50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (6 page)

McCrone, Walter C. Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1999. Everything that shroud-believers need to
know is in this book.

o you ever feel small and insignificant? There is not necessarily anything wrong with having those feelings occasionally. It can be a natural reaction to living on a big world in a very big
universe. Being just one of billions of other people might also make it
a challenge to feel special. The current global population is nearly
seven billion. Over the last fifty thousand years or so, more than a hundred billion humans have lived. That's a lot of people. It's no surprise
that some of us might feel lost in the crowd.

It gets worse. Consider the fact that you are not even "you," at
least not as much as you probably think you are. Every human body,
including yours, is actually a complex ecosystem made up of about ten
trillion human cells (you) and also more than one hundred trillion
microbes (not you). Weird as it seems, if you could conduct a census
of the space your body occupies, you would find that what you think
of as all you is actually mostly other lifeforms such as tiny arthropods,
bacteria, viruses, and fungi. You are a minority in your own skin. But
you are not only outnumbered, you are also tiny-very tiny.

How small are we? Most humans today weigh less than two hundred pounds and are less than six feet tall. Compare that to our planet's
mass, which is estimated at an intimidating 6,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000 kilograms. The Milky Way galaxy, our immediate neigh borhood, is one hundred twenty thousand light years wide. (A light
year is the distance it takes light to travel in one year, or about
5,879,000,000,000 miles.) Our galaxy contains more than a hundred
billion stars. Our universe probably contains more than one hundred
billion galaxies. It's anyone's guess as to how many planets there are.

So much is going on out there without us that it can seem as if we
are invisible, even nonexistent. There are beautiful clouds of dust and
gas called nebulae that are much larger than our entire solar system.
Stars are born. Stars die. Sometimes an entire galaxy smashes into
another galaxy. And this is just in the "observable universe." Some
cosmologists think there may even be many more universes besides
ours. Feeling tiny?

Size and numbers are not the only potential sources of human
insecurity. By the measure of time we don't add up to much either. The
universe is so old (fifteen billion years, give or take a few billion) that
we might think of ourselves as mayflies, enjoying nothing more than
a brief afternoon in the sun. A long life for an individual human today
is about eighty years. That's a fairly small slice of time on a planet that
is four and a half billion years old. It has been at least seven thousand
years since we made the transition from the Stone Age to civilization.
So many lives have come and gone in that period. Imagine all the dramatic events of those seven thousand years that we missed. Imagine
all the interesting and beautiful people who died before our time.

Wouldn't it be nice if something or somebody, maybe a god, could
make us feel important, relevant, and large? Maybe the god could even
allow us to live forever. It sounds appealing. For some, the desire to
feel important is sufficient motivation for them to seek out the comforting arms of a god, even if that god has never been shown to exist.
But hope and desire should not be confused with certain knowledge
about something. Many believers in many different societies say that
believing in a god or gods makes them feel significant in a vast and
intimidating universe. But this benefit from believing is not necessarily evidence for the existence of gods. It can easily be the believing
alone, not a real god, that provides the reassurance.

Many belief systems make a big deal about this issue of the significance of the individual. Religious leaders are well aware that people
often feel overwhelmed and lost in the herd of humanity so they are
quick to offer a solution. Many Christian preachers, for example, talk
about the "Book of Life" in which a god has written down the names
of believers. Christians have told me that their god knew my name,
even before I was born. Obviously this is a story that could make me
feel special. But although having your name in a god's "Book of Life"
may sound great, someone first should provide an explanation as to
how we can know that such a book exists. Where is it? If it's up in a
place called heaven that we cannot see, then how does anyone down
here know about it? If the only source of information about this magical book is found in ancient writings by anonymous authors, then how
can we believe with any confidence? Yes, the Book of Life, like the
gods themselves, may help believers feel special but this does not
mean they necessarily exist.

I can understand when believers say they feel good about a god
who knows them and cares about them. I can imagine how such a
belief might allow some to cope with life a little better. But there is
another way. Everyone does not have to believe in Allah, Yahweh,
Jesus, Ganesha, Vishnu, or other gods to feel significant. We can be
happy, feel important, and lead meaningful lives without gods. Hundreds of millions of nonbelievers around the world manage to do it
every day. One does not necessarily have to look any further than
family, friends, and the joy from being productive or creative to find
satisfaction and purpose in life. These real things can be so wonderful,
in fact, that I wonder why anyone would ever want to take time away
from them in order to worship a god who has not yet been proven to
even exist. Believers might consider the possibility that every minute
spent thinking about and talking to gods up in the sky is a minute
wasted down here.

Believing in an unproven god may offer some level of comfort but
it certainly is not the only way to feel a connection to something
bigger than yourself. Besides, it is not really so hard to confront the intimidating reality of our place in the universe. It is possible to meet
it head on by embracing the power and mystery of it all rather than
shrinking from it. For example, when I was writing the opening paragraphs of this chapter, describing a universe that is billions of years
old and billions of light years wide, I didn't feel overshadowed, overwhelmed, or intimidated. I felt excited and inspired. I love living in a
universe that is outrageously big; anything less would feel claustrophobic. One does not have to be left feeling cold, hollow, or depressed
by the realities of time and nature. Don't bow down and cower in the
immense shadow of this universe. Stand up and claim your place in it.
Be the opposite of those who glance up at the night sky and feel small.
Look up and be a giant because you are a part of it all. Furthermore,
you are special because, as a thinking and creative lifeform, you are
one of the most fortunate collections of atoms in all the universe.

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 2002.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse, and Donald Goldsmith. Origins: Fourteen Billion
Years of Cosmic Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.

-Mark Schnitzius

ome believers charge that atheism is just another religion.
Atheism requires faith like any traditional religion, they say. "It
takes more faith not to believe in a god than to believe," is a common
quip these days. Some believers even claim that atheists worship
humans and look to science as their religion.

These are strange but surprisingly common claims. I have heard
them many times. Some believers apparently find it difficult to comprehend the existence of people who are not convinced that any gods
are real. The weirdest thing about calling atheism a religion is that
some religious people say it as if it's an insult. I know they don't mean
it that way, but it sounds a lot like, "You atheists are as silly as we are."
That aside, believers need to be aware that declaring atheism to be a
religion does not help the case for the existence of a god. Whatever
atheists may or may not be has no bearing on whether or not gods
exist. Therefore, labeling atheism a religion is no justification for
believing in a god. By the way, no atheist thinks Charles Darwin, Carl
Sagan, or anybody else is a god. If they did, they wouldn't be atheists.
They would be believers.

I suspect that many people who believe in a god are eager to call atheism a religion because thinking of it that way makes it more comfortable for them to deal with. Then it becomes just another rival belief
system, easily dismissed as a mistake and ignored like all the rest. But
atheism is more challenging when it is seen by the believer for what it
really is: the absence of belief in gods. Atheism is not a religion,
organization, club, philosophy, lifestyle, tribe, race, ethnicity, or team.
Atheism is the absence of a belief in a god. That's it. It doesn't even
necessarily mean that one is certain that no gods exist. It just means
she or he does not believe in gods.

Some believers tell me that atheists think they are smarter and
better people than believers. Unfortunately, some atheists probably do
think that. But the assumption that nonbelievers are superior to
believers is simply wrong. Yes, less religious societies tend to be more
law-abiding and peaceful than more religious societies (Canada vs.
United States; France vs. Pakistan; Sweden vs. Nigeria, for example).
And yes, there are studies that show a decline in religious belief as
educational levels go up. But any random individual atheist is not necessarily morally or intellectually superior to any random individual
believer. I do understand, however, why some atheists might feel a
twinge of superiority when they see images in the news of bloodsoaked Shia Muslims flailing themselves with chains and cutting
themselves with knives while chanting and parading; Hindus stabbing
swordfish bills and other objects through their cheeks during a religious fesitival; and Christians allowing nails to be hammered into
their bodies in gruesome crucifixion reenactments. But an atheist
would be wrong to ever assume blanket superiority based only on the
absence of belief. Intelligence and morality at the individual level
can't be predicted based only on the presence or absence of belief.
There is too much variation to generalize. Belief is just one ingredient
in the complex recipe that makes up an individual's life.

When believers charge that atheism is "just another religion" I
question them about what they think a religion is. In fairness, it's not
an easy thing to define. Anthropologists are aware of so many beliefs
and rituals in so many cultures that they know better than to make a narrow definition of religion because inevitably it would have too
many exceptions. So they end up defining religion very loosely. Usually anthropologists say something like religions are behaviors and
ideas that are an important part of a culture. With a weak definition
like that maybe the believers are right. Maybe atheism really is just
another religion. But the astronomy club and the chess team could be
religions too, by that standard. Few nonanthropologists have any idea
just how many varieties of religious belief there are today, much less
in the past. It is staggering how productive we are when it comes to
gods and religions. Humans have created millions of religions and
confidently claimed that countless gods exist; so many that we can't
even define religion very well because every definition threatens to
leave somebody out.

So, is atheism a religion? No, it is not, at least not by the definition that people use outside of anthropology conferences. For most
people religion includes belief in a god and atheism is, by definition,
godless. Atheism is the absence of belief in gods. Most atheists don't
seem eager to be united into an organization based on their absence of
belief. I suspect that for many atheists, nonbelief is just not an overriding concern in their lives. Perhaps they have more important things
to do than sit around discussing the unlikely existence of Thor and
Odin. For example, I would probably list twenty or thirty personal
attributes before I got down to atheism. I may care about how religious
belief impacts the world and I may write about it, but I don't feel a
need to dwell on being an atheist every day. It's just not that big of a
deal. I'm far more interested in being a father, husband, friend, and
writer than I am in being an atheist. There is a lot more to do in life
than obsess over what you don't believe in.