Why I Don't Believe - Society Doesn't Need Religion

One of the most common complaints theists make regarding Atheism is the alleged amorality of atheists. This mirrors the common misconception that Atheism is either equivalent to or at least a kissing cousin of nihilism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The genesis of this allegation is the notion that human morality is dependent upon the existence of and adherence to a system of morality mandated by the divine. The obvious utility of this allegation is that it means that religion, all religion, is necessary to prevent humanity from descending into the Hobbesian nightmare of the eternal war of all against all.

When asked plainly, however, is it obvious that human morality can exist only within the confines of an externally mandated system of divine rewards and punishments?  Is a divine code of conduct a necessary for human morality?  These canards are not only patently ridiculous, but demonstrably against the weight of the evidence of the entirety of human history.

As a threshold matter, the idea that human morality is dependent upon a divine code of conduct depends first and foremost upon agreement as to the basic tenets of what that code of conduct IS. It should first be noted that over the course of human civilization innumerable human religions that have waxed and waned.  More importantly, those innumerable faiths do not possess any overall consensus as to what code of morality the divine actually intends for us to follow.  Indeed, nearly all express not only skepticism regarding the morality of other faiths, but outright condemn those who practice them.  Given that supposed moral exclusivity, one would assume that within a given religion, at least, that code of morality would be as unchanging as the eternal divinity it purportedly represents.

It is obviously and irrefutably true that the myriad human religions that have dominated our existence for thousands of years do not have any overall agreement as to the code of conduct we are to follow.  Even within a single religion, however, that code of conduct, that supposedly unchanging moral code has shifted over the millennia.

To be blunt, the written code of conduct and ethics that dominated each of the Abrahamaic religions is incredibly barbaric. Chattel slavery was expressly permitted. Women were expressly relegated to second class citizens. Sex outside of marriage and was considered a sin so vile that adultery, let alone any whiff of homosexuality was to be punished by death. God not only authorized, but expressly commanded genocide. The list of barbaric conduct not only permitted, but demanded by the Gods of the Abrahamaic religions is too extensive to list.  Suffice it to say, however, that adherence to such a code would make God a War Criminal if he were human.

Even more troubling, the Abrahamiaic religions were obsessed with what we would probably call Thought Crimes today. Envy, covetousness, lust, etc. Simple human emotions were themselves branded as sinful.

Obviously, the draconian code of conduct demanded in ancient stone tablets, scrolls and parchment, and its demand for the death penalty for ridiculously minor offenses, is somewhat difficult to put into practice.  So over the centuries, Religion gradually filed off some of the harsher edges.  Such softening was utterly necessary if only to ensure that they didn't execute half of their citizenry for having sex and the other half for thinking about it. As the centuries progressed, humans recognized that chattel slavery was itself a moral evil, and that freedom in and of itself is a moral good. This revelation is rather striking in that one would assume that an all knowing, all powerful super-deity would have been well aware that slavery was inherently evil LONG before humans figured that out on their own. One would assume, that had this being had any interest in our code of conduct reflecting its own, that it simply would have added another commandment stating “Thou Shalt Not Enslave Or Own Thy Brethren.” The ancient texts' treatment of women eventually suffered the same fate as that of slavery in that over the centuries, human beings came to understand that females were fully capable of being amazingly productive members of society and that, in fact, they were MORE productive when they were not subjugated to the patriarchal whims of their husbands. The same is presently occurring with regard to homosexuals and their inevitable recognition as full members of society and their entitlement to all of the legal and civil benefits afforded to heterosexuals.

As further evidence of this softening, it is fascinating to understand that many of the heroes of the ancient religions would be considered war criminals in the modern world. Moses and the itinerant Hebrews launched waves of invasions and genocidal warfare against their neighbors and their God commanded the slaughter of the men, women and children of the cities they seized. Imagine the present day reaction to a stateless religious group of men and women who invaded neighboring countries, attacked and razed their cities and butchered their citizens. We would call such people war criminals.  We would label them terrorists. Our leaders would declare that we want them 'Dead or Alive.'  We would hunt such barbarian thugs to the very ends of the Earth and execute them for their crimes.

Theists will argue that the world was different then, that it is unfair to apply OUR morality to a different world, but is that not the very ESSENCE of moral relativism?  Indeed, in defense of their founders, Theists MUST argue such things.  Must argue that Isaac was on the side of light and was perfectly justified as he lifted the knife and prepared to murder his son.  Must argue that Moses was on the side of justice as he and his followers butchered innocent men, women and children and plundered their cities.  Else they must recognize that the moral code, the ethical code handed down to us by the Divine is flawed and has been fundamentally rewritten.

The Atheist is more than happy to accept our moral relativism.  The Atheist, unfettered by endless reference to ancient, archaic and barbaric traditions and codes of conduct, is free to acknowledge the reality that morality is a social construct.  A flexible, malleable and adaptable set of expectations whose reciprocal obligations are enforced through social dynamics such as shame, guilt and ostracism.  The Atheist recognizes and delights in the fact that morality evolves.  It evolves with us, because it IS us, it is our will, our desires, our conception of ourselves and how we should be.  And the Atheist is free to recognize that just as our societies, as our human civilization has grown more egalitarian, more fair, more just, that morality will adapt and evolve along with it - hopefully towards greater justice, greater freedom, greater liberty, and greater acceptance of others.  As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends towards justice."  May it ever be so.

Why I Don't Believe - The Great Chain Part 10 - Tiny Life

Level 14 – Your Cellular Organelles

Even those individual who become extremely agitated over the loss of one particular kind of human cell cannot be bothered with the constituent parts of those cells, despite the fact that the only real difference between a fertilized egg cell and an unfertilized one is that the nucleus of the fertilized egg cell has undergone DNA synthesis, a process involving cellular organelles.

Cellular organelles are to a cell, what our organs are to our bodies.  Just as our organs are only really capable of meaningful associate with our bodies, our cell’s organelles are only really capable of meaningful interactions with the parent cell.

Frankly, even amongst those who have the smallest possible version of God, who view God as nothing more than an interplanetary Santa Claus actively intervening in the lives of people like a teenager playing the Sims do not argue or claim that God cares about cellular organelles – and small wonder, on an individual level, no humans care about individual organelles either.

Level 15 – Your Amino Acids and Other Organic Compounds

Even further down the chain of existential association are amino acids and other organic compounds.  While these compounds are of absolutely critical importance to our actual existence, we really do not care about them very much unless we are in the business of microbiology or genetics.

The most well known example of one of these organic compounds is DNA, which is the great unifying feature of all life on this planet.  Every living thing, indeed every single cell on this planet has a strand of DNA that tells it how to function.  DNA is, in essence, the fundamental building block of life.  Composed of literally billions of pairs of amino acids, DNA forms the blueprint for every living thing on Earth.  While scientists are intensely interested in DNA, and while unpacking and understanding the human genome stands as one of the greatest achievements of the human race, individual strands of DNA are functionally meaningless.  Every single cell in my body has a strand of my DNA.  As little as I care about my individual cells, I care even less for an individual strand of my DNA.

And while I am intensely interested in the potential ways my DNA might combine with that of someone else, I do not normally think of that in terms of what sequence of organic compounds might be created, but in what the aggregate result of that union would be once that DNA has replicated and specialized a few trillion times.

Quite simply the idea that we as human beings would be able to care about individual strands of DNA or other organic compounds, despite their centrality in the formation of life, is simply laughable.  We cannot even be bothered to care about our individual cells, how can we possibly be interested in the individual organic molecules that make up parts of those cell’s constituent parts?  The links in the existential chain are simply too attenuated.  And if WE cannot be bothered to care about such things even at our lowly level of existential association, how can the God of the Great All, possibly be interested in such minutae?

LEVELS OF ATOMIC EXISTENCE AND ASSOCIATION

Level 16, 17 and 18 – Molecules, Atoms and Sub-Atomic Particles

Once one enters the atomic realm, all connection to any recognizable human scale world ceases.  Atomic radi are measured in picometers, which are 0.00000000001 meters.  It is difficult to overstate just how truly minute the atomic realm really is.  Atoms exist on such a small level that there are over 200,000,000,000 in the period at the end of this sentence.  It takes billions of large and incredibly complex organic molecules to make a single strand of human DNA.  As stated before, there are 60,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules in less than a teaspoon of water.  If you were to take a single drop of water, you would have to make that drop of water larger than all of New York City to see a single atom with the naked eye.  If an atom were the size of a 12 ounce can of soda, the number of atoms in your fingertip would cover the entire surface of the earth three miles high.  The numbers are simply staggering.  They are too large for any human mind to really comprehend.

Atoms do not even have color because color is bequeathed by the reflection of different waves of light and atoms are too small to reflect a single wave of light.  It is only in the aggregate that atoms can have ‘color’ as we would define it.

Few would argue that God has any interest in individual atoms.  Certainly humans have no interest in individual atoms.  While we <i>do<i> have a great interest in aggregations of atoms, specifically in those kind that we can manipulate into harder or stronger materials, or those we can bombard with other kind of atoms to create fission or fusion or exotic materials, our ability to meaningfully associate with individual atoms is utterly non-existent.

Our ability to meaningfully associate with protons, electrons, and neutrons, or sub-sub atomic particles like quarks, bosons, and leptons is utterly impossible.

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ?

By now, those of you who aren’t terribly interested in science are probably wondering why I bothered to make such an exhausting inventory not just of the Macroscopic Universe, but the Microscopic and Atomic Universe as well.  For those of you in that boat, I apologize, but it is critically important to understanding where we fit in the great scheme of things and it is the Chain of Existential Association that I personally found most influential in realizing that the existence of the God of the Great All, even assuming that the Big Bang was an act of conscious authorship is irrelevant to our lives.

Recognize that the God of the Great All occupies level ZERO.  The God of the Great All, assuming that it exists, on a level ABOVE our Universe as a whole.  Indeed, the God of the Great All may well exist on a level ABOVE an infinite multitude of other Universes floating within some even larger Multiverse.  Such speculation is utterly unnecessary as even if we are to assume that ours is the ONLY Universe, the God of the Great All still exists on a level that is infinitely higher than our own.

Assuming that the Big Bang was an act of conscious authorship, the being that presides over our Universe is separated from us as an entire species by 10 levels of existential association.  This is the same number of levels of existential association that separate us as individual human beings from sub-atomic particles.  Think about that for a moment.

I have often heard adherents of religion use the analogy that trying to understand the mind of God is like asking an Ant to talk to understand a human.  The reality is far more stark.  Ants actually exist on the same level of existence as humans.  To have a closer approximation, one must ask a quark or a lepton or a boson or some other sub-atomic particle that isn’t even visible with the strongest microscope ever made and whose existence can only be inferred mathematically to understand the mind of a human.  In comparison to the God of the Great All, we are far more analogous to sub-atomic particles.  Which leads to the obvious question, do you care about your sub-atomic particles?  If you are even remotely intellectually honest, the answer is quite simply no.  None of us know or care about cells or atoms or sub-atomic particles.  They are simply too small, too numerous and too unimportant to associate with us in any meaningful way.

How arrogant, how egocentric, how narcissistic, how self important, then, is it to assume that the God of the Great All, even if it exists, is interested in or cares about us as a species, when in the Cosmic scheme, we are no more important than a humble atom.  Do you ponder the moral or ethical dilemmas of atoms?  Do you judge them based on adherence to some scale of atomic behavior?  Do you punish or reward individual atoms or even massive aggregations of them for transgressions of the atomic code of conduct?  Of course not.

And the God of the Great All doesn’t do that to us either.  The God of the Great All DOES NOT CARE.  The God of the Great All is not interested in your moral or ethical dilemmas.  The God of the Great All is not judging you.  The God of the Great All is not condemning you.  The God of the Great All is utterly uninterested in your level of adherence to some book written by some man who has been dead for thousands of years.  The God of the Great All quite simply does not care about any of this or any of us because we are utterly and completely irrelevant to it.  We simply do not occupy a level of existence which would concern that kind of being.

You are FREE!  God isn’t judging you.  God isn’t condemning you.  REVEL in the fact that we are free, that we are beneath the notice of the God of the Great All.  REVEL in the fact that we can live lives that are full of joy and light and love and meaning REGARDLESS of whether the God of the Great ALL is even aware of us.  Take Heart in the simple fact that despite our insignificant place in the cosmos, our lives can be full and meaningful and filled with purpose.

God doesn’t need us.

And more importantly, we don’t need him.  Even if God exists, even if he created the Great All, we don’t need him.  As far as we are concerned, His work was done 13,700,000,000 years ago.  While such a being would certainly deserve our gratitude, recognize that we have NOTHING to offer such a being.  Such a being would not notice, desire or require our obedience or adoration any more than we notice, desire or require the obedience of individual atoms or clusters of bacteria.  Indeed, a massive colony of bacteria living in my colon might be profusely praising my name right now, showering me with adoration, pleading with me to intervene on their behalf and save them from the nasty white blood cells that are mercilessly slaughtering them – unfortunately for them, I am blissfully unaware of their please or adoration and utterly disinclined to intervene on their behalf.  And they are only TWO levels of existential association beneath me.  How much more disinclined must God be to answer the pleadings of a pack of whiney monkeys who live TEN levels of existential association beneath him?

We do not require God.  We don’t need him.  We don’t need him to have meaningful lives filled with joy and peace and love and beauty.  We don’t need him to save us.  We don’t need him to remove our faults.  We don’t need him to intercede on our behalf or forgive us for our transgressions, because NOTHING we can possibly do can possibly transgress against the God of the Great All because we are not accountable to him.  We are accountable only to one another and to ourselves.

We don’t need God.  Because we have one another.

Why I Don't Believe - The Great Chain Part 9 - Beyond Humanity

Level 11 - Pieces of You

It seems highly likely that you care about your organs.  It is equally likely that you also care about the organs of those people with whom you meaningfully associate.  I know I care about my organs.

The human body is composed of an incredibly complex and magnificent system of specialized structures that work together to allow us to do all of the things we want to do and about a million other things we are completely unaware of but are nevertheless necessary to keep us alive.  Our organs clearly associate with one another in myriad meaningful ways, from transmitting data, to transmitting fluids, to supplying energy, to supplying oxygen, the various systems of the human body are a marvel of both complexity and simplicity.

Our organs are also capable of meaningfully associating with us insofar as their successful functioning will cause us to feel a sense of pleasure and well being while their failure will cause us all kinds of problems, ranging from discomfort to pain to death.

Our organs are also capable of meaningfully associating downward to the levels of the specialized tissues that comprise them in the sense that acid on the specialized tissues of the stomach will create an ulcer which will effect the stomach which will, in turn, effect the unfortunate human who has too much stress in their life.

Now, depending on the specific tradition, some religions actually tell their adherents that the God of the Great All, the Great Author of everything is actually interested not only in humanity as a whole and the specific religious community in particular and personally interested in you as an individual, but also in your internal organs and that the God of the Great All will actively intervene on behalf of your heart or kidney or gall bladder and will actually expend the effort to notice and fix whatever ailment is currently afflicting the troubled organ.

Some traditions are SO certain that this is the case that they actually FORBID their members from partaking in the fruits of modern scientific medicine.  Some are so crazed, and I do not use the term lightly, that they will actually refuse treatment even when doing so will mean certain death for themselves or their loved ones.  While that kind of resolve might be admirable under different conditions, under such circumstances that kind of resolve is monstrously and horrifically misguided.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that the God of the Great All is not only obsessively interested in your moral adherence to the tenets written down on a piece of parchment several thousand years ago, but is also interested in and will actively intervene on behalf of our poor benighted organs.  One must assume then, that as our organs are made up of specialized tissues, that God is interested in them as well.

Level 12 - Specialized Tissues

While you may actively consider the well being of an individual organ, it is highly doubtful that you spend much of your consciousness energy on your body’s individual specialized tissues.  If you are aware of them at all, it is likely that your awareness is a dim memory of a long ago biology class rather than any sort of present-day awareness.  Indeed, we are normally only concerned with our constituent parts when something goes awry.

Nevertheless, the specialized tissues that make up your individual internal organs, your skin, your eyes, your muscles, your heart, your stomach, your bones, your central nervous system, everything, are all capable of meaningful association both with the organ they comprise and your body as a whole.  Indeed, most diseases are actually begin by damaging or destroying portions of these specialized tissues.  Diseases like Cancer are essentially conditions where the cells comprising specialized tissues undergo some manner of mutation that causes rapid growth and replication of mutated and useless cells.

While specialized tissues are capable of meaningful association upwards to the level of organs and the organism as a whole, in an organism as large as a human, specialized tissues do not normally associate in any meaningfully way with the individual cells that comprise them because of the colossal number of cells involved.

So let us assume, for at least the next few moments, that God is capable of caring about your specialized tissues.  Not only yours, but everyone else’s as well, or, if you are a member of some incredibly narrow minded religious tradition, at least the specialized tissues of those members of your particular community.  Is it possible that the God of the Great All actually cares about your individual cells?  Is it possible that the God of the Great All could actually care about something as insignificant as an individual cell?

LEVELS OF MICROSCOPIC ASSOCIATION AND EXISTENCE

Far below our specialized cells, lives a microscopic world.  And entire ecosystem dwelling on each one of us.  A menagerie of strange, wild, wonderful creatures crawling on our skin, coating our eyes, filling our bowels, reproducing in our mouths, festering in the air we breathe.  We are scarcely ever aware of this world.  Indeed, individual existences in this world are utterly meaningless to us.  It is only when those individuals aggregate in the billions and attacks us in come concerted way that their existence impinges on our consciousness.

Humans dwell on the 10^th level of existential association.  It is necessary to use a microscope to even be aware of the denizens of the 13^th level of existential association and necessary to use an electron microscope to see anything on the 16^th level or below.  Indeed, humans were largely unaware of the existence of the microscopic world and its potential effects on our health and welfare until the mid 1800s.

Even today, most humans are completely oblivious to the microscopic world except on those relatively rare occasions where millions or billions of microbes that have replicated themselves in our bodies make us sick.  Even then, however, our interest in, and ability to associate with individual microbes is virtually non-existent.

Once one goes below the level of a single celled organism, our ability to meaningfully associate with anything smaller is virtually non-existent.  Individual cellular components, amino acids, individual molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles are so incredibly small that they simply do not register with any of our senses in any meaningful way – it is only in the aggregate that any portions of the microscopic world is capable of being known or felt on our level of existence.

Do you care about your individual cells?  It’s okay if you say no.  Understand that simply by rubbing your eye or taking a shower you are killing thousands if not millions of your very own cells, condemning them to certain death without you.

I would like to think that I care about my cells.  They are ME after all, but I confess that I regularly murder millions of my cells without a sparing even a moment’s thought for their well-being.  I rarely, if ever, consider whether my cells are good cells or bad cells.  I rarely consider whether they have behaved admirably or poorly and never bother to ask them whether they have adhered to whatever manner of code of ethics cells have.

Why would I bother to care about my individual cells when I have 50,000,000,000,000 to 100,000,000,000,000 of them?  How can I possibly be expected to care about such a trivial and meaningless organism, even when in the aggregate, those organisms comprise ME when there are so many of them?

It is highly doubtful that you care about your individual cells any more than I do.  We can’t be bothered with worrying about their welfare because quite frankly they are beneath our notice.  They are irrelevant to us as individual because of the sheer number of them and because we simply dwell on an entirely different level of existence.

How much less do we care about such cells when they are NOT our cells, but those roaming out in the wild, or congregating on our skin, or our teeth, or our bathtub.  Indeed, the videos below capture in stunning detail, the microflora and microfauna that inhabit the world right in front of our eyes yet are utterly beneath our notice.




In the same way that such organisms are beneath our notice, is it not possible, nay plausible, that the Creator of the Great All, who is sovereign over the entirety of the Universe would view us in the same way?

Why I Don't Believe - The Great Chain Part 8

Experiential Association - Man vs. Wild


"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Gen 1:26.  "He (Allah) it is Who made you vicegerents on earth." Surah 35:39.


Religious understanding, especially those stemming from Abrahamaic traditions, places a great deal of importance on man's separation from nature and man's dominion over it.  It is worth noting that the entirety of what is commonly considered 'nature' all falls within the same associational level as humankind.  Cats, dogs, flowers, trees, lions, tigers, wheat, corn, bears, elephants, grass, weeds, grasshoppers, fleas, ants, all of these organisms exist on the same associational level as an individual human.  All of them are capable of meaningful interactions with us.  They can feed us, their smells can entice or repel us, they can bite us, eat us, amuse us. We can associate with the plants and animals of this world in countless ways.


"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?"  Matt 6:26.  "Seest thou not that it is Allah Whose praises are celebrated by all beings in the heavens and on earth, and by the birds with extended wings? Each one knows its prayer and psalm, And Allah is aware of what they do." Qur'an 24:41.  According to Abrahamaic traditions, God not only cares about humans, but all of the creatures of the Earth.  Presumably, this would indicate that God would also care about the communities of bacteria that thrive and crawl and 'creepeth' across the Earth.  Simply because ancient peoples were unaware of the existence of the microscopic world would certainly not hinder God's awareness.  One would also have to assume that if God cares about all of the life on Earth, he would similarly care about ALL life spread out throughout the Great All.


It is at this point that one must begin to ask whether such a belief is reasonable.  To be sure, as many theists have pointed out, we cannot know the mind of God.  Assuming such a being exists, this is manifestly true.  Indeed, one cannot state that God cannot or does not care about each and every spark of life in the Universe.  Clearly, any being capable of causing the Universe to burst into being has capacities that dwarf any human conception.    Clearly, such a being COULD care about every living thing in the Universe.  Such a being obviously COULD intervene in their existences, COULD love each one individually.  The fact that such a being COULD, however, does not make it likely, or reasonable or even plausible.  Indeed, when one looks not only at the size and scope of the Universe, but at the incredible violence inherent in the Universe, the idea that such a being actually cares begins to look incredibly fanciful.

Our own small planet has been pulverized by asteroid impacts and decimated by volcanism numerous times in the past.  Indeed, catastrophic geological and extraterrestrial events have wiped out virtually all life on this planet at least twice in the past 500,000,000 years.



The impact event that almost certainly wiped out the Dinosaurs left behind a crater 110 miles across, spread a rare element, irridium, across the entire planet and caused fires so massive that the fossil record immediately afterwards contains tens of thousands of times the normal levels of soot and ash.  The conflagration was so massive that nearly all complex life on planet Earth was incinerated.  Recovery from the impact took tens of millions of years.



135,000,000 years before Cretaceous-Tertiary asteroid described above wiped out the Dinosaurs, a supervolcano covering approximately 2,000,000 square kilometers with lava helped to bring about the largest mass extinction on record.  Approximately 96% of all marine life was killed and over 70% of life on land.  The damage was so severe that it took 30,000,000 years for the Earth to recover.

And these are simply two of the five mass extinctions we can track over the last 500,000,000 years.  It is highly likely that many more such extinction events have taken place in the Earth's 4,500,000,000 year history.  Indeed, in addition to the five recognized mass extinctions in the past half million years, over twenty smaller extinction spikes have taken place.

And Earth is merely one planet.

Nearly every single species that has ever existed on Earth is extinct.  The individuals are not merely dead, the entire species is gone.  If God truly loves and cares for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, one has to assume that God cared about such beings long before the advent of humans.  So why would God allow them to die?  Not merely as individuals, but allow the entire biosphere wiped out.  Why would god allow his beloved planet and the creatures he cares so much about to be annihilated not once, not twice, not three times, but countless times throughout history.  Surely it cannot be because the birds of the air and the beasts of the filed 'sinned.'  Surely it cannot be because God looked upon his creation and was displeased.

Those with Religious Understanding often say that we have no right to question God, no right to ask why.  The Atheist has no such restriction and the Atheist is free to ask why such a being would allow its Creation to be destroyed.  What purpose does it serve?  What reason does God have to allow his precious creatures, whose prayers and psalms He hears, to be incinerated?  To allow new forms to life to take over?  To allow evolution to progress?  To facilitate the rise of his bestest favoritest species of all, humans?

Obviously, if God has the capacity to create life out of nothing, God could easily have simply created humankind out of whole cloth without the need to repeatedly destroy his Creation.  Obviously, an omniscient and omnipotent deity would not have made mistakes.

So why does God's beloved planet bear the scars of such cosmic abuse?  Why were the vast majority of God's beloved creatures annihilated?  Why does God's beloved Universe bear the marks of such profound devastation?

Even beyond our parochial Earthly concerns, God's beloved Creation has always taken and continues to endure incredible, mindblowing violence on a routine basis.  In our own galaxy, a star explodes into a supernova about once every fifty years.  These explosions routinely flood hundreds of star systems with intense radiation even when the shockwave doesn't destroy the planets outright.  If the tenacity and proliferation of life on Earth is any guide, countless star systems are likely filled with life.  And if life on Earth is any guide, this life has almost certainly endured annihilation similar to those on Earth.  To be sure, much of that life is likely simple, just as it is here on Earth, but would a lack of intelligence render it any less precious to God?  Indeed, for virtually its entire existence, Earth possessed no intelligent life.

The Atheist is free to look at the voluminous evidence of Earth's devastating history and conclude that such events are part of the natural cycle of evolution, that while they are unfortunate, they merely demonstrate that life is tenacious and when presented with tragedy and adversity, it adapts, evolves, progresses.  The Atheist can look at the violence in the Universe and see how even the most destructive events provide the raw materials necessary for the evolution of matter to continue, to allow planets to form and life to flourish.  The Atheit is free to recognize the reality that evolution and progress are often preceded by destruction.

Religious understanding must contend with the fact that their God supposedly cares for the organisms he allows to be repeatedly destroyed.  Religious understanding must contend with the fact that such destruction and devastation is almost certainly widespread throughout the Universe.  That God allows life on other planets to be annihilated just as readily, if not more so than He allows here on Earth.  And Religious understanding must contend with the fact that if life here on Earth really is unique, really is special, really is limited to our small blue world, then God has allowed his precious creation, his precious life to be decimated again and again and again.

Why I Don't Believe - The Great Chain Part 7

Given the small associational range within which Humans operate, the Great Chain is best understood not only as a series of associational levels, but also divided based on our ability to meaningfully associate.  The first eight levels of the Great Chain are best understood as Macroscopic Associational Levels.  Objects and forces on such levels exist and associate on a level far beyond than anything an individual human or humanity in the aggregate can hope to meaningfully relate. Neither an individual nor our entire species can meaningfully associate with the Sun, for example, no matter how hard we might try.

Human activities and concern are almost exclusively limited to Experiential Associational Levels.  Objects, forces and organisms that exist and associate on roughly the same level as we ourselves do.  It is to these Experiential Associational Levels that we now turn.

Level 9 - Human Communities

Communities are generally the largest aggregations of people with whom the majority of humanity is capable of meaningfully associating.  Like the larger scale divisions in human society, such divisions are often, but not necessarily, geographic in nature.  Indeed, the interconnectedness of modern human society has facilitated the rise of incredibly diverse communities unbound by geography.  Communities are generally capable of meaningful associations not only with other communities, but larger political, ethnic and or religious entities.  There are so many communities and their size is so varied, that most human interactions take place within one community or another.  Indeed, most humans are involved in and meaningfully associate with numerous communities simultaneously, thus giving the community a remarkable flexibility in human society.  This flexibility enables humans to meaningfully associate with one another to accomplish a shared goal or purpose.

In purely religious terms, community generally refers to a much smaller group of individuals who distinguish themselves from other members of a larger religious community by means of some doctrinal distinction.  Many, but by no means all, of these communities actually believe that their community and ONLY their community is capable of knowing the will of God and worthy of salvation.  A handful of these communities are so radical, so blinded by rage, xenophobia and hatred that they are actually willing to murder those of differing sects out of some perverse sense of divine duty.  While such individuals and communities are, thankfully, rare, their presence and unthinking, unfeeling devotion to their warped ideas about God serve as a constant reminder of the dangers of fundamentalism.

Why would God care about a small group of people amongst the sea of 6,800,000,000 people based on their interpretation of a book?  The picture below shows a small portion of a crowd of about 70,000.  Having attended the event in question, I can personally attest to the fact that meaningful association within such a group is next to impossible.  And 70,000 is merely a small portion of a single city, located within a single country.  Attempting to distinguish amongst individuals within the enormous sea of humanity is incredibly difficult, even when we exist on the same level.  To expect that the Creator of the Great all would bother to make such distinctions with creatures so far below its level of existence seems silly.

Does such a distinction make any sense at all?  As with every previous level, the question is whether, why or how the God who created the Great All, who exercises dominion over the 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so stars in the observable Universe would bother making a distinction based on a human interpretation of an allegedly divine book.    Even assuming that God wrote the book, in what way does it follow that He would be in any way bound by OUR interpretation of that book or would even be Interested in how we interpret it.  This question becomes especially pertinent when EVERY single Sacred Text claims divine authorship and is mutually exclusive of every other Sacred Text.  And where nearly every sub-sect claims some manner of exclusive Divine Mandate over their specific interpretation.  The idea that any one of these sects has ANY insight into God, let alone that they know His will, let alone that they know the proper way to worship him, is simply ludicrous.  Indeed, such distinctions look more and more like the distinctions we make between ourselves than the kind of distinctions any deity, let alone one incredible enough to have caused the Big Bang would make.

Even more ludicrous, is the idea that this being, this entity, this force that is responsible for the creation of and is master over the countless worlds and endless phenomena in the Universe will actively INTERVENE on our behalf.  That this being is interested in us personally, by which I mean YOU.

Level 10 – You

At last we've arrived.  We're here.  At you.  We are now 10 levels of existential association down the Great Chain, meaning there are 10 levels of existential association between you and the Creator of the Great All – The Author of Existence.  In case you haven't figured this out yet, I personally find the idea that the Creator cares about you to be a bit far fetched.  A bit narcissistic.  A bit arrogant.  A bit egocentric.  A bit much.

Be honest with yourself.  Do you have a hotline to the Governor of your state?  Can you call him any time?  Do you meaningfully associate with him or her?  If you do, then you are one of the more powerful people in your state.  What about your President or Prime Minister?  Are they within your circle of meaningful association?  Do you have a Red Phone that rings in their office letting them know that you are on the line?  Unless this book has spread much farther than I imagined, it is highly unlikely that you have a personal connection with the President or Prime Minister.  And the President is on the same level of existential association as you!

Most normal people will never have an audience with the President no matter how hard they try.  And far, far fewer will meaningfully associate with such people.  So if it is difficult if not impossible for you to meaningfully associate with another being who lives on YOUR OWN LEVEL OF EXISTENTIAL ASSOCIATION, how can anyone possibly claim to have a direct and meaningful connection with THE BEING THAT CREATED EVERYTHING! WITH A BEING WHO DWELLS ON A LEVEL OF EXISTENCE 10 LEVELS ABOVE YOUR OWN?  If the vast majority of the people who dwell on the same level of existence are oblivious to, or uninterested in you, how is it reasonable to presume that the Nexus of the Entire Universe is more interested than your human brethren?

My apologies, but the egotism, narcissism and self-importance in such an assertion simply blows my mind.

Obviously, you know who you are, you know who you associate with.  No one knows better than you, how far up and how far down the levels of existential association you go, whether you are a leader of a community or a leader of a nation, you know the people you meaningfully associate with.  You also know how far down the chain of existential association your interests lie.  To be sure, you probably love your pets, you probably care about your organs, you are probably partial to your specialized cellular tissues, but how much farther down do you care about?  Do you care about your individual cells?  Do you care about individual bacteria?  Do you care about your individual cellular organelles, DNA, amino acids and other organic compounds?  Do you care about individual molecules?  Do you care about individual atoms?  Do you care about individual sub-atomic particles?  Do any of those things meaningfully associate with you?  Do you meaningfully associate with any of them?

The reality is that once you get down to the levels of Microscopic existence and association, individual existences rapidly lose any meaning or relevance in our lives.  The reality is that we do NOT care at all about our individual cells.  Why would we?  Depending on our size we generally have between 50,000,000,000,000 and 100,000,000,000,000 of them.

As an example, a single drop of your blood contains approximately 5,000,000 red blood cells.  The picture below contains approximately 500 red blood cells, meaning that 10,000 identical pictures would contain approximately the same number of red blood cells as a single drop of blood.  These cells are YOU.  Your body made them.  Crafted each with precision and care.  Do you care about their individual existence?  Do you concern yourself with their well being?  Mete out justice between them?  If you are honest, the answer is clearly no.  You do NOT care about any of your individual cells.  And these cells exist only ONE level below you.  A single level of association separates you from the countless trillions of cells within your own body.  And even that distinction renders an individual existence meaningless to us.

We care even less, if that were possible, about the constituent components of an individual cell.  How much less, do we care about individual molecules or atoms or sub-atomic particles.  The simple fact is that once we get more than two or three levels of existential association below our own level, we simply cannot care because the individual existence is functionally meaningless to us.

As you read on, consider this.  There are at least 10 levels of existential association between God and you.  How many levels of association below you can you go before you lose any and all interest in the individuals comprising that level of existence.

Why I Don't Believe - The Great Chain Part 6 - Tiny Gods and Monstrous Egos.

Level 7 - The Greatest Show on Earth!

Assuming God were actually interested in our star and in our planet, it makes a large amount of sense that if such a being were truly watching Earth, it would most likely be watching us.  We are a rather interesting species.  In an incredibly short time, we have risen from a small population of bipedal scavengers living on the verge of starvation and at the mercy of nearly all of this world's flora and fauna to a massive population covering the entire globe that exerts dominance over nearly every aspect of the planet.  In 5000 years we have gone from small nomadic bands on the verge of learning to make metal tools to a globe spanning civilization that has split the atom, cracked its own genetic code and overcome the inexorable pull of gravity that has held every living thing in its grip since the moment of its birth.  We have become such a dominant force on this planet that our activities actively impact the climate, the atmosphere, the geography and topography and ecology of the entire world.

To be sure, we are not the first species to drastically alter the atmosphere.  Life and evolution are messy, messy processes.  Living things take in energy, metabolize it and let out gases.  In sufficient numbers and given sufficient time, any creatures will change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. Earth’s primordial atmosphere would have been poison to nearly every creature that lives today.  It was only after countless generations of cyanobacteria exuded oxygen as a waste product, wiping out virtually all anaerobic life on the planet, that aerobic organisms began to thrive.  Those humble organisms precipitated an atmospheric crisis unparalleled in Earth's history.  But it was that very crisis that enabled the proliferation of life to proceed. Indeed, at points in its history, Earth's atmosphere has been incredibly different.  350 million years ago, oxygen levels, far exceeded those that exist today.  In such an environment, massive insects thrived among verdant swamps and enormous trees.  Thankfully for us, a Supervolcano combined with other environmental stresses wiped out that biosphere, and altered the atmosphere, allowing small lizards to predominate.  In this newer Co2 rich world, plants thrived like never before and the abundance of food led to the most massive creatures of all time, the Dinosaurs.  Luckily for us, they too were wiped out, by massive impact event, setting the stage for the rise of our distant ancestors.

The difference between the impact of our activities and those of previous generations of atmosphere and biosphere altering species is the speed at which our impact has been felt.  When cyanobacteria oxygenated the atmosphere, for example, it took tens of millions of years.  By contrast, we have been burning fossil fuels for roughly 250 years and in that time have already driven Co2 concentrations above 390 ppm, a massive increase. 

While some of our activities are doubtless harmful to us and other species, there can be no doubt that humans have a tremendous and profound impact on this world.  No other species on the planet even comes close.  No matter how one chooses to look at it, humans are easily the most powerful living force of nature that has ever lived on this planet.  Unlike any other creature, humans, through their intelligence, adaptability and technological capacity have developed the ability to meaningfully associate with nearly everything on this planet.  Humans are capable of meaningfully associating with the atmosphere through our voluminous emissions, humans are capable of meaningfully associating with the biosphere through agriculture, through selective breeding, through pollution, through construction, or thorough conscious conservation or eradication efforts.  Humans are capable of meaningfully associating with the topography of the planet through earthworks.  We actively modifying the hydrology of the planet with dams.  We actively mine the subsurface. We have even begun to have a meaningful impact on low earth orbit due to the number of satellites we have put in place for our extensive communications networks.  No other species has ever possessed the ability to meaningfully interact with this planet on so many levels and in so many ways.

For that reason alone, if one were to assume the existence of a God who actually bothered to take an interest in our planet, it seems logical that such a being would probably be most interested in our species, even if its interest amounted to nothing more than a celestial nature program.  Religious understanding, however, doesn't stop there.  The Abrahamaic religions in particular don't merely assume that such a being would be interested in humanity as a whole.  Religious understanding asserts, and billions of people somehow believe, that this being, this entity that created the WHOLE Universe, is not only interested in humans as a species, but is actively engaged in taking sides between different liturgical and ethnic groups of humans.

Level 8 – Geographical, Ethnic, Political, and Liturgical Groups

While each of the previous two steps have made sense if one assumes that God is interested in our star system, the idea that God would choose to take sides between different groups of humans is one that simply makes no sense whatsoever and merely serves to illustrate the intense narcissism and egocentricity of Religious understanding generally and Abrahamaic traditions in particular.

The human species can be divided in so many different, overlapping ways that discussing these divisions individually is incredibly tedious.  In general, however, most divisions usually boil down to divisions along roughly geographic lines.  Generally speaking different geographical regions of the world share (roughly) similar cultures, ethnicities, liturgies, and systems of governance.  While this is a massive oversimplification, it is generally true that if a person is born in a specific geographic area, chances are very high that person will be of a specific ethnicity and further, that person  will likely be raised in the specific liturgical tradition dominant in that geographic region.

Different liturgical groups and different political groups or nation states are clearly capable of meaningful association not only with one another, but also with the species as a whole.  Clearly, the introduction of new liturgical practices can have a dramatic effect on human society as evidenced by the spread of nearly all of the world's major religions and even more dramatically when those regions of the world dominated by one particular liturgy come into contact and or conflict with a different region following a different liturgical practice.

But why would God, even if one were to go through all of the levels of existential association and arrive at the point where he is interested in our species as a whole, make present day distinctions amongst human beings based on human interpretations of ancient human writings based on even more ancient human oral tradition?  Why would God even care?

Adherents to most of the world's major religions, the Abrahamaic religions in particular will, of course, object to the characterization of their sacred text as an ancient human writing.  Indeed, this is one of the chief objections I hear every time I debate Christians.  Their objection is that the Bible (or the Koran, or the Torah and the Talmud) was either directly written by God, or at the very least 'God breathed.'  Timothy 3:16 states that “All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction[.]”   The simple fact is that every single Sacred Text has passages identical to those found in the Bible.  Indeed, if the Text did not make a claim to Divine Authorship, it would, by definition, NOT be a Sacred Text.  One has to wonder, however, how it is that all of these ancient writings, all supposedly written by God, and all supposedly containing literal truth seem to be mutually and expressly exclusive.  Despite the attempts of theologians to soften the impact of their Sacred Texts for more modern times, all of the Sacred Texts also contain a variant on the exclusionary theme best expressed in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”

How, or why, would God, who created and is master over all of the the entirety of the Great All, bother with humans?  Further, why would God bother to write or inspire all of these mutually exclusive tracts supposedly containing his will and then make distinctions among humans based on their adherence to either one rule book or another?  Indeed, when one considers the simple fact that religious identity is primarily a product of geography and class, distinctions made on such a basis look less like the distinctions a divine being would make and more like those WE make.

The idea that God would make distinctions amongst humans based on other criteria Ethnicity, National Identity or other false human distinctions is equally ludicrous.  Such distinctions do not even possess the patina of divine approval and represent PURELY human distinctions.  Nevertheless, billions of adherents to the world's major religions believe that the God of the Great All makes such distinctions and further that he makes even further distinctions, preferring not only those whose liturgical practices center on a specific book, but based upon some human interpretation of the way the teachings of said book are to be carried out.

Why I Don't Believe - Stars as Cells

70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Our best observations place the number of stars in the observable Universe at something in the range of 10 to 70 Sextillion Stars. A sextillion is a number so large that there is nothing in human experience that we can even begin to use as a comparison. To even begin to describe such a number we are reduced to incredibly poor analogies that fail to truly capture the essence of such a figure. Nevertheless, to provide some sense of perspective, imagine how long a sextillion seconds would be.

Since a second is generally considered to be the shortest unit of time which we can meaningfully understand this is the closest we can come to providing some sense of the true enormity of such a sum. 60 seconds in a minute. 3,600 seconds in an hour. 86,400 seconds in a day. 31,536,000 seconds in a year. There have been only 63,387,370,000 since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. There have only been 157,680,000,000 seconds since the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. There have only been 3,153,600,000,000,000 since Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the Earth. Our entire solar system has only been in existence for approximately 132,564,600,000,000,000. Indeed, our entire Universe has only existed for 428,889,600,000,000,000 or 428 Quadrillion, 889 Trillion, 600 Billion give or take a few hundred trillion seconds. What this means is that one sextillion seconds is the equivalent of 2,219,685,438,863,521 years, or over 163,212 times as long as the entire Universe has existed. A sextillion is an unimaginably huge number.

Put another way, there are something on the order of ten to fifty trillion (10,000,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000,000) cells in the human body. There are roughly seven billion humans living on Earth at the moment, so if each and every individual cell in your body were to correspond to a single star in the observable Universe, and every single cell in the bodies of everyone else on Earth were all to correspond with a single different star in the observable Universe, then every single cell in your body and that of every single other person on the planet would roughly correspond to the number of stars in the observable Universe.

Several years ago, a Christian author wrote a book entitled 'Your God is Too Small' which argued that people have insufficient faith in what God can do in their lives because they believe that their problems are too large for God to solve, because their vision of God is too narrow, too limited, too small. The problem the Atheist see is exactly the reverse. Atheism looks at the Universe and concludes not that God is small, but that any divinity that exists is so incomprehensibly vast and powerful and incredible, that it seems the height of narcissism, egocentrism and arrogance to believe that such a being could possibly have the slightest interest in anything that happens on our small blue world.

Even if one were to assume that the Universe itself IS God, that we are all part of God's celestial existence, this in no way means or even implies that such an entity would be interested in or even aware of our existence. Remember that our entire solar system is but one among sextillions of other solar systems. That if a single solar system were to correspond to a single cell in the human body, that it would take the cells of every man woman and child on earth to represent the number of solar systems in the observable Universe.

Now even if we were to assume that God IS the Universe, that our solar system is simply a part of the divine body, does it naturally follow that God is aware of us or cares about us? Of course not. Do you concern yourself with your individual cells? Do you feel remorse when you wash your hands when you destroy thousands of your own cells? These are your own cells. They are part of you. They are you, yet you and I and every other person on Earth routinely and thoughtlessly discards millions of cells a day without a single thought – not because we are monstrous or wicked or uncaring, but because the fate of such things is simply beneath our notice because we are concerned about infinitely larger issues. How are we any different than the cells of our own body that we routinely discard without a second thought? Indeed, the difference between our existence and that of our constituent cells is much, much, much smaller than the difference between the divine and our entire solar system.

The simple fact is that our solar system is not special in any sort of cosmic sense. If the sun and our entire planet were to be completely annihilated by a supernova or black hole or a gamma ray burst or some other monstrous cosmic phenomenon, the Universe would continue without a single moment's pause. There would be no divine salvation, no deus ex machina to deliver us from our celestial fate. If our entire star system were to be completely destroyed, the stars and planets in our galaxy would continue their eternal celestial dance, forever spinning under the relentless, implacable tide of gravity just as they have for the last 13.6 billion years and just as they will continue to do for countless trillions of years to come. Our galaxy will continue its own celestial dance, merging with other galaxies, forever twirling within the great cosmic web of galaxies.

The Universe will not pause, because compared to the Universe, we as individuals, our planet, our entire star, are utterly inconsequential. Our 5000 years of ascendance barely register in the scale of galactic time. Compared to the Universe, we are nothing. Compared to the divine who allegedly created that Universe we are far less even than that.

If there is a God who created the Great All of the Universe, that being does not care about you. That being does not care about me. That being does not care about the petty liturgical and theological disputes that have wracked our species in the past. That being does not care about our species at all. Indeed, if such a being exists, it would concern itself with the fates of tens of billions of galaxies, not with a humble collection of apes huddled on a small blue world around a middling star in a mid-sized, middle-aged galaxy. The reality is that you, I and everyone else on this tiny blue planet are irrelevant to the God of the Great All. Our star is of no more importance to such a being than a single bacteria cell half a world away is to you. And you and I as individuals are infinitely less important than that. We and our entire civilization are utterly beneath the notice of such a being – revel in that fact.

Take heart in the fact that you and I and are entire species are beneath the notice of the Creator of the Great All. Advocates of an interventionist deity, a deity who listens and responds to our mental urgings and responds to our pleas and songs advocate a level of human arrogance and narcissism that borders madness. Comforting as it may be to believe that you have a personal connection to the very nexus of the Universe, the simple truth is that you have no such connection. Unless you are an incredibly well connected person, the reality is that you do not even have such a connection with the governor of your state or province, let alone the leader of your nation, and I assure you, those individuals are nowhere remotely near the Creator of the Great All.

The simple truth is that life without God is not meaningless. It is not pointless. It is not empty or shallow or self-centered. My life without God is infinitely more poignant, touching, meaningful and purposeful than my life with God. I have found purpose without God. I have found a path without God. I have found truth and beauty and light and love and life without God. I revel and thrill to the wonders of existence in a way that my theistic life could never fathom.

I recognize the possibility that the Great All may well have been a single staggering act of intentional authorship – the ultimate act of Creation, however, even if such a being existed, it is in no way concerned with the life and fortunes of Jeff Myers. Nor is it concerned with the life and fortunes of any man or woman. That knowledge should not impart a sense of despair or isolation or fear or anguish. It should impart a sense of freedom, a sense of the limitless possibilities that exist for you as an individual and we as a species. It means that the sense of connection that we all feel in those moments of quiet reflection and spiritual clarity are not the stirrings of the Universe or the power of God pouring through us, but of something far closer and more meaningful – the connections we have to one another as human beings.

I have discovered a love for who and what we are that was antithetical to my entire existence as a theist. I am proud of my humanity, proud of our species, proud of our successes, heartbroken by our failures, but always, always, always amazed at our limitless capacity for change and self-improvement. I love our species in a way that is utterly foreign to me – I even love our mistakes and our excesses because it is through our follies and occasional foolishness that we find the path forward.

We as a species are truly blessed.

It is critical that we as humans take stock of our true place in the Universe if we are ever to progress as a species. Critical that we understand not only our place in the Universe, but our place on this planet, and the amazing potential that we as a species possess to transcend the normal limits that apply to beings who dwell on our level of existence.