AS YOU read this, the Global Atheists Convention is being held in Melbourne. 
Census statistics show that people describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or of no religion has steadily risen every census since the Australian Bureau of Statistics was founded.
My guess is that the number of non-believers will rise again in the 2011 census and in future censuses, but the 2011 numbers have not been crunched yet. And the number will rise even though the way the question was posed was skewed against giving an atheistic answer.
So why the rise of professed atheism in the past 30 years or so?
First, it is no longer a big deal, at least in the west, to say you are an atheist, unlike 500 or 50 years ago. Five hundred years ago profession of atheism meant death. Fifty years ago it meant ostracism. (It still means ostracism in backward areas of the Bible belt in the US or in many parts of the madly theistic Muslim world.)
Secondly, why not announce the obvious. In Australia atheism is not professed as an intellectual stand but by going surfing on Sunday morning. We do that.
Thirdly, and most importantly, is the change in the nature of rationality itself.
The Enlightenment professed rationality. Scientists found laws to explain the physical world – Newton’s gravity; Boyle and Dalton’s law on the relationship between pressure, volume and heat; and Faraday’s splendid explanation of the laws governing electrical current.
These great rational explanations of the physical world, however, always allowed for a divine being who created the laws. Indeed, Newton himself said as much.
But Bayes, and his great interpreter Laplace, suggested that the great Enlightenment pursuit of ultimate truth was too absolute. Bayes said that by updating our initial beliefs with new and objective information we get a new and improved belief.
You can see how an Enlightenment scientist might take umbrage at that. Science is not engaged in “belief” or improving “beliefs”; it is aimed at discerning the ultimate truth.
While ever science insisted on the pursuit of ultimate truth, of course, this relativist Bayesian view of the world would always be suspect. And while it was suspect theism could be respectable: prove to me there is no god?
But enter the Bayesian view of the world and things differ. We move away from a requirement of absolute truth.
Instead, we use statistics and probability theory to approximate the truth. We ask do we have any new and objective information that might change (and improve) our initial belief? Well, true right we do.
In the past few hundred years we have had mountains of objective information that will change and improve initial beliefs: humans cannot walk on water; change water into wine; raise people from the dead; raise themselves from the dead; ascend into some metaphysical abode in the sky; liver forever after death, and so on.
As time goes on more and more physical phenomenon are explicable without the need of a deity.
Drought, famine, disease, tempest, volcanoes and the like are not manifestations of divine wrath but perfectly explicable natural phenonmena.
As the evidence comes in, the possibility of an all powerful and all good god gets ever more remote, but neither I, nor Richard Dawkins, nor Bertrand Russell nor Christopher Hitchens could say with 100 per cent confidence, there is no god.
But do not say: “Gotcha.”
My understanding of the Dawkins view is that when you look at all the evidence around you, the possibility of an all-powerful all-knowing god is fairly remote, indeed so remote as to be dismissed.
Further as more information comes in it tends to add to the case against an all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful god.
So let’s craft life and our moral response to the human condition on earth accordingly.
Religion is just a human construct. And like most human constructs it can be deconstructed, even if it will take a very long time. It has taken 500 years for the vast majority of humans to accept the earth is not flat. Even after 150 years less than a majority understand and accept the principles of evolution.
One of religion’s major advantages in capturing hearts and minds – a complicated natural world that lends itself to supernatural explanation – is falling away as science explains more and more of it bit by bit.
The other major advantage that religion has had over rationality is access to children. People who have been indoctrinated as children find it very hard to shake it off. But this, too, is changing because peer pressure is gradually falling away, at least in the West.
Elsewhere, particularly in the parts of the Arab world, religion’s grip is much as it was in Europe several hundred years ago, but it, too, will change.
Access to knowledge is becoming more widespread. Children can question more and in the internet age seek answers themselves.
Proselytising agnosticism and atheism – that the acceptance that the preponderance of evidence is weighted against the existence of an all powerful all-good god – is an important activity in the betterment of humankind.
The Melbourne convention is not – pardon the expression – just preaching to the converted. Its purpose should be converting those who have been preached too.
We should aim to be good for goodness’s sake, not because we expect reward or punishment after death.
There is something fraudulently selfish about religious charity – some, perhaps many, are only in it to save what they believe are their immortal souls or because they have been brain-washed. How much more laudable to do charity just to help humankind and to be seen to be doing it for that reason.
So much evil has been done in religion’s name and would not have been done without the religious motive. Whereas the good done in religion’s name could just as easily have been done without the religious underpinning.
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 14 April 2012