| Jan. 23rd, 2005 @ 11:45 am A Question of God, Part IV |
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Having underlined the biographical and psychological basis of my atheism, it seems like the appropriate moment to discuss the "thing" I am rejecting. What do I mean when I say "god"? What does it mean to say one doesn't believe in god?
The image of god I was raised with was the Catholic god, a god designed to be all things to all people, it seems. God, I was told to believe, was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, all-just, all-merciful, and timeless. I was told that god was three-in-one, a kind of split personality I guess. The notion that Jesus was the son of god was to be taken literally, and yet, Jesus was God and had existed for all time... the whole meaning of son has a kind of temporal component here that was clearly being defied, and yet, so the argument went, still to be upheld. Philosophers tend to get hung up on the all-knowing and all-good notions, and its implications for free will and so forth; rather, for me I got hung up on a more basic contradiction: the all-just and all-merciful combination. I recall pelting my mother and grandmother and the priest and even the Sunday school teachers with questions on this topic. What does it mean to be just? What does it mean to be merciful? I mean, certainly, one can balance these considerations, but how can one be both all-just--treating everyone the same under the law--and also all-merciful--forgiving a pauper who steals a loaf of bread, but what of a wealthy joker living on an inheritance who steals to support a drug habit, even if he swears he's sorry? is the first case not just (in the sense of upholding the law--let's not confuse this with our everyday notion of what is "just" being more-or-less similar to "fair").
This notion of the inherent contradiction of the Catholic/Christian definition of God is ultimately what I was trying to reconcile. In the many years I searched for belief, it was in many respects a two-fold search; first, to find a reason to believe in these inherent contradictions; second, if Catholicism was to be rejected, what exactly to replace it with. Despite a few moments where it looked like case one might be possible, generally, this was pretty much impossible. I really need for things to make sense, and contradictions just aren't going to do it for me. Catholicism has plenty of other problems, it's sexism for one thing, which is hardly exclusive to that denomination, and so Christianity was rejected along with Catholicism. The second case was very much an on-going thing for quite a number of years even after my so-called conversion to atheism.
Now to the point. What makes me an atheist? Atheism is, by definition, a disbelief or a lack of belief in god, but is this the Christian god?--well, then clearly I'm an atheist, since I definitely don't believe in the Christian god--or is this some more abstract notion of god that I'm rejecting? Well, what it came down to for me was a combination of rejecting "existing" definitions of god, i.e. those actually worshipped by some religion or another, and rejecting one at a time the attributes of a supposed "god"--or minimally, suggesting that convincing evidence for such a thing is lacking.
Let us speak of the major attributes of god, in no particular order: god is supposed to be eternal; god is supposed to be powerful, far more powerful than people, and it's certainly common to presume god is all powerful; god is supposed to be wise or knowledgeable to a degree unattainable by humans; god is supposed to be the creator/Prime Mover or the like; god is supposed to respond to prayers, and to punish the wicked and reward the good. Clearly, these are not all the possible attributes of god, but they are typical.
Let me start on this list with the ones that are easiest to eliminate (for me). The power of prayer, based on my personal biography, I have a great deal of experience with having prayers not work. Frankly, I consider belief in prayer to be a logical fallacy, specifically, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the fallacy that since something happened after another thing in time, it was therefore caused by it--the idea that sometimes when you pray you get what you pray for means prayer works... but not the reverse. The only kind of god consistent with the universe is that prayer only works sometimes. To still believe, then, that god is still capable of answering prayers and does not, one has to ask, "why not?" more often. This leads down a slippery slope into what I believe is a fundamentally disturbing consequence. Only by denying reality can one continue to believe in a god that answers prayers, and is not capricious in the application of this power.
Punishing the wicked and rewarding the good is clearly related to this notion of prayer. If god is capricious, we can't make any claim to this at all. But in general, I have to side with Voltaire, and suggest that lots of good things happen to wicked people, and bad things happen to good people, leaving us no evidence in this life that anyone but ourselves and random chance have anything to do with it. To sustain this claim ultimately requires some sort of belief in an afterlife or karma. I find no evidence for this, and I am certainly not comforted by it.
What about god being knowledgeable? Philosophers have spent copious amounts of time on the consequences to free will, so once again, I will defer here. However, one is forced to presume some kind of omniscience or one runs into the problem of humans possibly attaining the knowledge of god, perhaps not a single person, but as a species. If god's knowledge is not unlimited, then there is some limit, and it would be possible to acquire that much information (or approach it asymptotically). What then would be the problem with "playing god"? Limited information is clearly conceivable, but what does infinite knowledge mean? We must be clear, as well, that infinite doesn't just mean everything there is to know, no more than infinity means the largest number possible. Omniscience, in a way, implies finite knowledge. What does it mean for definitions of god if we then claim that knowledge is limited, that god is thus limited? I suppose one could get around this by supposing infinite universes, but this notion of god is completely beyond human comprehension. Historically, there was the optimistic claim that this universe was the best of all possible worlds, allowing for infinite "possible" universes, which god could then know about, even if there was only one actual universe. I don't really see that we can even convincingly make that claim, that there is only one universe--only one that we can know of, but how can we convincingly dismiss alternate universes that we can't experience in any way? Clearly, this can't impact our everyday lives in any way, but how can be then use it to justify other flights of fancy as if proving that we can't eliminate the possibility is actually a proof that it's true?
What about god as Creator of the universe? This question presupposes that god existed before the universe. But this is an interesting scientific question in itself--and can we know what was before time itself? This goes to a question I may address at a later time that relates to god being a way to answer the kinds of questions that science can't answer, like "why" instead of "how". I consider the notion of the prime mover the most innocuous of attributes of a god, as long as no other claims are made about what god might be like or why he might have done something... again, god attempting to answer the question of "why" is, to me, a philosophical quagmire. This question of creation of the universe, however, does not imply eternal (which is the next topic). Can one conceive of a being capable of creating the universe, but then disappearing (or dying if one prefers)? It seems to me that this is as conceivable as any of these other attributes.
The last attribute I listed was god as eternal. This is a claim that is inherently not only impossible to prove, but really difficult to even conceptualize. I am left with the impression that this is a necessary attribute for god, but suppose there was a being that reasonably satisfied several others of my criteria in some way? Would they really be gods, or just powerful beings? Eternalness would have to be the decisive characteristic. It should be noted here that I don't think that eternalness necessarily supposes an interest in humans or even the creation of the universe. If one does not accept the notion of eternity, how old is old enough to qualify as god?
So what this comes down to, I think, is that the most general definition of god would have to be an eternal being--regardless of "form"--that may or may not have created the universe. Clearly, if one accepts that god created the universe a certain amount of power is inherent, but I implicitly am avoiding the notion of "all-powerful" because it is too prone to logical fallacies (like "can god move an immovable object" nonsense). But otherwise, I am avoiding these other notions which I perceive as problematic, and it is this notion of generic eternal being that (possibly) created the universe that I reject a belief in, and thus claim the label of atheist. Along with god, I rejected most of his supernatural trappings, as well, like heaven and souls, and the like, but that's ostensibly independent. |
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