Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Not altogether persuasive.
Ah, for the good old days before Trump and genderism. How refreshingly quaint this post feels in the midst of our current Orwellian/Kafkaesque nightmare.
But what is “God”? It still hasn’t been defined, which surely makes it laughably easy to “believe” in it without having to give any reasons at all.
Good luck with that. Even with a definition, they still have to make god “work” within the world. Einstein built on Newton, and accounted for the special cases where Newtonian mechanics breaks down. Gods don’t build on anything. The “gaps” they have been relegated to filling are getting smaller and smaller; most have disappeared altogether. Leplace got it right two centuries ago: we have no need of that hypothesis. Gods aren’t needed for special cases, but they do require special pleading.
If you’re going to claim that a god or gods exist, it can’t come down to “personal experience” or “revelation” that might be as easily explained as the result of “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” Or just plain old fraud and confidence tricks. You can “believe” whatever you like, but if you want to prove your diety exists, it has to show up. “Faith” is just the excuse that’s trotted out when it doesn’t. A being that is supposed to actually exist should be discernible and discoverable by means of neutral, impartial investigation. Real phenomena exist whether anyone “believes” in them or not. “Belief” or “faith” alone doesn’t do the trick either. You can’t even rely on the placebo effect to dig a hole or fly an airplane. You have to roll up your sleeves and get a shovel; you have to climb aboard the plane, start the engines, and pilot the aircraft. Faith doesn’t do it. Wishing doesn’t do it. You have to do the actual work, or nothing happens. So does a purported god. If you want to your say god did something, you have to be able to explain exactly what and how. You have to catch it in the act. It has to be observed. It can’t cheat. It has to pass convincing tests. You can’t make excuses for it, otherwise your “god” is like the cheeseburger that a Breatharian scarfs down when nobody’s looking.
Not only that. Calling on the god hypothesis has to explain things better than explanations not relying on it. Occam’s Razor cuts very close. Used properly, there is no stubble for gods to hide behind.
Holy books are no good, because they all beg the question. You could burn all the physics texts in the world, and the phenomena they explain and demonstrate are all still there to be studied, allowing the books to be rewritten. Burn all the “holy books” and the gods burn with them. Gods are more like unique (but still strictly human) literary and artistic creations, than they are observable facts about the universe. Their distribution and “footprint” on the world, unlike, say the operation of gravity or optics, is patchy and parochial, mapping closely with particular languages and cultures, which suggests a cultural origin rather than a discovery about the facts of the world. If there actually was a class of beings like the hypothesized gods, they should be there for the finding, no books required. You have to run the experiment. You have to find the bits of reality that betray the existence of these entities. Where are the divine footprints, figerprints, and DNA evidence showing that gods exist and act in the world? A nice sunset, or a bunch of whirling leaves in the wind is awfully thin gruel.
Long before we get to the “Problem of Evil,” proving that gods exist still leaves a huge amount of work to do. You can’t stop once you’ve been able to count the number of angels dancing on the head of that pin, you also have to go into the details of their costume and choreography. You still have to distinguish between monotheism and polytheism, or even pantheism. So, gods exist. How do you know exactly who you think you’ve been praying to, and show that it was actually these beings answering these prayers, or not, as the case may be?
Theists have to be able to prove the existence of their particular god, and then prove the links to the particular holy book they claim is its product. Maybe gods exist, but haven’t “written” anything. The writings themselves do not prove any authorship beyond human ones, as their content does not include any “advanced” knowledge of the world inconsistent with the level of knowledge available to humans at the time they were first set down.
And what about the avenues not taken? Truly omnipotent, omnibenevolent gods would be able to prove their existence in a flash, avoiding all the bloodshed of religious wars, removing all doubt for all. A nice, large-type text saying ‘I AM THAT I AM” spelled out clearly in stars, visible to all, would do the trick nicely. If gods really want us to believe in them, why place obscure ads in the minds and scribblings of backwater goat herders? I would think that a nice, big, celestial billboard would be in their budget. Why not do that? Why make people guess, or worse, make shit up? In the stories told about them gods show themselves. Regularly. Convincingly. Gods aren’t afraid to mess with laws of nature in the stories told about them, so why not mess with them in the material of the Universe itself? “Free will” my ass. The demand for “faith” seems to be a wasteful, pointless digression, when a deity of the capabilities imputed to it could produce evidence of its existence without breaking a sweat, metaphorical or otherwise. What does it mean for “theology” when a schlub like me can come up with an idea that so easily shoots down the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god? How much “sophisticated” argument has been expended in order to handwave away this fatal objection? What does it say about the god in which they profess to believe, that they would saddle/credit it with such shoddy alibis? “It’s a mystery!. Goddamn right it’s a “mystery.”
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