Have you ever questioned your atheism?

In this entry I continue my interaction with Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists. This post is my answer to Brown’s fifth question. My answers to Brown’s previous questions can be accessed here:

1. Why are you an atheist? 

2. Can an atheist have purpose? 

3. Are you sure there’s no god? 

4. Can science answer the remaining mysteries of the universe?

In his fifth question, Brown queries atheists on their personal experiences, asking whether or not they’ve had any which challenge their atheism. The subliminal assumption seems to be that atheism is a worldview like a religion, and that certain experiences that one might have may conflict with the fundamental tenets of atheism. But atheism is not a worldview, and as such atheism has no tenets to speak of. Theism is not fundamental, and thus neither is atheism as an antithesis to theism. One can be an atheist and, like theists, still get the issue of metaphysical primacy wrong. (In fact, many atheists do!) 

Brown’s question is the following:

Have you had any experiences in life that caused you to question your atheism? Has something happened to you that seemed genuinely supernatural or otherworldly? Or have you been confronted with some information that shook your atheistic foundations, such as a scientific argument for intelligent design? If so, how have you dealt with such doubts to your atheism?

I have noted in previous writings that apologists for a religious viewpoint tend to treat certainty on the non-believer’s part as a kind of threat, and consequently much of the substance of apologetics is aimed at undermining the non-believer’s certainty. This certainty is a barrier which the apologist needs to break through if his apologetic is going to have any chance of catching more fish for Jesus. If an atheist announces that he is certain in his atheism, the apologist will need to weaken that certainty before plying other tricks of his trade. So when an apologist encounters a non-believer who stands on his convictions, the apologist can be expected to wince with “Don’t be so sure!” While I don’t think Brown’s fifth question is sharp enough for such purposes, it does seem to be pointed in that general direction. 

My answer to Brown here is a firm no, certainly not since I learned about the proper relationship between consciousness and its objects. Prior to my familiarization with basic Objectivist principles, I was philosophically vulnerable to all sorts of mystical suggestion. I had no grasp of the axioms and the issue of metaphysical primacy – I was unaware that such ideas even exist, so I was, as one would expect, philosophically defenseless against claims of supernaturalism. That is not to say that I believed every otherworldly claim that I had encountered, but I had no fundamental principle by which I could reliably and consistently distinguish between what is real and what I was actually imagining and thus rule out fantastical notions in a principled manner. In fact, any awareness I had of the distinction the real and the imaginary, albeit implicit, was tranquilized by constant distractions all around me which reinforced a mental habit of not seeing what was right in front of me all along. But once I grasped the essence of the primacy of existence principle, it was as though a light had come on: reality is not the product of conscious activity, and reality does not conform to what I or anyone else might wish, hope, believe, prefer or imagine. This truth is fundamental and unchanging, and there is no area of knowledge that is immune to its implications. This understanding is a power unlike any other that I had encountered in my life. 

I have stated before that I do not doubt that people have had experiences which they consider highly significant. I would think that eventually everyone who has reached a certain age has had some remarkable experience or other, perhaps many in some cases. I myself have had many. It is not the fact that we experience things that is susceptible to problems, but rather the way in which we go about identifying the nature of our experiences, their causes, and their implications for our lives. If an individual claims to have experienced something supernatural, I readily grant that this person did in fact have an experience. But I would inquire on the methodology by which he went about determining that it had a supernatural or mystical impetus. Even more, I would ask him what his ultimate starting point is. Insistence that no other explanation can account for the experience may very well be cover for unwillingness to countenance mundane explanations. And from what I have observed among those who are invested in belief in the supernatural, claims to have had experiences of the supernatural are typically not met with probing scrutiny – that is saved for those who express doubts or reluctance to accept such claims. The prevailing interrogative procedure is not “Why do you believe?” but rather “Why don’t you believe?” as though uncritical acceptance of supernatural claims should be the norm. 

To claim that one has experienced something miraculous is to attribute the causality of that experience to the supernatural. But causality is a feature of nature to begin with. I remember hearing a story once about a church burning down and the only thing which survived the flames unscathed was a bible. This, it was reported, was miraculous. Now there was no way for me to know this directly – it was something I learned about from other sources. So I was in no position to determine whether any door hinges, water pipes or breaker boxes survived unscathed as well. As the recipient of such a report I could not investigate such details myself. After all, if a light switch survives a housefire, who would find this significant enough to announce it? If a house had burned down and everything in it but a doorknob had burned to a crisp, would anyone think that was at indicative of divine intervention? I suppose not. But a bible? Now, that must be miraculous, right? And the rest of the church? It’s all gone. All destroyed. Quite probably many other bibles did not survive, for churches typically do not have only one. So a church burning down is not miraculous, but the survival of a single item in the church is miraculous. A miracle, then, is compatible with widescale destruction of value, so when believers pray for miracles, are they prepared for the destruction that may come as part of the package? What parishioner of that church would consider the survival of one bible resulting from the destruction of his church a good exchange? The gathering place has been sacrificed for an artefact that already existed. The people already believed, so what was gained as a result of the sacrifice? 

But notice something else here: a miracle claim typically involves attributing the cause of something that is seen to something that is not seen. We see the church, we see the wreckage after it burned down, and we see the surviving bible. (The char marks on the south wall may on first glance look like Jesus, but to me it looks more like Ivan Turgenev.) And this is all attributed to a supernatural being which one never sees. Such claims are brought to us by the same bunch which produces thinkers who parrot David Hume’s skepticism in regards to inductive inferences. Hume famously ruled that since no “necessary connexion” between a cause and its effect can be seen, one should therefore not consider his conclusions connecting the two to be definitive or certain. But yet we can be certain that an invisible supernatural agent prevailed upon itself to allow the destruction of an entire congregational meeting house and yet save one item from the flames. Really? If even the bible perished in the flames, would it not still be a miracle – one in which the supernatural agent made the choice not to allow anything to survive? The tendency in such matters is to presume that the skeptic has all the burden to demonstrate that a mundane explanation prevails over and against any supernatural “account,” while the religionist bears no burden in explaining how he “knows” that a supernatural agent was involved at all.

The point here is that it all seems quite slippery to suppose one has the intellectual acumen to determine on the one hand that natural causation played no role in an event and yet, on the other, to be entirely certain that a supernatural force must be behind it all. What engines of epistemology allow for such shoddy reasoning? On the one hand, we have the resources we need to draw so-called “naturalistic” conclusions right here in reality, and on the other all we have is what we can imagine when it comes to supernaturalism. Might it be that the believer really just wants to be a witness to something he considers miraculous? A worldview which takes supernaturalism seriously and emphasizes mystical notions as core truths will likely predispose its adherents to a psychological yearning to witness something he believes is supernatural.

If I had an experience and claimed it was a miraculous event, I would have to ask myself: on what basis could I possibly determine that it was in fact miraculous? Some thinkers seem treat it as a matter of elimination: we have before us a long hallway with many doors on either side, each representing mundane possibilities. As we go down the hallway and find doors on either side all locked, we come to the very last door at the end of the hallway – it represents extramundane options not available to us until now, and it’s not only unlocked, but wide open! But that’s just it: it will always be unlocked, even if others we find before it can be opened, because we will always have the capacity to imagine alternatives to what we find right here on earth. Yes, that door at the end is open, and Rod Serling is waiting there with a smile and a smoldering cigarette.

What’s most ironic about Brown’s question is the fact that my own experiences militate in a direction opposite to where Brown might want things to go. For my experiences have consistently demonstrated that existence exists independent of conscious activity and that human beings have the capacity to imagine things. My experience has also demonstrated to me that, if thinkers do not secure their cognitive habits with rational principles, they very well may miss the signposts indicating that they’ve departed from the real and into a realm of fictive invention. I would think that any honest thinker can relate to this observation, even in retrospect.

Prior to grasping the principle of the primacy of existence and its implications for entire structure of my thinking, I was caught in an oblivious haze and blown around by a storm of indiscriminate winds. While I was what I might now call vaguely hungry for fundamental principles – implicitly sensing that there must be a grounding to all knowledge which I had yet to discover, I did not have even a rudimentary understanding of the hierarchical nature of concepts. I had assumed that the deeper one might plunge into the fundamentals of knowledge, the more complex such matters would become and the more specialized I would need to be in order to grasp it – requiring skills and intellect that I simply did not have or know how to obtain, when in fact quite the opposite is actually the case. These truths are easy to grasp and may even seem trivial given their obviousness. But I did not know this, and if anyone in my social orbits had any genuine understanding in these areas, they certainly were not sharing it with me. 

Sometimes I figured that other thinkers must have attended some private meeting that I missed out on where all the secrets were laid out, and sometimes I figured that everyone else was as clueless on such matters as I more and more began to realize I was. It was a fog of ignorance either way, underscoring the facts that (a) I did not know these things – though I privately wanted to know them, and (b) in spite of all my time spent in classrooms, no teacher or classmate ever sat down and tried to impart such knowledge to me. The closest thing to an exception to this was a high school friend of mine who enrolled early in college and took a logic course; he was so excited to share what he was learning with me that he drew out all these Venn diagrams to demonstrate what he was studying. But at the time it all seemed both rather obvious as well as quite tedious to me, so his enthusiasm was less than infectious. That was my error entirely: a truth should not be dismissed as inconsequential simply because it seems obvious. If it is a fundamental truth – a truth on which other truths depend – one should prize it above all others. But I was under the impression that I should be expecting some earthshattering revelation to clear up all the fog, and I was not prepared to question that assumption. 

While deep in the stupor of this foggy haze, I joined a church and became a Christian. I let myself believe that this would finally enlighten me on the things I was yearning to discover. However, the exact opposite happened: I found myself surrounded by people, all ghoulishly clambering for a chance to dig their claws into my soul, who were far more misguided than I thought possible. It was a vat of cultish behavior distilled down to the most undiluted concentrate. After months of deep study of the Christian bible, I was no closer to understanding the hierarchical nature of concepts, the proper relationship between consciousness and its objects, the proper starting point to knowledge, etc. My first impressions were very mixed of course – everyone welcoming me with open arms, their expressions of neighborliness overflowing with warmth, while all utterances – from pulpit preaching to kitchen chatter – were profusely decorated with bible quotes and incantations to Jesus, so much so that it all came across as rather contrived for its own sake. But this was their normal, their culture, their daily bread as it were. I don’t think they even realized that they were faithfully reciting all the approved verbal formulas necessary just to stay on the Lord’s good side. But they must have been because the preacher’s job was to continually remind the congregants of the Lord’s bad side. It was just habit for them by this point. They all seemed beyond the point of no return. In spite of it all, what happened to me could have been much worse. I was just far too conscientious to go the distance. 

Christians often speak of protecting themselves with “the armor of God.” This comes from Ephesians 6:10-11, which says: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” The sheer number of denominations within Christianity – some of them antagonistic towards each other – should be sufficient to raise suspicions that this form of protection is not a set of rational principles. And it isn’t. Instead of rational principles, the believer has a pool of psychological devises assembled for the task of positively reinforcing his commitment to the imagery by screening out any and all data which conflict with the Christian devotional program, in whatever form it may take. Much of this consists in holy slogans and pious incantations (examples such as “if the Lord says the same,” “get thee behind me, Devil!" and “washed by the blood of Jesus” come to mind) deployed as coping mechanisms to ward off unsettling ideas, soothe the mind, and neutralize psychic stress all the while maintaining an outward façade of euphoric calm that’s supposed to signal the peace of Jesus and eternal salvation. For the believer, this strategy feels principled because it consistently refers back to a common source – namely Christian teaching, biblical instruction, church doctrine, etc., which are accepted and treated as fundamental truths, when in fact it is delusion. 

Centering one’s worldview on a commitment to the belief that whatever the bible says is true (to the point that one must be willing to sacrifice his life for it), does not equip a thinker to distinguish between fact and fantasy, reality and imagination. On the contrary, the very starting point of such a regime is something that can only be imagined, a diametric reversal of the proper relationship between consciousness and its objects, and consequently adherence to it will only predispose a thinker toward accepting fantastical notions – so long as they can be made to be compatible with the core details of the worldview – as at the very least plausible if not potentially true. I could approach another congregant and say something like, “The Lord has impressed on my heart to talk to you. He knows your burdens and sees your struggles,” and the congregant would be ready to accept this appeal on its face, because it would reaffirm what the congregant wants to be true. I could have just made it up, but that would not matter. 

By contrast, the principle of the primacy of existence – i.e., the recognition that reality exists and is what it is independent of consciousness, that reality is not a product of conscious activity, that wishing does not make it true, that the imaginary is not real – provides a thinker’s mind with the most powerful protection possible to man. 

by Dawson Bethrick