Comment on Open Thread: July 2009

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:26:47 GMT

But I think some people innately do have a belief in God, and for whatever reason, it is connected with their motivation to explore the universe.

I don't think people have innate beliefs in God. I think people are creative, and afraid of the unknown, and when you put the two together, you get a lot of imagination. You might get a God who grants you immortality in paradise, a cycle of rebirth that goes on forever until you achieve enlightenment, or just a sense of being connected to everything in a mysterious way. All of these things are interchangeable. A boy is born in India and grows up to be a Hindu. The same boy, transplanted to Saudi Arabia, grows up to be a Muslim. Again, moved to England, he may turn out to be an Anglican, or a Shintoist in Japan, or a New Ager in California, etc. In each case, he may say that the "hole" is filled by his beliefs, that he has an explanation for everything, a universal theory.

The reality is that this kind of belief is no different from any other. It's no different than preferring cats to dogs, or being afraid of spiders. We aren't born with a reflexive cats > dogs preference in our brain, nor are we born with a God-shaped hole in our heads. The reason the hole looks God-shaped is because we made God to fit. When Laplace was queried by Napoleon about the lack of the "Creator" in his work on the solar system, he replied, "I have had no need of that hypothesis." Is this because Laplace did not have the same motivation to explore the universe as his religious colleagues? No, it is because Laplace had an even stronger desire to explore the universe, and realized that involving God in his exploration was like finding the X on the map and laying bricks over it.

If I don't believe in God -- if I consider it unimportant whether or not the world actually makes sense -- then I lose my interest in it.

It's extremely important to me that the world makes sense, and not believing in God is part of why I think it does. Even a God that lacks volition or interest, a totally impersonal God, injects enough uncertainty into the universe to make it absurd.

I'm interested in learning how true atheists avoid this feeling of nihilism.

We don't. It's called "existential depression", which usually first presents when you realize that Death = Not Being, although it's probably worse if, like me, you grew up believing you'd go to heaven when you died. I don't see how believing in an impersonal, uninterested God of physics could possibly help mitigate the feeling, though. I prefer to just be pragmatic about it; even if I could "live forever", I probably wouldn't escape the heat death of the universe. My instinct is to stay alive and try to enjoy myself, though, so that's what I do. And I take psychedelic drugs.

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