Why God?
Ian MacFarlane
Though there has
never been one clear, solid definition of religion, it seems there have been
religions for as long as humans have recorded history. Indeed, much of the early recorded history
which exists today comes either from religious writings or from religious
scholars who recorded events as they saw them at their time. Religions have served as foundations for
moral guidance, as comforts in times of trouble and need, and as tools of
conquest and justification for slaughter.
Believers often hold their religious beliefs dearer than anything else
in their lives, and see those who disagree with them as being "lost"
or "misguided". This
phenomenon is most often observed in the Judeo-Christian religions which harbor
a belief in "God". The very
nature of believing in an all powerful, all knowing creator, as the Christian
God is supposed to be, lends itself to close-minded thinking; for if God is
what Christianity claims he is, then anyone who disagrees with the teachings of
that god is by definition wrong in their thinking.
But why should we
as humans believe in that god, or any god at all for that matter? There have been numerous arguments for the
existence of God, but none have ever been able to escape the circular logic
their authors have burdened them with by trying to prove the impossible; that
what cannot be proven to exist (and thus, for all intents and purposes, does not exist) actually exists.
In the eleventh
century, Anselm of Canterbury tried his hand at proving the existence of the
Christian God, in what came to be known as the Ontological Argument for the
Existence of God. Anselm argued that
God was "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived." He
defines God as the greatest being which anyone could even imagine, and as such,
can be second to none. If I were to
imagine the greatest possible being, I would have to imagine it to have
complete and total power, for if I imagined it as less, it would not be the
greatest being I could imagine.
Furthermore, according to Anselm, it is greater to exist than to not
exist. Thus, if we conceive of a being
that is the greatest possible being, yet we imagine that it does not exist, it
cannot be the greatest possible being, for a being with all the same traits
that actually exists would be greater.
In this manner, Anselm has defined and imagined God into existence. Yet, real problems exist with this
argument.
If I were to
imagine in my mind Thomas Moore's "Utopia" (which, ironically, means
"no-where"), I could imagine a place where everything was
perfect. I could imagine it having the
perfect temperature, with the perfect balance of exciting and relaxing
activities, and existing in the perfect location (on the shores of Loch
Ness). As I can imagine a God than
which nothing is greater, so I can also imagine a place than which no other
place is greater. Yet, I know
empirically that this place I have imagined does
not exist, for though I imagined its location, it does not occupy that
space in reality. Simply thinking of a place (or divine entity)
does not bring it into existence.
A second problem
with Anselm's argument is that it pre-supposes that it is greater (or better
than any alternative, which is entailed in the word "greater") to
exist than not to exist. Yet, there are
many times when this is not the case.
Take, for example, falsity and suffering. The existence of falsity is not better than its non-existence,
for its impact on such statements as "I am happy" makes the statement
worse, not better. Consider, also, the
concept of suffering. Suffering is not
better than any alternative when it exists; it's alternative, non-existing
suffering, is far better. Thus, to
assume the greatest possible god must exist because it is better to have
existence is to assume based on a false (or at least sometimes false)
premise.
The thirteenth
century theologian Thomas Aquinas decided to have a crack at proving the
existence of God rationally, but had as little success as Anselm. Aquinas proposed several arguments,
including the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God, also called the
Argument from Causality. Aquinas says
that if we examine the world, we will see that each event which occurs had some
cause, and its cause had a cause as well, an so forth on back to the beginning. Yet, he claims, there must have been a start
to it all, an "original cause", a first cause which set the chain
reaction in motion. Aquinas calls this
first cause "God", and decides that it is the Christian God.
At first glance,
this argument seems impressive. On
examination of life, it is difficult to think of a single circumstance where
cause and effect relationships are not evident. I am writing this paper because it is part of the class
assignment, and I took this class because it is a requirement for my major, and
I chose my major because of personal interests, and those interests exist
because of life experiences I have had, each of which had its own causes. Even those who would try to distinguish between
causes and influences would have a difficult time denying the existence of causes
on the micro-level in the face of modern scientific knowledge. If I am to choose between eating a bowl of
grapes or a bowl of strawberries, I may find both equally appealing, and yet
still choose the strawberries.
Attribute this to an un-affected, free-willed decision, which had no
causes other than my will deciding it to be so; yet, where is the will, if not
in the mind, and what is the mind but a series of chemical and electrical
causes and effects in the brain? Thus,
it seems Aquinas has gained ground by basing his theory on the seemingly
tangible idea of a cause and effect-governed world.
However, as is the
nature of arguments for the existence of God, Thomas Aquinas quickly veers off
into the realm of the intangible, and goes so far as to postulate a God, and
the Christian God no less, as the original cause of all subsequent events in our
world. Aquinas makes three unfounded
assumptions here: 1.) that there must
have been an original cause (that the chain of cause and effect cannot go back
in time infinitely); 2.) that the original cause is a tangible being which still exists today, called
"God"; and 3.) that this "God" is the omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God of Christianity. If number 1 falls, the other two fall with it, so we will address
these assumptions in reverse order.
The Problem of
Evil, an argument which fells the Christian concept of an omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God, will be addressed later, so we will leave
that for now. However, we may say now
that there is no necessity for an original cause to be these three things, for
it could simply set in motion the chain of events which continue today without
knowing that such things are going on, and without "good" intentions. As for the being which still exists called
"God", there is no more reason to believe this is the case than there
is to believe the "big bang" theory, which says that there was
originally a large mass of matter, which exploded into the matter of our
current universe, and thus had no sense of intent or knowledge, or even a
continuous existence which has continued on to this day. Finally, there is the issue of whether or
not there must have been an original cause at all to set the world into motion. To humans, the concept of infinity is a
difficult one to accept, because we do not see it provable in the tangible
world. The universe may be thought to
be infinite, but we can never know it for certain, because even if we were to
board a space-ship and begin traveling, if the universe is infinite we would
never reach the end. If we ever reached
an end, we would know that the universe is not infinite, but it's infinity can
never be sampled by us. This does not
mean, however, that infinity cannot exist.
Numbers are our closest link with infinity, because they are both
concepts and sometimes tangible entities.
Infinity of numbers exists, because we can always think of a number
higher then the previous one. Infinity
does not exist simply because we can conceive of it, but we can conceive of it
because it can exist. Thus, it is just as conceivable to believe
that causes and effects go back in time forever as to believe that there was
one original cause, and since no other evidence exists to prove either position
more correct, the assumption of either one is unwarranted.
Thomas Aquinas
tried again to argue for the existence of God.
This argument, known as the Teleological Argument for the Existence of
God, or the Argument from Design, makes use of several faulty analogies. Aquinas argues that the world seems to have
an order or organization to it, which would suggest an organizer. He compares the world to an arrow, an
inanimate object which has goal-directed motion, and God to the archer, the mover
of the arrow. An eighteenth century
philosopher, William Paley, made a similar analogy using instead a watch and
watchmaker in comparison to the world and God.
Paley says that if while walking along a beach we found a watch lying in
the sand, we would examine it, and, noticing how all of its parts worked
together and seemed to have purpose, we would therefore know that it had a
creator, or a watchmaker.
The problems with
this theory are immense and immediate upon examination of the argument. Firstly, it presupposes that the world as we
know is like a watch or an arrow. It assumes
that the fact that the world functions as it does is evidence enough to assume
there is intent behind it. As support
for this assumption, Paley mentions the ozone layer which protects the
inhabitants of earth from the harmful rays of the sun. He says that the fact that it exists is
"mighty proof of the Creator's forethought."
Darwin surely would have pitched a fit to read this, for his theories of
evolution offer a far more reasonable view of the situation, and are founded on
tangible evidence (the common traits many species share on a physical and
genetic level, as well as the Reznick-Endler experiments). Life on earth is of such a form that it is
able to exist with the conditions present not
because the earth was designed that way for life, but because life over time
adapted itself to the environment. If
there was a divine creator who created the world with intention, and made it
such that life could survive on it, why would this creator allow any species to
die off? The extinction of the
dinosaurs is a detrimental wound to Paley's argument. There is no necessity of a divine "watchmaker", for the
world is not at all like a watch.
Again, the same
problem of assumption which was seen in Aquinas' Cosmological Argument still
exists in the Teleological Argument. A
large void exists between the notion that there is a world creator and the
certainty that this creator is the Christian God. As is typical of arguments for the existence of God, the argument
ultimately becomes circular, because to accept the premises as true you must
have already accepted the conclusion; that God exists.
For many people
today, the belief in God is not something which can be argued or proven
rationally. I have had various
discussions with people who hold a belief in a divine force, yet do not hold
their beliefs because of any logical, tangible evidence. Most commonly, they say that they believe in
God because it is dismal for them to think that there is nothing out there to
offer help, and no afterlife to welcome or comfort them when death comes. Some devout believers argue that there is a
feeling which they get inside, which sometimes comes from reading the Bible,
which they feel is God making personal contact with them. Many of these believers say that to achieve
this feeling, you must read the Bible with an openness and readiness to accept
God's power and love (again presupposing God exists even before the proof [the
spiritual feeling one supposedly gets from reading the Bible] has been
evaluated!). They leave the convenient
escape clause: if you read the Bible but do not get the spiritual feeling, it
is not because God does not exist and there is nothing to feel; it is obviously
because you have closed yourself off from the power of God!
Every human being
has moments of "revelation" or "awakening," where they
suddenly feel as though something is different, or that they are privy to new
information which they did not have before.
Though it is just as likely that these feelings have perfectly rational
and scientifically physical causes, many people interpret them as being
mystical experiences. I was recently
talking with a woman who worked at a hospital as a nurse, and who had seen
people die many times. She told me of
when her father had died, and how she had felt a presence there, which she felt
was some sort of a guide for her father's soul. No rational evidence could change her beliefs; she
"knew" what she had experienced, and nothing would convince her
otherwise.
An early 20th
century philosopher, William James, had an interesting view of such mystical
experiences which merits mentioning here.
He felt that while mystical states have a very significant impact on
those who have them, still "no authority emanates from them which should
make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations
uncritically."
Thus, mystical experiences, though they may greatly impact an
individual, serve no purpose in an argument for the existence of God, for if
everyone cannot feel them, there is no way to achieve a continuity of evaluation
of these experiences.
There are many
religions which foster a belief in a divine entity, and thus there are different
concepts of the nature of this divine being.
Wicca, for example, focuses on worship of the Goddess, which is closely
linked with nature and love of the natural world, and is completely lacking the
restrictive or judge-like nature seen in many other religions' deities. However, the most commonly held concept of
God is still that of the Judeo-Christian God who is omniscient (all knowing),
omnipotent (all powerful), and omnibenevolent (all good). With this idea of God exists a very large,
fundamental problem; the Problem of Evil.
The problem is that
evil exists in the world. If god is all
knowing, he must, by definition, know
that this evil exists. If he is all
powerful, he must be able to resolve
or eliminate the evil. Finally, if he
is all good, he must desire to get
rid of that evil. Yet, evil
exists. Thus, one of four things must
be true: God is either not omniscient, or he is not omnipotent, or he is not omnibenevolent; or, he is all three,
but evil does not exist.
Perhaps, as St.
Augustine argued, evil does not exist.
This could be argued based on differing definitions of the concept of
"evil", but even if we define around the word, we are only changing
the name of this particular argument against the Christian God, for in place of
evil we can always use "bad things" or "suffering". It is undeniable that suffering exists in
this world. There are children born
into terrible situations of poverty, abuse, starvation, and neglect. Eastern religions have the concept of Karma
to explain this; these children are suffering in this life for evil deeds they
did in previous lives. Christianity has
no reasonable explanation for such unequal suffering. Though the concept of Adam and Eve's "original sin"
might be applied to suggest that all
people are sinners and that suffering is part of our just desserts, this offers
no rational reason for why some children are born to wealthy, loving,
well-esteemed families in countries ripe with opportunities, while other
children are born to dirt-poor single-mothers with no education and no concept
of how to care for themselves, much less a child, and certainly lacking the
means or state support to do either.
By far the most
comical rebuttal to the Problem of Evil comes in the form of Christians who
protest our even asking after God's
intentions, for we as petty humans have no right or place to question the
actions or motivations of our divine creator.
Here again we see the presupposition made that a God exists, that he is
the Christian God, and that he is everything the Bible says he is, without even
getting into the discussion of why it should be thusly. The very purpose of the discussion is to
question if a god exists, and if so what its nature might be, but the arguments
for that particular god cannot help but try to end the discussion by assuming
as true the very issue in question.
The idea of a god
certainly serves a purpose in the lives of humans. Perhaps it is as the Sociological Perspective suggests, and the
concept of God and Religion serves to bind societies together. Perhaps Freud's theory of God and Religion
as a crutch for people to lean on in times of turmoil is correct. Certainly the varying views of gods and religions
have caused endless problems as well, from the Crusades to the Pogroms to the
Holocaust to the modern bigotry which still exists against people of various
races, religions, sexual orientations, and overall beliefs (or non-beliefs). However, the usefulness or non-usefulness of
"God" is not what is in question here. Though everyone, in my opinion, has the right to believe what
they choose, there still exists the situation of "A or Not A"; either
God exists or God does not exist.
Ultimately, it is illogical to say that both are correct, and though
there is not enough evidence to say with 100% certainty that God does not
exist, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that God does exist. If I were to postulate a giant aquatic
creature swimming in the depths of a cold Scottish loch, the burden of proof
would rest on me to prove it exists.
The burden of proof for the existence of God rests squarely on the
believers, who have consistently fallen short of the challenge.
Footnotes
Hick, John H. Philosophy of Religion: Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. 1990. p.15.
Hick, John H. Philosophy of Religion: Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. 1990. p.24.
Stewart, David. Exploring the Philosophy
of Religion: Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. 1998.
p.13.