capacity for reason which allows us to reliably discern truth from falsehood. For example, if you were raised by religious parents, went to church regularly, surrounded yourself with religious friends, kept to religious practice, partook in religious ceremony, and maintained your faith as such you would never have any reason to question or doubt it. Everyone would be telling you that you’re right and that they agree with you, so you would have no reason to even begin to doubt your beliefs in God or question the validity of your religion.

Yet if a person of faith didn’t have this tightly woven support group, with people who all thought the same way, then groupthink would vanish leaving only unanswered questions, and as the other famous saying goes, curiosity killed the cat. Which is to say, skepticism and doubt can destroy one’s faith, either by dismantling it or discrediting unfounded beliefs, or by discovering arguments and facts which prove contrary to one’s personal convictions.

Perhaps this is why people of all religious faiths are, to some degree, discouraged from skepticism. After all, faith itself is a suspension of one's tendency toward skepticism. Why is this? Because it safeguards their convictions and protects them from a potential loss of their support network of the religious community they are a part of.

But for those who find reason to inquire, it’s not such a simple matter of shrugging of the difficult questions. Just to illustrate, Christians rarely think it sounds more than a little implausible that an all-powerful deity knowingly sacrificed himself to himself as a blood offering to free humanity from a curse he (himself) put on us. Why doesn’t such an absurdity upset, vex, or bother them? Because they have faith! Of all the thousands of religions throughout the world, right through human history, with tens of thousands of dead or forgotten gods, to believe that you just got lucky enough to have found the one correct one, we must ask, doesn’t it sound overly ethnocentric not to mention highly improbable? How can the religious believe as much? They take it on faith!

This is the problem with faith—it allows you to believe in anything you want to for any reason! And how do you justify such a tendency? You invoke faith! It’s a circular digress of reasoning, the same reason people believe the Bible is true, because the Bible says so. Simple as that. So when a theist claims that atheists rely on faith too, this is simply false. We depend on science and nature and trust that they continue to remain steadfast, but if they should ever cease to be dependable, we’d cease to put our trust in them faster than a dead cat can bounce. The same cannot be said for religious faith however.

Why I am No Longer a Christian Part 3: Religion Explained via Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience as a Human Invention

Why I am No Longer a Christian Part 3

Religion Explained via Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience as a Human Invention

Humankind has emerged out of the darkness into a bright, technological, scientific age. By now, we should have abandoned the mind in the cave…. Over the last four hundred years, we have witnessed an astonishing explosion in our understanding of the universe, something almost like a “big bang” of scientific understanding. I no other period in human history has humankind made such breathtaking advances in explaining so many facets of the natural world… Science should be the bedrock of our knowledge and wisdom. And yet beliefs in the supernatural—beliefs that are unnatural and unscientific—are still very common. –Bruce M. Hood (Evolutionary Psychologist)

What follows is the third part of the main three reasons (among many others) for why I am no longer a believing Christian. The first part dealt with what we can know historically about the Gospel account, namely, I revealed that via Higher Criticism, such as Source, Form, and Redaction criticism, we discover that the New Testament stories are mainly myth and legend and retellings of old Jewish fables, legend, and lore. In my second installment I discussed biblical errancy the plethora of Bible contradictions which confuse and confound virtually every concept of Biblical authority, and moreover, show the indelible stamp of imperfect man as its author, not some divine or supernatural influence. My discussion of Bible canonization put the icing on the cake and showed the undeniable tampering, editorship, translation, emendation and alteration which went on during the formulation and formation of scripture and further depicts, not only an overtly orchestrated man-made agenda, but reveals that religious doctrine was manipulated from the ground up to align with Christian orthodoxy and molded to fit the various changing convictions of an endless variety of Christian sects’ beliefs at every step of the way.

Now I shall put the nail in the coffin and show conclusively how anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience reveal the irrefutable man-made origins of religious belief and how the implications of this shatter any possibility for belief in the supernatural, and/or belief in God, once and for all. More than this, however, since we are discussing indisputable scientific facts, they do more than just confound belief in God, they also thwart even the slightest attempt or leeway for an educated person to entertain grandiose notions as tenuous as religious belief in the first place.

The Beginning of the End: Reasons for Religious Belief

Anthropologist Jack David Eller, author of a college textbook called Introducing Anthropology of Religion: Culture to the Ultimate (Routledge, 2007), lists six functions of religion in society:

1. Filling individual needs, especially psychological or emotional needs. Religion provides comfort, hope, perhaps love, definitely a sense of control, and relief from fear and despair.

2. Explanation, especially of origins or causes. Humans wonder why things are as they are. How did the world start? How did humans start? . . .

3. Source of rules and norms. . . . religion can provide the answer to where the traditions and laws of the society came from. . . . This is the charter function of religion: It acts as the "charter" or guideline or authority by which we organize ourselves in particular ways and follow particular standards. Why do we practice monogamy? Because a religious being or precedent says to, or because the first humans did, etc. Why do other societies practice polygamy? Perhaps because their religious being or precedent (say, the ancestor or founder) said it or did it.

4. Source of "ultimate sanctions." Religion is, among other things, a means of social control. . . . a large part of religion is about what we should do, how we should live. . . . Human agents of social control cannot be everywhere and cannot see everything, and the rewards and punishments they can mete out are finite. . . .

5. Solution of immediate problems. . . . If we are sick or distressed, are the beings or forces angry with us? What should we do about it? If there is an important social or political decision to make (say, going to war), is there a way to discover the preferences or plans of the beings and forces--to "read their mind"? Can we ask them for favors, give them gifts, or do anything at all to influence their actions and intentions?

6. Fill "needs of society" . . . Certainly, not everything that a religion teaches or practices is good for every individual: Human sacrifice is not about fulfilling the needs of sacrificial victims. Nor does religion always soothe individual fears and anxieties; for instance, the belief in a punitive afterlife may cause people to fear more, and concerns about proper conduct of rituals can cause anxiety. However, belief in a punitive afterlife can cause people to obey norms, which is good for society. The primary need of society, beyond the needs of individuals, is integration, cohesion, and perpetuation, and religion can provide an important "glue" toward that end.

I think much of the reason people go to church is summed up in numbers 1 and 6, but has aspects in all of them. I think the religious psychology is more complex than simple brainwashing. Although there is a lot of that going on too (See HERE and HERE). Anthropology reveals quite well that the existence of religion is closely tied to human existence, yet what’s more is it can show how we as a species utilize religion in society as a cultural means to various ends.

Meanwhile, in his book Religion Explained anthropologist Pascal Boyer gives a similar scenarios, albeit somewhat extended, and lists further possibilities for the rise of religious practice and belief. They include the following:

Religion Provides Explanations

1] People created religion to explain puzzling natural phenomena.

2] Religion explains puzzling experience: dreams, prescience, etc.

3] Religion explains the origin of things.

4] Religion explains why there is evil and suffering.

Religion Provides Comfort

5] Religious explanations make mortality less unbearable.

6] Religion allays anxiety and makes for a comfortable world.

Religion Provides Social Order

7] Religion holds society together.

8]Religion perpetuates a particular social order

9] Religion supports morality.

Religion is a Cognitive Illusion

10] People are superstitious, they will believe anything

11] Religious concepts are irrefutable.

12] Refutation is more difficult than belief.

These scenarios offer plausible explanations for religion’s cultural development, however, after proposing his list Boyer goes one further than Eller by suggesting that although the list is fairly representative, all of these explanations ultimately fail to explain why we have religion and why it is the way it is (eBook; loc. 145-52). In other words, even though these observations can yield insights into the cultural function of religion they still don’t explain the origin of religious belief or why religious belief is seemingly ubiquitous among humans to begin with.

Digging Deeper: Looking Inside the Mind

In his excellent book Supersense the evolutionary psychologist Bruce M. Hood lays out the groundwork for why we develop supernatural beliefs in the first place. Much of it has to do with child psychology and how inference works when our brains begin to try and make sense of the world around us. In psychological terms this inference mechanism is explained in terms of mind design. Hood describes mind design as: the organized way in which our brains are configured to understand and interpret the world.

Religion then, comes in two parts, or we can think of it as having two main components: a psychological component and a cultural component. About the psychological aspects Hood states:

…we may never truly abandon our childhood misconceptions when we become adults and learn new facts about the world. Some of us are more vulnerable to these misconceptions than others. Now imagine how difficult it is for us to abandon beliefs that include the supernatural. Here there is precious little evidence to dissuade us of our beliefs. If we hold childish notions about the unseen mechanisms of reality, then the difference between believers and nonbelievers may have less to do with what we have been told and more to do with our susceptibility to our own childish misconceptions. (loc. 538-44)

Hood goes on to demonstrate several examples of how our minds dupe us into thinking supernaturally, and how such inferences are unavoidable as it is all a part of our brain infrastructure, that our mind design has a natural tendency to generate superstitious thoughts as a way of understanding the hidden or unseen forces in nature. He goes on to add to the previous comment that, “If you are someone who is inclined to believe that there are supernatural forces operating in the world, then you will interpret all manner of events in light of this way of thinking.”

No Place to Hide: Neuroscience is Closing all of the Gaps

Modern neuroscience delves even deeper into the mysteries of the human mind and how it churns out superstitious and supernatural thoughts. It gives us the explanations we are seeking. Likewise, other neuroscientists have been studying brain activity with regards to belief and non-belief in order to see if there is any discernable change in brain patterns amongst believers and non-believers. Apparently there is.

Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht has discovered there is a difference in those who believe in God and have religion and those who do not. According to Inzlicht belief can reduce anxiety, making a religious sphere of existence relatively peaceful and stress free. This in turn explains why suicide rates are often less in religious societies (see HERE).

"Obviously, anxiety can be negative because if you have too much, you're paralyzed with fear," Inzlicht informs, yet goes on to warn, "However, it also serves a very useful function in that it alerts us when we're making mistakes. If you don't experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behavior so you don't make the same mistakes again and again?" Basically, religious belief also impedes our ability to question our acts and may ultimately affect our judgment. This goes to show why religious believers are less skeptical on average and frequently lack critical thinking—basically because they don’t need to question anything—which is a polite way of saying that ignorance is bliss.

A recent study conducted by Sam Harris and colleagues at UCLA and the University of Southern California found that comparing religious with nonreligious statements reveals that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation and cognitive conflict in both believers and nonbelievers, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks. Activity in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with cognitive conflict and uncertainty, suggested that both believers and nonbelievers experienced greater uncertainty when evaluating religious statements. The study goes on to explain the case for belief being content-independent (see HERE).

But although we might one day have a fully fleshed out theory as to the natural origins of religion, we may never be able to recognize if God or something like it might exist even if it should. Neuroscientist Georg Northoff, research director of Mind, Brain Imaging, and Neuroethics at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research is certain that our brains place a limit on our ability to comprehend things, and that this limit is consciousness (see HERE). Ironic if true, since the whole premise behind the last several hundred years of natural theology has been to posit God’s existence via assuming consciousness denotes intelligence and that one consciousness can detect another—even a divine one—not so says Northoff.

An Example of Why Supernatural Inferences will Always be Misleading

With the work of anthropologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike, it appears that a natural framework for an all encompassing explanation for religion and religious belief is slowly, but surely, revealing itself. Yet even should there be such a devastating revelation made, basically that ALL religion is man-made, and it seems that it is, this won’t necessarily mean an end to religion or religious belief, or for that matter, supernatural beliefs in general. Bruce M. Hood puts it into perspective by explaining:

Religious beliefs may be indoctrinated by associative learning in the same way phobias are, but like irrational fears, they may also build on our natural inclinations. This is because they fit well with our natural ways of thinking about the world—the mind design we have inherited through our genes. This may partly explain why supernatural beliefs are so easily accepted. They seem to fit with what we think is possible.

But I should caution, simply accepting something which we feel is possible doesn’t mean it is true. And how can we tell if something is true? We must look to the evidence and apply the scientific method to see if what we find is reliable, fits with observation, and is quantifiably true. If it’s unverifiable, it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, so God may exist, but as Northoff has shown even this knowledge may forever continue to elude us.

As such, supernatural explanations can’t just automatically be assumed. To do so would be akin to a God of the gaps argument whereby we just plug in an unknown explanation with the familiar “God did it” excuse popular among theists. This is not only insufficient, it’s highly irrational. When we see a cat leap into the air with a hiss and a fit we don’t just assume a gust of wind blew it up. We can infer better natural explanations, such as, it sensed a threat such as the neighbor prowling dog and was startled. Wind blowing your cat up into the air is just a bad inference, and a stupid explanation, but what would make it downright irrational is to suppose that instead of invisible wind throwing your feline up into the air was that it was the devious work of supernatural agents, such as prankster angels who had nothing better to do. So although, as with the example of the wind, there can be bad naturalistic inferences, what we can be certain of is that a supernatural inference is almost always completely naïve and almost always certainly wrong. 

Daniel C. Dennett makes clear the distinction between both trains of thought, the natural and the supernatural, in his book Breaking the Spell in which he looks at religious conception from the standpoint of a philosopher but with the naturalistic understanding which modern neuroscience has revealed. Dennett lampoons religious penchant to try and offer extraordinary explanations all the while never actually being able to explain anything at all, such as the human soul (i.e. consciousness), when he quips:

It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.

As a philosopher and cognitive scientist Dennett knows the distinction between a philosophical explanation which offers little more than an illusion of explanatory depth and an actual qualified explanation with authentic support. Angels tossing your cat around is less likely an explanation for the animal’s behavior than, say, it was startled by the neighbor’s dog. We know the supernatural explanation is incorrect for the very same reasons of deduction—the angel explanation lacks all credible support and so is baseless. But it’s actually more complicated than this, because before we could infer a supernatural agency, such as angels, we’d need to prove they exist—which is difficult if not outright impossible. What’s more still, before you could assume angels were behind it all you’d have to rule out all the other natural possibilities! We can therefore know the inference of supernatural entities is erroneous because we know the neighborhood is filled with rambunctious and rowdy canines which like to terrorize the occasional feline, therefore based off of this deduction we don’t even need to have any proof of invisible angel activity to know it’s not really an explanation but simply faulty reasoning.

Such supernatural assumptions inevitably suffer from, not only their unlikelihood, but also from being horribly strained. Such a scenario as supernatural (invisible) beings tossing your poor cat around seems so far from the truth that it’s outright laughable. Which is how much of religious belief appears to non-religious non-believers—it ALL sounds silly because, although the explanation might be plausible, the reasoning is defunct just as sure as it is unverifiable. Yet as I showed above, we need not even have to verify it to know it’s completely faulty reasoning and, in so realizing, makes the believer’s beliefs mistaken.

Neuroscience has, in the case with the example of the soul, offers a real believable explanation while the metaphysical claims of religious faith only offer a nice sounding, yet completely unfounded, unbelievable supposition. This just goes to show that if you’re looking for genuine answers then science can provide these real answers, whereas, it would seem, the religious person who looks toward faith for supernatural explanations must, in this age of scientific reason, immediately feel stricken with the weight of immense embarrassment. For how couldn’t they?  In light of the current bulwark of scientific knowledge, consider that even they cannot fail to see the inadequacy and paltry nature of religious explanation. It’s inadequate precisely because it fails to describe the natural world accurately, and even if it did it still doesn’t explain enough to pass muster, especially when compared to the awesome explanatory power of science.

So for me it’s apparent that science is the way to the future, as it can answer our questions, and religion is the way to the past as it continues to fail to answer our most pressing concerns—yet does a good job of finding supernatural excuses to excuse away the worries and anxieties of not knowing. If you’d ask me, though, I’d rather put my faith in science to discover the hitherto unanswered answers than trust religion to do so. Religion will simply infer some supernatural agency, such as God, did it—and in so doing infer wrongly.

Conclusion: Even Though it is Untenable Religion is Here to Stay

Religion isn’t going anywhere. That’s a fact. But what we know now is that religious precepts, suppositions, and beliefs are largely untenable. That they fly in the face of reason, and all of it is man made, what’s more there is scientific empirical evidence to back all this up. What does this mean for the future of religion? I’m not entirely sure. I personally feel it means that only those who need religion in their lives will seek it out, meanwhile the rest of the world will continue its gradual process of secularization, creating a bigger divide between the world of metaphysical naturalism rooted in scientific understanding and the world of metaphysical mysticism rooted deep within religious modes of supernatural thinking.

Needless to say, this gap in basic understanding could be both good and bad for both sides. Good in the sense that it will mean there is a discernable victor in the God debate, and it’s not the religious. Yet simultaneous it could spell disaster by creating further tension between those with unfailing dogmatic convictions and cause larger rifts between believers and non-believers. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Dan Dennett has mentioned as an aside that:

If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.

Education always helps, as the more educated one is the less likely they are to be religious (likewise those with higher intellects have proven to be atheist more often than those with lower I.Q.s see HERE),but it seems there is another obstacle to be aware of: the gap in knowledge is a growing concern. As the philosopher A.C. Grayling laments:

As science has become increasingly more specialized and complex, so the public mind in general has become increasingly less acquainted with it, and therefore correspondingly less able to participate in informed conversations about the implications, applications, promises, possibilities—and periodic risks—of science.

Only time will tell if a more universalized knowledge base can act as an antidote to deter the harmful and credulous aspects of religious beliefs, but in the meantime, I suggest we find ways to continue to communicate with one another to ensure the worst doesn’t happen. Through discourse we will have the ability to inform others and point them in the direction of the proper information, while the religious will continue to deny all the scientific findings which contradict their beliefs, we all must learn to live in a world where science has demolished the validity of religious belief once and for all—where religious belief is proved supernatural bunk—yet, paradoxically enough, where the religious belief continues to persist none-the-less.

Afterward

As an ex-believer, each new discovery led me to a newfound understanding, one which competed vehemently to establish a worldview completely contrary to my faith. Eventually, after wrestling with the relevant information, I was forced to change my mind about what I thought I knew. My faith based assumptions just didn’t hold up to scrutiny. And changing my mind was a long arduous process, not some overnight revelation, but rather it took five years of diligent study and contemplation.

Once I had the knowledge at my fingertips, like magic keys, it unlocked my mind and opened it a little bit wider, until all the religious chains which shackled my intellect lay at my feet and my mind was wide open and free. This enlightenment came after several long years of holding my faith up to scrutiny and finding, to my faith-shattering-bewilderment, that it wasn’t even defensible. Whether or not this information will do the same for you is unknown, just know that if you are a believer this may be a bit challenging. At least, I hope it will challenge you to think about your faith more critically, as it did for me.

References

Supersense by Bruce M. Hood; PhD Evolutionary Psychology

Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer; PhD Anthropology

Anthropology of Religion by Jack David Eller; PhD Anthropology
Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett; PhD Philosophy

Referenced in Supplementary Articles

Sam Harris; PhD Neuroscience

Georg Northoff; PhD Neuroscience, PhD Philosophy

Michael Inzlicht; PhD Psychology

Science Daily

“Where Religious Belief And Disbelief Meet”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005092302.htm

“Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-Believers”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090304160400.htm

The Vancouver Sun

“Brain unable to understand existence of God: Expert” by Jennifer Green

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Brain+unable+understand+existence+expert/2682486/story.html

The Globe and Mail

"Scientists investigate if Atheists' are missing a 'God spot'" by Erin Anderssen

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/scientists-investigate-if-atheists-brains-are-missing-a-god-spot/article1521557/