Alex is not dumb, in the traditional sense of the word. He's a student at Cornell who's overcome enormus odds in order to be here. He's also a personable and good-natured, if somewhat gullible, guy.
He's also a member of the Ithaca Church of Christ.
I met him my freshman year. He was sitting at a table in the student union giving away free bibles to promote his cult. I came for a bible and stayed to argue, because that's the kind of bitch I am.
So one day almost a year later I'm talking to Alex and he says to me, "I want you to tell me why you aren't a totally devoted servant of Jesus Christ right now."
It was mind-blowing, the way he said that as if none of our previous conversations had taken place. He said it as though he thought I was going to exclaim "Hey, wait a minute! There isn't any reason! I think I'll become a christian RIGHT NOW!"
At that moment I realized that to be understood by the people who were trying to save my soul, I was going to have to explain my position is very simple terms indeed. This essay is the text of an e-mail to Alex in which I attempt to explain my lack of beliefs.
First, you've got to understand that I cannot believe by pure faith. There are thousands of teachers and thousands of doctrines in the world, and once I suspend my disbelief enough to allow any one of them, there's no reason not believe all of them. Not one of them is any more or less credible than any other, from an objective point of view, so faith always runs the risk of being faith in the wrong teacher or teaching.
What about logic? I'm sure you've run into some atheists who seem to worship at the temple of logic, and who know every Latin term for a fallacy, who can debate for hours and hours about theoretical tortises. I'm not one of them. Not that there's anything wrong with logic - after all, we need it to get through the day ("IF there are no cars heading in my direction, THEN I will cross the street.") But the problem with logic is that it can never get past any flaw in the logician's initial assumptions. As the computer geeks say, "Garbage in, garbage out." The ancients thought that it was perfetly logical to believe that objects of different weights fall at different speeds, and that the sun revolves around the earth.
The keys to finding the truth about our world, though, are observation and his blood-brother experimant. Observations through a telescope led Galileo to the conclusion that the Earth went around the Sun instead of vice-versa, and an experiment showed him that objects in free-fall accellerate at the same rate, regardless of their mass. Applying logic to initial assumptions that have been confirmed by experiment is the most reliable way to discover the truth about the world around us.
So, I observe the world around me. I see that nature is endowed with great beauty - colorful birds and butterflies, majestic horses and wolves, luminescent sea creatures that survive under mind-boggling conditions. However, nature is also incredibly brutal and wasteful. 75-90 percent of the songbirds that delight us never live to see their first birthdays. As many starve on the nest as ever fledge from it. Thousands drop exhausted into the oceans during migration. Hawks eat them, then die themselves, miserably tangles in powerlines.
The world of humanity is no different. Shakespeares are born, and Einstiens and Mother Theresas; also Hitlers, Pol Pots and Ted Bundys. The vast majority of mankind lives on a middle path, knowing moments of joy and nights of splendour but also times of mourning, defeat, and boredom, more through the workings of chance than through any fault of their own.
In other words the universe is not what we would expect to see if there was an omnipotent being that loves humans; neither are our observations consistent with the Diabolist's notion of an all-powerful Evil. What we call good and what we call evil occur more or less at random, which is what we would expect to see if the universe did not care one way or the other about human beings, or about anything else, but merely worked blindly away according to its laws, whatever the results.
That is the primary reason why I am not a Christian, the rational one. I also have an emotional reason for not being a Christian, which I will detail in my next letter.
See you around.
Your friend,
Carrie
I stole the title of this essay from Bertrand Russell, one of my favorite philosopher (though in all honesty I must admit I am not big into philkosophy. Or indeed into philosophy at all.) Check out why he is not a christian, and if you like it, buy his book.