Or, at least, a guess at what it might consist of.

There’s an interesting debate going on between Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers on the provability of God’s existence. The standard atheist position on this matter seems to be disbelief for lack of evidence to the contrary, but that in principle it might be possible to conjure some piece of evidence that might prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that “God” exists. Coyne offers, as an example, a series of highly unlikely events, all perpetrated by a being calling himself Jesus. Myers rightly insists he still would not believe in God or Jesus if these happened. [Read more →]

There is something rather premature about the recent “controversy” over Hawking’s statements on God’s existence. Firstly, there is nothing at all new in what we know of Hawking’s views. Theists (and believers of all varieties in a creator) might have held open the possibility of Hawking’s agnosticism, but this agnosticism was only ever a purely theoretical one anyway. The hope seems to have arisen largely from the concluding paragraph in A Brief History of Time:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.

“The mind of God” is naturally an alluring term that sounds like the product of an agnostic brain. It carries with it an appeal to our civilization-long search for the answer to the question, why are we here? But it really only shows the usefulness of God as a metaphor. “God” is simply the origin of all our laws—and clearly, if this was all that a theist believed in, he would be no theist at all. [Read more →]

Many theists believe that whenever something terrible (and often arbitrary) happens, it somehow fits into God’s plan. For instance, the earthquake in Haiti, some say, might be taken to be God’s way of making non-Haitians better people because it wakes them from their moral slumber and provokes them to do something good for those suffering, thus raising the general level of goodness in the world. As with many theistic arguments, it is often difficult to show, to one making the argument, that it makes the world less meaningful, rather than more so. But the argument, which implies that God is the sole arbiter in any question of morality, when taken to its conclusion leads to a contradiction. [Read more →]

It seems to me that in the atheism/theism debate, neither side openly professes certainty, for fear that they will look like fundamentalists. If neither side is certain, then nobody can back up their view with real conviction. Let’s look at it this way. If someone were to tell you that object x exists, but that nobody in the world has seen it, your first inclination would be to doubt it, especially if the object has such extraordinary qualities that it would be very surprising if it was even possible to exist. However, you couldn’t say, x definitely doesn’t exist. The most you can say is that it probably doesn’t exist. But how do you accurately assess probabilities in such cases? Given that there are an infinite number of things that x could be, one would have to conclude that the probability, in this grand scheme, that x exists, is very low. As far as we know, God is as likely to exist as a unicorn.

But there are other things that we haven’t seen, yet we have reason to believe exist. The reason we believe that black holes are likely to exist is that they are postulated as a result of calculations which, as far as we know, are correct. There is no equivalent for God. There is no calculation which says the universe must have been consciously created. Scientific endeavour hasn’t led us to a definite conclusion about the beginning of the universe, but the evidence leads us further and further away from conscious creation.

In a world in which the idea that some unseen x might possibly exist is taken seriously, how are we to treat this x? Certainly, we should not treat it seriously according to how it is defined. If I say that x is a being such that if you don’t believe in its existence, you will suffer an eternity of pain (and that is its only property), again you will be disinclined to believe. There could be another being called y which has the property that if you believe in x, you will suffer an eternity of pain. How can you know which to believe in? They are equally likely to exist, and neither x nor y has any presence in our lives in any meaningful way, other than that we are told that they exist by people who have never seen them.

That is the reason why, despite a lack of evidence (if such a thing could ever be produced) that God doesn’t exist, there is no reason to believe. One’s life might be different if the idea of God was removed, but not if God himself were gone.

This house believes that if someone were to claim to be a prophet nowadays, they would be roundly mocked by most of the very people who follow prophets of their own, and followed only by desperate or crazy people. Perhaps this says something about the first followers of the great world religions?

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