Musings on my path to Atheism / Secular Humanism, and my happiness with it.
Don't click on the following unless you really wanna read my story. It was inspired by a comment I made elsewhere on LJ: When I was 12 years old or so, I rejected the Catholicism inflicted upon me in my childhood at the point where I was supposed to go through the ritual of Confirmation and stand up and tell the world that I Believed. I didn't, and I asked my mom for permission for me to quit before Confirmation, and she let me, and I've been thankful ever since.
My childhood Catholicism was pretty strict, and we were taught that we had to believe all the tenets of Catholicism, or else we weren't really Catholics. This strict belief system didn't work for me at all, and it was clear to me that I saw the Bible stories and stories of the saints as just stories instead of literal truths. I had casually attended the CCD classes on Wednesday afternoons for a few years, not paying serious attention (I didn't protest because I liked the nearby playground quite a lot). But getting to the point of Confirmation, where we were supposed to Confirm that we believed all that -- that was something I couldn't honestly do. I was glad to be spared from that ritual.
However, in later high school, I had a friend, Grace, who was a member of a liberal Quaker church, and she was always So Very Happy. She wanted to share her happiness with me, and suggested I go to church with her. I was drawn by her happiness and earnestness, and felt she "had something I didn't have". So I went with her to church for a couple of months, including to a retreat. During the retreat, I got swept up by the excitement (I really wanted to), and decided to stand up and "accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior". Yeah, I did that. I knew I didn't believe yet, I was just accepting it. I figured accepting was the first step, and the belief would follow.
Well, after that retreat, I started going to Sunday School with Grace in addition to church. They were doing Apologetics! It was practically a sign for me -- getting to go through a study of why to believe in the Christian God. Perfect. Unfortunately for me, all the reasons ended up getting boiled down to "I had to take a leap in faith", and from that, the rest would follow. My acceptance wasn't enough, I had to take a leap in faith in order to have faith. Uh-oh. My logical brain couldn't handle this. It reminded me of the mathematical idea that if you started from the axiom (assumption) that 1=0, you could pretty much prove any crazy false statement. I felt if I started from the axiom that The Christian God is True, or even Any God is True, I was just assuming something that might be as false as 1=0, and I couldn't allow myself to go from there. It was obvious to me that starting from a faulty assumption of that magnitude you could get yourself into drawing all sorts of horrible and wrong conclusions. I couldn't be happy with lots of pretty answers if those pretty answers had the chance of being unfounded and untrue. That's where the problem with faith was for me. Much later I found a quote by a favorite scientist that captures this well: You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here... I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1981 BBC interview)
I found that the only kinds of "truths" I could put any level of faith (or confidence, really) in were scientific truths, which are really only "provisional truths", i.e. our best approximations of truth until the next better theory comes along. Looking at the history of science, the truths built on each other, gradually becoming more refined and detailed and extended, in such a way that you can feel that at least a comfortable fraction of reality is being reasonably approximated. I like Stephen J. Gould's definition of a fact: "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'"
So, again I quit trying to be a believer. I rejected not just Christianity, but any form of belief in a Higher Power or force outside the natural laws that couldn't be measured. I could only believe in what I had evidence for.
Luckily I found that this lead to a different kind of happiness for me. I found a freedom from "shoulds" and "guilts" that so many religions push on their believers. I realized that my ethical system ended up pretty much the same as (I found out later) the pagan idea of "An it harm none, do as you will.". I found logical reasons for ethical behavior and positive reasons to find worthwhile purposes in life, that (I found out many years later) was called "secular humanism". I ended up feeling so happy about this freedom that I ended up feeling very happy and positive about my atheism and secular humanism, that I ended up not entirely unlike my high school friend Grace. I get the urge, occasionally, to spread my form of "the good news", which for me is the message of freedom and tolerance and pleasure and a positive humanistic outlook for the future. But I remember that most folk don't like to be proselytized at, so I don't usually go on about it.
Last night I got to go to a Watson Lecture at Caltech. The lecture was "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" given by Dr. Christof Koch. I have had several debates wtih various people about the mind/brain question, and so have always been eager to learn the latest news in the "mind is a physical phenomenon of the brain" types of research. I'm not fond of the "we don't know how this happens, so we call it god or soul or whatever" kind of arguments. Anyway, the lecture was excellent, and Christof Koch was his usual energetic and enthusiastic self. He described his latest research (much of it done with the late Francis Crick [yeah, *him*]), where he and his fellow researchers were able to show evidence for particular neurons that were keyed into identifying particular faces, such as Bill Clinton (a face *always* in the news [with M. Lewinsky] at the time that that particular experiment was done). I remember reading many years ago that brain researchers doubted that they'd ever find a "grandmother cell", i.e. a cell that was dedicated to recognizing your own grandmother -- they suspected that recognising one's grandmother would be a higher brain function that would require many neurons to act together. But Koch's work seems to show that there are grandmother cells, and Bill Clinton cells, etc. Fascinating! He also showed really intriguing results that showed that higher brain functions were responsible for interpreting some visual illusions (which he inflicted on us too!), implying that the results we "see", i.e. the results we're conscious of, happen beyond the basic functions of the visual cortex. Wow.
For me, getting to go to this kind of lecture is almost like what I imagine some people might get from a sermon. I get to learn new insights into the physical world, in this case new insights into what makes our brains capable of creating the "I" experience, the experience of consciousness. Dr. Koch is dedicated to finding the physical and neurobiological explanations for these feelings, and I applaud his progress and look forward to further updates.
My childhood Catholicism was pretty strict, and we were taught that we had to believe all the tenets of Catholicism, or else we weren't really Catholics. This strict belief system didn't work for me at all, and it was clear to me that I saw the Bible stories and stories of the saints as just stories instead of literal truths. I had casually attended the CCD classes on Wednesday afternoons for a few years, not paying serious attention (I didn't protest because I liked the nearby playground quite a lot). But getting to the point of Confirmation, where we were supposed to Confirm that we believed all that -- that was something I couldn't honestly do. I was glad to be spared from that ritual.
However, in later high school, I had a friend, Grace, who was a member of a liberal Quaker church, and she was always So Very Happy. She wanted to share her happiness with me, and suggested I go to church with her. I was drawn by her happiness and earnestness, and felt she "had something I didn't have". So I went with her to church for a couple of months, including to a retreat. During the retreat, I got swept up by the excitement (I really wanted to), and decided to stand up and "accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior". Yeah, I did that. I knew I didn't believe yet, I was just accepting it. I figured accepting was the first step, and the belief would follow.
Well, after that retreat, I started going to Sunday School with Grace in addition to church. They were doing Apologetics! It was practically a sign for me -- getting to go through a study of why to believe in the Christian God. Perfect. Unfortunately for me, all the reasons ended up getting boiled down to "I had to take a leap in faith", and from that, the rest would follow. My acceptance wasn't enough, I had to take a leap in faith in order to have faith. Uh-oh. My logical brain couldn't handle this. It reminded me of the mathematical idea that if you started from the axiom (assumption) that 1=0, you could pretty much prove any crazy false statement. I felt if I started from the axiom that The Christian God is True, or even Any God is True, I was just assuming something that might be as false as 1=0, and I couldn't allow myself to go from there. It was obvious to me that starting from a faulty assumption of that magnitude you could get yourself into drawing all sorts of horrible and wrong conclusions. I couldn't be happy with lots of pretty answers if those pretty answers had the chance of being unfounded and untrue. That's where the problem with faith was for me. Much later I found a quote by a favorite scientist that captures this well: You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here... I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1981 BBC interview)
I found that the only kinds of "truths" I could put any level of faith (or confidence, really) in were scientific truths, which are really only "provisional truths", i.e. our best approximations of truth until the next better theory comes along. Looking at the history of science, the truths built on each other, gradually becoming more refined and detailed and extended, in such a way that you can feel that at least a comfortable fraction of reality is being reasonably approximated. I like Stephen J. Gould's definition of a fact: "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'"
So, again I quit trying to be a believer. I rejected not just Christianity, but any form of belief in a Higher Power or force outside the natural laws that couldn't be measured. I could only believe in what I had evidence for.
Luckily I found that this lead to a different kind of happiness for me. I found a freedom from "shoulds" and "guilts" that so many religions push on their believers. I realized that my ethical system ended up pretty much the same as (I found out later) the pagan idea of "An it harm none, do as you will.". I found logical reasons for ethical behavior and positive reasons to find worthwhile purposes in life, that (I found out many years later) was called "secular humanism". I ended up feeling so happy about this freedom that I ended up feeling very happy and positive about my atheism and secular humanism, that I ended up not entirely unlike my high school friend Grace. I get the urge, occasionally, to spread my form of "the good news", which for me is the message of freedom and tolerance and pleasure and a positive humanistic outlook for the future. But I remember that most folk don't like to be proselytized at, so I don't usually go on about it.
Last night I got to go to a Watson Lecture at Caltech. The lecture was "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" given by Dr. Christof Koch. I have had several debates wtih various people about the mind/brain question, and so have always been eager to learn the latest news in the "mind is a physical phenomenon of the brain" types of research. I'm not fond of the "we don't know how this happens, so we call it god or soul or whatever" kind of arguments. Anyway, the lecture was excellent, and Christof Koch was his usual energetic and enthusiastic self. He described his latest research (much of it done with the late Francis Crick [yeah, *him*]), where he and his fellow researchers were able to show evidence for particular neurons that were keyed into identifying particular faces, such as Bill Clinton (a face *always* in the news [with M. Lewinsky] at the time that that particular experiment was done). I remember reading many years ago that brain researchers doubted that they'd ever find a "grandmother cell", i.e. a cell that was dedicated to recognizing your own grandmother -- they suspected that recognising one's grandmother would be a higher brain function that would require many neurons to act together. But Koch's work seems to show that there are grandmother cells, and Bill Clinton cells, etc. Fascinating! He also showed really intriguing results that showed that higher brain functions were responsible for interpreting some visual illusions (which he inflicted on us too!), implying that the results we "see", i.e. the results we're conscious of, happen beyond the basic functions of the visual cortex. Wow.
For me, getting to go to this kind of lecture is almost like what I imagine some people might get from a sermon. I get to learn new insights into the physical world, in this case new insights into what makes our brains capable of creating the "I" experience, the experience of consciousness. Dr. Koch is dedicated to finding the physical and neurobiological explanations for these feelings, and I applaud his progress and look forward to further updates.