Tag Archives: Carl Sagan

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Why I am An Atheist: Science is better than Faith

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Since I am recently talking about The God Virus, it bears mention that religion is not the only viral idea out there. In my youngest years the “god virus” (to use the metaphor) was not the only viral idea I was exposed to. I was also infected at a young age with a high regard and respect for science and for logic. For a long time I thought these two ideas, the religious idea and the scientific and logical idea, were in no conflict with each other because, naturally, Truth cannot contradict truth.

Throughout my life I have been driven by the search for answers. Not just any answers, but answers that make sense, answers that I can understand well enough that I can competently explain and defend to another person. According to the evangelical religious tradition in which I was raised, it was my duty to “witness” to anyone that I could to bring them into the fold of Christianity so that they would be saved. But I had a problem….even at the point when I most deeply believed, when I tried to speak the ideas out loud I felt a conflict, like there was something unfathomable that was just not right. I didn’t really understand this thing that I was trying to convince others to believe, and I could just imagine all the ways in which a non-believer could shoot down every argument I had in my arsenal. This bothered me immensely. I had to resort to just parroting what others had told me, or just skip the theology completely and just invite my target to come to church with me. My lacking witnessing skills guilted me tremendously, and I prayed fervently that God would grant me boldness and tell me what to say.

So, in my search for sensible answers, I dug into apologetics books by authors like C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zacharias, and Max Lucado. Without going into the details of each one, I found the following pattern nearly every time: I would read the book and it would bolster my faith and make me feel good about what I believed. Then, a week or two later the doubts and uncertainties would creep in again and I would read another apologetics book and feel good again…then go back to doubting again in about a week. I ran to the apologists and gobbled up their encouraging words, but didn’t really examine the arguments they were using. I so wanted to believe their conclusions that I didn’t really care if their arguments made sense or not. So when I tried to explain to myself what I had learned from them later I remembered the conclusions and good feelings, but still couldn’t reconstruct the arguments behind the conclusions. So back into doubt I would slide. After several cycles of this I started to get really frustrated. 

Little did I realize, I had two conflicting viruses vying for dominance in my mind. I wanted verifiable, scientific, logical answers and I just was not getting what I needed from the previously mentioned apologists. Then I got into creationist literature, including my heavily anti-evolution home-school biology text, and thought for a while that I found what I needed. That science really did support the Bible and Christianity.

I found bits of the truth about evolution and creationism later in college, with the help of Astronomy 101 which explained to me about the Big Bang, and showed me a timeline of the universe including that of life on Earth. That piqued by curiosity and lead me to read more on my own. I was furious at first and felt I had been misled on clear scientific matters by Christian authors I had trusted in the name of God. I gave up on the apologists and creationists and started perusing the science section at our small local library. That is where I found the book form of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. And I was hooked.

Cosmos (book)

I started checking out all the books in the local library I could find on both cosmology and evolution. I would bring them home read them guiltily in my room, hiding them under the covers when my parents knocked at the door for fear of their disapproval (I was a bit paranoid perhaps?). This was my rebellion, searching outside the family religion to find my explanations in science. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and other science writers I discovered didn’t simply rush to a desired conclusion. They actually explained each step in the progression of their arguments in a way that I could grasp, slowly building up to the conclusion while I followed along. And it made sense, and still made sense a week later (though I usually had to go back and review.) I was actually learning new things when I read, unlike when I read the apologists, and the new understanding I found was intoxicating. The more I learned, the more my former supernatural beliefs fell away in favor of natural scientific explanations, all the way back to the origin of humanity and the origin of the universe. I could see that there were still gaps in scientific knowledge of course, but science had replaced the supernatural explanations so many times in the past. I couldn’t see any sense in posing supernatural explanations for what we didn’t know yet. To insert “God did it” anywhere in the natural world just made no sense.

The viral idea that truth cannot contradict truth lead me to embrace science and reason over faith.

Happy Darwin Day!

Science and religious ignorance

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The emerging picture of the early Solar System does not resemble a stately progression of events designed to form the Earth. Instead it looks as if our planet was made, and survived, by mere lucky chance, amid unbelievable violence. Our world does not seem to have been crafted by a master craftsman. Here too, there is no hint of a Universe made for us. -Carl Sagan, from Pale Blue Dot

I am currently reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, and I have just finished the chapter called “Routine Planetary Violence.” This chapter highlights the violent history of the solar system, and the creation of rings around the huge gas giants. The thing that inspired this writing was the part about the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994.

Unlike many of the events that Sagan recalls in this book, this event happened within my teen years and was all over the news of the day. So I remember it distinctly. I was 14 years old, in the midst of my fundamentalist Christian homeshool lessons from Christian Liberty Academy. I was a committed Christian and a creationist at the time, and was used to interpreting just about everything in terms of Christian belief and the Bible. Including the Shoemaker-Levy 9 incident. So, to my scientifically interested but poorly educated mind, this “shaking of the heavens”* was part of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and a sign of the coming rapture. I thought it was a confirmation of the Bible.

Of course now I know it ain’t so, and it boggles the mind that I ever thought such things. But it is not surprising that I did because it was all I knew. The Christian leaders and teachers I trusted talked in such terms, and I was much more likely to distrust the adults that give a more simply scientific account of such events. After all, there are those out there who would deceive us…unfortunately at the time I was mistaken about which set of people deserved the label of “deceiver.”

The Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter really was a perfectly straight-forward, and basically routine (on the timescale of about 5 billion years), scientific happening. I wonder if I would have ever realized that if I had not gone on to get a decent college education and find out the scientific facts of the matter. It reminds me of a woman who came to speak with (actually more like scold and preach at) me at the KY State Fair. She said she knew someone who had died at a hospital and had been brought back to life, and that this confirmed that God was real (or something like that). When I asked her about it (“Did her brain actually die?”) she looked like no one had ever questioned her story before and said that her friend’s heart had stopped momentarily and then had been restarted. Of course, a person’s heart can stop without them dying, as long as it is started back up before tissues start dying of oxygen deprivation. At the end of our conversation she just huffed something about atheists having no hope and stormed away. It’s amazing how a person’s mind can be so clouded by religious mythology and superstition that they really can’t see what’s really going on around them. I was a teenager during the Shoemaker-Levy event but I got over the superstitious thinking by the time I was out of college. This woman was middle-aged. I can only guess that, even that that age, this kind of thinking must be all she knows.

*A reference to Mark 13:25