Why I am an Atheist

or

Confessions of John Mertus of Rumford

Open any web page on atheism and you will often see rational lists of reasons there cannot be a god. Open a religious web page and you often see rational (and some not so rational) lists of reasons there must be a God; a pale reflection of the great scholastic and theological mêlées over the existence of God.

But the reason I am an atheist has nothing to do with these arguments.  To me they are post hoc justifications of belief systems.  I want to explain my long and personal road to atheism, hence the tongue in cheek subtitle of this essay.

Bear with me as I clarify a few words.  I am a non-theist.  And by theist I mean someone who believes in a supreme transcendent God or Gods that created the world either directly or indirectly by setting physics into action.  So by theism I mean the fire and brimstone God of the young earth creationist, the passive God of Thomas Jefferson’s deism and all in between.   I reject these gods.  I don’t believe in pantheism, that the physical universe is god, because such semantic twists define god by a tautology and is hardly worth consideration.

My parents were second generations Slovaks that grew up in the coal fields of Southern Ohio and move to Cleveland after the depression and before the war.  In the mid 1950’s, when I was four, my family moved to Akron, Ohio and my parents decide that Zion Lutheran School would be perfect for their children. Zion was Missouri Synod Lutheran; to quote their web site of today

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod accepts the Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and subscribes unconditionally to all the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God

In the fifties it was even theologically stricter.  From Kindergarten to eight-grade, I was taught about how Jesus loved me despite the worthless person I was.   Every Sunday Pastor Kruger would actually take his fist and pound on the pulpit, point his finger, and tell me I was a sinner and no matter how hard I tried, I will suffer the eternal damnation of the fires in hell.  Maybe, just maybe if I repented, Jesus would open his hear and save me.  But it was unlikely for such a horrific sinner as me.  These were German Lutherans, and years later I came to the realization the guilt of WWII was a major reason they turned inside and against themselves.

We all had to be in the Choir.  Nature has blessed me with many talents; an inquisitive nature, great mechanical abilities, superb mathematical skills, and both mental and physical toughness; however, nature did not bless me with musical ability.  I am tone death; so musically defective that Mr. Helweagy told me when singing in front of an audience, just to move my mouth.   I never appreciated the irony of the daily poundings of God knows all and we must be honest with the deceitfulness of me not singing.  Even Lutherans fall to form over content.

But I believed in God, I believed in an all powerful being that cared about my every move.  One who would answer my prayers and punish not just me, but the ones I loved if I did not behave.  I learned Luther’s Small Catechism, many passages by heart.  Most of all, I believe that the church was right, God was Good and Merciful, and that any bad which happened was my fault.  I only remained alive by the intercession of a loving Jesus with the Father: a god who would prefer to swat me like a fly for my sins.  I tried to be good.  I tried very hard.

The one thing I will say good about the Lutherans is that they produced great pot luck dinners.  The problem with pot lucks is that although everyone can cook well, the themes and flavors are in conflict. No problem with the Lutherans, it was pigs in a blanket, sausages, sauerkraut, hams, chewy cookies and sweet cakes.

After graduating from eight-grade, I endeavored to stay with the church.  I sometimes attended Watlther League, a teenage church group.  But the beginning of a split was happening.  Not over philosophical question of how a Perfect God could create evil or why God would design a vermiform appendix that killed, but over the Vietnam War.  The sermons and discussion in Wather League completely ignored the war.  It was as if it didn’t exist.

I was in high school when my neighbor and older friend Jeff Cochran joined the Marines.   He fought in the iron triangle region of Vietnam and was wounded.  He showed me his scars as he describe finding a Viet Cong cutting the barbed wire and both shooting each other; but it was the physiological scars that made him almost unrecognizable. I could not understand how the church could ignore something so real.

About this time, a friend of mine, Betsy Blake lent me the first book in the trilogy The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell.   I was enthralled so much I spent my paper route money on the other two.  Russell was an outspoken atheist but I was not drawn to him for that but by his logic and rationalistic writing.  He showed me the world could be figured out rationally, something, ironically I now believe as false as Jesus’ divinity.   Interestingly, his Why I am not a Christian essay made almost no impact on me as I felt he misunderstood Christianity.  Disproving a reason there was a god just disproved the reason; it didn’t disprove God.  One only had to have faith.  Had Thomas Kuhn listened, he would have used me as the classical example of secondary causality, but it would be decades before I developed the mental skills to understand why rational and logical arguments do not change people’s minds.

Then I left for college at Carnegie-Mellon University.  For the first year I tried to go to church services but quickly became absorbed in studying physics, calculus and chemistry.   Increasingly I became bitter toward the Lutheran church for the emotional captivity and pain it caused me.  Life could be enjoyed. 

Why bitter?  As an example, if I knew I would have to fly in a plane, I would have to be very good the week before otherwise God would crash the plane.  Lutherans were anti-physical pleasures including sex, so I had to be very careful not to have sex the week before my plane flight.  Why a god would kill 150 innocent people just to punish me is easily answered in the book of Job.  Also why any plane with 150 people could have ever flown safely if none could have sex the previous week was never questioned. This Lutheran guilt ruined a major part of my teenage and young twenties life. 

The best way to describe by relationship to god is paraphrasing an old nursery rhythm.

As I was going up the stair,
I met a God who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.

At first I tried to exorcize god but the best I could do was consciously push religion into a dusty corner of my mind. I was very careful never to attack God or religion lest the guilt awaken to rip through me like a Dum-Dum bullet through flesh. I could not say out loud that God did not exist.  I could not even think it.  I just learned never to think the question.

Over the next twenty years, my efforts were on graduate school and establishing myself in a scientific profession.  Later, my energies were spent on my marriage, raising two children and work.

I also spent my lifetime learning to view the world as a place driven by laws.  If you put a cup of tea in a microwave and press start for one minute, the tea either heats up or nothing happens.  The tea does not become a block of ice.   If it doesn’t heat, I assume the microwave is broken or unplugged and I fix it.   I am not just using common sense induction to conclude this, but also a belief in the theory of electromagnetism.   The theory I slowly believed in because, unlike religion, I could verify or disprove its statements with my own senses or at least trace back to someone I trusted.

My belief in causality and electromagnetism is so strong that sometimes I when I hit start and the tea does not heat, I assume that I just didn’t press the switch hard enough and press start again.  I do not assume the laws of electromagnetism were suspended for a brief moment. Such a suspension would be a miracle, in fact, is the definition of a miracle.  The most likely cause of the tea not heating was some unknown, and often unknowable, materialist event.  Thus over 20 years, my world view became that of materialism and any indications of miracles were rejected by assuming an incomplete understanding of the atomic system. 

This is much different than my previous religious view. Suppose, for example, one day I woke up late, put my tea in the microwave, pressed start, came back and found it cold.  Thus I ran even later.  As a German Lutheran, I would say a vengeful god suspended the laws of physics to punish me for my sin of reading (sic) Playboy the night before.   As I got older, the explanation would be that God caused me not press the start button hard enough.  In the present of an omnipotent god why one is more palatable than the other is something I never threshed out.  Now I fault the maxim haste makes waste, the logic behind Finagle's corollary to Murphy's Law.

What had happened is most important.  No longer did I believe that the bad things that happened to me were punishment sent by a vengeful God, but the quasi-random alignments of an uninterested universe.  Nonetheless, I was not an atheist; at most I would cop out and say I was agnostic.

As my daughter became older, all her friends went to church and Sunday school and she want to attend.  I couldn’t stomach a Lutheran Church.  Near us was a UCC church called Newman that provided children care during service.  I could sit in the pews and not have to worry about taking care of my kids for an hour a week.  Of course I paid a price of the collection, but it was a good trade and tax deductable.

The UCC is a liberal Jesus church.   It worships the ideas of Jesus and pays lip service to the Father, completely ignoring the Holy Ghost.  It engages in what I consider as the goodness of religion, that of creating a better world through deeds.   I also enjoyed the social life and the people there, most of who are dislocated Catholics or Episcopalians.   Alas, it had horrible pot lucks.

As I listened in church, I became aware that my fear of god was gone.   I could actually start asking myself if he existed and what type of god he was.  Now the classical philosophically argument contained in Why I am not a Christian began to make sense: the divinity of Jesus can be rationally explained and that explanation is best that Jesus is not divine. 

Jesus’ divinity is no different that the tea in the microwave, the best reason behind the water into wine miracle, according to my world view of materialism, is that the miracle just did not happen.  It was a post hoc story that became a part of Christian sacred scripture because it fit into the Jesus is divine world view.   This is much more palatable to me than the violation of a dozen physical laws. 

My belief in God only came because I was a child and told the bible is true by adults that I trusted explicitly.  This world view supports itself because I believed in the omnipotent God can violate a dozen physical laws.   I now trust the book of nature and the scientists and philosophers elucidation of nature

Once my belief in miracles collapsed, the inspired and inerrant source of the bible collapsed.  It was more reasonable to interpret theism in the most likely materialist way using William of Ockham’s divine argument: Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora (It is vain to do with more what can be done with less).   Postulating a god is postulating an unneeded entity.  In other words, the god of the bible does not exist. Emotionally, I was able to view the Christian God as Satan and cast him out. I now am able to rejoice “Free at last, oh Lord, free at last.”

So if after I die and I find myself in front of a divine throne where a Christian God judges me to everlasting pain in hell for not worshiping him, I will flip my middle finger at him and say “You were a very bad god.”

-John Mertus

Rumford RI, March 2009

Notes:

Of course the law of parsimony is neither a law nor a proof, just a heuristic. But in all my work, I seek simplicity.

Second, Betsy Blake Bennett, the one who introduced me to Bertrand Russell, is now a Deacon in an Episcopal Church, somewhat of an irony.  She has used faith to tame her demons and write quite nicely reasoned, albeit sometimes circular, sermons.  Her world view, which include acceptance of miracles such as Jesus taming a storm, builds a structure for her life.   That is great for her.

Also, for those of you who don’t understand humor, I purposely used words like divine and oh lord in secular ways.

Lastly, so you atheists think I am coping out on the above, something like evolution is completely different. I am the product of a union between two parents; they are products of unions between two others. The trace back from child to parent is real, and this trace back either leads to Adam and Eve or to a primate branch that ancestors both Bonzo and me. Thus evolution either happened or not. You cannot say believing in evolution or not is a choice. It is not.

Of course, there is no scientific question evolution occurs, although the exact mechanism will change over time. However, a person’s personal belief system is a choice. It is the belief systems I am talking about above that leads people to accept the Bible and reject evolution or, by clever interpretation of scripture, accept the Bible and evolution simultaneously.