Why Atheism May Be the Best Way to Understand God

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted December 19, 2008.

If the word of God is true, it makes a certain amount of sense that people will kill and die for it. Understanding that is pretty straightforward. But if people are killing and dying for a delusion, then there's some explaining to do.

That's actually an exciting question. Because it raises fundamental questions about human psychology.

Religion has an important place in all societies. Even in those where it is proscribed.

If the priests are, in fact, acting out the commands of God, they're like engineers or generals, trying to get certain things done, based on the data that's available to them.

If religions are made up, with most of their creators and practitioners sincerely unaware that they are creating institutions based on fictions, that's a very different type of phenomenon.

The economics of religion are quite mundane if God exists. It makes sense that billions of dollars are collected in his name. But if he is a widely held fantasy, then the resources devoted to the God business are a great and fascinating mystery.

If people are making up the God stories, it's not hard to figure out why they're different. But if God exists and they're actually coming from him, we have to wonder why he doesn't make himself clear. Or -- more likely -- assume that it's not his problem, since he's perfect. and then we would have to ask what's the matter with his prophets that they keep screwing it up during transmission, and figure out why that is. After that, we must wonder why people insist that the revealed word is accurate.

Agnosticism does not permit us to take either approach. Agnosticism can't ask the fundamental questions about God. Or man. It leads to triviality or incoherence.

The Way Forward

If we start as agnostics, we can't ask the fundamental questions.

We can look at what people do, but not understand why they do it. We can look at the forms that religion and spiritual practices take, but we can't understand why spiritual practices and religion exist, in all their various forms. We can find out a lot about the subject, but not really understand it or create a coherent theory that explains it.

If we start with belief, we're stuck.

We can't go up to God, drag him into the witness box, make him swear on himself, then cross examine him about what he's really like, what he really wants from us, and why he keeps sending different messages.

We can't get up close and examine him. We can't set up scientific tests to measure and evaluate him.

All we have are "revealed truths."

But we have too many. There's no way to sort out which is "truthier," short of killing each other in the hopes that only one side will be left standing. We've been doing that for over a thousand years, without making any progress.

We are at the same impasse today that we were at when Richard the Lionheart went off to Jerusalem to fight Saladin.

In the effort to understand religion and faith, belief -- even if it's correct -- is a dead end. If we start from there, we end there. There is no way forward.

If we start with atheism, we are asking questions about ourselves. That's something we can do.

We can examine ourselves, test ourselves, and see if our theories -- hypotheses -- about ourselves will stand up to examination. We can insist on consistency and coherence. If our ideas don't work, we can change them, and change them again, until they do.

We can even go in front of panel of judges of all the different faiths and say, "if you're willing to pretend for a moment that God doesn't exist, would this theory make sense?"

If we can't succeed, and there is no way to explain what's going on from a position of unbelief, then we have to eventually give it up and go at it from a different perspective.

Even if you, personally are a believer or an agnostic, and you are in search of some way to advance our understanding of faith and religion, to get past the impasse we've been at for millennia, there's only one way forward.

There are three doors. One leads us to confusion. One goes to a dead end.

Paradoxically, there's only one that offers the possibility of increasing our understanding of God, the one through unbelief.

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Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

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