Letter: The beliefs of many atheists are based on unscientific presuppositions

Editor,

We would like to present the results of the Atheist Survey collected on the UNM Albuquerque campus in April-May 2015.

Of the 56 self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics who completed the survey, 45 (80 percent) have at least one parent who believed in God, 35 (63 percent) believed in God as a child, and 42 (75 percent) began to doubt God’s existence prior to leaving high school.

Regarding what caused them to disbelieve in God, 41 (73 percent) answered study of science, philosophy or personal research and 15 (27 percent) cited life experiences. 39 (70 percent) believe in the Big Bang theory and 55 (98 percent) believe in evolution. To the question about what might convince them that God exists, 24 (43) said that adequate evidence or miracles might convince them.

Perhaps the least surprising result of this survey is the universal belief in evolution, since, if there is no God, the existence of life on Earth must have a natural explanation, of which the theory of evolution is the only one accepted by scientists. The universal association of atheism and belief in evolution suggests that the two beliefs are dependent so that, if evolution from microbes to man were proven to be impossible on a mathematical or scientific basis, the atheist would be required to believe in God, or some other supernatural power as the origin of life.

Since most atheists and agnostics began life as believers in God, having parents who were theistic, it is very likely that understanding the theory of evolution contributed to their conversion to atheism. Only 70 percent believe in the Big Bang, so the rest likely believe in an eternal universe, thus avoiding the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God.

The most surprising result of the survey was that 40 percent suggested they might believe in God if adequate evidence were presented: either scientifically verifiable evidence or palpable miracles. Of course, they have already consigned the existence of life and the universe itself to the category of “not evidence for God,” or else they would be theists. Any physical, scientific evidence offered for the existence of God could be easily consigned to the same category.

These 40 percent of the atheists who think new evidence might convince them of the existence of God seem to be unaware of the presuppositions on which their worldview is founded, and perhaps unaware that they even have any presuppositions. They seem to think that it is a scientific fact that the existence of the universe and life on Earth are not evidence for God. They fail to understand that they have a worldview based upon presuppositions, which by definition are not scientific facts.

Marshall Jordan and

Ringo Beaumont

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