One of the founding ministers at our church once said that every atheist can give you a detailed description of the God in which he does not believe. (Sometimes much more detailed than the believer can.)
I read the books. When they asked my what I thought, I told them I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but what they believed was a lot of nonsense. They left in a huff.
If their beliefs were a lot of hooey, I wondered later, how realistic were my Southern Baptist/Lutheran beliefs?
So I dove into a study of theology. When I emerged from it, I realized what I had believed was also based on a lot of hooey. Once that river is crossed, it is hard to go back. That’s because, in my case anyway, I cannot will myself to believe things I don’t actually think are true.
Are you sure tehy didn’t leave in a minute and a huff?
Why do you say it’s hooey?
‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
- Francis Crick
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
- William Provine
It starts by giving up an active deity, then it gives up the hope that there is any life after death. When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily. You give up the hope that there is an imminent morality. And finally, there’s no human free will. If you believe in evolution, you can’t hope for there being any free will. There’s no hope whatsoever in there being any deep meaning in life. We live, we die, and we’re gone.
- William Provine (RIP)
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making…. We do not have the freedom we think we have. I cannot determine my wants…. My mental life is given to me by the cosmos. People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery—one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contributions of chance). You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.
- Sam Harris, Free Will
To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect; it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfisf Gene (where he proclaims humans are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as genes.”)
[A]n individual cannot be held responsible for either his genes or his environment. From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior.
- Anthony Cashmore, biologist at the University of Pennsylvania
[Y]ou are robots made out of meat, which is what I’m going to try to convince you of today. Our behavior is absolutely determined by the laws of physics. Why did I get out of bed this morning? I thought, I hope to persuade people, and that was determined by the laws of physics. …Even our very desire to try to change people’s minds. The fact that I’m up here trying to do this is determined by my own, you know, physical constitution and environment. That is the infinite regress and the sort of annoying thing about determinism. It’s turtles all the way down.
- Jerry Coyne’s lecture at the Imagine No Religion convention