Salvaging Atheism from Crypto Theists

I encourage you to read my prior post on atheism.

Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine 100 crore individuals flip a coin. Only participants flipping heads move to the next round. The probability of flipping heads or tails is 50%. So, in our experiment, half a billion people would flip tails and leave the game. The game continues up to the 29^th or the 30^th round where we are left with just two players. And finally emerges our winner, from among a billion, who flipped heads in all 30 attempts. Wow! What is at play here? Grace or probability? Let’s tweak the rules of the game to have the last man standing beheaded. You would probably hear the lament, ‘Of all people, why me?’ Statistical probability, nothing else.

This thought experiment checks the innocent tendency of human mind to celebrate a certain turn of events in the universe as incontestable signs of Supreme Intelligence or Providence. Among the billion minus one chances of the universe remaining lifeless, life was the billionth possibility in the 13.7 billion years of its existence. And with all odds stacked against a two-footed creature in the Savannah grasslands, the rise of homo sapiens is surely a minuscule possibility. But, it's certainly not an impossibility made possible by Divine intervention. 

Kids uninfluenced by religion will rarely descend into God or Providence as an explanation for things. We don’t fall on our knees before wildfires anymore, we extinguish them. Our age is armed with a scientific understanding and a credible hypothesis for phenomena we don’t yet understand. The arc of knowledge is now too long for one to meet God any soon. If a school-going teenager refers over to God, it reveals that he has shirked his moral duty of acquiring knowledge. Or he is merely parroting a tradition.

In bequeathing us its values, tradition has also handed down to us not-so-credible ideas. Along with Chess and Ludo, we also inherited the game of God-seeking. In deference to tradition, we repeat the same questions and answers that our ancestors repeated over the millennia. We repeat them to the point of personal certainty, shaping our beliefs around those ideas. Those ideas become part of our identity. It needs great courage to overthrow them and walk in the bright light of reason.

As a theist, I never saw science as a challenge to my spiritual beliefs because the beliefs I espoused were expressed in such vague and universal terms that every scientific progress would only confirm my views. If I had to choose, I would have given up my scientific temper to accommodate my spiritual convictions. I was of the view that the spiritual core of the universe was out of bounds for science. I was also certain that I mirrored that spiritual core in the depths of my personality, an ‘inner being’ that is detached from all that is happening around me.

We are creatures endowed with imagination. It has its use. One of which is dealing with sorrow. People talk to their dear departed ones. That's an effective coping mechanism enabled by the faculty of imagination. When people say that they feel the presence of their loved ones, it's because the images of their loved ones are too vivid to be fazed by death. The imprint of their voice, face, and touch on the memory feeds that enduring image. 

On the contrary, words such as 'Self' or 'God' do not stamp our awareness with any certitude or a positive image (unless by God one means a personality; four-armed deity or the man on the cross. I have no debate with that dumbed-down idea of God). The idea of God survives on purely verbal association of analogy, metaphor, and narrative, which together create a gossamer in the dim periphery of our minds. Those mouth-watering words mean nothing. 'God rolling up the sky like a carpet' seems very plausible at first. Sounds rather poetic. We have seen carpets being rolled. It is easy to pick up the analogy between the carpet and the sky. But when you are rolling up the sky, what's in the background? Imagination is a play upon imitation. When you define 'sky', you realize the untenability of the idea. Words can create an illusion of meaning.

How do we come to believe in a Self that is distinct from our biological and psychological self? I think, introspection or faculty of self-refection is partly responsible for this. Introspection makes us self-aware. Development of self-awareness was a big leap in our evolutionary journey. It inaugurated the phase of psychological adaptation in human beings. In self-awareness we run a mental reconnaissance, as it were, of our situation and our relationship with others and ourselves. Self-awareness, which is a state of mind, is likely to be mistaken for a state operating in its own right and an abiding internal state which like the external world is always there when we turn to it. And, we give it names like soul or Self.  

If I am convinced that some rabbits have horns, a sane person would ask, "How did I come to such a conclusion. Is there an evolutionary branch-off from a close species with horns to suggest it? Or, was a rabbit found dead with deep gashes in its burrow?" I reply, "The head somehow feels incomplete and the rabbit vulnerable without horns." What an unsound logic, you say. Assertions about God and Ultimate Truth toe a similar line of reasoning: “Something is amiss that science does not account for. My relationship with the world and the people I love cannot be explained away as a corollary to human evolution. My moral choices in the face of temptation cannot go unrewarded. Death cannot be the end of my existence.” God is not our well-thought-out conclusion; God is our expectation. He better be around when we our done with this mortal world.

I also hear arguments that agnosticism is a more nuanced stance than atheism. Because, for all we know, science could be one grievous error. People sit on a plane and make it to the other side of the globe and still believe science could be a mass fallacy that is somehow working until it won't. Our phones use the GPS satellite clock to keep time that is adjusted for time dilation because time ticks faster in low gravity (that's the application of Einstein's general theory of relativity, in case you thought it's just a theory). Forget computing and other conveniences of modern life, even bringing an all-pin from the mine to your desk requires a great deal of science. It's all around us, taking care of us, and we are its ungrateful masters. Science never deceives us. It is the only credible voice in the cacophony of tradition and authority. Indian Muslims are asked to disclose their allegiance: Is it to sharia or to the Indian constitution? I ask you to reveal your allegiance: Is it to science or to your tradition or to your inner voice? An agnostic says we may never know a few things. He claims to be open to ideas if that's how he can hold on to all manner of ideas and seeks legitimacy for his position by sharing bed with a theist and an atheist. Now, that's a crypto theist who is unable to let go the comfort of ideas he grew up with. 

Yes, Science does not have answers to everything yet. That's what keeps it exciting. By the way, questions like ‘Why do I exist?’ do not warrant a serious answer. That mumbo-jumbo of a question is an attempt to measure science up, to avenge it for the ever-receding role that it has left for God to play in the creation. People seem to think that scientists are in some secret handshake to further the cause of atheism. No, scientists will warm up to the idea of God if it presents itself as a  model that can be tested and validated. If God is something that eludes human understanding but somehow reveals itself to those with a raw capacity for believing, then scientists are entitled to view it with suspicion. Sitting on the fence, as agnostics put it, may be construed as unwillingness to give science the place of prominence it rightly deserves. I am confident that if science ever discovers God, it will translate those findings into the language that a human brain can process. If God is outside the scope of mental translation, outside the taxonomy of human knowledge, He is practically non-existent. But, if we happen to solve the mystery of God, we will use that knowledge of God and push further ahead. 

P.S: Atheist is a tacky name for an individual embracing rationality. Rationalist is a more positive and appropriate term for an atheist. That makes a theist an irrationalist, which characterizes him appropriately.