Let me state my bias. I’m not a physicist, I’m not a cosmologist or
mathematician and I’m not a theologian.
I’m mostly an aging philosopher,
who has published a few philosophical papers.
I spent much of my life as an actor/director and then as an
academic. My research area is the
Philosophy of Art and my research tool is the Philosophy of Language which akins me to the analytic school of philosophy. I am,
however, a believer in God.
However hard I search I have not
been able to find a suitable analogy for God which, when you think of it, is
understandable if God is all He is reputed to be. So I’m going to beg your patience a bit and
resort to a
This is a painting by Ad
Reinhardt called Blue Mask. I want to
use this colour as an analogy for God so
I hope you will bear with me when we come to discussing Him.
I’m going to approach this topic
from two fronts: first the
disingenuousness or outright dishonesty of some atheist critics of the
Judeo-Christian belief in God and secondly how logic can show the necessity of
their being a supreme being called God. I would like to start with this quote from a
paper published in the journal ‘Philosophy Now’ titled Atheism on Trial.
Now,
we have been trying to be kind to atheism, not going beyond what it claims. We
have done our best to observe the principle of charity in describing its
essential features. However, our search has forced us to a conclusion that may
sound somewhat uncharitable, and there is no longer a way to avoid it: atheism
is irrational.
.Dr Stephen L. Anderson 2015Stephen Anderson is a
philosophy teacher in London, Ontario.Philosophy Now August/September 2015
I don’t intend to duplicate Dr Anderson’s argument but you can obtain a copy of his article by going to the Philosophy
Now website and downloading it.
I have read a number of books arguing in favour of atheism and for the most part I have found in them arguments that were either dishonest, facile or glib, rife
with hyperbole and at times, irrelevant.
It is so prevalent that it seems to be a character trait. It seems one
cannot be a vigilant atheist without the badge that allows them to mock,
misrepresent and verbally abuse those who hold opinions that atheist are sworn
to disavow. Dr
Anderson points out that Richard Dawkins has backtracked somewhat, in a YouTube
video, insisting that he is not a true atheist, rather he thinks of himself as
a confirmed agnostic and so he has abandoned that ship of hate that contributed
to his prominence. Let me give you an example of the character trait I spoke
of.
“Peter Sutcliffe, the
Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill
women, and he was locked up for life.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
A clear example of dishonesty.
Dawkins knows and we know that Peter Sutcliffe did not distinctly hear
the voice of Jesus. Dawkins states it as
a fact! And he blames religion for
perverting such people. Whatever it was
that Sutcliffe heard it was not Jesus however much he may have believed it.
Next is a quote from Richard
Carrier hoping to make a name for himself as one of the new young guns of Atheism.
When the
Gospel of Peter (yes, Peter) says a Roman centurion, a squad of his soldiers,
and a gathering of Jewish elders all saw a gigantic cross hopping along behind
Jesus as he exited his tomb, and then saw Jesus grow thousands of feet tall
before their very eyes, there isn't a Christian alive who believes this. And
yet that was among the most popular Gospels in the Christian churches of the
second century, purportedly written by someone who was alive at the time. So
why don't Christians believe Peter's Gospel anymore? Well, for many of the same
reasons we don't believe the marvels of Herodotus. But why then believe any of
the other Gospels, those according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Richard
Carrier in John W.
Loftus. The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (p. 293). Prometheus Books.
Kindle Edition.
Carrier knew this.
He has access to the same sources I do but he saw it as a good
opportunity to ridicule Christianity. After
all the ability to ridicule Christianity
or God earns you a merit badge as an atheist. Still, another disbeliever comes to the fore.
Gene Roddenberry
This is actually a good comment.
I too have asked where the logic lies with such a God, but Roddenberry
doesn’t question it. His argument is
facetious because he has done no research.
I want to suggest there is an exquisite logic behind the idea of
creating humans with a tragic flaw which I will demonstrate later. Also, there
is no evidence that God has made a mistake.
One more.
Either
God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either
impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.” Sam Harris
Harris
is undermining his atheism here. If we
are allowed to describe God as impotent or evil then He must exist. People are the only promoters of evil in
this world. Harris is playing a straw
man game. We all know that whatever is
imaginary doesn’t exist by definition.
God is not imaginary, rather he is imagined. For us
it is a logical necessity that He must be. Even atheist must imagine the God they argue
does not exist. Imagined things may exist (and most often do) but imaginary
things cannot. Example: your spouse…..
If I ask you to think about or imagine what your spouse, partner, sibling or friend is doing right now I’m sure you
can. For you he or she is imagined but
they exist. Sceptics in the pub, for
example, is an imagined concept. Yuval
Noah Harari (Yuval Noah Harari,
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, (2014) Random House, Kindle edition.) calls it a fiction. It is an idea you hold in your head and you
manifest the idea by meeting together every month or so. Religions manifest the idea of God with
regular meetings and worship every week or so.
Let’s move on.
I can't
prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without
one. Lawrence M. Krauss
I find this a sad comment.
Lawrence Krauss is the real-life
Sheldon Cooper of theoretical physics and cosmology. In debates,
he is rude, impatient, intolerant and convinced his existence is the single contribution that can ensure the well-being of the world. Sir Antony Flew, world-renowned philosopher, who lived as an atheist all his life and
published several books on the topic, later came to the conclusion that atheism
was ill-conceived and published a book
disputing his earlier views on the subject.
He argues:
“The approach taken here is that we have all
the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate
refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.” Flew,
Antony. There Is a God: How the World's
Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (p. 163). HarperCollins. Kindle
Edition
Not quite an ‘Atheism is Irrational’, comment but certainly it
is a criticism of the attitude most atheists tend to adopt. If it is not blind ignorance it is blind
stubbornness or both. But Flew does not
fail to get specific;
It’s much like if you don’t believe in God, do the maths. Someone who has done the maths is cosmologist
Alexander Vilenkin.
For a long time it was
popular to argue that the universe was all there is and it was nonsense to ask
what was not included in the universe. Vilenkin, however, has offered convincing evidence that
demonstrates that the past universe was not eternal, ergo something had to be
there and that the big bang hypothesis is correct. A quote from Vilenkin will provide a clue as
to how well his ideas have been received in the world of physics. He notes:
“Richard Dawkins, Lawrence
Krauss and Victor Stenger have argued
that modern science leaves no room for the existence of God. A series of science–religion debates has been staged, with atheists like Dawkins,
Daniel Dennett, and Krauss debating theists like William Lane Craig.15 Both sides have appealed to the BGV [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin] theorem, both sides appealing to me—of all
people!—for a better understanding.” The Beginning of the Universe http://inference-review.com/article/the-beginning-of-the-universe
So Vilenkin’s views have been well received but an
opinion piece from Discovery Magazine points out an anomaly arising from
Velenkin’s universe. It says:
Although a universe, in Vilenkin’s
scheme, can come from nothing in the sense of there being no space, time or
matter, something is in place beforehand — namely the laws of physics. Those
laws govern the something-from-nothing moment of creation that gives rise to
our universe, and they also govern eternal inflation, which takes over in the
first nanosecond of time. That raises some uncomfortable questions: Where did
the laws of physics reside before there was a universe to which they could be
applied? Do they exist independently of space or time? “It’s a great mystery as
to where the laws of physics came from. We don’t even know how to approach it,”
Vilenkin admits.
Discover Magazine. The Magazine of science, technology and the future. http://discovermagazine.com/2013/september/13-starting-point
The off and on again agnostic Stephen Hawking seems to want to
agree with the dilemma Velenkin espoused.
“Even if there is only one possible unified
theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire
into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen
Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 175, 174.
So we have a
situation where mathematics is used to create a model for the beginning of the
universe but it allows for a governing force that is not included in this
universe and this governing force is described as the laws of physics. The important point is that it is not the
case that there is a nothingness that is not included in the universe -- for
obvious reasons. ‘Nothing’ or
‘nothingness’ cannot exist. Existence is
always something and it is a contradiction to describe nothing as something. Some physicists create a fudge factor by describing Empty
Space as ‘nothing’ and then propose that it actually contains photons popping
in and out. In such a case it is
neither ‘nothing’ nor is it empty. We are all familiar with the ambiguous epithet that
‘Nothing is impossible to God’, again, for obvious reasons. Now we must ask:
“If nothing cannot exist then something
prior to the big bang must have
existed. What is that something?” Vilenkin’s
comments show that rather than it being nonsense to ask what is not included in
the universe it is necessary to ask such a question and Antony Flew provides an
answer.
“Equally,
it is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex
phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by all phenomena.” Flew, Antony. There Is a God: How the World's
Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (p. 162). HarperCollins. Kindle
Edition.
So here is a
prominent philosophical opinion. The universe is not all that there is. Ancient Hebrew
scholars assumed that God fashioned our solar system after the coalescing of
gasses formed galaxies some eight billion years after the big bang. How they reached this conclusion is a mystery
but it coincides with cosmological views. More importantly,
where does this leave the person who doesn’t believe in God, the atheist? They must struggle to find something other than God to fill the
vacuum in their argument.
Now I should like to
look at this from another angle. According to Einstein’s
special theory of relativity when an observer travels at speeds closer to the
speed of light, the clocks associated with the observer (even biological) slow
down. If you could travel at the speed
of light your watch would stop and you would not grow old. Time for you would cease to exist. Actually
Einstein’s idea is no longer a theory for it has been demonstrated in several
ways. It is a reality. Imagine yourself starting out from a planet
10 billion light years away riding on a
light wave and heading for earth. Light
travels at 299,792.5 kilometers per second and it never changes. From your perspective
you get here instantly and travelled zero distance in the process. From the perspective of something or someone
on earth 10 billion light years passed before you got here. As weird as it may sound this is how time
works in space.
I have simplified this explanation
somewhat and I have assumed that everything in space is static which of course
it isn’t. I have left out a number of aspects that physicists
might hold to be
crucial if we were going to use this description as the basis for space travel
to the edge of the universe. In the
first place matter (particles, solid objects) can never travel at the speed of
light. Only energy, such as a supposed
God, has this prerogative and I would bet this God carries the laws of physics
in His pocket. Now, this leads to an interesting phenomenon. God can do
everything at the speed of light but as He is outside of space and time He is
not limited by Einstein’s physics. The
speed of light may be a bit slow for His will.
If there were no one about other
than God to contemplate the miracle of the big bang it had to end as soon as it
had begun. God tells us this.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” (Rev: 21: 6 KJV)
For God, there is no time to use up or let pass by. He has told us it is all over and He knows we
haven’t caught up. God doesn’t wait for
things to happen. Everything that is
going to happen has happened and that includes your life and the lives of
people to come.
“46:9Remember
the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and
there is none like me, 46:10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from
ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand,
and I will do all my pleasure: (Isa: KJV)
Everything for God is instant, we are the slowpokes. As far as God is concerned the Bible has been
fulfilled. The End of Days has already
happened but our earth clocks need time to register the event. God doesn’t make prophecies He makes promises
because He knows what has already happened.
God doesn’t sit around and wait.
Being eternal there is no time, everything is now; He is a being always
in the present. We are the only ones harnessed
to the yoke of time. This constraint is
necessary to allow us to make choices.
As the event has already happened God knows the choices we all have made
and will make. We have all sealed our
own fates though they have not yet come to pass for us. God knows if we have changed our minds and
become believers or if we have defaulted and become atheists or agnostics as
the case may be. God doesn’t control our
future, He was merely a witness to it.
It’s a bit scary to know that what will be done has been done and there
is no changing it. We, of course, can change
and be part of what will be done. We, of course, can change and be part of what will be done. This is how time benefits us. This is the logic of God’s work. If we believe in the Big Bang we are obliged
to believe in God for God, being eternal, He
encompasses space and time. 9th
and 10th century Hebrew scholars believed that God retracted to
allow the universe to exist.
Eternal existence as God means
there is no future or past for there is no such a thing as time. Everything is always now! Our future is His present.
Supplement
Now I would like to attend the
question Gene Roddenberry posed earlier in this piece.
“We must question the story logic
of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates Faulty Humans and then blames
them for his own mistakes.” Gene
Roddenberry
Adam was
placed in the garden in Eden and expected to care for it. I imagine this would include picking up the
fruit that had fallen to the ground to prevent it from being eaten by birds and
animals. It would not do to have animals
and birds knowing good and bad or having the ability to live forever.
“2: 16 And the LORD God
commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; 2:
17 but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it;
for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” (TANAKH 1985).
In Adam and Eve’s defence this wording seems
to be more a ‘for your information’ type of direction rather than a harsh
command. I don’t think it would be too far-fetched
to suspect that Adam and Eve were set up to fail. I think we can safely assume that Eve was
informed of the directive given to Adam by God. I don’t think it was part of God’s plan that
Adam would be a mere groundsman in the garden. Prior to the eating of the forbidden fruit
they were a somewhat primitive couple. They had an intellectual capacity but they
were innocent; they had little learning and they were without guile. It leads us to wonder why such a tree as
the tree of knowledge of good and bad was in the garden in
the first place. It was the only tree
they must not eat from. Why did God put
it there? It wasn’t there by accident. They could eat from the tree of life
so living forever was not a big deal as long as they were ignorant of good and
bad.
Much is
made of the serpent as the evil culprit who was either Satan in disguise or was
hovering over the serpent to ensure he beguiled Eve. Richard Friedman tells us something about
this.
“3: 14. the snake. Just a snake, not the devil or Satan as
later Christian interpretation pictured. As the curse that follows indicates,
this story has to do with the fate of snakes, not with the cosmic role of a
devil. There is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible.” (Richard Friedman, Commentary on the Torah 2012).
Be that
as it may, a knowledge of good and bad would allow someone to deduce that given
there is a God who is good there probably is the opposite; a bad entity. One identifies the other.
It is worth trying to imagine what
their lives would have been like had Eve not been swayed by the serpent. Was it part of God’s plan that they both
lived happily in God’s garden, talking with and worshiping Him? But then he expected them to be fruitful and
multiply. How were they expected to indulge
in that activity? By base animal
instincts? Would the children of their
rutting be cast out of the garden when they were old enough to fend for themselves? No, I think it is pretty clear that God
intended that Adam and Eve would have to leave their special garden. God
was not surprised by their disobedience.
He knew they were destined to eat of the forbidden fruit. Like all the rest of humanity to follow, they had a
fatal flaw; ---they were created with a propensity to sin. When you are created with an inclination to
sin you can bet your sweet bippie, that eventually, it will happen. And history (yours and mine) has shown it will happen many, many
times.
But more significantly, as a
result of having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, Adam and
Eve had a prehension of sin. They had
the knowledge that they were susceptible to desire; the indulging in
unspeakable deeds that could not be hidden from God. This is where their shame comes from. Knowing they were naked is the awareness that
they are unable to hide their unworthiness; their baseness and ‘there, but for
the grace of Jesus Christ, go you and I’. It is their psychological nakedness that
causes them to want to hide. Who among
us would be comfortable to have their private urges, desires, and activities
open to public scrutiny?
As innocents, Adam and Eve had the
promise of immortality for the tree of life was planted in the center of the
garden and they were not prevented from eating from it. That is…until they failed to follow God’s
command.
“3: 22 And the
LORD God said, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and
bad, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life
and eat, and live forever!” 3: 23 So the LORD God banished him from the garden
of Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. 3: 24 He drove the man out,
and stationed east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery
ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.” (TANAKH
1985)
So there
it is, we cannot know good and bad and be immortal at the same time. It was not part of God’s plan so God kicks
them out of the Garden of Eden.
For some
Christians it is the story of the ‘fall
of man’ and how we have inherited Adam’s sinful ways. But humanity is not sinful because of Adam,
rather Adam and Eve were sinful because they were members of humanity, a
humanity God created. I’m sure some
Christians will protest: “Oh no, Adam and Eve were protected by a shroud of
perfection. God could not create
sin!” I think God would disagree. “45:7 I
form the light, and create darkness: I
make peace and create evil: I the Lord
do all these things.” (Isa.
KJV)
I expect that some will point out that the
Hebrew word that is translated as ‘evil’ may also be translated as adversity,
affliction, calamity, distress or misery.
In any case, take your pick. But
remember there is nothing in this world that was not created by God and that includes sin.
The
Genesis
Adam
and Eve story is a message from God and the message is:
‘Innocence is priceless. We can never
return to innocence once it has been lost.’
The question we must ask is why did God create us with this tragic
flaw? Why were we created with a surety
that we will transgress God’s law? Let
us turn the question around. What would
the world be like if we were not created with a propensity to sin? Would innocence be replaced by ignorance? Imagine, if you can, a world in which there
is no commandment against transgressing God’s law; there is no sin but death is
still a lottery that we all must succumb to.
How different would that world be
from the world today? For many there
would be no difference for this group
chooses to ignore or are determined not to recognize that there is a God whose
law may be transgressed. Also, many of
those who do confess a somewhat superstitious belief in God feel little need to
confirm their conviction (saying you believe is not evidence that you actually
believe). A photograph of the business
of living in such a world would be unrecognizable from a photograph of the
world today. So it would seem that a
propensity to sin; the inclination to transgress God’s law has not changed the
world. What has changed is what some
persons believe about their
relationship to God and this is why we were created with a propensity
to sin. If there were no propensity to
sin; no propensity to be selfish, to think only of ourselves and transgress
God’s law --the world would be much as it is today. We, then would be forced to ask ‘Why did God
bother to create such a world? What’s in
it for him? Imagine ---an all knowing,
all powerful, all present consciousness who creates a people--- that ignore
Him. He gives these people the ability
to think for themselves, the ability to choose freely; he provides them with
clues to His existence, inspires men to write, speak for and about Him but-----
many still ignore Him.
Recognizing
that we sin promotes a relationship with God.
This recognition entails the understanding that our sin must be absolved
if we wish to share the joy God offers us.
God wants a relationship with those beings He created --- but He wants
us to choose Him freely. God created us
with a propensity to sin to awaken us to His being; to remind us there is
something beyond a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ existence. We are free to not choose God --and many take
that path.
It was
always God’s plan that He would have a relationship, as love, with his
people. We were created as vessels for
God’s spirit. We are expected to
recognize that God is all there is. As
pain reminds us to attend to our physical self, sin reminds us to attend to
God’s spirit within us. We ignore both
at our peril. God has something to give
us; the joy of an everlasting life. Not
just a prosaic life but a life of constant joy.
God wants us to come to Him through worship knowing we are cracked
vessels in need of repair. As Eugene
O’Neil wrote ‘Man is born broken; he lives by mending and the grace of God is
glue.’
(O’Neil,
E., The Great God Brown)
# # #
Yuval Noah Harari,
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, (2014) Random House, Kindle edition.
