Who Cares whether God Exists?
Since time immemorial, humanity has had its gods. The ancient Egyptians had Osiris and Isis, the ancient Greeks had Zeus and the Vikings had Odin and Thor. The People of the Book (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have their one true God. As far as we know, all human societies evolved accompanied by gods of one form or another[i], yet since at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, the question of whether the Gods or God really exists has troubled mankind. Gods feature prominently in possibly the earliest text in western literature, the story of the Trojan War. We follow the fortunes of Greek heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus during the ten year siege of Troy, and the Gods are always there in the background, pulling the strings and determining the fates of the mortal protagonists. This story is told in the Iliad, believed to have been written down in c. 8th century BC. However, we also know that by the 5th century BC, philosophers in Greece were seeking natural explanations for celestial phenomena like thunder, rainbows and the movement of the stars. Protagoras, considered one of the leading intellectual of the time, said that he could not be sure that the Gods existed at all[ii]. And so for at least two millennia, debate about whether the Gods exist and the influence that they might have on mankind persisted unresolved.
Yet for many, the existence of God seems self-evident, both as an explanation for the events taking place around us, and as a source of spiritual guidance that gives our lives meaning. It has been widely accepted within Christianity for centuries that it is possible to come to know God directly, through prayer and meditation. Famous Christian mystics who, it is said, have experienced God in this way include Hildegard of Bingen and St. John of the Cross[iii]. And in the present day perhaps, there are also those who have had religious experiences whereby God’s existence is so immediate, that he appears to them in the same way as do the sun and sky.
But for the rest of us, even those who practice their religion on a daily basis, there is doubt. Humanity appears to have always had its sceptics and the absence of concrete proof of his existence has always allowed atheists to argue that the events that unfold around us can be explained without the need for a supernatural deity. Indeed, since the Enlightenment, the march of science has increasingly provided us with detailed explanations for why crops fail or volcanos erupt, simply in mechanistic terms. In consequence, today for many, God appears increasingly surplus to requirements.
And so if the world can get by without God, then it seems increasingly plausible that there is no God. Yet in that case, what is it that gives our lives meaning? It is this question that haunts so many of us in the 21st Century. Within philosophy, the school of thought that insists that life is essentially meaningless is known as nihilism and many have made peace with this, finding a kind of freedom in the lack of obligation that it implies. Likewise, others have attempted to derive a moral code, not from religious doctrine, but from what we know about the world around us. A number of moral frameworks have been developed which proceed along these lines, for example, utilitarian or even hedonistic ones which derive an alternative morality based on what is important for us as human beings.
So why is it that one of these frameworks has failed to supplant religion as the primary moral code by which we all live today? The clue perhaps, is in the fact that ‘a number’ of such frameworks have been developed. While most of us will nod in agreement at Kant’s advice to treat other people as ‘ends’ in themselves and not merely as a means to our ends, or more generally at Hippocrates’ principle ‘First, do no harm’ , questions of morality are not always so simple. Most ethical questions involve balancing competing rights. For example, is it okay to steal if your family are starving? Should you save the life of your child or the lives of ten unrelated children? Ultimately, frameworks of this kind run into the ‘Is-ought’ problem, first identified by Scottish philosopher David Hume. This makes the point that it is not logically valid to derive an ‘ought’ statement from an ‘is’ statement. You cannot say ‘because things are like this, I should do that’ without including extra, value based, information in the premise. Let’s take a seemingly uncontroversial statement like ‘He killed another man, therefore he should go to gaol’. For this statement to be logically true, we need another premise; another rule to follow – for example ‘the punishment for killing someone is gaol’ – which is a value based premise. Otherwise, it takes for granted that killing deserves a punishment, and so implicitly assesses killing as wrong. Now, such assessments can be justified on a number of grounds. We can appeal to a sense of fairness and equity – you wouldn’t like someone to kill you, so you shouldn’t kill others. We can appeal to utility – you shouldn’t kill because it will lead to great distress and hurt. Or we can take a more pragmatic view – if killing was acceptable, it could lead to everyone killing each other and there would be no-one left. However, despite all these arguments, most societies do permit killing in certain circumstances e.g. war or perhaps self-defence or the defence of others. And so, as Hume points out, whether killing is right or wrong is not a logical consequence of the facts of the situation. Rather, it involves making a call; making a judgement. And such judgements are subjective.
Of course, there is nothing stopping each of us from finding our own meaning in life and deciding on our own moral code. For you, the most important value may be ‘the sanctity of life’, for me, it might be ‘happiness’ or ‘freedom’. Or perhaps ‘spontaneity’. But with no common arbiter for values, such judgements about which values are the most important are subjective. And even if a common standard of values could be agreed, with no link to agreed facts about the world, such a standard would be arbitrary – a rationale could be found for selecting a different set of values as primary.
And so many people, if they have their health and enough to eat, and their other immediate concerns are satisfied, find themselves asking ‘Why am I here? What is it all for?’. Science is very good at explaining the ‘what’, but there is a deafening silence when it comes to the ‘why’.
As well as causing consternation at a personal level, the lack of clarity over God’s existence is a well-known source of conflict within society. Without God to provide some meaning and guidance, what is the purpose of it all? Atheists may consider themselves to have transcended such questions, and to have a more modern view (although, as noted above, atheism has been around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks), yet others may describe atheism itself as a dogma, often held unreflectively. The atheist might say
“These believers are like children believing in unicorns or Father Christmas. We, on the other hand, have a grown-up approach and seek evidence before believing in fairy tales. Look at these idiots, believing in something for which there is no proof or even reliable evidence. It must be a sign of weakness. Unable to stand on their own two feet, they need someone to hold their hand through life”.
To be sure, many believers find such talk patronising and insulting. After all, and at the very least, just as there seems to be no proof that God exists, there also appears to be no proof that God does not exist. At the other extreme, fervent believers may be suspicious of unbelievers or ‘infidels’, noting, as we have above, that without God, their values may be left ungrounded. What is to stop these people behaving however they like? The infidels may be able to justify their behaviour in their own minds, but is it good for society and in line with God’s teachings? Liberal democracies often look to separate church and state, but in that case, on what basis are our laws of society grounded? Without ‘God’s guiding principles’, we are left with the humanist views touched on above or social norms. Again, the lack of clarity provided here is a source of strong disagreement and conflict.
I put ‘God’s guiding principles’ in inverted commas, because of course, who is to say what God’s guiding principles are? Do we look to religious authorities? Or do we pray for guidance and listen to our hearts, perhaps? Cynics may claim that God’s principles are surely human ones, dressed up as divine to provide them with a bit more authority. Do the ten commandments come directly from God or reflect social norms? And we can note that different religions make different and often contradictory claims about what God’s guiding principles are. A topical example is the Taliban’s policies on the education of women, which is very different to modern Christian policy. And of course, Christian policy towards women has itself changed over time. Is this because God’s principles have changed?[iv] Today, violence in the name of religion remains a regular occurrence, with terrorist acts motivated by religious extremism perpetrated on a regular basis. And different religions – different world views – have vied for supremacy for centuries; examples include the Crusades between Christian and Islamic forces lasting from 1095 to 1291 AD and the earlier efforts by Christians to convert pagans.
If we were looking for religion to provide social leadership and a focal point for moral unity then perhaps it is not unfair to say that in the 21st century, the opposite is the case. Religion is often seen as a source of division, with the separation of church and state aiming to prevent any one religion holding sway over society.
And so, for all these reasons and more, the question of whether or not God exists remains central for us as individuals and for society as a whole. In exploring the answer to this question, our investigation will aim to provide a deeper understanding of the world in which we live and so allow for clarity in our personal beliefs as well as provide a firmer footing on which we can move forward as a society.
This book takes an unconventional approach to exploring and answering the question of whether or not God exists. The conventional approach might be said to start by considering our understanding of God; namely that he is an all-powerful, all-knowing and fundamentally good being that created the world around us. This god ensures that events unfold in line with a divine plan, and intervenes as necessary to answer prayer and grant miracles, including the miracle of eternal life. Theists insist that such a being exists, atheists insist that there is no such being and agnostics are not sure. How are we to decide who is right? Conventional arguments for the existence of God look to show that were it not for God, things could not be the way they are. God is required to kick-start the universe into being and there are many examples where it is asserted that God must have intervened to save that poor child from certain death. We shall take a brief look at the philosophical arguments in Chapters 2 and 3, but it is perhaps fair to say that most people regard such debates as inconclusive. Theists see the hand of God at work in day to day events and atheists do not. But ultimately, it seems impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt whether there is a God playing a role in daily events. And so in the early 21st Century, the jury seems to be out. He may exist. He may not. It seems impossible to tell for sure.
I propose taking a different approach. Instead of looking at the world around us and asking whether it must be the case that God exists in order for it to be the way it is, we take a closer look at what it means to say that something exists at all. We will see that the problem is not merely that we do not have the tools to uncover whether or not God exists. Rather, I aim to show that it makes no sense to even ask the question! Importantly, this shouldn’t be interpreted as saying therefore that God doesn’t exist. I won’t be arguing that the concept of God makes no sense. What we will see is that the existence of God is subjective. God may exist for you – as genuinely and as truly as anything else that exists – but equally, he may not exist for me.
Now of course there are many objects that we are very happy to say do exist. This book in front of you exists, whether this is in the form of a physical paper copy or within an electronic device. The building I am sitting in exists, the earth exists, stars and planets exist. The palm tree in the desert oasis exists. Or does it? Might it be a mirage? This one might take a little more investigating, but we can establish the truth, by going up to it and touching it. Once we have satisfied ourselves of the truth of such things, is that the end of the story? We might vaguely be aware of various Buddhist or Idealist philosophies that claim that all the world is an illusion. Perhaps nothing that we see around us really exists? Now this may well be the case within the context of these philosophies, but this doesn’t really help us here. What we want to know when asking whether God exists, is whether or not he exists in the same sense that these other objects exist. That is to say, we want to know whether there is such a being as described above – a being that created the world, listens to prayer and grants life after death etc. This God that we described above is an idea – a concept – that we are all familiar with. What we want to know is, is there such a thing in the world, to which this concept corresponds? This is our normal definition of existence. Unicorns don’t exist, because although we can understand the concept of a unicorn, there is no such thing in the world to which this concept corresponds. The difficulty with this approach, I will aim to show, is that God is a completely different kind of animal and so trying to apply this definition of existence doesn’t work.
The problem is exposed once we recognise that our definition of existence – the correspondence between an idea and a real object – is itself an idea. This idea is so ingrained into our thinking in the 21st Century that it generally goes completely unchallenged. The idea is that the universe is structured in a certain way, as a configuration of real objects, behaving in line with certain laws. Through rigorous and painstaking investigation, it is asserted that we can gain ever more knowledge of that structure and its behaviour. However, as many philosophers have argued, this assertion is groundless. The difficulty lies in how it is possible to gain any knowledge of these ‘real objects’ to which our concepts are purported to correspond. Philosophers and scientists have long recognised that all of our knowledge of the world comes to us by virtue of our own experiences. This means that our understanding of the universe is based on what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Now at this point it may be objected that surely we have theoretical insights as well? For example, we know that the earth has a solid core at its centre made primarily of iron and nickel, without ever having observed or sampled it. However, the point is that all our theoretical insights about the world start with the raw data. Information about Earth's core mostly comes from analysis of seismic waves and the Earth's magnetic field, which are observable more directly. And so ultimately we are limited by what we can infer based on the information we receive through our senses. We are limited by our humanity. We speculate on how the universe must be structured in order to produce the results we observe, but we have no ‘God’s eye view’ giving us a direct sight of this structure.
And so we have no direct sight of the ‘real objects’ of the universe – for example, the ‘real’ book behind the image of the book generated by the brain. These proposed ‘real objects’ are actually just concepts and our understanding of them is inferred from what we do see around us. We will see in Chapter 4 how the brain conjures up the objects in our minds that we interact with, in order to make sense of the incoming data signals from our sense organs. We will see in Chapters 5 and 6 how scientists have conjured up all sorts of structures for the universe in order to make sense of experimental results. But if the problem of getting access to the ‘real objects’ of the universe is intractable, this casts doubt over the truth of the idea that there are ‘real objects’ out there to which our concepts correspond and that we can come to know. Philosophers have long recognised this, and have proposed alternatives to this dominant idea, which is generally termed scientific realism – broadly falling under the umbrella term of Idealism touched on above. Idealism is the idea that the world, or the world as humans can know it is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial. This is perhaps a disconcerting idea to many. They might ask ‘Am I just living in a dream world?’ ‘Is nothing I think I see actually real?’ Some form of idealism has been advocated by Philosophers of the past, such as René Descartes, David Hume and Bishop George Berkeley and we will explore some of these ideas in due course. However, these alternative philosophies suffer from significant drawbacks of their own, not least the challenges raised above and so these ideas are not mainstream today.
The case I am making in this book is that just because our brains conjure up certain objects, images for us to live by that might not be a true reflection of how the world actually is, this does not mean that these objects and images are not real. They are as real as anything can be. Without our brains making sense of all this incoming data, we would just have a kaleidoscope of colours, sounds, sights and smells. The brain takes this data and applies a coherent framework to it, forming a multitude of objects that we interact with, or to put it another way, a model of the world that we live by. Pythagoras is renowned for saying “All the world is numbers”, but it would perhaps be more accurate to say “All the world is models”. It is the model given to us by our brains that is familiar to us and allows us to make sense of the world. The objects given to us by our brains are analogous to the items we see on a map – they describe the territory of the world at large in a way that makes sense to us. However, when it comes to our conception of the universe, the map in our brains is all we have – we can never step beyond it and see the world as it really is. Nevertheless, we have been conditioned under the scientific realist idea to believe that there are ‘real’ tables and chairs out there, to which our sense impressions correspond, even if we cannot get direct sight of them. However, a moment’s reflection allows us to realise that when we are considering tables and chairs, we are considering those objects as modelled by our brains. The true form of any ‘real world’ out there is beyond our comprehension – things only make sense to us in terms of how our brains model them. And so, I will argue, when we talk about tables and chairs, we can only be talking about features of our model. As far as each of us is concerned, this model or map is our world. It is the only world we can ever know and so contrary to popular belief, the map is the territory.
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Now how does this help us understand whether God exists? Well under our correspondence definition of existence, we said that a thing exists if the concept of it corresponds to a ‘real object’. But we then saw that ‘real objects’ can be no more and no less than the objects on our map. So when we are asking if God exists, we are looking to see whether our concept of God corresponds to one of the objects on our map. Or to put it another way, we are looking to see if our map of the world – the universe as we see it – contains God.
This is revolutionary! Remember, we cannot step beyond our map to see the universe as it ‘really is’. Everything we know, everything that has meaning for us, everything that makes sense to us, is on our map – the model that your brain puts together to assimilate all the incoming data in a way that makes sense to you. And so ultimately, I am arguing that the question of whether or not God exists boils down to this:
What does your model of the universe look like?
Does it contain a God? Does the universe make more sense to you with God in it? If so, then yes, he exists. If not, then no, he doesn’t. God exists if you believe in him.
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Now the first objection that may spring to mind at this point is ‘But what if your model of the universe is wrong? What if you make sense of the incoming data through the idea that God doesn’t exist, but actually it turns out that he does?’ This is a confusion that results from the scientific realist way of thinking that has been ingrained into us since birth, but is actually completely groundless. It takes for granted the idea that not only is the universe structured in a way that can make sense to us in principle, but also that we as humans, have the capacity to comprehend this structure. This is a truly heroic claim to make, given that it is made purely on faith! In the next few chapters, we’ll spend some time exposing just how dubious and dogmatic this claim is. Other metaphysics are available.
Chapter 1
[i] For a thoughtful account of how societies have evolved in tandem with their deities, see, for example, the article by Philip Bell in Nature (4 March 2015) titled “Complex societies evolved without belief in all-powerful deity”. Essentially anthropological in character, the article looks at analysis which investigated the relationship between the complexity of a society and its form of religion. Bell notes that all human societies have been shaped by religion and looks in particular at belief in a "big God" (an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions) as well as other forms of religion, such as polytheism and a belief in the power of karma or ancestral spirits. He argues that belief in a Big God co-evolved with social and political complexity and goes on to discuss which drives which.
[ii] For more on the degree to which atheism captured the popular imagination in ancient times, see Tim Whitmarsh’s book ‘Battling the Gods - Atheism in the ancient world ’(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). In this unusual book, Whitmarsh explores the role of religion in ancient Greece and Rome. Whitmarsh argues that priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom and that the absence of centralised religious authority allowed for an exceptional diversity of perspectives on sacred matters, ranging from devotional practises to organised religion right through to the atheos, of the “godless.”
[iii] For a number of detailed examples on the direct experience of God, see William P. Alston’s ‘Perceiving God’ (Cornell University Press, 1991). Alston argues that incidents of perceiving God directly contribute significantly to the basis of religious belief and goes on to make the case for how this can be justified.
[iv] Christianity: A Very Short Introduction (Linda Woodhead, 2014) has a good section from Chapter 6 onwards, covering how Christianity in its various forms has adapted to a changing world.
