[Correction: I mentioned a 6,000 year old universe. The world turned exactly 6,012 years old on the morning that I wrote this (at least according to Archbishop Ussher).]
One of the things that bothers me is when people talk about "God". For example, the claim that it is impossible to disprove "God". When someone makes that claim, he or she is technically correct. This might a rather weak way to start a blog on rationalism: you can't say that "God" doesn't exist. But if you don't like it, try to show that "God" doesn't exist.
Say to some hypothetical theist that "God" has been shown to not answer prayers, at the very least not those for sick people. What response will you get? "God isn't a guinea pig. He knows that the prayers were just being used for research and therefore weren't real, so he didn't respond to them." Pick some other topic and you will get the same sort of result. It is therefore impossible to disprove "God". At any point, the goalposts that you were using can be changed.
You may have noticed my excessive use of quotation marks. I use them for an important reason. Many people seem to talk about "God" as if it is a single thing whose properties everyone pretty much agrees upon (the details may cause holy wars but they are all basically the same guy). Even nontheists talk about "God" as if it is some single, specific thing. It makes sense to me that a theist would talk about "God" because he or she is prone to only thinking about his or her god, but a nontheist has no such excuse. This idea of a single meaning simply isn't true. A sophisticated apologist's idea of "God" is completely different from the one believed in at some church down the road. Say the apologist realizes the problem of evil is actually problematic and reformulates his god so it isn't omnipotent or omniscient. This is profoundly different from the run-of-the-mill god down the street that can create a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it… and then manage to lift it. One is all powerful and all knowing, the other does not even come close. It would be silly to call these two distinct deities the same thing.
That is why you can never disprove "God", the concept is so nebulous and so easy to covertly morph should your particular version be proven false that it can never get nailed down. Essentially, the goal posts are to easy to change. As Thomas Jefferson wrote (and Mark Crislip often mentions), "Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…." Before we can talk about whether these things exist or not exist, we must be clear about what we are discussing.
Instead of talking about "God" we should talk about gods or sets of gods. Unlike their nebulous cousin, these clearly specified gods can be nailed down and proven false. For example, take the set of omnipotent gods. Omnipotence leads to contradictions like the classic boulder that I mentioned above, so omnipotent gods would be logically inconsistent and could not exist. Other sets of gods get ruled out by other logical impossibilities. Then there are the gods that are ruled out by evidence. The set of all gods that created the universe 6,000 years ago has been proven to have not existent members—the universe was not created at that time. In fact, all sets of gods that created the universe at a time other than 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years ago have been shown to not exist.
The set of all possible gods is extremely large (much larger than the set of gods that humans have thought of), perhaps it is even infinite. This approach does not allow you to get rid of all gods in one go, but it provides a basis on which to deal with claims about deities. Without making the details of the gods explicit and unambiguous, you cannot have a meaningful discussion on this topic.
Very much agreed! One possible approach from here is theological noncognitivism, which is the position that no definition of the word "God" will ever be rigorous enough to critically discuss, and hence claims of "God"'s existence or non-existence are inherently meaningless. I'm personally still debating whether that's really the case, but it certainly does provide a powerful, easy-to-use argument-stopper for the nontheist.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the theological noncognitivists. I don't know much about them, so I could be misinterpreting their position. They focus too much on the concept of "God". They should be focusing on the various gods that people actually do believe in. The use of "God" is just a problem of the language, not the substance. I don't know if they address whether talk of gods is valid or not.
ReplyDeleteIgnore the term "God" for the time being, it's just a term and doesn't matter. You can give good definitions of specific gods. Maybe you can't give a good definition of what makes something a god, there might not be a clear demarcation point between me and gods. But you can say, I'm going to have some entity that is in {gods}, which created the universe within this range of time and then left us alone (a type of deistic god). You still might have to flush out some things, but I don't see how that is inherently different from defining an every day object. Therefore, I don't see how the use of specific gods is problematic.
The concept "God" might be meaningless if you don't interpret the sayer to mean something more specific, which I think he or she does indeed mean. The exact concept that the person is using might not be well thought out but it isn't really the concept "God" it is some more specified set of gods. So I agree with the theological noncognitivists that "God" is a useless term, but that doesn't solve the problem—people talking about "God" are still talking about something meaningful even if the language is incorrect. Getting rid of "God" just makes dealing with this problem easier.
If I were a Martian scientist who had never dealt with questions of religion then I could certainly be quite in tune with Zev here, but I think Dave is importantly right. Maybe a lot of the properties people are predicating on "God" (various forms of perfection, unlimited causal powers, etc) might not be coherently statable, but people generally have in mind that there exists some sort of being, a concretely real entity/person, with psychological states and an active interest in human doings. They often believe that there are perceptions of him and that his particular conception of good human life is mediated to the realm of public knowledge through religious institutions, holy texts, and maybe direct revelation.
ReplyDeleteTheological noncognitivism places the burden of proof only on theists claiming to have a fully developed, a priori account of the concept of God. I don't even have a fully developed a posteriori description of anybody and doubt I ever will. They can still point and say: "but look at this, that guy, that thing, that effect, that is what I *mean*." And then we'd have to show they are not referring to any particular agent but only, in all likelihood, a small cross-section of the dance of physically determinate world events.
You endorse Jefferson's claim that "Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…."
ReplyDeleteYou get the same principle from Plato in the Meno. But it's not obviously true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_equilibrium
Also, as a matter of PR if nothing else, atheists should avoid the word "proof" with relation to the existence of God. They don't need a deductively valid argument for the conclusion that God does not exist (although perhaps there are such argument). All they need are arguments to the effect that we ought not to believe in God.
If the idea isn't distinct, which I interpret to mean clear, precise, &c., then you have nothing to base your reasoning on. Both you and the other parties need to understand what you are discussing before the discussion can be useful.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the term "proof" can be somewhat problematic. As a physicist and not a mathematician or philosopher I don't use proof just to mean a deductive argument. All I need to say something has been proven true or false is to have it shown beyond a reasonable doubt—scientific proof. Of course, this does muddle the language, but I don't know of a concise way to say this other than the colloquial version of the term "proof".
But how can one make one's ideas precise without doing a bit of reasoning?
ReplyDeleteI tend to think that the colloquial usage of "proof" does correspond to deductive validity. Of course, we can use words however we like. If you think that to "prove" means to "establish beyond a reasonable doubt" then atheists ought to be in the business of "proving" the non-existence of God--i.e., establishing that belief in God is unreasonable.