Greta Christina’s post on

How Atheists Can't Win

, tells us why we can’t seem to win in our debates with believers. I’m going to give ten reasons why atheists can’t win at all because we are against the overwhelming odds—so much so that a post title like this is deserved. The odds are so against us that it should be shocking when believers change their minds by leaving their culturally inherited Christian faith. I think religion is here to stay and that’s why atheism can’t win.



1) Atheism can’t win because in America (where I live) Christianity dominates our culture. People in America are enculturated or indoctrinated to believe, first by their own parents and immediate family, and also by the culture at large. This has the same effect as brainwashing with all of the difficulties of helping brainwashed people see things differently. There is also a lot of social pressure to believe, depending on one’s social contacts. And it’s harder in the professional business or sales world to get ahead if it’s known you are an atheist. There are alternative Christian Yellow Page phone books for people proud of their faith, whereas any atheist listed in an Atheist Yellow Pages would bring the kiss of death to his business. Polls show that atheists are one of the least trusted minorities. Christians also have a ready made network of social groups in place for believers to meet other believers in church, and to find companionship and help in times of need. Atheists in the meantime are afraid to come out and remain isolated and alone in their doubts.



2) Atheism can’t win against the brain. Our brains evolved from the lower species of animals and so we have a built in agency detector inherited from them. Animals who survived were the ones that saw faces in the leaves and the grass and the trees. Precisely because they saw faces in random objects in the woods they also had the time to escape from any predators lurking in the woods before they struck, even if this meant a lot of false alarms. It’s this same agency detection that caused the ancients to see divine agents behind strange events their world, like lightening, or thunderstorms, or disasters like fires. And this same agency detection was at work when they had a good crop, or the birth of a boy, or when they had a dream. As agency detectors they saw divine beings behind these events and it still lingers on today. Even in today’s world after a plane crash kills everyone on board except one woman, she will see the hand of god in it and believe god has a purpose for her life because she was spared.



3) Atheism can’t win because it offers no eternal hope. It offers no hope to live forever in a blissful heaven with a loving all-powerful eternal God, which ultimately means that our life has no eternal significance. It offers no hope to ever see dead loved ones. It offers no hope that there is some supernatural being outside this world who can help us when we’re in need as we pray. When I see that picture of Jesus welcoming a pilgrim into heaven I know atheism cannot compete since there is nothing we can offer to replace that wishful hope.







4) Atheism can’t win against the threat of an eternal hell. This is the flip side to reason number 3. Once indoctrinated to believe as children by our Christian culture it becomes extremely difficult for adult believers to doubt their inherited faith. Throw in the belief of a devil who wants to make you doubt and thereby cause you to end up where he will, and you have a cradle to grave threat against even wanting to seriously investigate your faith. When a believer does care enough about the truth, the threat of hell will cause atheists to make an overwhelming case with overwhelming evidence before believers will seriously question their faith. But this doesn’t seem to be something atheists can produce, given the nature of belief and the kinds of evidence believers will accept as telling against what they believe. After all, believers must be forced by the available evidence to risk Pascal’s Wager that the Christian faith is nothing more than someone crying wolf too many times to be bothered by it, without even noticing that Christians risk the hells of other faiths including some sects within their own ranks.



5) Atheism can’t win because there will always be room for religious faith. The mere existence of something unexplainable by science will always leave room for faith, since that’s where believers can find their god, in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. The problem is that in closing the existing gaps scientists will also discover more mysteries to be solved. Scientific discoveries do this, for that’s the nature of what makes for a fruitful scientific discovery in the first place. And as science has opened up new gaps the believer can always say with faith that “God did it,” without waiting for science to close the very gaps it discovered in the first place. Even as scientists close the gaps believers can still find a designer/creator god in the complex workings of the harmonious universe who isn’t to be found in the gaps at all. So even if one day scientists come up with a Theory of Everything that closes all of the gaps, believers have already been preparing themselves to say “God is in the universe, not in the gaps,” so it won’t change anything for True Believers.



6) Atheism can’t win against the mind of the believer—especially the smart, educated ones—who rationalize away the objections to their faith in the face of the available evidence. This is where cognitive dissonance theory comes into play. Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that when people have a lot vested into what they believe then when confronted with powerful evidence to the contrary they will not only remain unconvinced, they will actually become more convinced that they are right. And in the case of Christianity with a vested interest in the eternal promise of reward and threat, along with its cultural dominance, this has got to be of much greater force than on the more mundane cases where psychologists have focused their studies. See this chart about cognitive biases . And I’ve devoted several posts to the topic people believe what they prefer to be true . So coupled with the threat of hell and cognitive biases, atheists must present utterly overwhelming evidence that Christianity is false, something which isn’t to be be found in the debates that separate us. In any other debatable issue a believer would cease believing if it weren’t for these biases and the threat of hell.



7) Atheism can’t offer a universal absolute unchanging eternal grounding to morality (or ethics). For some reason believers think an absolute grounding for morality is necessary for living a good life. In fact, this is one of the reasons atheists are one of the least trusted people in the polls, for without an absolute grounding then why not eat babies, rape others, and kill them if we think we could get away with these deeds? This misinformed belief of what it makes to live life without a god is something even intellectuals like William Lane Craig prattle on about. It’s a serious impediment to getting believers to consider atheism. In any case, morality for the atheist is that which pays in the here and now in this world without any eternal promise of a reward or any threat of punishment, and that’s all they have even though it should be enough. It does matter now what they do. It matters a great deal to ones they love and who love them. Believers by contrast don’t have to think about their inherited ethics as much because their god is the source of it. All they have to do is accept it. Believers just don’t see that theirs is an infantile morality where they feel secure in knowing the limits of behavior rather than having to think about it and come to their own conclusions.