Would you be an atheist without science?

MadArchitect

I've been thinking lately about how an interest in, passion for, or advocacy of science seems to be a pretty common motif among atheists. Today the thought occurred to me that, in accordance with Thomas Khun's principle that people rarely reject one paradigm without having another paradigm available to serve as it's replacement, I started to wonder if maybe science wasn't playing that role for a lot of people who grew up religious but later apostacized. I don't say that in order to lend support to that hoary old argument that science is just another form of religion for atheists, but it does seem to me at least plausible that science could facilitate a person's switch to atheism if it provided some way of making up for the sense of order one would lose in giving up a religion they had grown up with. So this question is directed specifically to those atheists who started out in a religious background, and who feel strongly about science. Do you think you would have made the break with religion when you did had you not had science?

Feel free to talk about your answer in more detail if you think you can illuminate the subject that way.

Niall001 · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 6:02 am Post subject:

Yeah, I've wondered about this.

Personally, I think that the strong science advocacy among prominent atheists stems from the same bias that leads researchers to overestimate the importance of the subject they study and the method they use to study it.

The functional assumption made by those operating in the role of scientist is that the universe is a closed system and that it is its own explanation. Fruitful research will push a person to believe that the assumptions that underly the research must be valid. Because science has had such success by adopting these assumptions, certain individuals with a background in science tend to find it particularly frustrating and/or irritating when people speak as though these assumptions are not true, which is what motivates such people to speak out about atheism.

Most atheists I meet in my day to day life, tend to be apathetic toward religion and questions regarding the origins of religion etc. They're less than likely to write books or appear in the media talking about atheism. I'm not sure that science is really important to them at all. I suspect that the relationship between atheism and science may be less close than a reading of New Atheist literature might suggest. Just because prominent atheists are scientists does not mean that science is important to atheists in general.

George Ricker

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 10:45 am Post subject:

Science was not a factor in my realizing there is no god. I was at the end of high school (Catholic boy for 12 years to that point) and did not have even the slightest interest in science that I have now. I just realized one day, after a life of doubt, that there really was no god and that the various gods/religions do not match up for a very good reason: They are all created by man.

After HS, I became MORE interested in science.

Mr. P.

MadArchitect · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 1:58 pm Post subject:

So, Mr. P, would you say the opposite, ie. that, like George, breaking with religion was what led you to a greater interest in science?

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 3:14 pm Post subject:

camsquirrel · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject:

Almost certainly I would have done, but the fact is I didn't. Carl Sagan's Cosmos was a huge influence on me; I think what it did was solidify in my mind what I believed in and, more significantly, what I did NOT believe in. I think he gave me the philosophical underpinnings for the reasons WHY religious answers did not satisfy or convince me, and helped me realise what a wonderful, awesome place the Universe is with or without gods and that gods are not needed to explain it. So I started with Carl Sagan, and moved on from there.

It was after Cosmos that I began to refer to myself as an atheist, so it also emboldened me and gave me that essential self-confidence. I later changed the A to a capital, thus making myself an Atheist.

Dissident Heart · Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 7:56 pm Post subject:

seeker · Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 3:17 pm Post subject:

I broke with religion my first year at a small religious college where I was preparing to become a missionary. Science was not directly involved, although a strong drive to know the "Truth" was. My science education was minimal at the time, and it was not uppermost in my thoughts, although my rudimentary understanding of the scientific method did help me understand the value of critical thinking. I came to look to science as a source for factual truth fairly soon afterwards, but only recently have I begun to see that it can be an inspiration for "spiritual enlightenment" (for want of a better term) as well.

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 3:33 pm Post subject:

Frank 013 · Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 2:47 pm Post subject:

I put that I would have broken from religion either way, but that is not totally accurate for me. I never believed in a god or gods. I was never indoctrinated into any religion so I never had to break away from religion.

I did have a good appreciation for science from an early age, I was lucky enough to have gone to a private school where our classes had the best available materials and I got to experience several disciplines scientific as well as others. Back in those early years (4th through 8th grade) I loved studying dinosaur fossils, geology and literature… subjects (minus geology) that I still enjoy. My parents often took me and my sister to the natural history museums all across the country where we got a much better view of the history of our planet than most kids our age.

To say that I replaced one belief with another would be false and to say I believed science had the same meaning for me that religion has for other people would also be false; unless you mean from a totally informational standpoint, which would be saying that religions were simply stories made up to explain natural phenomena.

I currently believe that science best explains the workings of the world we live in and it jives with my personal experiences. The god assumption never made any sense to me, and still doesn’t.

Later

Meme Wars · Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 8:55 pm Post subject:

Science and Atheism:

Count me in as a lover of science! I do believe this to be a common them among heathens, though some born to atheist parents may not have needed the assistance of science for their point of view.

Even without science, I would have drifted to non-belief for moral reasons. It is astounding to me how indifferent believers are to the statement "what you believe is an accident of where you were born." Not only is this a revealing eye opener, but if there is some kind of god, how immoral this is that those of good fortune to accidentally believe the right thing goes to heaven while the other 66 to 90 percent of this world wind up in hell! There's a hell of a lot of good people in those other lands who believe differently and I find the whole concept morally repugnant and incoherent.

In order to clarify my beliefs after getting out of the Air Force where I was subjected to many belief systems (and none), I spent the next 4 years reading two chapters of the Bible from cover to cover every day. The god commanded genocides, inconsistency in philosophical concepts, conflicting history and testimony left me cold and agnostic toward the whole enterprise. The book only made sense if I see it as a morally evolving civilization rather than a perfect god handing down text for the commoners to read and obey. I realized then that morality was indeed separate from religion, and that both religions and gods could be held to the standards of how they treat people and given a pass or fail grade.

So even without science, I would have eventually turned away from religion from both a philosophical and moral standpoint.

Monty Vonn

LanDroid · Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:11 pm Post subject:

Meme Wars reminded me of my earliest inclinations towards atheism. I was brought up in a somewhat religious household, then my dad got into a bit of fundamentalism. I remember in high school reading the Bible thinking it was the literal word of God. Then I came across a sentence in the New Testament "Women shall remain silent in the church". Un-oh, an error. How can the word of God contain errors? Ironically, reading the Bible was the beginning, not science. However, joining BookTalk and reading Sagan's Demon Haunted World re-ignited my interest in this subject. Cool

Chris OConnor · Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:10 pm Post subject:

Carl Sagan's Cosmos was extremely influential for me too. But just plain thinking was what I think led me towards atheism.

camsquirrel · Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 6:17 am Post subject:


	FORUMS	ABOUT	BOOKS	VIDEOS	TRANSCRIPTS	LINKS	BLOGS	DONATE	CONTACT