“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Alice in Wonderland
Like Alice I am woefully unskilled in the art of believing impossible things. Even if I were to spend an entire hour a day I doubt I could develop the proficiency to believe even one impossible thing before breakfast, much less six. This lack of imagination is one of the primary reasons I could never be an atheist. (I figure since I’m already on this rant . . . )
I’m not sure how they do it, how they aquire the skill, but modern atheists have an incomparable ability to believe impossible things. Take, for example, the following list of beliefs. Not all of them are shared by every atheist, but all who claim the label believe at least one of these items:
1. Emergent properties “arise” out of more fundamental entities (i.e., matter) and yet are novel or irreducible with respect to them. Consciousness, for example, is an emergent property of the brain, arising—like magic—from a specific arrangement of molecules. This magical property which is created by the physical can also turn around and affect the physical matter from which it came.2. Everything that is real is, in some sense, really physical. Therefore, mental states such as beliefs, desires, and sensations do not exist . Mental states—even ones like the belief that mental states do not exist—do not actually exist but are merely physical states in the brain.
3. Our cognitive faculties are the result of from blind mechanisms like natural selection working on sources of genetic variation, such as random genetic mutation, yet are reliable for distinguishing between truth and false aspects of reality, such as the claim that our cognitive faculties have resulted from blind mechanisms.
4. Evolution is a blind process that has no teleology; whatever behavior works is the behavior that survives . Yet ethical norms of behavior should not be based on what works or what will lead to survival but should be based on concepts not found in nature (even though nature is all that exists).
5. The brain is nothing more than a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. Nevertheless, a person’s beliefs (i.e., about the existence of God) are not determined by random fluctuations in the natural chemical and physical laws but are chosen by the individual and should be considered rational, reasonable, and respectable.
6. A human being has a finite ability to know, yet human beings should be taken seriously when making claims that no infinite beings can or do exist.
While I’m fairly certain that all Western atheists believe at least one of these items, I am completely baffled at how they do it. Admittedly, I’ve never been much of one for magic or mysticism, and since such alien and exotic concepts are required to maintain a belief in atheism, I am at a distinct disadvantage.
Still, I wonder how they are able to maintain such supple reasoning abilities. I wonder sometimes if, like the Queen of Hearts, they have to practice the skill of believing the impossible.
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