Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, February 18, 2023 - What’s Real?

Recently, I was sparring with an atheist friend of mine online about the existence, or lack thereof, of God. 

I personally believe in the existence of God, but I have no proof of it. So I have to remain humble about definitively claiming that a deity of any kind exists. Likewise, there is no proof that God doesn’t exist either, so atheism should also stand by that same level of humility.

It’s interesting when you start talking about empirically proving or disproving something that is not claimed to exist on the physical plane. By the very lack of its claimed non-physical nature, it can’t really be proven or disproven. So I can’t prove to you that God is real anymore than you can prove to me It isn’t.

On the physical plane, requiring proof that something doesn’t exist is a fallacy as well, because you can’t actually prove non-existence. Of course, you can prove that a container is empty, which feels a lot like proving something doesn’t exist. But really, you are simply proving that the container's emptiness is factual. 

We can also claim that unicorns don’t exist, but we aren’t able to prove it. We can only work toward proving that they do, not that they don’t. Even if we were able to invent a machine that can scan the entire planet for unicorn DNA, that is still no proof of a lack of their existence because, in theory, they could exist elsewhere in the universe, just not on earth. To say nothing of the fact that in order to scan for unicorn DNA, you’d actually have to have encountered some unicorn DNA in the first place, which makes the argument that their existence is factual. 

My point here is that almost any definitive statement about the existence of something which cannot be proven or disproven is reckless at best and harmful at worst. A lot of harm has been caused in our human society by those who insist everyone believe in the existence of God. And not just that, but that all others must believe in the version of God that they personally believe to be true.

If you put a bunch of God-believers in a room together, you’ll find that they all have different versions of what God actually is. Are any of them correct? Probably not. Can any of them prove their version is correct? Definitely not.

I am aware that there are those who feel that the Bible constitutes evidence of some kind. But if it wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, it is not proof. It is belief. And we are all entitled to our beliefs. What we are not entitled to do is insist that others hold the same viewpoint that we do about anything metaphysical or non-physical. 

Similarly, when we make broad sweeping generalizations about “all theists“ or “all atheists“ we are automatically proven misguided. Because there is virtual nothing that all theists or atheists really have in common with their own group. We certainly cannot claim that all those who believe in God cause harm in the world simply because of their belief, the same is true for atheists.

And yet each group has members that feel quite strongly threatened by the other. That is certainly true with my recent debate. My friend was quite adamant that my position was claiming to be a definitive declaration in God’s existence. But it never was. It got pretty heated as well, hovering quite close on his part to full-on name calling. I could tell that my argument was getting under his skin.

But still, I wonder why. His point was that religion has caused harm in the world. And he’s 100% correct. It has. But he’s equating the existence of religion with a belief in God, and then making the leap that the belief in God is what caused the problem. To my mind, the more closely one follows world scripture, the more improbable it becomes that harm can be caused. 

For instance, all world scripture is quite clear that we should do no harm, that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, that we should welcome the foreigner, feed the poor, and visit the imprisoned. 

When people do harm in the name of religion, they are not following the tenets of their own faith. Which means God has nothing to do with their behavior whatsoever. They are merely cherry-picking uncontextualized aphorisms from within the text that correspond with their desire to exclude, oppress, or eradicate others. That’s called confirmation bias. 

So be careful with making definitive statements about the divine one way or the other. Because the only likely truth is that not a single one of us really knows a damn thing about it.