Throwing Away Ideas, Not Observations

Why do people believe in a god or gods? Two simple reasons.

1. They cannot explain the world around them (death, disease, natural disaster, etc.) with reason, so they guess that someone is playing a trick on them, or making things happen behind the scenes.
2. They were taught to - sometimes gently, sometimes harshly - at a relatively young age. If they doubt their beliefs, they fear reprisal from family as well as the "man upstairs".

No person is born with an innate knowledge of the existence of any god. I admit this is a bold statement and I probably can't prove it. But I can show why it is extremely likely to be so.

If I said that no one is born with an innate knowledge of the English language, or of juggling balls, or of making a fire, not one person would challenge me, because obviously we needed to learn these things ourselves before we knew them. There are many people alive today who cannot speak English, juggle balls, or make a fire without some sort of special technology. Clearly these are not innate.

However, we can argue that we have the innate ability to communicate, to manipulate objects, to experiment with phenomena we observe. I don't think anyone will argue these. It's those innate skills that led our predecessors to invent formal language, juggling and ignition.

And we also teach these skills with care to not abuse them. We tell our children what sort of language is permissible in certain places and situations, and which words would result in a less than favorable result for them if used. Jugglers are aware that they need a safe distance from others to perform the feat, and that the whimsical nature of it does not blend well with certain more sober situations. And we keep matches and lighters away from children while we let them plan our fire escape plan, and we collectively support the very socialist notion of a local fire department so even those who cannot afford to pay for such property and life rescue can benefit.

I think it is innate that we reason. I think it is innate that we look at things fall and notice that they never fall up. We see that fast things hitting objects perform more spectacularly than slow things. We notice that it is light out for about half a day, then it is dark out. All of these observations make us curious and drive us to understand more about the reality we find ourselves in.

The trouble is what happens when we can't reason it out. A few thousand years ago we did not understand why tides rose and fell. We needed some explanation because reason wasn't cutting it. We didn't understand why life can just stop, and someone becomes dead. We needed some sort of explanation.

Generally, the answers to the above problems was that a god or gods did it. God made the tides go in and out. God cursed a person for their evil, or called him home for his good deeds. And without any evidence to contradict all that, that served us as good as any other explanation.

Now we understand the Moon's gravity with the Earth and how it affects the oceans. We understand infection, disease and the genetics of old age. Yet there still are those who attribute tides and death to divine action, despite all we have learned.

There are many who reject science as against religion, as a sort of sorcery or evil craft that lies to us. They claim evolution is no better a theory than, say, intelligent design, and when shown mountains of strong evidence supporting evolution they simply say it is faulty, it doesn't prove a thing.

Now, having provisional explanations for things we don't understand is fine and normal. Gestalt psychology is criticized,  but most agree that when we see something that is incomplete we fill in the blanks naturally. It's in our nature.

The problem is when we use these provisional explanations even when our reason shows us that there are other, more reasonable explanations. When we dispense with the science of radiometric dating and insist that this book says the Earth is only so many thousands of years old, we are letting provisionality overrule reason. When we insist that a pregnancy initiated through a violent sexual attack is "God's will" we are letting provisionality overrule reason.

Tim Minchin wrote, "Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved." In other words, reason means dispensing with an idea when it does not match observation, not dispensing with an observation when it does not match an idea.

If the god idea was innate, why would there be so many contradictory versions of it? If there was one true god or set of gods that we can just know, why aren't we all in agreement? Does this deity want us to kill each other over it?

It's like the old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.When repeated observations and man's best ideas do not match up, we must throw away the idea, not the observations.

I have no problem if you want to personally fill in the cracks with God Spackle. I do have a problem when there already is an explanation for what you are spackling over, and you refuse to accept it because it doesn't fit your premise. My problem is that you then teach your children not to think critically. You encourage ignorance of reality over believing tradition. You celebrate the emotional security of a Father in Heaven over the need for stewardship of our Actual Reality.

If you must be religious, please never allow religion to become harmful to others. Take care to juggle a safe distance from me. Use words that are peaceful, not inflammatory.

And please, above all, don't let your children learn to love the flame of religion like a modern-day arsonist, but to respect it, just like our earliest prehistoric chemists did when they invented fire. Religion, like fire, can destroy if left unchecked, or if used without rational thought.