Religion Front Page
Atheists, Agnostics, and how we know stuff
Jeremiah Johnson, Richmond Faith Lutheran Church
06-13-2008
I don’t think Ray County has many atheists, so perhaps it seems silly to write an article about atheism. But in our larger culture, atheism presents a much more immediate challenge. So even if you’re not an atheist or don’t know any atheists, it’s still a worthwhile topic to discuss. Now I will admit that this article is a little more cerebral than what I write for the paper, but that’s just the nature of the subject.
First, let’s tackle some terminology. Atheists are those who deny the existence of a divine, supreme being (which is usually called “God”). Atheists are not to be confused with Agnostics, who state that we cannot know with any amount of certainty that such a divine being exists. It is possible, they say, but we just can’t know for sure.
Just to let you know where I’m going with all this, I have two main points. One, atheism and Christianity both believe in the existence or non-existence of God. Neither one “proves” it. (I must clarify that when I use the term “prove”, I mean it strictly in the empirical, deductive, or inductive senses. I realize that this narrow definition leaves the door open to potential misunderstanding, but I simply don’t have the space to clarify further.) Two, such belief does not contradict its truth.
There are many arguments against the existence of God. There’s the classic grade school conundrum - “can God make a rock so large that he can’t move it?” For the more intellectual types, there are the countless variations of the problem of evil - “if God is so good, why do bad things still happen?” Yet these and all the other arguments against God’s existence can be categorized into two different types of arguments. The first type says that there’s enough evidence to disprove the existence of God (empirical argument). The second type of argument says that the idea of God itself is illogical (inductive or deductive argument).
So is there enough evidence to disprove the existence of God? Is there enough evil and suffering and pain to convince us that God couldn’t possibly exist? Or on the flipside, is there enough evidence to prove God’s existence? Are there enough documents and miracles and personal testimonials to prove that God must undeniably exist? Either way, the question comes down to “evidence.” Is there enough of it? Well, the problem with this approach is that evidence is something that applies to the physical world. Evidence (empirical data) is stuff like bullet casings and people’s hair color and how far a car slid and how much carbon dioxide a fern consumes. Evidence, the way we normally talk about it is something you can see and measure and record. But how are you going to measure and record God? By definition (at least the Judeo-Christian definition of God), God is not immediately accessible to the senses. True, the Bible records that God manifested himself in ways that were accessible (Jesus was born as a man, after all), but God, in His totality, is inaccessible to our senses. You can’t put Him on a scale or hold a ruler up to Him, and our idea of evidence doesn’t quite apply to him. This means that you cannot finally prove or disprove the existence of God based upon evidence.
If we can’t disprove the existence of God by evidence, then can we do it by proving that the idea of God is illogical? For example, atheists often point out that in the Bible, the Christian God is said to change His mind. If God is all-knowing, how could it be said that he changes his mind? It is argued that if God knew everything already, He should have been able to make the right choice the first time and not needed to change His mind. Thus the claim of an all-knowing God is inconsistent with his description in the Bible. The problem with this argument is that if one presumes God to be infinite and all-knowing, then how can we presume what is consistent or inconsistent with respect to God? Let me explain further. This argument of God’s illogicality presumes (if only for the sake of argument) the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite God. We, being finite beings, limited in both knowledge and power, apply our logic to our own finite, limited world. But can we apply the logic of the finite to the infinite? Can we apply human logic to the mind of God? If God is truly all-powerful, which, as I pointed out earlier, even the critics assume for the sake of argument, it is not logically necessary that the same rules of logic and rationality apply to both finite beings and infinite beings at the same time. Put more simply, just because 2+2=4 in our mind, it doesn’t have to be that way in God’s. So just because God seems inconsistent to us might only be the result of applying our finite logic to the infinite God.
Review time—what have we shown so far? Well, we’ve shown that God is outside of our sphere of verifiability. If we assume that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and infinite, then he cannot ultimately be subject to either our observations or our logic. In other words, the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven. Thus the Atheist and the Christian are surprisingly similar in this respect: their conclusion as to the existence or non-existence of God is a belief, not a “proof.”
It sounds like I’ve just made a strong case for agnosticism, doesn’t it? If the existence of God can’t be proven or disproven, then we have no choice but to throw up our hands and say, “I don’t know!” Don’t we? Maybe not.
Not everything that is true is “provable.” For example, we had no evidence of Neptune and Pluto until the telescope was invented. But simply because we couldn’t see them didn’t mean that they didn’t exist. In fact, there are plenty of things—things we hold to be true everyday that have not been “proved” to us. When you were young, you trusted that the language your parents were speaking to you had meaning, but you weren’t furnished with proof up front. You flip on a light switch and you believe that the power company is still doing its job generating and transmitting electricity to your house and that that bulb is going to light up. But do you have proof of this? No, not exactly. And when you watch the news or read the paper, you generally trust that the information that they are conveying to you without needing to research all of it yourself. Most of us don’t believe that the government is staging an intricate conspiracy against us and continually feeding us false information.
Think of it from the other extreme. What would your life be like if you had to had to definitively prove everything to yourself? You would have to prove that your shower would work in the morning and that your toast was truly made from the ingredients listed on the label. How would you know if the law of gravity hadn’t been repealed or that the lettuce in your salad wasn’t tainted or that someone hadn’t bombed your car? The point is, you couldn’t. Technically, most everything that you do on a day-to-day basis isn’t “proved.” it’s believed.
So is it so unreasonable to believe that something is true even though it hasn’t been thoroughly tested by a double-blind clinical trial? If so, then we’re all doomed to live totally unreasonable lives. But I would argue that it’s completely reasonable to believe things that can’t be proven by a whole mountain of evidence. So even though the existence of God can’t be directly verified, that doesn’t mean that He doesn’t exist or that it’s irrational to believe in Him.
As for me, I’d trust God’s existence over the six o’clock news any day.
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