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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).