I ran across a tweet in my Twitter "Thinkers" list that got me thinking. Darn the luck!
A response by @RealAtheology (here) to some questions by @DrMichaelLBrown got my blood going, and serves as an excuse to continue the train of thought that I left at the station in 2016 (here)
Dr. Brown's questions are:
- Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?
- Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?
- Does God Exist?
- Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?
- Have You Questioned Your Atheism?
- Are You Materialistic?
- Would You Be Willing to Follow God?
Although no one asked my opinion, I'll consider question 3 to be "Does God Exist?", and touch on the others in another post soon.
Since I can't say definitely that God does or does not exist, I'll consider it as a evaluation of my belief that the proposition "God Exists" is true.
First, I use the term "belief" as meaning "a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing". Specifically "a state of mind in which confidence is placed in some thing" ... the "thing" being the proposition that God exists.
Assuming that absolute knowledge is not possible, and that absolute certainty is thereby not possible, I end up establishing a credence value in the range 0.01 to 0.99, much as you might see a probability value expressed for some scientific topic. Mind you, I don't do this every day. Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the time, "credence" and "probability" are just not things that pop into my head.
So, about that credence.
For this post, I presume God to be the omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omnipotent creator of the universe and judge of all mankind. Let's examine only what the "creator of the universe" part means. First, if I accept that Genesis is notionally worthwhile as a starting point, God exists before the world does. That presents us with a puzzle, since we have to presume there is a realm occupied by God in order to perform the work of creating the heavens, the earth and all of creation. Taken literally, Genesis 1:1 through 1:31 doesn't reflect what humanity knows to be the case. What do we do?
It's here that I might estimate whether Genesis through verse 31 has a high likelihood of being true. It's helpful to have some other benchmark that can be used for comparison, so that, for example, claim A.1 can be said to be more or less likely than competing claim B.1.
Let A.1 be "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.". Then let B.1 be "The universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature."
Claim A.1 has as a prerequisite that there be a thing called God, while B.1 requires that there be space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these. Right off the bat, we are presented with the bare assertion that God exists, in order to get to Genesis 1:1, the creation of the heavens and the earth. Likewise, the believer should ask, why is the pre-existence of "space-time, matter and energy...etc" any more plausible? In both cases, you need a starting point.
At this point, you could make the claim that God is a simpler proposition than "space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these" - thus Occam's Razor tells us God is a better starting point. But that's a gross over-simplification of God.
If we're being fair, claim B.1's prerequisites are also at question. Where did they come from? The main Big Bang models (the expansion of space; particle horizons; thermalization) do not make claims as to the provenance of the Big Bang prerequisites, but they can be observed and measured so that we can verify that they pertain in all cases. Can we put God on that same footing? Let's try.
Given that the prerequisites for claim B.1 are assumed to be real because they can always be verified under close examination, can we then make the claim that "God is assumed to be real because it can always be verified under close examination?"
This is where we run into a problem. For someone that conceives of reality as space-time, matter, energy and physical laws that describe them - no corresponding description of God - that I can find - is testable and would yield a confirmation. It sounds labored and dismissive to say, but proponents of God's existence never walk over to a window and point to God directly. They never point to a flower and say God made that, and here's how. They never hop into a car and drive you to an institute of higher education and sho off the observations that could lead us to verify God's existence. Yet, you can go to a biologist and ask them to describe how the flower germinates and blooms, how it propagates for reproduction so that its species can persist. They can describe the chemistry that is required to perform these activities, or can defer to chemists who can explain the chemical activities in detail. The chemists can refer to the physics that describe how chemicals come to be, and cosmologists can then describe how the elements and molecules, monomers and polymers come to be so that chemical processes can take place. Cosmologists can also describe how the structures of the universe - stars, galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids etc. - come into existence. All of this can be traced back to a hot dense state in the universe some 13.8 billion years ago.
So you can "net it out" by comparing the two claims and how well they explain the features and behavior of the universe. Claim A.1 relies on God, whose existence is more or less proposed in the Hebrew Bible, and assumed to be true by Hebrews, Christians and Muslims. God is assumed to be responsible for, or a participant in the narrative put forth in the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. You can somewhat infer what God is and what his leanings are by the writings in these books, but it is neither accurate, precise nor consistent in the way that a description of a chemical process (derived from claim B.1 and its results) is.
On this basis alone, I feel that God - as described in the Bible - very likely does not exist.
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