Proselytizers(part 1)

A couple of Christan proselytizers came by my door this morning. I tried to give them fair warning. I told them right form the outset that I was a "militant atheist" but they really wanted to share their message with me and persisted in engaging me. When I was working for the campaign, they told us not to bother with people who strongly identified with a different viewpoint. That is why I said that to them when I saw their Bibles. At the campaign they said that you are not likely to be able to convince someone on their doorstep.

Anyway, it was they who persisted and I decided to go with it because it was a good opportunity for me to practice my arguments and debate technique. I think that they went away frustrated and disturbed. If I didn't think that religion was such threat to human existence, then I think that I would feel sorry for them, disturbing them like that. However, I know how hard it is to work up the effort to go door to door and talk to strangers. Maybe by giving them such an unpleasant experience, they will find it harder to go out and do it next time and the world will be saved, not from their supposed sins, but from irrational uncritical thought inherent in religion.

So the first thing that they asked me was why I consider myself a militant atheist. In their case, it may have come out more like, "why don't you believe". That is a fair question. For me that comes down to a rather philosophical question, the nature of truth and how you test a particular statement to see if it actually true, false, or one of the various flavors of unknown.

Without diving into the deep water of philosophy, there are observations and these constitute the facts that support or refute particular hypotheses. When a hypothesis is consistent with all observed facts then it can be considered to be true until the point when it is found to be inconsistent with a newly discovered fact. This hypothesis can then be called a theory. These theories can then provisionally be used as facts as long as it is understood that they subject to change at some point in the future.

This whole pyramid of reason is grounded on observations. There are a lot of caveats to observation and the resulting perception of the event which can lead to uncertainty. This is philosophical deep water and will probably end up being a blog entry some time in the future. Thus when it is very important to get things fairly close to correct the first time (as is the case with scientific truth) and not have things change too quickly due too poor observations or omitted observations, only a certain kind of observation is considered. The observation has to be made in such a way that it can be independently repeated. Many times this is done through setting up a controlled experiment. Theoretically, the experimental setup is clearly enough defined that someone other than the original observer can repeat the experiment and observe the exact same thing.

That last step is extremely important because it takes a personal experience which is very limited because it is only local to one person's experience and infuses it with a transcendent property. When a particular observation is repeatable, takes it from the realm of a personal experience and makes it something that is universally accessible. It transcends personal experience, and because it is universally accessible it can be considered a universally shared experience. You may not have personally made the observation but because you could theoretically repeat the experiment and have the experience yourself and make the same observation, you can consider it part of your own experience.

All of that above is thumbnail sketch of the philosophical basis for reason and science. It is the foundation of much of our knowledge.

So back to the proselytizers and my answer to their question, "why are you an atheist?" When you finally strip religion (all religion) down to its fundamentals, there is a revealed truth. How do you know that God exists? This fact was revealed to someone. How do you know the will of God? God reveals himself through his Holy Bible. Where did it come from? God inspired some people to write the scriptures down.. At the terminus of all of the questions such as this, is some form of revealed knowledge. I will unquestionably accept the fact the people had a personal experience that led them to believe that God had communicated something to them and they acted upon that. However, the thing about this that causes me to categorically reject revealed truth is the fact that those personal experiences never acquire the transcendence that elevates them from personal experiences to universally accessible experience. The fact that those experiences are unique events that happen only within the perception of an individual means that they can never be repeated. Without the ability to repeat the observation personally, I cannot ever accept that observation or experience as part of my own personal experience. I therefore cannot accept that observation as one of the facts on which I build my beliefs.

That, in a nutshell, why I'm an athiest.