In an epic post, Steve Zara argues that we Atheists cannot reasonably say that given the right evidence, we would believe in God's existence.
Zara carefully examines the God category as distinct from mythical beasts and aliens.Then he discusses the logical contradictions and mental gyrations required by current ideas of the Abrahamic deity--all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, cleans his room, and the like.He talks about all the barriers to evidence for this God being, and finally concludes:
So what do we have? An inconsistent and illogical idea of a being that has self-contradictory attributes, a being that exists in a realm of magic and wishes that come true, where rules are for the breaking, and yet with the magic indistinguishable from some technology that might exist centuries or millions of centuries in the future, and with even the truly miraculous (if such exists) shown to be impossible to verify. We also have the word games of theologians insisting we trust their propositions about the world, propositions that were absurd even before the Enlightenment.We can't get to God by evidence, even if we wanted to. The very idea of God puts him beyond evidence and beyond logic. So no, we will no longer waffle about with vague attempts to express possible conditions that would persuade us to believe. There are no possible conditions.
The inconsistencies and contradictions of theism and supernaturalism seem to have no end. And, with all this, we are supposed to concede that there is some possibility of evidence for the Abrahamic God? Seriously?I agree with Zara that we should no longer make this talk of evidence that could change our minds. Jerry Coyne disagrees a bit, but even his hypothetical scenario, addressed to P.Z. Myers tends to lead me to Zara's position:
To claim that such evidence could exist is to deny Clarke, to deny Hume, to deny the relativity of Einstein and the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg. To concede that there could be acceptable evidence for the supernatural all-powerful all-knowing, all-loving eternal deity is the opposite of reasonable.
Suppose that you, P.Z., were present at the following events, and they were also witnessed by lots of other skeptical eyewitnesses and, importantly, documented on film: A bright light appears in the heavens and, supported by wingéd angels, a being clad in white robe and sandals descends onto the UMM quad from the sky, accompanied by a pack of apostles with the same names given in the Bible. Loud heavenly music is heard everywhere, with the blaring of trumps. The being, who describes himself as Jesus, puts his hand atop your head, P.Z., and suddenly your arms are turned into tentacles.I think no. The evidence doesn't lead to God or connect to God, or whatever, by definition.
As you flail about with your new appendages, Jesus asks, “Now do you believe in me?” Another touch on the head and the tentacles disappear and your arms return. Jesus and his pack then repair to the Mayo clinic and, also on film, heal a bunch of amputees (who remain permanently arméd and leggéd after Jesus’s departure). After a while Jesus and his minions, supported by angels, ascend back into the sky with another chorus of music. The heavens swiftly darken, there is thunder, and a single lightning bolt strikes P.Z.’s front yard. Then, just as suddenly, the heavens clear.
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation—all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces? And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
This scenario is jocular, of course, but the point is serious--is there no evidence of any sort or variety that would convince you that God exists?
The existence of what we see as philosophical problems are either soluble or insoluble. If they are resolved, the mental gyrations required are retrospectively unimportant. I am reminded of a Dilbert cartoon in which the Pointy Haired Boss gives Dilbert a crisis to manage, and Dilbert complains that all he gets are crises. It is revealed that the PHB has three boxes on his desk: one labeled "crisis", one labeled "moot", and one labeled "aging". I would find it but I am in a place with a glacial internet connection right now.
ReplyDeleteI think the greatest barrier to the probability of a god is the impossibility of dualism rather than anything wrong with this particular class of supernatural hypothesis.
Please elaborate as to whether your objection is in fact specific to gods and not all supernatural entities and why you would distinguish, or explain that you are only applying a rejection of the supernatural in the way most relevant to our time and place.
Looking forward to it.
Brian,
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I'm not sure I get your question.
If we're talking about the Abrahamic god, the one commonly referred to in American mainstream religion, I definitely think that one does not exist.
Can any gods exist, or could they have? No, I don't think so.
Is there a realm of the supernatural, a world that is apart from ours yet intertwined, where inhabitants from there fly for no apparent reason and come into this world and influence it? Again, I don't think so.
To me, the most parsimonious explanation is that all these things are made up.
Basically: is there much more of a reason to say the Abrahamic god doesn't exist than that ghosts don't exist?
ReplyDeleteWhy does your post mention god specifically, rather than the supernatural?
If you wrote a post about the creationist argument from the designed banana being invalid, I would still have to ask if you were a creationist. Most of them reject such nonsense, in my experience.
This is all quite interesting. It seems to me that evidence for the Abrahamic God could in fact exist because the Abrahamic God isn't really God at all. He is just a big bully that can do magic. Not too hard to imagine scenarios that would evidence existence of such a creep.
ReplyDeleteAll the metaphysical crap is just to avoid criticism and provide ammunition for special pleading arguments like KCA.
BTW check out Ignosticism and Sherwin Wine. I am pretty sure you already have.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom-up approaches to God like KCA, Watchmaker, Ontological argument, Pascal's wager, etc. always fail to connect to the top-down personal God these theists actually believe in.
I think it is a fair question though. If atheist complain about lack of evidence, we should know what that evidence would actually look like.
The bottom-up God is full of conceptual difficulties, which the article well points out. So evidence of his existence would be a squared circle. You can see that the evidence each group of theists marshalls for their own God is evidence of a magician, which is what their Gods really are (see my above post)..
Anyhow, another interesting question is, what piece of evidence/data/observation would convince a theist that his religious views are wrong. I have asked this to a lot of theists and they tried to change the subject every time.
One would think that a religion whose central text claims unequivocally that the sun appeared before the earth would seem man-made to people. I have heard a lot of attempts to wiggle out of this problem, but none of them seem to fit what the text is actually saying. Personally, I realized that my Orthodox Judaism had reached the point where there was not a single piece of hypothetical evidence that could disprove it. That realization coincided with my abandoning the faith.
These people have already taken the position that their faith can be reinterpreted to accommodate anything. No one who realizes this actually still believes though.,
Brian,
ReplyDeleteZara does a decent job of explaining why there's more reason to reject the idea of the Abrahamic god than ghosts. I think he'd say that ghosts, at least theoretically, can be seen and filmed and otherwise measured. the A-god cannot.
I encourage you to read Zara's post.
Rambam,
ReplyDeleteMy complaint has superficially been about "lack of evidence." The more pressing point is the common arguments from believers that I should believe and/or I should not ask about the nature and evidence for belief. The more pressing point is the argument that I should refrain from pointing out that the evidence for belief is emotional and traditional, at best.
We know there's no evidence. Everyone agrees about this. The only question is whether we can just dismiss religion altogether or whether we need to continue pretending that "there might be something there."
Larry,
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about what I wrote above. That there are two distinct Gods in Abrahamic religion. The very rational God that creates the universe, and the everyday anthropomorphic God.
I recall during one of the many presentations of Kuzari principle when I was younger, a certain argument was advanced about miracles. It went as follows:
Other religions use miracles as evidence that their prophets have real info from God. The reasoning is that since only God can perform miracles, God must prefer that this prophet do miracles, and so forth.
Judaism, on the other hand, does not rely on miracles as evidence for its truth claims. Instead, the Jews witnessed God speaking to Moses directly. This was direct evidence to Moses' prophetic status, as opposed to indirect as with other faiths.
The obvious question is, how did the Jews know God was speaking to Moses. The answer is, of course, miracles, but one can imagine the long and windy theistic arguments that try to argue otherwise.
What am I getting at? There is a deeply buried premise in almost all theistic thought that the ability to do magic is always a sign-post pointing to the creator of the universe.
We can't arrive at this through deductive/causal God definitions like we find in KCA, Watchmaker, Ontological, Pascal's. It is arrived at by people who really did believe in fire and brimstone and an anthropomorphic God.
I think this dichotomy is a really interesting example of where state-of-the-art apologetics are used as a bandage on very old and silly superstitions.
The problems reconciling the two views (Omniscience & free will, evil, affecting the universe altogether and yet not being a part of it, etc.) are usually swept under the rug with a little "we can't understand God" talk.
The theist likes to believe that these two perceptions of God reinforce each other. They do not. The evidence described in the counterpoint above is evidence of magic alone. It need not imply anything about God.
The God that lives outside of the universe- we can never evidence his existence. This I totally agree with. Regardless of what a really great magician says, no amount of magic implies credible knowledge of the formation of the universe from outside causes. I feel that these appeals to magic and that magic somehow elucidating mysteries of the universe is second nature to theists. The great premise underlying all of this is the notion of a higher magical realm that provides structure and purpose to everything else. We naturally think this way.
Larry,
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about what I wrote above. That there are two distinct Gods in Abrahamic religion. The very rational God that creates the universe, and the everyday anthropomorphic God.
I recall during one of the many presentations of Kuzari principle when I was younger, a certain argument was advanced about miracles. It went as follows:
Other religions use miracles as evidence that their prophets have real info from God. The reasoning is that since only God can perform miracles, God must prefer that this prophet do miracles, and so forth.
Judaism, on the other hand, does not rely on miracles as evidence for its truth claims. Instead, the Jews witnessed God speaking to Moses directly. This was direct evidence to Moses' prophetic status, as opposed to indirect as with other faiths.
The obvious question is, how did the Jews know God was speaking to Moses. The answer is, of course, miracles, but one can imagine the long and windy theistic arguments that try to argue otherwise.
What am I getting at? There is a deeply buried premise in almost all theistic thought that the ability to do magic is always a sign-post pointing to the creator of the universe.
We can't arrive at this through deductive/causal God definitions like we find in KCA, Watchmaker, Ontological, Pascal's. It is arrived at by people who really did believe in fire and brimstone and an anthropomorphic God.
I think this dichotomy is a really interesting example of where state-of-the-art apologetics are used as a bandage on very old and silly superstitions.
The problems reconciling the two views (Omniscience & free will, evil, affecting the universe altogether and yet not being a part of it, etc.) are usually swept under the rug with a little "we can't understand God" talk.
The theist likes to believe that these two perceptions of God reinforce each other. They do not. The evidence described in the counterpoint above is evidence of magic alone. It need not imply anything about God.
The God that lives outside of the universe- we can never evidence his existence. This I totally agree with. Regardless of what a really great magician says, no amount of magic implies credible knowledge of the formation of the universe from outside causes. I feel that these appeals to magic and that magic somehow elucidating mysteries of the universe is second nature to theists. The great premise underlying all of this is the notion of a higher magical realm that provides structure and purpose to everything else. We naturally think this way.
ReplyDeleteRambam,
ReplyDeleteA "very rational God"? Which biblical passages are you thinking of?
Rambam,
ReplyDelete"There is a deeply buried premise in almost all theistic thought that the ability to do magic is always a sign-post pointing to the creator of the universe."
I think you are correct here in a very significant way.
"Which biblical passages are you thinking of?"
ReplyDeleteNone. I mean rational in the sense of being a minimalistic "cause" lacking a physical description, cares, desires, etc. Perhaps I should have said "less irrational". This God is certainly not the God of the bible, although the bible may have represented a step in this direction relative to competing sacred texts. The Abrahamic God is nonetheless much more of a anthropomorphic magician than the "rational" God you will read about in sophisticated theology.
Ask a theist to tell you what he knows about God and you will hear: created the universe, perfect unity, non-physical, omnipotent, etc. You won't hear about homosexuality or eating pig. There is a disconnect between the conceptual God and the one from the stories.
(Of course there is no disconnect if you accept the buried premise)
There is, I think, an interesting discussion about the existence of the conceptual/rational God I have referred to. An interesting discussion doesn't mean a solid proof. An issue is that the conceptual/rational God of the universes causation and the subject of cosmological discourse could be just another cold, mathematical physical law in some multiverse. Of course, the theists won't acknowledge this and rely on a specific but unstated premise.
What I am getting at is the arguments about intelligent design and why there is something instead of nothing, etc. are really quite separate from the discussion of whether this thing is personified in the Abrahamic God. Or, more pointedly, whether this Abrahamic God is an actual actor in history.
I want to see arguments that the cause of the universe should care about humans and their choices and perform magic, from first principles. Otherwise, any evidence related to virgin births and fireworks is evidence about something that is, by definition, of THIS universe.