I've started and stopped writing several entries since my last post several weeks ago. I always find myself in the same situation: I start writing, and the next thing I know I've written several pages and gone waaaayyyy off of my originally intended topic, digressing to the basis of my world view. Everything comes back to God. It really makes sense, if you think about it. All opinions on moral issues come out of our world view, which for many of us centers around the existence of God. So I've decided to tackle the big issue before I go into any others, and I'll be able to relate all future topics back to this one. But first, I want to make one thing clear. To all my Christian friends, don't start getting excited just yet, and to all of my atheist friends, don't start making assumptions about my beliefs or my intentions. I am not espousing any specific religion with this post. My only claim is that it is more beneficial to our society to believe that we were intentionally created by an intelligent being than to believe that we are a random byproduct of the universe.
I suppose I should start with this claim: The only logical belief regarding the existence of God is agnosticism. I know this is quite a stretch for many devout believers in either God or the spaghetti monster who refuse to entertain the possibility that they could be wrong (see my post on Confidence). But here's the fact of the matter: God has never revealed himself in any definitive way. Sure, theists will argue that he's revealed himself to individuals who have shared their experiences with others. This may come as a surprise to you, but people often lie. Sometimes they lie for selfish reasons. Sometimes they lie for good, selfless reasons, like to fix a broken, archaic religion or to bring together a warring people. Hell, sometimes they lie to themselves so well that they aren't even aware that they're lying to others!
Picture this. You're praying in your bedroom late at night. You've been struggling with a personal issue, maybe you're going through a divorce or struggling financially. "God," you say, "just give me strength." Suddenly, you feel this immense feeling of calm, and you just know that everything is going to be okay. Maybe you don't know much about psychology and the powerful effects of meditation and positive thinking. Maybe you do, and you just really want to believe that that unearthly peace was God resting his hands on your shoulders and giving you comfort. The next day you go to church and tell your friend that God spoke to you last night and told you that He would take care of things. Next thing you know, word gets around the church that you've had your own little miracle happen. But the fact is, you never saw or heard anything. You had an emotional response at a time when you needed it. This is only a small, innocent example, but all of our individual experiences with God can be explained by an outside observer as being some combination of psychological phenomena and simple lying, accidental or intentional.
But isn't that the essence of faith? If God were to prove himself to us, wouldn't that completely negate faith? Yes, it would. In fact, if God does exist, he's gone to incredible lengths to hide himself. Just look at this huge universe! Why build all this if it's just about us silly little monkeys on this tiny blue dot in space? Makes perfect sense if he wanted to not make himself provable. That's why we should be even more skeptical of individual experiences with God. If faith is so important, and God has hidden himself so well, why would he prove himself to any particular individual? I guess you could argue that having a huge amount of faith gets you some sort of "in," where God just says, "Well, this guy's gonna believe in me no matter what, so I guess I'll heal his sprained ankle when nobody's around to see it." Whether that's what's happening or not, my point is that God doesn't reveal himself to the whole of society in any way that can go without question, and hasn't left any tangible proof of his existence, so no one can logically conclude that God exists.
So, how about the other side of the coin? If we can't logically conclude that God exists, that means that we must conclude that He doesn't exist, right? Unfortunately, we can't do that either. I find it baffling that anyone can confidently proclaim that something doesn't exist when we are faced with the overwhelming and improbable fact of our own existence! The most basic question that anyone who thinks about these things asks is: Why is there something instead of nothing? Wouldn't nothingness make much more sense? Wouldn't it be far more simple? But instead, we have this huge, immeasurable universe. And more than that, we have intelligent, conscious beings who can observe that universe and ask what it all means. I really think that's all it takes to show that it is illogical to claim that "God doesn't exist." Now, don't get me wrong... I am NOT claiming that: "Our universe exists, so someone must have created it!" What I am saying is that we have no way of gauging the likelihood of anything existing or not existing. We know that Universes can exist (because we live in one). We know that conscious, creative beings can exist (because we are such beings). Therefore, who's to say that our Universe wasn't created by some other type of conscious being in another type of Universe?
Now, I know many of you are probably thinking of a teapot that's floating in orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars, and I strongly suggest you read the Wikipedia article on Russell's teapot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot). In short, the burden of proof does lie on the believers, but both theists and atheists are believers; both are just making different truth claims about the origins of the Universe. It makes no difference if that truth claim is positive (i.e. something exists) rather than negative (something doesn't exist).
So... we can't logically claim that God exists, nor can we claim that he doesn't exist. What are we left with? The ultimate cop out! The only logical view to take is no view at all. We don't know whether God exists or not, so it only makes sense to hold no opinion on the matter.. Remember, you can certainly refute many religious claims, but I am not talking about any specific religious claims. I am only discussing the existence of some creative consciousness outside of our universe that is responsible for our existence.
In my next post (which I will get to when I have sufficient time + motivation and/or insomnia + beer), I will address my 2nd claim: That agnosticism is functionally useless. In the meantime, I am open to debate on the specific claim made in this post (that agnosticism is the only logical viewpoint), so please, share your thoughts!
No comments:
Post a Comment