Faith, Reason, and other mutually exclusive terms

It never ceases to amaze me how much believers want to convince me that they are not “blind followers”, that they have come to their religious beliefs through reason, just like me. No, I’m not going to refute the claim that atheism is a religion here. That will have to be another blog. What I want to address here is that people want me to believe that they have used reason, not “blind faith”, to come to religion. They say that they use logic and find Christ.

Now, I should start by defining my terms. Faith is believing in something without evidence, or in spite of contrasting evidence. If you have evidence, there is no need for faith. No faith is required to believe that if I drop a rock, it will fall. There is evidence that suggests a very reasonable expectation that the rock should fall. If, however, in the unlikely event the rock does NOT fall, that does not mean gravity is no longer valid. Further investigation is required to discover what caused the expected outcome to differ from the actual outcome. Faith requires no evidence. Again, if there is evidence, there is no room for faith. If faith only exists without evidence, then it is unreasonable. It is not reasonable to think that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow. There is no evidence that would support such a claim. In fact, there is good evidence to suggest otherwise. To say that the belief is based on faith does not make the claim more rational. It simply states why someone would have chosen to believe it.

Invariably, if I ask a believer why they think there is evidence to support the belief in god or gods, they fall to the usual arguments: the first-cause, the cosmological, and the argument from complexity, etc. They seem unaware these have been refuted over and over again. This is what they consider to be evidence. But if I press further, none of these are actually the reason they believe. They are reasons they still believe after having questioned their faith in the past. That is why they say they have come to faith from reason. They questioned faith at one point, learned of these arguments, and were satisfied with the answers provided. Some, most even, seem surprised the arguments have been refuted ever.

When I go over the standard rebuttals to their standard arguments, they go back to faith. This is where they like to attack me. A few have realized mid-step the circular nature of this, and stopped. But a few have actually stopped to think about why these arguments fail. They go back to faith anyway, but at that point I feel like I’ve succeeded.

There is no virtue in faith, and even the believer recognizes this. If they really thought faith WAS a virtue, they would not try to defend faith with reason. They would not try to use science to “prove” design. They would not try to “prove” jesus actually walked the earth or did anything reported in the bible. They’d just admit it’s all blind faith. But that makes them sound unreasonable, even to themselves. So they further delude themselves into thinking there are reasons to believe.

Those are two more mutually exclusive terms: virtuous faith.

The Know-it-all Atheist

Every so often, someone will tell me that atheists are impossible to debate, because they think they know it all. Someone will tell me that I am dismissing their claims before I have even heard them. They accuse me of shutting out the “evidence” they have to “prove” god’s existence. They say I am doing what I accuse them of doing: sticking fingers in the ears and screaming, “La-La-la! Can’t hear you!”

Well, they may have a point. I guess.

The truth is I’m not really doing this. I’m not sticking my fingers in my ears. It’s just that I’ve heard this before. Care to guess how many times I’ve been approached with the first cause argument? Or the argument from design? Or pascal’s wager? Or the ontological argument? Seriously.

I help run a student organization at my local university. One of the things we are doing now is going over these arguments that are so common; they may as well be mantras. A few of the younger members haven’t heard these before, and I want them to understand that these are not new arguments and they have been refuted by people WAY smarter than I long before I could spell atheist.

So if I cut someone off when they begin with, “Everything has a cause…” and insert immediately, “What caused god?”, it’s not that I have fingers in my ears, it’s I’ve heard this before. When they begin with, “God is the greatest thing we can imagine…” and I cut them off with, “So you admit god is imaginary,” I just want to skip the long explanation I know is coming. And when they fall back to, “What if you’re wrong?”, I just smile and ask, “What if you’re wrong about Zeus?”

It’s not that I know everything. It is completely possible that there is an argument out there I’ve not heard and will actually have to consider. Thus far, that has not happened.

Oh, and back to my student group: We entertained briefly the idea of having “mock debates” where one of us would take the opposing side and argue for it. We wanted to be sure we were not attacking strawmen and that the actual arguments were justly represented. But when this came to practice, we couldn’t figure out how to do it in a way that would not at least appear that we were attacking strawmen. So we just present the argument and refute it in a discussion.

Therefore, Delusion Exists AKA We Call This Delusion God

Therefore, Delusion exists. AKA and We Call This Delusion god.




Most every argument I hear for the existence of god ends with, “therefore, god exists.” Such as, there must be a first cause; therefore, god exists. Or, logic requires a mind; therefore, god exists. The phrase could be, “and we call this first cause god.”



Let’s say for instance that I accept whatever argument you use. For simplicity, I’ll just use the first-cause argument, but I think this could be applied to the majority of the arguments most commonly used to “prove” the existence of god.



Say I accept your argument. Say I concede all your points, premises and conclusions up to the point where you say, “therefore, god exists” or “and we call this thing god”. How do you then jump from a first cause to a specific god? I mean, why don’t we ever use the first cause argument to argue for the existence of a giant world turtle, or the titans? How do we them move from a creator to a specific creator? This was the point behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If we accept a creator, how does one distinguish one creator from another? Do you really think a giant world turtle is as plausible as a flying spaghetti monster or aliens or the world was made from the ejaculate of titans? See, I do find them all equally plausible and that is why I dismiss them all.



Why call it god? If it is a first cause, and that is all it is, why not call it Original Cause? Why use the word god at all? Sometimes I hear people say that they think nature is god, or god is nature. Why call nature god? We have a word for nature; it’s “nature”. There is a perfectly good for “energy” or the “universe” or “everything”. Why attach the extra baggage of the word “god”? Just say you believe in nature. Guess what? I think nature exists, too!!



The problem is that these arguments assume a specific definition of god, and that no other definition exists. Add a definition of god, and the argument falls apart. The believer forgets that there have been countless gods and goddesses and deities of all sorts that have been worshiped and feared by humans in history. Why should your god be considered any more likely to exist than any other god?



Now of course, I think the first cause argument fails miserably. What caused god? I think the ontological argument is nothing more than a word game. But even if I found them convincing, they still fail.