There comes a point,
in the meatier discussions I occasionally have with theists,
where it feels like the main meal is over.
We’ve consumed the particular arguments before us.
And the time comes to observe the postprandial outcome.
These vary hugely.
One outcome is atheism.
The other party realises they’ve crossed that line,
and no longer believe in any gods.
Another outcome is silence.
The other party vanishes, for reasons unknown.
A third outcome is the parting handshake.
The other party expresses appreciation for the discussion,
but decides to withdraw from it, for whatever personal reasons.
A fourth outcome is the parting shot.
The other party exits with an abusive remark,
revealing a hitherto concealed aggression.
It’s worth noting that over the years a small percentage of these folks
have got back in touch down the line to share with me
that their outburst reflected a state of panic, or even dread,
when they began to perceive the problems in what they were defending.
A fifth outcome is the unmasking.
Here, it’s revealed, intentionally or not,
that the ‘theist’ was actually an atheist playing devil’s advocate.
But the outcome I’d like to talk about here is one I’ve come to call the refuge.
Here, despite acknowledging my counter-arguments,
the other party suddenly takes refuge in an assertion
that they possess some special insight as a theist
that I just don’t as an atheist.
Some call it a sixth sense.
Others use different analogies —
a common one compares atheism to colourblindness.
But when we look more closely at these ideas,
they just don’t stack up.
In fact, far from offering refuge,
they backfire against theism, actively highlighting its flaws.
I want to take a look at this refuge response.
I’ll focus on the colourblindness analogy,
but the problems apply to similar claims of an extra sense.
Then I’d like to talk about a couple of experiments
that lay bare just how easily we can be convinced
we possess some special insight that other folks are missing.
The comparison of atheism with colourblindness comes in two primary forms.
One asserts that arguing with atheists is like trying
to convince a colourblind person of the existence of colour.
Another variation asserts that arguing with atheists is like
trying to convey the beauty of a rainbow to a colourblind person.
These are obviously two very different cruxes.
So let’s see them through.
How would you convince me that people experienced colour,
if I couldn’t experience it myself?
Well, how about this:
paint each of five identical objects a different colour —
blue, green, yellow, orange, and red —
making sure the colours have identical luminosity,
so that to me they appear the same shade of grey.
Label them according to colour with the labels facing me,
and get members of the public to identify the colours.
We could switch the order round to add a layer of randomisation.
With appropriate experimental controls,
when the colours were reported with overwhelming accuracy,
I’d be persuaded that people were experiencing
a reliable, consistent phenomenon.
So, if arguing with atheists was indeed like
convincing a colourblind person about colour perception,
it would be a pretty straightforward matter, wouldn’t it?
To see why it isn’t, let’s continue the colourblindness analogy,
and look at some responses more aligned with what theism offers:
What if a crowd of individuals showed you
their own ancient books defining colour,
each of which contradicted the definition in everyone else’s book.
Some books said there were many colours.
Others proposed only one colour,
although the concept of that colour varied hugely
according to which book you read.
Bizarrely, some books claimed there was one unchanging colour
but then described that colour changing into
something completely different over the course of the book.
But one thing everyone agreed on was that
you just had to accept that they had the truth
and everyone else had got it wrong.
If you were colourblind, would you be convinced
that these people are perceiving a reliable, consistent phenomenon?
Even if we take away the contradictions,
all we’d have is a group of folks who agree on a definition.
No one’s demonstrated that the thing to which that definition refers
has any manifestation in reality.
Say we define pixies as invisible beings that open all the flower petals.
When we see flowers opening their petals,
is that then evidence of pixies?
No. We’ve started out with an unfalsifiable assumption:
that the process of opening petals
requires an external supernatural agent to make it work.
These kinds of assumptions were widespread among our ancestors,
who believed that everything from thunder
to the motion of astronomical bodies had to be driven
by various supernatural agents to make them work.
For instance, it might be claimed that
the sun was drawn across the sky on a chariot
by a deity dedicated to that specific function.
These were definitions that everyone within a given culture agreed on;
definitions woven deeply into the fabric of their belief systems.
But as humans produced more accurate models of how things worked,
the gods started disappearing.
If you believe in any supernatural agents,
I’d like to invite you to reflect privately for a moment
on the processes you believe
those supernatural agents control in your life.
Do they engineer coincidences?
Do they orchestrate events to teach you lessons?
In your private reflection, ask yourselves,
do any of the events you’re thinking of really require supernatural agents?
I’ll come back to this later on.
But for now, let’s continue with the colourblindness analogy
and look at some more hypothetical responses from the coloursighted.
What if they said you just haven’t tried hard enough to see colour?
What if they told you you first have to believe in colour, then you’ll see it?
What if they asserted that nothing made sense without colour?
What if they claimed that, secretly, you already believed colour existed —
you were just angry with it?
If you were colourblind, what would you make of these assertions?
Not much, I suspect.
But these are the kinds of evasions and sideshows
that I receive as an atheist all the time, in place of evidence.
Let’s see them through.
I can’t count the times it’s been put to me
that I can't see gods because I haven’t tried hard enough —
obviously, not something you’d say to a colourblind person.
The circular nature of this argument is exposed
when I ask what proof there is for it.
I’m told the proof I haven’t tried hard enough is that I can’t see gods.
This kind of circle does have a ring of validity in certain circumstances.
Playing Chopin requires sustained effort.
Practice generates incremental improvements
in accuracy, speed, emotional expression.
With other tasks, sustained effort leads to a eureka moment
where a skill is suddenly acquired.
An example would be stereograms.
These are pictures composed of repeating patterns.
For those of us who have reasonable binocular vision,
it’s possible to defocus, stare into the middle distance,
and watch the repeated patterns coalesce
to reveal a hidden 3-dimensional object.
Takes a while to get the knack, but once you get it, you’re off.
In both the steady-learning and eureka-moment tasks,
the ‘haven't tried hard enough’ circle acts as
a simple algorithmic prompt
to determine whether further effort is needed.
If the task can't be done, more effort is required.
If it still can’t be done, still more effort is required.
And so on — until finally it can be done.
But the ‘haven’t tried hard enough’ circle gets vicious in other scenarios.
Without binocular vision, no amount of effort will unlock stereograms.
Raw effort won’t help any of us when it comes to goals
like levitating, or hearing the rotation of Jupiter, or making a cloud smile.
Sometimes it isn’t that the goal’s impossible,
but that we become entrenched in an impossible method.
Take the alchemists’ dream of chrysopoeia —
the transmutation of other metals into gold.
In the 1980s,
minute quantities of gold were reportedly obtained from bismuth,
not through chemical reactions, which the alchemists doggedly pursued,
but by physical bombardment from a particle accelerator.
Before you put task failure down to lack of effort,
you have to rule out all other possible explanations —
including lack of physical endowment and unworkable method,
but most basic of all, task impossibility.
So, first things first:
let’s have it demonstrated that seeing gods is achievable —
as it is with stereograms, playing music, and seeing colour.
Then we can talk about who hasn’t tried hard enough.
I have to believe in gods first, then I’ll see them?
Wrong. I speak from experience.
I used to believe without reservation. Never saw a god.
What I did was take experiences that I found rewarding or punishing,
or seemed improbable or inexplicable,
and attributed them with divine significance.
That’s not seeing a god. That’s defining pixies —
defining a supernatural agent as the cause of these experiences,
then taking those experiences as evidence of that supernatural agent.
It’s a system perfectly designed to reinforce unjustified beliefs.
Nothing makes sense without gods?
On the contrary, history demonstrates
that things make more sense without gods.
I’ve already noted previous divine conceptualisations
of thunder, the sun, etc.
When we use gods as pseudo-explanations which offer no insight,
we miss valid explanations which offer reliable, predictable results.
Many christians claim we all secretly believe in their god Yahweh —
that we’re just angry with him.
This idea seems to track back to a Biblical passage in Romans,
that claims Yahweh made known to the godless
those aspects of himself that could be known.
The obvious problem with trying to use this passage
to suggest everyone secretly believes
is that the Bible fully acknowledges the existence of unbelievers.
Mark 16 talks of the condemnation awaiting those who don’t believe.
Corinthians 6 specifically instructs christians
not to be yoked together with us, citing our wickedness and darkness.
No mention here of pretending not to believe.
These and other Biblical passages make an explicit distinction
between those who believe and those who don’t.
If it was true that everyone already believed,
then missionaries would be redundant.
The most their work could amount to would be simply
to remind the cultures they visited of beliefs they already possessed.
But that’s not what they do, is it.
Missionary work isn’t restoration. It’s colonisation.
And it’s further evidence that seeing gods is nothing like seeing colour.
I gave an example of a formal experiment earlier,
but the evidence of our colour perception is everywhere.
We use it to negotiate traffic, to judge the ripeness of fruit,
to interpret statistical charts, to identify poisonous species,
to distinguish sports teams. And so on.
But no such utility has been demonstrated regarding gods.
On the contrary, the so-called evidence presented in defence of gods
is a quagmire of contradiction, evasion, and deflection.
Different issues are thrown up by the statement
that arguing with atheists is like trying to convey
the beauty of a rainbow to a colourblind person.
For starters, colourblindness is a red herring.
The obstacle here isn’t an inability to see colour.
If you think it is, let me remove that obstacle
by inviting you to convey the beauty of rainbows to me.
I don’t find rainbow beautiful at all — I find them insipid.
But I do see colour perfectly well.
Folks who accept my invitation soon realise the problem.
They can talk about the colour of rainbows till the cows come home.
They can talk about saturation, juxtaposition, permeation.
Yep, I see all of that too. Rainbows still leave me cold.
Beauty is not conveyed.
When we say something’s beautiful —
whether it’s an object, a sensation, an idea —
we’re not perceiving some inherent property of that thing.
All we’re saying is that we feel some personal connection with it;
that it resonates with our own ideas, values, fantasies, needs.
Nothing more than that. Nothing objective; nothing universal.
We haven’t observed some profound reality,
or unlocked some transcendental insight.
Nor does beauty indicate goodness.
There’s little that we humans haven’t found beautiful in our time —
including rape, torture, genocide, even apocalypse.
The idea of these things puts some humans in a state of rapture.
Experiences of beauty merely reflect our own sense of personal connection.
And those connections can be broken.
For instance, beauty might not survive
the revelation of disagreeable information.
If we discover that a favourite singer beats his spouse and children,
we might well find that his music,
which for years we’ve found transportingly beautiful,
seems suddenly empty. The music hasn’t changed.
It’s our connection with it that’s been damaged.
When ex-christians are asked what prompted them
to unsubscribe from christianity, a very specific experience emerges
as one of the most common, pivotal factors.
Reading the Bible. Some cite it as the cause of their deconversion —
the primary event that begins the unravelling.
Sometimes it’s characterised more as a catalyst —
reading the Bible lubricates a process already in motion.
For others, Biblical disillusionment comes
near the end of their transition to atheism.
For these folks, it has more of the feel
of nailing a coffin already long-assembled.
But all of these folks are responding to new disagreeable knowledge
that damages their previous connection.
For many of them, it’s the Biblical celebration of sadism
that makes them realise just what they’ve been signed up to —
seeing humans depicted as disposable playthings
who must dance to whatever arbitrary, degrading tune
Yahweh chooses to hum.
And this is by no means an exclusively christian phenomenon.
Some ex-muslims have expressed similar alienation
in relation to the Qu’ran and the Hadith.
Of course, losing a powerfully beautiful connection can be painful.
And rather than face that pain, some will try to prevent the loss.
One way to do this is to cherry-pick —
like reframing a vile painting, the apologist reframes the Bible
to try and hide the ugly parts from the audience.
Forget about all that dehumanising sadism,
just think about the fluffy stuff, like the story of the good Samaritan —
a story that encourages us not to stand by
in the midst of suffering and do nothing,
but to do what we can to help.
A principle the Biblical god Yahweh conspicuously fails to honour.
Other apologists display their vile painting unapologetically,
and instead try to paint their audience as similarly degraded.
Rather than attempt to hide the Bible’s sadism,
they assert that we’re all sinful creatures deserving death,
so we should expect no better treatment.
If you ever find yourself in a community
that tries to instill that level of self-loathing in you,
I’d suggest you think hard about the company you’re keeping,
and about whose needs are really being served by your degradation.
Other apologists attempt to blur the vile painting,
absolving Yahweh of his atrocities by suggesting
he must have ultimately noble reasons,
however unclear they appear to us.
With substantial denial and distortion,
Biblical beauty can sometimes be preserved.
But preserved at a cost.
Those who, with honesty and integrity, refuse to conspire
with these distortions will have to be discounted in some way —
mischaracterised, dehumanised, even demonised.
The conflict this kind of distortion breeds is a price we all pay —
and will continue to pay so long as we’re happy
to value our personal fantasies above the lives of other humans.
An experience of beauty can be uplifting, consoling, intoxicating.
But it does not mean that the beholder of that beauty
has special access to some transcendental reality hidden from others.
In fact, in order to sustain that experience of beauty,
substantial amounts of reality might have to be blocked out.
As I’ve indicated, human beings can connect to many things.
The question is: do they have any substance?
If you’re not familiar with the illusionist Derren Brown,
I encourage you to change that.
If you have 50 odd minutes to spare,
I recommend the second part of his Fear and Faith project.
In it, he explored our desire
to make sense out of the randomness we experience.
He invited applications to a fake TV show called ‘Intervention’.
Meeting his chosen subject Emma,
he explained that a number of actors would be
intervening in her everyday life over the next few weeks
in order to teach her lessons that she could use in a positive way.
She was told all the encounters would be filmed to see her reactions.
Her task was to detect these interventions,
and record them in a video diary.
In fact, there were no actors and no cameras.
She was left to go about her business unobserved.
Nonetheless, she recorded a number of events
that she suspected to be artificially staged,
like people staring at her, or running after her with money.
And she started to consider the lessons they might be teaching her —
for instance she began to think she should smile a bit more, and worry less.
But the interventions and the lessons were all in her head.
The parallels with theism are clear.
Having been a theist myself, I recognise how we were encouraged
to look out for divine interventions in our lives.
And just like Emma, we of course identified many interventions,
along with the lessons we thought they might be teaching us.
What evidence did we ever have
that they were in fact any divine interventions? None whatsoever.
Of course we all learn from life.
As an atheist, I still review my actions critically.
I ask myself, Am I ok with the way I’ve behaved?
Have I been fair?
Might I have done things differently given the chance?
I don’t think anyone who’s serious about self-awareness
ever stops asking questions like these.
The only thing that stopped when I became an atheist
was the head game I was playing on myself
that there was some grand, supernatural design behind it all.
The Derren Brown special also showed
an artificially induced religious conversion.
Over a course of focussed conversation,
Derren invited an atheist stem cell researcher called Natalie
to imagine a perfect father, to imagine a sense of awe,
to think about the idea of faith reframed as a positive thing,
and to think about the notion of agency in her life —
the idea that there could be a plan.
Derren then left her to her thoughts,
suggesting she should feel free
to stand up and move around if she wanted.
The moment she did so, she appeared to be physically overwhelmed
by what she later described as love magnified beyond her experience.
It’s clearly an indescribably beautiful moment for her.
She begins to cry and offers both gratitude
and apologies to an unidentified recipient.
She reports the feeling that her spectrum has been broadened,
labelling the experience ‘supernatural’ because she was unable to explain it.
Derren later debriefs her,
gingerly explaining how her experience was stage-managed.
It’s fascinating viewing.
And, for many folks who’ve had similar experiences,
possibly uncomfortable viewing.
Because it does raise one loud and reverberating bell of a question:
‘Is that what happened to me?’
Was your experience the product of an accumulation of suggestions
simmering away then coming together
in a powerful moment of beautiful but artificial revelation?
Some of us will choose to ignore these questions.
Some will seek refuge in thought-terminating clichés
like the colourblindness analogies.
How you respond is up to you.
For me, if it’s a choice between a beautiful illusion and an ugly fact,
gimme ugly every time —
whether that means discovering the treachery of a loved one,
the betrayal of a trusted government,
or the depravity of a cherished religion.
Only when we possess good information about the world
can we hope to respond with any real justice and precision.
Which is why I encourage you to stay with these questions;
to see them through; to ask yourself:
‘Am I really seeing things?’