January 6, 2011

• Does science show that atheists are angry at God?

  There's some survey information floating around the popular atheists blogs. 

  The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta complains:

  I don’t know what questions Exline asked, but if the conclusion people are reporting is that “atheists are angry at god,” there’s either a problem with the questions, the interpretation of the results, or communication of what was actually found.

  This plays into a common Christian narrative that atheists validate the existence of God because of their emotional states.  Normally atheists respond negatively to the accusation and try to distance themselves from it with some intellectual move.  I recall that atheist Richard Carrier will quip: 

  Finally, [Christian apologist, David Wood] resorts to the ad hominem tactic of claiming I'm "angry at God" because my "mind has been poisoned by rage, and this rage has led to [my] irrational war against Christianity." I'm angry at someone I don't even think exists? That's like accusing me of being angry at Darth Vader.

  Um...I do get angry at Anakin Skywalker for betraying his wife, murdering children he probably helped to train, and being such a selfish wanker who falls for the Dark-side despite there being virtually a large neon sign saying "EVIL" floating over Emperor Palpatine. That dick move cost the galaxy a huge setback in moral progress. You can be angry at hypothetical people and I'm sure the mirror neurons are firing in pretty much the same way.  My investment in the plight of the characters from the original trilogy, having watched the films countless times in my youth, is predicated on the sins of Darth Vader.  When I think of how horrible Luke Skywalker's life was and how virtually the entire weight of setting the galaxy right again was laid upon his orphan shoulders (at the expense of having a normal life), Anakin's moral failings shine brightly.  So I can be rather moved by this anger at times when watching Revenge of the Sith.  

  Although in terms of "me and the Christian god" I've been more historically bitter that there isn't even a coherent concept of that god to even properly hate. It probably would have been a much more emotionally healthy transition into unbelief had I been able to be straightforwardly angry at that god.  One has to be able to model the mental states of a being plausibly enough to even get a direct emotional "lock." And needless to say there are just so many messed up things in the definition of god that I've been intellectually unable to disregard in favor of some simplistic sky daddy picture.  It's just too psychologically hard to do and so historically I've been unable to get that lock in some subjective sense.  I had similar problems as a Christian with just trying to establish a coherent stable relationship for lots of similar reasons.  Others were willing to make all sorts of unjustified arbitrary assumptions that could be completely different than the next Christian over and I just wasn't willing to do that.  The Christian god had to do his own job of interacting and I wasn't going to interpret him into reality in ways that I knew were so plastic as to be entirely useless.  I always knew it wasn't my job to make the Christian god my imaginary friend.  I lived with that lack of confidence for a long time in a Christian context...and then eventually push came to shove and I bailed. 

  I imagine other people less constrained by the plausibility of the entity in question who reject its existence are perfectly capable of being angry in ordinary senses at a god they don't think exists. I see no reason to fault them for this and I don't think this tells us anything about atheists other than that they are human and have historical emotional entanglements with their native religions.  Allah doesn't exist because of angry apostates from Islam.  The many gods of the Hindus don't exist because of the emotional states of their ex-believers.  The common denominator here isn't hard to discern in a naturalistic context. 

  Ben

  • 9:29 am
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