I used to think atheists were smart. Then I visited an atheist social media community.
People were posting all kinds of unbelieverably stupid things in there, like “Why should I have to disprove the existence of your God when you haven’t proven it in the first place?” Do these people really think that something can be proven false only if it has already been proven true? Or do they not know what the word “disprove” means? Or are they just not putting any thought into what they’re saying?
Anyway, here are some things I wish my fellow atheists would stop getting wrong.
Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain
I hate it when people miss the point of a clever idea or joke, and start repeating it all the time devoid of the context or meaning that originally made it actually clever or funny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was a clever idea when someone demanded that Pastafarianism be given equal time in schools, in order to make a point about creationism being taught in schools. It’s not so clever when you’re just using it as an example of something that would be absurd to believe in, or when you’re just using it as a silly name for God, or when you’re just pretending to be religious for no reason.
“The Israelites made up the story of Lot and his daughters to make their enemies look bad.”
I doubt it. The Bible does claim that the Moabites and Ammonites had an incestuous origin, but it also says the Israelites themselves had incestuous origins. Abraham’s wife was his sister, to name just one example of incest in the history of Israel according to the Bible. Were they trying to make themselves look bad too?
“The Bible gets the value of pi wrong.”
Not really. The value implied in the Bible isn’t exactly equal to pi, but neither is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.1 If the circumference of a circle is 30 cubits, then the diameter, calculated using the correct value of pi and rounded to the nearest cubit, is 10 cubits. Which is what the Bible says it was. The numbers the Bible gives for this are a perfectly reasonable approximation.
“Religious beliefs are so obviously absurd, there’s no way anyone actually believes that stuff.”
There are religious people who think the same thing about your views, that there’s no way you can really think there’s no God. You’re both wrong about that. There really are people who don’t think like you.
Actually, I have seen some interesting arguments for thinking that religious people don’t really believe what they think they believe. But if you’re going to make that claim, you’d better have much better reasons for it than that their beliefs sound absurd to you. Plenty of things that sound absurd to some people are honestly believed by a lot of other people. And there are even a lot of things that sound absurd and are actually true.
“The story of Jesus is copied from earlier stories about gods like Horus, who were said to have been born of a virgin under a star in the east, been subject to assassination attempts as babies, fasted for 40 days, had 12 disciples, performed the same miracles, been resurrected after three days, etc.”
If you actually read the stories of those gods from sources written before the New Testament, you will not find most of these alleged parallels. The story of Horus’s birth, for example, is that he was born after his mother had sex with her brother who she had reassembled after he was killed and dismembered by another of her brothers. Doesn’t sound anything like the story of Jesus, does it?
“Hitler was a Christian.”
Maybe, but the evidence is pretty unclear. He did sometimes claim to be a Christian. He also sometimes said he wanted to destroy Christianity. He also denied that he was against Christianity. But maybe that was just because openly opposing Christianity would cost him too many supporters. Or maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he believed in an unusual version of Christianity that he recognized should probably not really count as Christianity. Whatever he was, he does seem clearly to have been against atheism, though.
“Historical dates should be written with the religiously neutral terms BCE and CE, not BC and AD.”
Jesus is the only reason we count years starting from around 2000 years ago. No matter which terms we use for it, we are still using a Christian calendar. So why pretend we’re not? If you’re not going to actually invent a new and improved calendar system with an objectively better starting point and convince everyone to use it, just admit that we are all using a Christian calendar. Dishonestly calling something by a different name doesn’t change what it is.
If we’re not going to insist on renaming the days of the week just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, and renaming the months of the year just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, then we don’t need to change the terms BC and AD just because we don’t believe in the god those are named after. Just use BC and AD. They’re easier to tell apart than BCE and CE.
“Galileo was punished by the anti-science Church for disagreeing with their dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.”
It was probably more because he insulted the Pope. The Church was still wrong to punish Galileo for what he said. No one should ever be punished for what they say. But this was not a science vs religion thing. The Church was open to new scientific discoveries like this, as they had been for centuries. But as of Galileo’s time, there was nothing particularly scientific about rejecting geocentrism.
Based on the evidence available at the time, the heliocentric model wasn’t any more reasonable a conclusion than the geocentric model. The ancient Greeks had not discovered heliocentrism long before; they had decided to believe in heliocentrism for wildly unscientific reasons, and happened to be right.
More recently, Copernicus had also proposed heliocentrism, sort of. But his reasons for preferring heliocentrism weren’t particularly rational either. His model didn’t explain the evidence available at the time any better than geocentrism did, and it was more complex, so Occam’s razor says the Copernican model was not to be preferred.
“If you can’t explain where God came from, God is useless as an explanation for anything else.”
God is a bad explanation, but not because we don’t have an explanation for God. “God did it” is a bad explanation because it doesn’t really explain anything. It’s a bad explanation because it lacks the properties that an explanation should generally have in order to be a good explanation. But having an explanation for the explanation is not one of those requirements.
If every explanation had to have an explanation of its own before it could be valid, all explanations would be useless. Nothing could ever be truly explained, because that would require an infinite number of other things to be explained first.
So expecting every explanation to have an explanation would be completely unreasonable. It’s possible for an explanation to be a good and useful one even if it raises questions that we haven’t answered yet. If you see a house, it’s perfectly reasonable to explain the house’s existence by saying humans built it, even if you have no idea how to explain the existence of humans.2
Having an explanation for everything may be the ideal that science aims for and continually progresses toward, but an explanation isn’t useless just because we haven’t completed the impossible task of explaining the explanation, and the explanation of the explanation, and so on forever.
If someone wants to use God as an explanation, but isn’t open to seeking alternative or further explanations, then that is a problem. And if someone wants to posit a God because intelligent beings require an explanation, but that person doesn’t think God requires an explanation, then that is an inconsistency in that person’s thoughts. But just lacking an explanation for an explanation is not a problem, and does not automatically invalidate the explanation.
“Religion is the root of all evil.”
Not all of it. The fact that religion can cause evil doesn’t mean that nothing else causes evil. Evil surely existed before religion was invented. There have been non-religious people who have done great evil for reasons unrelated to religion, or even sometimes because of overzealous opposition to religion.
God is made in the image of humans. If some people weren’t already (without religion) inclined to do the kinds of evil things that religion promotes, they wouldn’t have invented a God who told people to do those things. And God is not the only possible justification people can give for doing those things.
Not that justifying these evils was the purpose of inventing religions. The evils that religions promote were already widely accepted in ancient times, so there would be no need to invent a religion if you wanted those things to happen. Religion was not invented to enable oppression, nor was oppression invented as a result of religion.
Some views that most atheists would consider to be religiously-motivated evil ideas really have nothing to do with religion. There are atheists who have the exact same views, and make the exact same arguments for them.
I personally find some of the moral views that happen to be popular with atheists to be far more concerning than those of typical modern Christians.3 I think we should spend more time deeply questioning our own moral opinions, not just those of the outgroup.
“Most people believe in God for non-rational reasons.”
A poll asking people why they believe in God found that while most people think that other people believe for entirely non-rational reasons, about half or more of respondents said their reason for believing in God was based on some kind of evidence. I’d say their evidence isn’t very good evidence, but they do at least believe for evidence-based reasons, as opposed to something like faith or comfort or upbringing. I think it’s important not to falsely label people as uninterested in reason. That’s just a lame excuse for not reasoning with them.