The science of faith

I was chatting with an acquaintance recently, and our conversation wandered into the topic of Evolution. He thinks Evolution is all fake. Naturally his view of Evolution is entirely based on the fact that he has already accepted on faith that the Bible as absolute truth. Once your reality is based on faith, you can believe whatever you want to believe.

But I've found that many religious people are at least willing to attempt to debate on facts, because nobody wants to be seen as being irrational. (Never mind that they retreat deeper into faith if they start to lose the battle of facts.)

This individual wasn't even willing to debate me. The reasons he gave were reasons I've heard before, and reasons I'm hearing more and more lately...enough to think there is a real movement behind this.

The argument goes something like this:

"Look, people have been debating the existence of God and the meaning of life for thousands of years, and nobody has ever come up with a winning answer. How could I be smarter than all of them? I have accepted God on faith, and there is no use in thinking about it or debating it any further. You can show me any reason to doubt God's existence, and I can find someone on the other side who would counter your argument. Debating gets you nowhere. I'm going to focus on living my life and being happy."

Obviously there are holes in every part of his "just believe and be happy" argument. It assumes mankind has collectively learned nothing at all, it assumes that human beings are totally incapable of reasonable judgment, it assumes that happiness is a greater goal than truth, and it is a defeatist attitude in the face of an imaginary challenge of their own creation! It is a complete abandonment of reason. You could justify anything with that kind of logic.

And yet what this presents is a more difficult and vexing form of faith that what I usually encounter. Many people want to believe that their religion is reasonable and logical and can easily stand on the facts. They want to believe that we all live in the same reality and that reasonable people will come to the same conclusions when presented with the same evidence.

But this "believe and be happy" form of faith takes the shape of a conscious decision to see the world as they want to see it, to willfully believe whatever they want to believe, without any concern for seeking any absolute truth. If mankind has proven itself unable to discern what is real and what isn't, then everything must be faith, and we might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride.

It's like something right out of the movie "The Matrix", and yet this is real, and it's happening right now. Hundreds of millions of people are making a conscious choice for the blue pill.



Do I value truth over happiness? Yes...but I don't believe they are mutually exclusive. A life without magical thinking offers the freedom of the mind that is necessary to have an enriched and well examined life. I also don't believe that a blue-pill life leads to happiness. I know plenty of religious people who suffer terribly and are miserable people.

But I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a bubble of blind faith...to be able to believe whatever I want to believe, and be absolutely certain that it was the truth. I would never even be aware that I had traded truth for fantasy. I would never know a red pill even existed.

But once you've seen the real world, it is most difficult to go back. And when I think about that, I wonder how I got "unplugged" in the first place. Why do a few of us escape the bubble of faith that traps so many?

How can the world be so full of religion, and yet I feel so sure that I have reached an awareness that most people have not? I don't consider myself as being any better than the believers. I've met religious people who are brilliant and wonderful people. So it is a puzzle to be an Atheist in a world full of religion. Atheists sensed that something wasn't right, and that there was more to the world that what we were told. We were skeptical and inquisitive, and we wouldn't stop digging until we found some answers. And what we discovered turns out to be vastly different than what most of humanity just accepts on faith because they aren't so inquisitive.

But why are the majority people people not inquisitive?




"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." -- Morpheus






Most people aren't inquisitive because most people have a lot invested in their chosen reality. And that is what makes atheists such an unpopular minority: We deny their reality. We are a much greater threat to their world than any other religion. Having multiple religions in this world only serves to reinforce their reality. The existence of Islam reinforces Christianity, and vice-versa. Worshipers look around the world and only see other worshipers. So they see no need to question their reality. The only question is who picked the right god.

But atheists deny the reality of what these religions have all collectively created. We are the weirdos. We are the glitch in the system that they want fixed. Every religion throughout history has had it's "enforcers" who have attacked and hunted us. We are the one group that everyone can agree to hate. Polls have shown that people would rather elect someone from another religion than an atheist.

In this country, "religious freedom" is interpreted to mean that you can believe in God any way you want...just so long as you still believe...just so long as you remain plugged-in to the system and admit that faith is all there is. I can't count the number of times I've heard religious apologists claim that even Atheism is an act of faith...that we are no different and we play by their rules.

And this brings me back to my blue-pill friend who just doesn't care about science, philosophy, or religion. To him, atheism is just one of many ways to view this reality. But no, he is very wrong. They are all very wrong. Something fundamental has changed, and even many atheists don't realize it. This is not the same philosophical debate that has been raging for thousands of years. This is something brand new. In very recent human history we have seen the enthusiastic and universal application of the scientific method, and this has given us our first true glimpse of the real world.

For the first time in history, we are developing the ability to see the raw data of this reality. It is only in the past 100 years that all of the pieces of biology, geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and psychology have come together into a coherent picture of the real world.

100 years ago, within the lifetime of many people living today, there was no concept of galaxies, no concept of continental drift, no DNA, no general relativity, no protons, no neutrons, no big bang, no understanding of evolutionary mechanisms, and no way to see the "code" that makes up reality. What science has delivered in the past century is nothing less than the physical reality that lies underneath our perceived reality. This is an absolutely brand new challenge to religion and it is the ultimate challenge to the inevitability of faith.

Atheism has teeth now. The Atheistic stance has changed from "Maybe the world could work without supernatural influence" to "Here is actually how the world actually does work without supernatural influence." It is a switch from inductive to deductive arguments based on our new-found ability to observe the physical reality of this world.

Religion is losing it's last foothold in reality and is being forced entirely into the realm of faith, and faith is losing it's legitimacy. In the past, faith was the act of believing in the absence of hard evidence. Today, faith is the act of believing in spite of hard evidence. The doorway to reality is finally open for all of us, and the only way to miss it is to willfully choose to look away. And this, of course, is exactly what most people will do.

If science becomes the tool that unplugs humanity from the false realities of religion, then science will eventually be attacked or be abandoned by large segments of the population. I can only hope it's not a majority of people. But even a rabid minority can cause catastrophes. The theory of Evolution will be the front line and the pivot in this battle. We can gracefully progress to the next stage of human society, or we can willfully close our eyes and slam ourselves back into another Dark Age. A significant percentage of the world's population, including my blue-pill friend, will absolutely prefer the latter.

I would no more push Atheism on someone than I'd want them to push Christianity on me. (And believe me, they do!) You can't force someone to take the red pill. But what I will advocate with utmost conviction is science. As a species, we are strong and we are many, but to survive we must move forward, and to move forward we must learn. We need the collective insight and wisdom to solve our own problems instead of waiting for the man in the sky with the white beard to save us.

It's not that I'm optimistic that science will find easy answers to all the problems that face our planet, but rather science will allow us to see our problems for what they are, and science will give us the best options for dealing with them. Science will give us the red pill we desperately need, and then the rest is up to us!

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