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I’VE LONG thought of myself as a no-frills, straight-down-the-line atheist.
Don’t believe in God or other supernatural beings, don’t believe the Universe
has some ineffable purpose, don’t believe we pass through this vale of tears as
a prelude to existence on a higher plane. Straightforward enough: but as
scientists we ought to find ways of testing our assumptions.

So it was with cool investigative interest that I came across Belief-O-Matic
(www.beliefnet.com), an Internet quiz with 20 questions about deities, morality
and the nature of the Universe, all with multiple-choice answers. After a
grilling, it presents you with belief categories ranked from best to worst fit.
This is a serious item, an online discussion of the purpose of life, Good v
Evil, that kind of thing. The Belief-O-Matic name is a bit of a gag, but the
site isn’t flippant. It was good on what I’m not: Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jew,
Hindu or Seventh Day Adventist. All these schools, I suspect, are unbending on
the deity question.

But the matter of where I might fit in was more problematic. I scored a
somewhat disappointing 89 per cent as an atheist, but 97 per cent as a Unitarian
and a convincing 100 per cent as a secular humanist. More perplexing was my 71
per cent rating as a liberal Protestant. Liberal maybe, but Protestants still
believe in God, don’t they? Or has it become, in today’s socially conscious,
eager-to-please church, a negotiable item? A weakness of the questionnaire is
that it lumps together atheism, agnosticism and mere indifference. Whether you
positively don’t believe in God, aren’t sure, or don’t care, you have to press
the same button. This is a website created by people who argue about forms of
belief so perhaps they recoil from the idea that a person might vehemently not
believe at all. This, at any rate, is why I rated highly as a Unitarian or
secular humanist: such people are agnostic about atheism, so to speak.

But that still left me wondering why I fell 11 per cent short of being an
out-and-out atheist. Where was I going astray? The website includes a brief
précis of each belief, which told me that genuine atheists not only don’t
believe in God, they don’t believe in morality or the potential for human
improvement either. This is atheism à la Hobbes: life is nasty, brutish
and short, we’re all going to hell in a handcart, and there’s nothing we can do
about it.

This is, however, a calumny against the modern scientific atheist. In the old
days of absolute determinism, the strict rationalist had to believe that the
course of the Universe was fixed by its initial conditions. The great
mathematician Laplace famously remarked that if he knew the present state of the
world, he could predict the future in its entirety. That seems to rule out free
will and the possibility of conscious improvement in our lives.

But in the 20th century, science moved beyond classical determinism. Quantum
unpredictability doesn’t help with free will though, because it’s random and
uncontrollable. In any case, we can’t influence the world at the quantum
level—or only rarely.

More pertinent is the subtler unpredictability implied by chaotic dynamics,
which applies to the world at our fingertips. Tiny variations in initial
conditions can have large and effectively unpredictable consequences, so the
detailed forecasting that Laplace imagined can in practice never be
achieved.

Now, if the human brain is a machine of surpassing complexity, it can
generate outcomes that derive in part from the data going in but are nonetheless
not easily predictable. Which means, I think, that we can have original ideas.
If we can have ideas, we can change the world around us: it’s the opportunity to
reconcile scientific atheism with the possibility of progress and
betterment.

Or as Dirty Harry might have put it: go ahead, love thy neighbour!