I confess to a crime: I firmly believe in God.
It is a continuous crime, a crime I have done, without contrition or attenuation, since I was born, and much more intensely in the last 30 years. Unfortunately and to my great sadness, science has discovered (believe me) that skeptics are more intelligent. Therefore, believers are the most obtuse minded. At least that's what a new atheism advertises today in a loud voice, both in Europe and the United States. It is also what our potential as mad importers of ideas has caused us to suffer, in Brazil, though not knowing exactly what to peddle.
I refer to the ideas and fashions of authors like British Richard Dawkins (The God delusion), Americans Sam Harris (The end of faith), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the spell) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not great) and French André Comte-Sponville (The spirit of atheism), and Michel Onfray (Treatise on atheism). Among many other ideas, most of these intellectuals show good deal of confidence that the skeptics are more intelligent than believers.
Although I disagree with almost all their central theses, I admit that Dawkins, Harris and other great scholars are absolutely right on this point. I only have to add that the question about the intelligence of distrust is much more complex than they generally argue. Beginning with the fact that the conviction with which these authors claim is mere faith, not disbelief. So if they are right, they are wrong, since they are moved by what they call error.
I also have to add that the faith of believers (which, based on my ignorance, I would shower and fluff, every day) is at the same time, made up of so much unbelief! I believe in God, it's true. Committed, and commit this crime every day. I admit it, though not contrite. And for all serious, I admit that I read endlessly, and still read the works of dozens of scientists and philosophers about the origin of the universe, of life and species. Based on these readings, I even committed the folly of publishing my findings on the question of God in the book Darwin's hypothesis.
But I do not believe in God alone: I also believe that the Jesus of the Gospels is a divine person. Again, this absurd and obsolete belief (it is now clear) compelled me to the meaness of paying great attention to the discussion about the historical Jesus and of writing my ideas on that problem in The teacher from Nazareth.
By studying the question of God and by dwelling on the historical Jesus, from the bottom of my nothingness, my faith has been so strongly confirmed that I became the perfect example of what science calls the control of faith over the conscience (including reason). I started from faith, and had my faith confirmed: that is the iter criminis whole. I got where I was when I left - there may be further proof of my crime?
To illustrate what I mean with an example of the current month, in The believing brain (Holt, 2011), Michael Shermer shows how faith makes the human mind hopelessly biased (such is my case). There is no way to discuss here the ideas of Shermer, who are so close to those of the authors mentioned earlier (some of whom call themselves brights). I would rather confine myself to inform you that he refers to four deviant tendencies of faith, which are called anchoring bias (tendency to anchor), authority bias (tendency to accept authority), belief bias (tendency to belief-based thinking) and confirmation bias (tendency to seek evidence that confirms the belief, rather than refutes it). The human mind is deeply carried away from truth by these four trends, which are all nourished by faith.
As far as this thesis is concerned, I can only state that it is perfectly correct, but like everything that springs from today’s atheism it asks some complement. In this case, the complement is that every true believer is a stubborn unbeliever. He knows so well he believes that he tends to become mortally suspicious of his faith. Of course, from this point of view, the perfect believer is a perfect Thomas.
As explained above, Shermer's thesis seeks further explanation. I mean that science has shown that not only religious faith, but every kind of faith can rule human conscience beyond what is reasonable. This also applies (and how!) to the new faith of scientific atheists. On the other hand, I swear that personal experience of religious faith can bring forth exactly the opposite of what Shermer calls belief-dependent realism (sense of reality dependent on faith). A faith nourished by ingrained distrust has led me to study the themes of God and Jesus. That faith has made me a radical kind of skeptic. Early on, I told myself: I will not buy it; I will thoroughly study the issues of God and Jesus; I will face all the literature and the best one can find on these subjects, not to give myself up to the seduction of a blind faith. I'll do it wherever I am, and in spite of what takes place.
I did so, because reasonable people usually know that faith can blind. Therefore, they become suspicious of it. The fairly experienced believer is not quite different from one who feels he's got fever or cold. He notices when his mind is shadowed by conviction. He feels the disturbance in the normal state of reason. In some situations, he even resolves to put his faith to the test. I have been one of these. Taking the test has become a constitutive trait of my personality. I've always believed, I’ve never believed blindly. I’ve never stopped thinking, and thinking critically. I'm embarrassed to say: not for a single day. To think critically, for myself and all my fellow men, also means to distrust, mistrust, doubt, question. It means to say "no, it is impossible."
When I did this (it would be better to say when I felt it) for the first time, I was just 18. I vividly remember those days: how I went into a trance. How I collapsed from the clouds of dogmatism to the ground of doubt. That experience was as strong and radical as that which the believers call conversion. It was indeed a conversion to the truth as it is and not as I am. The feelings I then had were so powerful, so overwhelming that I simply could not cope with them. I had to retreat, not to totally lose my balance, and not to lose my intellectual healthiness. Because I had not the capital of maturity, strength, health (incredible as it may seem) to face the devil of doubt, I resolved to postpone a distressing reflection on my deepest questions.
Three years later, in another state of mind, I began the long walk in which I have examined my questions thoroughly. Like Johnnie Walker, I never stopped walking, because it is not given to man to do so. I must confess the crime.
There may be a greater state of attachment to the truth as it is and not as we want to force it to be, than that of the person who believes himself responsible before God? That person does not feel the crushing weight of condemnation to hell, but of the conviction to profess a lie. I have experienced that to some degree.
Say, however, that the whole experience I had was delusive, and that the fashionable division of this day is indeed that of the intelligent and of the not so intelligent. Unbelievers on the one hand, believers on the other. What does this mean in practice and within the major problems of knowledge? What does it mean, for example, in terms of the great question of the origin of life? God created the first living thing (whatever that may have been), or else its little pieces joined together by themselves, at the sound and the light of blind phenomena? If a Creator made the first living being or if its components came together, to form the miracle of protocell, are not the object of two epic acts of faith?
Since Stanley Miller produced amino acids in the laboratory, decades ago, up to the time when scientists produce legs and arms of ARN, no living being slightly moved in laboratories. I became the most hardened of skeptics about the possibility that it might one day move. So, I remain a skeptic and a believer, a believer and a skeptic. I say then, and the new atheists, what are they? Let Pascal answer the question by his famous exclamation: "Unbelievers, the greatest believers. Believe in Vespasian's miracles, not to believe Moses'" (PASCAL. Pensamentos. Art. XVI, XCIV. São Paulo: Edipro, 1996. p. 138).
Years after my fall from the clouds of dogma, when published Darwin's hypothesis, my preface writer, philosopher Regis de Morais, wrote something in my favor. He said he admired how I was able to control myself, while examining the length of nonsense of atheists who believe themselves to be higher and above all the rest of History. Regis found that self-control in my book or he seemed to have found. Well I must say with the radical distrust of compliments that I have (unlike the atheists who so strongly believe in them), my patience with those aristocrats ran out. They are but scientific fundamentalists. They are as dangerous (although acting on other methods) as the fundamentalist who killed nearly 100 people in Norway, this week, to revive the Templars. They are but wretches who do not realize that their aging aristocracy does not match the demands of truth, nor those of the current time.
However, the end of my patience does not mean I shall speak as these gentlemen speak to the world: from top to bottom. Do not misunderstand me. The end of patience means I will talk all the more as an equal to all people, for this is the only worthy way for a human being to address another. That applies both to atheistic scientists and to their (usually uninformed) followers. And it is really true that the scientific Templars do have a lot of followers. Our young people dive in the atheistic wave in phalanges. It has become fashionable, intellectually chic, and advanced to say "I do not believe in God." Even though the person does not have one more sentence to add to this.
Brazilian science magazine Galileo published a report stating that the percentage of atheists is now an incredible 85% in Sweden, 72% in Norway, 80% in Denmark, Finland 60%, 44% UK, 44% Netherlands, 43% in Belgium, Germany 49%, 54% in France. If we consider that for many millennia, the percentage of radical atheists (people without religious faith of any kind) has always been very close to zero, we shall realize that, suddenly, mankind did take a giant leap forward in intelligence! Clearly, the time has come for the Ministry of Intelligence to warn: to believe is bad for your brain.
