The Study Card Argument

I heard, and saw, quite an interesting argument for atheism on youtube. Funny thing about youtube for me is when I go there I usually end up watching stuff you don’t really need to watch. I end up surfing stand-up. I love listening to comedians and with a few exceptions like Carrot Top, magician comedians or guys who are spastically jumping around on the stage and making faces, you don’t need to see anything. So you usually get a collage of still photos while you hear the act. I was listening to comedy by a guy named Doug Stanhope. Totally filthy but he makes some really good points. Like why are American people worried so much about the “under God” part of the pledge of allegiance being recited by school children? Shouldn’t they be more worried about the “liberty and justice for all” part? And why do we need to advertise so much? If you have a good product you don’t need to advertise. Almost everybody tries drugs but THEY aren’t advertised. In a democracy we get to pick our leaders, yay! But what if I’m doing okay leading myself? Where does MY vote go? This is what makes Americans Americans. Well would you still call yourself a Christian if you voted in a new Jesus every four years? Or the 4 million people a year who come into America and don’t contribute a thing that should be kicked back where they came from: babies! (I don't know how to post youtube links here but you can find the ones I'm talking about easily)

By remarkable coincidence this atheist guy who posted on youtube looked like Stanhope and I clicked on his video by mistake. But I was intrigued. I listened to the entire argument – something this atheist would most likely discount the possibility of a believer in some sort of religion doing. Likely, but I can’t say for sure. I just got a feeling that this guy had that swagger about him. His monotone voice and half closed eyes gave me the impression of perceived intellectual superiority. And it seemed a bit hypocritical since Atheism is packaged with a belief system analogous to religion. In my opinion anyways.

The scenario was as follows: He had a stack of all the religious beliefs in the world written on study cards so that the stack was massive. All the beliefs except those that I believe myself, that is. The atheist goes on to say that as we go through the cards I explain why I don’t believe in all the things written on the cards and we write my reasoning for non-belief on the backs of every individual card. He says that at some point we wouldn’t have to write anything on the backs of the cards any more, we could just refer back to earlier cards where I had explained why I didn’t believe in something else that was similar. Then he says after days and days of doing this we got to the bottom where he had secretly written all the things I DO believe in and says that when we get to those cards we could just as easily discount them using some of the earlier cards as precedence.

A pretty arrogant assumption in my opinion. First of all I really don’t think that it would have been very easy for me to GET to the bottom of the stack without finding a hell of a lot of cards that I could not discount. There would be lots of cards that are based in the same sort of reason or faith that is at the heart of my own belief system. Therefore I could not arrogantly discount them, rather I would set them aside and say that they could very well be true as far as I know. My beliefs are not always based on something that is easily proved or disproved. Often they are based on things that are impossible to prove. That’s why it’s called “faith”.

For example if there was a card that said, “Allah has always been and always will be.” I would be an arrogant dick to say that this is untrue. Rather, I believe I’d say that it could very well be possible. I just prefer to call the infinite being “God” instead of “Allah”. It’s more a question of preference, culture or geography than proof or logic or any scientific explanation.

Or one of the cards contained the idea that there was a “cosmic egg” of matter that imploded upon itself creating what “science” calls the “Big Bang”, which is the beginning of the universe as we know it. And BELIEVE me this IS a religious belief! I would have no reasoning to refute this argument because the cosmic egg is the infinite matter in this philosophy and it isn’t much different than an infinite Being that I believe in who, through divine design created the beginnings of the universe as we know it. It is absolutely identical in theory if not in terminology. I just happen to think that outrageously good luck is harder to believe in than a sentient Creator.

Indeed even this youtube guy’s atheism is something I couldn’t refute. It could very well be true for all I know and the reasoning he has for it is surely exactly the same as my reasoning on many counts. This guy apparently believes that people who aren’t atheists absolutely “KNOW” every little detail of their entire faith and have readily available streams of logic with which to reinforce those details. Well that’s not faith, that’s training. That’s somebody trying to explain something that he/she will never fully understand with knee-jerk, unchallenged dogma.

I will never claim to understand God and I’m not so arrogant as to assume that I have irrefutable evidence of my beliefs. It is only people who are as dogmatic as to think that everything is, or even CAN be explainable that would fail this study card test. That is, their own beliefs on the cards at the end would have been self-refuted at the beginning. This, admittedly, is the kind of thinking that, when attached to a religion, causes inter-religious fighting and has lead to countless wars, fights, bloodshed and violence. It’s interesting that before stumbling across this atheist’s post I was listening to a rant by Stanhope which noted that you never hear news reports saying, “Credit for the bomb that killed 180 people in the atheist settlement was claimed by the agnostic liberation organization,” or something like that.

I am not this kind of believer and I think there are MANY more like me who believe strongly without feeling any need to force others into our way of thinking. If all religion could be like this perhaps nobody would fail this test. Perhaps religion and spiritualism all over the world would be able to conspire for more good than bad.

But the guy has a point. There certainly are some people who would fail this test. Those people are more soldiers and less believers. And I agree, this kind of mental discipline is detrimental to the world and indeed their own religions. But it’s pretty darn arrogant of this guy to think that nobody who has spiritual beliefs could ever pass this test, or even that atheists themselves would get to the end of the stack and have all their cherished beliefs completely unassailed by the arguments made on the backs of the previous piles of cards.

And if this is, as advertised on youtube, the most compelling argument for atheism, this guy, and this argument, sure don’t make me want to go find a local atheist meeting and hang out with folks just like him. And that’s the point that this guy is making in an unintentional and self-defeating way: a closed mind is a dangerous thing. Anyone who believes in this card stack argument is a dogmatic atheist and that’s just as bad as a dogmatic believer.

Atheism is a relatively new thing. Given time I’m sure they’d cause lots of wars if they continue to believe so closed-mindedly. At least that's what I reckon.