I send e-mail

CH,

Okay. You asked why I don’t believe in God. These explanations could fill volumes, so I hope you’ll forgive what must necessarily become dim paraphrases of large concepts. I will endeavor to do my best. Also, since you asked about my non-belief in God specifically, I’m not going to get into critiques of the Christian religion itself, or critiques of the various ways Christ’s followers act. (Further, throughout my answers, I will refer to “divine beings” as it were, as god or gods, and the Christian deity as “God” capitol G.)

The short answer is that I don’t have evidence for the existence of a god or gods. At best, I believe the evidence for and against god can support naught but a null hypothesis – not having an opinion one way or the other. Or, at the very least, I do not have evidence for the existence of the God of the three Abrahamic religions.

Imagine starting from a default position of non-belief. You’ve woken up this morning with no knowledge of God or Jesus, along with the rest of the world. Overnight, every bit of religious iconography, architecture, and text has vanished magically from the world. No church, no Bibles or Korans or Torahs, no crosses around necks and no Pope.

What, outside of religious texts and the traditions that surrounds them, points us to the existence of a god or gods? Certainly not nature – we have naturalistic explanations for just about every way we know the world works. And while of course there are things we don’t know, we would feel no need to fill that gap in our understanding with a divine placeholder. We understand that our imperfect human minds can be fooled by lifetimes of expectations, or by us throwing something at it that evolution hasn’t had time to correct for. Every time we see an optical illusion (By the way, here’s my favorite optical illusion ever.) we’re throwing things at our eyes that fool them. Our senses and more importantly, our intuitions about the world are not foolproof, they can be tricked – so to rely on them will, of course, introduce errors into our conclusions.

What we need is a system – a formalized set of ways of looking at the world that, as much as possible, attempts to leave our human intuitions with all its possible flaws out of the system. Cognitive biases, old habits that we don’t even realize we have, prejudices – can affect any of us, so we need a system that is open and transparent, where people are required to show their work, where others can help correct and keep people honest. In short – we need science. We need self-correction built into the system. We need experimental verification – more than once – before we can decide that something might be true. And even then, we must be willing to abandon any earlier idea we had or have about reality when we see evidence that it might be wrong. Einstein had to get rid of Newton’s physics that people had used for hundreds of years. Darwin had to abandon the idea that the animals were brought forth by a divine Creator. Chemists had to relinquish the notion that there were but four elements of earth, wind, fire and water. Astronomers, after a bitter struggle with the church of the time, finally announced that in fact, the earth revolves around the sun, and walked away from a geocentric model of the solar system.

This is the lens through which I view the world. My senses and intuitions are well and good for, say, typing an e-mail, holding a baby, or running a light show, but they fail on some of life’s biggest questions. Who, looking at our world, would believe for an instant that it wasn’t created? The very notion that this amazing universe, with beautiful flowers and animals, stars and nebulae, the grand visions of majestic mountains, the joy of running through the forests, diving into the lakes, bare feet on beaches white. Standing in canyons, painted hills around and the wind against my skin – these things would make any human being wonder “Who…who?! deserves the thanks for this beauty and wonder and majesty?” But that is fundamentally a wrong question. Our human intuitions have failed us because we are used to the idea of things being made for us. If we are to understand the universe and world around us in the truest sense possible, we must be willing to look beyond the feelings that are engendered by the majesty all about us and look at what matters – the data.

And God – the Christian God, the God of the Abrahamic religions, Vishnu, Zeus, and all the others – fail the tests of evidence and data. We know, to a high degree of certainty, where the universe came from, how the planets formed, how life evolved and flourished and branched into the beautiful plethora of taxonomic pulchritude that we observe today – oak tress and lemurs and penguins and fireflies and humans. Our data does not, as of now, require the existence of god to make any of this possible. We certainly have unanswered questions – the Big Bang remains mysterious, as does abiogenesis – but would it be wise to invoke god to answer these small gaps in our knowledge? I don’t believe so. God is not an answer to questions such as these – He would merely be a placeholder while we studied the information. An unanswered question is not, I believe, an invitation to fill God into the gap, but a beckoning by nature to come uncover some deep mystery. One of the truly bad effects of the kind of religion that I (personally) grew up with is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

There are, of course, various arguments put forth by theologians, the proofs of God’s existence, none of which I have found terribly convincing. Thomas Aquinas’ proof relied on an “unmoved mover” to get the universe rolling. The obvious flaw in logic notwithstanding (he makes the assumption that God is immune to the infinite regress that he’s set up) and allowing ourselves the dubious luxury of conjuring up a terminator to the infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the qualities normally ascribed to God – omnipotence, goodness, listening to prayers, etc. The ontological proofs rely on a leap from thought to existence. The Transcendental Proof hinges upon a bit of very tricky worldplay.

God, as it turns out, is pretty tricky logically. Anything intelligent being capable of creating the universe, listening to the prayers of all the inhabitants of all the worlds (if indeed there are more than one) and interceding in the natural order of things when He wished would have to be very, very complex indeed, and would therefore need something nearly as complex to create Him.

Pascal’s Wager also fails here: he leaves out several possibilities. For instance, he makes the assumption that he knows which god is the correct one. What if he’s wrong? What if gets to the proverbial pearly gates and there stands Zeus, asking why he followed a false god all this life? Further, Pascal assumes that god will reward belief, but the kind of belief that Pascal advocates could be better termed “attempting to convince yourself”. We humans can’t decide to believe things as a matter of policy. You can’t decide to become an atheist today any more than I can decide to become a Christian. It doesn’t work like that. Perhaps God would rather punish people who claim to believe in Him but don’t really. Would you bet on God’s valuing dishonestly faked belief over honest skepticism? Pascal seems, to me, to advocate cowardly bet-hedging.

While I’m on that topic, what happens when people die without having ever heard of the true god or having a chance to worship him? Does God send those people to hell? Or do they get a proverbial get out of jail free card? Would a god that sends people to hell for the misfortune of not having heard of him be a god worth worshiping? (This paragraph is rhetorical and I don’t expect an answer. I’m just poking fun at our friend Pascal.)

Arguments from scripture are also, at best, weak. A common argument, attributed to C.S. Lewis (who should have known better, he was a great man and a deep thinker) was that since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane or a liar: “Mad, Bad, Or God”. The historical evidence that Jesus claimed divinity for Himself is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma we see here would be a false one. A fourth possibility is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are – they mean no harm, they’re just wrong. A fifth possibility is that other people lied about Jesus. The fact that something is written down isn’t persuasive. Dan Brown penned the abysmally-written and almost preposterously stupid “Da Vinci Code”, but I know of nobody who believes that the events described therein actually occurred. At any rate, we have to ask ourselves “Who wrote these things about Jesus?” “What was their culture like?” “Did they have a political or religious agenda that they were trying to advance?” “Did they witness these events firsthand, or were they writing down oral traditions?”

Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I cannot consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity.

I suppose, if I tried, I could at least be a Deist. But I could not believe in God who takes any kind of active role in the events of humans or their triumphs or problems or disasters. The world, the universe – these things don’t require the existence of a god to have come about. And I have no further evidence to suggest that an interventionist god exists, somewhere out there. I know I’m repeating myself here, but the universe has just the properties we’d expect if at the bottom, there isn’t anything directing it. No design, no purpose, no malevolence and no beneficence. Just chugging along, doing its own thing without really noticing us. It ain’t romantic, but it’s probably true.

And this is important for me, incredibly so: to seek the truth, no matter to what conclusion it may lead me. I will take a harsh truth over a comforting lie any day. I don’t believe in God because I have some desire for Him not to exist, or because I want to disbelieve. Likewise, I wouldn’t believe in Him for the sole reason that I desired to believe, or I desired for Him to exist. He could exist or not exist – either way – and while that would certainly inform my behavior, I wouldn’t be personally insulted or complimented by it. I’m not an atheist because it’s cool, or because I’m angry at the church, or because of religious extremism or because I think science can disprove God. I’m just a guy. Just a small, frail human. The universe is much too big for me, but I wish to understand it in the best way that I know how, and with all of the intellectual honesty that I can possibly muster.

[personal bits cut out]

-C

Exit, stage left.
Sparks