What confirmed my atheism
After reading another article on atheism on Medium to which I responded with a large writing, I figured it was worth it as a stand alone article below.
I was never really religious.
My dad had no use for religion. He rarely talked about it, but one summer when I was an adult and the subject of Mormons as a cult came up, my dad said “all religions are cults.”
My mom sent my sisters and I to vacation bible schools in the summer, but I think that is more so she could have us out of her hair. I remember the VBS reading all the miracle stories which seemed to me no more fanciful than the sci-fi I read.
When I was 15, a couple of us were hanging out in the band room office and someone brought up religion and I said I wasn’t a christian. I thought there may be SOMETHING out there, but to drill it down to our level was a bit of a stretch. My friend said “what are you ? Jewish “ We all laughed, but this instigated my decision to think about it deeper.
Even IF we posit a higher being or power behind the universe it’s a point of hubris and anthropomorphizing to think such a fantastical entity is even concerned with this planet much less your individual needs and wants.
People want to use the big bang as a ‘proof’ of a deity claiming some power had to ‘create something from nothing.’
But this is a ‘god of the gaps’ argument!
In fact, there some evidence in cosmology that the universe contracts as well as expands.[1] The so-called “Big Bang” seen as the beginning of everything might actually be one of a series of big bangs as the universe expands, then contracts, then bangs again in an eternal cycle. Theists have no problem accepting a paradigm of an ever present always existing deity, but for some reason cannot wrap their head around an ever present always existing.. existence. Matter never goes away, it merely changes form.
This materialist approach then informs us of evolution and creation of life.
Theists, especially creationists, will argue materialism has no answer to how life began. But materialism does. The Miller-Urey [2] experiments did accomplish, using electricity, to spark inorganic molecules to become organic. While not replicated, it doesn’t take much consideration to understand the billions of years such electical force was being applied against a stew of material in the early forming earth to increase the odds of such a spark instigating organic life.
There are 4200 religions on earth, with at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses, and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans since our species first appeared. So, yes, it’s also a point of hubris to assume YOUR religion and YOUR deity is the “real” deity and all others are fake or made up.
The final big conundrum is consciousness.[3]. The brain is complex. BUT- if we examine human behavior on a scale of other mammals, for example, we find lower mammals with a limited approach relying mostly on stimulus and response. As we get to higher levels of mammals we find steady increase in the nature of their interactions with their own species and their environment. Elephants aparently grieve. Many animals exhibit serious problem solving skills as well as recognition of other species in their orbit.
Let me give a personal example. We got our current dog, Nakita (an American Akita) from the animal shelter in February 2017 where she had been recently lodged. She was two years old at that time and is our third Akita since the mid-1990s. From the time we got her, she exhibited problem solving skills. Her ball would roll under some piece of furniture and when she could not reach it on one side she to the other side of the furniture to retrieve it. This is pretty normal for dogs, of course. But then, we moved into our new house.
We had all along been keeping her in a dog crate when we were gone for work because we were not yet sure of her house training. When we moved to our new house in July 2017 we were still keeping her in the crate. The crate is similar to what I show below except it had TWO latches, rather than just one. [4]
I came home one afternoon from work and she was greeting me at the door! She figured out how to get out of the crate, but I didn’t know how. Few days later- repeat. I finally realized she was batting at the lower of the two latches on her cage until she was able to work it loose. She then used her nose to push open and through the bottom of the cage door even though the top latch was still secured.
We took to securing the door with a snap on lock mechanism. I came home a subsequent day and she had spent all day trying to get out and squeezing her paw through a gap between the door and cage that she dug a hole the carpeting to the wood floor as well as damaging one of her nails causing a small bloody wound. We subsequently decided to not keep her in the cage. She knew she COULD get out now and so would continue to try to the point of hurting herself.
Anyway, the universe and life exist on a continuum and scale and I see no evidence this is at all deity based.
[1]
https://phys.org/news/2013-08-cosmologist-universe.html
