Six Impossible Things

In Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass Alice is chided by the Queen for her inability to believe that the Queen is over a hundred years old:

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Thinking of the debate between naturalism and theism brought this exchange between Alice and the Queen to mind. If one is a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) one must, like the Queen, believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day.

For example, to be a consistent naturalist one must believe that:

1. Something (the universe) arose uncaused from nothing.
2. Life emerged by chance despite the fact that as physicist Fred Hoyle put it the odds of just a single functional protein arising by chance are about the same as giving Rubik's Cubes to 10^50 blind people and finding that they all solve it at the same moment.
3. Organisms like the Venus flytrap emerged purely by blind, chance processes.
4. Human consciousness was somehow produced by non-conscious matter.
5. No objective moral duties exist. Moral rights and wrongs are simply fictions.
6. The notions of human equality and objective human rights are likewise fictions.

Technically, a naturalist might not find the last two impossible to believe, but they do find them impossible to live by unless they're nihilists.

Most naturalists, though, prefer to cling to the idea of human equality and the conviction that there really are objective moral obligations - the obligation to treat people fairly, for example - even though, if naturalism is true, there's no reason at all to hold either of these beliefs. They're just arbitrary preferences.

There are other beliefs that many naturalists hold that really are incompatible with naturalism. Belief in free will is one and belief in a mind or soul is another.

A worldview that forces one to believe things that are so unlikely as to be in all practical respects impossible is certainly not rational. It's not much different than a superstition. Or a Lewis Carroll fantasy. Yet many would rather live in this looking glass world of impossible beliefs than believe that theism is correct, even though each of those beliefs is completely compatible with theism.

That seems to be an odd fact about people that one might think would interest sociologists and psychologists more than it apparently does.