I Can't Give God A Chance

Occasionally, I get fan mail. On the most recent occasion, I received a kind plea from a young Catholic to give god a chance. He was very honest with his beliefs and what he understood about reality, so I felt like I needed to show him a bit of respect by taking everything he had to say as seriously as I could. What resulted was over 4200 words of me trying my best to explain to him why I don't believe in his god and why it simply is not possible for someone who doesn't believe (in the way that I don't) to consciously give it a chance. Below is his quoted e-mail (emphasis is his), followed by my response.

hello andrew, my name is Kael_____________. i am 17 years old and live in _________, Autstralia.
i really liked your piece SO, YOU WANT ME TO BELIEVE IN YOUR GOD?...it pointed out to me a lot of concerns obviously felt by many non-christians. i myself am a christian and attend church regularly. you are very right. it is so hard for us to convince a logical and intelligent person such as yourself that God exists. i understand that you do have an open mind and i really respect that.
I also have a relatively open mind so please read what i have to say before dismissing. i think youd be very interested.
i am a hypocrite
do not take christians to be perfect
God knows i am not perfect. i sin every single day i assure you. the world’s view of Christianity can be obscured by the narcissism and self-righteousness that a lot of “CHRISTIANS” are exhibiting these days. so please don’t let these posers and self-righteous street corner preachers affect your view of God, his son and true eternal LOVE.
it is hard for me to give you evidence that supports our creator’s existence. it is silly of me to simply tell you about my amazing life changing experience with God. i was never a drug addict turned Baptist or anything mind blowing like that. i have been raised a catholic although my family were not even truly Christian themselves. when i came to my new high school, i started to learn what true Catholicism and Christianity was all about. i have been in love with God passionately since. and i do not wish to have it any other way.
but youre right, were going on about it the wrong way. how might i give you evidence of an invisible yet infinitely powerful being?
i cant really other than ask you questions that you may be asking your self already anyway prior to your posts. how did the world get here? how can the big bang occur from a singularity, without explaining where that matter came from?

but my true effort is this. please accept my challenge. it should not be too strenuous or evangelistic.
try talking to God each day for a week
i know that you probably don’t believe in him, but you seem to be very open minded and id hope that you can take this seriously and place a little bit of hope in the exercise. i doubt God’s voice will resound in your ears, as i have never experienced anything similar. but ask him questions and look throughout the week for answers and signs that will show you his word.
he will show you. but dont expect the mountains to part for you. God answers me in small details like something someone may mention in passing that i just know is sent by God or things that i see and just cannot describe or explain.
ONE EXAMPLE IS: today i was looking for some good jokes for my radio show which i co-host with a girl from my school. while looking i found a link to your blog and for some reason i clicked on it and read your article. i know now God pulled me towards this to try and get you to talk to him. i do not beleive this was a coincidence and have never done anything like this before. but i know God has told me to do so. so just look for small signs and gut feelings telling you to do something.


so please accept this challenge and let me know how it goes. i hope God will reveal the wonders that he reveals to myself and others like me. if you have any christian friends and you have any questions or you just want to talk to them about your experiences, i hope that you do and get a lot out of it.

'im sorry if i come across self righteous at all. not by my actions will i enter his kingdom. only through what god has done, do i feel whole again after being broken.

one major point i want to press is that there are alot of questions you may be wondering.
if God is so powerful and loving, how come there is so much pain in the world?
God made the world beautiful and perfect, but from man’s first sin, we had uncovered evil and committed ourselves to an eternity of sin. throughout the bible a son was prophesied for centuries, and about 2000 years ago he was born. Jesus christ was born to die. to die for me and to die for you. in this beautiful sacrifice, we were given a second chance.

the pain in the world is a consequence of man’s sin, not God’s failure to love, but ours.

so anyway, please let this week be a good effort and may it be the evidence youre looking for. it would not a be a faith unless it required faith so there is no clear cut evidence i can give you except your own experience. so please take this challenge seriously. i am not selling you the product before you know about it and i hope that this will be different tactic to those conmen selling false beliefs. God is real and loves us all unconditionally. i pray that the challenge shows you this.
God bless you Andrew, even if i haven’t made it clear.
please please try it. you dont have to buy it, have a free sample and see the evidence for yourself
-Kael ________

Hello Kael, and thank you for the long heart-felt message. Because you gave a lot of effort in writing me, I wanted to make sure it was returned in kind, though I must warn you that I get a bit wordy. I’ll try to respond to your words in the order that they appear in your correspondence. Keep in mind, however, that what you sent me was quite provocative, and so I must also take the time to explain to you what I think when I read your words. Maybe I can help you understand a little more about where I am coming from.

I want to start out by saying that belief is not a choice. I believe things that occur to me and I don’t believe in just the same way. We can refer to beliefs as the sum of all our personal knowledge, focused through the lens of our personal biases. Therefore, in order to make me believe something that I currently do not believe, I must first consider it as a type of knowledge and then I must accept it through the filter of my current biases.

I thank you for recognizing that I have an open mind. It is open to considering new ideas and new ways to look at things, but not so open that any idea can waltz right in and take up residence. I think a better way to put it is that my mind has a foyer that any idea can enter for consideration, but only the best ideas may progress further into the inner sanctum. I want to say now that I have previously considered the essence of your challenge, but my knowledge of psychology precluded any actual beliefs that you might have hoped would come of it. More on that later.

You’re at a very formative age; about the same age when I started thinking about the world and how god fit into it. The most poignant thought I had at the time was this: there are thousands of religions in the world and every religion has different interpretations. Every single interpretation claims that it is the right one. We can use simple deduction to realize this means that either there is one true way to worship god and an infinite wrong ways, or simply everyone is wrong.

I am assuming you’ll claim that your belief is the true one, but so will the next person of a different faith. And they’ll have just as much fervor as you. They’ll have stories and justifications and miracles and scripture, too. But neither of you will have any other way to assert any truth over another, unless your ultimate proof is whoever wins in a fight. Obviously, the one represented by the true god is the one who defeats the other, right? I’m not saying this is what you personally believe, but it is certainly the legacy of the Catholic Church.

My logic at your age had me pretty convinced that the world in its entirety had no clue what god was or what it was about. And neither did I. It led me to think about why religion existed in the first place, so I really thought about how it worked and why it needed to be centralized and organized. As they say: follow the money. Religious leaders make a lot of money, as do political leaders who use religion in their platform. Religion, called the opiate of the masses, is a tool to stop people from asking questions. Why did X happen? God wanted it to, duh! It is a justification for wars and conquest, where old rich men send out young poor men to die for them in the hopes of gaining more land or power. This god figure is a symbol of the subjugation of people en masse.

When you tell me that you sin every day, I see a very pitiable person. This mythological father figure has told you that your natural manner is bad. You think that you sin, which makes you feel guilt, which makes you more obedient. You are being bent to the will of the church, which is an organization run by wealthy men, who run the faith like a business. They sell you guilt-remover to cure the guilt they slapped on you in the first place.

One thing you may learn in life is that getting into financial debt is horrible. Take it from me; you do NOT want to get into debt. The last time I looked, Australians on average spend more money than they make. I’m bringing this up because being in debt has a lot of parallels to the guilt that belief imposes on you. Being in debt means that you have to constantly make money in any fashion that you can muster. Because you owe some bank more money than you own, it means that you never get to experience your entire paycheck. It means that you are tied down to a job that you might hate and it means that you can’t take risks to fulfill your dreams. Debt, it has been said, is just another form of slavery.

When you are devoted to Jesus or god, every part of what you do is tied to them. Either you feel guilty for masturbating, lying or being mean, or you attribute your successes and happiness to them and not yourself. Something that we humanists really like about our way of life is that we recognize that we are in control. We are responsible for our failures as much as our successes – entirely. And it makes all of them that much more enriching. Attributing your success to god is like owing half your paycheck to a bank. Feeling like you must work off this original sin is like having to repay someone else’s debt.

Avoiding financial debt was the single best thing I have done for myself, as it now allows me the freedom to do with my life whatever I please, whenever I please. Exercising that freedom is sweet and fulfilling. I urge you to avoid falling in love with your cage.

When Christians mention their god’s love, I can’t help but wonder what exactly that is. They don’t define it beyond using the word love, which by itself has a plethora of different uses and meanings. Does god love you the way a girl loves cute kittens? Does god love you in a way a man loves his car? Do you understand what I am getting at? You use the word, love, but you don’t define it. All Christians do is go on and on about how great it is. Leaving things vacuous and open to interpretation is deceptive. If you want me to take this “love” seriously, I’m going to need you to define it as specifically as possible. Otherwise, you might as well be suffering from Stockholm syndrome for all I know.

If, by love, you mean the love of a father for his children, then I must disagree with you that your god’s love is very desirable. As taken with the debt example above, it resembles an abusive relationship in which guilt is used to convince someone that they are unworthy, yet somehow fortunate enough to receive the love of someone so much more powerful. Religious nuts of all kind use their god’s love in this way; they even falsely label it as “unconditional.” But it is quite conditional; supposedly if you die without god in your heart, you go to hell, or at least do not get the same privileges as the devout. Those are conditions if I ever saw them. They are also veiled threats.

But the voracity of religious claims is beside the point. I maintain that no god even exists. You claim that you can sense him or talk to him, but Sam Harris has a great argument for this. Imagine a man who says he is in communication with god through his hair dryer. Even the most gullible would see that there is something wrong with this picture. I don’t see, however, how the addition of the hairdryer to this situation is what makes it crazy. Still, you need something to explain how it is that you’re supposedly communicating with a god, when, to the best of your knowledge, you are not crazy. Am I right?

The one assumption about me that you got wrong is that I am interested in finding god. My challenge for evidence is there as an argument in disguise. You know as well as I that no real evidence exists for god. You’ve admitted that much. You also know that as soon as you provide something that you claim to be evidence, it has the potential to be disproven. A believer is forced to be nebulous in their descriptions of god, lest someone point out how exactly wrong they are. I would hope that this is the single most poignant way to introduce doubt into a believer’s mind, but too many people actually take pride in the fact that their belief defies logic. This is mind-boggling.

I forgive you your lack of knowledge about the recent developments in answering questions like how the universe began. I must tell you, however, that physicists have come up with a few different mathematically valid explanations, each of which do not involve a deity for creation. If you’re interested, I think the most digestible one is a lecture by Lawrence Krauss called A Universe From Nothing. Google it up; it is an hour long and very enlightening.

Thus we run into the main problem with using god to explain things that we don’t understand yet. Throughout history, every physical phenomenon that we have discovered that was originally attributed to god has turned out to be, through scientific inquiry, not god. Such arguments are called “god of the gaps.” If you have a mystery and solve it with “god,” you’re doing two VERY BAD things. First, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. You’re defining the realm of god and thus allowing him to be disproved. Naughty. Second, you’re stifling intellectual curiosity. If all you do is say that god did it, where is the intelligence in that? What effort does it take for you to look at a problem or a question and just throw up your arms and say it was god’s will? I’m sorry, but fuck that. Real justice is done when things are investigated to their fullest extent so that a REAL answer can be given in the place of some imaginary force.

Your challenge is honorable, but it is impossible to accept. Asking a god for answers or signs is a silly endeavor. What do you think a shaman sees when he looks at the bones that he has scattered before him? What do you think an haruspex sees when he has examined an animal’s entrails upon an altar? If you believe in Christianity, then you also believe that these pagan rituals hold no magic or supernatural power. In other words, the shaman and haruspex are being fooled by their own minds into thinking that a sign is there when there is actually nothing. And so are you. So is everyone. Humans see patterns everywhere, and their brains’ natural processes draw those patterns. Psychologists have documented these pattern-seeking tendencies, so it is my suggestion that you educate yourself about them. The process of looking for signs that you described to me is textbook confirmation bias.

You know how you can go for a while without noticing something, but as soon as someone points it out to you, you see it everywhere? As a resident of New York City, I have noticed there are signs placed on hundreds of buildings around the city that tell people that there is a nuclear fallout shelter in the basement. These signs have been around for about 50 years now, but I’ve met life-long New Yorkers who have never noticed them. Once I point the signs out to them, they come back and tell me that they see them everywhere now. This little example is just one of many ways in which our brains filter the immense amount of information that we encounter and call to our attention the things that we have recently thought about. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic.

The confirmation bias works like this: A few months ago, a video made the rounds on the internet of a fishing boat that got its net tangled with a sperm whale. The video begins with the crew trying to untangle the whale while it tries to pull itself free. Eventually, the whale is freed and the crew celebrates. The rest of the video has clips of the whale breaching and crashing into the water on several occasions, as well as performing a few tail slaps. The crew see this incredible display of beauty and claim that the whale is celebrating its freedom, thanking them by giving them a great show. Nearly every internet viewer of this video is lured into thinking the same thing, that the whale is leaping from the water with joy. But all of this is false. If they had bothered to do some research, they would have known that breaching is a whale’s way of establishing territorial dominance. It is a sign of aggression. So what is happening here? Everyone saw what they wanted to see in the situation, but never bothered to discover what it is what they were actually observing.

Combine my last two paragraphs together and you get this: If you look for god everywhere, of COURSE you’re going to find him; you’ll find him even when he isn’t there. The example of you finding my blog is a great example of the confirmation bias. My blog gets lots of hits, so what makes yours a sign from god? I put a lot of work into making sure people stumble into my corner of the internet, so why don’t I get the credit for bringing you there instead of god? Heck, part of what I get paid to do in my professional life is driving people to sites. If every one of them thought that their coming to a site that I wanted them to go to was a sign from god, you might as well consider me one of his agents.

Your challenge is mentally unhealthy for me to consider. What you’re asking me to do is voluntarily induce insanity in myself. You’re asking me to denounce the explanations I know for the mental phenomenon that are responsible for belief and instead believe that they are not psychological flaws but in fact doorways to a spiritual link with god. As I said before, belief is not a choice. You’re going to have to give me more reason to believe and that reason has to transcend what I already consider knowledge in that area. I can go about doing what you asked of me, but it will be done with a higher understanding of what I am doing, thus dispelling any “proof” I happen across. In a way, that already happens.

Being who I am, I think about the concept of “seeing god” in things all the time. Sometimes things happen where I have to stop and think, “If I believed in god, that would trip me the fuck out.” But I don’t believe in god, so I see things for what they are: opportunities and random happenstances that I put myself in position to experience. And you know what? These things happen all the time. We seem fascinated by “rare” coincidences and nifty revelations (like today, I just randomly stumbled on to an awesome photo opportunity at sunset), but we fail to honestly analyze how common they really are.

I’m not sure if you’re too familiar with the American sport of baseball, but it is a game of rare probabilities. A good buddy of mine is a baseball fan who tries very hard to catch balls that fly off of the field and into the stands. He is either incredibly good at this or incredibly lucky, depending on how you want to look at him. Or, you can take your route, and conclude that god surrounds him. On one occasion, my friend has managed to catch three errant foul balls deflected into the seats in a row. He could easily say, “Wow, God is really working on my side,” but he doesn’t. He’s an atheist. One of his favorite sayings is, “luck is the residue of design,” and in his role, where it seems he is the luckiest person on the planet, his fortune really just comes from a huge amount of preparation and even more perseverance. To conclude that god is trying to talk to you through everyday things is a little vain. On a related note, the notion that god helps those who help themselves is asinine, inserting god into places where he isn’t necessary.

The world is an amazing place, but I don’t need to believe that some higher power created it to enjoy living in it. In fact, some (including me) would say that the idea that this reality self-assembled makes it even more amazing. Discovering the mechanisms through which it assembles itself is fascinating, intuitive and inspiring. Simply stopping all of that to conclude that god simply willed it is intellectually destructive. We have to look past that lazy idea.

I challenge you to educate yourself about psychology and to learn why we think the way we do. I challenge you to learn about evolution and how we retain many animalistic survival traits and vestigial parts and formations from our prehistoric cousins. I challenge you to learn about physics, cosmology and chemistry, to discover how the world functions, how it came into existence, and how real scientific inquiry is carried out.

When you explain to me about why there is pain in the world, it sounds a lot like Greek mythology, where the gods punished people for silly things that wouldn’t make anyone bat an eye these days. Why do you listen to these stories and actually believe that you are part of some modern drama of godly jealousness? The idea that YOU are responsible for the error of someone else is … ancient. Morals have advanced far enough these days so that we no longer allow scapegoats, trial by combat, or whipping boys. The sentiments portrayed in the Bible are barbaric and outdated. The world doesn’t work like that today.

While I’m on the subject about the world moving on from the standards of the Bible, it is worth noting that another key moment in my life that led me away from the belief in a god was a class I took in college; Modern Jewish History. This class simply told the history of the Jewish people through the last couple thousand years. Figuring prominently in their history was the Catholic Church, the source of most of their oppression. It was interesting to note the evolution of the Catholic Church’s stance on Jews and various social customs throughout the centuries. More interesting, though, was what drove that evolution.

The Church, seen as an authority, with the Pope speaking with god’s voice, should, in theory, dictate and precipitate any changes to biblical law and Church outlook. That was not the case. Throughout history, the Church has been forced to change its stance on various issues (the persecution of the Jews, Galileo, evolution, etc.) based on public outcry. This is to say that the general public is more up to date with morality than the Church itself.

Most of the laws that you read in your Bible are glossed over and ignored by nearly everyone who follows them. Who decides what is worth listening to and what is garbage? Once again, it is not the church but the people. This gives us a very good indicator to where morality truly comes from. Morality evolves with society, politics, technology, and knowledge. There is no precedent in the Bible for the moral code that we now have today. Instead, it is a collage with both suggestions from the Bible and new ones that society comes up with on their own (and attribute them to the Bible, for good measure). This is because the Bible is not a collection of god’s morals, but man’s morals from thousands of years ago. Some of those morals have stuck around, but most have fallen out of style. The book itself is a collection of legends from iron-age illiterate nomads. It is a piece of history, but it should have no place within modernity.

I don’t wonder about god. The concept of god is not a factor in my life. I don’t wonder why there is so much pain in the world. I accept the pain as a fact of reality because I know how humans work, how reality works and I know why you think you’re following the right god when there are people who live about an hour’s drive from you who think you’re going to hell. You’re not going to hell. Neither am I. Nor is anyone. And nobody is going to heaven either. None of that exists. Your soul does not exist because your mind is a manifestation of your brain. Your evidence, your experiences, all have good explanations for why you feel so strongly about them despite the fact that they don’t represent reality. If you are interested, you can start by reading my blog post entitled “Why You Are Wrong” to get a feel for the many different ways in which your brain glitches out when you experience things. You might also want to pick up either of Michael Shermer’s books on believing strange things. His latest is “The Believing Brain.”

If you were to say that most people seem to believe in something, and that the majority seems to be keyed into this concept that something greater than them exists, and that billions of people can’t be wrong together, I would respond like so: Before these current gods were worshipped, there were other gods, and others before them. Every new generation of gods seems to hold the same purpose: to explain why things beyond our control happen and to explain why we are here, and this was done in the fashion of the time, using the environment that the believers knew best. This seems to me like a broken record, like we have retained the same flaws throughout history. And indeed we have; our shared DNA is practically the same as the humans who lived 30,000 years before us. We all have the natural proclivity for curiosity, but only as much sense as it takes to interpret what our own eyes can see. The problem is that we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Before we ask “why,” we must ask “how.” Before we assume there is a purpose, we must understand how our world works.

I believe that the best antidote for silly beliefs is empathy for things both living and not. You may claim that the world suffers because some mythological figure once sought knowledge from the gods, but, to paraphrase a line from Tim Minchin (also an Aussie), it’s quite pretentious to think that god lets people starve by the millions every year while he is intently interested in curing the vision problems of some middle class white bitch who sucks up to him. Learn to see the world through other peoples’ eyes and minds. Understand what it means to take another perspective. Imagine our world as if it were a nature film narrated by David Attenborough. See the diversity and understand that everyone has a good story and nobody seems to agree. Look at the Earth through the eyes of the planet Jupiter. Look at our solar system through the eyes of the Andromeda galaxy. What are we to these celestial bodies? Nothing. What influence does our spiritual plight have on the universe at large? None at all. Who are we to the passage of time? Hardly a blink.

I am writing this to you from the city of Rome, and within Rome sits Vatican City, seat of the Catholic Church. Within this city are amazing feats of architecture and I recognize with it what a powerful influence the idea of god is to humans. It would seem that god is everywhere here. But humans, not god, built all these churches and basilicas. Humans put god here, not the other way around. We have such incredible potential when we are organized and motivated. Imagine what we can accomplish if we could motivate ourselves toward building a better world and furthering secular education instead of distracting ourselves and devoting our best efforts to pleasing a deity who will, in a few thousand years, be as obsolete as Zeus and Venus are today. If we took all of the passion that went into Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel and focused it into education, medicine, technology and human rights, imagine what we could accomplish. We wouldn’t need great cathedrals to enthrall us because we would each be as grand. If we instead contribute to the collective knowledge of the human race, expanding on things that are real and consequential, we can contribute to the world, as it will be for the millennia hence.

-Andrew