An Atheist's Apology

Let's get one thing straight: I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural entities, nor any kind of afterlife-heaven, hell, or otherwise. Now that I've slapped the elephant in the room on the ass, let's move on. I wish I could say that I'm the poster child for atheism, that I'm wholesome and moral-a real boy scout. There are plenty of atheists out there like that, but I'm not one of them. And I'm not going to lie and say that I am any of those things in order to cast a positive light on my worldview. I'm probably just like you: I've made some mistakes, but nothing heinous; I'm more blameless than a lot of people, but certainly not perfect. With that in mind, take what follows for what it is: one lonely kid's experience with religion and spirituality.

Lonely kid

When people ask me why I'm not religious, I can never seem to articulate my answer in a way that satisfies them. The most concise way to put it is that I seem to be congenitally incapable of faith. Really. I remember going to a Methodist church as a boy and never quite getting it. Even at the age of ten, I can remember thinking to myself: do these people actually think praying accomplishes something? When the pastor called for the congregation to bow their heads, close their eyes, and pray, I would take the opportunity to look around freely. It was always a feeling of being invulnerable: here's a room full of people, and I'm the only one with my eyes open. I felt alone in a sea of people, and I liked it.

I've grown up to be a respectful person nonetheless-maybe a little too thoughtful for my own good-but mostly reserved and good natured. What I lack in morals I make up for with a strong ethical sense. I favor ethics to morals because ethics are immediate and palpable. If you cheat your fellow man, you should feel a pang of regret. But, as a contrasting example, I can't find a logical reason that anyone should wait until marriage to have sex. There's a disconnect in rationality when you start talking about things like baptism, sexual orientation, political persuasion, etc. But something like the golden rule is self evident in its importance. Those are key words with me: rational, logical, and self evident.

Leaving religion

Why am I so demanding about proof and rationality? Personally, I blame it on watching too many PBS science programs as a kid. It's that simple. If you're a kid, and your pastor tells you that thunder is, "God bowling upstairs," and a science program tells you that thunder is a discharge of massive amounts of static electricity, which superheats the atmosphere causing a booming sound, who are you going to believe? Maybe if the pastor would've had spiffy computer generated graphics, I might not be an atheist. But happenstance would have it that science took root in my mind, not religion. And given enough time, science raises too many questions for a curious kid.

The age of reason

I made do with my curiosity for a while, accepting the uncertainty of what I was religiously, until around the age of fifteen. That's when I reached the age of reason, and discovered philosophy. There's an effect we've all experienced, where you're reading what someone else has written and go: "That's it! That's the thought that's been in my head forever and I could never put words to it." It's like discovering the thief of your best ideas. My own philosophic thief was Nietzsche. As far as philosophers go, Nietzsche was Neil Armstrong: God is dead; so simple, yet so astounding in its significance. He was the first to be so bold, to step into no man's land. What intrigued me most about Nietzsche's philosophy was his concept of the übermensch, or the Overman. Nietzsche used the Overman as a symbol for the next step in human evolution, a man who could recognize the truths of existence, both beautiful and terrible, and create meaning out of seeming chaos.

For all his positive influence, I had my first nervous breakdown thanks to Nietzsche. At age fifteen, it's quite distressing to discover that even the truths that seemed immutable can be doubted. It was an intense period of holding every value I had to the fire. I flirted dangerously with nihilism, and not the nihilism of angst-ridden teenage poetry, but honest to God borderline psychosis nihilism. But in the eloquent words of Tyler Durden, "It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything." (Fight Club) What arose from this destructive palaver with myself was a deepened appreciation for rationality. If the majority of the human truths we cling to are only relative, then the absolute truths shine with a greater iridescence.

Birth of a rationalist

So I turned from Nietzsche to a rigorous study of science and mathematics, which seemed to be the only game in town when it came to absolute truth. I was seeking the pinnacle of rational beauty. Not surprisingly then, the next thinker to affect my perspective was the ancient Greek geometer Euclid. My copy of Euclid's Elements never left my side my entire sophomore year of high school. Up until this point, it had seemed to me that mathematics was simply a set of mystical transpositions, a game of moving symbols on paper. From studying Euclid, I finally understood the concept of proof on an intuitive level; I was overjoyed by the austere beauty of his figures. Like the specter of John Nash, I drew Euclidian proofs on the chalkboards of unattended classrooms. Putting aside Euclid, I began teaching myself calculus. By age sixteen, I had memorized and intuited the proofs behind the theorems of calculus as well.

Strangely enough, it was calculus that brought about my first peak-experience. I am borrowing this neologism from American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote a groundbreaking book, entitled: Religions, Values and Peak-experiences. His observations of the universality of religious experiences led him to the general characteristics of a peak-experience, which are: ego transcendence, feelings of oneness with reality, extraordinary perception of beauty, and a sense of delving deeper into existence. In effect, it's an endogenous psychedelic experience. All of this I learned in retrospect. I wouldn't discover Maslow's philosophy until after my first peak-experience.

Peak-experience

What precipitated my first such experience was the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. I had been trying to master the proof for a week; not to just memorize the text, but to understand at a gut level how differentiation and integration are connected; to know it. It was around 7:30 at night, and I was hunched over my desk glaring at a calculus textbook. Strewn about me where about two dozen discarded Post-it notes with graphs and scribbled equations on them; Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto played in the background. Then, like a bolt of lightning from Valhalla, it came to me; I finally understood the proof. I began to weep, and a wave of pure pleasure coursed up my spine; my skin was prickled with goose bumps. Everything around me was transfigured: I thought about the photons streaming from the lamp, the opsin proteins in my retina which were capturing the photons, giving my visual cortex a signal to decode. The whole world breathed out its meaning to me in that moment. Beethoven's concerto ended softly.

Denouement

The irony is that I've had half a dozen of these spiritual experiences, and yet I remain an atheist. My skepticism seems to be bullet proof. But I do remain open minded; by the principles of logic, I know there's no way ever to provea negative statement. You could theoretically prove Bigfoot exists, but you can never prove he doesn't. But as an argument for God, this kind of logic fails. Would you base your entire life on the odds that there's a hairy, nine foot tall ape-man roaming the American countryside? Neither would I. To paraphrase Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins from his book, The God Delusion: everyone is an atheist. No one believes in Zeus anymore, or Aphrodite, or Juno, or tens of thousands of other gods. As Dawkins puts it, "Atheists just go one god more." Keep that in mind if you happen to bump elbows with us.

Sources:

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Print.

Maslow, Abraham. Religions, values, and Peak-experiences. New York, NY: Penguin Arkana, 1994. Print.