Doubting Marcus

What Would Convince Me God Exists

One of the most important ideas within skepticism is that there ought to be some amount of evidence that would convince you to change your mind about a topic. We frequently back away from discussions in which the other party acknowledges that they can’t conceive of anything which would change their opinion but I’ve realized of late that when it comes to belief in god I can seem to fit into this category. However last June I outlined what would convince me to consider a particular religion to stand above any for consideration. I gave three examples of claims which would give more credence to one religion over others namely the existence of miracles, the specific effectiveness of prayer and a perfect holy book.

These all seem to be necessary but not sufficient steps to justifying any particular religion but because we just wouldn’t be in a position to say what caused any miraculous displays even these now seem pointless. Even if all of these were true, and it’s not clear how we could ever really know that miracles were happening, it could no more prove that the particular god of that religion were real than it could prove that 6 advanced aliens created our universe as a game and are “answering prayers” through the manipulation of the programming in our world. This seems to be an inherit problem in arguing for the existence of beings in an inaccessible realm of reality which doesn’t apply to other fields generally under the umbrella of skepticism.

That is to say claims of gods are not like homeopathy which, no matter how unlikely it may seem due to having no plausible mechanism, could be proven beyond reasonable doubt with a few sufficiently large double-blind controlled clinical trials. God claims suffer from a lack of coherency and even if this is ignored they all seem fall into the categories of the demonstrably false or completely unknowable. For example, deism is by definition physically undetectable while theistic claims depend on the unverifiable because it would be impossible to distinguish the acts of a theistic god from natural processes. This leaves only logical arguments but having only ever seen unsuccessful attempts to argue for a being outside of our universe, and given the inherit limits of knowledge about what is happening independent of our universe, I don’t know what a successful argument would look like and they may in fact be impossible.

So what would change my mind? Any claim would have to begin with a coherent definition which is both free from fatal contradictions and knowable. Given that I haven’t a clue about how you could ever demonstrate such claims without testable evidence I provisionally assume any proposed gods would have to operate in a manner that is testable. Some would at this point claim “if it is god then it isn’t testable” but if that is the case then by definition no possible physical evidence could support this claim and I wouldn’t believe anything presented would be sufficient reason to believe in such a being. However I realize to some believers this merely seems like I’m being just as stubborn as the most fervent of the faithful but this is because they fail to see the difference between rejecting possible evidence for a claim simply because that belief isn’t based on evidence and being unable to even conceive of evidence because the proposed concept is incoherent or can’t be supported by evidence. The former is a faith position devoid of evidence but in the latter the fault lies in the concept itself.

I’m still open to changing my mind given a workable concept and sufficient evidence, the problem is all concepts of gods seem to be divorced from ever being supported by this kind of evidence. If and when this changes I’ll be listening.

What is God?

For there to be meaningful discussion about the existence of god there must a clear ontology for this proposed being. Nevertheless when it comes this question most people, self-described theists and atheists alike, almost always overlook this issue. There are many different gods in which people profess belief and many different descriptions supplied which allegedly define god but these are illusory. Some define gods in terms of particular attributes: Omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenvolence, etc, but such a list of attributes merely defines what god can do not what god is and reveals nothing about the “it” these traits are supposed to be assigned to.

Others define god with secondary relational qualities: Creator, loving, father, first cause, etc, but these too give no hint at what exactly these qualities are supposed to be assigned to. This becomes apparent if you attempted to define a person by solely listing such features: Mother, sister, boss. A person is not these relational qualities but rather a certain pattern of matter (if you must be specific a temporally continuous specific pattern of matter which is distinct from the outside world and so on…) to which those secondary characteristics are applied to.

Still others define gods in terms of what god is not: god is non-physical, atemporal, ineffable, supernatural. Saying what something isn’t is not a coherent description just as saying a person is non-conceptual does not tell you what a person is. Moreover merely describing something in undefined terms or as the “unknowable” itself adds nothing to the coherent description of this entity. Additionally if god is defined as ineffable then what are we talking about? How can believers say nonbelievers fail to believe in “the indefinable?”

Lastly there are those who describe god as love, energy, the universe, etc. but these are mere equivocations. We already have words for these terms and unless something additional is implied it is nonsensical and redundant to just call that entity god. If some additional trait or quality is implied then not only is god not love, energy, etc, but those traits need to be clearly stated and defined, a task yet to be accomplished.

In no other area of discourse is it acceptable to present arguments for an entity before it is even defined with a comprehensible positive ontology yet theists have for millennia been presenting arguments for this yet unspecified entity and skeptics, myself included, have been refuting these arguments. These discussions are about god, but what is god? Apparently no one knows but if the subject at hand can’t be defined there is nothing to debate and hence the discussion is over before it can even begin. If anyone, no matter your religious views, has an explanation for why this isn’t the case and can show me what, if anything, I am missing I’d like to hear it.

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Last Edited 5/9/12

The Problem of Good: Stephen Law’s Evil God Challenge

I’ve never embraced the problem of evil as a challenge to classical monotheism, perhaps because I think there are much more devastating logical impossibilities inherit in the Abrahamic god, but you need not prove something is impossible in order to cast serious doubt on it’s existence. The typical challenge presented by the evidential problem of evil is to ask the believers of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good god to account for the vast amounts of moral evil and suffering and through various theodicies, explanations for the evidential problem of evil, theologians have attempted to explain away this problem but that’s exactly where the problem lies according to philosopher Stephen Law.

In his paper The Evil God Challenge Law argues that, more or less, for every theodicy that will erase or mitigate the problem of evil for believers in this omnibenevolent god there are mirror “reverse theodicies” that could be used to explain away the existence of good if there existed an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-evil god. However most people find the existence of an omnimalevolent god ridiculous, dismissing it out-of-hand, and claim it’s easily rendered mute by the vast amount of good in the world but Law has answers. Why is there natural beauty?

To provide some contrast. To make what is ugly seem even more so. If everything were uniformly, maximally ugly, we wouldn’t be tormented by the ugliness half as much as if it was peppered with some beauty. The need for contrast also explains why evil god bestows lavish lifestyles and success upon a few. Their happiness is designed to make the suffering of the rest of us even more acute. Who can rest content knowing that they have so much more, that they are undeserving, and that no matter how hard we might strive, we will never achieve what they have (and remember, too, that even those lucky few are not really happy).

Law anticipates and responds to numerous potential objections and discusses some potential asymmetries between the good god hypothesis and the evil god hypothesis but concludes that, as it stands, there is a rough symetrry between the two which he calls the symmetry thesis. Given that basically everyone considers the evil-god hypothesis absurd he says:

until [theists] can provide good grounds for supposing the symmetry thesis is false, they lack good grounds for supposing that the good-god hypothesis is any more reasonable than the evil-god hypothesis – the latter hypothesis being something that surely even they will admit is very unreasonable indeed.

I’d highly recommend that anyone interested in the problem of evil, be they theists or atheists, read this relatively brief paper. Even if there was some evidence that proved, or even hinted at, that some intelligent being created the universe Law has provided ample reason which suggests the idea that this being would be omnibenevolent as just as absurd as the idea that an omnimalevolent being is behind the universe.