Proof of the Existence of God

Copyright (c) 2008 by Kenny Felder

As I was walking the dog the other night, I started down one of my standard sort of mental paths...a fantasy conversation between me now, and me in college. I play that fantasy a lot because I always wonder if I could find the things to say that would be meaningful to him, to save him a few years. This particular fantasy conversation went something like this.

Me-in-college: "I don't define myself as an atheist, per se. Atheism implies a faith, a faith that there is no God, which I haven't seen any evidence for. The opposite is faith that there is a God, and I haven't seen evidence for that either. One assumes the incredible, inexplicable existence of a universe ex nihilo, and the other assumes the incredible, inexplicable existence of a God ex nihilo. I call myself an agnostic: one who just doesn't know." Editor's note: this is something I said a lot, back then.
Me-now: "And you feel pretty intellectually superior to the people who have either kind of faith. It's a very smug little feeling, isn't it?"
Me-in-college: stammers and sputters, not used to conversations that cut beneath the logic and go straight to the motivations. "Well, I guess people have faith for all kinds of reasons. But if they're just believing something because it's convenient to believe it—because it gives them some kind of direction, rather than because they have any kind of evidence at all that it is really true—well, yeah, I think I'm a step ahead of them in this area."
Me-now: "What sort of evidence are you looking for?"
Me-in-college: "Well, I don't mean a logical proof. I don't think that's possible either. Either universe—the one with God, and the one without—seems logically, internally self-consistent, meaning it can't be disproven. So I think you'd really have to see for yourself. Maybe you don't get to see until you die, or maybe not even then."
Me-now: "OK, so let's play a game. I'm going to spin the most compelling evidence you could want."
Me-in-college: "What do you mean?"
Me-now: "Well, you're taking a sort of 'seeing-is-believing' tack. So let me describe what you see. It starts with a bus barrelling toward you. You can't escape! Wham! It hits you! For a few moments, you see only blackness. Then you see the scene, your friends rushing toward your body, but you see it from a detached floating viewpoint. You watch yourself get rushed to the hospital, where you are pronounced dead."
Me-in-college: "Then tunnel-of-light, blah-blah-blah?"
Me-now: "Sure, tunnel of light, if you like. But now comes the good part. At the other end, you see a cloudy vista with a lot of people who look impossibly bright and beautiful. Some play harps or other instruments. Some are familiar, people who you knew and they died. They're glad to see you, and they fill you with a wonderful sense of love."
Me-in-college: "Sounds nice so far."
Me-now: "They lead you to a magnificent throne. Seated upon it is a gigantic guy with a beard and sandals. Santa Claus, only more so. You can take it from here: put Moses on his right, or Jesus, or whoever you like."
Me-in-college: "OK, I get the drift. I'm in heaven, seeing it all with my own eyes. But I don't get the point."
Me-now: "If you saw all that, just like I described it, would you believe? Would you be absolutely 100% sure that this was the real deal, God is real, you really are dead? You're not dreaming, hallucinating, being tricked, being shown a 3-D movie, nothing like that: you finally have the evidence you need to know all life's answers?"
Me-in-college: "I see where you're going with this. You're saying there's no way we can possibly know, even if we see it."
Me-now: "Actually, I'm not. But that's a step in the right direction. We see things that aren't there all the time. We see them every night, and sometimes we do believe in them, but seeing and believing together still don't make them true. We wake up."
Me-in-college: "OK, that's a fair point, but scary."
Me-now: "Good, because it gets worse. Now suppose that somehow you were 100% convinced it was all real. You really did die, and that big guy really is the omnipotent creator of the universe. And then He gives you a second chance to live, or reincarnate, or something. Have you seen enough to convince you that the highest and best purpose in life is to glorify Him? Have any of the questions you really want answered—good and evil, the life worth living, that kind of thing—been answered at all, just because you know that something incredibly big and powerful made heaven and Earth? Or might you still decide that you don't want to follow Him? Can you imagine a version of this story in which the most heroic thing for you to do is to disobey Him?"
Me-in-college: "Sure, I can imagine all kinds of scenarios like that. But where does that leave you?"
Me-now: "I'm going to leave you right where it leaves you. You said earlier that you don't know if there is a God, and you at least half-admitted that you feel intellectually superior to people who choose to believe in one simply because it gives their life direction. Well, you have to choose some direction for your life—every minute, you choose—and you're going to base it on whatever you believe is true. But you've just concluded that neither logic, nor any sensory experience whatsoever, can help you decide what is actually worth doing with your life. So you're stuck, right?"
Me-in-college: "I know you're going somewhere with this, right?"
Me-now: "Nope. I'm there. If you actually think that someone else might be able to supply an answer that you haven't thought of yet, my work's done here, and so is this blog."
Me-in-college: "This what?"






COMMENTS



From: Andreas
October 2, 2008

I had a quick browse around your site and read your "Proof of the Existence of God" with curiosity. To be sure I'm on the you-in-college side. I do not quite intend to start a God/no God discussion here, out of the blue. Still I'd like to say this:

you-now says: "I'm going to leave you right where it leaves you. You said earlier that you don't know if there is a God, and you at least half-admitted that you feel intellectually superior to people who choose to believe in one simply because it gives their life direction. Well, you have to choose some direction for your life—every minute, you choose—and you're going to base it on whatever you believe is true. But you've just concluded that neither logic, nor any sensory experience whatsoever, can help you decide what is actually worth doing with your life. So you're stuck, right?"

Indeed I do not know in what sense me wondering about dx and your website helping me with it are 'real' rather than some sort of 'dream'. But I wonder in what sense the help and satisfaction you give me (and others) with your pages could be so 'not actually real' that they would not be 'worth doing'—irrespective of what unknown entities and aspects of reality may or may not exist. Granted, perhaps you making the pages or me reading them actually contributes to something horrible in the real reality out there. But we can say nothing about that beyond the expanding reaches of science, and can only keep tabs for the world which we currently know. Positing an outside 'god' does not really change that—other than to perhaps hush us into assuming that the unknown real reality won't be so bad. The latter may be reassuring but I can't see how it can be really reassuring to an inquisitive mind.

As I said, I really don't particularly intend to begin a polemic, even if I'll be happy to hear your thoughts. I'm merely appreciative of your website and thought it curious how your case for a god involves the actual worth of such an appreciation. I hope this thought was of some interest to you.


From: Kenny Felder
October 2, 2008

Just to clarify: I am certainly not attempting to prove that God exists. What I am trying to show is that the kind of "proof" that many people demand—proof based on some sensory experience of a violation of the laws of nature, for instance—is useless. If there is a God, and if it lies in our power to find Him, it does not lie in that direction.

But it does tie in (for me) with the question of purpose. You assume that "the tally here takes human (and perhaps animal) satisfaction as its measure" but I find that very unsatisfying. Is the goal to have as many happy people as possible? If so, we have a moral obligation to procreate as much as possible. Or perhaps the goal is to increase the "average happiness," in which case we should go around killing sad people?

And anyway, if happiness is nothing more than a particular chemical state in the brain that we pursue for reasons of blind evolution, then how can it have any moral force?

I can make other arguments to this effect, but for me, the bottom line is this: I cannot meaningfully choose any direction in my life or even my day-to-day decisions without believing that there is some purpose higher than a happy person. Does that make sense?


From: Andreas
October 3, 2008

Hi again!

Just to clarify: I am certainly not attempting to prove that God exists. What I am trying to show is that the kind of "proof" that many people demand—proof based on some sensory experience of a violation of the laws of nature, for instance—is useless. If there is a God, and if it lies in our power to find Him, it does not lie in that direction.

Well, the concept of a 'violation of the laws of nature' makes no sense to me, nor do words like 'supernatural'. If it's there, it's part of nature. I am quite happy to think that we might one day find out about some currently unnoticed part of nature that goes some way towards putting some purpose in the universe. Then again, maybe not. To be honest, I don't feel that the whole of the universe, with its multitude of forming and collapsing stars and so on, seems very purposeful. But as stated, we may not have looked at the right things.

This hypothethical purpose-giving Thing certainly isn't making its purpose very clear if you ask me, but then again, maybe it's more of a deistic Thing.

As for your using 'Him', do you envision a Bible sort of god (male etc.) - why?

But it does tie in (for me) with the question of purpose. You assume that "the tally here takes human (and perhaps animal) satisfaction as its measure" but I find that very unsatisfying. Is the goal to have as many happy people as possible? If so, we have a moral obligation to procreate as much as possible. Or perhaps the goal is to increase the "average happiness," in which case we should go around killing sad people?

Good questions for sure, and difficult and paradoxical ones. If you're a vegetarian, then should there even be cows? But I think they're actually questions that humanity (and each of us) is going to have to face one way or another, sometime. Or I hope we will. Maybe. I'm not sure how nice a world would be where the question "What are we really doing it all for?" figures more prominently in daily politics. But to me it seems almost like an unavoidable step in the story of mankind's enquiring mind. Unless it proves too scary or expensive a question to face, collectively.

And anyway, if happiness is nothing more than a particular chemical state in the brain that we pursue for reasons of blind evolution, then how can it have any moral force?

I object to the "nothing more" argument. You might as well (or more correctly even!) rephrase it: a chemical state in the brain equates to nothing less than happiness! That's much more optimistic. A wall is not "nothing more" than some bricks and mortar. Bricks and mortar, put in a particular way, are nothing less than a wall, which can protect you from the elements and hold up the Mona Lisa. That's the 'magic plus' of organisation of matter.

(I think a lot of Cartesian/Christian/Platonic talk about 'nonmaterial stuff' comes from confusion about how organisation of matter alters things even though there 'is' only matter.)

But to answer your question on moral force (and I wished I had a neat scheme of thought about morality, but it eludes me)... No, a man or a frog being happy (or whatever state corresponds for a frog) doesn't really carry any intrinsic moral value, except to the creature itself perhaps, and maybe only to the extent that the creature is self-reflexive. And if you have self-reflexive dude A and self-reflexive dude B, both hungry, and only one apple, their moralities may well be in conflict. But if their reflexivity extends beyond the self, there can be a debate and some sort of agreement (democratic, technocratic, inebriated...) on the morality of the situation. This agreement will be artificial but not therefore bad ('bad' again seen from the perspective of those who have any interest in the matter).

I can make other arguments to this effect, but for me, the bottom line is this: I cannot meaningfully choose any direction in my life or even my day-to-day decisions without believing that there is some purpose higher than a happy person. Does that make sense?

I sympathise with that to the extent that anyone would get bewildered once they start questioning what stuff is actually like. But I find your solution, in my turn, "very unsatisfying". You ask the right questions about morality, find no answers in facts (for facts say little about morality), and rather than to say "now we have to do it ourselves" you make this leap of faith and go with (a variant of) something someone once invented because they didn't know better or to be at ease or whatever the causes were.

I also fail to understand what purpose (higher than happy persons) religious people suppose God (or gods, or...) could have that is so satisfying. Why create the universe we live in? What can be the purpose of that? Even if we were to discover some very esoteric purpose beyond our ken (maybe the gods are competing in universe-building), then (a) is that really so cool necessarily? and (b) what does it imply—if anything—for our morals? But I don't see signs of purpose beyond those fueled by material self-organisation. And I think we have to work with what we have there.

There's also this train of thought in christianity about how we have to 'be good' or else pay for our sins and all that, which I find circular and illogical to the extent that I can't really phrase it properly; as well as aggravating—why create us if it's only so we can suffer + feel the joy of non-suffering? If something indicated that really was the situation (nothing does, if you ask me), I'd be pretty miffed/outraged.

Pray tell what sort of purpose you're suspecting and/or hoping for (these shouldn't coincide necessarily). If you say 'dunno, but hoping for the best', ok, back to the leap of faith issue.

I'm getting quite verbose here, even though I didn't want to. But it's maybe a step in a long-due clarification for myself (and... others? been hoping to concoct a website for ages) of my worldview—wished I were on Astro's trip and had extra time :). I hope you enjoy the conversation...


From: Kenny Felder
October 3, 2008

I think my responses to the issues you raise here are actually in my humility essay. The core point of that essay is that any mental model we build of God is wholly inadequate. I don't have a problem with people who get specific ("God created the universe, loves mankind, sent His only Son, etc") although I don't personally share their capacity for faith. But I do have a big problem if they believe that God is so small that He fits entirely within their conceptions. Whatever you think the universe is, it is actually bigger than that— much, much, much bigger, and quite possibly infinitely bigger— and that's where the humility comes in.

So in terms of purpose, I find Christian answers...not satisfying, but at least inspiring or interesting...when they are vague and serve as pointers to something we can't understand ("our purpose is to glorify God" or "to allow the holy spirit to act through you"). I find them very unsatisfying when they get specific and easy to understand ("when you die, if you had faith then you go to an eternity of heaven, and otherwise an eternity of torture"). The same is true for most religions. I think they are useful as pointers to something much higher, but lose that usefulness when taken as doctrines that circumscribe truth itself.

On the other hand, the idea "there is no purpose except what you yourself decide is the purpose" leaves me utterly cold. So I am left hoping that all that infinite, incomprehensible bigness has room in it for some sort of higher purpose that I simply can't comprehend. If it doesn't, then life is a cosmic joke in bad taste.


From: Jordan Tullis
December 10, 2009

I'm coming into this discussion over a year late, I know, but I wanted to address a couple of things you've said. Very intriguing essay, by the way.

First of all, I am an atheist, and let me clarify what that means for me. I define atheism as NOT BELIEVING that there is a God. I do not define atheism as BELIEVING that there is NO God. In other words, if you asked me "Is there a God?" I would answer "I don't know." If you asked me "Do you believe that there is a God?" I would say "No." Does that make sense?

Second, let's get to the main point about how we know what we know. Let's start with an easy example:

If I woke up in the morning and could not see, I could conclude a couple of different things. I could decide that the entire universe had become invisible during the night, and only blackness was left. Or I could conclude that I had gone blind. (I know this example has loopholes, like "find somebody and ask them if they could see anything", but assume for our purposes that there is no outside way to know what has happened.) Put yourself in this situation and I think I know what your decision would be.

Is it possible that the strangeness is with the rest of the world and not with your eyes? Sure, I guess so. But you would have no reason to choose this option. Blindness, on the other hand, has happened so many times before that it's way more likely.

I may seem like Captain Obvious right now, but that's my metaphor for the human condition. We are all stuck here on Earth and we have no idea why, and the only way we can judge something's objective truth value is comparing it to things that have happened before. Blindness is consistent with previous events, but spontaneous mass invisibility isn't.

It's partially true that we don't really know anything. It could turn out that we are all in the Matrix, or we're characters in someone's dream or novel, or that you are just insane and nobody else exists. But living your life under that assumption, of "we don't know if it's real so why bother", seems like a sad waste of your time and your life. So does arbitrarily choosing a religious/mystical/new age set of beliefs to follow.

If I were "you in college" and you posed that question to me, I would have a difficult choice to make. On one hand, I'm probably insane, having a dream, or something along those lines. But I'd probably end up accepting what I see after a while. What else could I do?


From: Kenny Felder
December 11, 2009

Jordan,

First of all, I am delighted to have people jump in "a year late." This is one reason I have always avoided organizing my site as a traditional blog, organized by date. I don't think the contents are particularly dated: I want to put them out there to get conversations going. Conversations exactly like this.

Second, your definition of "atheism" and where you are right now is exactly where I was in college. I called it "agnosticism" but I've heard that word defined differently, too. But whatever you call it, it describes perfectly what I believed.

Third, I love your analogy. So let me tweak it around just a bit to suit my own purpose. As you point out, one hole in the analogy is that you could just go talk to other people. So let's assume now that everyone is blind. And in fact, let's assume that everyone has always been blind. There are a few crazies who insist that there is something called "sight" and it lets you see things like "light, and colors," but they are generally dismissed as harmless cranks. But they claim that if you take a certain very difficult journey and drink the waters from a certain far-off stream, you too can have "sight."

And now, and this is the hardest part of the analogy, let's assume for some reason that the question of their so-called "sight" is incredibly, incredibly important. It is the key to saving the world, or your children, or something like that. (Or, to make the analogy closer, with "sight" you can penetrate to the true underlying nature of reality, which the other senses can't do.) What can you do?


From: Jordan Tullis
December 16, 2009

If that truly is the definition of a mystic, then I suppose I am one. I'm always interested in "finding things out for myself," and if drinking some water can give me a better perception of reality, then sign me up.

I'm not sure it's that simple, though. So I have to ask you a question about your example. Does sight represent something objective in your analogy? Something subjective? Or do you not see any difference between the two?



From: Kenny Felder
December 17, 2009

First comment: don't forget the "very difficult journey" in my analogy. If it weren't for that, everyone would be a mystic, right?

But anyway, to your question. The straightforward answer is that the experience of sight is subjective, but the things seen—the facts revealed by sight—are objective. But things become less straightforward when these sighted people start to describe their experience in words. This culture has no visual descriptors such as "bright" or "red" or even "dark." When the mystics try to describe "sight" to the blind population, they grope for metaphors. For instance, they might describe reds and oranges as "warm colors" and blues and greens as "cool colors," as many people actually do—but, they hasten to add, that doesn't mean that red things have to be warm, and in fact they may be very cold! It comes out sounding like nonsense. The wisest among them, perhaps, refuse to say anything at all about what sight is like, and confine their comments to giving directions to the sacred river. The problem with that strategy is, it doesn't give anyone a whole lot of motivation to make the journey!

But it gets worse. (I'm going to write a whole fantasy story here before I'm through.) Thousands of years ago, in this almost-entirely-blind world, a few mystics from different cultures found the river, gained sight, and returned to their own villages. But they never met each other. They came up with ways of describing the world of sight, but their metaphors were very different from each other's—because they were different people, because they came from different backgrounds, and because, although they all had the same "sight," they actually saw very different things. Now, as technology has improved and the cultures are in contact with each other, people are discovering that each village has its own description of what a "color" is, and they all sound like they're talking about completely different things. This leads to wars, and it also leads many intellectuals to believe the whole "vision" thing is completely subjective. You and I know that it is not subjective, but it certainly sounds that way to the blind!

There are a few holes in this, as a metaphor for spiritual truth, but overall I think it holds up pretty well.



From: Alex Dunham
May 23, 2010

What exactly is it that "sight" is serving as a metaphor for? For the people of your scenario, even if they do manage to gain sight, their lives are no more full of meaning than they were before—they just get the really cool sensation of "seeing things."

If I understand your position on spiritual ultimate truth, after having a direct spiritual experience you're not left with a rational "answer" to your questions, you're left with a totally indescribable, totally different "viewpoint."

So, even before having such an experience or knowing anything about it, it seems very much that this is the path of a successful spiritual seeker:

  1. Deep feeling of non-understanding of the universe, intense desire to have meaning, etc.

  2. Really hard work that based on intuition and hearsay that supposedly will lead you to

  3. experience causing the non-existence of the feeling in 1.
The experience is at least as cool as gaining sight after not having it, according to spiritual teachers. But it seems no more "meaningful" than anything else you could do with your life, does it?

Not that I'm suggesting an alternative path to "meaningful." I just think you're no better off than the man on the happiness machine, just for you it's a "meaning machine."



From: Kenny Felder
May 24, 2010

Excellent and insightful as always, Alex! One of the things may have gotten lost in my analogy was when I said, "with 'sight' you can penetrate to the true underlying nature of reality, which the other senses can't do." The ultimate goal is not an "experience" or a "feeling" or the "non-existence of a feeling," although those may all be helpful means to the end. The goal is absolute knowledge of absolute truth. "Sight" here is a metaphor for "the capacity to perceive what is real."



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