My CNN I report on "How strong is your faith?"

We all live by faith. Everyone of us. As an atheist I have faith in all kinds of things because faith is believing in something for which there is no proof.

I have no proof that pixies don’t exist but I have faith that they don’t. Just like I have faith that there are no invisible fairies hiding in the clouds. There is an endless number of things for which we have no proof. Most people believe that their spouse is not cheating on them. We don’t have solid proof that they are not because we can’t watch their actions 24 hours a day (nor should we of course) which is why, if they have been cheating, it’s called being un-faithful.

What I refuse to do is have faith in something for which there is no proof at all. God for example.
With a spouse there is a track record that one can refer back to. She or he has told you on many occasions that they love only you and that there is no one else and their actions toward you indicate that is true. If you start to see evidence to the contrary your faith in your spouse will start to slip.

I have never seen a pixie and there is no recorded evidence of human-pixie contact. Unless of course you believe some story books.

I have never seen god and there is no recorded evidence of human-god contact. Unless of course you believe some story books such as the Bible and the Koran etc.

There is enormous amount of evidence that shows mankind has, all through out our history, created many many gods to explain things that we simply didn’t understand because our comprehension of the natural world was limited. Things like thunder, lightning, the northern lights, earthquakes. These are all things that we know now are just natural events of weather and plate tectonics but to early humans they couldn’t have been anything else than a god or gods.

Rain is another superb example. We need water to live and we have to carry it back to our villages. It’s heavy. We also know that it falls from out of the sky. That would be, to people with no understanding of water vapour and clouds, proof that there is something up there capable of holding all that weight until it’s time to let it fall to earth.

I win all the discussions I have against with people who believe in god and their entire argument always comes down to one thing. Pasqual’s wager.



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