Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Atheists & Agnostics

There’s a school of thought out there that claims that atheists — ie, those who profess an absolute belief in the nonexistence of God — are engaging in a kind of faith every bit as unsubstantiated as the religion they’re trying to debunk. The argument hinges on the notion that, fundamentally, we can’t know how we got here, so making categorical statements about the absence of a world-generating deity is just as radical as claiming absolutely that one exists. Ergo: if you’re intellectually honest, you can’t really call yourself and atheist. At best, you’re an agnostic.

At first blush, it’s a fair charge. Atheists, by and large, emphasize rationality, materialism, and logic in their arguments against religion, so they’re open to these kinds of attacks in ways that people who base their arguments on faith are not. You want to be rational about it? Then follow your argument all the way to its logical conclusion. If you must argue for a world without absolutes, then you have to live by its rules.

But it’s a soufflé argument — beguiling and delicious on the outside, hollow on the inside. Because, yes: if you posit an infinite universe that is by definition full of infinite possibilities, then it’s possible that all of it is the work of an ineffable Master Planner. But, by the same token, you could make the claim that, somewhere out there, fluttering aimlessly about in the vast soup of the possible, there exists a butterfly that craps tacos. Because we’re all just physical manifestations of data encoded in genes, aren’t we? And genes are just molecules, and molecules are just atoms, and atoms are always buzzing around doing weird quantum mechanicaly things. So it could happen.

But probably not, right? For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely. If you could plot the likelihood of the existence of taco-crapping butterflies on a probability graph, I imagine they’d be several billion times less likely than, say, being struck twice by lightning while you’re running from a meteor strike behind an honest politician. For another thing, there’s no evidence to support it. If there was some empirical data involved — fields of tacos appearing in the middle of a butterfly preserve, for instance — then the notion might be worth considering. But there’s none of that. Tacos come from Mexican restaurants. You might be able to construct a pretty plausible argument that Taco Bell craps its tacos, but that’s probably as far as you could go.

I don’t mean to draw parallels between gods and insects that excrete tortillas. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make any sense to tell people they can’t make absolute statements because anything is possible. It’s permissible, and even necessary, to make bold, absolutist claims in the face of the infinite, if you have actual facts to support them.

So if a group of people says that there is no god, and points to the vast lack of evidence for their existence, and then points to the errors and internal contradictions of pretty much every holy book that makes claims on the material world, and then points to the growing body of science that is busily explaining all the miraculous things that were once the sole purview of scripture — then I think they can safely call themselves atheists without having to worry that the claim invalidates itself.

I get where you’re going with this, and it’s a very sound argument, although I think your presentation of it becomes too distracted with witticisms about taco crapping (mmmm…. crap tacos). I fully agree with the basic argument, but I would go one farther and say that making absolute statements in not only allowable, but mandatory, because while anything is possible, only one thing actually happened. So at some point there is an absolute right, with all else being wrong. I think it is important for people to understand that there is one, and only one, absolute truth. Us not knowing that truth does not change it, nor does only knowing pieces of it. At some point, we will hopefully be able to point at that truth, but until then, identifying pieces of it as being absolute is not only important, but also dispels other potential explanations.

First of all — the crapping taco is an indispensable part of my argument. No crapping taco, no argument.

Second — I agree with you, up to a point. There are absolutes hiding out there somewhere, far beyond our reach. In some ways, that’s comforting. Maybe that’s what heaven is — a ripping away of the veil that hides us from the truth.

But I distrust the idea of absolutes, at least in human hands. We’re incapable of finding the truth, I think, but we’re more than capable of believing we’ve found it, and that’s what’s dangerous. There’s nothing worse than messianic Truth-dealers. It’s like Nietzsche said: “Absolutes corrupt. Absolute absolutes corrupt absolutely.”

Fundamentalism of every stripe scares the crap out of me, because there’s no arguing with it. I don’t think we can be trusted with even the possibility of capital-t Truth. Uncertainty is the only defense we have against ourselves. That’s what the crapping taco says, anyway.