How did I become an atheist?

How it happened that one day I stopped believing in God?

The oldest of my memories go back to the high school reading of Stanislaw Lem's science-fiction book "The Invincible". The characters of this book struggle on a distant planet with the microbots created by artificial evolution and merging into huge, intelligent clouds capable of destroying spacecraft and eradicating human memory. I guess for the first time I learned that there may be not too much difference between something not-living and alive, and the boundary between one and the other is not clear. Biological evolution may be a further stage in the evolution of the cosmos, and in that case "life" does not have to be "breathed" into the matter by the Almighty God. Today Big History is describing these processes better and better, and astrophysicist Eric Chaisson even argues that both evolutions are based on the same principle.

Our reality by modern science: Laniakea supercluster. Contains 100,000 galaxies. One of them is our Milky Way, composed of 100 billion suns …

In any case, even if I did not lose faith at the time, God was less needed because I began to explain the origin of life in a new way. Interestingly, somehow I have never been obsessed by the differences between the Book of Genesis and the scientific theory of the Big Bang. The beginning of the whole universe did not worry me. My God was not so much the Creator of the world as the Giver of life, and here my problems began.

My lecture of Lem's novel is the only time I remember myself as a believer and the discovery of "mechanical evolution" as a shock that I was not able to cope with. When a few years later I began to study and popularize the knowledge of Early Christianity, and especially about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, I was already an atheist. I read serious academic papers written in English not only by the atheists, but primarily by Protestants, Jews, few Catholics. I first described these works on the Internet, then in Catholic "Znak" journal. I realized that the only hypothesis recognized by biblical scholars regardless of their particular worldviews was that of Jesus as a Jewish prophet who believed in the coming of the Kingdom of God and the end of the world. This was supposed to happen in his own life and in his disciples' lives. The New Testament is, in fact, one big apologetics: dramatic attempts to understand and explain why the Kingdom did not come.

I began to distance myself from the Churches, especially from Catholicism. My historical Jesus articles were read and differed strongly from the official works of Polish biblical scholars, arranged correctly according to Vatican instructions. The Polish Association of Rationalists asked me to make a translation of the secret Vatican instruction "Crimen Sollicitationis". This shattering document, which could not be duplicated, commented on or kept outside the bishop's safes, for decades constituted the basis for secret trials in cases of pedophilia. The work on the translation allowed me to understand why sexual offenses against minors (which in the Church happens no more often than in schools or orphanages) caused the depopulation of churches in so many countries of once Christian Europe.

It looks bad even today, although the popes are no longer silent on the subject. In March, Maria Collins, an Irish victim of sexual violence, was resigned from the Papal Commission for the Protection of Minors. (Her reason: Cardinals blocked the rise of a tribunal, supposed to judge bishops, concealing the crimes of their diocesan clergy). On Catholic websites, I am still not allowed to link to my "unauthorized" translation, and when I ask if the Polish Church is preparing its own official version, I meet with a perfect silence …

Spire Lofts, formerly known as the Church of St. Vincent de Paul in Brooklyn, New York

Does all this give me a solid and complete case for being an atheist? The Church of sinners can distort God's good; any hypothesis of historical Jesus is, in fact, very fragile because of the lack of non-Christian sources for studying his teachings, and even the possible emergence of life from inanimate matter does not yet mean that the Almighty does not exist. I am telling here the story of my doubts, as far as I can recreate it. I do not claim that it is a coherent whole.

In recent years the greatest influence on my atheism has been made by the physicist David Deutsch, and his distinction between "bad" mythological hypotheses about the invisible world and "good" hypotheses of modern science. By "the invisible" Deutsch means phenomena and processes too fast or too slow, too big or too small to be registered with our senses.

And so in the well-known Greek myth of the seasons, the goddess Demeter, mother of Persephone, is sad in winter, for her daughter must live in the Hades at this part of the year. The stress of the goddess is making the Earth cold and sterile. Deutsch notes that if the ancient Greeks had gone to Australia, they would have had a problem with that myth because it is the warmest in Australia during the Greek winter. In this situation, would the Greeks reject the myth? Probably they would supplement it with some ad hoc explanation, e.g. that in Australia it is so hot because that's the place where Demeter is pushing the heat from Greece.

Deutsch explains the success of modern science in that scientific hypotheses are not so easily adjustable to new, surprising observations. Current explanation of the seasons: The axis of the Earth is tilted toward its plane of rotation around the Sun, which gives the Greece a stronger warming for one half of the year. Leaning OFF the axis, Greece is freezing at the same time when Australia (lying on the other hemisphere and tilted TO the axis of rotation) fights with summer heat. According to Deutsch, in the case of such a "good" hypothesis, for example, the possible discovery that Greece and Australia have the same seasons at the same time - would immediately falsify the whole theory. In contrast to the Greek myth, there is no easily implemented change that could save the theory of "tilt to the plane of rotation" from being refused.

A whole new theory would be needed. In this way, science developed very quickly, replacing weak hypotheses with better and better ones, while myths for centuries were subject only to minor, forced corrections.

The Creation Museum in Kentucky (USA) placed dinosaurs in the reconstructed Noah's Ark. And how did the armadillo survived? In the picture is a skeleton of glyptodon, armadillo's ancestor from South America.

Let's leave aside the myths. Aren't Christian theology and other theologies created in the religions of the Book very similar here? Catholicism under John Paul II, for example, recognized that evolution is "something more than a hypothesis." What does that mean? Well, it means that man appeared as a result of evolution as an animal, but then God used that "evolved biological material" and "breathed" his soul into it…

Is that adjustment (or rather hasty, superficial synthesis) different from the corrections of the ancient Greeks, who according to Deutsch would save the myth of Persephone, threatened by observations from Australia? I do not see much difference here. Again, this is not a clear reason to reject God. The religions of the Book with their "theology of enforced adjustments" may not inspire confidence, but there are other religions…

However at some point, you have too many doubts, and suddenly you discover that you have become an atheist. It's a bit like a friendship. We forgive our friends for one disloyalty, then another, maybe even a third. However, after crossing a certain limit, confidence disappears.

Today I adhere to the sad belief that God probably does not exist.

According to Steemit's @orenshani7 good, verifiable hypotheses could historically precede religion. In his opinion, the elite priests in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China emerged as groups that began to associate celestial bodies with such phenomena as the tidal of rivers, rains, and droughts. The priests began "prophesying" when it was best to sow and when to harvest. Then both simple farmers and kings turned to priests with other questions: "Will my wife give birth to a son?" or "Do I declare war on the neighboring kingdom?" This time priests did not know the answers but quickly discovered that it is enough that their predictions will be only sometimes correct. "The likelihood of this happening grow rapidly as the flow of people seeking their advice increases. People that the prophecy made for them was fulfilled quickly told their friends in astonishment, and this led to an increase in the current of applicants".

@orenshani7 thinks that the miracles in fully developed religions works in exactly the same way as in lottery games: the chance to hit a particular combination of numbers (or to cure a cancer) is extremely small and almost certainly it will never happen to you. “A specific combination has a very small chance to win, but because of the great number of tickets sent, the chance that someone will win is quite good. In this way, it is very easy to entice people to participate in the lottery because they see that someone wins and ask, "Why wouldn't I?".

Sources of photos: 1, 3.

Additional info:

Eric Chaisson, The Natural Science Underlying Big History, here

Dariusz Kot, Jezus zapomniany (in Polish), here

Tajna watykańska instrukcja Crimen Sollicitationis (my Polish translation), here

David Deutsch, A new way to explain explanation, here

@orenshani7, The winner effect, here