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Yes­ter­day while dri­ving back home from help­ing my now-ex-roommate move out, I was lis­ten­ing to a recent episode of Athe­ists Talk radio (pro­duced by Min­nesota Athe­ists) in which the guest was Dan Barker, for­mer Chris­t­ian min­is­ter and now co-president of the Free­dom From Reli­gion Foun­da­tion. A few very good ques­tions were raised which have rarely come up when I’ve dis­cussed reli­gion in the past.

The first ques­tion I’d like to ask is why believe in any god or gods?

With reli­gion as with any other claim, the stan­dard pro­ce­dure of sci­ence is to start with the null hypoth­e­sis. A claim about the exis­tence of a god is treated the same as a claim about the effec­tive­ness of a med­ical treat­ment and the bur­den of proof is placed on those mak­ing the claim. In the case of reli­gion, this means that any claim based solely on so called “holy texts” is imme­di­ately dis­carded as their “truth” is entirely depen­dent on some­one already sub­scrib­ing to that belief. The claims must be inde­pen­dently ver­i­fi­able by any­one, not just believ­ers. Attempts to claim truth based on some­thing that requires one to already be a believer will invoke the wrath of the Fly­ing Spaghetti Mon­ster.

The sec­ond ques­tion is why YOUR god(s)?

I con­sider this to be the best counter when a believer tries the Pascal’s Wager argu­ment. The three most well known and pop­u­lar reli­gions in the United States are Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, and Islam, col­lec­tively referred to along with a hand­ful of other smaller reli­gions as Abra­hamic reli­gions after an impor­tant char­ac­ter in the texts of the group. Within all three of these major reli­gions, there are a num­ber of denom­i­na­tions which then branch fur­ther in to a vari­ety of sects. Now with­out even look­ing beyond the top three major monotheisms we’re look­ing at lit­er­ally hun­dreds of pos­si­ble groups, all of which will tell you that the oth­ers are doing some­thing wrong and deserv­ing of some kind of divine ret­ri­bu­tion. Beyond this we have the var­i­ous poly­the­is­tic beliefs, the Indian reli­gions, the Far East­ern reli­gions, an uncount­able num­ber of tribal reli­gions, and mod­ern reli­gions such as Sci­en­tol­ogy, as well as the ever-popular and vague “spir­i­tu­al­ity”. I’d be will­ing to wager that very few of those read­ing this have ever seri­ously looked in to any reli­gions beyond the major denom­i­na­tion they were born in to and fur­ther than that I’d bet that absolutely zero have made a major change in their reli­gious belief other than leav­ing reli­gion alto­gether. It would be a num­ber of life­times to even under­stand the Abra­hamic reli­gions to the level where one could make an informed deci­sion. With that in mind I believe the answer to the ques­tion posed by Mr. Pas­cal cen­turies ago would be non­be­lief, as if it were to turn out that there was a god and it was one of the many jeal­ous gods of the world’s reli­gions (in the words of the Chris­t­ian god from both the Exo­dus and Deuteron­omy vari­ants of the Ten Com­mand­ments, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me…Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jeal­ous God,”) one would log­i­cally be bet­ter off hav­ing not believed in any god rather than the wrong one.

Now at this point some will cer­tainly be ready to pull the faith card, and I can’t refute that one. Pure faith is by def­i­n­i­tion with­out evi­dence, so attempt­ing to mount a log­i­cal oppo­si­tion to faith is silly and a waste of time.

My third ques­tion in response to that would sim­ply be what good does it do?

There are a num­ber of exam­ples read­ily avail­able for evil in the world which is caused by reli­gion. The vast major­ity of wars through­out his­tory were fought over reli­gion. The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East is because of reli­gion. The 9÷11÷2001 ter­ror­ist attacks and in fact almost every ter­ror­ist attack ever to occur in all of time were at least par­tially reli­giously moti­vated. Assaults and killings of homo­sex­u­als, Fred Phelps and the West­boro Bap­tist Church, etc. It is much much harder to get some­one to seri­ously injure or kill another per­son and almost impos­si­ble to con­vince them to die in the process with­out the belief that they’re sat­is­fy­ing the desires of a higher power. I’ll gladly con­cede that the same abil­ity to orga­nize around beliefs does allow reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions to bring in vol­un­teers and dona­tions for char­ity work more read­ily than a sec­u­lar orga­ni­za­tion, but until you show me some­one blow­ing him or her­self up in a crowded mar­ket for sci­ence I per­son­ally see it as a worth­while trade-off to have to work harder for char­i­ta­ble goals.

The last ques­tion I have for the believ­ers out there is what would it take for you to change your beliefs?

Often in debates the reli­gious side will accuse non­be­liev­ers of being closed-minded and/or biased against the super­nat­ural, when from our posi­tion it is the believer who is closed-minded and biased. Going back to the ear­lier point about faith, to be truly faith­ful one is arguably required to be closed minded. The num­ber of con­tra­dic­tions within entire reli­gious texts and occa­sion­ally even within the same chap­ter or even para­graph of said texts requires a level of closed-minded men­tal acro­bat­ics to accept the whole as still being a reli­able source of “truth”. As for bias, the believer who runs in to a gap in their knowl­edge or in the knowl­edge of soci­ety as a whole (for exam­ple the ori­gin of life) will often just say “God did it” where the non­be­liever would hit that same point and say “I don’t know”, then start look­ing for answers if the ques­tion is suf­fi­ciently interesting.

I’m sure I speak for many non­be­liev­ers when I say we’d love to see con­vinc­ing evi­dence for any set of reli­gious beliefs. I wouldn’t be par­tic­u­larly happy in some cases depend­ing on which one turned out to be true in that sce­nario, as many belief sys­tems would label me as very high on the sin scale (I’ve vio­lated as many of the Ten Com­mand­ments as is pos­si­ble for a non­be­liever to do aside from the one about killing, and com­mit­ted every sin­gle one of the Seven Deadly Sins a num­ber of times, often simul­ta­ne­ously. I’m less famil­iar with the equiv­a­lents in other reli­gions, but I’m sure many are sim­i­lar), but I’d still find it inter­est­ing to know and would be more than will­ing to start liv­ing by the ideals of whichever reli­gion it was if there was rea­son to believe it would mean any­thing. In that way I believe I and most other non­be­liev­ers are very open-minded about reli­gion, again we sim­ply do not see the evi­dence offered as being convincing.

Can any of you believ­ers hon­estly say that if evi­dence was pre­sented to you tomor­row of your reli­gious text being noth­ing but a work of fic­tion that you would accept it? Of course this is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble with most of the older reli­gions as the sim­ple lack of a large quan­tity of his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion makes if very hard for specifics to be ver­i­fied about any­thing, much less to the level one would need to make claims about dis­prov­ing one of the world’s large reli­gions, but it cer­tainly could hap­pen with more mod­ern reli­gions such as Mor­monism or Sci­en­tol­ogy. Both of those were founded in the United States (by trea­sure hunter Joseph Smith and science-fiction author L. Ron Hub­bard, respec­tively) within the last two hun­dred years and their pub­lic his­tory is very well doc­u­mented. It would be very pos­si­ble for doc­u­men­ta­tion to arise show­ing either of these to have been entirely bogus. Note that I am not mak­ing that accu­sa­tion specif­i­cally at those tar­gets, obvi­ously I believe all reli­gions to be equally fab­ri­cated, but the younger a reli­gion is the more reli­able of a his­tory we have of its found­ing and thus more ques­tions can be answered rather than being left open.

I may come up with more ques­tions, but I’ll save those for a follow-up post later. For now, I await any responses and would like to take the oppor­tu­nity to remind any who read this that as long as you’re not a Phelps clan mem­ber or Sci­en­tol­o­gist I’m not here to flame you, I’m just ask­ing legit­i­mate ques­tions and would like rea­son­able responses. Cra­zies quot­ing scrip­ture and the like will be laughed at, flamed, and torn apart in the spirit of PZ’s won­der­ful “I get email” blog posts.