By STEVE ZARA
Updated: Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:17:15 UTC

Note from moderator - Mon 5-Jul : Steve made a few minor updates to his discussion and posted to his own blog. The updated text has now been posted here with a link back to his blog so that you can see any of his other posts and comments on his own site.

Original link

It seems like a reasonable statement that we atheists would change our minds about the existence of God if presented with the right kind of evidence. I'm going to propose that this position is actually not reasonable at all.

First, It's useful to consider what God, this thing that evidence is supposed to be able to reveal, isn't.

God isn't like a mythical beast. God isn't a dragon, a unicorn, a hippogriff. Such a beast could potentially be seen, examined, and proclaimed real. Its mythical status lost, the biologists could get to work. They would be surprised, but would have something to deal with. They would have evidence: scales, wings and flames do indeed mean dragon. That's clear enough.

God isn't an alien. Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he did not say is that such technology actually is magic. What Clarke said has great power, as it implies that we are almost certainly unable to recognise magic, as we have no understanding of the limits of technology. And now we start to see the problem: with such ignorance, what evidence could there be that we are seeing the supernatural and not the unknown natural?

But for now, back to God. The words used to describe the deity seem at first sight to make sense. He (for it's almost always “he”) is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing. He is the source of morality, and will punish the wicked and reward the deserving for all eternity.

However, when unpacked, these phrases have no more meaning than Lewis Caroll's Jabberwocky. An all-knowing deity has no freedom, and therefore can't be all-powerful. Like Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert's novel Dune, God would be trapped within his own prophecy. A God that is all-knowing (especially one supposedly outside of time) can't help but know his own future actions. God can do no more than gyre and gimble in the wabe, and he has no freedom to do otherwise.

The words are said, they are believed, because of how they make people feel. God has to be perfect, loving, all-powerful, because any lack of these characteristics would make God fragile, and that would never do, at least not for the Abrahamic religions.

Gods weren't always so perfect. The Greek/Roman gods were remarkably (or perhaps not remarkably) human. But they were still isolated from the mundane world, looking down from the tops of mountains (it's quite amusing to see how the domain of the gods hasshifted from high altitudes to some invisible place “outside of time and space” or “beneath the quantum”. Truly the gods are shy).

Knowing the meaninglessness of the words, knowing the inconsistencies, there is a trick that some believers play: it is to put God beyond logic. Why should theists concern themselves with inconsistencies when God can bend the rules? But how can we non-believers accept something as evidence when that “evidence” is supposed to point to something which is beyond logic, beyond rules? What does “evidence” even mean in such a situation?

Then there are the unverifiable promises. Eternal punishment... Eternal bliss. How can we possibly know? What evidence can there be for an eternal state? There is a story of a long-lived bird that once every millennium flies to the top of a mountain and wipes its beak on it, imperceptibly reducing the height of the mountain. When the mountain has been totally levelled, we are still no closer to eternity. So what evidence could there be for the truth of such promises?

This mountain/bird argument also applies to the complexity of the Abrahamic god. A being that knows all of eternal time and space must have a very big store of knowledge indeed: probably infinite. If the bird pecked away at one book in God's library once every thousand years, then … you get the picture.

This astonishing complexity of God adds yet another barrier to evidence, as literally anything else is a better, more likely explanation of phenomena in the real world. If you curse the heavens and get struck by lightning, it's infinitely more likely to be bad luck than God. If it happens repeatedly, it's infinitely more likely to be a rogue member of the Vogon constructor fleet having fun with their weapons than God. Anything is more likely.

And what of the “sophisticated” God of the theologians? A perfect, necessary being that simply has to exist? This is a strange entity, constructed out of words and symbols on paper, the result of supposed logical proof. But the words stay flat and lifeless on the page. They aren't a form of incantation that creates reality. Some uses of words, some paths through logic, can be consistent. We can say that if you start from here, with these rules, you can get to there. But if these paths through logic are to be useful in describing the real world, then the rules, and the starting points (the axioms) have to be shown to have some relationship to the real world.

But, reality need not follow any rules we come up with, and it seems not to follow the rules commonly described by theologians. Indeed, we know that reality is far stranger that we imagined centuries ago. At small scales causality breaks down and every day, as we navigate our way through this world using satellites, we experience the stretching of time and space.

But even if the theologians’ views of the universe were founded on truth, where do their arguments lead? What is a “perfect being”? It is just an empty phrase. It contains no implication of intelligence, of mind, or even of thought. There is no path from “perfect being” to “Father, Son and Holy Ghost”. So, can we consider the work of theologians as evidence for god? No. It is only evidence that their opinions and reasoning describe nothing that any typical believer would recognize: there is still no generally recognisable content in their use of the term “God”.

As if these absurd ideas were not sufficient, God is placed in a supernatural realm, and has the power to perform miracles. (The idea of evidence for miracles being taken seriously was shown to be unreasonable by David Hume centuries ago, and yet still major religions pretend that we have the power to know when magic happens).

It's worth a brief diversion into the idea of the supernatural. What exactly is it? The answer is that it is about fear. The world we see around us is full of pain and tragedy. It's just not fair. So, for some, it seems only reasonable that there is a realm of justice, a place where wishes can come true; where we need not die permanently. The supernatural is not a place, or a state: it is a desire. This leads some to set up a false dichotomy between the natural and supernatural, between the heartless, unfeeling and cruel world of atoms and the void, and the place where morality is as real as words carved on stone and God loves things into existence.

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.

The theists can't win. They can't talk about evidence when they base their beliefs on faith. They can't describe us as flawed beings and yet claim that we can get to truth through revelation. (Incidentally, when the Pope decides to be infallible, how can he be sure of the infallibilty of that decision? But I digress).

Theists hide God beyond rules and logic in the supernatural, and then claim that we can get to God through the rules and logic of theology. We are supposed to use logic to demonstrate the illogical.

And finally, what I consider the most absurd position of all – theists claim that we are far more than material beings, that we can exist beyond death of our bodies, that our true selves have a supernatural foundation, and yet they insist that we could not exist unless God had tuned the universe just so, to make the physical, natural world perfect for our existence, an act which would seem absurd if our true selves were non-physical.

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?

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.

This is not fundamentalist, and it is not dogmatic. It has been suggested by some atheists parodying religion that some unicorns exist. One in particular is of interest. It is both invisible and pink.

http://www.theinvisiblepinkunicorn.com/index.htm

There could be no better parody of the absurdity of theism. Would it be fundamentalist to insist that it would be ridiculous to accept that there could be evidence for the colour of this invisible beast?

I propose a new strident atheism. No playing the games of theists. No concessions. No talk of evidence that can change minds, when their beliefs are deliberately placed beyond logic, beyond evidence. Let's not get taken in by the fraud of religion. Let's not play their shell-game.

TAGGED: ATHEISM, POLITICS, RELIGION, SCIENCE