uberkuh

The Bible centers the story of creation around Earth. In fact, I find no reference in the Bible to planets or galaxies. Given this, if you believe in God, then you have to ask, Why did God create such a gigantic universe and make Earth a speck in one tiny corner of it?

The How or the Why

Theists argue that science and religion can work together because science answers the “how” and religion answers the “why.” In other words, science tells us how the universe works, while religion tells us why it works. The argument made is that these two questions never overlap.

Is this true? Consider any natural phenomenon about which you are ignorant of its cause. Take the weather, for example. Before the advent of meteorology, climatology, and daily public weather reports, weather was a mystery to us. Why is it raining today when it was sunny yesterday? Why did I get a sunburn when it was overcast? Without scientists who have studied the weather and technology, like radar, satellites, thermometers, barometers, and sophisticated software, tracking and predicting the weather is often little more than a crapshoot.

The How and the Why

We need science to understand the weather. This answers the “how,” but, according to the argument above, it does not begin to touch the “why.” Yet, when I learn about how the weather works, I find that I understand why it works as well. When I learn about how rain works, I find that I understand why it is raining today. When I learn about how ultraviolet light works, I find that I understand why I get sunburned on an overcast day.

The Why of It All

But what about the universe as a whole? Does the “how” of the universe also explain the “why?” Does knowing how I came to exist explain why I came to exist, for example?

First, we are making a huge assumption when asking these questions. Namely, we are assuming that there is only one universe and that it is finite. It is possible that our universe is one of many, as part of a multiverse, and that it is not encapsulated and finite, but continues forever. There could be an infinity of infinite universes, each of which could have an infinite past and a finite future, a finite past and an infinite future, or an infinite past and an infinite future. And if our universe is one of many or the only one, but infinite, then what does it mean to ask why “it” exists? There is no “it” to speak of.

Of course, we can still ask why an infinity of infinities exists. This does not mean, however, that we will necessarily ever find an answer or that, if we do, the answer will be religious. This is the second point. Religious answers are always partly mysterious, owing to their supernatural nature. Saying “God did it” tells us nothing, especially about the “how,” but equally about the “why.” Remember, God’s ways are infinitely mysterious.

As I see it, science is the only hope we have of understanding why we exist. While religion offers a comforting answer, it is unfortunately never a complete one. More importantly, it is also never a rational one.

The Nature of Belief

Christianity, like any religion, is based on faith. It is essentially comprised of a community of personal beliefs, all of which derive from a single source called the Bible. The Bible describes Christianity, but it is senseless to say that it forms a foundation for rational belief. Christianity is irrational, which is why faith is required.

This makes it all the more strange to see Christians debating their beliefs. Those beliefs are irrational by nature, so there is no hope of making them rational. In fact, if any Christian thinks about it, he or she will realize that Christianity cannot become rational or it will cease to be a religion. It will, instead, become a philosophy, which people would then be free to take or leave without any significant consequence.

A Ridiculous Comparison and Conclusion

This makes it all the more ridiculous to see Christians arguing that Christianity is a rational alternative to science. It does not matter what is being compared to Christianity. It is enough to notice that one is comparing something to a religion and that all religions contain irrational beliefs.

In the case of Christianity, the number of irrational beliefs is astounding. Three examples will suffice. First, it is ridiculous to argue that the creator of the universe, in effect, wrote a book. Second, it is ridiculous to argue that God would punish his creations for making them a certain way when God is supposedly omnipotent. Third, it is ridiculous to argue that God was forced to send another version of himself down to Earth to be voluntarily tortured and killed, only to rise from the dead after a weekend in Hell. None of these things make the slightest sense and, yet, most Christians continue to believe all three.

Whatever shortcomings science might have, it is at least based on reason. Christianity, or any religion for that matter, has no business trying to compete with science as a plausible explanation of our existence. Movements like Intelligent Design and Young Earth creationism simply have no place in the marketplace of credible ideas.

That Christians want their religion to be scientific suggests not that Christianity might be scientific, but that Christians desperately want to resolve their religious beliefs with science. And this suggests that Christians find some value in science that their religion fails to provide.

The Continuum of Intelligibility

No concept can be completely intelligible or unintelligible. All concepts are somewhat unintelligible because all contain unknowns. All concepts are somewhat intelligible because, at the very least, a coherent mental construct, composed of other intelligible concepts, exists in the mind.

God is a concept that is defined as unintelligible. However, it cannot be completely so, for the reason previously noted. It must be somewhat intelligible. It is no different than any other concept with regard to intelligibility and can be analyzed to the extent that it is intelligible.

To be intelligible is to be understandable and to be understandable is to be reasonable. To the extent, then, that the concept of God is intelligible, it is reasonable. In other words, it must be reasonable until it reaches a point of unintelligibility.

Furthermore, the scope of unintelligibility must be clearly defined and isolated. The intelligible area of the concept is finite and the unintelligible, by virtue of representing a singular unknown, is infinite.

An example of God’s intelligible attributes is that he is the creator of the universe. An example of God’s unintelligible attributes is that he is somehow not consumed within it, but, rather, stands outside it and is not bound by its laws. In short, we can know something about God and what we know is clearly defined and amenable to analysis, with the caveat that we will always reach a point of unintelligibility.

What God’s Unintelligibility Means

So, if we find that something about God is unintelligible, then our conclusion is not that God does not exist but that we have reached a point where we can go no further. It is often argued among strong atheists that God’s internally contradictory attributes confirm his nonexistence. However, as explained, these attributes confirm only God’s partial unintelligibility, which, again, is a feature of all concepts.

That said, it must also be said that the inability to disprove a mental construct’s extension into physical reality due to its various mutually incompatible properties in no way proves that it does physically exist. In fact, it is never the case that being unable to disprove something proves it. Neither does this inability cast doubt on disbelief in a concept’s existence or, what might be another fear, suggest that anything is possible. As far as we know, a square circle or married bachelor is never possible, and we have no reason to suppose that it might be.

Can logic be trusted to prove or disprove God’s existence? To answer this question, we must first understand the limitations, if any, of natural language. If natural language does not constitute a consistent or complete system or if it is fundamentally illogical at core, then it is inconsistent, incomplete, or impossible to determine and no argument using natural language ultimately proves or disproves anything. If natural language is consistent, complete, and logical, then all arguments can be proved or disproved given sufficient evidence.

However, note that, either way, a single argument can be proved or disproved. This does not mean that a premise could not be added to or taken from that argument to invalidate it. What it means is that, within a finite set of premises, a conclusion can be drawn about the argument.

So, to return to the initial question, if an argument is created to prove the existence of God, it contains a finite number of premises, and one or more of those is false or indeterminable, then that argument fails. Conversely, if an argument is created to disprove the existence of God and all of its statements are true, then that argument holds. The answer to the initial question, then, is that while logic might or might not suffice to prove or disprove everything, it can prove or disprove some things, such as the existence of God. I find that God’s existence cannot be proved, if for no other reason than that the major premise includes the purposely indefinable concept of a deity.

I had a thought. Miracles are like software bugs. And just as an all-powerful software program, like, say, Ubuntu, wouldn’t break or, at least, break as often as miracles have allegedly occurred, so would an all-powerful deity have no need for miracles.

A common complaint against First Cause arguments is that assuming causal contingency and the necessity of it or, in other words, that every cause must have an effect is an admission that the obverse must be true. That is, there is no effect without a cause, including God. So, the complaint goes, if every effect has a cause, then what caused God?

When considering this complaint as an argument in its own right, an unsupported assumption appears, which is, namely, that the universe is spatiotemporally finite. It is possible that the universe is spatiotemporally infinite and that “God,” or whatever one might call a point of cosmically causal origination, has created and recreated himself infinitely many times. Of course, no perfect being would have a reason to make more than one attempt at creating himself, but this does not by itself invalidate the notion of a point of origination, given that the point is arbitrary but definable via some conceivable difference, like an explosion.

I have experience of the finite and the infinite, but with respect to causation, I have only the latter. Therefore, I cannot say with any certainty that there was no first cause. All I can say is that there is no reason to believe one existed, much less still exists.

Dawkins’ Scale

In his recent book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins divides religious belief into a seven-stage scale, with the first stage representing devout belief in God and the last representing total disbelief. Dawkins says that since no one can completely disprove the existence of God, no one can logically claim to be squarely in the seventh stage of disbelief. However, since Dawkins says that he finds the existence of God to be highly improbable, he claims that he fits at the far right of stage six.

My first reaction when reading this was to shake my head, because it seems laughably simple to disprove the existence of God, if by “God” one means a perfect creator of the universe. This is because, like the concept of a square circle or married bachelor, God’s various self-contradictory attributes cannot cohere. This seems to prove, in no uncertain terms, that God cannot exist.

I Was Wrong

But, does it? I thought so. And I hate being wrong, especially when I am unclear about why I am wrong. Yet, there is a problem with my logic, namely, that logic itself has been proven to be so limited that no formal system can be both consistent and complete. We have the mathematician Kurt Gödel to thank for this, um, proof.

In other words, I cannot conclude that God cannot exist, because I cannot prove it to be true in all cases, despite what seems trivially true to me. This is because language is built on top of logic and the last word on logic is that it is, as mentioned, incomplete.

Disclaimer: I understand that most people have not come to terms with Gödel’s results and that most, if not all, who read this and are even passingly familiar with Gödel’s work will be reluctant to assign relevance of those results to natural language. Nevertheless, to be clear, I am assuming here that all natural languages derive from underlying logical systems and that, in all likelihood, all logical systems derive from a single, universal grammar. This is essentially saying that all linguistic truths are mathematical truths.

Proof (Sort Of)

To show this, let us try to define God. We start by assigning God with the most general and abstract attribute available, that of perfection. Then, little by little, we expand this definition to include consequent attributes, like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.

We can immediately see, if we keep an open mind, that these three attributes clash with one another, since no all-knowledgeable, all-powerful, and all-loving creator would allow his creations to suffer or, for that matter, create an environment in which suffering is possible. These creations are, after all, corporeal extensions of their creator. And this is basically the root of the famous Problem of Evil, which, all by itself, has driven many theists from their once precious beliefs.

We have now ripped a mighty hole in the historically woven fabric of divinity, which seems to be more than enough to disprove God’s existence. However, remember what we are trying to do. We are trying to build a consistent and complete argument that disproves God’s existence. So, it must be constructed with a consistent and complete set of axioms or self-evident truths.

Unfortunately for us, if we plan to continue until we have completely defined God with all possible attributes, then, again, thanks to Gödel, we can expect to eventually run into an instance in which one axiom makes the sum total of all attributes internally consistent! At this point, we will have proven what we set out to disprove, namely, that God exists.

Conclusion

In effect, then, logic can prove or disprove anything we like and, at the same time, ultimately prove nothing at all. This means that logic can never be trusted to prove an allegedly irrefutable statement or argument. And in this case, specifically, it means that logic cannot be trusted to disprove God’s existence. It also follows that God’s existence cannot be proven to be impossible to disprove, but that only adds to the complexity of the problem (or any problem, for that matter).

The Debate

Those who support the compatibility of religion with science argue that these two facets of our lives form complementary lenses through which we can view reality. Moreover, they claim that science does not answer life’s biggest questions, like those about why we are here. Opponents counter that religion gives us, at best, a blurry vision of reality and, at worst, an irrational and eventually destructive one, while science alone provides us with a proven survival mechanism. Which side is correct?

Prayer is to religion what research is to science. Each is a tool to give us an edge on reality. Prayer gives us comfort and research gives us knowledge. But both give us hope.

The Difference

The difference is that prayer is based on what we want to happen, whereas research is based on what actually is happening, despite our needs and desires. This difference is key, because it shows that prayer not only might fail to help us, but that, more importantly, it is founded on an irrational expectation and serious misunderstanding about the nature of reality.

It is important to mention, however, that prayer does seem to satisfy one of our very real and basic needs, that of calming our fears and giving us confidence to continue living. Science tries its best, but our imaginations are insatiably hungry for answers. Religion, by wishing into existence an all-powerful or otherwise supernatural helping hand, trumps any and all scientific claims to truth. It doesn’t really matter that most tests of religious beliefs fail.

The Decision

So it seems that, although religious belief has little or no basis in reality, it is a major fact of reality that science cannot satisfy our imaginations. Does this mean, then, that religion has some place in our lives? If so, does that mean that religion does us any good?

The answer to the first question is yes. Religion does have a place in our lives by virtue of the fact that science cannot satiate us. But the answer to the second question is no, because religion, being based on something other than reality, cannot ultimately satisfy us, either. Science is our only hope for survival, even if it doesn’t keep us warm at night.

Oh, wait, it does! I forgot about my heater.