Why I Don't Believe

This question has come up now and then, and, for sake of reuse and completion, I want to put this to something more persistent than a Facebook wall post.

tl;dr: I used to believe in the Christian god, gained an appreciation for materialism. That's all you're going to get, you lazy bums. Read on if you want the details.

The "deconversion ", as I describe it, started innocuously with a good friend - who was Wiccan - if I believed she was going to Hell. I, much to my regret (for the terrible implications of such a response, not for what it eventually resulted in), said, "Yes." I was uncomfortable saying it, and, in hindsight, I later realized it was because I believed that a friend of mine, despite being a terrific person, was doomed to eternal torment for simply not accepting my god.

That, of course, is not justification alone for a loss of faith. Many "reason" their way around it - refer to Catholicism's latest amendments to their policy of purgatory (though I've read that I'm still destined for Hell since I rejected Jesus' offering of salvation, even under the security blanket of purgatory).

That conversation with my friend, however much it bothered me, did not sway me away from my faith. I mention it because, looking back, it planted the seed of doubt - the chip in the glass that spider-webbed into a later shattering of my belief. I continued on believing in my god and creationism, until the next step in my deconversion: online debates.

During my middle and high school years, I frequented a site named "The Massassi Temple". The community had a few non-Christians, chiefly atheists amongst them. It was my first real exposure to a belief system radically different from my own - the idea that, not only was the Bible wrong (that was something I knew from discussions about Judaism), but the idea that there was absolutely no god at all.

I debated a lot with those "non-believers" (and, in looking back, I wish to apologize for anyway frustration my attempts to argue for creationism and Christianity may have caused my non-Christian opponents at the time) and came out with two conclusions:

1. Creationism is a unsustainable (with regard to rationality) hypothesis of the origins of our universe and the origin of life on our planet. There are more-sound theories, such as the Big Bang theory, abiogenesis, and the theory of evolution, supported by physical evidence and logically-sound deductive reasoning. The only reason I had ever believed in creationism was because I was raised in a Christian household.
2. The biggest reason why I believed in Christianity - my being raised by Christian parents aside - was because I was afraid of death. The idea that I would cease to exist the day I died was (and still is) a frightening thought, but I found solace in the thought that I would continue to exist as long as I believed enough.

I emerged from this time in my life transformed from a Christian creationist into a Christian intelligent design proponent. The barbarism of the Old Testament had been raised in debates, as well as the discrepancies between Genesis and modern scientific theories; I rationalized the former with the oft -repeated (and what I now realize to be logically fallacious) justification of those parts being written for a "different time", and dismissed the latter with the assertion that science has been wrong before, will be wrong in the future, and is merely a little off now (i.e., the Bible is still eternally and infallibly true) .

From high school through college, I didn't change much, religiously. The most college contributed to my deconversion was a shift in my thought processes to a more rational and analytical style. It wasn't until I had graduated and truly moved out on my own that I fully deconverted (the fact that I was living independently was merely incidental and I only mention it to help give a frame of reference for when the event occurred).

The turning point was really the realization that the reason why I was Christian - even bigger than my fear of death - was because my parents were. Had I Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh parents, then the chances of me emerging from childhood as anything other than their religion was extremely - and, likely, negligibly - low. Without any personal stake in these religious beliefs - for how can one feel any conviction with beliefs that one did not come to on their own? - I was able to evaluate Christianity with a clean slate, free of my wants of what I wanted the universe to be like, and able to evaluate what the universe is. I found evidence for the Christian god lacking:

• Why do we no longer see glorious miracles like those described in the Bible, and why did this increasing absence have such a strong correlation with increased means to understand and understanding of our universe?
• The debate of nature versus nurture aside, why would God create people, like homosexual people, with an inclination or outright drive to do something that sends them to Hell?
• If the Catholic church is truly the original Christian church, why would God allow the schism? Why didn't he send someone to either fix the Catholic church or to correct the heretics?

There are numerous other reasons why I lost my faith, but these highlight the core concepts that drove me away from Christianity. Now free of the crutch of faith, I looked to the landscape of religions, and saw a collection of superstitions that ultimately boiled down, after peeling back layers of rationalization, a dependency on faith by the individual who adhered to a religion: a fundamental discouragement of rational thought and a passive or active encouragement to continued religious adherence even in the face of the most concrete contradictions.

I couldn't tolerate that mindset, especially the latter half. To quote Carl Sagan: "Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable." Was there a god? Possibly, but the gods described by the religions of the world are either so far-fetched that belief in them strains credulity (such as some members of the Hindu pantheon) or are so heinous that, even if they did exist, they would be unworthy of worship (such as the, among other reprehensible traits, genocidal Jewish god). Thus, no religion provided a satisfactory answer or direction of life, and continued patronage was unconscionable.

This was, by no means, an overnight process. The biggest hurdle I encountered was overcoming my fear of eternal damnation in Hell. However shallow my belief in Hell may have been, the risk of eternal damnation was daunting. It was only through repeated re-evaluation of the evidence - or lack thereof - of the Christian god that allowed me to eventually overcome this.

The next major hurdle was fear of death. Religions provide a sense of safety against one of the most omnipresent human fears: death. The promise of an afterlife is what helps facilitate people fly planes into buildings, to gun down children at camp, to climb aboard public busses and blow themselves up, and, to a less-often lethal extent, attract newcomers to a religion: "Follow my god, and you will not cease to be at death, but continue on in an everlasting paradise". My overcoming of this wasn't dependent on theological arguments (or those against), but falling back to what I have previously mentioned: I was now free of what I want the universe to be, and merely accepted what the universe is. I will die some day. I don't like that, and I'm not going to actively seek it out, but my aversion to death is no justification for religious belief.

Now that I had shed my theism - and its associated morality and purpose of life - I felt a need to find replacements.  I think a large number of theists - and I among them, at one point in the past - feel security with their holy text(s): in one convenient package is an explanation of where we came from, why we're here, where we're going, and how to get there. Thus, it's not uncommon for a theist to assume that, with a lack of a god to provide a morality, an atheist is, by default, an anarchist or nihilist. These same theists often make the argument that atheism leads to harm by citing the lack of fear of eternal damnation after death as a lack of reason to not do harm and an encouragement to "give in" to their violent and selfish desires (an argument that speaks more of the one making the argument than anyone else).

For myself, and an overwhelming number of atheists, I looked inside to determine my morality (and, though many won't admit it, so do a majority of theists). Within, I found the desire to simply advance the human race (in all likelihood a result of evolution), and the best way to accomplish is to evaluate the net benefit and harm of an action as a means to determine whether an action was "good" or "bad" - rationalize morality instead of blindly deferring to an interpretation of a text. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had stumbled upon secular humanism. It is this principle that has guided me through life since my deconversion, and it is extremely freeing: if a part of my morality is untenable, I excise it and rationalize its replacement.  I'm no longer constrained like I was as a Christian, where my morality hinged on the accuracy of the Bible (for, if one part of an inerrant book is proven wrong, then the whole of the book is suspect); I no longer had to defend the discrimination against women, the discrimination against non-believers, the discrimination against homosexual people, the logical fallacies, or the contradictions between the books.

But what of purpose in life?  I had morality, but a moral code does not necessarily give one purpose in life. I referred again to introspection and found a desire to help advance my species. Conveniently, this once again falls in the domain of humanism. I naturally have a desire to help people and leave the world in a better state than how I found it - donate blood, involve myself in social causes, donate to those in need.

So, that's it. Like a true Darwinist, I gradually changed through small changes from a conservative Christian creationist to a rational agnostic atheist. Maybe I'll change again in the future, but at least it'll be with a greater understanding of where I came from and how I got there.

Tornadoes Don't Make Airplanes

Fred Hoyle, in an attempt to disprove evolution without an intelligent designer, once said:

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

The crux of the argument is that the complexity of life is too high to be without a designer (commonly proposed to be the proponent's god or gods). Many of have written about why this is a fallacious argument, but I'd like to cover what I see as the origin of this invalid example, and propose an example that, I think, accurately illustrates evolution in action.

This example is used by people who have one or both misunderstandings about evolution:

• Evolution is purely random.
• If something is without an intelligent designer, it is implicitly random.

Evolution, at its core, is defined as small changes occurring over time within a population. This can be as simple as the emergence of a new hair color, described as microevolution, to something as complex as a new species (known as speciation), which can be a product of macroevolution.

These changes that manifest are often random - a faulty duplication of genes, be it by a faulty reproductive process or some external agent such as radiation. However, this duplication - which is, for all intents and purpose, random - is not the only component of evolution. A counterpart to the creation of new genes is selection - natural selection, genetic drift, and other methods - which eliminate the "useless" genes. Although there is no (yet discernible) intelligence driving these methods (excepting forms of artificial selection), these are the counter-balances to the randomness of these random gene mutations.

Take, for example, the recent discovery of humans who are immune to HIV. We know this immunity has a genetic cause - how and when the mutation occurred, we don't know yet (and may never know). Now, let's take the scenario where HIV becomes a true world-wide epidemic; anyone not immune will be killed by it. Once everyone without the immunity is dead, the only people left behind will be those with an immunity to the virus.

In this example, the spread of the HIV virus is an example of natural selection - a change occurred in the environment, and it was only those with the special genes that grant the immunity left behind. Those genes will continue to reproduce, and the genetic composition without those genes will have been wiped out. On a side note, this opens the door for a fantastic discussion of the genetic origins of charity, empathy, hate, and other traits in humanity.

The take-away from this is that, while there is no design or purpose evident in natural selection, it is not random; if it were random, we'd have organs or growths that have absolutely no functional purpose, either now or in our history (even the once-considered-useless appendix has been proposed to have a use after all). Additionally, it's worth noting that we've worked through this entire example without any indication of an intelligent designer - while that does not disprove the existence of an intelligent designer, it does render "tornado in a junkyard" argument obsolete.

In conclusion, it's fair to note that what I've written here isn't anything new, but that I'm merely standing on the shoulders of giants. Richard Dawkins really awakened my interest in science, and I'd recommend his books, such as The Selfish Gene, for more information on genes and how they've shaped the development of our world.