A piece I've written for our campus newspaper. Not the Prehistoric Weekly series (I've been too busy to put anything together), but hopefully this will at least please your appetite until I do find the time. ;-)
I’m Tor Gareth Bertin, born of (names emitted in case it's a problem) in a gorgeous town in Northern Idaho, and I’m an atheist. It’s not something I shy away from, and something that I generally don’t boast about. However, Gallop poll after Gallop poll have shown atheists to be one of the most secretly reviled and mistrusted non-criminal groups in the United States today, and I feel the need to clarify some of the many misconceptions about the philosophy. To make things simple, I will be numerically ordering each point.
1. Atheists hate God. This is something that I hear a surprising amount. In truth, without any evidence to show for the concept’s existence, we don’t accept a God in the first place, let a lone hate it. I do abhor some of the horrible things that have been done in the name of God however.
2. Atheists must be anti-religion. This one varies person by person. I’ve certainly known atheists that do despise religion, but I personally have no qualms with it in general. In a cultural sense, I think it can be a pretty remarkable thing: the mythos, the holidays, the costumes. I have a general ‘live and let live’ policy. If you’re not attacking me or my work, I’ll leave you alone. If you’re spreading misinformation and lies in the name of your religion to people who don’t know better (like a certain Dr. Bruce Watne), then I will call you out on it. Otherwise, I’ll wish you the best of luck!
3. Atheism equates to immorality. This is possibly one of the most damaging ideas that has spread about atheism. To many people, morality comes from God, therefore how can one without God be a moral being? In truth, morality is far from unique to our species. Because evolution works at a population (and not individual) level, organisms that go out of their way to suit themselves and none other tend to get weeded out of the gene pool quickly. This’s why you won’t see piranhas eat one another while they’re stripping a carcass, and why vampire bats will punish mothers who neglect the young of other bats. The more complex the mental structure of various creatures, the more often you’ll tend to find advanced social rules; but at a rudimentary level, morality in some form or another is found throughout most of life.
4. One must be an atheist to accept the scientific reality of evolution. Though I am an atheistic scientist (specifically a paleontologist), atheists are far from being the only ones that accept this particular well-documented fact. In truth, there are countless Christians throughout the world, many of them scientists that see the data and accept it for how it is. Some of them put a God into the process, some of them don’t. This isn’t the place to discuss the mountains of data supporting evolution, but if anyone reading is interested in getting to know more about evolution and how we know what we know, I highly recommend http://www.talkorigins.org/...
5. Atheists cannot live a meaningful life without God. This particular conception is fairly in line with the third—many people cannot fathom meaning without a God in the picture. In truth, the universe (and the world we live in) is inspiring beyond imagination on its own. Think of it: at present, we’re standing on a rocky, largely ocean encased planet orbiting one star (which contains 99.86% of the solar system’s mass) of the one hundred billion stars that form the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is in turn one of the roughly one hundred billion galaxies throughout the known universe, some of which contains quite literally trillions of stars. We’ve learned through scientific inquiry and skepticism (a process that I feel too little people are exposed to) that we and the planet we walk on are the ancient remains of archaic stellar explosions. As Carl Sagan once said, ‘we are sentient stardust. A way for the universe to see itself.’ How can that not be meaningful? I sit every day in wonder at this world’s history: the myriad of evolutionary pathways and courses its life has taken, its ever-changing geology, and the people that live on it right now.
-Tor Gareth Bertin