“Faith in God or Gods Is Unjustified, Harmful, and Dangerous”

And calling atheism a faith is lame

This meme popped up on my Facebook feed recently: “When a man creates a god, he can tell you all about him, what he likes and dislikes. That’s how imagination-gods work.” This describes a practice that has gone on for millennia: Humans have indulged in creating, imagining, and describing gods in detail—many thousands of them. The writers of the Bible were committed to this practice, but they disagreed far too much about Bible-god. Hence clergy, theologians and apologists have devoted so much time and energy to diverting attention from the contradictions, making excuses for them, and minimizing the bad consequences. All in the interest of keeping their particular versions of Christianity intact.
   
 
But they’ve tried another ploy as well: labeling atheism as a faith. John Loftus has addressed this baffling approach in an article published on the Secular Web a few days ago, Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer (and then on this blog, 7 February).
 
He cites a 2004 book co-authored by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. 
 
“Geisler and Turek’s book is typical in being bent on dragging atheists down to their level. Those who value reason, evidence, and science are said to have no greater justification for what we conclude than people of faith who, on my view, devalue, diminish, discredit, and deny reason, evidence, and science. When it comes to science there is no higher authority than the consensus of scientists working in their respective fields…If believers refuse to accept this requirement, it’s clear that they are not reasoning properly.”

Not reasoning properly. The huge mess that Christianity is in—many thousands of brands that don’t get along—demonstrates this abundantly. Or as Loftus states the case: “Too many believers disagree with each other because people of faith don’t require sufficient evidence to believe things like a virgin named Mary was the mother of God’s son. When the evidence is lacking, they still believe rather than—at the very least—doing the right thing and suspending judgment.” This is why, as Loftus states near the beginning of his article, “…faith in god or gods is unjustified, harmful, and dangerous.” Theism has split into so many differing varieties because none of them search for sufficient evidence: reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. Thus Christianity has commonly denigrated Judaism, and Islam has done the same for both of these other brands.

The supremely devout advocates of these religions are obsessed with defending the religious “truths” that were installed in their brains at very early ages. Loftus states the case bluntly: “There’s no such thing as reasonable faith. To have religious faith is to have a misplaced trust in nonexistent deities. Faith is the entrance ticket to the fantasy land of religion. It keeps people childish in their thinking.”

This is massively deceitful in the times in which we now live. There are very curious scientists, for example, who devote their careers to gathering data trying to figure out how the Cosmos came into existence. So far, none of these scientists have made announcements, such as “We have identified the god who did it!” In 2003, Sean Carroll published his article titled, Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists. This is the case because a divine power, divine energy, has yet to be detected. 

But if the day ever comes when such an announcement is made, how could the “god who did it” —responsible for sparking the Cosmos—be identified with the primitive god depicted in the Bible? Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) was a Catholic priest and physicist who, analyzing the work of Albert Einstein, proposed that the Cosmos was ignited by the sudden expansion of a primeval atom (later this was labelled “the Big Bang”). In 1951, Pope Pius XII proclaimed that this constituted proof of the Genesis story of creation. “Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O’Connell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology.” (Wikipedia article)

It would take so much theological wishful thinking, guesswork, and mindless speculation to equate the god of the Bible—imagined by authors who had no clue about how the world works—with a divine force that ignited the primeval atom. 

In an essay published on this blog a few days ago (12 February, What Is Evidence?), Daniel Mocsny states the case pretty well:

“Religions are all about gods that ordinary pre-scientific peoples could observe or interact with in some way. The God of the bible, for example, is routinely portrayed as crashing about through history, working miracles, slaying people in vast numbers for misbehaving, torturing Job to win a bet with Satan, and generally making himself impossible to ignore. That sort of God has simply disappeared like a puff of smoke with the rise of modern science. So either God went away, or pre-scientific people were lying or mistaken when they attributed natural phenomena to God.”

Mocsny’s essay is a thorough analysis of a debate about evidence that John Loftus had with Orthodox clergy. His essay should be studied alongside Loftus’ essay, Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer. Mocsny states the matter bluntly:

“If the Orthodox spokesmen had done their homework, they would immediately recognize that John’s definition of evidence is closer to the definitions you’d find in the scientific or legal/judicial communities.”

“Insofar as modern science has been able to tell, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection stories are impossible. Since the scriptures were written long before the start of modern science, people at the time wouldn’t have understood the impossibility.”

And clergy today, whose business it is to promote their brands of the faith, accept as evidence personal feelings and testimonies, religious “truths” accepted for centuries, as well as events and stories reported in ancient scriptures. But studies of these scriptures by devout scholars—for many decades now—have shown how much they are not to be trusted, how much they fall short of being reliable history. 

None of these examples of evidence quality as reliable, verifiable, objective. It would be so helpful if clergy, apologists, theologians could snap out of these delusional patterns. And stop it with the nonsense that atheism is a faith. 
 

 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.