Is Atheism a Belief or a Lack of Belief… and the worth of a Master’s degree in Theology.

I was sent a link to a blog post, an excerpt form an upcoming book by one Mr. Trent Horn, proud owner of a Master’s Degree in Theology. A Catholic who is an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers…

The post is here: http://www.catholic.com/blog/trent-horn/is-atheism-a-belief-or-a-lack-of-belief

I generally wouldn’t bother writing (or indeed reading for that matter) about a random Catholic’s opinion on atheism – it’s a pretty simple concept to grasp after all – but this piece is so bad, the quality of thinking so low that I feel compelled to write something. I know I probably shouldn’t judge all holders of “Master’s degrees in Theology” by the standard of a single blog post but it does a pretty depressing picture paint.

But the problem with defining atheism as simply “the lack of belief in God” is that there are already another group of people who fall under that definition: agnostics.

It seems like the man is insinuating that agnostics have a monopoly on “the lack of belief in God”? Strange. Let’s see what the Oxford English dictionary defines atheism as:

atheism
Pronunciation: /ˈeɪθɪɪz(ə)m/

noun
[mass noun]
disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.

Perhaps Mr. Horn feels he can redefine the meaning of the word?

An illustration might help explain the burden of proof both sides share. In a murder trial the prosecution must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the murder. But if the prosecution isn’t able to make its case, then the defendant is found “not guilty.” Notice the defendant isn’t found “innocent.”

I think that perhaps Mr. Horn hasn’t heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence. Which would be strange, since its the basis of the secular legal system he operates under. It’s a pretty fundamental principle… “innocent until proven guilty”. Sort of says you don’t need to be found innocent since you are innocent until proven otherwise.

“Presumption of innocence” serves to emphasize that the prosecution has the obligation to prove each element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt (or some other level of proof depending on the criminal justice system) and that the accused bears no burden of proof.

He goes on:

Likewise, even if the theist isn’t able to make his case that God exists that doesn’t show God does not exist and therefore that atheism is true. As atheists Austin Dacey and Lewis Vaughn write, “What if these arguments purporting to establish that God exists are failures? That is, what if they offer no justification for theistic belief? Must we then conclude that God does not exist? No. Lack of supporting reasons or evidence for a proposition does not show that the proposition is false.”

You see, Mr. Horn completely and strangely misunderstands how reality works. If a theist isn’t able to make his case that his god exists then one is entirely justified in concluding that god doesn’t exist. If I claim that a pink invisible dragon lives in my garage but can’t prove it then clearly one is justified in concluding it doesn’t exist. Under Mr. Horn’s system of thinking, I can claim anything, literally anything without evidence and the only valid conclusion must be suspension of judgement and that is patently absurd.

If you claim something fundamentally ridiculous – fairies in the garden, leprechauns and gold at the end of the rainbow, talking donkeys, global floods, deities who care where about the location of your penis – without evidence, it can be dismissed, without evidence. And the more ridiculous your claim – Yahweh created a man-god out of himself to sacrifice to himself to change his own opinion, for example – the more evidence you’re going to need to prop up the proposition.

The primary mistake in Mr. Horn’s thinking is that he feels his claim that Yahweh and Jesus Christ exists is somehow different, more important or somehow more special than a claim that flying pigs exist, great big invisible farm llamas live behind Jupiter or that Krishna is real. It is not. Once Mr. Horn and the religious in general understand this fundamental point, their world view will change.

If he wants to demonstrate that atheism is true, an atheist would have to provide additional evidence that there is no God just as a defense attorney would have to provide further evidence to show his client is innocent as opposed to being just “not guilty.” He can’t simply say the arguments for the existence of God are failures and then rest his case.

I don’t need to demonstrate that atheism is true. See the Oxford English definition for the word. Atheism is the default position on god: there isn’t one since I have no reason to believe there is one and never have. Before the invention of Christianity, every living person was an atheist with regards to Jesus Christ since that’s the default position. Before the invention of religion, everybody was an atheist with respect to every god invented since. Why? Because atheism is the default position. Innocent until proven guilty. Reasonable.

The religious try to change the default position of non-belief with a claim and that claim either has evidence or it doesn’t. If it has convincing evidence, the position changes. The religious have yet to provide any evidence what so ever. For any of the thousands of deities invented by men in history.

Mr. Horn’s religion is one of many. It’s mutually exclusive to all other religions. His only evidence is a book, compiled by a committee of men with an agenda, written by anonymous authors with agendas, from second or third hand accounts, translated over and over by scribes with agendas who were prone to mistakes and no originals remain at all. As far as evidence goes, it’s more than little thin I would say.

I might give an illustration of my own to show what Mr. Horn thinks is a viable legal trial:

In a murder trial a man is accused of killing another man. There is no body, no murder weapon, no witnesses. There is no proof the murdered man even existed. In fact, the only evidence the prosecution brings is a hand written note. The note claims the accused murdered a man. Nobody knows who wrote the note, when it was written and to make matters worse, the note was originally written in a language nobody understands. The note presented to the court isn’t the original, it’s a copy of a copy of a translation. Nobody knows who did the translation or when the translation was done. There are also other notes – similarly translated from copies of copies – which contradict the note that the prosecution has chosen to make their case.

Tell me again, Mr. Horn, how we should suspend judgement on the veracity and truth of the claim instead of summarily dismissing it for the garbage that it is.

An argument for skepticism, empirical evidence and critical thinking

Rainbows: they're caused by the refraction of light in water droplets, not by the promises of sky fairies.

A fundamental tenet of religion is faith. Faith is belief in something without evidence. In the Christian sense that would be a belief in Jesus Christ (among many other things). Christians in particular celebrate ‘faith’ since it’s the core of their religion: believe (without evidence) in Jesus Christ, accept him as your ‘Lord and Saviour’ and you’ll be ‘saved’ (go to heaven to live in paradise forever). Christians accept the ‘truth’ of the Bible, that their God exists and that He had a ‘son’ Jesus Christ on faith, without any empirical evidence.

Of course, every religion man has ever invented functions on exactly the same principle, including some ‘belief’ systems more appropriately called superstitions that sometimes pre-date Christianity by a fair amount. Some Christians believe the world is only 6,000 years old but we know, based on empirical evidence, that people have been around in Africa for significantly longer than that. Many African superstitions involve  worshipping ‘ancestors’ and a form of witchcraft that involves witch doctors and magic potions.

The following is an extract of an article posted on July 21 2011 at 09:26pm on the South African IOL website:

A witness watched as schoolgirl Masego Kgomo was mutilated, the High Court in Pretoria heard on Thursday.

Albert “Nono” Mathebula was testifying in the trial of Brian Mangwale, who has pleaded not guilty to of murdering and raping the 10-year-old Masego and selling her body parts for muti.

Mathebula was initially also arrested in connection with Kgomo’s murder.

He testified on Wednesday that he was smoking dagga with friends on the night of December 31 2009 when Mangwale arrived in a car with a man named Jan, a woman in sangoma’s clothing and a young child.

He and two of his friends accompanied them to a sangoma’s house in Soshanguve.

Mathebula went inside with the woman, who carried the child. His friends stayed in the car.

He told the court that he and Mangwale were given cooldrink which contained something that made him feel dizzy, out of control and hear voices in his head.

“On entering, we found initiates. They were dressed in sangoma clothing,” Mathebula testified.

“… The lady came in with a cloth. The child was not crying. It appeared she was also made to eat or drink something. When Jan cut her open, she did not scream.

“… I did not see the other parts. I only saw the internal organs. When she was cut open I looked so I could see what it is inside a woman’s body.

“Jan continued to cut open the child. When they were removing the organs I vomited,” he said.

Mathebula said the child’s body was later put into the car boot and he and his friends were dropped off at a party.

“My friends asked me what happened with the child. I did not tell them. I was afraid,” he said.

Mangwale’s trial was previously postponed for judgment, but Judge Billy Mothle called Mathebula and two other witnesses to shed more light on the killing.

The other witnesses, a magistrate and a senior policeman, testified that Mangwale made confessions and a pointing-out to them in March last year about the alleged murder and mutilation of another young girl.

They said Mangwale told them how the girl was lured into their car and taken to bushes near a river, where a sangoma called Jan Maleka cut out her tongue and cut off both her breasts before removing her womb.

The sangoma took the body parts with him when they left the child’s body behind in the bushes.
…

The full article can be found here: http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/when-he-cut-her-open-she-did-not-scream-1.1103672

Any sane person who reads that horrifying story should find it hard to believe that things like that happen; believe it, they happen, often. For clarification: a ‘sangoma’ is a witch doctor and ‘muti’ is what ingredients used in magic potions are called.

Now, it doesn’t take much for a civilised, educated westerner (and I am including all westerners, especially Christians – Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular) to look at that article and write all of it off as the barbaric actions of primitive uneducated people driven by ludicrous superstitions. And they are terrible,  ludicrous superstitions.

Being religious (Christian, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness) and writing those superstitions off as ridiculous though is disingenuous at best but completely unsurprising. Several million Christians in South Africa will do exactly that today: read the article and write it off to stupid superstition while happily continuing to believe what they believe.

No doubt Christians would object to and be outraged at me comparing their ‘faith’ based beliefs to… the ‘faith’ based beliefs of African witch doctors. After all, nobody wants their cherished beliefs to be compared to something that sickening and horrifying.

There are several issues with that misplaced outrage.

First and foremost, there is ‘Holy Communion‘. As with everything else Christian, what is actually believed depends on how fervently one believes it. You see, Catholics at the very least, believe that during Communion the little cracker (or bread, Eucharist) they receive physically changes into the body of Jesus Christ and the wine they receive physically turns into the blood of Jesus Christ. Catholics genuinely believe they are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a god-man. Normal people refer to this practice as cannibalism.

Of course, they believe this without evidence (actually, they believe this in spite of evidence to the contrary).

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that one shouldn’t accept blood transfusions because ‘blood represents life and it sacred to God’ as described in the Bible in Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:10, and Acts 15:29. Since the Bible is not proof of anything other than the existence of bronze age creation myths, this no-transfusion belief is accepted without evidence.

Clearly there are situations where refusing a blood transfusion is going to kill the person refusing the transfusion but some might argue that it’s their own choice and they should be allowed to choose that option. I tend to agree: if a cognisant  adult chooses to die, then who are we to say otherwise?

My problem lies with this ‘choice’ for suicide being forced on children. People are rightly outraged at the news story I posted earlier where adults butchered a child but in my opinion forcing a child to choose to die instead of live because of a ridiculous belief based on some obscure passages in an arbitrarily put together book chock full of contradictions, impossibilities, flat-out lies and horror is an order of magnitude worse.

Killing a child is one thing, forcing a child to choose to die is… possibly the worst thing I can imagine.

Christians outraged by that story may want to consider again how their Bible commands genocide, provides guidelines for slavery, commands the murder of children, commands the enslavement of virgin girls. They might want to consider how their entire religion is based on the torture and execution of an innocent to pay for the alleged crimes of the guilty.

Christians might also want to consider how for several thousand years they have been mutilating little babies by chopping off pieces of their penises.

Isn’t it interesting how people can be outraged at the superstition motivated actions of a foreign group of people while they are completely happy to carry on with their own, similar, superstition motivated actions?

So what is the argument for skepticism and empirical evidence?

People demand evidence for just about every other claim outside their religion. Religious people demand proof for the religious beliefs of other religions and refuse to accept the ‘truth’ of religions other than their own based on their lack of proof and evidence. This is the central point of John Loftus’ Outside Test For Faith: if a person had to examine their own faith with the same skepticism they reserve for other religions it will quickly become apparent that their own faith is exactly as unfounded as they perceive the faith of others to be.

When claims are made, evidence must be required and provided.

If evidence for efficacy were required before butchering a child for magic potion ingredients, the butchering wouldn’t happen since there isn’t any empirical evidence for magic potions working. If empirical evidence were required for refusing blood transfusions outright, no children would be forced to choose to die. If empirical evidence was required before slicing pieces off of a child’s penis, children wouldn’t have their penises mutilated. If empirical evidence was demanded to show that vaccinations caused autism, children wouldn’t be left unvaccinated, endangering the entire population and dying unnecessarily.

Faith without evidence makes parents choose to not get their children medical treatment but pray instead. Faith without evidence makes parents choose homoeopathy for treating serious diseases instead of actual medicine. Faith without evidence cause parents to not vaccinate their children.

Demanding evidence kills faith and saves people.