To a Jehovah's Witness
Please note:
The title reflects the fact that, at least in the UK, an unexpected doorstep visit from a Jehovah's Witness is one of the most common situations in which people will find their religious beliefs being directly and explicitly challenged; thus the essay nominally takes the form of an address to such a (hypothetical) visitor, but it is also aimed more widely at 'religion vs. atheism' and 'faith vs. science' debates as a whole. Similarly, while I focus largely on Christianity, this is only because Christianity is the most common religion in my country - the arguments are intended to apply equally to other theist religions, and much of it applies to non-theist religions, too. The essay is aimed primarily at religious people who try to convert others to share their beliefs, and at those who actively criticise atheism, although others (whether religious or otherwise) are of course still very welcome to read and comment.
All comments and criticisms are welcome, and I would appreciate any suggestions as to how the argument might be improved. (Of course, I must also ask that all comments be polite. I realise that this is a sensitive subject, but I have tried to maintain a neutral and civil tone throughout, and would appreciate the same courtesy).
To a Jehovah's Witness
You are seeking to convince me that my atheism is mistaken, my reasoning flawed, my conclusions unsound. More than this, you think that my beliefs are bad for me - that I risk eternal damnation - and that it would be in my best interests to change my mind. Please understand that I think the same of you - I consider your beliefs to be not merely false, but bad for you. In my view, you are devoting much of your life to something which does not exist, and in your pursuit of an impossible afterlife, you are failing to make the most of this, your only life. Depending on what form your religion takes, you likely deny yourself pleasant and harmless experiences, you might needlessly deny crucial medical treatments to yourself and your children, you may exhibit or at least tolerate unjustifiable prejudice towards innocent minorities, and you waste your precious, limited time in trying to convince others to share your beliefs, instead of focusing your altruism on anything which could do real, practical good. If you would try to convince me that you are correct in your faith, you should know that I, likewise, would consider it time well spent if I were able to convince you of the opposite.
The reason why I do not believe what you believe is that I have seen no evidence to support your claims. Let us consider the importance of evidence. Many religious people – Christians especially, in my experience, but others, too – have explicit and strongly negative views concerning the value of evidence. Remember the Bible story of Thomas, the doubter, who demanded proof before believing the implausible-sounding claim that Jesus had risen from the dead; the story is taken to convey the clear message that to believe because of evidence is less praiseworthy than to believe without it. As a scientist, I fundamentally disagree with this assertion; in fact, I consider it a complete reversal of good practice and common sense. More importantly, though, I do not think that Christians really believe it either.
Consider this: do you believe in the existence of fairies? Probably not. What if someone told you that they do believe in fairies, and furthermore that they have actually seen them? What would your response be? Would you accept their word and start to believe in fairies, too? Again, presumably not – you would probably believe that they were either lying or delusional – but what if, for the sake of argument, they were actually correct, and they caught a fairy in a box and showed it to you? Might you start to believe then? I suspect your answer might now be 'yes', but why has it changed? The answer, of course, is evidence: before believing a seemingly unlikely and implausible claim, you consider it natural and proper to require proof.
We should remember that anything at all might be true. We must accept that Christians or atheists or Hindus or Muslims or absolutely anyone else might be correct in their beliefs, simply because we cannot prove that they are not. Evidence is the only tool available for us to sort the few things which are true from all those which merely might be, and that means that the burden of proof must always rest with the person making a claim, not with the one refuting it. There is much disagreement about what atheism really is (as opposed to agnosticism, for example), and I certainly do not assert that my definition is the “correct” one, but to be clear, my atheist position may be defined as an absence of assumptions. I cannot assume that God exists, in the same way and for the same reasons that I cannot assume, before opening a door in an unfamiliar house, that the room beyond will have a green carpet. We have no evidence in any direction, so all positive assertions are unjustified – including, incidentally, the positive assertion that God absolutely does not exist.
However, for the purpose of guiding our daily lives, it is common (and more practical) to act as though things do not exist unless we have evidence that they do. For example, it is possible that a volcano, somehow undetected, exists beneath our feet and could erupt at any time – this possibility would suggest that it would be sensible to move, except that the equal possibility exists that the undiscovered volcano might instead be at the location we move towards! The possibility that the volcano might exist therefore provides no guidance to our actions or beliefs, because any of an infinite range of possibilities might equally be true, and we have no way to choose between them – thus we simply act as though no volcano exists, even though we cannot prove that it does not. For practical purposes, then, it is natural to act on the assumption that such claims are false (even if this assumption is unproven), until such time as evidence is provided to support the claim.
We must remember, too, that the more unlikely a claim seems, the more evidence we consider it appropriate to need before believing it; if someone told you that your new neighbour was called Steve, it is unlikely that you would demand corroborating evidence before believing it, but if they told you that Steve was an alien, you would probably want a little more than just their word for it!
So far, so good. Claims need evidence, and the more extraordinary the claim, the stronger the evidence required. It is important to understand that, unlike religions, atheism (in the sense defined above) makes no claims at all - it merely doubts the sound evidential basis of the claims of others. This is all it needs to do, because the starting position for the existence of God is the same as that for everything else, from fairies and dragons right down to specific cups, tables and volcanoes: we do not assume that these things exist unless we have evidence that they do. Atheism does not need to claim that “there is no God”, because the positive assertion of any specific claim must be supported by evidence - and it is up to the believers of that claim, if seeking to convince others to share their faith, to provide that evidence. If you, or any follower of any religion, can present sound evidence that your beliefs are correct, I will gladly convert to the religion in question – honestly, I truly will.
What do I mean by “sound” evidence? You would not be alone in considering this a very thorny question: what really counts as “evidence” for your religious beliefs? Put simply, it must be an event or phenomenon for which the most likely explanation is that the specific religious claim in question is true. If, for example, you posit a religious explanation for some phenomenon, but a different, scientifically well-evidenced explanation exists, too, then the religious explanation will not be the most likely one. This is not to say that it becomes impossible that the religious answer is correct – nothing is ever absolutely certain, as we can never entirely rule out the possibility that something crucial has been missed or misunderstood – but it will not be the most likely explanation, and so it cannot be used as evidence that the religious belief in question is true.
Of course, this is only the beginning of the problem. Given some phenomenon or event and a range of possible explanations for it, how do we decide which of them is the most likely, and hence the most convincing? In practice, this can be very difficult, but in principle, there is a more straightforward answer: the most likely explanation is generally the simplest, most parsimonious one which fits the facts. This is commonly (but inaccurately1 ) referred to as “Occam's Razor”, and it is based (of course!) on very simple reasoning: the greater the number of unproven assumptions (“axioms”) we need to make in order to assert that a particular theory is correct, the greater the risk that one or more of these crucial assumptions will turn out to be false, and therefore the greater the chance that the theory as a whole is incorrect. Conversely, the smaller the number of axioms a theory is based on (i.e., the 'simpler' the theory is, in this sense), the lower the risk of any of them being incorrect, and so the more likely the theory is to be true.
In practice, as I said, this reasoning can be very difficult to apply, not least because it is not always obvious what assumptions one is inadvertently making! You might be tempted to think, for example, that the explanation “God did it” is the simplest one imaginable for anything, but those three short words conceal a staggering number of unproven assumptions. As an example, let us consider the creationist explanation for life (I'm not intending to imply that those who disbelieve evolution are representative of religious people in general; it's just a usefully clear illustration): the religious, creationist explanation for the existence of humans requires a great many unproven assumptions. To take just a simplified sample of these, the creationist must assume, among other things, i) that a non-corporeal being (God) exists, and that it somehow predated the universe and all its physical laws; ii) that, among other characteristics, this being had both the ability and the desire to create the universe (this sentence alone covers countless other unstated assumptions, concerning for example the nature of 'desire', not to mention how the creation was achieved); iii) that the being had specific intentions about how the universe would be arranged, including the existence of life and its precise development; iv) that the being somehow retained precise control over the development of the universe, including life, for billions of years (or, in the case of 'young Earth' creationists, that misleading evidence was intentionally planted to imply that the planet is older than it really is); and so on. The list goes on and on, and for the creationist account to be true, every one of these assumptions must be true as well, and every one must be accepted without evidence. You will see, then, that any statement invoking God, or for that matter any other supernatural force, necessarily introduces a huge amount of complexity and a very large number of untested, untestable assumptions. God is not a simple explanation.
By contrast, I would suggest that the whole of science rests on only two axioms. Every field of scientific inquiry and every theory and discovery derived from them, including every technological achievement of our society, rest at their core on only two assumptions: i) the universe is governed by predictable, consistent rules; and ii) our senses provide us with an accurate (or at least consistent) impression of what is really occurring around us, such that (for example) if, under identical conditions, we seem to observe the same thing happening twice, this means that the same thing really has happened twice. And that is all – these are the axioms, in their entirety, which underpin all science. Everything else – all of our scientific knowledge in every field, our technology, our medicine – rests, at its core, upon these assumptions, and these alone.
From these axioms, everything else is a matter of conducting experiments and making observations, slowly collecting evidence, and then finding explanations which are consistent both with the evidence and with each other. You might be forgiven for wondering: why, then, do scientists get things wrong? If the two axioms above are the only assumptions made, and everything else is just a logical, inevitable extension from them, why do scientists ever disagree with each other, and why are scientific theories sometimes overturned and replaced?
Usually, the reason is that the evidence is unclear or that new evidence is found which the preexisting scientific theory cannot explain, but it is also true that scientists are human, flawed, and make mistakes; for example by misunderstanding the available evidence or by their theories requiring additional, unproven (and incorrect) assumptions which the scientists themselves do not realise they are making - this is why good scientific practice requires that experiments be tightly controlled. Although mistakes do occur, the number of scientists working worldwide in each field, and the strict guidelines governing their work, ensure that these are ultimately noticed and corrected. Science is, by design, perpetually a work in progress, with the newer discoveries and theories at its frontiers being more speculative, while the older, better-understood areas are increasingly refined and honed towards the point where nothing remains except a logical (although complex) extension of the two basic axioms above. In general, this means that the longer a theory has been in existence, the more rigorously it will have been tested and the greater the amount of evidence that will exist to support it; and so the more confident we can be that it is the truth. This is why I can say, with confidence, that the scientific explanations for phenomena and events are usually very convincing: they are, by definition and design, the simplest explanations which fit the facts.
You will understand by now, then, that the only thing which would convince me to accept your religious beliefs is evidence, and that the standard for what counts as acceptable evidence is very high. I hope that you might even agree with me, after considering the above, that this evidence is an entirely appropriate and necessary thing to require.
Click here for part 2:
The title reflects the fact that, at least in the UK, an unexpected doorstep visit from a Jehovah's Witness is one of the most common situations in which people will find their religious beliefs being directly and explicitly challenged; thus the essay nominally takes the form of an address to such a (hypothetical) visitor, but it is also aimed more widely at 'religion vs. atheism' and 'faith vs. science' debates as a whole. Similarly, while I focus largely on Christianity, this is only because Christianity is the most common religion in my country - the arguments are intended to apply equally to other theist religions, and much of it applies to non-theist religions, too. The essay is aimed primarily at religious people who try to convert others to share their beliefs, and at those who actively criticise atheism, although others (whether religious or otherwise) are of course still very welcome to read and comment.
All comments and criticisms are welcome, and I would appreciate any suggestions as to how the argument might be improved. (Of course, I must also ask that all comments be polite. I realise that this is a sensitive subject, but I have tried to maintain a neutral and civil tone throughout, and would appreciate the same courtesy).
To a Jehovah's Witness
You are seeking to convince me that my atheism is mistaken, my reasoning flawed, my conclusions unsound. More than this, you think that my beliefs are bad for me - that I risk eternal damnation - and that it would be in my best interests to change my mind. Please understand that I think the same of you - I consider your beliefs to be not merely false, but bad for you. In my view, you are devoting much of your life to something which does not exist, and in your pursuit of an impossible afterlife, you are failing to make the most of this, your only life. Depending on what form your religion takes, you likely deny yourself pleasant and harmless experiences, you might needlessly deny crucial medical treatments to yourself and your children, you may exhibit or at least tolerate unjustifiable prejudice towards innocent minorities, and you waste your precious, limited time in trying to convince others to share your beliefs, instead of focusing your altruism on anything which could do real, practical good. If you would try to convince me that you are correct in your faith, you should know that I, likewise, would consider it time well spent if I were able to convince you of the opposite.
The reason why I do not believe what you believe is that I have seen no evidence to support your claims. Let us consider the importance of evidence. Many religious people – Christians especially, in my experience, but others, too – have explicit and strongly negative views concerning the value of evidence. Remember the Bible story of Thomas, the doubter, who demanded proof before believing the implausible-sounding claim that Jesus had risen from the dead; the story is taken to convey the clear message that to believe because of evidence is less praiseworthy than to believe without it. As a scientist, I fundamentally disagree with this assertion; in fact, I consider it a complete reversal of good practice and common sense. More importantly, though, I do not think that Christians really believe it either.
Consider this: do you believe in the existence of fairies? Probably not. What if someone told you that they do believe in fairies, and furthermore that they have actually seen them? What would your response be? Would you accept their word and start to believe in fairies, too? Again, presumably not – you would probably believe that they were either lying or delusional – but what if, for the sake of argument, they were actually correct, and they caught a fairy in a box and showed it to you? Might you start to believe then? I suspect your answer might now be 'yes', but why has it changed? The answer, of course, is evidence: before believing a seemingly unlikely and implausible claim, you consider it natural and proper to require proof.
We should remember that anything at all might be true. We must accept that Christians or atheists or Hindus or Muslims or absolutely anyone else might be correct in their beliefs, simply because we cannot prove that they are not. Evidence is the only tool available for us to sort the few things which are true from all those which merely might be, and that means that the burden of proof must always rest with the person making a claim, not with the one refuting it. There is much disagreement about what atheism really is (as opposed to agnosticism, for example), and I certainly do not assert that my definition is the “correct” one, but to be clear, my atheist position may be defined as an absence of assumptions. I cannot assume that God exists, in the same way and for the same reasons that I cannot assume, before opening a door in an unfamiliar house, that the room beyond will have a green carpet. We have no evidence in any direction, so all positive assertions are unjustified – including, incidentally, the positive assertion that God absolutely does not exist.
However, for the purpose of guiding our daily lives, it is common (and more practical) to act as though things do not exist unless we have evidence that they do. For example, it is possible that a volcano, somehow undetected, exists beneath our feet and could erupt at any time – this possibility would suggest that it would be sensible to move, except that the equal possibility exists that the undiscovered volcano might instead be at the location we move towards! The possibility that the volcano might exist therefore provides no guidance to our actions or beliefs, because any of an infinite range of possibilities might equally be true, and we have no way to choose between them – thus we simply act as though no volcano exists, even though we cannot prove that it does not. For practical purposes, then, it is natural to act on the assumption that such claims are false (even if this assumption is unproven), until such time as evidence is provided to support the claim.
We must remember, too, that the more unlikely a claim seems, the more evidence we consider it appropriate to need before believing it; if someone told you that your new neighbour was called Steve, it is unlikely that you would demand corroborating evidence before believing it, but if they told you that Steve was an alien, you would probably want a little more than just their word for it!
So far, so good. Claims need evidence, and the more extraordinary the claim, the stronger the evidence required. It is important to understand that, unlike religions, atheism (in the sense defined above) makes no claims at all - it merely doubts the sound evidential basis of the claims of others. This is all it needs to do, because the starting position for the existence of God is the same as that for everything else, from fairies and dragons right down to specific cups, tables and volcanoes: we do not assume that these things exist unless we have evidence that they do. Atheism does not need to claim that “there is no God”, because the positive assertion of any specific claim must be supported by evidence - and it is up to the believers of that claim, if seeking to convince others to share their faith, to provide that evidence. If you, or any follower of any religion, can present sound evidence that your beliefs are correct, I will gladly convert to the religion in question – honestly, I truly will.
What do I mean by “sound” evidence? You would not be alone in considering this a very thorny question: what really counts as “evidence” for your religious beliefs? Put simply, it must be an event or phenomenon for which the most likely explanation is that the specific religious claim in question is true. If, for example, you posit a religious explanation for some phenomenon, but a different, scientifically well-evidenced explanation exists, too, then the religious explanation will not be the most likely one. This is not to say that it becomes impossible that the religious answer is correct – nothing is ever absolutely certain, as we can never entirely rule out the possibility that something crucial has been missed or misunderstood – but it will not be the most likely explanation, and so it cannot be used as evidence that the religious belief in question is true.
Of course, this is only the beginning of the problem. Given some phenomenon or event and a range of possible explanations for it, how do we decide which of them is the most likely, and hence the most convincing? In practice, this can be very difficult, but in principle, there is a more straightforward answer: the most likely explanation is generally the simplest, most parsimonious one which fits the facts. This is commonly (but inaccurately1 ) referred to as “Occam's Razor”, and it is based (of course!) on very simple reasoning: the greater the number of unproven assumptions (“axioms”) we need to make in order to assert that a particular theory is correct, the greater the risk that one or more of these crucial assumptions will turn out to be false, and therefore the greater the chance that the theory as a whole is incorrect. Conversely, the smaller the number of axioms a theory is based on (i.e., the 'simpler' the theory is, in this sense), the lower the risk of any of them being incorrect, and so the more likely the theory is to be true.
In practice, as I said, this reasoning can be very difficult to apply, not least because it is not always obvious what assumptions one is inadvertently making! You might be tempted to think, for example, that the explanation “God did it” is the simplest one imaginable for anything, but those three short words conceal a staggering number of unproven assumptions. As an example, let us consider the creationist explanation for life (I'm not intending to imply that those who disbelieve evolution are representative of religious people in general; it's just a usefully clear illustration): the religious, creationist explanation for the existence of humans requires a great many unproven assumptions. To take just a simplified sample of these, the creationist must assume, among other things, i) that a non-corporeal being (God) exists, and that it somehow predated the universe and all its physical laws; ii) that, among other characteristics, this being had both the ability and the desire to create the universe (this sentence alone covers countless other unstated assumptions, concerning for example the nature of 'desire', not to mention how the creation was achieved); iii) that the being had specific intentions about how the universe would be arranged, including the existence of life and its precise development; iv) that the being somehow retained precise control over the development of the universe, including life, for billions of years (or, in the case of 'young Earth' creationists, that misleading evidence was intentionally planted to imply that the planet is older than it really is); and so on. The list goes on and on, and for the creationist account to be true, every one of these assumptions must be true as well, and every one must be accepted without evidence. You will see, then, that any statement invoking God, or for that matter any other supernatural force, necessarily introduces a huge amount of complexity and a very large number of untested, untestable assumptions. God is not a simple explanation.
By contrast, I would suggest that the whole of science rests on only two axioms. Every field of scientific inquiry and every theory and discovery derived from them, including every technological achievement of our society, rest at their core on only two assumptions: i) the universe is governed by predictable, consistent rules; and ii) our senses provide us with an accurate (or at least consistent) impression of what is really occurring around us, such that (for example) if, under identical conditions, we seem to observe the same thing happening twice, this means that the same thing really has happened twice. And that is all – these are the axioms, in their entirety, which underpin all science. Everything else – all of our scientific knowledge in every field, our technology, our medicine – rests, at its core, upon these assumptions, and these alone.
From these axioms, everything else is a matter of conducting experiments and making observations, slowly collecting evidence, and then finding explanations which are consistent both with the evidence and with each other. You might be forgiven for wondering: why, then, do scientists get things wrong? If the two axioms above are the only assumptions made, and everything else is just a logical, inevitable extension from them, why do scientists ever disagree with each other, and why are scientific theories sometimes overturned and replaced?
Usually, the reason is that the evidence is unclear or that new evidence is found which the preexisting scientific theory cannot explain, but it is also true that scientists are human, flawed, and make mistakes; for example by misunderstanding the available evidence or by their theories requiring additional, unproven (and incorrect) assumptions which the scientists themselves do not realise they are making - this is why good scientific practice requires that experiments be tightly controlled. Although mistakes do occur, the number of scientists working worldwide in each field, and the strict guidelines governing their work, ensure that these are ultimately noticed and corrected. Science is, by design, perpetually a work in progress, with the newer discoveries and theories at its frontiers being more speculative, while the older, better-understood areas are increasingly refined and honed towards the point where nothing remains except a logical (although complex) extension of the two basic axioms above. In general, this means that the longer a theory has been in existence, the more rigorously it will have been tested and the greater the amount of evidence that will exist to support it; and so the more confident we can be that it is the truth. This is why I can say, with confidence, that the scientific explanations for phenomena and events are usually very convincing: they are, by definition and design, the simplest explanations which fit the facts.
You will understand by now, then, that the only thing which would convince me to accept your religious beliefs is evidence, and that the standard for what counts as acceptable evidence is very high. I hope that you might even agree with me, after considering the above, that this evidence is an entirely appropriate and necessary thing to require.
Click here for part 2: