To Infinity and Beyond
March 15th, 2008 by Larry D. Burton
I have no problem with people who claim to be agnostic. Lord knows I’ve been there and still find myself wondering at times. Still I consider myself a devout Christian who can recite the Apostle’s Creed with conviction.
Atheists, however, are another matter. I don’t dislike them I just can not fathom how anyone can say, “There is no God,” with any certainty. I don’t understand them and I can’t help but view their certainty of there being no god as a bit of arrogance.
I know it may seem hypocritical of me to view an atheists certainty of there being no god and not some believers certainty that there is but I don’t see it that way. To me I can understand someone taking even the flimsiest bit of evidence of a god and having it become a certainty but just because to another there is a lack of evidence can not lead to a certainty that there is no God.
Look at it this way, we really have no universal definition of what a supreme being might be. On top of that we really have no consensus that a god has to be a supreme being or that just any supreme being is a god. Since we really don’t know what a god or a supreme being might be how can we say it doesn’t exist?
To look at it another way we live in a complex universe. The more we find out about it the more we find that we don’t know. Some look at the universe as being boundless, without limits or as constantly expanding. We understand the basic laws of physics and how they work but when we go beyond the basics we continue to find things to be just a little more complex than what we fully understand. We get a grasp on that complexity and that opens up even more complexity.
The complexities are proving to be more and more enormous the more we look. So are we so arrogant then as to think that we are looking at something that the human mind is fully capable of completely understanding? I’m not saying that it is useless and that we should stop looking and theorizing but what I am saying is that I don’t expect us to ever be able to comprehend the laws of physics completely, at least not in our current form.
So where am I going with this? If we can’t fully understand our universe, and by that we I’m also including the physicist who is so intelligent he can comprehend 26 different dimensions in a theory that has merit throughout the scientific community, if we can’t come to an agreement on what a supreme being might be or what a god is, how can we be so arrogant as to make the bold statement that there is no Creator God? How can anyone possibly state with any confidence at all that it all just happened?
Now, with that said I can fully understand someone telling me they can’t believe in a Sky Wizard or some invisible Magic Man. I find those terms offensive to me but I can understand someone not being able to believe in the God of the Bible or the Koran or any of the pagan gods out there. I just can’t understand how anyone can say with any certainty that there is no God, period.
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the existence of the cross is still in doubt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Soledad_cross_controversy
So I’ve been trying to come up with some analogies to help bridge that communicational divide, ways to open up the understanding a bit, and I’ve been struggling, so here are a few random thoughts.
The first is a little bit of rambling on the fallacy of Pascal’s Wager: So say there is a god, and you’re damned to the firey pits if you don’t worship appropriately, the choice is not between worshipping and not worshipping, because there have been innumerable manners of honoring deities proposed over the years, so it’s between not worshipping and thousand if not millions of different subtleties in worship. Hundreds to thousands under the label “Christian” alone.
However, you didn’t approach this with the false dichotomy in mind, and you allowed for that with your lack of definition of a specific god. It’s a choice between the experience of any god, and none at all.
So there’s the obvious analogy that starts out “There were six men of Hindustan, to learning much inclined…”, but as I thought about it a bit more I realized that perhaps the better comparison is the tomato.
On one side, you had the common wisdom: Tomato plants have all of these indications that the fruit is poisonous. The leaf shapes are really similar to night shades, The leaves and stems do bad things to animals. On the other hand, animals ate the fruits.
Both camps, those who thought tomatoes might be edible and those who thought they were poisonous were looking at a lot of available information, they just drew different conclusions.
I see the existence of a god or gods that’d make any difference to my life, as distinct from the possibility that there might be more advanced species of creatures, or that societies and aggregations of creatures might be advanced enough to be classed as minds of their own, as an explanation for a set of physical phenomena that can make sense, but doesn’t fit all of the available evidence as the hypothesis that there isn’t such a being.
I understand how you can come to the other conclusion, I even sometimes think it’d be nice to have that comfort or sense that the universe may care, but around the fringes there are things that make me sure enough that the common wisdom is wrong that it’d take a direct apparition to make me waver, and even then I’m more likely to question my own perceptions and memories of the event than I am to accept that explanation as the first one.
Because for me it just doesn’t work as a hypothesis that fits the available evidence.
Okay, Dan, I can understand where you are coming from but there is also a difference between saying, “I see no evidence of a god,” and saying, “There is no god.” It is the same difference as there is between saying, “I see enough evidence to convince me there is a god,” and saying, “There is a god.”
I’ve never had a problem with your form of atheism because by accepting my belief in a god as being valid for me you aren’t saying, “There is no god.” What you are saying is, “I see no evidence to cause me to believe there is a god.” If God walked up to you you would most likely say, “Cool! You do exist, good to meet you.” You wouldn’t say, “Get out of here, you don’t exist.”
Perhaps the difference is that I’ve accepted the notion that there are weird assumptions and shortcuts that my brain uses in trying to explain the world, and that I’ve accepted that there is a fundamental human tendency towards spirituality, for better or for worse.
It’s easy to look at the history of religion and see all the bloody violence and want to reject it, but I’ve come to the place where it seems to me just a human thing, not a religious thing, and many of us atheists only associate the evil with religion because humans have that drive to explain things through spiritual mechanisms.
However, I can sure see looking at what many people offer up as their vision of God and saying “even if such a being existed, I’d refuse to worship it in principle”.
Which leads to another possible explanation: I’ve seen the fallout from evangelical Christians who went through their judgmental phases, there can be a lot of hate expressed in that judgment, and it can tear families apart. Yep, being vague for the obvious reasons. Maybe what you’re seeing in atheists is that same personality transferred to a different belief structure.
Obviously, I think I’m right and I think your belief is a coping mechanism which helps you explain the universe in mechanisms which your brain accepts, but I accept that all of our brains need coping mechanisms to wrap our heads around things that we’ll never understand. If God is the label you ascribe to it and “things we won’t know in my lifetime” is my label, I can accept that and don’t insist that you stick to my labels.
I just hope for luck rather than providence when things get sticky.
Saying “there is no God” (or more accurately, “there are no deities”) with a sense of certainty is just as silly as saying “there is a God” with a sense of certainty.
Atheists aren’t certain that there aren’t any deities, it’s just that they believe that there aren’t any — as opposed to the agnostics, who don’t actively believe there are or believe there aren’t.
I don’t see how “there is no God” is any more arrogant or obnoxious than “there is no Santa Claus.”
Actually, I think it’s pretty arrogant to say “there is no Santa Claus.” Maybe that’s due to my idea that Santa Claus goes beyond just a character in a red suit that drives a sled powered by flying reindeer. Santa to me is an ideal. Sort of like God, come to think of it.
Perhaps then the issue is in both the definition of “God”, and the difference between the cultural, spiritual, personal and prescriptive elements of religion.
“God” to me implies an entity with a consciousness and intellect that could communicate with mine that has the ability to operate outside the physical causality that can be repeatably tested by experiment. To some extent what we come to here is the old Arthur C. Clarke line about “sufficiently advanced technology”: What separates “God” from aliens further ahead on the curve?
Which might speak a bit to the personal definitions: To such a creature, are we anything more than pets? If so, maybe I’m just a cat person and you’re a dog person…
I think that one of the problems is that every one is so use to anthropomorphic terms being used to describe God that we start to believe that God can only exist in our image. While Genesis tells us that God created Man in His image that doesn’t necessarily equate to God being just another physical representation of us.
I have to admit that I don’t have a full definition of God and it would be presumptuous of me to think I could possibly provide one. A definition would limit God. Wouldn’t it? Who am I to try to limit God?
I can tell you that at the very least God is whatever force created this universe. Along with that creation came a set of rules that we call the laws of physics. I think that there are also some rules there that I would call the laws of happiness. The foremost of those laws would be “Respect God.”
I think the way to respect God is by respecting what God has created. That would mean respecting nature and being a good steward with nature’s resources and respecting my fellow man.
That falls right in line with Christ’s teachings which were an affirmation of Jewish law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might and love your neighbor as yourself. I think every major religion in the world has a similar commandment.
What got me thinking in this direction was the opening verses of John’s Gospel. To paraphrase it a bit to show where I’m going we can say that in the beginning was the way things ought to be and the way things ought to be stems from the way things were created and nothing would have been created without having a proper way of being.
But regardless of all that, I’m still looking at something had to happen to cause the universe to be. Whatever that something was or is or shall be it’s still something and I’m assigning it the title of God. It’s the only way I can keep sane.