No more God, please. I’ve had enough. From now on, it’s the Supreme Being who Created the Universe (SBwCU). God just comes with too much baggage. SBwCU is a much leaner concept: SBwCU refers to the super-being who brought the Universe into existence. Nothing more, nothing less. SBwCU may or may not have been alone at the Creation. SBwCU may or may not concern Himself with humanity. SBwCU may or may not be a good guy. SBwCU may or may not have fathered a child of the Virgin Mary. But SBwCU is definitely the Supreme Being who Created the Universe.

God is SBwCU, with the additional properties of being all good, all powerful, and all knowing. It’s fairly easy to make a convincing case against the existence of God; the problem of evil, for instance, will suffice. It’s harder to argue against SBwCU: you can’t argue against Him on the basis of the existence of evil; you can’t argue against him on lack of evidence; the universe itself is the evidence!

There’s a whole universe out there that needs explaining. Isn’t SBwCU, by definition, the explanation?

If “the world is everything that is the case“, as Wittgenstein said, then the truth consists of an accurate representation of the world. But it’s a big, complex world out there, and we’re just puny humans, after all. Often, the truth can only be approximated. That is the point of view of science, by the way: Newton’s law of gravity was (and still is) a useful approximation to the truth. Einstein improved upon Newton; further improvements may be in store if quantum mechanics and general relativity can be united.

In fact, for almost all the interesting questions, the knowledge we have is, at best, approximate. And if knowledge is only approximate, then it probably is not certain knowledge. The logical conclusion: we can be certain of almost nothing.

Is knowledge therefore futile? Of course not. Approximate, non-certain knowledge is extremely valuable. Think of a photograph, which simultaneously reflects the world, and at the same time, introduces certain distortions. What matters is being able to separate out the distortions from the reality.

Knowledge isn’t futile, but this perspective on knowledge does have consequences. Since a certain amount of doubt attaches itself to almost all of our knowledge, the truth that we think we possess must always be held as provisional, subject to revision. Doubt should be cultivated. It is through doubt that knowledge is refined, and brought into closer contact with the truth. Again, this is exactly the point of view of science.

Contrast this with the religious point of view: there is a certain set of absolute truths, which mankind has been in possession of since pre-history, and which are fixed and immutable. Doubting these truths - something even the most committed believer can’t help but do from time to time - is most emphatically not an avenue towards enlightenment. Rather, it is the road to hell.

When religionists accuse me of having a “faith” of my own, they make the mistake of assuming that I hold to my beliefs in the same way as they hold to theirs. For the religionist, holding onto the sacred truths in the face of an utter lack of evidence is a virtue, not a vice. No evidence could ever be enough to shake him from his faith. As for me, I can very easily describe evidence that would convert me into the most devout believer: a heavenly choir of angels, levitating approximately 3 feet above my front lawn, would do the trick quite nicely, for instance. Or perhaps the discovery that the text of the New Testament is encoded in the junk DNA of human beings.

Given the vast variety of faith traditions, how likely is it that the one you happened to have been born into is correct? Excepting religious “truths”, what other knowledge about the world has survived unaltered and intact from the days of human pre-history?

The atheist’s position is most likely closer to the truth than the religionists’, because the atheist’s beliefs are subject to doubt, and hence amenable to correction.

Atheism is often seen as extreme, ultimately requiring a kind of “faith” similar to that which Christianity requires. “After all,” the argument goes, “you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, any more than I can prove that He does. So your atheism requires just as much faith as my Christianity.”

Yeah, but … no.

I suddenly proclaim a new god, call him X. You can’t prove that X doesn’t exist. But does that mean that X is actually likely to exist? As long as we’re talking about my god X, you can see perfectly well that the burden is on me to produce good reasons for believing in X, not on you to justify your non-belief. But when the conversation turns to your God, the rules of the game change: now your faith needs no justification, while my lack of belief is seen as some kind of “atheistic faith”.

Wrong. The burden of evidence is always on he who asserts the existence of X, whether X be my god, or yours. My lack of belief isn’t a faith of its own kind; it’s just a lack of belief.

Atheists disbelieve in God, not because we can prove God doesn’t exist, but because we see no evidence that God exists. It’s possible, of course, that we atheists are wrong on this score. God might nevertheless exist, even though there is no evidence for it. But we continue to hold that, without evidence, there’s no good reason for believing that God exists. Even a committed Christian embraces this logic, when the discussion is about Allah, or Zeus, or Odin, or Osiris, or my made-up god X. But somehow, his own God is exempt from this logic.

Let’s start with a simple fact: currently over 50% of the world’s population professes a belief in one of the 3 great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The monotheists are almost all either Christians (33%) or Muslims (22%). Adherents to Judaism make up less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population. Why is this so?

The vitality of monotheistic faith as a “mind virus” - a set of ideas very apt to “infect” any exposed minds - is indisputable. However, unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism is not a proselytizing faith. This tends to limit its success as a mind virus. Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, are proselytizing, multi-ethnic faiths. When a monotheistic faith becomes proselytizing, watch out! Combine the vitality of monotheistic belief with the proselytizing compulsion, and you have a very infectious mind virus indeed.

In a sense, Christianity is Judaism, version 2.0. To the successful features of Judaism, like monotheism, Christianity has added the all-important compulsion to proselytize, while jettisoning tenets that are self-hobbling to a mind virus, such as the belief that the Jewish race are God’s “chosen people”. Also in Christianity there is a more full and hopeful vision of the afterlife, which adds to the appeal of the religion. Of course, Christianity comes with its own set of baggage, in particular, the notion that Jesus Christ, is, in fact, God, along with the concomitant mysteries of the Trinity, and of the “three persons” of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Enter Islam, which is Judaism, version 3.0. Gone is the divinity of the Christ, a notion that was apparently too much for the desert peoples to swallow. But Christ remains a prophet, and his moral teachings remain intact. Another improvement over Christianity is that in Islam, God is depicted in an altogether less anthropomorphic way. In this respect, Islam is more intellectually respectable than Christianity.

It is often said that Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion. If that is so, the above considerations suggest a reason why: Islam is simply a more infectious mind virus than either Judaism or Christianity. It has all the monotheistic zeal of Judeo-Christian religion, but none of the baggage of Christian notions of divinity, or Jewish ethno-centricity. And because Islam is a more infectious mind virus than Christianity or Judaism, it is a more advanced mind virus than Christianity or Judaism. After all, what is the purpose of a virus, if not to infect?

What about atheism, considered as a mind virus? I’m afraid it has some rather distinct disadvantages in this regard. First of all, atheism lacks the proselytizing zeal of either Christianity or Islam. Most atheists are quite content with having saved themselves from religious belief, and are not too concerned with “saving” others. Neither does atheism offer comforting visions of the afterlife. Finally, atheism offers no easy answers to the basic questions of human life: ethics, the “meaning of life”, and so on. Note that I didn’t say it offered no answers, only no easy answers. All these factors tend to make the atheistic outlook a much weaker mind virus than almost any religious worldview.

Atheism does have a crucial saving grace, however: all the evidence says that it’s probably closer to the truth than any of the established religions.  Understood properly, atheism is not a mind virus at all. Rather, it’s the state of not being infected. And that’s a good state to be in.