Atheists don't need faith

[EdithSimcox]

Atheists don't need faith

Lots of interesting things here including:

• nearly half of us are non-religious but less than a fifth are atheist...
• atheists need "simply more than can be proved by logic and science"

Any thoughts? A view I've often seen expressed on MN is that logic and science are the end of the subject.

On the "belief in aliens" survey - we know for sure that there is life on Mars, because we put it there.

So anyone who doesn't believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life presumably has either not being paying attention or alternatively believes the space programme is a hoax.

A subgroup I find interesting is the 2% of Anglican Clergy who agreed that they were not sure 'God' is more than a human construct in a recent YouGov poll.

I found myself wanting to know more. Were they having secret momentary doubts when they filled in the survey form or are they 'preaching' that view consistently to others? Is it what people want to hear from a priest? Is it allowed by the C of E?

You might find this (US based) interesting: clergyproject.org

The only thing that remotely resembles 'faith' in my children's upbringing was Santa.

When they were born, they had no concept of Santa.

I brought them up to believe in Santa.

Every Christmas they bore witness to his existence by his turning up every Xmas eve without fail, he never let them down.

I showed them YouTube videos of Santa magically appearing in people's homes (they had caught him visiting on hidden cameras).

He answered their Xmas letters and fulfilled their wishes.

At 10, I told them I'd made it up; I told them he wasn't real.

So - is it rational to believe in Santa?
Did my children have 'faith'?
Did they need to suspend a certain amount of belief and fact for him to remain 'real'?

Religion, to me, is like Santa.
It's a lovely idea but ultimately a load of made up stories.

Thanks for the link contortionist. It must be the loneliest feeling in the world to be a member of the clergy and discover you don't have faith any longer.

"What intrigues me is that more atheists believe in aliens than do religious folk. (55% of atheists versus, for example, 32% of Christians) Do atheists need their own thing to be credulous about?"

Not at all. That is probably because atheists don't see anything special about Earth & humans - just a planet where life has evolved on its own.

If I were asked the question "Do you think intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist?", I would have to say it appears quite possible, given the vast numbers of G-type stars (like our Sun) and habitable planets (like Earth) orbiting them. And that's just the probability of life that resembles ours. Intelligent life can be so different than ours that we might not recognise it when we see it.

As Carl Sagan said, if aliens exist, they could resemble us far less than cabbage, since cabbage has at least evolved on this planet

"we know for sure that there is life on Mars, because we put it there"

I don't think the question "Do you believe in aliens?" is about microscopic organisms we have unintentionally sent on interplanetary probes.

if atheists said that they believed in little green aliens with red finger polish who would never eat parsnips with their roasts, then they could be accused of having faith. That's how well most religious people claim to know god.

Cote - the survey question was: "Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life?" (From outcrowd's link).

Of course it was then reported as if everyone answering "yes" believed in intelligent aliens whizzing around in flying saucers, but that's definitely not what was asked.

I'd be interested to see what the aim of the survey was, how it was asked and what the preceding questions were. You can design surveys relatively easily essentially to get the answers you want, both by using leading questions and by pursuing particular lines of questions leading in particular directions.

I don't 'believe' in aliens, but I also think it's unlikely that the Earth is the only place that life has ever evolved. I expect that at some point in the future humankind probably will encounter extraterrestrial life. Whether that life will in any way resemble anything on earth is another matter.

I don't 'believe' in aliens, but I also think it's unlikely that the Earth is the only place that life has ever evolved.

Yes, that's my position too Nooka.

Frivolous Surveys Alert!

From a National Geographic Survey and Harris Poll:

77% of Americans believe there are signs aliens have visited Earth
versus 68% believe Jesus is God or the Son of God.

Perhaps the former are talking about the panspermia theory … or perhaps not!

From OnePoll data collected in the UK, a ‘hierarchy of beliefs’ was obtained:

(This was an online poll and the sample population may have been skewed in favour of the credulous, but nevertheless it’s interesting to see the order, I think.)

	Ghosts (55 per cent)
	Aliens (51 per cent)
	UFOs (42 per cent)
	Angels (27 per cent)
        God (25 per cent)

It appears to suggest that some atheists/agnostics are not necessarily thinking rationally in other areas.

Again, yes, the alien result does not distinguish between those who think they were abducted by aliens last Tuesday and probed in their spaceship and those who have pondered the Drake Equation and followed the news about exoplanets – so apologies for that.

Caveat: Obviously a lot of this data was collected for publicity generating purposes so not supposed to be taken too seriously.

End of Frivolous Surveys Alert

Yes, it does sound like the question was not specific enough & would get "Yes" answers from people thinking of bacteria on rockets from Earth as well as little green men.

In my list of "things that might happen' finding extraterrestrial life is much higher up than finding out that there actually is a God......

And if our universe, planet, and species were indeed created / designed, I would think it more likely that it is all the experiment of an advanced species, than that there is a benevolent, omnipotent & omniscient deity who expects obedience, love, and devotion, who impregnated a peasant girl with himself and got himself to be tortured on the cross for the wrongdoings of its creatures.

There are certain aspects of the physical universe that do make me wonder about some sort of creator, although not the anthropomorphised personal God of religion.

My conception of a creator would draw inspiration from John Conway and his Game of Life computer program. So the creator would introduce the starting conditions and the rules/laws of propagation and thereafter take a benign interest in proceedings but not be constantly tweaking in response to prayer.

The creator would also be curious to see the various forms human beings gave him in an attempt to understand their world. He’d be interested to find himself conceived of as a sun god and interested to find himself being associated with a man on a cross. He wouldn’t get angry at the attempts of humans to make sense of their experiences however wildly inaccurate. There’d be no raging at those worshipping the wrong god, indeed no desire to be worshipped at all and quite possibly no afterlife.

Okay, so this is all rather fanciful, but I offer it up as an alternative to the God of scripture.

"There are certain aspects of the physical universe that do make me wonder about some sort of creator"
Like what?

Well, any sufficiently advanced civilisation would presumably be interested in seeing what happens if they create life and leave it to develop & evolve.

It would make sense to keep life spans short, so they quickly grow old and die, to make space for the new generation. It would be interesting to see how these organisms & their civilisation change over a hundred generations, a thousand generations, 10,000 generations, etc.

"There are certain aspects of the physical universe that do make me wonder about some sort of creator"

I am not unsympathetic to this view, just not sure what it buys you.

the problem is that most religious people aren't restricted to this rather minimalist view of god.

"There are certain aspects of the physical universe that do make me wonder about some sort of creator"
Like what?

Bert, I'm thinking in particular about the universal physical constants of nature being, apparently, fine-tuned. Some cosmologists suggest a vast ensemble of mainly 'barren' universes with physical constants set at random in order to explain the fortuitous existence of ours.

"universal physical constants of nature being, apparently, fine-tuned"

Do you mean constants like Pi, e, and C?

"mainly 'barren' universes with physical constants set at random in order to explain the fortuitous existence of ours."

Or maybe we are the life forms that have evolved in this universe, and other life forms would have evolved in another universe with different conditions.

Link to the Wiki article about the fine-tuned universe concept

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe

I would say pi is a mathematical constant, so would pop up with the same value in another universe. Is e Euler's constant or the charge on an electron?
If the former, I'd say that it would also have the same value in another universe for the same reason as pi. If e is the charge on the electron, I think that could be different - I mean there could be different fundamental particles entirely in another universe.

I think the point is that there are lots of ways for a universe to get it 'wrong' - so no chance of stars, galaxies and chemical elements forming - and therefore no chance of life at least as we know it - if the physical constants are selected at random and have the 'wrong' values. And there is a much narrower range of ways in which a universe can get it 'right' from the point of view of creating conditions in which life can develop.

I am a Douglas Adams Puddleer.

Me too, Bert. I certainly don't want to be too anthropocentric about reality.
We're not an endpoint or a goal - we've evolved to fit our surroundings not vice versa.

It's just that cosmological models suggest that a universe stable enough to allow observers/life forms to evolve in it seems unlikely compared to short-lived unstable universes with no complex forms, not even elements, in them - yet here we are!

"cosmological models suggest that a universe stable enough to allow observers/life forms to evolve in it seems unlikely compared to short-lived unstable universes with no complex forms, not even elements, in them - yet here we are!"

How many "short-lived unstable universes" has anyone ever observed? [puzzled]

You can't talk about probability for dice that have only been rolled once. You have no way of knowing other possible outcomes and what their probabilities would be.

All I am saying is that if you allow the physical constants to be assigned a range of random values and plug those into cosmological models, most of the resultant model universes would not be stable enough for life to develop in them.

That's where the apparent fine-tuning comes in. Only a narrow range of values for the physical constants will result in the 'right' sort of universes. It's as if the values have been 'chosen' in our universe. And if not 'chosen', some cosmologists suggest there could be a multiverse of possible universes with different values of the physical constants in each. Only a few of those universes would be able to support life.

People argue over whether these sort of concepts are actually in the realm of science though, because it would be impossible to observe the other universes.