Leap

In a fit of curiosity, I visited AllAboutGod.com and eventually made my way to a page that hoped to answer the question, "Does God Exist, Scientifically?'

After going on about how "creation" proves a "creator", and other drivel echoed in the style of "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists" by Ray Comfort, the author made the following statement:

"Based on what we know today, I truly believe that atheism (not believing in any kind of god) is a much bigger 'leap of faith' than theism (believing that some kind of god exists)."

Well, at least he got the definitions correct.


Know When to Walk Away...
How is it that not believing in something requires "faith"?  Put generally, faith is belief in something without evidence to justifiably do so.  Most atheists hold no god belief because of a suspicious lack of evidence or reason to actively belief.  So how does this mean that said atheists are faithful?

Consider an experiment.  Imagine I shuffle a common deck of unmarked playing cards and draw out four random cards.  I lay them face-down on the table, so that no one--including myself--knows which four cards they are.  If you were to point to a card and say, "I believe that this is the Ace of Hearts", would you be justified?  Of course you would, because belief doesn't require knowledge [remember my bit about the $2 bill?].  That would be fine, if for some reason you needed to believe that.  Most of us would just say "I don't know" when asked what we thought any of the four cards were.  It'd just be guessing to say we knew.

But what if you said you knew.  What if, instead of just believing, you claimed knowledge of a card?  Remember that here, for the sake of this illustration, the cards are not marked in any way, and there's no way anyone could know what the four cards are.  I'd probably call you on it and ask "Really?  How do you know?"

"I have faith!" you'd say.

"So you don't really know then?"

"I just feel it in my heart."

"A feeling isn't proof of anything."

"I think it would take more faith to not belief that card #4 is the Ace of Hearts than to believe it!"

Obviously this sounds silly, but this is the same kind of argument many believers will present when questioned about the existence of their God.


Can't Get Past the Evidence
One way to determine the identity of the four cards would be to look at the cards remaining in the deck. This way we could narrow down, scientifically, our four mystery cards and deduce their values. Suppose we did this and found that there were only two Aces in the remaining pile, neither of which is a Heart.

The odds of the blind believer being right are increased dramatically, but was your faith in it then justified? I say no; the time to believe something is when there is sufficient evidence to do so, and not a moment before.

Suppose you were to somehow travel back in time and tell someone in the year 1383 that "in the future, a person will be able to instantly talk to another person who's on the other side of the Earth!" Should the man hearing your story believe you, even though it's true? Again, I say no. Not only will he think you're a fool for thinking that there are people living on the other side of the flat Earth, he'd have no reason at all to think what you were saying could ever be right. And he'd be justified in doing so.

Getting back to the analogy, the scientific researchers of today are looking through the remaining deck of cards of the universe and are finding that there is no need to claim knowledge in any card, yet some claims can be ruled out by the evidence (such as someone still vehemently claiming that card #2 is the Three of Diamonds, when we've found a Three of Diamonds in the deck).

"Based on what we know today," said the author of the page I was reading. Does he even know what we know today?


Everybody Jump!
So how many leaps of faith does it take to reach the kind of "average" belief in today's America?  Don Baker, of the Atheist Community of Austin, does a wonderful job of laying out the most common leaps in an episode of the Atheist Experience. Don puts it this way: faith is just a guess, and therefore the likelihood of it being correct is very small. When you start making multiple "leaps" or guesses, the likelihood gets multiplied and you end up with a very small possibility of it being true. The more assumptions or leaps of faith you make, the less likely the thing is to be true.

Again, suppose that I wrote something on the face of the four playing cards. You then claim that not do you know what a card's face value is, but that you also know the message written on it, the color of ink used, and the language I wrote it in. Would this not be absurd?

Yet so many people claim to not only know that there exists a "god", but that they also know its likes and dislikes, and many other properties.

"…atheism is a much bigger leap of faith than theism…"

Atheists aren't leaping anywhere. It takes no faith to say, "I don't know yet, so I'm not going to say I do."

-STA