Your god doesn't exist, and I can prove it
I was very irritated by a radio programme last night. It purported to be a balanced response to the scientific evidence that we are 'hard-wired', in our brains, to believe in the divine. In actual fact, the furthest it got across to the atheist side was the middle, i.e. "It tells us nothing about whether or not those beliefs are true". True, but hardly the point that needed to be made. If we show that belief is hard-wired, and then we show that there are obvious natural evolutionary reasons for those beliefs, then we have provided a god-free explanation for religion. That is highly significant.
However, what really pissed me off was yet another assertion that "we are no closer to proving God doesn't exist" (don't you just love the presumption, as always, of a single God). What do we have to do to get through to people? I prove gods don't exist ten times before lunch, and still people carry on in their delusion of the unassailability of the god idea.
Here's an example of a disproof. A book on Hare Krishna beliefs I am reading insists that if you pray to Krishna for something, you will receive it. Now it has been proven, emphatically, that prayer does not work, no matter how committed and convinced the prayers are. So that god, the one that answers prayers, has been proven not to exist. Absolutely!
But the vast majority of god attributes are tackled logically. There is a wild idea that if you disprove an attribute of god, you haven't actually disproved god. But of course you have! That would be like saying if you prove that god cannot be benevolent, the Christian god could still exist. No! It would be some other god idea, not the Christian one, goodness is intrinsic to the Christian idea.
I've proved you can't have a benevolent, powerful god, or an all-knowing god plus free will, or a 'perfect' god, or a powerful god with intention, or a god with needs or desires, or a god who needs religion to exist, or a benevolent god who allows many religions to exist, or a thousand other attributes that religions describe god as having. It seems like every argument over these proofs ends with some assertion about god's intentions being mysterious and beyond our understanding - but that's just another way of admitting that yes, that particular god doesn't exist, it is in fact some other kind of god that you don't understand. And then there are the other outlets, like redefining benevolence to mean something completely unrelated to what we mean when we describe a person as benevolent, making the whole thing meaningless.
What we are left with, after all the arguments, is an inconsequential god. One (or more) that is indistinguishable from a universe with no god at all. But this is not a god of any religion. It is not a god worthy of respect, or prayer, or time, or money. In that sense, it is no god at all. The god that you all believe in, that has been disproved. It cannot exist. It does not exist.
However, what really pissed me off was yet another assertion that "we are no closer to proving God doesn't exist" (don't you just love the presumption, as always, of a single God). What do we have to do to get through to people? I prove gods don't exist ten times before lunch, and still people carry on in their delusion of the unassailability of the god idea.
Here's an example of a disproof. A book on Hare Krishna beliefs I am reading insists that if you pray to Krishna for something, you will receive it. Now it has been proven, emphatically, that prayer does not work, no matter how committed and convinced the prayers are. So that god, the one that answers prayers, has been proven not to exist. Absolutely!
But the vast majority of god attributes are tackled logically. There is a wild idea that if you disprove an attribute of god, you haven't actually disproved god. But of course you have! That would be like saying if you prove that god cannot be benevolent, the Christian god could still exist. No! It would be some other god idea, not the Christian one, goodness is intrinsic to the Christian idea.
I've proved you can't have a benevolent, powerful god, or an all-knowing god plus free will, or a 'perfect' god, or a powerful god with intention, or a god with needs or desires, or a god who needs religion to exist, or a benevolent god who allows many religions to exist, or a thousand other attributes that religions describe god as having. It seems like every argument over these proofs ends with some assertion about god's intentions being mysterious and beyond our understanding - but that's just another way of admitting that yes, that particular god doesn't exist, it is in fact some other kind of god that you don't understand. And then there are the other outlets, like redefining benevolence to mean something completely unrelated to what we mean when we describe a person as benevolent, making the whole thing meaningless.
What we are left with, after all the arguments, is an inconsequential god. One (or more) that is indistinguishable from a universe with no god at all. But this is not a god of any religion. It is not a god worthy of respect, or prayer, or time, or money. In that sense, it is no god at all. The god that you all believe in, that has been disproved. It cannot exist. It does not exist.
posted by extabgrad at 1:32 AM
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