Quite frequently the quarrelsome atheists one runs into online are very poorly educated; in many cases they’re basically fundamentalist Christians who swapped the bible out for a biology textbook as the holy book that they don’t read. This seeming lack of knowing anything that would normally be learned by reading books lends itself to them coming up with some really weird creation myths for the existence of religion. Consider this recent one left in a comment to my post You Can’t “Believe In Science”:

Regarding experimentation, science requires observation, not experimentation as such. Paleontology is observational science, like astronomy. Simples. But anyway, the difference between science and religion is that scientific ideas are tested against observation while religious ones are not. Science rejects hypotheses which don’t agree with observation; religion keeps them and adds excuses. The Problem of Evil should have done away with the “everything was created by a perfectly good God” hypthesis, but religion has kept it and added excuses: Free will/God is impossible for puny humans understand/Best of all worlds/Etc. The flaw here is that adding excuses to a failed hypothesis doesn’t make it more likely, it makes it less likely.

While I’ve seen similar creation myths for religion from atheists, I’ve never seen this exact one. According to this myth, people first came to believe that God exists and created all that is, and reasoned out that He is perfectly good, then later discovered evil and invented the idea of free will and the concept of the world being too complicated for us to understand in detail in order to explain away this new discovery.

I doubt that the fellow who wrote this actually believes it; based on previous experience with him I doubt that he really believes anything at all; he seems to be a rhetorical thinker who just types stuff that happens to sound good at the moment. That’s pretty typical of the type, which is why I’m using it here for illustration. (Btw, rhetoric, on a technical level, is generally a micro-narrative or series of micro-narratives. Understanding this will make it easier for me to talk about it.)

You can see the basic flow of the rhetoric in the quoted paragraph. He started off with a story of how science is about observation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was largely based off of pictures he’s seen of people looking through telescopes and microscopes. (It’s too much to go into here, but in many ways the “scientific revolution” was really the avalanche of knowledge gained when lens-making technology got good enough to make telescopes and microscopes, rather than any change in methodology.) From that mental image, now called Observation, he proceeds to try to distinguish Religion from Science using this. That is, he goes on to tell the story of how Science uses Observation. Since Science uses Observation, Religion must not use Observation. What story to tell?

Well, here he runs into a problem, since obviously in any normal sense of the word “observation” which isn’t code for “looking through a telescope or microscope” looking at a man heal a cripple or walk on water or feed 5000 people when there was only a few loaves of bread and a few fishes would be “observation.” So merely observing things can’t be the story of Observation he wants. However, with falsificationism being a popular idea among atheists, he brings it in as the backbone of the story he’s going to tell. So in Science, Observation allows you to falsify theories, which Scientists heroically do. This is in contrast to Religion, where Observation is not used to falsify theories. He doesn’t bother coming up with an example of scientists rejecting a theory based on observation, probably because this would be far more difficult than he consciously realizes. (It would be far easier to come up with examples of scientific theories being retained in the face of contrary observation. E.g. Newtonian mechanics, the inability of quantum mechanics and relativity to be reconciled, the Standard Model being kept despite observations indicating dark matter, etc. etc. etc.)

He then needs to tell a story of Religion ignoring observation. It would not work for his rhetorical purpose, however, to simply appeal to the fact that Religion (he really means Christianity; this is less true of non-Abramic religions) rests on testimony rather than observation. And this is not because virtually no one actually conducts scientific experiments for himself and relies on testimony. It’s because the narrative flow must be the ignoring of observation. So he comes up with the astonishing idea that there were people who were ignorant of evil that came to believe in God for unspecified reasons, then discovered the existence of evil and rather than rejecting their idea came up with a rationalization for it. It’s dumb as the proverbial solid waste from a dog, but it does have the correct narrative flow.

Now, while these micro-narratives have nothing to do with reality to an impressive degree, they do feature a common theme I’ve seen frequently from this kind of atheist: they get really offended when people don’t take their judgment to be the final word on a matter. They will identify something that they perceive to be a problem and get mad when people don’t instantly change their minds, but instead offer an explanation. This would be nonsensical unless the atheist were infallible, which I think gives some insight into the psychology behind it. Somehow or other (and I suspect there are many possible causes) they have come to be their own authority.

It is unpleasant for anyone to see an authority which they respect being disrespected.