Recently, the Atheist Experience uploaded ancient episodes they had aired from long ago. This weekend I’m listening to episodes from 1999. Despite being 16 years old, these conversations are largely relevant to today – maybe not the discussions about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, but rather the theistic discussions. We’re having the same discussions now that we were back then.

One argument pops up at me from one of those episodes – “You aren’t trying hard enough, or sincere enough, to find God, and that’s why you don’t believe”

I have a problem with the basic approach.

The approach is unfalsifiable

They never provide any bounds for how the test could fail. Suppose a particular theist who is chiding you about not working hard enough to know God put in 100 units of effort to achieve belief.

If you engage in 500 units of effort and sincerity, and aren’t any more convinced that a god exists, the person will just say, “Well, you did something wrong, or weren’t sincere enough.” Fine – you ramp it up to 5000 units of effort and sincerity, with no positive results, and produce the same feedback from this theist.

At what point have we shown that the theist making this claim is wrong? Maybe, after launching a massive campaign to engage in 500 million units of effort and sincerity, we could conclude that our efforts weren’t the problem. The problem could be that the theist was exceptionally gullible.

Without any provided parameters to the experiment, we don’t have to way of ruling it in or out.

The human mind can be conditioned

Worse yet, engaging in that level of effort, particularly when it’s purely about psychology, can become brainwashing – where a person’s mind is conditioned towards an intended goal to the point where the conclusion is accepted, even if it’s not actually true.

Imagination Inflation can occur if a person hears a story repeatedly, even if he/she was present at the event, and remembers it, until the memory is modified.

When they’re talking about “searching for God”, they’re not talking about searching your livingroom for your car keys, where if you investigate every surface, and in between every couch cushion, that you can reasonably conclude that the car keys aren’t present. No, they’re asking to drop to your knees and “become sincere” and to telepathically send out signals to an other undetectable being. They’re asking you to modify your psychology until you uncritically accept whatever they’re saying.

Suppose, instead of brainwashing techniques (accidental or intentional), the key to the belief was a physical object instead (such as from The Matrix):

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Would you take the pill?

Some people take drugs purely for the sake of having an experience. That’s not what I’m talking about here. You’re being offered a pill that will supposedly reveal “the truth” to you, but only if you take it.

I wouldn’t take either. I’d tell him to go fuck himself. In order for evidence to be valuable, it must be accessible and addressable to a completely sober mind. For all I know, this person has taken a delusion and labeled it “The Truth”. Even if I were to take the pill, and experience everything this theist has, and seen what he/she is calling “The Truth”, all I can say now is that I’ve observed what the person is calling “The Truth”. For all I know, either pill is going to warp my thought processes and produce hallucinations.

Going in, someone is claiming something that seems like it’s a delusion. Going out, all that I know is that I’ve shared in that delusion.

If someone said to a theist, “I can convince you that God doesn’t exist, but all you have to do is have this machine reprogram your mind, and you’ll see the truth”, I’d be right alongside the theist, backing away slowly.

Without that falsifiability, it’s impossible to distinguish between it being a delusion, or reality. That’s why, when this argument comes up, I dismiss it out of hand, because I already know from the outset that its epistemic value is abysmal. They see me as trying to find an excuse not to believe in a god.

… but I’ve already been there. I was kneeling in my room, roughly around the time these AE episodes aired, praying to God for any distinct sign that he was real, because I wanted to believe. I give precisely zero fucks about the theist’s personal experiences with the supernatural. The insinuation is that their personal experiences are somehow more important than my lifelong personal experiences that have revealed a world, where no supernatural anything manifested at any point, ever.

I’m not going to engage in self-imposed brainwashing to satisfy the theist’s poorly thought-out methodology for “finding God”. When I finally realized I was an atheist, I vowed to myself that I was going to do my best to not allow anyone to deceive me ever again.

That requires a sober mind.

I know one objection to what I’ve said. Yes, I am advocating for a change in thought process towards skepticism, critical thinking and scientific methodology. That does require you to condition your mind. The key to what I’m saying is in the phrase “sober mind”, which I mean “most in-tune with reality as possible.” While countless mental modes may exist, only one mode is the best at consistently and accurately understanding reality. That’s what I’m advocating – at least, to do one’s best at achieving. Often, the best reality-based position to take is “I don’t know.”

It’s a legitimate point to make, I think. Don’t dive into that blindly. If you care about what’s actually true, go ahead and evaluate my position, and see how well it does. If you don’t care, we don’t have much more to talk about… except maybe the “fantasy” genre.

Don’t get the mistaken impression that because we both have world views about how to reveal “the truth”, that we’re on an even playing field. If you think that appealing to your god can reveal information about reality, that’s a testable experiment.

We can establish double/triple blind trials where a sealed box is placed in a sealed room with a person. There’d be three groups, I think… one where the person is not trying to figure out what’s in the box. Another group would be allowed to investigate the box empirically. The third group will be allowed to pray or telepathically communicate however they wish, to whatever spirits they want, but are not allowed to examine or study the box. We’d give each group an hour with the box. After all, maybe God’s download rate is slow. That information may take awhile. The Bible doesn’t say he’s omni-bandwidth.

We’ll then compare results.