While You Were Sleeping - Atheism is faith.

November 22, 2011

You’ll have to forgive me, I’m new to Quora. I read a question about atheism today, and the answers (often written by atheists), seemed to be filled with half-truths about what it means not to believe in God, and completely beside the point. I think there’s much more confusion about the whole topic than is strictly necessary. These are big questions, but there’s much too much judging going on between the two camps. I feel there may be a simple answer to it all, one I did not come up with on my own, but one I could attempt to clarify… Let me give it a go, I’ll try to stay rigorous.

Science can test the veracity of the stories as they are told in the Bible. Adam and Eve, to take the most obvious. There is scientific evidence that the world was not created in seven days. It’s called Evolution. Contrary to what the most strident amongst believers will have you think, many people of faith understand and accept this reality. They are not threatened by it, much the opposite. What this does is allow for the power of the parable to be unleashed. Parables are important, necessary. Every culture needs a narrative to explain its moral imperatives. Taking parables literally doesn’t help that. I’d go as far as to say that it hinders learning and comprehension.

But I digress. As I was saying, science is able to test the veracity of the stories. In fact, it has already disproved many of them, in so far as we assume them to pertain to the physical world. But God is much larger than the Bible, which is at best an imperfect account of religious history, written by man. God may have inspired the Bible, but He is not the Bible. So. These stories aren’t literally true. Is this evidence that God does not exist?

I’ll say it, as a proud atheist: it isn’t. Just as the Bible has no way of proving the existence of God, science has no way of disproving it. It can explain how we got here, from the Big Bang to the 21st century on Earth, but it cannot explain why. Has a higher entity willed the Universe and Humanity into being? Is there an almighty Creator at the origin of it all? Science can say: “from what we know, it seems unlikely.” It cannot say: “We know for sure that there is not.”

I heard Richard Dawkins say once that the day he learned about Evolution, he stopped believing in God. Why? Because Adam and Eve didn’t really happen? All this tells me is that he gives, even as an atheist, the same importance to the Bible as any literal-minded Christian, but from the other end of the spectrum. The very nature of science, and its greatness, is its ability to admit what we know and don’t know, and recognise what we can and cannot prove. With that remark, I felt Dawkins had betrayed that very principle, and demonstrated a very limited, very basic understanding of religion.

So let’s think about it dispassionately: what is atheism? Some define it as the absence of faith. I’ve certainly experienced it as a void, an empty spot where my spirituality would’ve been. However, if we stick to strict scientific reasoning, if we remain intellectually honest, and if we block the noise from outside, we must humbly admit: we cannot know. But we are human: every gap in knowledge we like to fill with hypotheses.

People of faith cannot prove the existence of God. Atheists cannot disprove it. From this perspective, atheism is a belief: the belief that God does not exist. It is just another kind of faith.

If you think about it like that, neither spiritual people nor atheists are right. And, what is more, they are not even wrong.

You can argue about all the ways faith manifests (or should manifest) itself. They will change from country to country, culture to culture. You can argue about all the interpretations of a given text. You can argue about all the miracles and parables and everything else. What you cannot argue about, or even judge each other on, is that deeply private, deeply personal thing: faith.

— From SF.

9:29pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z9DOYyCH4t_J
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