Truth is obtained by satisfying an individual mind. When the information is satisfactory, it is considered truth. Many individual minds are satisfied with the truth of religion. When enough minds are satisfied the group becomes imbued with truth and this truth becomes communicable. In order to convince other individual minds and to inculcate these truths in young minds the truths must be communicable and they must be given as evidence, of some sort. There are many religious evidences. A learned individual, however, soon learns that there are only two main defenses of religion. They are:

1. So many people believe them that they must be true.
2. It makes the world a better place.

There are really no other marketable evidences, try it some time. The two defenses satisfy all possible requirements on the surface. They prove objective truth and they rally for their implementation.

The materialist critic finds that his best dialectical strategy is to attack these two positions. A similar attack on these defenses can be found in Freud�s "Future of an Illusion". These defenses, and the following critiques, seem strangely simple, so simple that they appear unimportant. It is strange then that a thoughtful analysis of the subject seems always to lead back to them. I challenge the notion that my own argument is made against the weakest structures in my opposition - something that would be called a straw man fallacy. I challenge the reader to outline the myriad other religious defenses and watch how easily they fall.

The materialist critique is as follows:

In regards to the first defense, there seems no reason to believe that a quantity of believers has an effect on the truth of a specific belief. The history of man is rife with majority failures. The fallacy that a majority alone dictates truth is not only historically miserable, but it is obviously illogical. Just one of its many failed lines of reasoning leads to the notion of choice. If a population does not understand its variety of choice, in a particular debate, it cannot, individually or otherwise, come to a sound conclusion through reason. If candidate A is elected by majority decision this does not prove, in fact, that he is the best man for the job. Even if we assume voter competency, the problem would lie in the choices available at the time of voting, in the minds of the people. Perhaps there just weren�t enough candidates. John Stuart Mill discusses this most clearly, in regards to knowing both sides of an issue, in his example of the best possible route to truth. Only a majority of people who understand all options (this being a predicate of the higher intellect) are qualified as judges of truthful outcomes in a debate. If a believer relies on the idea that majority decisions equal truth, without a concern for the actual arguments contained within, he is not only obtaining weak conclusions but he is unaware of his own faulty reasoning.

It is not difficult to devise an argument that demonstrates the failure or stagnation of the evolution of modern societies. There is no reason to believe that the world has gotten better. The greatest tragedies of man have occurred in the twentieth century. The few scraps of obvious improvement in the progress of men have direct links to science, healthcare and law. The roots of these inventions, when properly analyzed, are clearly under the domain of enlightenment thinking. The atheistic founders of the scientific method, Aristotle, Bacon, and Hobbes; and the intellectuals behind theories of democratic law, Locke, Mill, et al, have all put their energies into a progress that must claim empiricism, and not rationalism or faith, as its foundation. Any thinker who proposes that science has done as much bad as good has confused the benign theories of science with the inspired totalitarian intent of evil men. Having at our disposal the ability to do great damage to people and to the earth is clearly not the path to war. War is illogical argumentation in action and it is born of psychology. The world has been under the ideological control of religionists for thousands of years and the cultures have not gotten better. At best, they�ve stayed the same.

Using these arguments against the two defenses, the materialist or atheist is easily able to demonstrate why it is not plausible to feel satisfied with religious truths. These individual minds, the non-believers, have demonstrated their position. Their position is merely that the dominant position - the opposing position - is built on faulty grounds and should therefore be the object of skepticsm for a sound mind.