For
about a thousand years, Christianity’s grip on Europe was so firm that no
challenge to the faith was really possible: challenge Christianity and you
would be fired, ostracized, run out of town, or just plain killed dead.
Then
Martin Luther and Henry VIII came along, and suddenly it was possible to argue
about belief. At first, it was a battle between Christians. But then people
began to wonder whether all that God stuff was even accurate. And Christian
philosophers felt compelled to defend their faith. And not by saying “I’m right
and you’re wrong, and if you keep arguing I’m going to have you arrested and
tortured.” So they tried to argue the logic of Christianity on its own merits.
Using the best minds of Christian civilization. And it didn’t go so well.
Thomas
Aquinas gave us five arguments “proving” God’s existence. Three of his five
arguments essentially repeat the fallacy that something must have created the
universe; the other two arguments are that there must be one being whose
existence is necessary, and that there must be one being of infinite goodness.
Um, yeah.
Descartes,
who proclaimed to the world that he was a thinking man, said that God is the
greatest conceivable being, and it is greater to exist than not to exist, and
therefore God exists. Seriously.
The
Inductive school of philosophers essentially punted and said God exists
because…um, he just probably does.
William
James said God exists because believing in him simply “works” for believers.
The
argument from reason claims that there would be no way to know anything without
God.
The
anthropic argument claims that God is just the best explanation for our
existence.
Teleology
argues that only God could make a universe so perfect.
Intelligent
design insists that only an intelligence could create the universe.
Some
argue that only a universe with God could contain morality and beauty.
The
transcendental argument insists that only a universe with God could contain
logic.
The
argument from degree states that a property has no meaning unless there is a
being that is perfect in that property – i.e. beauty is meaningless unless
there is one thing that is perfectly beautiful.
Interventionists
insist that God intervened in human life when he gave us the commandments and
raised Jesus from the dead and then gave us the Qur’an and the book of Mormon.
Notwithstanding the fact that all those books contradict each other.
The
testimonialists rely on witnesses who say God exists and they experienced him.
In other words, delusion.
The
majority argument asserts that throughout history most people believed in him,
so it must be true. Just as, throughout history, men believed the world was
flat.
The
Scottish school argues that belief in God is just common sense.
Rousseau,
one of the true fathers of the American revolution, one of the great minds of
the 18th century, said men’s hearts tell us God exists, despite what
our reason tells us.
Saint
Anselm said God is the thing that nothing can be greater than.
Spinoza
said God is the whole universe.
A.E.
McGrath admitted that science cannot prove God, which for many agnostics is the
deal-breaker: until science shows them God, there is no God.
And
of course Immanuel Kant, proclaimed as the Big Daddy of all philosophers,
smarter than the rest of us put together, the guy college philosophy teachers
throw at you when they really want to put you in your place. So this smart guy
Kant must be really good at illuminating all this, right? Kant stated the
practical necessity for a belief in God; “we do not have the slightest ground
to assume in an absolute manner ... the object of this idea"; the idea of
God cannot be separated from the relation of happiness with morality as the
"ideal of the supreme good….One cannot provide objective reality for any
theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is
the condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the
idea of God can only be proved by means of this idea, and hence only with a
practical purpose, i.e., to act as though there is a God, and hence only for
this purpose". God and immortality are also knowable, but practical reason
now requires belief in these postulates of reason. Proving God’s existence is
impossible because the various arguments for God's existence all depend
essentially on the idea that existence is a predicate inherent to the concepts
to which it is applied.
Glad
we sorted that out!
So
for five hundred years, Team God has wheeled out its greatest minds, to defend
their beliefs. And failed.
When Jesus People
holler that no one can prove that God doesn’t exist, you can explain to them
that the burden of proof is on them, since they are asserting his existence.
Or, alternatively, you can ask them whether they’re referring to the God of the
Bible.
If they say “Yes, I’m
referring to the God of the Bible, you can’t prove he doesn’t exist!”, then
that guy is quite easy to refute. Jehovah is a mythical character appearing in
one two-thousand year-old work of badly-written anonymous fiction, performing a
series of acts which provably never happened – the six-day creation, the flood,
the repopulation of the earth from Noah’s family, the massacre of the Egyptian
children, the liberation of the Jewish slaves in Israel, the building of heaven
above us and hell below us. Every reported miracle in scripture, every reported
violation of natural law, belies his existence as anything but a fictional
character. Just like Voldemort and Darth Vader.
If they retreat from the
Jehovah argument and say “No, I’m not referring specifically to the God of the
Bible”, then they’re admitting tacitly that there is no basis for asserting the
existence of the Biblical Jehovah. So again, their efforts to turn their
reading of scripture into barbaric stone-age laws, on things like abortion and
contraception and gay marriage, are based on myth: the effort to deny marriage
rights and medical freedom to Americans, based on the opinions of a fictional
character. Which is like banning marriage with Muggles because Voldemort
disapproves.
