Self-Fulfilling Religious Prophecies, and the High Road to Atheism

First, a congratulatory note to George Smoot of UC Berkeley's Physics Department for winning the Nobel Prize. It was a stunning achievement to confirm the way in which the Universe was formed on the basis of such subtle evidence. He has done my alma mater proud.

Meanwhile, back in American Reality, debates continue to rage about whether the Earth is 6,000 years old or somewhat less than the age of the (current?) Universe, about 14 billion. Perhaps just an honest difference of opinion. Or perhaps not. The persistence of irrational thinking in human affairs, even at this "late" date of human civilization, is probably a reliable indicator it's here to stay. Sorry, Sigmund, but your salutary hope that mankind would someday rise above the "illusion" you described in The Future of an Illusion has not yet come to pass, and that "future" you talked about? It's now, and things are as bad as ever. One could argue they're worse than ever, as the apocalyptics cheer on our impending demise brought about, in large part, because apocalyptics think an impending demise is a good thing.

If we're going to follow Hawking's advice and preserve some human DNA on Mars, it might be best to search for a Human Genome 2.0 which could avoid the mischief apparently inherent in Version 1.0. That one was obviously shipped before complete debugging, and we've paid a terrible price for rushing to market.

By the way, think about this idea, which I owe almost completely to a parallel line of thought first penned by Richard Feynman, another eminent physicist who liked thinking about ultimate questions. Feynman thought that religous thinking could be grouped into "believers" and "atheists," and that all interim categories, such as agnostics, could be eliminated. Just like him to go deep and eliminate unnecessary complications. You get there as follows:

Belief in a Supreme Being is a conscious state characterized by faith. If you believe, you believe. You can describe the god so conceived as anything you like, a Consciousness, an anthropomorphic God, or some shadowy, insubstantial presence so ethereal that Freud puckishly said that such backpedaling led to "taking the Lord's name in vain." Very clever, that Sigmund. In New Age parlance, it might be called "Spirit" (on the Oprah Show also). Anyway Someone or Something is up there, out there, around here. You can talk or communicate with it perhaps, through prayer or meditation.

Anyone who doesn't believe, in the positive, conscious sense described above, is an atheist. If, for example, you claim you simply don't know how the Universe was formed or created, or whether there's an ultimate cause, or a spiritual meaning to life, you certainly are not, by such declaration, affirming your "faith." On the other hand, you are admitting that you lack that positive, conscious affirmation in a divinity, etc. Lacking such faith, you are an atheist.

The wiggle room sought by agnostics (a kind of propitiation of the gods, I suspect - ancient habits die hard) is achieved by driving a distinction between "knowing" and "thinking" or perhaps "believing." Agnostics claim they simply don't know if there is a god or Supreme Being, but they don't rule it out. The distinction, for such questions, is specious, because no one can rule it out. Of course you don't know. Similarly, you can't really say you "know" there is no Supreme Being. We have no tools or sensory apparatus available to us in our Universe that allow us to determine singular conditions existing before the Big Bang (outside of our space-time continuum) or what may have occurred in prior Universes, and the possibility always exists, of course, that the real solution to Leibnitz's question, why is there Something instead of Nothing?, lies in data that are simply not accessible to the human sensory apparatus.

So, think it through and see if Feynman, as usual, hasn't simplified the issue profoundly. You're a believer or you're an atheist. You profess faith, as a positive, conscious attitude, or you don't, and if you're in the second category, however you arrive there, you're an atheist, although in the second category, of course and as in all human endeavors, there is a lot of jostling about who is more pious in their godlessness.