Unbelieving

Unbelieving is a word showing to keep off from belief. It has besides two main meaning:
a) - holding that only material phenomena can be known and knowledge of spiritual matters or ultimate causes is impossible
b) - denying or questioning the tenets of especially a religion; "a skeptical approach to the nature of miracles"
Mainly the unbeliever kept that all the prophets assertions about God was false or issues of dreams. They show that what God was thought speaking through them is actually an amount of stories or myths. That a revelation was announced long ago makes it difficult to examine, but does not otherwise attest its soundness. That some revealed doctrine has lasted for ages and has met the needs of many generations proves that it is the kind of doctrine which endures and satisfies, but not that it is divine. Secular doctrines which turned out to be perfectly false have also endured and satisfied. If belief in a God has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof. If we suppose a God did exist, and suppose he did communicate his will to any of his creatures, we make only a dictation, for overwhelmingly persuaded persons, which have already faith, believing in the revealed books. So they will by its correspondence to their imaginations and wishes, but not with any proof of historical evidence. 
The unbelievers think that nothing is proved by this general response except that men are everywhere very much alike. They have the same members, the same organs, the same glands, in varying degrees of activity. Being so much alike, they tend to agree upon a few primary desires. Physical and social conditions brings about a general similarity in prophecies. They think besides that the human mind is often teased is the desire to live after death, and believers seeing themselves cut off before their will to live is exhausted and that the religions which provide these successful schemes credit with keener insight into human wishes than other religions have had, but nothing credit them with greater authority as regards the truth. They would be for unbelievers all guesswork at all.
==History==
Many forms of unbelieving ran in the past, but it is only from XVIII century that it became an important sociological point of view. 
It was during the 19th century that the controversy between materialists and Christians shifted from the question of the relation of soul and body to the question of the origin of life. This change was brought mainly. No problem when the physician Van Helmont (1577-1644) claimed to have generated live mice by placing a dirty shirt in a bowl of wheat germs and keeping it there for three weeks or William Harvey (1578-1657), the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, believed that worms and insects could be spontaneously generated from decayed matter,
No problem even when Lamarck mentioned the possibility of the spontaneous generation of mushrooms. But some later evolutionists made this adjustment by giving God a small part in the evolutionary process. God, they said, created the first germ of life, and then evolution did the rest. This was the view that Darwin had already advanced publicly in his Origin of Species. Privately, however, he preferred a materialistic explanation of the origin of life, suggesting that life might have arisen from a protein compound in a warm pool in which ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity and other ingredients were present. Thomas Huxley believed that life had originated in the sea When some slime was dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. Huxley proclaimed it the simplest form of living matter and named it after Haeckel, but later it proved to be only some inorganic salts. 
In the 19th century Positivism was a type of unbelieving first advocated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857). His fundamental doctrine was the alleged three stages of human thought. The first stage, according to Comte, was the theological. As men passed through this stage, they were first fetish-worshipers, second polytheists, and finally monotheists. The second stage was metaphysical. In this stage men no longer referred phenomena to supernatural beings but to unseen causes, to occult powers or forces which can not be detected by the senses. But this stage had for he also been outgrown, and thinking men had now entered the third stage of development, to wit, the positive stage. Men living in this third stage have come to recognize that there are no spiritual agencies in the universe, no efficient causes, nothing but facts discoverable by the senses, nothing but events which take place according to natural law. In this positive stage, Comte insisted, it has become evident that theological and metaphysical problems are insoluble and senseless. All that we ought to attempt is to discover and systematize the laws of nature.
John Stuart Mill and the historian Thomas Buckle were numbered among his admirers. Of the later 19th-century positivists Kirchhoff and Mach, noted physicists, were especially prominent. And throughout the century there were many other scientists who, though they refused the positivistic label, yet by their contempt for religion and metaphysics showed themselves to be thoroughly imbued with the positivistic spirit.
The most important historical fact for the birth of a new and stronger unbelieving was the issue of The origin of species by Charles Darwin in 1859, because with it a totally new scientific horizon was open, strongly supporting unbelieving. The book produced immediately an amount of religious negative opinions and, at thesame time, was changing horizons and increasing secularisation by unbelievers. 
After Darwin we can see in Thomas Huxley, which called his point of view Agnosticism, a way to define the unbelieving. Huxley's position is based on an empiricism that is nearer to Mill's poin of view because, even he, thought that we are not able to prove the existence of God, but even we are not be able to disprove it. Thet is not the point of view of medern unbelievers, that think God, as the monotheis affirms, denied by the natural reality. 
In 20th century some followers of Darwin look eagerly to space science to confirm the unbelieving point of view, so, in 1959, Urey and Miller made a very important experiment, to confirming the opinion that all the projected space flights and the high costs of such developments would be fully justified if they were able to establish the existence of life on either planets. 
 
Later some scientists claim that this feat has already been accomplished. Experiments with viruses, for example, have sometimes been so interpreted. Viruses are minute particles which cause certain diseases. When they are not in the cells of an organism which they can infect, viruses seem entirely lifeless, even forming crystals after the manner of inorganic chemicals. But as soon as a virus penetrates a living cell, it reproduces (makes copies of) itself just as if it were alive. Viruses, moreover, consist of two parts, a protein shell and a core of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA). In 1955 at the University of California H. L. Fraenkel-Conrat accomplished the remarkable feat of disassembling two breeds of the tobacco mosaic virus and then successfully combining the protein shells of one breed with the RNA nuclei of the other. But as Fraenkel-Conrat himself observed, this was not a creation of life but an analysis of biologically active structures in terms of chemistry. 
Other experiments have proceeded along similar lines. In 1957 A. Kornberg and his associates in St. Louis caused DNA nucleic acid molecules to reproduce themselves by mixing a small "primer" of DNA with a ferment (enzyme) taken from colon bacteria and then adding the proper building materials of nucleic acid (nucleotides). (86) And in 1965 Spiegelman and Haruna of the University of Illinois did the same thing with RNA nucleic acid, using a ferment (enzyme) taken from cells infected by a certain virus, a small amount of RNA as a primere - magnesium salts, and the proper building--materials. (87) But as Dobzhansky (1964) admits, such experiments, though very impressive, do not really involve the creation of life from non-living constituents, since some of the materials are taken from living cells and, in any case, no living cell is produced. 
==Social effects on unbelieving==
The social effects of the unbelieving where in every times important concerning secularization of society. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer became a very influential exponent of social evolutionism besides of biological evolutionism. In his complex groups of essays A System of Synthetic Philosophy he proceeded beyond the belief, asserting that the existence of God was a matter of faith rather than certain knowledge. He even argued that the force behind the cosmic process of evolution was unknown and unknowable. 
In later books The Principles of Biology (1864–1867) and The Principles of Psychology (1855–1870) Spencer defended evolution as a universal natural process of development from simple and homogenous to more complex and differentiated forms of life over millions of years. Thus Spencer became embroiled with Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and others in the debate with those who held to a literal interpretation of Genesis or who denied the simian ancestry of human beings. Spencer also used the evolution debate as a forum to attack the idea of established religion.
In The Principles of Sociology (1876–1896) Spencer presented an account of religious evolution fleshing out the first "sociology of religion", because he thought that the origins of religion lay in the worship of ghosts or ancestors. Thus he extrapolated this view from the balance of evidence found among "primitives," or what he had no hesitation in describing as "the lowest races of mankind." He shown besides a progress in social mentality, from Greco-Roman to the "cruder" monotheisms of Jews and Muslims and then with the refinements of Catholicism and Protestantism on an ascending scale, envisaging his own unbelieving, scientific position as the top of the history of religious consciousness.
Such system, obviously, also carried ethical implications . In various social essays (especially in Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, 1861, and The Principles of Ethics, 1879–1893, he was seen as a liberal and an individualist unbelieving opposed to Christian morality.
In fact the unbelieving very often is following, in every times, the scientific discoveries, especially in field of biology from 19th century so far. The theory of evolution, undoubtedly, opened a new way for unbelieving, including an scientific explanation of humanity's origins that had a profound impact on human societies. Some have vigorously opposed acceptance of the scientific explanation due to its perceived religious implications (e.g. its implied rejection of the special creation of humans described in the Bible). This has led to a vigorous conflict between creation and evolution in public education, primarily in the United States.
Probably for the reason to change traditional mentality which pervades many people of states of West and South of Union, Barack Obama recently said: 'We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers."
==See also==
*Laicism
*Relativism
*Religiosity
*Religious skepticism
*Secularism
*Skepticism
== External links ==
* Think without Beliefs Does rational thinking require the adherence to beliefs at all?
* Ethics of Belief Classic WK Clifford essay that belief by its nature is unethical, with counterpoint by William James.
* "Why I am an unbeliever" by Carl Van Doren
Category:Criticism of religion
Category:Disengagement from religion
Category:Secularism
Category:Epistemological theories
de:Unglaube
es:increencia
fr:Incroyance
it:Noncredenza