How much will we ever know?

In New England I am finding it harder and harder to find some genuine religious people to argue with.

At UVM, we are almost in a reverse situation from the rest of these united states. Rather than feeling embarrassed to be an atheist or agnostic, people actually feel embarrassed when they admit that they are "religious". The rest of us give them a sort of sad look, and the topic is dropped. Rarely do I find someone who believes it all enough to argue with me about it.

Last fall a couple or evangelical preachers from across the lake came to proselytize at UVM, but my conversations with them were just plain... frustrating:

Preacher: "Now, when you come to find God's love, your life will feel complete. Don't you feel like something is missing?"
Me: "No. In fact I believe the only way we can truly feel complete is to accept that we are not special and that we are alone, and to live the best life that we can with that knowledge."
(he kept up with the presumption that one day I would "see the light". Silly preacher man)

...later
Preacher: "Evolution is false. God created all creatures in there current form, as described in Genesis."
Me: "Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?"
Preacher: "Well in The Bible in book (I forget which book he quoted), it says that The Bible is the word of God, so that's our proof that everything in it is true."
I tried to impress upon him the inherent silliness of believing something to be true, simply because that something tells you it is true, without any external evidence whatsoever, but he didn't budge and so I eventually walked away.

Instead of firm believers like the preacher, I find a vast number of people who would like to call themselves "spiritual" in one way or another, and are confused by the strong stance I have taken on the issue.

Yesterday, I had such a conversation with my brother. Now, I "believe" in science and scientific method, but I also believe that there are MANY forces at work in the universe, even right here on earth and even inside our own brains, that we as humans may never understand. I even believe that our brains are capable of things that we can't even imagine. Abilities that, when exhibited, suggest some sort of supernatural psychic powers. In fact, I'm willing to believe a lot of things that modern science isn't, like the harmfulness of the radio waves that surround us and are slowly microwaving us from the inside out.

But I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to believe in anything anybody would like to call supernatural. Suppose monks in tibet truly have achieved telekinetic abilities. That's pretty cool. Pretty far-fetched, but pretty cool nonetheless. If it is true though, I am 100% positive that there is some physical explanation behind it -- an as yet-to-be-discovered waveform or subatomic particle that makes it all possible.

I explained this concept to my brother (who loves playing the devil's advocate) in this fashion: A couple of thousand years ago, early man had no explanation for lightening (I am borrowing a bit of this argument from my subconscious memories of something I read long ago, probably Hitchens or Dawkins). And so, early man invents God (or in most cases, Gods) to explain it all. There is a natural progression of this phenomenon. As "science" discovers that lightening is really just static electricity building up between water molecules in the sky, and that the sun is not a god but in fact a gigantic thermonuclear reaction floating in space, man's ideas of God updated to reflect his scientific knowledge.

This is not a novel argument. The important part to remember, and I believe the portion that I am actually originating, is that we are NOT at the end of this spectrum, as we arrogantly like to assume. There are myriad things we haven't the foggiest idea about. There are great questions of physics like, "Is there a higgs-boson particle?" or "what is the general unified theory?" but ultimately, it comes down to the questions that we haven't even asked ourselves yet. These are the questions about which the laity continues to use "spirituality" to fill the gaps.

Ultimately though, I believe that all of these concepts we have yet to understand (or even understand to exist) could be broken down into basic physical laws just as light, gravity, etc. are now understood. That's not to say that WE as humans will ever be the ones to understand the breakdown, but it exists, I assure you. The Universe obeys its own laws, and thus there is no such thing as the Supernatural because the very definition of the word precludes its existence.

So please, be humble, and remember that we are a bunch of monkeys who really don't know the first thing about how The Universe works.

A Disturbing Story

My little sister is seven and in first grade (Yes there is a large age gap). The other evening I had a very disturbing conversation with her.

I forget exactly what she was saying, but I overheard her talking about hell, and even though she is seven and innocent and all that, I couldn't help but say to her "Shannon, there is no such thing as hell."

I didn't think this simple comment would create such a problem. I hadn't said anything about God, Heaven, Angels, fairies, Santa Claus, or any of that. I didn't that anything healthy could come out of the concept of a place where one might go to burn for eternity.

My little sister started crying when I told her that.

This goes back to the post I made a few weeks ago about how all children are atheists until they are converted or indoctrinated. Patrick pointed out an obvious flaw in my theory which is that Children, with their vivid imaginations and lack of real-world experience, are more predisposed to soak up any belief systems presented to them. Even I fell victim to this as a child.

But perhaps a bit of background information is necessary at this point. Though technically both Catholic, my parents are pretty atheistic, or at least apatheistic*. I was baptized only at the request of my Catholic grandmother. I was taken to church only on SOME Holidays -- every third Christmas or so. In our household, The Bible did have a place on the bookshelf, but it shared that space with the Bhagavad Gita, The Diamond Sutra (one of many Buddhist teachings), and a dozen or so books about Yoga (my parents were both Yoga teachers at the time).

The point is, in my parent's household, Yahweh is about as holy as Shiva, which is to say, not very.

And yet somehow my little sister has conceived this notion of Hell, and she was convinced that for not believing in it's existence, I would end up there. She stopped crying a little bit to explain this to me.

"If you don't believe, you will just see when you get there." she said.

Disturbing indeed.

I should further point out that my sister lives in Western Massachusetts and goes to a private, secular school. Evangelical Christianity, where hell is most stressed, must be almost non-existent amongst my sister's social networks, and even plain-vanilla Christianity is an uncommon site in the community. At her school, Bible stories are taught. But the stories that are taught have nothing to do with hell or any of the nastier aspects of Institutionalized religion, and they are taught right alongside Norse mythology.

Something is seriously gone wrong if even in such a theoretically secular community, a seven year old is condemning her older brother to hell.

Fortunately, her "faith" in this idea was not deeply held, and over the course of several days I was able to convince her that I was not, in fact, going to burn for an eternity in hell. She even said a few things which surprised me, without my prompting.

"Some people say, 'I've never seen God', and I tell them that they are silly. 'Look in front of you,' I say, 'God is not a person. God is everything. God is the world.'"

This was quite impressive for a seven year old, even my exceptionally intelligent sister (though I may be a bit biased on that count). My guess is that she picked this up from a religious moderate, most likely my Grandmother. These religious moderates are people who are brought up with a particular faith that is so ingrained in their psyche that even when faced with overwhelming evidence, they cannot bear to give it up, and so they "reshape" the faith to fit a more naturalistic world view. They fall under the category of "spiritual theists" as far as I am concerned, and in my previous posts you can read more about this.

But regardless, my little sister is now of the opinion that there is something Divine about the Universe itself, which is a belief that I am not all-too concerned about.

I know that I myself had more steadfast Christian beliefs even at the age of 11-12, and so I have hope for this next generation. I just wish people would stop talking about Hell to other people's children. Whether or not you agree with me that the religious indoctrination of children should be considered child abuse, surely attempts to convert OTHER people's susceptible and innocent children is no more noble than cigarette companies trying to get kids hooked on tobacco.

*Aptatheism is the idea that God's existence is a purely academic concern and of no serious concern. Apatheists are atheists in practice.