Irresponsible Musings about Atheism and Science

The only scientific evidence I have that I am responsible for anything I do is the feeling that I am. Some people, whom we classify as psychotics, do not feel such things. In fact, some of them don't classify other people as anything except objects. Does this mean that I am indeed responsible for what I do, or that they are not, for what they do?

The only scientific evidence I have in favour of the existence of God is that I feel I am entitled to value judgements that have meaning. If I can feel such things, and they have an existence beyond mere chemical biology, then there can only be something that material analysis cannot detect.

To assert that there is a God is a special claim, a claim for which no affirmative evidence has been shown to exist. I say this despite the many claims of affirmative evidence that people have made; if you are inclined to put all these claims to the test, they are circumstantial at best, and not at all direct.

To assert that we are responsible for our actions is likewise a special claim. After all, we don't hold any other mechanism responsible for its actions. We don't hold animals or babies responsible for their actions. The only thing that allows us to claim responsibility is our own authority, our own belief, our own claims to intelligence, our own collection of chemical interactions.

We create predictions for how the universe should behave, and because this seems a specialised and valuable interaction to us, it leads us to think that this ability allows us to decide that believing in our intelligence and responsibility is somehow more defensible than believing in God. But it all boils down to feelings, value judgements, the favouring of one paradigm over another; it boils down to saying that our capacity to balk entropy is objectively important and shows that we are a significant anomaly. That is a value judgement, and it is as empty as believing in God.

I say this, however, in the sense that two full glasses are as empty as each other.

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Further reading: I've spent some pleasant hours at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. The entry on 'Free Will' is of interest; how can we claim to have judgement and volition if we claim to be part of the universe of natural order and not more? Likewise, the entry on 'Moral Arguments for the Existence of God', which merely concludes, "Moral considerations give all a reason to examine the proposition that there is a God very seriously. For if there is no God, morality is a more perilous enterprise than if there is."

Disclaimer: Yes, I am a scientist of some sort. Also an historian of some sort. And some sort of some sort else. Does it matter? I am as much a bag of chemicals as you are.