Christianity, The World's Most Falsifiable Religion?

I find myself not writing about religion very often anymore mostly because I’ve got the gist of Christian apologetics at this point and am rather bored by it, so I’m much less often inspired to respond to something I read. Still, something extraordinary does occasionally drift by, like this article from Michael Patton, Th.M., (presumably not the Mike Patton from Faith No More) entitled “Christianity, The World’s Most Falsifiable Religion.” It struck me as odd that someone with a background in theology would write so confidently about the historicity of the core claims of the Christian faith. Then again, the major endeavor of Christian apologetics is to attempt to muster up some kind of argument other than “you just need to take it on faith,” even though most believers would not cite “the overwhelming persuasiveness of Christian apologetics” as the reason for their belief. Apologetics is not for convincing nonbelievers, it’s for reassuring believers that they have legitimate, non-laughable reasons for the beliefs that they already hold, beliefs that don’t actually have their origins in the cosmological argument, or the teleological argument, or the moral argument, or the [insert apologetic du jour] argument.

Here is Patton’s thesis:

“Christianity is the only viable worldview that is historically defensible. The central claims of the Bible demand historic inquiry, as they are based on public events that can be historically verified. In contrast, the central claims of all other religions cannot be historically tested and, therefore, are beyond falsifiability or inquiry. They just have to be believed with blind faith.”

The TL;DR version of my response: No, Christianity is not historically defensible. Its claims, like those of all other religions, are not falsifiable, and you do just have to take it on faith. Here’s the long-winded version:

What is History?

To explain why the claims of the Christian faith cannot be investigated historically, the first thing that needs to be done is to define what history is, and just as importantly what history is not. (I’m borrowing heavily here from the work of Dr. Bart Ehrman, New Testament scholar and historian.) History is not the past. History is what we can show probably happened in the past. This is not a trivial distinction; there are things that certainly happened in the past but cannot be shown to have happened with any high probability. For example, there is a factual answer to the question “What did Benjamin Franklin eat for dinner on October 23^rd, 1778?” Unless we’re fortunate enough to discover Franklin's journal meticulously detailing his prandial selections on that day, we have no method of seeking the answer to this question. So although the question asks about a particular event in the past, it is not a historical question – it can’t be investigated historically. Let’s look at the claims of the New Testament and determine if they are historical claims, i.e. claims that can be investigated historically.

History as a Genre

Not every piece of writing that talks about the past is historical. “History” is a specific literary designation, and any writing deemed to be “historical” must meet certain criteria, just as any writing claiming to be satire or science fiction or biography must meet certain criteria. So, what exactly is history? The word itself comes from Herodotus, the 5^th century BCE Greek writer commonly referred to as “The Father of History” (an honor conferred upon him by Cicero, no less.) Herodotus begins his famous work with the immortal words “Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε,” “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus.” The Greek word whence comes our word history means an investigation or inquiry. In this hugely influential work, Herodotus establishes many basic features of the genre of historical writing. First of all, he clearly identifies himself by name and place. Second, he often gives multiple conflicting accounts of a story and identifies to which people each perspective belongs. In the case of events he didn’t witness himself, he tells the reader where he got his information and reports it neutrally, inviting the reader to decide which side is telling the truth, if any.

Thucydides, Herodotus’ 5^th century Greek contemporary wrote a detailed history of the war between Athens and Sparta as it was unfolding before his very eyes. His methods are even more mindfully scrupulous than those of Herodotus, and he tells us explicitly in Book I, section 22 how he gets his information:

“And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.”

Thucydides’ work is also noteworthy for his inclusion of long speeches, about which he gives the following disclaimer in the same section:

“With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”

So, history as a genre was established more than four hundred years before the New Testament: a transparent inquiry into events by an author who identifies himself, dutifully reports on sources, and declares any biases. It should already be clear that the writers of the gospels make no effort to be historical in their approach to narration. But wait, there’s more!

Investigating the Historical Past

Having established what historical writing looks like from its ancient roots, we should mention what modern scholars of history look for when trying to determine what probably happened in the past. The most important resources in investigating the historical past are primary sources – first-hand accounts reported by people who witnessed the events. Historians want not only primary sources, but multiple primary sources that were created independently of one another, are consistent in their description of the events, and have no obvious bias in reporting. How do the gospels of the New Testament fare as desirable historical evidence? Let’s find out:

Are the gospels primary sources?

The stories narrated in the gospels are not eye-witness accounts and don’t even claim to be. Even worse, the original autographs of all New Testament books are lost. The earliest texts of the gospels we have are copies from a century later or more. Historians don’t know what the authors of the gospels originally wrote because the original texts don’t exist.

Are the gospels multiple independent sources?

Well, kind of. Multiple? Yes, technically. Independent? Definitely not. The first three gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) are plagued by a troublesome debate known as the synoptic problem, a veritable cluster-fuck of scholarly confusion as to where the hell the writers of these books got their information, because large parts are repeated verbatim across the three books, and the authors never mention their sources.

Are the gospels consistent in their descriptions of events?

When was Jesus executed? Mark (14:12, 15:25) and John (19:14-16) can’t agree on the hour or the day. Did Jesus carry his own cross, as John says (19:17), or did Simon of Cyrene carry it, as Mark (15:21), Matthew (27:32), and Luke (23:26) say? Were the women watching the crucifixion from far away, as Matthew (27:55), Mark (15:40), and Luke (23:49) say, or were Jesus’ mother Mary, her sister, and Mary Magdalene close at hand as John (19:25) says? What were Jesus’ last words before dying? Did he say “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” as Mark (15:34) and Matthew (27:46) report, or “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” as Luke (23:46) reports, or “It is finished,” as John (19:30) reports? That’s just a small selection of the inconsistencies in the crucifixion story alone. The gospel writers don’t tell the same story about anything.

Are the gospels unbiased in reporting events?

The gospels are stories narrated as if factual with no attempts whatsoever at impartiality. The authors of these books were 1^st century Christians who already believed these stories and disseminated them for the purpose of converting people to their religion.

So, the gospels display precisely none of the characteristics shown by actual writers of history, and the texts have none of the characteristics that modern historians look for when investigating historical events. I could stop here, but wait, there’s more!

The Nail in the Coffin (Stone in front of the Tomb?): Miracles

As if everything mentioned thus far wasn’t problematic enough for the historicity of the claims in the New Testament, Dr. Ehrman reminds us of an even bigger problem: miracles. What is a miracle? A miracle is a suspension of the natural order of the world - an event that transcends the very physical laws that govern our entire existence. A miracle is not just an improbable event, but an impossible one. It’s rolling a 7 on a six-sided die, or being raised from the dead, or correctly folding a fitted bed sheet. Historians, as we established earlier, have to try to demonstrate what probably happened in the past. Miracles are by definition the least probable things that have ever happened. Of course they are – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be miraculous. The conflict should be obvious: the least probable occurrence can never be the most probable explanation for anything. Thus, for a historian, no miraculous story can ever be a historical one. This is why history text books do not mention gods, demons, angels, fairies, and hobgoblins when explaining the D-Day invasion, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the French Revolution. Highly improbable explanations have no historical explanatory power.

What About Other Sources?

There aren’t any. Jesus of Nazareth, whoever he was, wrote nothing. His disciples wrote nothing. His contemporary followers wrote nothing. (This shouldn’t be surprising – lower class people in Judea in the 1^st century were illiterate.) The earliest author we have is the apostle Paul, who never met Jesus. Everyone else, including the gospel writers, the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus, came later. There are no verifiable historical witnesses to the crucifixion, to the empty tomb, to the resurrection. As far as historians are concerned, these claims cannot be evaluated, let alone shown to have probably happened.

Conclusions and Caveats

If you're a Christian and reading this (or if you're Michael Patton,Th.M. - Hi Mike!) and frothing at the mouth right now, please note that at no point have I said that the crucifixion, the empty tomb, and the resurrection did not happen. To say that a claim is not historical is NOT to say the event did not happen. Michael's claim is that the Christian stories about Jesus are historical, and I've explained why that isn't true.

I don't personally believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. I'm not even entirely convinced that anything reported about him in Christian texts is factually true, given how powerfully unhistorical they are. I cannot, however, state with absolute certainty that the claims are false, because they are unfalsifiable. The complete lack of evidence to substantiate any claims about Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection strongly suggests to me that the claims are false, but it does not prove that they are false. It could be that there was a 1^st century Palestinian Jew who performed miracles and survived his own murder, just as it could be that Benjamin Franklin had steak and eggs for dinner on October 23^rd, 1778. Both could be facts; neither is historical.

Cognitive Dissonance: Belief vs. Experience

I was a faithful Christian for the first 20 or so years of my life. I mean a fully indoctrinated, Bible-thumping, Jesus-loving, nightly-praying, church-going believer of The Word. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, went to church regularly (even after I was old enough to stay home if I wanted), and even played bass in the praise band during my church's hip contemporary service. I know what it's like to be a believer, I know how most Christians acquire the beliefs that they hold, and, most importantly, I know what it's like to live in a world where those beliefs are constantly being called into question, or as Christians might say, tested.

I got the idea for this blog entry from watching a YouTube video made by a British fellow who goes by TheraminTrees. This video is actually the second in a series about his transition from faith-based beliefs to atheism, and his explanation in this second part is simply a perfect illustration of the effects of having beliefs that are inconsistent with our life experiences.

The phenomenon I'd like to talk about is one that is inherent in any faith-based belief system, and one that every Christian (and Muslim, and Jew) experiences and has to find creative ways to deal with. That phenomenon is something I'll call cognitive dissonance.

That sounds like a fancy phrase, but it simply comes down to this: we all have a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world in which we live, many of which we acquire directly from our parents during our formative years as children. We all also live in a world which is constantly bombarding us with sensory data and experiences. We try to interpret all of these experiences through the lens of our beliefs. Sometimes the two are easily compatible, and there is congruence - our beliefs and our actual experiences coincide harmoniously. Sometimes our beliefs and experiences, however, seem to be at odds with each other, and this produces a problem, which I'm calling cognitive dissonance. Picture it this way:

As you can see, when our beliefs about the world and experiences of the world coincide, there is congruence. When they don't, there is dissonance. Congruence makes us feel comfortable and confident in our beliefs; dissonance makes us feel uncomfortable and uneasy about them.

I'll recount an example when I can clearly recall experiencing this sort of cognitive dissonance. When I was in high school, I took an elective course in Philosophy. One day we were talking about the origins of life on Earth. The various theories were laid out, most specifically creationism/intelligent design and evolution. (The theory of evolution does not actually seek to explain the origin of the first life form, a phenomenon known as abiogenesis, but let's just pretend like we're dealing with apples to apples here.) As a Christian, my belief was that God had something to do with the creation of life on Earth. In the theory of evolution, there is no mention of God whatsoever; the theory works without any such supposition. Looking at the evidence for evolution, however, produced a problem for me: the explanatory power of the theory was overwhelming and undeniable. I simply could not reject the theory outright, even though it did not align with my beliefs. This troubled me greatly, until I heard about a third option, namely special creation. This hybrid theory states that evolution occurred, but God intervened at several key points in order to ensure its success. I immediately latched onto this theory and, for a period of time, accepted this as my belief for the explanation of life on Earth.

In order to correct the dissonance between my belief and my experience, I needed to distort the theory. There was no compelling evidential reason for me to insert God. I was beginning with the assumption that God simply had to be in there somewhere, and so I distorted my beliefs until I could square them with my experiences. This is one way that believers can reconcile dissonance and try to make their beliefs and experiences congruent. The problem is that, just as in my example, this process invariably produces garbled nonsense. In the end, my conclusion was an incoherent bastardization of two different theories, but crucially, it alleviated my cognitive dissonance about the matter at the time.

A more salient example that many Christians are facing right now is the issue of homosexuality. Among younger people especially, this seems to be extremely important - I know people who have decided to attend different churches based solely on this one issue. In this case, the cognitive dissonance arises between the Christian belief that homosexuality is a sin and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality by our culture. Many people who have close friends or family members who are gay find it difficult to condemn these people to hell for eternity as vile sinners.

There is a serious lack of congruence here between belief and experience, and there are many ways in which believers try to force a reconciliation. All attempts to do this require either distortion of belief or denial of experience. The believer has to convince himself that the scriptures must be interpreted in a different way; the translations are wrong, the verses apocryphal, the cultures incomparable, et cetera. The believer desperately wants to find a way to harmonize his sensibilities with his preconceived beliefs, and it is particularly difficult on this issue.

Christianity has some very serious dissonance built into it from the onset, in the form of obvious contradictions. Two examples that come to mind easily are the Garden of Eden story and the entire concept of prayer. Any amount of serious critical thought about these two things will reveal some serious cognitive dissonance, as I will attempt to illustrate.

The Garden of Eden story in Genesis is ridiculous for many reasons, but even if we dismiss it as entirely metaphorical and not descriptive of any actual event, it still has bigger problems. (Mind you, there's no textual justification for dismissing it as a metaphor - the Bible never suggests that the story is anything but literal truth.) We all know the story: God creates Adam and Eve and two magical trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge. A wily snake slithers up and tells Eve that God is lying, so she eats from the forbidden tree and gives some to Adam too, so they've both made a mess of it. Yadda yadda yadda, original sin.

The contradiction comes in God's reaction to this incident. By his very nature, God is said to be omniscient. He knows all that ever was, is, and will be. If that is the case, then God should never be surprised or react with any emotion to anything that ever happens, because he already knows exactly what will happen. This makes it absurd that God would ever be angry for anything that anyone ever does or doesn't do. If God is omniscient, then he knew that Adam and Eve would eat from the forbidden tree and be cursed forever. This story is supposed to explain original sin, but it actually implicates God as the originator of sin. God knew what would happen; he set Adam up to fail. The God we read about in the Bible does not react as if he is omniscient. The believer must try to square this massive inconsistency of experience with his beliefs in order to produce congruence.

 

Prayer is another head-scratcher of a contradiction. This is perhaps the most resonant source of cognitive dissonance among believers, because everyone has experienced a so-called "unanswered prayer." The process by which believers reconcile this troubling experience with their belief is by invoking "God's will." If anything happens, it is because God willed it to happen, and if we cannot understand the reasons, this is simply because we cannot understand God. Invoking "God's will" is a tacit admission that God does not listen to or answer prayers. He's going to do whatever he wants to do anyway, whether you pray about it or not. And remember, since he's omniscient, he already knows what you want. There's nothing you can tell him that he doesn't already know, including the fact that you don't want your grandmother to die from cancer. Praying is one of the most futile, contradictory, arrogant, misguided acts imaginable, and believers all but admit this themselves. One can make giant leaps towards congruence of belief and experience by simply disavowing the idea of a God who answers prayers; by our very experiences we know this to be simply false. Prolonging this clash between reality and unfounded belief only invites unnecessary suffering on oneself.

The problem with faith-based belief is that it demands that we reject our experiences. Instead, people are raised to believe completely arbitrary and unsupported claims like God is perfectly good. We have to dismiss our own experiences, which tell us that any God who offers eternal punishment for a transgression is unjust and cannot be good. No crime, however severe, could ever possibly justify an eternal punishment. One can only reconcile those conflicting statements by distrusting and rejecting one's own intuition. This is profoundly unhealthy behavior.

In the video above, TheraminTrees talks about atheism as a congruence. When you don't begin with a set of beliefs which you did not arrive at through evaluation of your experiences, congruence occurs naturally and much more frequently. There is no struggle to contort your experiences into a rigid predetermined framework. Atheism is not a rejection of God, it is an admission that there is no evidence for God. This is the only logical framework that promotes harmony between belief and experience. Believing things on no evidence, and rejecting evidence which does not fit with beliefs, is a recipe for constant struggle to reconcile belief with the real world, and for the believer, it must be exhausting.

If you believe things on faith, ask yourself why you have these beliefs. You will discover that you don't actually have faith in Christ. You've never met Christ. You have faith in other people who have never met Christ but have told you about Christ. You have faith in The Bible, which was written by people, none of whom knew Christ. This is no way to form beliefs about the world, as it leads to dissonance. Base your beliefs on your experiences, and you'll be stunned how quickly everything falls into harmony and makes sense. I've found that it's much easier to sleep at night as an atheist than as a Christian.

"Atheism is a Religion" and Other Fallacious Criticisms by Believers

As someone who is fairly open about being a strongly not-religious person, it often happens that I get into discussions (they start out that way, at least) with people who disagree with my worldview (or lack thereof). As any non-believer can tell you, there aren't very many criticisms of disbelief; there are actually only a few, and they inevitably come up in any discussion about belief and non-belief, and I'd like to point out why they're silly. 

The first is that atheism is a religion. The second, that "militant" or "extreme" atheism is just as bad as religious fundamentalism. The third, that blind faith in science is the same as blind faith in God. Lastly, that believing things based on evidence rather than faith is "arrogant." I've chosen these particular sentiments because they've all been lobbed at me by people I know, many of them more than once, and because they're all nonsense.

1. Atheism is a Religion

This is a very common retort, and perhaps the most easily dismissed. One need only look at a dictionary definition of the word religion to end the argument, I should think. Dictionary.com says:

1.  a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects.

Atheism in no way fits either of these definitions. That's because there is no dogma in atheism; there's nothing you must believe in order to be an atheist. It's not even a set of beliefs - it's simply the rejection of other belief systems. It's saying to the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, et cetera that you simply don't think their beliefs are true. [If you can't understand the difference between the statements "I don't believe that x is true" and "I believe that x is not true," please stop reading and come back when you can.] If you ask an atheist what they think about these things, namely the "cause, nature, and purpose of the universe," you'll get many different answers, with a common one likely being "I don't know."

As somebody once cleverly noted, if atheism is a religion, then "off" is a TV channel. Actually, atheists can't even agree on what word best describes themselves. Various suggestions come into and go out of fashion: atheist, non-theist, non-religious, free-thinker, humanist, bright, agnostic - the point is that it's really just "none of the above" on the religion list. The only thing that atheists are united by is simply what the word means: a (not) + theism (belief in god.) The reasons for not believing, and the explanations or answers to the questions to which religion generally provides answers, will be different for everyone. Atheism is not a religion, it's the absence of religion. 

2. Militant and Extreme Atheism

I like this one a lot, because it is self-evidently nonsensical after about 30 seconds of contemplation. Hijacking these adjectives which are generally reserved for religious fundamentalists and applying them to atheism is an exercise in utter futility. When someone is labeled a religious "extremist," for example, it's generally because this person has either killed other people because of his beliefs, or he at least judges it perfectly acceptable to do so. Religious extremists tend to be quite dangerous and frightening, as these are the most devout and hard-core followers of the literal word of their holy text.

What is a militant atheist? An extreme atheist? How often do you read a news report about someone who has violently murdered someone else in the name of atheism? There are degrees of the seriousness of one's religious convictions; there are no degrees of atheism. A casual atheist says "I don't believe in god." An extreme atheist says "I don't believe in god." Does the extreme one say it louder? Does he write it on a sign maybe? Write blog posts about it?

Generally I've found that anyone who is vocal about his atheism or openly critical of other peoples' beliefs gets labeled as "militant" or "fundamentalist," simply because people really don't like to be told that their entire worldview is based on lies. These are complete misuses of those negatively-charged words, and the comparison is laughable at best and offensive at worst. Nobody in the world is rioting in the streets and slaughtering innocent people because of atheism. While thousands of people in the Muslim world chant "death to the atheist bloggers," people at free-thinking rallies hold up signs like "What do we want? Evidence-based change! When do we want it? After peer-review!" People who are vocal about their atheism and critical of others' absurd beliefs are not dangerous, so stop throwing around these awful words as if they're apt.

3. Faith in Science and Faith in God

Religious people try as hard as they can to assert (and they all think they're clever, as if they're the first to do it) that atheists simply replace God with Science and worship it in the same way, so at the end of the day it's really the same thing. This is a woefully irresponsible comparison. First of all, "science" is (if I may use my good friend the dictionary again) systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation. Most important in that definition is what's missing, not what's included. There are certain fundamental questions, such as the meaning of life, or what happens after you die, or what sort of moral code we should all adopt, which science does not try to answer. Science is fine with not having an answer to some questions; it's perfectly fine to say "I don't know," or "I don't care" about these sorts of questions.

The scientific method, for example, is an empirically testable and productive process of finding the truth about the world in which we live. It allows for independent verification, actively tries to eliminate bias, and is perfectly happy with getting results that prove hypotheses wrong. There is no need to use the word "faith" when talking about scientific observation. We needn't simply have faith that gravity exists, or that the world is a sphere, or that the sun will come up tomorrow. We can go find out all of that for ourselves and prove it to be true, and understand why it's true. It's easy to trust the scientific method because it produces verifiable results. Using it cures disease and develops new technologies and explains phenomena in the world around us.

Faith is a particularly nasty attribute of religion, and it amounts to nothing more than claiming to believe something to be true when you have absolutely no evidence that it is. Christians, for example, have faith that they will go to heaven when they die. They have absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever, but assert it as if it's fact, even though they couldn't possibly prove it. This is a nice way to transition to the last complaint about atheism, namely...

4. Atheism (or Science) is Arrogant

This sentiment is the most irritating to me personally, because it's so inherently contradictory that it's baffling that religious people can possibly think this way. Again, I think the dictionary will help us sort this out quite succinctly: making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; a sense of superiority, self-importance, or entitlement. 

Let's just take some commonly-held beliefs among Christians, since this is the belief system with which I'm the most familiar. Christians believe that God created the universe for the sole purpose of the existence of human beings, and that he loves us and watches/cares about what we do. We now know that our planet is only one of several in our solar system, that our solar system is one of many in our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of many in the universe. With each increasingly powerful telescope we create, we reveal just how completely insignificant and unremarkable our existence is, and yet this completely self-centered belief that it's all for us persists among believers. This sort of thinking is both bafflingly ignorant and tenaciously arrogant. Many people of faith also deny the truth of evolution simply on the grounds that humans are somehow above having evolved from primates, so it's just not possible. 

The scientific worldview, on the other hand, is one of extreme humility: human existence in the grand scheme of the universe is staggeringly insignificant, and our time on the Earth is but a blink in the massive extent of geological time. Science admits when it's wrong, even after it thought it was right for a long time. I've collected a few catchy little epigrams about religion to make the point:

"Science has questions which may never be answered. Religion has answers which may never be questioned."

"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings."

"Morality is doing what's right regardless of what you're told. Religion is doing what you're told regardless of what's right."

The Point

The only reason atheists even have to call themselves something is because irrational people invented gods; there wouldn't be any need for such a word otherwise. If you're a believer in some sort of god and have faith that a bunch of extremely unlikely things are true, fine. But don't try to bring us non-believers down by insinuating that we're just like religious people in any way. We define ourselves by not being like you at all.

Do You Believe In Fate? No, I Mean Really?

Do you believe in fate? Do you believe that everything happens for a reason? Do you believe in karma? No, I mean do you actually believe in these things, or do you just make casual statements to this effect? Have you spent any time thinking about the consequences of these sorts of statements? I have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of people who say things like "I guess it's just not meant to be," or "karma's a bitch" haven't actually given a moment's thought to the implications of these statements, if they're actually made seriously.

These statements do seem fairly innocuous, and perhaps for most people they're just little stock phrases, little learned locutions we spit out in certain circumstances. I'm not concerned with this casual use, in the same way that I'm not trying to stop myself from saying "oh my god" or other things which are practically reflexes. I'm focusing here on people who actually believe in fate, or in some kind of force of karma, or that everything happens for a reason. These tend to be the same sorts of people who claim to be "spiritual, but not religious." This means that they like having ridiculous beliefs based on no evidence, but they also want to have the freedom to pick which ridiculous beliefs rather than conform to a preexisting dogma.

Here's the problem with beliefs of this sort: if you say (with complete intellectual honesty) that you believe that certain events are "fated" to happen (or not to happen), then the following things must be true, and by necessity:

• the universe, or someone/something within the universe, is consciously aware of the existence of every single person within it.
• the universe, or someone/something within the universe, cares about what happens to each individual and has planned out certain events (which are intertwined with the lives of other individuals).
• the universe, or someone/something within the universe, has some objective sense of morality (which coincidentally aligns with our own) and is concerned about keeping a balance.
• the universe, or someone/something within the universe, is sufficiently knowledgeable and capable of simultaneously taking care of every moment of every person's life in the world.

If you do not believe that all of these things are true, then you don't actually believe in fate, or karma, or that everything happens for a reason. There is no way for these things to be true unless there is some sort of sentience somewhere in the universe who is carefully orchestrating these earthly machinations. You'll see quickly that this is akin to believing in God in everything but name.

The most telling way to look at these beliefs is to ask why people hold them, and then it becomes clear why they exist. Ask someone who actually believes in fate or karma why he believes in it, and the answer will either be a blank stare (indicating that this person had never really bothered to think about that question before and has no real answer) or something along the lines of there just has to be something greater out there, something bigger than all of us, you know? Does there? Why? How can you possibly assert that that statement must be true? When you probe further, you will eventually get the person to admit that they believe it to be true simply because they desperately want it to be true, and so therefore it must be. Of course we would all choose to live in a universe that wants justice for everyone, but reality does not conform to our desires. The fact that you wouldn't want to live a life which is simply a string of random, meaningless events doesn't make it any less likely to be true.

Some people may also point to certain events in their lives which are seemingly so coincidental that there could be no possible explanation other than that the universe has guided everything to work out this one particular way. There are (at least) two problems with this line of "proof." First, coincidences are extremely common. Human beings live (on average) for nearly a century, and our lives are constantly intertwined with others' and full of all kinds of happenings and events every waking second of every day. This allows some extremely large number of opportunities for coincidences, and given such a large number of chances, the unexpected will inevitably happen, and happen a lot. We're much more likely to dwell on the one time something coincidental happens than we are the million times when it doesn't. To focus on the interesting to the exclusion of the mundane and assign meaning to the former rather than the latter is an arbitrary act inherent in human consciousness.

The second problem is closely related to the first: humans have an overactive tendency to pattern-match. That is, we see connections between unrelated events simply because they occurred at the same time, or sequentially. This predilection for explaining the world around us through cause-and-effect relationships gives an artificially-inflated sense of causality, which some people interpret as evidence for fate, karma, divine intervention, or whatever. We shouldn't feel bad though, as we're not the only species which is prone to superstition. Pigeons have been famously shown to behave this way as well.

If you actually believe that the universe or someone/something in it is sufficiently interested and capable of guiding events, you are obligated to explain why you believe this to be true. If you are unable to articulate the most basic information about this entity, such as where it is, what it's made of, how it works, where it came from, and why it's bothering to do all of these things, then how could anyone possibly believe you? How could you even believe it yourself?

There's nothing wrong with living in a universe that doesn't care about you. Really, it's ok. When something good happens, just be happy that something good happened. You don't need to thank anyone or call yourself blessed. Enjoy it and move on. When something bad happens, don't take it personally. Don't look up for help; do what you can to make it better.

Above all, as always, own your beliefs. Think about these things (I mean really think about them) and work it all out for yourself. Then stand up and be confident in what you've come up with, and be happy to talk about it with others. If you have questions you can't answer, go back and think again. Rinse and repeat.