Millions of People Can’t be Wrong

When confronted with the issue of the existence of God, many people call upon the masses for support. “So many people can’t be so wrong about so much”, they say. becoming a non-believer would be like calling ones ancestors and millions of his fellow believers stupid. They can’t all be wrong, can they?

In some cases it could be considered a great rule of thumb to check ones self against a crowd. We do so every day, as we weigh our actions against what our friends find acceptable. Whenever we contemplate our individual morality, the social circle can be a great measure. It is not illegal to be impolite to a co-worker, but we try not to be. We do so because it is not socially acceptable. And that’s fine.

In other cases, however, the majorities opinion is less valuable. Whenever an issue involves expert knowledge, the opinion of those without such knowledge would be a waste of time. We should definitely not hold a vote on whether or not ethylene glycol should be added to our food. The vast majority of people have no idea what ethylene glycol is and so would be useless in the decision (it’s antifreeze by the way).

This line of reasoning is true in the religious debate as well. when it comes to the moral issues, advanced societies tend to pick and choose the parts of their religion which is agreeable within that society. And so, to a large degree, most cultures morality is exceedingly similar. Customs may differ, but the basic morality of different cultures is often the same.

When it comes to the origin of the universe and the evolution of life, however, common wisdom suddenly diverges. Suddenly the numbers are against the religious. No matter what religion one subscribes to, most of the people of the world think he is fundamentally wrong. When the questions are not ones of morality and human action but cosmology, biology and geology, the religions become heavily divided. Can we really invoke common wisdom to defend issues that are beyond common knowledge?

What about our ancestors? Were they all wrong?

We know they were wrong about some things. Today we know the world is not flat. That it rotates around the sun. That germs exist. We can also point to moral divergences over the years. Today we consider our ancestors wrong on moral issues such as slave owning, or the rights of woman in society. Most of us think they were morally wrong in their treatment of Africans or homosexuals.

Is it really so hard to believe they were wrong about God as well?

Personal Miracles

In my experience, people often invoke miracles as evidence toward the existence of God. A miracle is an event within the physical world. It is for that reason that I am quite fond of them. Physical events can usually be tested.
In this chapter, however, we will deal only with the case of personal miracles. Those are the kind of miracles which most commonly remain within the realm of a single individual. Most often pertaining to miraculous healing or divine intervention in such cases as accidents or war. We will not, in this chapter, discuss other claimed miracles such as the parting of specific seas or the miracle of child birth. Those will be discussed in the future I hope.

As far as miraculous healing is concerned, the test is fairly simple. It is a well known medical fact that, sometimes, sick people heal. Cancers sometimes go into remission. Every once in a while infections subside. However such cases are rare enough for doctors not to consider them a viable treatment option. Later, we hear the stories of people who were told they have a month to live and then survived another twenty years. It’s a miracle.

But not every type of sick person heals. If it were God who is healing the sick, we would assume he does so by his own plan or morality. We would not expect him to do so based on an individual illness. God is almighty. He can heal anything. Right?
If this is the case, then why does God only heal people who suffer from ambiguous disease's? Disease’s which could have healed on their own anyway. And yet God never heals amputees. Surely there are amputees from all strata of the moral realm. Surely not all such people are evil and undeserving of a miracle. And yet this never happens. Never. Not rarely. NEVER!
Which leads me to the conclusion that God either hates amputees or people intemperate the good things that happen to them in the way their parents told them to. Religiously.

What about the other form of personal miracles? People survive accidents and war every day. Many of these are considered miracles. “I should have died in that car accident, but God intervened and saved me.”
These sorts of miracles are the same religious interpretations as the ones mentioned earlier. These, of course, harder to make fun of without the ready example of amputees.
But why don’t we just call this sort of interpretation by its real name: Narcissism.

“I was supposed to die in that car accident, but the almighty God, creator of the heavens and the earth, intervened in order to save me. I must be such an integral part of his grand cosmic plan that he suspended all of the laws of causality and physics for me to keep living. I am that important. Now I know I should run for president.”

Or maybe you just got lucky.

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Pascal’s Wager

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once posed the following line of reasoning: Even if the existence of God cannot be determined through reason and evidence, a rational person would wager as if God does exist because if there is no God, one loses nothing and if there is, one wins eternal life in his favor.

This argument does well to sniff out those who should stay out of the gambling den.
Pascal begins by making an assumption about the evidence for the existence of God. Though I do not entirely accept this assumption, I will accept it to argue the following point.

Pascals wager, like every wager, is based on probability. And sadly, we must ask this unanswerable question in order to establish an answer: Given there is no evidence for or against God, what is the probability of his existence? An exact answer, of course, cannot be given.

We can, however, exclude a few common answers. The probability is surely not fifty fifty, for example. If someone makes a claim for which there is no evidence, the odds of it being correct do not suddenly become fifty fifty. If that were the case, we would have to accept every whim of the human imagination as credible. In fact, considering the prevalence of Jerusalem syndrome among schizophrenics, there should be thousands of Messiahs locked away in asylums everywhere.
The lack of evidence may make it impossible to calculate odds, but it does usually make them automatically small. The grander the unsubstantiated claim, the smaller the likelihood of its correctness. So the odds are not known but they are small. One might say: incalculably small.

However small the odds are for the existence of God, we must now make them even smaller. Pascal’s wager was designed to allow him into the afterlife. Which means that not only must he be right about the existence of God, he must also pick the right God to worship. Wouldn’t he feel sheepish if, after choosing the Christian God, Pascal would find himself in a bad suburb of Hades?

Despite the incalculably small odds of picking the right God to worship, and his existing in the first place, the wager would still be perfectly rational if it would bare no cost. This seems to be the central assumption Pascal makes. say, for example, entry into heaven would entail only a declaration that one believes in God and nothing else. But there is a cost to believing in God. Every God expects one to perform a set of real world actions in order to win eternal life. The Christian God doubly so. To say nothing of forgoing ones healthy scepticism.

Finally, I have to ask: Would an all powerful judging God not see through this simple ruse? At the point of judgment would he not notice that the man standing before him decided to bypass faith and morality simply to reap eternal reward? Wouldn’t that make him a little angry? I think it might.
Let’s just hope he is more forgiving than the casino’s.

The basics of religious debate

Every time one is forced to defend his belief in a debate the arguments will be one of two simple types: The defender will either try and prove the correctness of his own claims or the fallacy in his opponents. In the case of religious arguments this is equally true and yet naturally more complicated. Following from this rule, just about all of the arguments theists bring forward in a debate fall into one of three major categories:

1. Arguments toward the existence of God or the truth of their religious beliefs. These usually include mention of the physical world, trying to show the world was deliberately created. Though I find this to be the most noble way to argue for ones religion, the advocate has his work cut out for him. He must both show the world was created by a supreme being, and then show that it was his specific supreme being that did so. God may have created the world. But which God?

2. Claims about the usefulness of religion. In these cases it is usually argued that religion makes people more moral or that prayer is shown to be good for your health. None of these arguments, of course, bare any relevance to the truth of the religious claims. Faith may be the best thing in the world for the human condition and religion would still not be true.

3. Attacking Atheists. Usually taking the form of trying to debunk evolution, cosmology and geology. Often it is claimed that a lack of belief in a higher power is damaging. How are people supposed to do the right thing, it is asked, when they know they won’t be punished if they don’t? You may have noticed this is also an argument toward the usefulness of religion, though it usually takes a very different tone. Once again, one may disprove evolution and prove Atheists are intrinsically immoral, and yet have taken no step toward arguing for the existence of God.

There are few arguments a religious advocate can make to convince a non-believer, that do not rely on evidence or reason. And yet there are countless arguments that might as well be wrapped in evidence and drenched in logic which would just as easily be dismissed by a believer. The root of belief is not based in the natural world but in personal feeling. And as any man who has ever been in a relationship with a woman can attest, feelings are difficult to dismiss. However, I find that all cases can be made. Be it an argument based in feeling or reason, logic or evidence, a perfectly good answer can be given. One that would make anyone pause and think.

There is one argument that does not fit into any of the three categories I mentioned above. It is Pascals Wager. A pragmatic argument that will be the first to be mentioned as I begin to discuss specific claims in the next installment.

The Diary of an Unbeliever

I am an Atheist. Which is to say I do not believe in any God, or in fact the super natural. On it’s face, this is an odd declaration to make. It is a positive announcement for a negative. I am not actively believing in anything and so, logic would dictate, have no business making announcements.

Some people may assert that the act of not believing in God is as active as believing. In the case of the God of Abraham I suppose that may be true. Western society tends to saturate its children in the assumption of God. So much so that it takes a real step to stop believing. However, as much as I do not believe in the God of Abraham I also do not believe in Thor. I am as much of an Atheist to Leprechauns and Unicorns as I am to Jesus or Krishna. I believe just as little in the past dead Gods of ancient Greece or Rome as I’m sure I will in the future Gods people are bound to invent. Only in a world where God is assumed to exist would this become something to announce positively.

Strictly speaking I am agnostic - but only strictly speaking. A prerequisite of proper critical thinking is to assume you do not know everything. It is practically impossible to disprove a negative and so I make no absolute claims. On the other hand, any claim made must be backed by evidence. And claims that are extraordinary in nature must supply extraordinary evidence. As none such evidence exists for God, Unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the claim should properly be ignored until such evidence can be presented. Saying one is a Unicorn agnostic would be silly. When no evidence is supplied the odds toward the claim do not suddenly become fifty fifty. So strictly speaking I am Agnostic, but practically I am an Atheist.

This logic is not foreign to those who do believe either. A believer in the God of Abraham is as much of an Atheist as I when it comes to Thor or Zeus. There are no people who really believe in all the Gods of the world. If only because most insist they are the one true God. Richard Dawkins put it well when he said: “We are all atheists about most of the Gods that societies ever believed in. Some of us just go one God further.”

One thing I do tend to do, on the other hand, is get into arguments. Many arguments. I’ve spent quite a few hours chatting, arguing or debating people of faith and I have heard many arguments made in favor of it. I think it may be time to begin to write them all down.

Gods thin layer of infinite protection

The undoubted source of Gods all mightiness is, of course, the word 'all'. A simply 'mighty' being could be nice, but it would not be God. The word mighty does well to describe big animals or conquering kings, but in order to impress the meek one needs just a little extra. Infinite power, however, may be more Impressive but is also more complicated.

Infinity is a mathematical term. It is a rhetorical term to describe things that are unending. But despite its wide spread in conversation, Infinity does not exist in reality. There is simply no such thing as infinitely large or small. Nothing goes on forever. Think for a moment of the simple mathematical question: What is infinity minus infinity? How can one even begin to answer such a question. It is a paradox. And questions that pose paradoxes always point toward a flaw in the assumptions of the question - in this case: infinity.

But what does this do to the concept of God? Once stripped from infinity, the concept of God takes an immediate turn in our mind. Suddenly questions begin to surface. If God is not infinitely old, when did he start? Was he born? and if so, who begot him?

We find ourselves asking questions about where he came from, and the limits of his power. Without infinity God seems to be reduced to a powerful alien at best (and a figment of our imagination at worst).

What about the human soul? Even if there is an afterlife, what's the use if it is not infinite. This is great news for those going to Hell but the occupants of Heaven may feel short changed. Without infinity, the soul would not live forever. Which means we will all eventually die. Even if we accept the afterlife as a possibility - it would end eventually.

After removing this thin layer of protection from God, These questions immediately follow. Our imagination cannot grasp infinite power, but finite power we can get our head around. A God which is not infinitely moral may be just regularly moral. Maybe he isn't all around us. Maybe he can't hear all of our prayers. Maybe only some. Or maybe none.