My journey from weak to strong atheism, to yet stronger atheism

In the beginning was my atheism. That is, my lack of belief in God or gods. I was an atheist about God in the same sense that I was about lots of things: fairies, invisible unicorns, Santa Claus, and so forth. I rejected the notion that these things exist - but I didn't positively assert that they didn't exist. In fact, I (just) allowed for the possibility that they exist (since we "can't be absolutely sure about anything"). And so I allowed for the possibility of God (which I nevertheless always imagined to be very slim indeed).

Then, I changed my tact to what's known as "strong atheism", which goes beyond the "weak atheist" claim that there is no evidence for God, and onto the stronger claim that the evidence shows that there is no God.

I have now migrated to a still stronger position, which is this: not only is there no evidence for God; not only is there evidence against God. I now reject even the possibility of God. There cannot be such a thing as God.

I take God to be that which most religious people subscribe to: a personal being as advertised in the Bible, the Koran, and other holy books. Victor J. Stenger handily dealt this God a public death blow in God: The Failed Hypothesis - How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. There, he addressed the personal God that most people believe in, not the nebulous and fashionable cliche of "Something out there" that a lot of otherwise rational folks suspect must exist (of course, there is a genuine sense in which one can't escape the notion that there must indeed be something out there, simply by virtue of the sheer size of the universe. It's so big that it's not at all inconceivable for an atheist like me to seriously entertain the possibility that there could be deities of a sort: extremely powerful extraterrestrials whose technology has advanced to such a stage that we would regard them as divine if we were ever to encounter them. But these beings would not be supernatural, because they too would have undergone a cumulative process of evolution and would ultimately be bound by the laws of physics). By testing whether the effects that should be detectable if God is real actually prevail, one can test for that God's existence.

Such a God necessitates a mind, and, in most modern theological formulations, IS a mind. In fact, God is often touted as being devoid of a body or any other physical baggage. Some have even gone so far as to call him "pure will". Upon closer examination, these sorts of claims are exposed as completely vacuous because they don't convey anything. But then, theology isn't meant to enlighten. It's meant to obscure, to avoid ever having to explain. Thus the easy resort to words that have no meaning in the context in which they're used.

In the last few weeks, I've been thinking a little more about the nature of minds. Minds are strange, wonderful things - and, like most strange, wonderful things, most people do not think at all clearly about them. There is a deep seated sense in which minds lend themselves to a sort of "assumption of precedence", as I'll call it: that they (or it) somehow had to be here first, "before" physical matter. Partly, this is because the manner in which humans relate to each other and their artifacts (in terms of schemes, designs and purposeful interrelations) manifests itself in an assumption that the universe must also be "for" something (otherwise, "What's the point?" That there is an ultimate point to the existence of matter and the physical universe is taken as a given, which pretty much guarantees that the conclusion arrived at - of a cosmic overlord/mind that put everything into motion and overseas nature and humanity - will be one that vindicates that assumption). Humans are also natural dualists: they are predisposed, for good evolutionary reasons, to thinking about intentionality as a distinctive kind of "thing", separate from the body. These "folk psychology" reasons for humanity's infatuation with the mind as an agent that is fundamentally disjointed from the physical universe are partial answers to why it is so difficult for people to break free from the notion that physical reality itself must originate from mind; and why it is so difficult for many to understand, let alone accept, the scientific alternative: that mind is an "emergent" property of the brain that arrived late in the universe, and that, ultimately, "bubbled up" from simplicity through the ratchet of evolution.

It seems clear to me now that if the being called God is supposed to be a "disembodied mind", then God is, by definition, necessarily nonsensical and therefore utterly impossible.

The most general reason for this is that mind cannot exist as a stand-alone entity. A mind is a high-level, abstract view of an evolving physical system. This high-level view is a manifestation of a process involving transitions between states, retrieval of information from registries, retention of information (often highly biased and distorted), the formation of an ongoing set of representations about the world, and a way of linking all of these together (and, if we're also talking about consciousness, a way of making it seem as though there is a central I in control). These representations exist as patterns in an appropriately organised apparatus. For a mind to exist, it must "reside", as it were, in some apparatus made of stuff, and that stuff must do something very specific. If you doubt this, then think about what it would mean to run computer software that does not ultimately reside on some physical medium. It is clear that a mind requires heterogeneous structure at some level, like computer software does.

God, when he wasn't so lame, oddly enough. Still, he was more of a cunt.

In the theological narrative, matter is almost taken as an obscenity (there was even a religious order back in the middle ages called the Cathars who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the Devil. Needless to say, the ruling class didn't take too kindly to these poor sods - the monarchy naturally wanted religion to legitimate its ascendant position in society - and so the Cathars were dealt the same fate that awaited all too many do-gooders and smart-arses: torture and death). Matter is crude stuff that drips with the Sin of Eve's transgression. To die is to graduate to a realm "beyond matter". The rotten physical world is left behind (this should be kept in mind when dealing with creationists, who like to extoll the grace of God through the complexity and intricacy of the physical world. These people will implore atheists to "just look around" and "see for yourselves evidence of the Creator's handiwork'', to which the atheist can reply, "But why so anxious to leave?"). The world is an arena on which to "test" us, a harsh, often pitiless theatre.

After death, we're transported to a place (though not a place in a spatial sense, curiously enough) where pain and suffering are unknown (however, many formulations take heaven to be suspiciously like the physical world. The reasons aren't far to seek, if we suppose that religions are crafted in the historical-material context in which their makers lived). As mentioned, God himself is taken to be "beyond" matter, indeed not even composed of it. Matter behaves in predictable ways; God is Pure Will, not reducible to the machinations of blind processes, which would constrain his degrees of freedom.

Something that's never explained is how this non-material being could ever interact with matter. God is supposed not to possess any spatial or temporal components (unless he chooses to use them as avatars). As mentioned, some have described him as "pure will". The question then arises: what is "doing the willing"? Does God will through one part of himself (if he has parts) and create things through another? Interestingly, some people have tried to describe God as a simple being, but it's clear that such a scheme is unworkable if this being can do even a tiny fraction of the things he is purported to be capable of. If, nevertheless, he could be a simple being (which I don't grant), then we arrive back at the problem of how God's thoughts and mental states can be organised if there is no requisite structure with which to organise them.

More power than God. Literally. Rather prettier as well, don't you agree?

If there is imagined to be some sort of continuity of mind with matter (with mind in the form of God, and matter in the form of the stuff that he produced through volition), then why not have matter precede mind anyway, and simply go with what the science (and the resultant logic) says? Why get hung up on lobbying for matter to be the product of mind? If there be a continuity, then have it go the other way, in which case you get this for free: you don't even need to make the stretch of saying that matter "creates" mind, in the sense of matter producing some independent thing that could exist outside of or beyond it. Rather, the philosophical materialist claim is that mind is an "emergent" property (or better, process) of appropriately organised matter. Thus, the matter-before-mind narrative makes less extraordinary claims, is consistent with what we know from neuroscience and psychology, and it escapes the logical absurdities of the mind-before-matter narrative.

The following things corroborate that mind is indeed a manifestation of physical processes in the brain:

- the induction of different mental states and even personalities through the administration of drugs, sleep deprivation, trauma, etc.

- the strengthening of synapse connections when a skill is practised (this drives home the notion of mind being part of an evolving physical system)

- genetic heritability for intelligence

- the correspondence of different parts of the brain to our various senses. When these parts of the brain are damaged or neutralised, the sense they correspond to is incapacitated (or eventually taken up by another part of the brain)

- thinking requires energy, which attests to the physical process that thinking is. If "the soul" was the thing that thinks, we wouldn't get drowsy from lack of sleep before the final exam the next morning, or crash our vehicles after a night on the town

- degenerative diseases that diminish our ability to remember or recognise people and situations, and that often make us "lose our minds" (literally, in some extreme cases)

- the effects of aging on our memory

Take away all the physical structures and processes alluded to here and what are you left with? Nothing.

There is no ghost in the machine. The machine is the ghost. In the absence of matter, there is not only no medium for thoughts to be "on", there are no things for them to be about. Thoughts are ultimately the result of physical stimuli and their interactions with patterns in the brain (abstractified as memories, thoughts, sensations and feelings). However, if God precedes physical matter, then he exists in a void that is absent of anything for his thoughts to represent. Additionally, God has no sensory organs by which to absorb and organise information about physical existence (in the theological narrative, there wasn't even such a thing to begin with); he is purported to somehow just "know everything" (another convenience afforded by gibberish notions such as "spiritual power"). Religious people take something that is an emergent property of the brain (mind and consciousness), and then assume that it can be detached and made meaningful outside of the brain.

It can't.

Let's assume, though, that there is something called "the soul" which survives physical death. What are the properties of this soul supposed to be? Does it continue, for example, to possess the deficiencies of its respective person while they lived? For example, if someone was severely mentally "diminshed" in some way (the result of, say, developmental abnormalities) does the soul continue to be afflicted with this shortcoming? Does the soul "spring back" to full functionality when it's liberated from the body? Is it an entity that never forgets anything? But if so, then how does it store the requisite information? And what happens as the information continues to pile up? If there be some mechanism to facilitate the flow of thoughts in a soul, then this soul is a heterogeneous entity that needs to be understood as a system. But the only system that could in principle act as the facilitator of thoughts, consciousness, memories and so on is something very much like the brain - which, while not necessarily needing to share the particular details of the hominid brain with which we have direct experience, must nevertheless have some equivalent "logical" structure to it. Homogeneous entities don't and can't think, because they do not have components that allow for the differential functionality that a mind necessarily requires. It is no coincidence, after all, that we have hugely complex brains, and that our brains are more complex than those of other animals. The only reference point we have for talking about minds is brains, which are really biological computers.

One of these goes a long way, biatches.

For God to do any of the things he is purported to be capable of, he must therefore be highly complex. We can immediately see why God can't be an adequate ultimate explanation for anything: if we're interested in explaining complexity, it simply won't do to invoke a gargantuan wallop of it from the very outset, and then leave that complexity unexplained; if we allow ourselves this lazy way out, we might as well say that people and horses and cats don't require explanations either. As the philosopher David Hume knew in his day: if a Designer is required to explain complexity, then all the more must that very Designer require an explanation through the invocation of design, and therefore another Designer, and so and on. Invoking design doesn't terminate the regress one iota; it bumps it up another notch, and in so doing, ends up irredeemably compounding it. It not only fails to solve the problem, it fails to solve the problem with a white-hot vengeance.

Theologians and other religious apologists often try to wriggle out of these tight spots by saying that God is an "uncaused cause". Why God should be allowed to get away with being an unexplained "first cause" is never adequately addressed, other than that it's required by the narrative. But what, let us ask, exempts God from requiring an explanation while the universe is reckoned to need one? Why not just cut out the superfluous deity and say that the universe doesn't require an explanation either? Of course, we then come to the crux of belief: a universe that is not haunted by an overlord spirit is unsatisfactory for emotional reasons. And given the boundless pride of human beings, it follows that the universe must have been created with us in Mind (God's!). In a bid to make science and religion "go hand in hand", increasingly nebulous schemes are concocted and massaged to help people overcome the suspicion that their beliefs are a litany of lies and falsehoods. The language becomes ever fuzzier in this New Age, hip sort of "reasonable" religion. Credit to those who don't completely strong-arm science to make it jive with their Sky Daddy beliefs. But even they are subscribing to concepts that, in the final analysis, are the sheerest of nonsense - and yes, are also unscientific.

To repeat, the religious are taking a phenomenon from within the physical universe and trying to apply it "beyond" this domain, imagining it to have efficacy in some other realm. There is not the slightest bit of evidence, of course, that such realms exist or, more importantly to my point, that they could exist. Most tellingly, it is not even clear that such notions make the slightest bit of sense, given what we know now about the nature of minds.

Again, if by God we mean a disembodied mind that precedes the physical universe (to the extent that this temporal narrative can be made intelligible), then God is a logical - not just an empirical - impossibility. He is not only a non-starter in the sense of the infinite regress problem that Hume and Dawkins have expounded. He's just not there as a possibility to begin with.

The lesson from all this is simple: God doesn't exist.

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Further reading: this excellent article by Scott Harrison. It talks about the deep analogy between mind/brain and software/hardware. It is written from a Marxist perspective (which can be both a good and bad thing). In particular, it lays out the case for seeing minds as high-level, abstract ways of viewing evolving physical systems, and why things like ethereal souls and disembodied minds are impossible (and hence, likewise, are any sort of "God"). This is really the article that nudged me over the line to strong, hardcore atheism. Scott has also commented that Dawkins and others, including even neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists - whose science strikes the final hammer blow against God - have not picked up on the obvious implications for theism. Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, even allows for the (extremely slight) possibility of God. Using evolution and physics in defence of atheism is fine, but the science that definitively demonstrates it has not been taken enough advantage of by atheists. This is largely an artifact of the philosophical idealist remnants that linger in the minds of even hardened atheist scientists. Needless to say, most of the rest of the population are nowhere near realising the implications of an authentically materialist conception of the universe, and still wallow in notions like disembodied minds, souls, spirits, and the like.