Embracing a political system in pluralistic societies via a specific faith, be it Christian, Muslim, Hindu or whatever, runs into trouble when we consider that a political order, in principle, requires understandable support for all those comprising the body politic. In a multi religious, multi-cultural society such as America, one faith is clearly inadequate to provide such publicly accessible justification for the political principles by which the society is to be governed.
If a country were a monarchy, perhaps. The monarch alone would have to accept the country’s laws and if he or she is of one faith or another, that is where such justification could come from. But in a society where everyone has the right to ask by what authority the law exists and the government governs, reliance on a faith peculiar to even a vast majority is not sufficient. A naturalistic or secular justification is needed. This is why “creator” was but “God” would not have been a wise choice for the American Founders as they conceived of the Declaration.
Some will argue that the issue of God’s existence can be resolved without resorting to specific faiths. They will advance various arguments, accessible to public scrutiny by nearly everyone not crucially incapacitated, in order to demonstrate that God exists and given His nature, something as vital as the issue of what kind of human community is fitting for us to live in cannot be divorced from Him. Their politics is in the Augustinian tradition, or Thomistic, whereby the nature of goodness and justice are unavoidably tied to theological considerations.
Is there good reason to take that route to understanding human political life? Which is to ask, ultimately, does God exist?
The first point to take up is what the question asks. Does it mean: Is God part of the world, do we have sound justification for believing that the claim is true? Or does it mean Is God real? And if the latter, what criteria of reality is to be applied to searching out the answer for something that is supposed to be prior to reality?
Indeed, a problem in approaching the issue is that, as many believers maintain, God isn’t supposed to be of this world as would be, say, unicorns, mermaids or black holes (whether these do actually exist or not), but logically prior to and/or transcendent: beyond it. That is to say, God is the sort of being we do not find among all the other beings in the world but exists in some other sense.
God’s existence is, thus, unique, unlike the existence of anything else in the world of which we can learn in familiar ways—e.g., going on an expedition, doing experiments, finding that it makes good sense of our experiences (e.g., a jealous motive), etc. As Anselm noted, even an atheist would admit that that this is how we think of God, as such a unique, extraordinary being.
So what is the nature of God, what do we mean by “existence” for such an entity?
What we are usually asked to accept is that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, omni benevolent, and eternal being.
Thus not only have we no direct, ordinary experience of God, and are unable to infer God’s existence from some well grounded and, therefore, sound theory; nor does God come to light upon analyzing some experiences and looking for something that underlies them. It actually seems that none of these approaches could prove to us God’s existence for that is not subject to being established in any mundane fashion.
What then is left? Some say that there is a familiar way to establishing God’s existence, namely, by way of the argument from best explanation. As one believer puts it, “We accept hypotheses of all kinds based upon what we may loosely call their explanatory power. In this case the hypothesis is of a mysterious being, not in conformity with the ontology of others explanatory entities, yet in a certain respect like them: without its existence, even as a mysterious being, the world itself could not exist.”1
In response to this it can be argued that it is difficult to see that God’s existence provides an explanation for anything not explainable in less problematic—less grandiose, more familiar, not internally confusing terms. Although in many explanations—e.g., when we postulate the infinity of space so as to make sense of some phenomena in astrophysics—the thing posited “outstrips by a lot” what is supposed to be explained by it, there is usually nothing internally incoherent about it. But God is very problematic because His characteristics seem not to be able to coexist. For example, omniscience and omnipotence appear to conflict in certain respects, as do omnipotence and omni benevolence.
But perhaps what seems incompatible to us is merely a matter of God’s innate mysteriousness, something we just do not, indeed cannot, grasp (as some fideistic theists maintain). God’s innate mysteriousness, at least to human inquirers, makes God a difficult explanation. God’s nature as something defying the nature studied in physics, chemistry, biology, etc., is the problem here. How can something intend, without the brain that enables us to have thoughts and make judgments? How can God communicate without any of the facilities or faculties that make communication part of the world? How can God be a cause without any of the familiar attributes that enable things to produce other things? More generally, how can something explain the existence of something else if it is impossible to reconcile some of its own properties: e.g., omniscience, omnipotence and omni benevolence with the clear presence of bad things within the realm supposedly explained by God. At least the sort of God associated with major religions, such as Roman Catholicism, seems to invite puzzles rather than solve them. For example, God is supposed to make possible at least one virgin birth, the rising of some dead persons, the raising of the dead by some other persons, the changing of water into wine, the presence of three persons in one, and other miracles. An explanation is good, in large measure, when it clears things up, not when it produces more puzzles than existence before its acceptance. Indeed, the only problem God’s existence seems to promise to solve is the origin of the universe, although even here it immediately introduces a corresponding problem, namely, the existence of God ex nihilo. Indeed, if God could exist eternally, as the solution to this problem is often put, why could that same solution not be introduced for the existence of the universe? No reason seems to exist for this.
A Thomist might be tempted to argue here that an entity which eternally exists and does not change its nature, is a different kind of entity from the universe, which does. Yet there are some things that do not change for the universe either, such as its most basic (metaphysical) laws, the laws of being qua being (to which a Thomist will certainly attest). So in this sense there is already something about the universe that meets what we look for in explaining the universe—a point Spinoza notes in his recasting of theism in atheistic terms.
Maybe, however, we ought to believe because it pleases us to do so? We certainly involve ourselves in numerous ventures that aren’t based on truth—the whole fascination with games, sports, magic, art in general, etc., would appear to attest to this. So why not believe in God if it makes one feel good? Why not consider such a belief simply life-enriching?
First, those other non-truth related matters are pretty much optional and those few who have no affinity for them aren’t supposed to be sinners, on their way to hell or missing out on something most important in life (unless one listens to the football, soccer or baseball fans of some university or some European or Latin American city). Second, no one attributes truth value to claims about who ought to win or lose in sports, who ought to succeed or fail in the arts. It is all pretty optional, to be determined as a matter of talent and effort. In religion, however, God is supposed to be real, one’s belief in God obligatory, one’s failure to believe devastating for one’s eternal salvation, and others often authorized to coerce or at least cajole one to adhere if one is indifferent or does not see the point.
The last substantive point to consider is whether mere acceptance of the necessity of existence—necessary being—may not suffice as the existence of God. But why should that suffice in the face of the overwhelming use of the term “God” for a being or beings that purportedly are far more than being necessarily existent. The principle of noncontradiction, for example, may be said to be necessarily existent—it is a principle that holds in any possible universe, to use a familiar way of putting it. But one would not confuse it with God, would one?
So we turn to the next step in this inquiry, namely, when it is advanced that we need to believe in God’s existence on the basis of faith. Faith is the sort of ground of belief that goes against and despite experience or argument. As Aquinas put it, “in faith the assent . . . is not cause by the thought by the will.” One has faith in someone one no longer can trust—as a wife may have faith in a repeatedly philandering husband, despite all the evidence. It takes faith to believe that this man will never repeat his betrayals.
Granted, theists do not advise that we have faith about everything, not directly. Yet by implication they do advise that some important aspects of nearly everything ought to be taken on faith. Christian Scientists ask us to abandon the help of physicians because we are essentially spiritual beings and prayer to God will be a much better road to healing ourselves and our children than relying on the work of medical doctors. And even religions without such drastic doctrines counsel that we should spend time on prayer, meditation, reading the Bible, etc., and forswear mundane ventures we could be embarking upon, as a matter of our underlying faith in God.
The question then is, “Is it right for us to believe in something (very important, widely influential in our lives) on the basis of faith?” It does not seem to be. We ought perhaps to believe, on faith, that our neighbors will treat us well, even if the evidence of such treatment among human beings is feeble, yet we are in need of the neighbor’s kindness just now. Even this is more like hope than faith, since some clear cases of trustworthiness back us up here. Maybe the case of having faith in the untrustworthy husband is at least excusable.
But ought we to convict criminals on the basis of faith? We would be doing an injustice. Given the importance of the issue of whether someone ought to be incarcerated, we need to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, otherwise we need to remain unconvinced. Also, if we recommend medication or the doctor’s treatment on the basis of no more than faith, we would face malpractice suits. (We do often simply have faith that some psychological therapy will work, even when we have little or no evidence that it has helped anyone. This, too, seems more like hope than faith, since faith arises in the face of contrary evidence. Some theologians actually argue that the beauty of faith lies in its contradicting evidence, argument—otherwise it wouldn’t merit rewards.)
Is it not evident that if we lead our lives on the basis of faith, we would perish? It seems to be so—indeed, the young people on hallucinogenic drugs did have faith they could fly and they jumped off buildings killed themselves. It is not enough to respond, well but faith in God is something limited, not all embracing of the important issues in life. In most ordinary religions we are asked, point blank, to trust God in everything, to follow scripture or some organized religion’s interpretation of it, because it is God’s word. The faith Kierkegaard asks of us seems to be more consistent than the faith asked by those who somehow imagine they can delineate the things of faith and the things of reason.
Faith, from the viewpoint of trying to prepare for living a successful human life, seems to be a luxury, to be indulged when serious matters of human living have been handled.
But even if we did believe on the basis of faith, in this case what is it we are asked to believe in, apart from the myriad stories told by different religions? At heart, it is in the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, omni benevolent being.
Can such a being be understood to exist? Can, to go back to a child’s innocent but telling question, god create an object so big that He cannot lift it? Why doesn’t god eliminate bad things—diseases, earthquakes, tornadoes, viruses—that kill the innocent by the thousands? (This is not the same as why He doesn’t eliminate human evil, for which a somewhat plausible answer may be available.2) Furthermore, how would free choice be possible fi God already knows everything? How could God cause the existence of the universe when causes are part of the universe, of the universe?
Belief in God is not only unjustified but morally suspect. Even if God existed this would be true: indeed, that is the story of my conversion to atheism. I thought that even if there is a God who created us, we would be betraying ourselves, something God would have to regard as evil, by believing in Him against all reason.
The issue of God’s existence is, in the last analysis, the issue of whether we human beings ought to believe in God’s existence. There is no way independent of this that God’s existence can be considered. But, it seems, we violate the norms derivable from our understanding of human nature if we believe important things, including that God exists, on the basis of faith. So we ought not believe that God exists. This need not be some final judgment on the matter—we ought not believe a lot of things that could, in time, warrant belief. But we cannot be held responsible to hold beliefs we cannot sensibly form.
The importance of this conclusion is not something widely missed, in fact. I believe the American Founders chose to put their political creed so that it can be interpreted both in religious and secular terms precisely because they did not wish to tie the case of individual liberty and a regime that guards it to any given faith. They wanted it to be understandable, at least in principle, by all who have political interests.
Notes
It seems to me that this simply stresses credibility. Say i sit on a sidewalk bench reading my paper and suddenly notice that a stroller with a baby has rolled on to the street and a big truck is headed right at it and I can just get up and hurry to it and rescue the baby. What justification could I possibly have for deliberately, not even just negligently, ignoring this and continuing with the reading of my paper? To believe that someone with the power to rescue the innocent and who is the best that anything could possibly be just does not carry out the rescue simply stretches the imagination so much that it cannot be fathomed.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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