The God Series, Part III -- Belief & False Beliefs

This is a multi-part series about God, religion, and politics. The previous parts of the series can be found here.

Part I says that we need to understand religion because, after a brief, semi-retirement of a few hundred years, religion has returned as the number one cause of violence, war and death.

Part II says that in order to understand religion we have to explore the idea of God.
We want to move forward. There are three places to start from.
1. We can't know - Agnosticism
2. That God exists - Belief.
3. God does not exist - Atheism

Agnosticism say either that we can't know or that we need more data. We can't move forward from there. Most belief systems say that we know God through revelation. But we have competing revelations and no way to sort them out. So there's no way forward from there. Atheism implicitly says that God is man's invention. That means that we have to study human nature and see why a false belief could have such a powerful hold on so very many people. That's something we can do.

Paradoxically, the most promising hypothesis from which we can increase our understanding of God, is that God does not exist.

Part III - Belief & False Beliefs

Belief

When we hear or use the words "belief" and "believe," we tend to jump to the top of the chain of complexity. The home of grand cathedrals, ornate mosques, colorful rituals and long, sacred texts.
However, belief, as a psychological mechanism, is much simpler.

We need to make decisions in order to act.

To make decisions, we seek information. Food/not food. Safe/dangerous. Easy/hard. Friend/foe. Pretty drapes that go with our color scheme/ugly ones that don't.

We never know 100% about anything. There's always an information gap between ourselves and certainty. When we get into a car, we don't "know" that a tire won't blow, that a speeding garbage truck won't sideswipe us, that the bridge across the river won't fail. But we can't afford the time and energy and effort that it would take to get all that knowledge. If, in reality, it is all getable. Yet we still need to get to the elementary school to pick up our children. To the office, to the grocery. To the water hole where the game might be.

We have a psychological mechanism that bridges the gap between the knowledge we don't have and the need to feel certain enough to act: belief.
You believe the car will work. And that your driving ability is sufficient to cope with the trials and tribulations that stand between you and Nancy Reagan Elementary School, where - you believe - your seven year old will soon be ready for pick-up.

We "believe" in thousands, millions, of things, every day. Belief is a standard, normal, useful, and necessary function of our minds.

Belief in Things That are False

The sun rises. The sun sets.

Except, of course, that it doesn't. For most of human history people didn't know it was an illusion.

The earth is flat.

If you sail too far, you'll fall of the edge.

Fairies.
Actual people, grown-ups, educated grown-up who had gone to universities like Oxford and had medical degrees, have believed in fairies. In 1917 two girls in England put paper cut-outs of fairies in their garden shrubbery, took photos of them, and people -- led by the famous Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes -- were convinced the fairies were real.

Color.
I'm on my brown deck, looking over the blue gray patio, to the green trees and yellow apples. There's a red iPod and a multi-colored magazine on the table.
It seems self-evident that there is color in the world.

But there isn't. There are electro-magnetic waves of different lengths that bounce off of, or are absorbed by, different materials. Through evolution, animal and human minds acquired a way of "seeing" that happen, and, a great way to sort it out. Instead of "seeing" a multitude of minute wavy lines, we translate it into an analog code - colors.

It's the original of Homeland Security alerts.

Inertia.

It seems pretty obvious that things slow down and come to a stop -- your car, the ball you hit, yourself -- unless something keeps pushing or pulling. That's what almost everyone thought from whenever thinking first started, until Galileo came along. He said it was the opposite. Left to themselves, things will keep going unless something stops them.

Newton codified the concept as his first law of motion: "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it."

Magic:

In April 1819, the British Colony on the Cape, Grahamstown, was menaced by a large Xhosan army. The Xhosan prophet, Nxele, had promised the Xhosan king, the Ndlambe, the ability to turn white men's bullets to water. Due to the mystic's promise, the Xhosan army was ordered into harm's way and engaged the British colonial army in a rare pitched battle. Believing in the powerful magic of Nxele, they advanced in massed columns against their enemy. The British, lined-up in formation, opened a withering fire with their muskets and artillery and decimated the Xhosan ranks, led personally by Nxele.

Richard Petraitis, Bullets into Water: The Sorcerers of Africa, REALL Newsletter v.6

Belief in magic is a human universal.

Fortune-tellers, entrail readers, and omen consultants have been advisors to generals and kings.

At other times they have been condemned.

The Code of Ur-Nammu (ca. 2100 BC) is the oldest set of laws that we actually have a copy of. One of them is: If a man is accused of sorcery he must undergo ordeal by water; if he is proven innocent, his accuser must pay 3 shekels.
In 1401 a British Act of Parliament made the penalty for witchcraft and divination to be burnt at the stake.

With the advent of science, supernatural claims were put to the test. It became obvious fairly quickly that nobody was able to demonstrate an act of actual magic, psychic ability (without "natural" information or fraud), or to forecast the future (better than at random or through natural reason). In 1735 the British passed a new witchcraft law. This time it treated the people who claimed to have such powers as con artists and reduced the penalty accordingly.

People still read their horoscopes, go to psychics, and consult palmists. Many believe quite fervently. Nonetheless, if someone gets money out of someone else based on a promise of psychic or magic abilities, it is treated in law as fraud.

Belief, in and of itself, is a normal and necessary mental function. It's utilitarian, functional, and usually quite mundane.

False beliefs are frequent, common, and widespread. Often, they're even universal.

Belief in God

Belief in God -- working with the hypothesis that it's a false belief -- seems significantly different than the examples above.

Religious beliefs are sometimes described as magical thinking.

But magic is case specific. A magic action has - one thinks or expects or hopes - one magic effect. Which can be countered, by counter magic. It can also, as in the case of the Xhosa, be shown not to work. Belief in prayer, or in a specific prayer, can be considered magical thinking, but not religious faith itself.

God is all there, all the time. He working everything, whether He's invoked or not. He cannot be countered and He cannot fail.

Belief in God is a vastly more important belief. It affects a wider and deeper range of choices and of behavior.

It goes to identity. Whereas magic operates outside of and against identity. It goes to a person's worldview. Whereas magic is an aberration, a violation, that breaks with the rest of the natural world.

Many people think that belief in God is based on evidence.

They've seen and heard Him. Or felt His presence. If not personally, then they know of many others who have had such experiences.

There's far better and far more frequent "evidence" that the sun is traveling around us.

We see it happen daily.

Yet almost everyone in the world is willing to accept that what we see is based on an illusion. Even that the illusion is caused by something that we cannot perceive. That the earth that feels so solid and still beneath our feet - another illusion - is actually spinning around.

More often, the case for God is based on inference.

"Oh look, what an amazing, an amazing wonderful world. And see how it all fits together, more intricately than a Swiss watch, but a million, million times more complicated, it must have taken one heck of a Great Watchmaker! There's no other way to account for it!"

This is, in fact, a very normal thing to do.

We have lots and lots of theories that involve things we can't "see," that create a whole story to explain the effects that we do see.
Evolution is one.

We have theories that claim the existence of things we don't understand.
From Newton, right up to the present, nobody knows what gravity actually is.
There are theories about things that are a lot stranger than God, who is, after all, a lot like a human -- with the same sort of values, standards, practices, consciousness -- just bigger and better.

People commonly say that God moves in mysterious ways, but not nearly as mysteriously as things move according to Quantum Theory.

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it possibly be like that?' because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

Nobody knows how it can be like that.

-Richard Feynman

"The more success the quantum theory has the sillier it looks." -Albert Einstein

"Any one who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not fully understood it." -Niels Bohr

So how do we sort out weird theories - including those about invisible things, those with big, gaping holes, and those that involve strange, inexplicable ideas - and pick the ones that we accept, and reject others?

We play a game called "If ... Then ..."

We take whatever observations we have. Then we make up a story that "explains" it. Once we have a story, we say, "if this story is true, then things should happen in a certain way."

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.

-Michio Kaku

What Kaku means by that is, if you plug in quantum equations, then make a prediction, it works.

If you imagine a mystery force called gravity -- without being able to describe what it is or how it works -- you can plug in Newton's equations and then discover that it works every time.

The same is true with evolution. Whatever the gaps, however incredible it seems, if you proceed on the assumption that it's real, then everything else in biology works with it.

The opposite is true with theories of God.

If God tells the truth and there's nothing wrong with the chain of evidence, then there should be no contradictions within sacred texts. But there are.

If God made the world in seven days, from the rock itself to humans, then the geological, fossil and historical records should reflect that.

If God created a flood that covered the whole world, then there should be physical evidence that reflects that.

If the sun stood still in the sky, then it must be moving around the earth.
This could go on for pages. And it's true of other sacred texts as well.

The point of all this is that we will drop perfectly obvious, common sense ideas (the sun goes around the earth) in favor of truly weird ideas (the earth beneath us is spinning), when there are things they don't account for (fails some if ... then ... tests) and the new idea satisfies the if ... then ... tests, but that we don't do it with religious ideas.

If we are going to work on the assumption that God is a false belief, we still have to acknowledge that it has a special status in the world of false beliefs. It is not only broader and more profound, it is stronger and has a special hold on people.

Any theory of why we believe has to account for those qualities.

This is part of a series on God, Religion, Faith and such. The next one, IV, will propose a theory of Why We Believe in God. Others will be about morality: monotheism vs. polytheism; when and why God is successful; evolution, economics, and our minds.

Larry Beinhart's most recent book is Salvation Boulevard. It's about religion. He is also the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin.

Responses can be sent to [e-mail].

Comments

[stevesrant]

God is the name given to the source of our selves by those who have never experieced this source, or by those who have, but had not fully understood what it was they experienced. Those who have experienced this source want more than anything to share it; they call it god and try to explain it, or they realize it cannot be shared and is beyond talking about.
The only faith worth having is that there is more to us than our thinking mind yet knows - the very source of our thinking mind - and that it is possible to experience this source because we are all still connected to it. Without this faith one would never seek and probably never find this hidden connecting link. Man/woman, know thyself. It's an awesome thing, but it's no thing at all.

[dctackett]

I'm wondering, how do you know that there have been people who have "experienced this source"?

[wondering]

Near the end of your article you conclude : "If we are going to work on the assumption that God is a false belief, we still have to acknowledge that it has a special status in the world of false beliefs. It is not only broader and more profound, it is stronger and has a special hold on people."

Let us consider the words, "broader and more profound" : First, in what way is the belief in god broader and more profound than the belief in Big Foot, ghosts, aliens (and their probes), or Santa Claus? For that matter, what does "broader and more profound" even mean? They seem like loaded terms that only have meaning to True Believers. Which brings me to my second point - by assuming that belief in god is "broader and more profound", are you not destroying the premise of your previous article that we should start from a position of atheism? No atheist I know thinks that belief in god is "broader or more profound" than any other delusion.

[wondering]

Continuing with your conclusion that belief in god is somehow special ...

Let us consider the phrase, "it is stronger and has a special hold on people." You seem to be making the Proof by Numbers argument - i.e., because so many people believe in god, she MUST exist! But millions of human beings also firmly believe that a fat man in a red suit enters their homes every Dec 25 and leaves presents behind. Does that mean that the belief in Santa is special because "it is stronger and has a special hold on people?" (Granted, most Santa-believers are under the age of 10 - but at least these children have the empirical evidence of presents to support them.)

Millions of people hold racist views, believe in the second-class status of women, or oppose gay marriage. Does the strength of their convictions, or the number who share those beliefs, make any of these beliefs valid or special? Of course not. (Interesting, isn't it, that so many people who hold one or more of these discriminatory beliefs try to legitimize their position with an appeal to god - e.g., gay marriage is against the will of god.)

No, we do NOT have to acknowledge the special status of god-belief - not even a little. I am afraid that by writing that paragraph, you reveal yourself to NOT be starting from a position of atheism at all.

[stevesrant]

Hi wondering - I don't think it was Larry's intention to validate or sanctify ;-) the god belief. I think he was simply pointing out (in keeping with the intention of this series) the hold it has over humanity. Not millions but billions of people adhere to this blind faith (in different forms.) I can think of no other concept (only tangible things like land and food and wealth) that so many people are willing to slaughter and die for, and have slaughtered and died for through history. Not even santa claus or democracy. For this reason, we must acknowledge the unique status of this mass psychosis and attempt to understand where it comes from. Writing it off as simple superstition or ruling class controller or anthropomorphism simply doesn't explain the staying power it seems to have in the face of not satisfying the if...then test. My own view is stated above: I agree the god belief is delusional, but has its roots in a deep, though uncommon, experience of self awareness. This experience almost always (inexplicably) engenders a feeling of sacradness. A Theodore Sturgeon character (in the book More Than Human) put it this way: "He felt a rising, choking sense of worship, and recognized it for what it always has been for mankind - self-respe­ct."

[HeevenSteven]

It seems the majority of humans don't "think" with their left brains or their thinking and conclusions aren't dominated by that mode of thinking. You're different, it seems, and that's why you're the Batman.

I don't remember if I discussed this before, but that feeling of connectedness that people experience, that one with everything thing comes from the right brain, and some people naturally can supress the left side chatter (or don't have any left brain, lol), or can learn to do it with meditation.

There's a book, "My Stroke of Insight", by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who experienced a stroke in the left side of her brain. She was aware of what was happening and observed the left side cognitive functions shutting down and feeling that oneness. Watch her TED conference presentation. She sounds to me like she's describing a religious experience.

I haven't read her book yet, this presentation is all I know about it.

www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

[dctackett]

The only thing broader and more profound about God belief is the multitude of life's experiences for which it is used to explain... it's just a place holder for everything.

[rainbowblue]

Interesting article. I have issues with it, some have already been raised (expectation vs. faith), others aren't that important. One thing I have to say is that you seemed to have channeled Nietzsche quite a bit (specifically, "On Truth and Lie in an Exta-Moral Sense"). If at the end of this series you end up with the same (or very similiar) conclusion will you be citing your sources?

[Dave24]

Might I recommend reading Dan Dennett's writings on "belief in belief." Pretty damn insightful.

[cayuse]

I recently read and interview with Mr. Knoll a leading geoligist on studying life. It was amazing. I learned the Darwin did not explain how life began or how life stared with a fish and became a BUSH. That Darwin only studied life after there was a Chicken and an Egg. Wow. The he went all and said man will never no how life began or even whether life can or would exist outside of earth. Man would never no what life is. What great honesty.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/knoll.html

Then I went to my great teach to see if this honesty still fit his 4000 year old scenario.

http://iamsubbu.com/Yogananda/30.asp.htm

In the bigger picture of you article my teacher would say Churchianity is not Christianity or the teaching of the Great Master.

[Larry Beinhart - Huffpost Blogger]

As to brainwashing, that may be true as regard the particular faith or religious system one adopts. But does not explain why all societies have such systems (that is, why all people invent them), and why individuals accept them. It's similar to the question of language in which children learn the particular language of their group but does not explain the fact that there are languages and that learning takes place in ways that are remarkably uniform.

[JohnFromCensornati]

"But does not explain why all societies have such systems (that is, why all people invent them), and why individuals accept them."

It does to me. They didn't understand the world, so they invented god. Then, they spread that nonsense across the globe. The brainwashing explains the acceptance.

[JohnFromCensornati]

The mormons and scientologists did not invent their religions in a vacuum. God-worshipping already existed. I seems completely unsurpising to me that new con men will come along from time to time. Relgion is profitable. Give me 10% of your income and I'll give you the meaning of life in return.

[Larry Beinhart - Huffpost Blogger]

Some quick responses:
Non-theism is important. It will be addressed in a subsequent post in the series.
The distinction between expectation and faith is, at best, on a sliding scale.
Although we have expectations (as used in another comment) based on previous experience or knowledge, those expectations are never based on complete knowledge and absolute assurance. I had every expectation that I could return that squash shot the day my acl snapped and I fell to the ground. I went after the ball with complete and utter faith that my body would hold up.
Furthermore, most people who have "faith" also think and feel that they base it on reasonable expectations based on their own or others prior experiences. It is only a very tiny, intellectual minority that consciously claim that their "faith" is not based on any real world experience and then continue to say that their faith defies the evidence of the real world.
If they are two different things - where does "faith" come from? Is it imposed? Was it made up?
Then why is religion a human universal, present in all cultures?
"Faith" must be something, in my view, that plays on some more fundamental mechanism, which is the psychological trick of jumping the gaps. Someone unable to jump such gaps becomes dysfunctional, agoraphobic, or the like.

[HeevenSteven]

If Og and Grog concerned themselves with, or tested their knees while chasing their dinner, or sex partners, they wouldn't have reproduced, and they'd never have a chance of making a squash shot.

Faith used in a cognitive, reflective, what's-it-all-about sense is a whole different brain function from everyday, minute by minute actions one performs while pursuing survival, work, squash, sex etc. There's no sliding scale here; one has nothing to do with the other.

Apparently the brain is a kluge comprised of different engines that can operate often quite independently from one another. I think the "god engine" is a later addition to earlier structures, actually was exapted from functions that serve other purposes.

There's a funny cartoon that I saw reproduced in Daniel C. Dennet's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" that has an evolutionary progression of creatures, beginning with a fish of some sort and ending with a human. All of the creatures are thinking "Eat survive, reproduce". The man is looking up at the sky with his hands in his pockets thinking "What's it all about".

Disclaimer: I'm not a cognitive scientist, just a dumb engineer.

[Dave24]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN8BHD9sXJ8

[wondering]

Hmmm ... I was the commenter who raised the expectatio­n-vs-faith issue. Two points :

First, you yourself indicated a distinction between types of beliefs when you wrote, "Belief in God -- working with the hypothesis that it's a false belief -- seems significantly different than the examples above." What can that mean other than that expectation and faith are not the same?

Second, if we accept your idea that, "The distinction between expectation and faith is, at best, on a sliding scale" - i.e., that the term belief is sufficient to cover all the examples you cite - then the question becomes, "What is NOT a belief?" But then, maybe that is your goal - as dctackett suggested, perhaps your intent is to say, "All is belief, so believing in god is as valid as believing that your car will start tomorrow." I.e., existence is a dream, and we are all just cosmic dreamers.

Here's the problem with not differentiating between faith and reasonable expectation : By allowing that all cognitions are equivalent beliefs, you open the door to every nutty explanation or idea that anyone has about the real world or the supernatural - ghosts, Big Foot, Chopra's ubermind, dragons. And none may be judged as more valid or worthy of consideration than any other. What a Tower of Babel will ensue.

[wondering]

Where does faith come from? Well ... where does schizophrenia come from? Where does obsessive-­compulsive disorder come from? They are all just malfunctions of our highly complex brain as it tries to make sense of the world. That so many humans share this particular failing is not proof that it is somehow more valid than what we usually call mental illness. Remember, we also all share a useless appendix which has the potential to become infected and burst, killing us.

Here are some more possibilities :

Faith is mental caulking material - it gives temporary answers when we face the unexplained. (This is what you call "jumping the gaps".) But so what? Then anything we have faith in (i.e., god) is just a place-holder.

Or faith is the result of anthropomorphizing the universe - if my crops wither and die, then some malevolent entity must be angry with me and I must appease it through prayer, or with the sacrifice of a goat.

Or faith is a consequence of the human tendency at navel-gazing : "Why ... I am SO important that god MUST exist so that my every thought and act will be recorded by the Holy Bookkeeper!"

Faith is not worth the paper it's written on. Faith in humans certainly doesn't prove the existence of god - that idea is called the Proof by Numbers, i.e., because so many believe, why doggone it, god must be real! But, by that reasoning, Santa must also exist.

[Valerie Tarico - Huffpost Blogger]

Recently I was rating quotes/pro­verbs/poem­s related to "faith" on a non-religious but interactive website called the Wisdom Commons http://www.wisdomcommons.org/virtues/48-faithh). I was struck by how many ways the term is used. I think people like the term "faith" precisely because it is slippery and ill-defined. At one end it means simply hope that our yearnings can be or can become realities. At the other it is a euphemism for dogmatic belief without evidentiary basis. Believers like the term because it turns "dogma" or "belief" into something fuzzier, kinder, and less accountable. Others of us like it because it makes hoping and dreaming somehow larger than life.

[HeevenSteven]

Yes, the same way "agnostic" turns "atheist" into something fuzzier, kinder, less accountable and non-confro­ntational.

[Arithrianos]

i would like to point out that there is at least one more way to think of god, and that is usually called NON-theism, as apposed to A-theism. Non thesim is the idea that is 100% meaningless whether god exists or not, since god is not required to end suffering via the eightfold path, and so is therefore meaningless.

[Valerie Tarico - Huffpost Blogger]

I think of non-theism as simply an absence of theism -- a humanoid god concept.

[Arithrianos]

it is not, Buddha believed the gods "existed", but that they were not important. Atheism is the absence of theism. If an athist and non theist were together and then god showed up and "proved" that "it" was god, the nontheist would not change, but the atheist would if honest.

[Pearlswan]

GOD = Grand Orderly Design

A scientific theory is actually based on facts, not beliefs.
Religion is actually based on beliefs, not facts.

In religion, God is the metaphor whereby we access the mysteries of life. The metaphor opens the door to understanding whereas beliefs keep the door to understanding closed. As your article implies, beliefs are relative truths, not absolute ones. God cannot be named. God exists beyond our mental concepts. Don't mistake the label for the thing itself. If you name it, you kill it.

[wondering]

Where to begin?

You have committed one of the most basic errors in logic - you have failed to adequately define a term that your premise is dependent on : i.e., "belief". You have assumed that everyone understands the term "belief" and moved on. But (evidenced by the way you use that term), you have lumped at least two disparate concepts under that term - expectation and faith.

Expectation is a prediction about future events based on prior experience and a knowledge of how the world works. Your examples regarding cars starting or picking up children from school are examples of expectations.

Faith is the notion that something is true that is unproven or unproveable - i.e., the idea that a thing exists for which no real evidence has been presented. Religion is faith.

I have the expectation that my bus will arrive at my stop at 3:15 tomorrow - because the bus schedule says it will, and because the bus has always arrived at 3:15 before. I do not have faith that my bus will be there.

By lumping expectation and faith under the umbrella term "belief", you have equated going to the grocery store with magic.

There is one other possibility : you are someone who thinks that EVERY cognition is a belief. Fine. But then the word "belief" is equivalent to "thought", and rendered meaningless.

I have many other concerns with your article, but this one struck me first. I would be interested in your response.

[dctackett]

Excellent catch, his description of belief did seem over simplified­...

I'm wondering, though, if it is intentional, maybe the distinction between expectation and faith for his purpose is irrelevent and he choose to keep it simple and define belief as a notion that something is true without actual direct knowledge of it's truth.

For instance, the bus schedule example, what if you've never taken the bus before and have never even directly seen a real bus. Others tell you about the bus and based on your experiences, these people are honest with you and disconnected people share the same knowledge of the bus. You seen artistic renderings of buses. There is even a bus schedule that tells you about the bus. BUT... you don't actually have direct experience of a bus...

or would that example constitute Faith?...

like religion, you don't have direct experience of god, but plenty of people tell you about god, some say they directly experience god, you see artistic renderings of god, there's even books about god...

I guess I'm being a bit long winded... straight to the point...

Couldn't the word of others and written material constitute, prior experience and a knowledge of how the world works, upon which you can make prediction­s?...

[wondering]

Of course it's possible that a person would reject a distinction between expectation and faith, and lump them together under the term "belief".

But then the question becomes, what is NOT belief? Previously established "truths"? (i.e., things that happened in the past?) But to accept an established idea as true means that you think it will remain the same in the future - which, of course, is an act of "belief".

See, we're back at a situation I described in my previous comment : If every cognition is a belief, then the term "belief" is just interchangeable with "thought", and is rendered effectively meaningless. But even the author of this article recognizes a distinction - he says, "Belief in God -- working with the hypothesis that it's a false belief -- seems significantly different than the examples above." What can that mean other than that expectation and faith are not the same?

Of course before you experience a thing you do not know if it exists. And we often accept the word of others as evidence in liew of our own experiences. But the problem with the existence of god is that ALL we have to go on is the word of others - bibles, word of mouth - and the human need to anthropomorphize what we do not understand. No other proof has ever been offered (the author makes passing mention of the teleological proof, but Voltaire and others debunked that long ago).

[Dave24]

Excellent articles, Mr. Beinhart.

When it comes to the idea called God, I find the transparency of the notion to be overwhelming. God "is" this, God "is" that. Anyone or any scripture that attempts to put words in "God's" metaphorical mouth, or to dictate how individuals should behave, etc., is making it up.

Those responsible for the creation of religious narratives knew nothing of the natural world; so to think they could convey the infinite complexity of the *super*natural (if we were to entertain its existence) is laughable.

God is just an idea, expounded in literary form.

[dctackett]

I especially love it when people say that God is unknowable, yet they know that there is a God, that God is unknowable, God is a male, God made everything, etc., etc., etc...

[Lon]

While I suspect that I agree with the beliefs behind this series, if the point is to provide a solid rational foundation there are things that one needs to be careful about.

The justification above for starting with atheism is not itself a good one. It is true that if one breaks the choices down into atheism, agnosticism, theism one can note that there are many different theist systems which disagree with each other and so where should we start. But if one breaks things down to Christian and non-Christian there are many ways that one can be a non-Christian which disagree with each other.

It seems a much better approach to try to understand religious beliefs by understanding them directly, and then seeing if they resemble other false beliefs. There is no real advantage to starting with the assumption that they are false beliefs. This post seems to advance this idea by drawing out differences between religious beliefs and justified beliefs. But then what was gained by starting with the premise of atheism?

Similarly one has to be careful with the refutations of religion. The contradictory nature of different passages in the bible is a problem for any religion that takes the Bible as a historical doctrine. But not surprisingly, not all religions do, and the religions that don't have their explanations of the significance of those contradictions. So, for example, neither religious jews or catholics seem particularly challenged by those examples.

[dctackett]

You have to start with Atheism, if you start with Theism then there is a God and you're done...

Just as in science, when someone puts forth a hypothesis, you try to prove it wrong... if you started out saying it is true, then you're done.

you can't "test" God... remember everything is happening the way it is because that's the way God wants it... even by lack of evidence, God is hiding himself, so that you come closer to him through faith...

[23000Days]

Early religious indoctrination is the major driving force behind the notion of God.

For the average fearful, uninquisitive mind, belief in a diety is a safe, cost-free enterprise that allows us to hedge our bets about mortality. It is only when the contradictions are overwhelming or hindering that the analytical mind rejects the idea of god.

[JohnFromCensornati]

Most people believe in gods because they are brainwashed from an early age to do so. It's hardly a coincidence that most believe in the same invisible friends that their parents believe in despite the multitude of available invisible friends.