I [...] think that basing your beliefs upon blind faith rather than upon evidence is potentially very dangerous, because you can’t argue against it.

- Richard Dawkins (in an interview)

The proposition, “At least one god exists” and the proposition “It is not the case that at least one god exists” are both morally neutral.

Taken at face value, they certainly are, and nowhere in this post will I imply something like “you can’t be a good person if you believe in God” (many believers, on the other hand, love to frequently insult atheists by claiming the opposite…). However…

Imagine the following scenario (I think I read a similar example somewhere, maybe in The End of Faith, but I’m not at home right now and can’t confirm it): there’s a school bus driver whose bus’s tires are long past inspection time. People at his school have warned him of that, but he believes that his tires are “blessed” and will be just fine, that they don’t need changing. His belief is pleasing to him, even comforts him. The facts that they don’t grip the road so well, or that they look old, or that so many people have warned him about it (but can’t force his hand since that would be “disrespecting his belief”) don’t make a difference; he has “faith” in his ability, in his bus, and in its tires.

Then, one day, a tire blows up. There is a big accident, and dozens of children die. Is that driver responsible for it? Was he guilty of the deaths of so many schoolchildren? Was he morally wrong? Even though he loved children and didn’t wish them any harm?

Of course he was. In fact, he would have been morally wrong (and culpable) even if, somehow, he was lucky and no serious accident ever happened until his retirement.

He was guilty of ignoring evidence and clinging to an unsubstantiated belief, just because it made him “feel good”. He was guilty of being absolutely certain, when there was no reason for it. He was guilty of putting a cherished belief above reality. He was guilty of being irrational, of being irresponsible, of being intellectually dishonest, both with himself and with reality.

Honesty is not just not lying to other people, or not cheating on your taxes, or something that needs to involve other people. Honesty also includes being honest with yourself, and trying to be aware of reality to the best of your ability, instead of deliberately ignoring it, ignoring evidence and facts, just because they are somehow “displeasing” or would force you to abandon a cherished belief.

The point of that story is that the driver was irresponsible, and morally culpable, because he chose to dishonestly ignore reality. He had no right to close his eyes to a fact he didn’t like, to be intentionally blind, and to put others in danger because of it. This is regardless of whether an accident actually happened.

Faith — defined as having one or more beliefs that are unsubstantiated by evidence, and, often, despite contradicting evidence — is morally wrong, because it is intellectually dishonest… and potentially dangerous. After all, if you don’t require a shred of evidence to be 100% certain of a belief, then you can potentially believe anything. And many people do.

And, if faith is morally wrong, then belief in a god — which can’t happen without faith — is also morally wrong. Even if the bus driver happens not to have an accident, or if the believer happens not to harm anyone.

Now that intriques me.  I would love to see that post sometime soon.  After all, if I stopped believing the feeling would be the complete opposite of relief.

I’ve written about it in the past (interestingly, in one of this blog’s earliest posts, How I’ve become an atheist), but I’ll try to answer your question specifically: why the relief?

Well, first consider this: what if Christians are wrong and Muslims are right? If that is so, Allah will send you to “the fire”. Scared yet? There are so many religions (and variations of each religion) out there that the odds of picking up the right one are very, very small. And most of them say their gods are “jealous”, so you can’t pick several at the same time. The fact that you’re a Christian and not a Jew or Muslim or Hindu, or that you’re, say, a Protestant instead of a Catholic, depends just on one thing: where you were born. And while you may have a more liberal theology (“anyone who accepts Jesus is saved”, or even “God wouldn’t send anyone to hell, even though it says he does in the holy books”), that’s a relatively recent thing, and you’re probably in the minority, not to mention that the holy books don’t agree with you. So, statistically, if there is a god or gods and there is a hell, then each individual has very good odds of ending up in it — and of that happening just by chance, because you were born in the “wrong” place and raised in the “wrong” faith. To me, that would be very, very scary indeed, and losing that fear would certainly be a relief. Most believers (including myself, when I was one) avoid living in constant fear of their statistically probable eternal damnation simply by not thinking about this at all; their faith is the “right” one, automatically, because they were raised in it, and it’s “obvious”, so, end of story.

However, my own relief was more related to intellectual honesty; I was always inquisitive, with “the soul of a scientist”, so to say, and only managed to keep my faith by not thinking critically about it, by stopping myself whenever I started to consider the implications, before going “too far” — and, with time, the lines of thought I had to avoid became more and more in number. I knew, subconsciously, that if I thought about it, I would lose my belief, and come to the natural conclusion: that all religions are man-made, self-contradictory, and teach morally wrong — sometimes even repugnant — things. And that the reasons I had for not believing in every other religion could apply perfectly to my own. So, my mind served me so well at school, at college, at work, and to solve problems regularly in life, but it had to be “chained” for me to keep a belief that would not survive a good, hard look? Can you imagine how dishonest, how “fake” that made me feel? To have a part of my life that I had to constantly avoid thinking rationally about? To have two separate standards of reasoning, one I applied to reality and life, and the other to a belief that I just “had” to keep… or else? And yet I blamed myself, not the belief — because I had been taught so.

It’s as Martin Luther said, reason is the enemy of faith. I just disagree with him on which side to pick.

Well, it depends, in a way, on what you mean by “no god”: not that god, or no god at all?

It’s very likely that, by “god”, you mean the Judeo-Christian god, Yahweh, as described in the Bible. If so, I can answer that one easily: do you need faith to say Odin doesn’t exist?

I’m sure that you don’t. You have no reason to believe in Odin, no evidence of his existence. Besides, Odin and all the other Norse gods are clearly anthropomorphic; that is, they’re exactly like humans, only “bigger”, more powerful. But with the same emotions, traits, character flaws, of humans. It’s safe to say that he’s made up by ancient Norsemen.

Well, all of that applies cleanly to your god, too! That’s why one doesn’t need any “faith” to say that he’s been invented by men, because there’s a lot of evidence in that direction, and exactly zero in the opposite one.

Besides, there are many logical arguments against the existence of an entity such as the Judeo-Christian god. Take the omnipotence paradox, or the problem of evil. The former is logically self-contradictory; the latter requires such convulted excuses (follow the link, they’re all examined in detail there) that it soon gets ridiculous.

But maybe you didn’t mean a god like that. Maybe you’re talking about a vast, cosmic being, who didn’t create the universe, but who is the universe. A being who, because it wasn’t invented by men, doesn’t have human traits; who isn’t focused on, or probably even aware of, our insignificant little planet, who isn’t concerned with trivialities (in the cosmic sense) such as “prayer”, “sin”, or “the afterlife”.

As suggested here, such a being, if it existed, would be completely undetectable by us, would not in any way interfere in our lives, or be concerned with us at all. In every possible sense, it is as if it wasn’t there; nothing we could do would affect it in any way. Much like the “do we live in a perfect computer simulation” questions, it is most likely impossible to know, and ultimately irrelevant to our lives (though there’s nothing wrong with being curious).

In both of the above cases, there’s also something definitive against the “you need faith to say it doesn’t exist” position: burden of proof. It’s always on the side of whoever claims something exists, and it’s him who has to provide evidence for that existence. If he doesn’t, the logical position is to say that his claim is false, and no “faith” is required for that.