Nothing is more central to the religious relationship with god than prayer. The deity hears the needs of his faithful and–sometimes–responds. For the unbeliever, prayer is a silly waste of time, akin to a child conducting a tea party with her imaginary friends. But prayer can also be a powerful wedge in arguments against the typical deist notion of an all-good and all-powerful creator—because prayer, if it means anything at all, requires god to interact directly with the world, influencing physical reality and the minds of humans. This influence undermines free will and, therefore, opens god up to criticisms arising from the problem of evil.

Why Does God Allow Evil?

Evil people do terrible things. This fact is not in dispute. But why a wholly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient god allows those terrible acts is a question that has plagued the faith of the religious since the time of the pre-Socratic Greeks. This is known as theodicy, or the problem of evil. It has usually been dealt with by saying that god gave us free will and, therefore, any human evils are not to be blamed on him.

Free will isn’t a particularly satisfying answer for atheists, since it sidesteps the issue natural evil (hurricanes, disease, etc.) and raises questions about allowing the free will of one human to cancel that of another (i.e., murder).

But, for the sake of argument, let’s allow free will to solve the problem of evil. If it does, prayer should immediately be seen as deeply troublesome.

Prayer Allows Us To Condemn God For Human Evils

Every day on television we see evangelical preachers asking their followers to pray that world leaders do the right thing—often in the form of voting in line with conservative christian values. If the prayer doesn’t work, a lot of Americans are wasting a lot of time. But if it does, if god reaches in and changes the minds of leaders, we are forced to ask why can’t he do the same when Hitler gets ready to murder six million jews?

Presumably, god changes the mind of a congressman regarding a vote on, say, banning stem cell research because god thinks stem cell research is bad. Thus, he changes that mind in order to promote good. Failing to change a mind when he has the ability to do so and has done so frequently in the past, especially when god is all-knowing, amounts to an endorsement of the actions carried out by that mind. Thus allowing Hitler to remain on the mental path that will lead to the Holocaust is a tacit endorsement of the Holocaust. Surely a lot of people prayed for an end to that terror.

If we accept the efficacy of prayer, we are left with the question of why god answers some prayers and not others; why he changes the mind of a senator who is about to vote on gay marriage but leaves the minds of Stalin or Caligula alone to commit unspeakable evil.

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One of the profound and fundamental misunderstandings theists have of atheists is the belief that the latter lead a cold and narrow existence, unconcerned with the mysteries of the universe. Anything that can’t be immediately, rationally known must be rejected. Wonder is sapped from life. What’s happening when this view is articulated, however, is an unfortunate assumption about the very idea of mystery. The theist defines mystery as “the unknown filled by unfounded imagination.” The atheist sees it differently.

Analogies often best illustrate distinctions, so imagine a mystery novel constructed from the theist’s perspective. A body is found in an alley, shot through the heart. The detective called in clears away the uniformed officers, squats next to the deceased, and inspects the wound. He gathers details — short range, low caliber — and announces, “This is clearly the work of a goblin, armed with a wand, and angry with the victim because he failed to perform the proper appeasement ritual.” With that, the detective stands up, gets in his car, and heads home to perform the ritual himself, so as not to suffer the same fate.

Besides being awfully short, this would make for a rather frustrating novel. Yes, the story the detective has told can be made to fit the facts — though there are some inconsistencies — and a large mythology exists going back countless generations about goblins, magical deaths, and mystic rites designed to prevent them. In short, we can’t entirely rule out the detective’s explanation. But does that make it valid? Does it warrant a satisfying “The End” and a year long wait for the next book in the series? Of course not.

Why, then, should we reject the detective’s theory? Why shouldn’t we afford it the same respect we’d give to one that included a .22 pistol, an unhappy wife, and an overheard fight the night before? Because, when examining theories about the world, we naturally demand evidence. The goblin story isn’t good enough because it has a strong air of simply being made up. While no facts immediately dismiss it, no facts can be found to explicitly support it, either. And we’d hardly claim that the detective who won’t accept goblins doesn’t appreciate mysteries, is cynical, or is intellectually arrogant.

The atheist is no different from the modern detective. Rather than investigating corpses, though, he examines the awesome beauty and wonder of the universe itself. How did this all come into being? Why am I here? What should I do now that I am? What is right, what is wrong? This are huge questions and ones we may never answer. Yet this doesn’t mean they should be approached from a religious standpoint or seen as gaps in knowledge that can only be filled by unfounded imagination.

For theists, the answers are easy. How did the universe get here? God did it. How did life come into being? God. How are we to live? The son of god told us twenty centuries ago. The believer can spend a fulfilling lifetime trying to understand god but that doesn’t make his answers anything more than made up gap filling. He’s posited goblins with wands and accuses anyone who rejects these little monsters of being elitist and intellectually overreaching.

The theist rejects the atheist’s stance, saying that the only honest position is agnosticism, because we can’t know the absolute truth of god’s non-existence. Here, again, we are presented with a misunderstanding of terminology. An atheist rarely makes the flat out claim “There is no god.” Rather, he says, “I don’t believe in god.” An agnostic, on the other hand, says, “I’m not sure whether I believe in god. I could go either way.” Therefore, far from being an intellectually arrogant argument, the atheist is merely saying “Nobody has a good reason for believing in god and, without reasons, we shouldn’t believe things about the nature of reality.” This has been the claim of scientists and philosophers since these fields arose from the sea of human ignorance in distant antiquity. The theist soundly rejects this tradition. His argument, when stripped of its theological veneer, becomes nothing more than “Because we can’t know everything, I can believe anything.”

And that’s not an acknowledgment of mystery. It’s only muddy logic.

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There exists a need among theists to justify life’s purpose. Far from being content with self made goals, with personal achievements set by the individual for his own existential benefit, they desire an authority handing down purpose, telling them this is how they ought to live or this is the proper role they are to play. For the atheist, the mere facts that he is here, existing, and that his existence is finite are purpose enough indeed. With one life, the drive becomes to make the most of it we are capable. Thus, the non-believer can answer history’s most asked question by saying, “The purpose of life is to live the best life each and every one of us can.”

Why should god be included in this consideration? Why can’t the question end there, with each human defining for himself what the best life looks like and taking whatever steps he is willing to get there? For the theist, however, this solution is not freedom but nihilism. A self generated purpose is no purpose at all. It is emptiness and, with it, despair. If nobody made me, why am I here? If nobody wants me to follow a given path, why should I follow any at all?

This is the same argument from consequences so often hurled at evolution: if we’re all just the product of random chance, what’s the point? If the universe is without a creator, then, for theist, we are all horribly, cripplingly alone. Yet, as an atheist, I am not alone. I have a wife I love and close friends and family I can share my successes and failures with. I’m on a planet with billions like me: humans living out their own tiny blinks of time in the same universe both awesome and mysterious. Making right by that world and the people in it is my purpose, one I can feel the profound weight of and the grand and breezy freedom it allows me to define exactly what “right” means for me. While I may be the result of the very non-random process of natural selection acting upon an arbitrary base of matter and mutation, the joy I feel when I’m with people I love and the sense of accomplishment I get when I fulfill my goals are far from random.

What role can god even play in any of this? Let us say there exists a supreme being who planted in my head the notion that I ought to live the best life I know how. Does he tell me what that means? If he does, it’s in contradictory forms, for what is best within a Catholic world view is very different from best for a buddhist or best for a Wahhabi muslim. Without definite selection criteria between the faiths, criteria that can themselves be verified without appeal to one of those faiths, how am I ever to know what is the best life? Because the specifics of the world’s religions are, therefore, of little use, I’m left only with what feels right *to me*. I can seek the advice of others–and I would be prudent to do so–but even they are in same boat as myself, advocating rightness to them as they understand it. Thus the existence of god, so far as purpose goes, is of pitifully little value, with the experience of man carries incredible weight.

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Mormons believe the North American continent was once populated by a race of white Christians, emigrants from Israel who built an advanced civilization in the new world over a thousand years before Columbus. These Christians eventually split into two warring factions, with the “bad guys” slaughtering entirely the “good guys.” God cursed the former, darkening their skin, thereby creating the race who would come to be known as Native Americans.

This conflicts with history, has no supporting archeological evidence, and is contradicted by modern DNA testing. Yet Mormons continue to believe it because the Book of Mormon tells them too, that book was written by Joseph Smith, and Smith was a prophet of God. Should we–should anyone who isn’t a Mormon–respect these beliefs? Are they different from, say, holocaust denial (another form of grossly unsubstantiated historical revisionism) because they’re rooted in religious faith instead of racial hatred?

Of course they aren’t. The Mormon belief structure is profoundly silly, as are the Catholic notions of transubstantiation and the vile sinfulness of covering a penis in rubber. Muslims hold fast to the idea that a millennium and a half ago a man rode a horse to heaven and conversed with angels in a desert filled by djinn. And evangelicals throughout the US teach their children that the earth was made at roughly the same time the Sumerians developed writing.

We are taught to respect these beliefs, to pay them deference even while we acknowledge how wrong they are. The holocaust denier is scorned not only because his theory is preposterous but also because it derives from hate. But a man who denies contraceptives to a continent ravaged by AIDS should be nodded kindly at because his views are based on a book a third of the world’s population takes as sacred.

How is the atheist to react to all this? Should he continue the capitulation that is considered right and proper when faith is at issue? Or should he rail against untrue and unjust ideas and the people who hold them? Christians are told to hate the sin but love the sinner, to separate beliefs and actions from the people who carry them out. Yet what is a person but the sum total of thoughts and conceptions he holds and choses to live his life by? Do we look down upon racists–or merely racism? Do we scorn bigots–or limit ourselves to bigotry?

No one owes respect to bad ideas and no one should blindly respect the people who hold them. Instead, we should work to relieve a world encumbered by these dangerous and untrue convictions, even if that means offending their pallbearers.

Religious believers have long recognized this and so fill Sunday television with proselytizing prayer displays, flood whole sections of bookstores–and frequently entire stores themselves–with evangelical texts. They go door to door handing out repetitive pamphlets and lean in close to whisper quiet suggestions to unsaved friends. The world is a cacophony of religious marketing, and yet any attempts by secularists to project their reasoned voices into the fray are inevitably met by calls for respectful silence. It’s okay, many theists say, for you to not believe in god, but do you have to convince other people too? Why can’t you keep your beliefs, or lack of belief, to yourself?

As America’s fastest growing belief category, it is time for atheists to recognize the hollowness and hypocrisy of these religious calls for moderation. The future of civilization–a civilization that has painfully been clawing its way out from under the smothering sack of unreason–is at stake. Meek voices and undue respect must be abandoned in favor of a rigorous clash of ideas.

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Without religion, won’t life be meaningless? Won’t we all collapse into nihilism, muttering “What’s the point?” while we waste away our years in front of the television, waiting for it all to end? Not at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. The religious obsession with life after death, with the entrance criteria of heaven or hell, and the never ending crusade to win the love of a deity leads billions of believers worldwide to devalue worldly living, biding their time until they can make the posthumous passage to paradise. This leads to everything from Mother Teresa’s cherished suffering to suicide bombings of discos and public markets.

The atheist, on the other hand, sees this life, the one each of us is currently living, as all we get. Death is final. Thus we need to make the most of life and instill great value in every moment because those moments are of limited quantity. When you have eternity, pieces of that infinity are worthless. Scarcity creates value. What’s more, the atheist recognizes that everyone else is living their own, finite existences. We respect life more because of that, since we know deep down that all humans are enjoying the only lives they’ll have a chance to live. Far from breeding nihilism, this sense of life as finite manifests purpose beyond living to impress a deity. It’s a purpose of one’s own creation, a variety we already recognize as more valuable, or at least as valuable, as a purpose handed to us by another.

Through much of childhood, we live for our parents. What do they want us to do? How do they want us to behave? Which behaviors cause them to beam at us in happiness? But then, perhaps during our teenage years, perhaps earlier, most of us learn to live for ourselves. We study topics in college because they interest us, not because they’re what we think our parents want. We get jobs that hopefully ignite our passions, disregarding our father’s desire that we run the family furniture store or our mother’s wish we become a doctor. Over the course of our lives we create our own purpose.

Yet for the believer, the parent never gives up his guiding grip. When mom and dad have lost their influence, Jesus or Muhammad, Yaweh or L. Ron Hubbard, step into the role, guiding and providing goals. Purpose in life becomes a quest to live to their standards, to become the type of person they want you to be. To clarify this distinction, try imagining two children born at the same time and into similar circumstances. Call them Brian and Alex.

Brian’s parents own a chain of dry cleaning stores, started by his grandfather and now run by his father. His family as a strict sense of what’s right and what’s acceptable, so Brian’s childhood was filled with proper, sit down family dinners, little league and soccer in the summers, swimming and wrestling during winter. Growing up, he never thought about whether this was what he wanted because doing all these things made his parents so happy and Brian loved seeing their pleasure and receiving their approval. He was happy and never resented his upbringing. When it came time to head off to college, Brian chose business administration as his major with the intent of taking over the string of cleaning franchises upon graduation. Doing exactly that, Brian settled into middle age as the inheritor of his father’s business and plans to pass it along to his own child someday.

Alex came from an equally loving family, but one that avoided the structures of Brian’s. They ate together when convenient and encouraged the children to spend their summers doing whatever they fancied, even if that meant hanging out with friends and whiling away the hot days. At an early age, he became enraptured by photography and his parents helped him get into a private high school specializing in art education and never told him he should look to a different career as the years stretched out without financial success. Eventually, Alex had an opening, sold photos, and managed to work his way into the life of a professional artist. He got married, had a child, and now attends middle school football games, encouraging his son to pursue his own dream of playing in the NFL.

Who has lead a fuller life? More crucially, can we easily say that Brian’s life has been better and more filled with purpose than Alex’s? It’s clear that the answer to this latter question is no. Some may prefer Brian’s life but there’s simply no objective way it is more fulfilling than the path Alex took.

Why, then, is the need felt to find purpose in a god’s wishes? The simple fact is that we all make our own purpose in life. Some do it by reading the words of the Gospels and saying, “That’s how I ought to live.” Others develop different criteria. None are better than the rest so long as, at the end, each of us is content with the choice we made.

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