In our hyper-Christian society, religious doubts are not easily entertained. They are discouraged in the church and barely tolerated in our American society. Thus, when you have them, they can make you feel incredibly isolated.
But many people find religious doubts impossible to dismiss, and we have to think them through. So here are the ways I thought about the existence (and ultimately, non-existence) of God:
First, we must define the term “God.” The problem with most theists is that this term is a moving target.
In addition, because there is no absolute evidence either for or against the existence of God, you cannot use deductive logic (for example, deductive logic is used as follows: a+b=c, therefore c-b=a). You can only reach a conclusion by inductive reasoning, i.e., using the balance of evidence to reach a conclusion. (For example, 90% of A is also B; C is B, so there’s a 90% chance that C is also A).
So to begin with, I will assert (and others may shoot this down) that the only RELEVANT definition of God states that GOD INTERVENES TO CIRCUMVENT NATURAL LAWS.
But IF God circumvents natural laws, then it becomes impossible to understand natural laws. All scientific findings would have to include the stipulation, “It is also possible that these results are an act of God, a miracle, thereby making our research meaningless.”
However, as medical advances, molecular chemistry and microwave ovens indicate, we have been able to continuously expand our knowledge of natural laws. Therefore, because the scientific method leads to accurate predictions and applicable discoveries, the likely (inductively reasoned) conclusion is that God, at least the intervening kind, does not exist.
Next, if God is defined as all loving, all powerful, and all knowing, then it is impossible to explain suffering. Either God is not all loving (he acts sadistically), not all powerful (he cannot prevent suffering), or not all knowing (he created suffering by mistake because he didn’t know the consequences of his actions). A God who is not all-loving, all-powerful or all-knowing is also not sufficient for the definition of God, because any God that fails to meet these criteria becomes bound by rules that are greater than God.
So if God is bound by external rules and/or does not intervene in our existence, then God is either non-existent or irrelevant. This is not absolutely certain, but the amount of evidence supporting this conclusion is so great that it makes any other conclusion outlandish. The classic Bertrand Russell argument is as follows: I cannot prove that a china teapot is or is not orbiting the sun between the earth’s orbit and Mars. But while I cannot prove this it either way, the evidence against it is compelling.
The evidence against God is equally compelling, and thus it makes enormously more sense to live your life as if there were no God.
Although it is admittedly speculation, it is more compelling to me that humans have invented God (a) to help people deal with the pain and fear associated with death and loss, and (b) to reflect the thoughts of the ruling powers in a particular time. Humans have evolved to search for explanations. When early civilizations found none, it was their natural inclination to declare that the cause of the unexplained was a superpower they called a god (or gods). (This process continues to be used by theists in their “god-of-the-gaps” arguments.)
As the faith grew, coincidences were defined as (and exaggerated into) miracles. Laws and moral authority were attributed to this divinity in order to give the powers-that-be more clout, and an orthodoxy grew up around the entire structure of “faith.”
Now it seems unhelpful to believe in such superstition. Most people, even believers, live as if the only matters that aid in our ongoing well-being are work, location, health, sustenance, and pure, blind luck. And no one ever went wrong in under exactly that assumption.
So those are my doubts, and they summarize why I have ceased to believe that any relevant God exists. And oddly enough, I went through a similar process to accept the fact I am gay and that society’s homophobia was ill-informed and prejudicial.
So who said that rational thinking was cold and unfeeling?
– {♂♂} – {♂♀} – {♀♀} -
© 2008. All rights reserved. Edited from my Sept. 2006 posting in my Yahoo! 360 blog.
Posted by NH Baritone 