An atheist’s defense of religion

I’ve been an atheist ever since I was born. My mom and dad were both fervent atheists, and I was raised to believe this was both obvious and normal. My certainty that there is no such thing as a god (in any relevant sense of the word) has not wavered throughout my life.

My attitude towards religion, however, has. I remember being stunned when I met my first person who [I knew] believed in a god, at something like age 7; I remember being equally stunned upon discovering that the vast majority of Americans did so. I remember, as a young kid, resolving that I would play punish by just not talking to anyone who believed in god (I did the same thing with smokers), only to quickly realize this was highly impractical.

When I got to college, I was still very militant, looking down on people who cling to religion as dumb insecure suckers who need a fabricated authority to define their moral belief system. A few things changed during college:

1) One of my roommates / best friends was very religious
2) I learned that 90% of people (including myself, obviously) have the same religion as their parents

This didn’t really stop me from judging religion, but it helped me at least allow that religious people could be otherwise be intelligent and worthwhile. It still seemed crazy to me that anyone could believe in God, but there was plenty of empirical evidence that smart people did and I came to understand the powerful psychology of instilling axioms at a young age. By the time I was in college, for me, it was very much a live and let live.

Recently, though, this understanding has advanced a little further. Sure, believing in God is crazy because the existence of God is so unbelievably improbable, but I realized a year or so ago that I believed in even more improbable things. Here are some things I believe in that are equally inherently ridiculous:

1. Gravity — It’s fundamentally ridiculous that an object 92 million miles away can keep Earth in orbit around it. That is many, many times larger than the fundamental unit of life (an atom) and there is no chain of atoms connecting them or anything. How can such a fundamentally communicative process occur with no medium over such a great distance? There is a hypothetical particle called a graviton that mediates this force but these are undetectable and really purely a hypothetical construct arbitrarily invented to explain a process we don’t understand. Kind of like God.

Gravity is absolutely not credible.

2. Srinivasa Ramanujan — I bet half of you know this story really well and the other half haven’t heard of him. For the latter half, here’s wikipedia. The key points: Srinivasa Ramanujan was a completely self-taught Indian mathematicians who despite having zero formal training of any sort came up with crazy formulas like these. This is not some kind of run of the mill idiot savant who can remember numbers or multiply quickly or something equally boring — Ramanujan discovered a ton of hitherto undiscovered and important mathematical theorems working in India completely disconnected from the mathematical communities.

At age 25, he finally established contact with the establishment, which did not believe he existed. The reaction of mathematician G.H. Hardy, who eventually brought Ramanujan into the fold, is telling: “Hardy’s initial reaction on seeing the letters was that Ramanujan was a fraud… but then there were several astonishingly beautiful formulas that were correct and very deep. Only a mathematician of the highest class could write them down. So on second thought Hardy concluded that it was more probable that Ramanujan was a genius and unlikely that he was a fraud because no one but a true genius could have the imagination to invent such formulae.”

Ramanujan went over to England, did some more crazy ass shit, and died at age 33. His whole life story is absolutely not credible.

3. Simple molecules — Alcohol (methanol) has 6 atoms and has a crazy variety of effects on the human body.

Hydrogen peroxide has 4 atoms and it will mess you up if you drink it or pour it on yourself.

Cyanide has 2 atoms and it’s fatally poisonous at 1.5 parts per million.

Carbon monoxide has 2 atoms and it’s poisonous.

Ammonia has 4 atoms and it’s brutal on many levels.

Nitrous oxide has 3 atoms and it’s called laughing gas for a reason.

All of these molecules are composed of (by far) the 4 most common atoms in terms of both occurrence in nature and in our bodies. It’s not credible that they can be combined in such simple combinations to have such strong effects in such small volumes.

Honorable mention: dogs, aluminum foil, sending a spaceship to the moon successfully on our first try

So, there you have it — three things that seem completely implausible, but I believe all of them and maybe you do too. Why do I believe these? Because I learned them from people I trusted, same reason people believe religion or anything else. Despite the fact that all three of these things are ridiculous if you think about them throwing your preconceptions out, and I certainly haven’t come remotely close to verifying any of these things myself (Newton’s-apple gravity feels qualitatively different than sun-earth gravity, though I might concede that point), I believe all of them very strongly to the point where I can’t even imagine how anyone could convince me that they were false.

And that gives me a lot of empathy and understanding for religion. There but for the grace of the laws of physics go I. Belief is, fundamentally, not about evidence in the vast majority of cases; initial conditions matter a whole bunch. Live and let live.