is it trendier these days to be an environmentalist or an atheist? there’s probably more evidence to convince the undecided to go green, but if i really thought about it, it’s probably more compelling to be an atheist because the day to day doesn’t change too much and because it eliminates the need for the vast majority of early morning wake-ups.
maybe this should be called the ‘what’s in it for me’ generation?
some people argue that the answer to ‘what’s not in it for me?’ is child molestation and genocide. i suppose it’s a fair observation that religion has been linked to these acts, but any suggestion that the relationship is somehow causal is a gross overexaggeration. people have been doing bad things to each other for 100,000 years and likely will continue to do so far into the future, unless something goes wrong with the large hadron collider.
(by the way, the large hadron collider is the new particle accelerator at CERN. this particular device, you should know, has a chance to create a black hole and wipe out the existence of our planet, but scientists conclude that it is - wait for it - “beyond reasonable doubt”.)
this argument i can buy. but does atheism hold some sort of intellectual superiority over theistic belief? many atheists feel this way. have you ever heard an atheist choke on their milk when someone in the room mentions they are a creationist? (try it! it’s a fun experiment.)
it’s not that i believe any particular god story is better than the scientific version. my issue is that belief in atheism is often related to an unshakeable confidence in the ideas of material realism: that things exist out there in the world and that science has the ability to measure them. these days, in this part of the world, any position that questions the implied superiority of science somehow suggests a lack of education or a brainwashed mind.
here’s my problem. this type of belief is predicated on four assumptions:
1) a material world exists external to us;
2) this material world is measurable by human instruments;
3) this material world is comprehensible by human consciousness;
4) humans will be confident in the true nature of this material world when they find it.
insofar as we will never be able to accurately answer these things, shouldn’t the unshakeability of an atheist’s convictions call the entire belief set into doubt? besides, believing that humans - of all species in the universe, let alone the earth - are somehow endowed with an unparalleled power to comprehend the true nature of things suggests some sort of implied superiority; superiority of specific groups being, of course, one of the atheist’s critiques of organized religion.
i wonder, how would we regard the world if we were capable of removing ourselves from a conception of superiority. how would the nature of things have been written by history’s losers - those cultures that have been wiped away through conquest?
maybe it’s time to reconsider the notion that we are moving on a path towards absolute truth. is there actually such a thing as progress? if there is, what are we progressing towards?