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Proof of God

Nov 26, 2013 //
5

Everyone loves debating the existence of God. It’s been around since the beginning of God. Since it was only recently that the general population started to actually care about whether or not you can actually prove God through some logic or science or non-voodoo-esque methodology, it kind of baffles the mind a little bit that those who were trying to do it were doing it during a time when the belief in God was pretty much on par with the belief in air. But anyway, all the proofs for God that I know of are from way back in those days, so apparently now that people want more and more proof, it’s becoming less and less necessary to give it. Go figure.

So let’s look at some of these proofs and see which ones we like. And by we, I of course mean I. You’re not contributing anything to this, slacker. Keep in mind I’m not talking about the Christian God, or any particular God, just the notion of a creator being. These would be proofs for theism.

I’m going to breeze through a couple first before I get into the more complex ones. First off, the watchmaker proof. Say you find a watch on the beach, and see all the crazy shit that makes up how a watch works. You look at that crazy watch and you think, “Wow, this shit is fancy. Somebody must have built this!” The watch is too complex to exist uncreated, so its existence implies a watchmaker. The universe and all the junk in it are the watch in this obvious metaphor, and God would be the watchmaker. So because stuff is complicated, there must be a God. This is dumb because science happened, and now we know how things became complex. It’s because of science. Thanks, science!

The next one is morality. There has to be a source for Goodness in this universe, God is that source, therefore God must exist. This is dumb because no there doesn’t. Wishful thinking is not proof.

Next up is personal experiences. Witnessing miracles, near death experiences, all the things where people have “seen” or “experienced” the divine prove the existence of it. These might be very personal and subjective reasons to believe in God, but objectively they prove nothing. Judging things you can’t explain by attributing them to God is the same as attributing them to aliens. Or mole people. It also creates the problem of the “God of the Gaps”, which means that as these things become explained, the status of God is lessened until everything is explained and there is no longer any use for God. Once lightning is explained away by electrons and whatever the fuck else makes lightning happen (I studied the arts, give me a break), we no longer have need for Zeus. If you want God to be relevant, find another way to justify Him (Yes I just gendered God. It just makes life easier. I’ll use “Her” next time if it’ll make you feel better).

This next one is a bit more complicated and harder to explain away. However, it’s even more dumb than the previous proofs I’ve mentioned. This one can be blamed on St. Anselm the Asshole, who asks us to imagine thusly, “think of the most absolute perfect being. Now, what would be more perfect: if this being existed, or if it didn’t exist? It would be more perfect if this being existed, therefore ergo and badda bing, this being is God and God exists.” Anselm then tells us to “Suck on that, hosers!” and does a little victory dance because as ludicrous as this argument is, it’s very difficult to counter. Allow me, your lovely narrator, to try.

Our good friend Immanuel Kant has two counters to this argument. The first is that this proof splits God into two: God and the idea of God, which is a fairly shoddy God indeed. It doesn’t really disprove the argument, just suggests that it’s super ambiguous and lame, and therefore not good enough to be considered concrete proof. Kant goes on further to say that perfection is not predicated upon existence. Existence doesn’t make something better or worse; it’s merely Being, and therefore does not actually add anything to that being (pay attention, this is a lot of beings.)

A couple counters to THAT argument are that even if existence doesn’t necessarily make something better or worse, it does vastly change the concept of that being. Does it make it more perfect? Who knows. The other is that necessary existence (not boring, regular-type existence) IS a predicate (such as, a four-side triangle necessarily must not exist), and that’s what Anselm was talking about. However, I disagree that necessary existence is a thing, since all the examples I’ve come across have been closer to necessary non-existence, which I would argue is a completely different notion. Also, this is still confusing even for me, so let’s just look at my idea next which totally refutes the thing to such a point that all of these counter and counter-counter arguments are superfluous.

My idea is that perfection as a concept is flawed. Since Anselm is asking us to do the imagining, he is relying on subjective analysis to create this perfect being. So the problem is, my idea of a perfect being would be one who makes it rain beer, whereas some other person’s idea of a perfect being might be one that really hates beer (looking at you, Mormons). Since there can be no objective definition of perfection, the proof is invalid. Suck on that, Anselm, you jag.

The last argument I’m going to dismiss outright is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Or the First Cause. It has a few names. What this one boils down to is that each event was caused by a previous event. You exist because your parents conceived you, they came from your grandparents, so on back to the apes, back to the primordial ooze, back to the beginning of the universe. If each event has been caused, there has to be something that started the chain. The finger that pushed the first domino, so to speak. That finger… is God. This God has been the God of the philosophers for a long-ass time, since it’s super logical and reasonable and smart people tend to eat that shit up. However, it’s not very popular because Deism is super boring, and not at all relevant to the goings-on of every day life. People typically prefer a more personable deity that they can relate to. One that shares similar values, etc.

Also, I don’t think that it necessarily proves the existence of an Unmoved Mover either. The question that started this was, “what caused everything?” Well, I have to ask, “What caused God?” The answer is, “Nothing caused God; God just is” which is the point of the Unmoved Mover. But how come God just is? Why can’t the universe just is? If the causal chain has to stop, what difference does it make whether it stops at the universe, or at God? Look at this shoddy diagram I’m going to attempt here:

God causes universe causes x causes y causes z….

compared to

Universe causes x causes y causes z….

The argument for what just is seems to be arbitrary. If the universe has to have a beginning (which I don’t necessarily think that it does) then why does it have to be a being that causes it, when it could be just a simple event like the big bang or something with the word quantum in front of it.

Now I’m going to offer one argument that has a bit of clout to it. The universe is bound by mathematical laws. For example, gravity will always be defined by its mathematical formula. Because these laws are absolute (and even if our current laws are wrong, newer ones will still prove this theory), there must be a lawmaker. God is a mathematician.

This still runs into a few of the problems we’ve encountered before. Like with the watchmaker, why does a law imply a lawmaker? But these laws have been here since the beginning of time, have never changed, and continue to define the universe, unlike the complex entities that the watchmaker theory refers to.

The best counter-argument I can come up with is one similar to the First Cause counter-argument. Just as the universe could easily be just is, so too could the laws that define it be as such.

My final proof, however, does prove the existence of God beyond the shadow of a doubt. It all comes down to a sociological theory called the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” So for example, objectively speaking, race isn’t a real thing. There is no difference between white people and black people outside of the colour of their skin. However, if you’re a black person on trial in the American south during the Jim Crowe era, it really doesn’t matter that race isn’t a thing. You’re fucked. You know why? Because of your race. Same with being white-bread going into Harlem after dark. You can objectively state that race is real because the consequences of race are real.

So it is with God. People recover from addiction, they honestly repent their crimes, they find serenity and strength, they blow up buildings and drink suspicious kool-aid, all because of God. You tell any one of those people that God doesn’t exist, and they will show you the proof in the consequences. The addiction is gone, the criminal is reformed, the spirit is healed, the building is destroyed, and Jonestown is a graveyard. The consequences are measurably real, therefore the thing causing them must be real. So God is real. At least, sociologically speaking She is.

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Categories Philosophy, Religion

The God-Shaped Hole

Sep 2, 2013 //
0

As dirty as the title sounds, the God-shaped hole is actually a fairly common philosophical concept. What it boils down to is that ever since God died, humanity as a whole is missing a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Not even necessarily the moral compass that God typically is considered responsible for, but just the essence of having something above us, greater than us, something that is inherently right in the universe.

Even if you don’t agree that God is dead, you might be able to appreciate that God is certainly less prevalent than He used to be. The “civilized” world has all but abandoned God, by keeping it out of the majority of its establishments. Flip side are those who place their faith less-so on God, and more-so on the war for God. In every day life it seems that the intimate relationship with God has lessened from what it was even a hundred years ago. Some see this as a bad thing, others see it as a good thing. But for something like God (Higher Power, whatever) that has been around for pretty much the entirety of human existence, you’d think that having God disappear might leave something missing in our shared consciousness?

Within the last few months, I have spoken to two people (I have spoken to others as well, but they obviously weren’t memorable enough to make it into this blog post) who were in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Narcotics Anonymous. I realize that two people isn’t exactly an ideal statistical sample size, but shut up because this is hardly an academic paper. ANYwho, the person in AA is partially religious, to the extent that they believe that Christ is our saviour, but still does not adhere to traditional religious practices. The NA member is anti-religious. A burning-down-the-churches-and-laughing type of person. Not as totally polar opposite as I would like, and if anyone happens to know a super-Catholic, bible-thumping lush I’d be happy to talk to them, but we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But these two almost-opposite people agree on one thing: they need their Higher Power to help them with their addiction. For the semi-religious person, the Higher Power is the obvious one. The anti-religious person relies on Love as their Higher Power, and focuses on NA’s stipulation of personal interpretation to exclude themselves from the otherwise religious tenets of the NA program. Keep in mind, this isn’t a romantic love that every day humans are capable of experiencing, as “romantic love is a bunch of bullshit and shouldn’t exist.” This is a Love with sentience, that produces a form of serenity and a sense that everything will be okay. This might sound almost identical to a definition of God, but from our conversation this Love seemed like more of an inner sense rather than an outer being. It is what this person needs, and they found it.

It might be argued that this is the Anonymous program brainwashing its members into its informal religious doctrine, but at the same time, it’s hard to say what it really takes when you’ve hit rock bottom, and you feel like nothing, and maybe humans as a species really do need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of the dark. I know I certainly haven’t come anywhere close to the lows that addiction can ravage us down to, so I choose not to offer an opinion on the matter, and prefer listening to the experiences of others.

There is also a song by Regina Spektor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqG1Dh36-6s) that discusses many other examples of points in our lives where we might reach out to something greater than ourselves. No one laughs at God in a hospital, when your mother is dying in front of you and all you can possibly do is wish for her to be at peace, happy, somewhere, anywhere. No one laughs at God when the last sight you’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes, and you cry out, hoping for any kind of justice to be done. No one laughs at God when it’s gotten really late, and your kid’s not home from the party yet, and all you can wish for is to have something take care of your child.

None of these examples actually prove the existence of God, or even a Higher Power, but as my old buddy Voltaire used to paraphrase, if there was no God, maybe, just maybe, we would need to create Him. The need for something more creates that something more, and to deny that something more is to ignore the necessity for it.

These are all low points in personal human experience. Maybe the God-shaped hole that people allude to is really, in our collective experience as a species, a low point in our humanity, and if we hope to escape it, we’ll need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of it. Maybe we are too obsessed with the distractions of modernity that we can’t unite to actively search for this Higher Power that will save us from ourselves. I’m not saying that it is some objective Higher Power that is doing any actual saving, but the belief in that Higher Power gives us the power to do it ourselves.

I’m going to offer some counter-arguments here, because this isn’t a post meant to convince you of anything, as even I am not fully convinced one way or the other. Feel free to make up your own mind regarding the God-shaped hole.

In regards to addiction, people give up cigarettes all the time without the help of a Higher Power. Cigarettes are equally deadly, but for some reason, there is no Anonymous program to help people escape it, and yet they do. Maybe since alcohol and narcotics destroy more than just your own life, but the lives of the people around you, and even change who you are as a person, do they require something more than just cold turkey and a patch. On the other hand, maybe since there is no secular option for the recovery of alcoholics and drug abusers, we have no other options with which to compare results. It is very difficult to say what it takes to save us when we need it most, and maybe only since we collectively have always reached out for something greater, do we continue to do it today.

There is also the Nietzschean belief that there may be a God-shaped hole, sure, but maybe instead of filling it with something that doesn’t exist, we ought to fill it with ourselves and our Selves. Believe that humanity is the greatest power, and should only aspire to be greater. We as individuals are capable of incredible things, and to ascribe those incredible things onto a non-existent being is an insult to that human capability.  This isn’t to say that what I said initially is invalid, as it is the belief that is necessary to help us escape our lows. It’s just instead of the belief in a Higher Power, it should be the belief in our own power.

Or ultimately maybe it’s not so much what we believe in, so long as we believe.

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Categories Philosophy, Religion

Subjective Morality: It’s all we’ve got

Aug 16, 2013 //
3

Remember when you were a kid, and you knew there were delicious cookies not-so-locked-away in a kinda-sorta out of reach location? Did you ever take one anyway, even though you knew you “weren’t supposed to”? Why weren’t you supposed to? Because you’d spoil your dinner or “Because I said so!” Now that you’re (presumably) grown up, you might still have cookies semi-locked away somewhere, and you might find yourself in a similar dilemma. You’ve added a few more reasons to the list of why you shouldn’t have a cookie. You don’t want to gain weight. You’re saving them for someone. You already stuffed your fat face so full of pudding pops that to have even one cookie would make you puke all over yourself. All of those options basically boil down to, again, “Because I said so,” but in this instance, it isn’t your parent telling you, it’s your superego telling your id. You’re choosing whether or not it’s okay to have a cookie.

Let’s get a bit more philosophical here. When you were a kid, eating that cookie was wrong 100% of the time. Let’s call it immoral, just for shits and giggles. Now as an adult, eating that cookie is immoral, let’s pull this arbitrary statistic of 50% of the time out of my ass. Half of the time you feel bad about cramming your face hole with cookie goodness, the other half you just savour its deliciousness guilt-free because you found some way to justify it. Maybe you’re going to the gym later or maybe it’s your “cheat” day. Or maybe you just fucking love cookies, who knows.

At some point, eating that cookie became less immoral. Probably it’s when you moved out of your parents’ house. At that point, all of a sudden a whole lot of things became less immoral. Staying out past 10pm, bringing girls home, pooping in the bidet; now you are deciding whether or not these things are okay. The actions themselves aren’t imbued with any moral value, it’s strictly how you as an individual perceive them.

These are, of course, small fry examples. I think most people would agree that these trivial actions shouldn’t even count towards a form of morality. What about if that cookie was a shellfish? Or pork? Religion, the ultimate guide for morality, in some instances dictates dietary restrictions. So let’s look at religious law and see if it’s just as subjective as choosing whether or not to poop in a bidet.

If you’re religious, (I’m going to stick to Christianity in this instance because I’m fairly western centric in my thinking, though it does apply to every religion. Feel free to apply your own belief set to this theory) you would probably say the biblical law against murder is higher than the secular, governmental law against murder. What I mean to say is, you aren’t going around killing people helter skelter because of what God says, not because of what Johnny Law says.

What about slavery? The Bible, even the New Testament, advocates slavery. Ephesians 6:5-8 tells slaves to obey their masters as they would obey Christ. I sincerely hope that you would place secular, governmental law higher than biblical law in this instance.

So why do this? You might justify about how the Bible was written in a different time period, under different circumstances, and that it needs to be interpreted in a modern cultural context, and that’s fine. Go ahead and do that. I’ll allow it, but in return, I need you to understand that the only reason you’re saying that is because you were raised in that same modern cultural context, and because of this, you are choosing which parts of the Bible to follow. The morality dictated by the Bible isn’t inherently moral because of where it’s coming from, it is only moral if the person interpreting it declares it as such.

Even if you followed every letter in the Bible, it would still only be because you are choosing to do so, because that is your belief. Your choice. It’s only “Because I said so” if you let it.

I feel as though I need to take a step back and explain what I mean when I say morality. I’m going to do this super quick because this is a huge tangent and I apologize, but I want to make sure I’m being clear. An action is moral only if it is inherently viewed as moral. Because I said so, and because I’m going to punish you if you don’t, are not valid reasons for morality.  So governmental law, for example, isn’t a basis for morality because it’s a mix between because I said so, and the fear of being locked in prison. The only reason that religious law is exempt from this stipulation is because God is viewed as the source of Goodness. So God’s laws are already imbued with morality, simply because of their source. My argument is that that is not the case, as you as an individual already have preconceived notions as to what’s good or not, based on your upbringing, and use those notions to pick and choose which parts you like or dislike. Some folks attempt to use reason to dictate morality, but that always leads to trouble, and I’m not getting into that right now.

And we’re back. Okay. I have lost my train of thought. And this is why tangents are a bad idea.

Oh right. I remember. I’m going to give a few more examples of subjective morality that don’t involve cookies because that will just make me hungry.

Since everyone loves pop culture, and you’re a damn dirty liar if you say you don’t, let’s look at some situations where traditionally “wrong” actions are looked upon in a favourable light. Aladdin, for example, steals things. Disney, the production company for kids, says that stealing is okay. Sure he shares the bread, but he still steals. What is the message here? There are some options. Stealing is always okay. Stealing is only okay if it’s food. Stealing is only okay if it’s for the benefit of those who need it badly. Which reminds me that Robin Hood is another good pop culture example. Stealing is never okay and Aladdin should have his hands cut off, as was the tradition at the time. Of those options, which one did you relate to most? It’s going to be different for each of you, but that’s my point. Based on who you are as an individual, you are going to relate more to one version of morality over another. Especially in the grayer areas. Note: I hope you’ve caught on that my point is that they’re all gray areas. Some are just grayer than others.

Oh wait hold on let’s look at  straight up killing folks. This one is easy for those of us who are lucky to be born into such privilege where we can smugly assert that killing is wrong in every instance and that it is never justified (For the record, killing is always wrong and is never justified). What about those who live in the context of kill or be killed? Maybe you might change your mind if every day is a fight for your life. Pop culture reference here is City of God.(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317248/?ref_=sr_1) I wanted to give an example of a localized culture where killing has become the norm, but every action movie ever has us relating to someone who is killing dudes left and right. Maybe it’s for some cause or another, but it’s still death dealing that movie goers cheer for. The book and upcoming movie Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card has us relate to someone who commits genocide. Spoilers, by the way. Maybe you feel as though that every instance of death dealing is wrong, and that movies that perpetuate that culture are a hindrance to social progress. Kudos, but that’s still only because that’s what you’re choosing to believe based on your personal, unique life experiences.

There are countless pop culture examples of robots being programmed with “humanity’s best interests” and then being unable to properly understand this directive due to an acute case of Lack of Feelings, so they go on a murderous rampage or whatever, and then humanity has to assert its humanity in order to bring the world back to its chaotic interpretation of morality. Sometimes it’s wrong doing right, and sometimes it’s right doing wrong. Robots don’t understand this, but humans do, and that is because we choose our own morality, and it isn’t based on anything having intrinsic value, it’s based on how we happen to feel about it at the time.

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Categories Philosophy
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