In my own comment I tried to explain that the concept of God is extremely coherent if one understands that it is an abstraction of our true creator, biological evolution. In that light, all the apparent incoherence, the badness, and the goodness, the stupidity, brutality and the benevolent intelligence all make sense. Now, of course that return to tyrannical nature was very useful to emperor Constantine, who imposed Christianism...
57
No human is in a position to pass judgment on why a three O god might create earthlings.
That is a fact.
Philosophy also includes an irrefuted and necessarily true strand of the limits of what humans can know given their human machinery has its human limits. So does psychology. Biology. Physics. Chemistry. And so on.
Trying to pin the divine in a corner by human tactics to serve theologians human purposes is frankly unseemly. and ignorant.
This is not an argument about the divine. It is a know thyself point. You are a mortal not a god. Behave accordingly.
14
For a very logical explanation of and answer to “is there a god?”, read Vedanta (or perhaps more “user-friendly”, a witty and interesting series of talks in English explaining Vedanta by Swami Dayananda Swaraswati, freely available on the app “Teachings of Swami Dayananda”.)
3
There is another theological solution to the contradiction of God being Omniscient yet Perfect: Evil is unreal. Yep, there is such a belief: Christian Science — a most high-minded religion. After the better part of my adulthood spent extricating myself from that nonsense, I do not recommend going down that rabbit hole.
3
The University of Virginia has a program studying reincarnation. They’ve collected some interesting evidence. If reincartion were to prove a defensible concept, that would impact the discussion of a deity, wouldn’t it? Pit your analytical skills against the “evidence” provided by UVA and tell us what you find out.
3
If I know one thing about God it is this: whatever it is we think God is, wants or does, we've got it wrong.
10
This will be it.
Read C.S. Lewis.
5
“That God intervenes in the world implies that God sits as a cosmic regulator, giving or withholding permission for every temporal event, signing off on some and preventing others according to an eternal master plan.
By contrast, a theology of the Cross responds to “why does God allow X?” with “God (obviously and observably) allows everything!”If God is all-powerful, his power is not akin to control. As noted earlier, God does not do control (employ power as force or coercion).Rather, God’s omnipotence is two-fold: God is all-powerful as the Creator of all that is within a fixed order. God established and set the limits of the universe. Within those limits, God lovingly chose to grant the realm of necessity (free will and natural law) free play without direct interference.
Rather than an act of abandonment, the cosmos is an expression of God’s plenitude, his hospitality, yielding space for authentic flourishing. God is all-powerful as the Savior of all that is through his supernatural love and his boundless grace....God’s care for the world isn’t magical: it is mediated by willing human partners who pray and work for God’s kingdom will on earth. God is all-powerful as the Creator of all that is within a fixed order. God established and set the limits of the universe. Within those limits, God lovingly chose to grant the realm of necessity (free will and natural law) free play without direct interference.” (Brad Jersak: A More Christlike God)
8
Religion has always been a means of social regimentation. The priests of almost all religions assign themselves greater resources that the toilers beneath them. As Voltaire said: “The first priest was when the sly rogue met the first fool.”
It is sad that in this great age of science people still believe in God. There are no scientific theories that have the existence of a supernatural deity as a working hypothesis.
Where is he, why doesn’t he show himself?
40
You never saw a cat play with a mouse or a bird for hours?
12
"But to say that God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others is to say that God is capable of malicious enjoyment."
Yes! I would say this, different terms, to my priest-teachers at the Seminary. (I bailed once I truly got the inside scoop) There is no way to make the claim that we are made in this Gods image, and not admit that means he is at least 1/3 as flawed as us. If a Being knows nothing but perfection, how could it "invent" imperfection...if it didn't have exposure to imperfection? If it didn't know imperfect beings and how it would manifest?!
I love me some Aquinas, but lets face it, he was a flawed logician. As much as Augustine, and all the other Catholic and Orthodox apologists and later of the Protestant faiths. They were all drawing their conclusions, made for them by the Church, then seeking ways to support them. As the tradition continues today - such as Creationists retro fitting scientific discoveries.
Lets face it, the Judeo-Xtian God is a jerk. He created Adam and Eve, let them loose in his "lab", gave them what he believed was all they needed, purposely gave them curiosity, then sequestered "the tree" (of knowledge) and then - sicced a trickster on them! ALL on purpose. Everything he did with and to A&E, he did with forethought and knowledge of the outcomes!
If this God is omniscient he knew long before he even gathered that handful of mud and breathed into it! Especially before he tore out that rib, and created Eve.
Jerk behaviors.
19
The vicious and violent spread of Christianity coincides with Europeans' bloodthirsty colonialism. That Christianity is popularly viewed as a beacon for morality shows the extent to which Westerners have whitewashed their thuggish history.
21
Since we can easily see that creation is arbitrarily cruel, it is abundantly obvious that a “western” God is nothing more than an unanswered prayer.
13
It seems to me that the worst thing about God is all the killing that is done in ‘his’ name.
11
Visit a pediatric oncology ward and tell me there is a benign God.
45
This article was arguing against a god I do not know. Once you get to know the Lord, you stop playing logic games and instead enjoy His abounding love.
9
God only makes sense only to those people who have been spiritually enlightened. "But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God." (John 1:12) And this is only possible if God gives us the POWER to do so.
God has revealed himself to everyone. (Romans 1:19)
But if your mind has been darkened, then spiritual things in the bible would not make any sense to you.
"So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:21-22)
In summary, if you have repeatedly rejected the truth about God, then I cannot help you. You are beyond help. (Sorry.)
6
How can you discuss God without any reference to Jewish thought about God?
4
God is what is God.
1
A woman who had a "near death" experience tells of asking, "Is God the light?" while being in the "death" state. The answer she got was, "No, the light is the breath of God."
19
P.S. (since my earlier posting hasn't appeared yet) I've found that "God" is usually a personification of a notion of luck. People who depend on "God" are very oriented by need for luck. "I pray to luck" for one's need. Or a disaster is an act of bad luck. Certainly, science has confirmed that life on Earth evolved by luck (as no other planet so far is the heaven that we are). "I thank luck for surviving" whatever. May luck with with you.
6
Nothing new here. I have heard it all before. Not a bad story of accounting of what has been argued in our history but that is all. Any new ideas out there?
3
Our beautifully human compulsion to accept the narrative that seems familiar and comforting is understandable. It reflects the natural inclination to translate everything into uniquely human terms. Unfortunately, it seems to me a manifestation of a great sin . . . Pride.
The ultimate transcendent sanctity is free of ego and releases us from all burdens to explain. Silly humans . . . Your truest joy will be when you are absorbed into God and are erased, willingly, joyfully connected to all the universe. True holiness will be when we are humble enough to let go and become one with the universe created out of love and which continues to expand each day.
2
Are we really still talking about this?
Haven’t we decided long ago that understanding god and god’s existence are matters of belief, that have no relevance to logic and science?
9
Another paradox:
In Catholic school, I was taught that God knows everything about the future. But if he knows what I am going to do before I do it, then free will is just an illusion.
7
Logical problems ensue for people who personify God as a big, all-knowing man in the sky who speaks 16th Century English.
Personified God is preached as religion by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Illogical and preposterous religious tenets are attributed to "miracles" that beggar belief.
Logically, God is the totality of universal laws of creation, destruction, and regeneration. To scientists, the logical God is described by mathematical equations. To laymen, logical God is just the way things work.
Logical God is not marketed as a religion. It is implied by, and abstracted from, science. Abstraction may be beyond the capability of persons who cannot grasp mathematical concepts beyond simple arithmetic and algebra.
2
Look everyone, we're all going to die. So make the best of what none of us ever asked for and maybe the concept will pass along where we respect every one. How's that for an idea?
13
It is worse for the mono-omni god theories than professor Atterton suggests: god had the choice of an infinite number of worlds he could have created. In an infinite number of those possible worlds, humans would have freely chosen to be morally better than we are in this world. Since it deliberately chose to create this much worse world with no more free will than the infinite number of morally better worlds that were possible, the free will defence is useless to save the monotheistic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or any equally nonsensical being.
There is no good reason to believe that the gods of Olympus, Valhalla or wherever exist, but at least they have the great virtue of making enough sense to be logically possible: unlike the incredible impossibility of the trinity of major Middle Eastern religions that have infected Western civilization, Zeus, Odin, Thoth and the like were at least sensible sorts of gods.
Thankfully, the West has been slowly recovering from the nightmares of the long dark age imposed with the conversion of Constantine, which the Christians, egged on my revered bishops of course, marked by destroying the great library of Alexandria and stripping the flesh from the bones of Hypatia.
7
"God" is a philosophical concept subject to the whims of those who wish to manipulate it to establish order.
10
Although I do believe that "the idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent," it's not surprising that this article is written by a philosopher. There are a number of typical philosopher type arguments here that are circular or incoherent in themselves.
3
If you believe there is no God, all of these questions are moot. Which is a better outcome.
5
I don't believe in any organized religion, but I believe in God. More accurately, I believe in the concept of a God or higher power being responsible for creation.
The reason for this is simple: science has yet to provide a valid explanation for where we (matter/mass) came from. To me, it's just as plausible that someone or something put us here (the universe) as it is that we were created out of nothingness.
Unfortunately, until we find a scientific answer to this question, religion, God(s), and all the ills that come with them, aren't going anywhere.
Faith in God can be a blessing, but religion is nothing but a curse.
3
Atterton is reiterating logocentrism (thus its array of failures) about a trope that originally served anthropological needs and gains literary status. "God" is a trope that mirrors idealization of human futurity. It's absurd because it's purpose isn't logical. Its purpose is to evince aspiration to progress, which requires personification, moral reliability, and other literary merits that have really nothing practical to do with metaphysicalism.
Animals are not capable of tormenting other animals, haha, like cats do to their prey. House cats aren't usually very hungry, they are bored. Arthur Schopenhauer never owned a housecat. We humans aren't much different than animals. Since animals can't talk, we can't discuss religion or God with them. In their world we probably appear as a God to them, even if they attack us in self defense or aggression. Dog bites man.
So as far as anyone has observed, animals don't go to temples. The cynic in me says, man invented religion to rule and to consolidate power. It's us suckers that fall for it. I'd like to believe there is some infinite power that cares about infinitesimal tiny me in this infinite universe, wouldn't you?
3
I'm surprised that the author didn't point out the incompatibility of free will with an omniscient god. If God knows everything, she knows what you are going to do, which means that you have no free will.
1
All that dizzying speculation!
Why?
When there is no god, there is peace, quiet, order.
4
And then there's the Holy Trinity, the one god but three separate entities, of presumed monotheists.
Yes. Rational people don't believe any of this God nonsense. Then sometimes something irrational happens in our lives that turns that rational thinking upside down. We discover there is something we couldn't earlier conceive of. Inherent contradictions like the lion and lamb being at peace are in fact the rules of that world. I found that despite my many, many mistakes that would cause rational people to despise me, God loves me. And much to my dismay, I found that God loves all those who don't even believe in his existence.
1
An omniscient god always knew all of the choices every one of us will ever make; how is that free will?
We are certain to make bad choices with the very limited abilities god chose to give us.
Yet our omniscient and omnipotent god is as unable to make a wrong choice as he is to create a rock he can't pick up.
How is that merciful or just?
I read to about paragraph 3 and then I thought "why am I wasting my time reading this rubbish?"
As an atheist, I have been convinced that God does exist. Now how is that for a contradiction? But where does this God exist? Why, in the fanciful imagination of the believer, that's where.
Now, please excuse me, while I move on to more important things.
4
What about the incoherence of one god versus many? Why should we imagine there’s only one? Couldn’t there be 6 or 50 gods? Is it possible the one who created Earth earned a C on her project?
3
Thoroughly enjoyable article! Thanks!
'Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human'. But, he does know what it is like to be a human. That's one of the reasons why Jesus was born as an Incarnation of God.
29
Faith: Belief in anything for which there is no evidence.
Carl Sagan said he always hoped there were extraterrestrial beings but that the evidence was too "crummy" (his exact word) to merit belief. God and revelations in holy scripture? I guess I'm a person of hope, not faith.
45
I think you describe blind faith. Maybe faith is to believe in something where there’s evidence but no proof.
5
Everything we think we know about a so-called "God" came from another human being or "mere mortal". Let that sink in. God is a human creation. We humans do not have the capacity to correctly identify the hidden truths of our own material existence and universe, yet some will easily claim to "know" what "divinity" is, or what a "divine" entity wants or expects of us. By definition, a supreme being does not want or desire anything - because, being omnipotent, it has no needs. Our behavior cannot make god "sad". A god could not want or need our love. The most plausible explanation for the human tendency to create god (or gods) is the human need and desire for certainty in the face of human mortality.
56
Just some thoughts that come to mind. The title of the book, 'Meet My Maker, The Mad Molecule'. The response God is said to have made when men said they could have created a better world (Get your own ingredients). It is tough imagining the nature of a monogamous God as we experience creation here inside the empire. Jesus was suppose to lessen the fear factor with God. The use and abuse of religion will continue. Philosophers bake no bread.
3
"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the Peace of God."
These simple words from A Course in Miracles explain much more to me than this piece. God is All that Is. We cannot know All that Is with our limited perception, therefore we cannot know God - at least not with the thinking/egoic, body/mind. Those who have had Near Death experiences tell us the same thing: God is Love beyond anything we can imagine.
God is not human and neither are we in truth. While we may experience being in a body, it is not what we are. Bodies give us the experience of being separate, fragile, vulnerable, and limited by time. But in truth, we are not separate, we are powerful, we are eternal consciousness. We are Love, created by Love, as an extension of Itself. This 3-D world of physical limitation truly limits our perception, but there IS a consciousness beyond it. Meditation, silence, contemplation allow us to touch the edge of this consciousness. Some people like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie have experienced it and brought it back to teach in this world. "Christianity" as it is traditionally taught has very little to do with it.
9
@Amy Haible...well done. If God is all-knowing and perfect, how can he know ANYTHING that is not perfect? How can he accept all "praise" if he has no ego with which to accept it? We so easily and casually see God as "like us.". As my mentor Ken Wapnick used to say, "if He is, then God help us!"
3
I don’t feel that god is a being of higher intelligence or all-knowing. "God" is a collective energy that we (humans), every one of us, create, and that energy is mostly, but certainly not all, positive, good, and infinite. That’s my interpretation of God until I find a better one.
4
I haven't thought about the nature of Godness for a while and have to say it's as fun now as it ever was. From the discussions I conclude that from underlying creative force behind all existence (possibly explainable with some combination of math and physics) to an all-seeing all-knowing perfectly benevolent being understandable only through mystical revelation we can all agree that God exists, now we just have to figure out what that means.
2
I think the professor describes the various versions of "god" in Western society in a manner that makes Nietzsche's "God is dead" all the more understandable.
2
Regarding the definition of a god as "a being believed to be the infinitely perfect, wise and powerful creator and ruler of the universe." This has not always been the sole definition in Western civilization. The gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans were hardly "infinitely perfect and wise" and were perhaps more like what gods could, or should, be.
4
There are two types of God in the Judeo-Christian religions. The first is the philosophers’ God, which Atterton describes. It is an intellectual concept. The second is the mystics’ God, which is a spiritual force that overwhelms the mystic in moment of religious ecstasy. This is the God to which Blaise Pascal refers. The German theologian Paul Tillich also wrote about Him. There is no point in trying to be rational while dealing with the irrational. If you want to discover God, then listen to your heart and soul and drop intellectual speculations.
33
I had no idea the ruminations of a philosophy professor could be so much like an undergraduate bull session.
Ipso-facto reasoning about things like an unliftable stone or the implications of encyclopedic knowledge belongs to Philosophy 101 (aka Logic). The idea of a divinity is not accessible at that level.
Granted, the author sets out to address only the Western conception of God as perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient. But he then implicitly restricts the subject further by reducing the Western conception to its Sunday-school version: an anthropomorphic being subject to human notions of perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience. Finally, we’re invited to recognize the logical non-existence of a straw man.
25
A regrettably small sample of philosophical theologians on which to base a judgment about the "Western" notion of God. A survey of Plotinus, Proclus and John Scottus Eriugena or Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz more recently, who took great pains not to fall prey to these problems, might have started to convince those more widely conversant with the literature than Professor Attenton seems to be. Fodder for ideologues and the prejudiced, there is not much for thinkers here.
9
@Wayne Hankey Wow. It's an opinion piece in the Times, not a thesis.
2
Atterton gets off to a bad start when he proposes a logical examination of the concept of God, then muddies it more when he consistently refers to God as masculine. Barbara Eherenreich in her book "Living with a Wild God," gets it right when she explores a nonrational, non-logical experience she had at age 17 which she at first interpreted as a nervous breakdown due to her strong atheistic belief system, but then changed her mind decades later and called it a religious experience expressing the concept of animism, perhaps the most primal and universal of all religious belief systems. God is not logical nor rational nor moral. God is an experience of a power that destroys all sense of logical thinking. God is as Rudolf Otto described this concept: a mysterium tremendom, destroyer of all logical and rational means to comprehend the experience.
12
It is obvious that in order for a society to evolve to a point where it is self sufficient, can reproduce, reasonably govern itself and is able to advance its knowledge, that society must have rules and boundaries. The complexity of 7 plus billion individuals arriving at a similar set of rules that allow for common progress is outside of our range of abilities. God has provided every resource necessary for our survival and advancement to more enjoyable lives. It is our ability to adopt rules applicable to each of us, that allow for the collective progress. These rules were provided to us, over an extended period of time, by God's inspiration. Without God, there is no check on unbridled human avarice and ambition. God provides the check on despots simply because they too have to answer to a more powerful authority, without God we would indeed not have survived as a unique species, with God and his gift of resources we not only survive we thrive and progress.
1
@Steve O
"We need God " is still not bona fide proof of God's existence. Sorry, it simply isn't. I say this as someone who wishes and hopes, against all evidence to the contrary, that God exists.
13
@DYou answered for me. I am an atheist. 91 years old, and have never felt the need for a god or gods to live. what is considered a moral life. I am also a kind, considerate person who adds to the life of the community, doing volunteer work to help others no matter their religious preferences Douglas Presler
36
Does it make sense that something as complex as the human mind happened by pure chance? Not to me. It was designed. However, the concept that the finite philosopher who wrote this essay cannot understand the nature of an infinite God does make a lot of sense to me.
7
@Curiouser We know humans exist and we even know how humans evolved even if millions, maybe even billions, of people refuse to believe it. A billion people can believe for a billion years in something that is absolutely wrong. We do not know that any god exists and any god that would exist would absolutely have to be even more complex than any human and the existence of such a creature as god is far, far more problematic and non-sesnsical than the existence of people.
9
There are vast gaps between "chance" and "design" and between "design" and "design by God."
2
I bought all of this for nearly fifty years as a hard core atheist. Then I stumbled across Greek Orthodoxy, and life at last made sense to me. Orthodoxy stresses that we cannot know what God is; it suggests what He isn’t. But ultimately, it recognizes He is incomprehensible to the human mind, which is why there can be no God of the philosophers, and why the Roman Catholic Church went off the rails in the Middle Ages with Scholasticism, Aquinas, all of that.
We do not take the Bible literally. We recognize its books were written by fallible humans over many centuries who were creatures of their times and locales, but whose works were inspired by God. Hence supposed contradictions don’t really bother us, and many are dealt with by the early church fathers not in the Augustinian tradition.
We stress prayer, penance, our faith in a Triune God one of whose persons, Jesus Christ, took human form and died to save us from sin and death, and love for others, especially our enemies. If we believe, and live our lives in accordance with that belief, seeking what we call theosis, becoming one with God, or God-like if you will, we anticipate salvation on Judgment Day.
That hope makes everything in life more wonderful to me, and makes me want to fight harder for progressive values and the dispossessed. As an atheist, my reward would be ashes and dust, like Trump or Hitler. Or oblivion, in Buddhism. No thanks. Orthodoxy has given me what my UCLA and Harvard degrees never did.
17
@PubliusI hope you do not mean to imply that your choice - atheism, Buddhism, Greek Orthodoxy, etc., determines your fate. What you believe has no bearing on your ultimate fate.
4
God sees those inflicting the suffering, the cruelty, the atrocities; God sees those responding with caring effort and loving generosity of spirit and the sharing of resources. That's the essence of volition, of what it means to be human and alive, of "free will." Everyone has their own beliefs and hopes, but the realities of the world are there: We cannot prevent the harsh actions of others, but we can respond to victims with our own kindness and duly advocate for justice. And we can join the timeless and endless quest to work, individually and together, to promote a world where cruelty occurs less frequently and kindness more often and more meaningfully.
9
Nice that this ends with Pascal settling things. One of his more celebrated and poetic passages in Pensee's is "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God,.." Which also means all ontological arguments are futile, the same as expecting logical answers about an infinitely incomprehensible entity especially if it exists or not - ergo the wager.
5
An intellectually stimulating read, though, the part about famines and earthquakes being nonhuman causes of suffering needs qualified. These “acts of God” are not acts of God or of nature. The deaths and suffering, associated with famine and earthquakes, are greatly dependent and influenced by human behavior, that is, if one is permitted to set humans apart from nature.
1
It depends where one asks this question about God. It is after all the global age. In Iran, can you ask this question? In North Korea, can you ask this question? Perhaps no, but for starkly different reasons.
In the U.S., the question is pointless as they are so many faiths. Leave it to faith. Worry about mortals confusing intolerance with inquiry.
What does not make sense is this whole opinion piece. The author wants to understand God through his human experience. If God created us, He does not have to explain anything He does in human terms. That is why He is above all else in the universe.
3
This column is too literal for me.
I prefer to say:
Something existed before time, and before space.
Whatever that “something” was, it is the strongest creative force in the universe.
6
@Jean
It doesn’t make sense to say something existed before time. Before is temporal concept. If time doesn’t exist then neither does “before”.
9
@Jean
For God, time does not exist as it does for us. He is before, during, and after us. Those who commented that we can never understand or explain God in human terms is correct. Just because I sculpt a man from clay doesn't mean he is the same as me.
2
These are just a slue of straw man arguments. Like Sam Harris, he’s an atheist trying to philosophize about Christianity, which often shows itself in that he may understand some truths, but lacks a larger set of understanding that connects those truths together and makes sense of them. For example, how could God create a world of physical suffering? The mistake is to assume that this life on Earth is meant to be a utopian paradise. It’s not, that’s the afterlife, and this life is essentially a choice given to us to accept or reject God. And so it makes sense that a test involves “testing,” so to speak, or it wouldn’t mean anything to choose. Another example, the author comceptualizes evil as an existing thing, and so therefore how does God not embody evil? In Christian philosophy, evil isn’t an existing thing, but a degeneration of the moral order which unites people in relationship and love. It’s a spiritual vacuum or absence of moral and social communion. Physical reality is not evil as he points out, but the spiritual choice to destroy communion between people. Therefore God knows and holds all things in being yet is not evil, as it’s not an existing reality but a lack thereof. Third, can God be all powerful if he can’t create contradictory realities? The answer is that while God is existence itself, and therefore no reality is lacking to God, God also has a nature. God will not act and cannot act against his own nature. God can never do evil for example.
3
God may well exist, but his indifference to our suffering, when he could prevent it, or even heal it, makes him not worth worshipping. And a god not worth worshipping cannot be God. Much better to think there is no god, than a cruel or indifferent one.
22
@karla in Christianity, God is not indifferent to our suffering, but takes part in it. By becoming the God-man, being the “man of sorrows” and “acquainted with grief” and ultimately dying a horrible death. God is not distant or apathetic to our pain. The seeming paradox of the Christian faith is that in our weakness we realize True strength. In tribulation, True peace. In suffering, True hope.
6
@BBB With respect, if God wanted to share our suffering he made a poor job of it. Jesus lived a short not-particularly difficult life; was quite popular among a smallish group of Jews (invited to speak in synagogues etc). Only at the very end did he experience true pain - admittedly gruesome suffering - but for just a few hours then he was mercifully dead. If God wanted to know real human pain perhaps he could have been a Holocaust victim, a torture victim, someone who watched their children killed, a rape victim. Much is made in churches of the iconography of Jesus bleeding on the cross. It can be helpful to contemplate these and feel some sense of not suffering alone. But the idea that God knew the depths of human suffering through Jesus’ experience is frankly insulting.
3
My cat will gleefully play with a mouse, catching it and releasing it over and over. He will just as gleefully play with a feather on a string, or chase the red dot from a laser pointer.
Does he play with the mouse because he is a sadist who enjoys inflicting pain? (If so, then why bother with the feather or the red dot?)
Is this play a form of practice? Perhaps he simply has an instinctive urge to pounce on a small moving object, but he doesn't know what to do with the mouse once he's caught it -- he's a house pet who's never had to hunt for his food -- and so he releases it, and as he watches it scamper away, the instinct to catch the mouse strikes him again?
We don't truly know what a house cat thinks. We project ourselves onto animals and claim to understand them. Western religions do the same thing with God. "If triangles had a God, it would be three sided" - Montesquieu.
We don't know what created the universe, or why. Are we, as Western religions teach, the pinnacle of creation and of such fascination to the Creator of the Universe that he knows how many hairs are on our head, and will intercede in our sporting events on our behalf? Or are we, as many religious people fear, the unlikely product of complex physics? This is an unanswerable question. The only intellectually honest position is to acknowledge that we don't know, and perhaps, may never know, who or what created the universe or to what purpose.
11
I find religion fascinating. God however not so much. If there is a god it has nothing to do with me, so why should I care? Religion though has huge impacts on my life through the actions of believers. That's an interesting story!
6
It does not make sense to me at all, and I go to a Christian church every week where perhaps a few people believe this, but most do not. We know there is an energy-Love-compassion that we learn about through the stories of Jesus. We recognize that other religions learn about this Life Force in different contexts and we are totally fine with it. I could meditate and hike to get in touch with it, but I go to church because I also experience it in this multi-generational setting, where we all care for each other, and work together to better our community and world. LOVE
4
Can God do things that are not logical? This only seems like a paradox if you assume that logic holds a power equal to or greater than God's power to create.
But logic is a human faculty founded on reality, as we experience it, and words, as they are taught to us. A person without experiences and without words would have great difficulty developing logic.
So if God creates something, then we experience it. And if our language, our minds, and our relationships suffice, we develop a logic to understand it. Seen in this way, the question of whether God "can" create illogical things becomes funny. Logic is just our best effort to understand what is. Everything created by God has the capacity to contain illogic, because it can always exceed the logic we have made for it.
6
A better definition of God would include the word "transcendent," which can be defined as "existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe." The intellectual mistake is to believe that God must be comprehensible to us. We make this mistake because it is far easier to personify God than it is to accept the paradoxes that arise when our limited minds try to grasp what is ultimately unfathomable.
24
if we do not use the name or myth of God, what are we left with in this standard Western concept of an all-knowing, all-wise, perfect, timeless, and all-powerful being? a small child's conception of a parent, looming large in a scary and unknown world. some of us grow out of that, and some can't. it is this second group that believes that because they have fairhfully held onto their childhood fantasy they have the responsibility and right to tell everyone else what to believe and how to live. because an imaginary friend said so, that's why.
8
What Pascal was getting at, with that embroidery, I think was something like this: that people who trust in God and serve his purpose are those who understand him best, while the savants will not; which is the converse of saying that if we hope to understand God, we should trust in him and try to do what he has has told us to do.
It is inconceivable to me that the earth, planetary systems, galaxies and in fact the entire dynamic universe was created from chaos by accident. Some super intelligent source or power is manifest in its functionality. The laws that govern the mathematical expressions of how nature operates are far too elegant and incomprehensible by mere human intelligence and the deeper we probe into the mysteries the more questions arise. I submit that humans will never master the grandeur and majesty of the creator albeit that we'll never stop trying.
As to why there are so many sorrows and so much pain and suffering in our existence is a part of the ineffable story of the timeline since creation. The very process of birth is both painful and glorious at once.
We need to join forces with the creator and partner ourselves with a vision to repair the world and make it a better place for all its inhabitants. Perhaps the ultimate state of mind is; to love your neighbor as yourself. What a concept!
7
@SyWies
You have my heart young lady!
Go on with this.
It will serve you well in your camino.
@SyWies
Why is it inconceivable that everything was created “by accident”? How much have you read of physics and evolution? Also, the line “The laws that govern the mathematical expressions of how nature operates are far too elegant and incomprehensible” doesn’t make sense. What are these laws you’re talking about?
A truly well written piece for the NY Times.
Thank you.
As you already know, religion is based on "faith".
Faith is based on human imagination.
And therein lies the definition of God: Within each and every individual, human imagination (i.e., faith).
In the end, God is what each individual, through faith (imagination) desires him (or her) to be.
Pascal rejected Philosophers because he imagined into existence a God that matched his, well, imagination.
6
@Michael
The biblical God is not like this at all. Faith in scripture is trust not imagination.
2
@Michael
You got it right Michael and thank you so much for making it so clear.
I lived in Rochester so I know you came out of an experience where the truth would set you free. It's so good you gave us this.
Adios.
"God cannot do X, because it defies the laws of logic." But who wrote those laws to which God himself must be subservient? Grandpa God? Hyper-logic without end?
Thus we stanch our fear of the dark by using reason to obscure that which is unreasonable.
As Joseph Campbell said:
«What we call God is a but metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being — those are categories of thought. It's as simple as that.»
14
@Etaoin Shrdlu
"metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought"
Thank you for a comment of great spiritual worth.
Peace be with you and remember to live what you have said.
1
Accordance to a 2018 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, religious observance is lower in countries with greater income equality, higher GDP and higher education levels. Per the study, 53% of Americans consider religion to be very important in their lives, compared to 10% in Germany and the UK, 11% in France, 9% in Switzerland and 27% in Canada. All these countries have greater job security, state-funded healthcare, excellent retirement benefits, and lower college-education costs. Perhaps, if fewer Americans were worried less about making ends meet both today and tomorrow, our belief in a benevolent God would be more in line with those countries.
52
As a freshman 45 years ago at UCLA one of the first classes I took was Philosophy of Religion and I failed it. Taught me all I needed to know about God.
3
I maintain that no one has better and more succinctly described the bible, and by extension its inspiration, than did Mark Twain:
It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. -- Letters From the Earth by Samuel Clemens, published, at his order, 50 years after his death.
God was smart, but more on the order of a know-it-all than of a wise man.
7
"For man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it. Other animals never do it except to satisfy their hunger, or in the rage of combat …. No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting"
Neither the author nor Schopenhauer have ever seen a cat play with a mouse.
Even though the rest of the OpEd is made of similarly simple minded false arguments, looking at the comments, this is red meat to the readers of the Times. It's an interesting example of confirmation bias. This is why atheists love flirting with proofs that God is impossible as much as some christians wallow in tautological arguments proving the existence of God.
God needs no proof. Faith is a gift, not a rational decision.
7
We don’t know what we don’t know; only that we don’t know.
As impressive as the human body and mind is, there are cosmological thoughts we cannot imagine, or comprehend.
Just what is infinite negative regress, i.e. no beginning? Mathematically, the concept is simple: no limit. But, we find it unsettling imagining either a universe that does not end while perhaps being more unsettled by a universe that does end. What is beyond?
Why does existence move forward, not backward?
As asked previously, why is there evil? If it is the straw man to set up the arguments about choice and free will, the Creator is pretty cruel. And getting religious for a minute, why is Jesus necessary?
That seems to bring up a related question: what is love?
I do not have an answer to what love is, though it seems tied up to process and not static. More like becoming, not being. And one wonders how perfection can give or receive love.
Believers believe; they really do not know. Empiricists will continue to expand their knowledge base. I will continue to struggle with these issues, highly confident that these questions will not be answered.
7
But how do we know existence isn’t moving backwards?
1
The Master Mind Jesus referred to G-d as Spirit. We all have the spirit of life within us to a degree so we can conclude that we are of the nature of G-d. We definitely are not of the nature of the god of religion except by choice. Faith, however, takes many forms in the human mind and many people obviously need the material effects of religion; i.e. saints, deities, dogma, etc. So, until they tire of these things, let them be.
@Rev. Henry Bates
jesus answered everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again but whoever drinks the water i give them will never thirst.indeed ,the water i give them will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.John 4:13,14
1
Your argument belies a weakness in the English language. Other languages have two different words for "to know." Take Spanish: Saber means "to know" in the sense of knowing intellectual knowledge. Conocer means "to know" in the sense of being in a relationship with or experiential knowledge. I conocer my friends, a city, etc. I saber geometry.
Your argument uses a conocer version of God's knowledge of the universe, evil, etc. Thus, for God "to know" evil, lust, etc., God must have experienced it.
Even a human being can know what murder is without having murdered someone. And so can God.
12
Einstein revealed how meager and impotent all religions are. Space and time are inextricably joined - for all of space to exist, all of time must also exist. Whatever will happen in the future is already in existence, but not within our power to observe, except as revealed by the passage of time. No matter what anybody may do, the future is as cast in stone, and nobody has the power to affect it in any way. Meaning you can pray all you want to all the deities you want, there nothing on earth or in heaven with the power to affect the future. Everything that is going to happen, will happen, exactly as it was destined to happen.
2
@Grunchy: Read books by the Jewish Mystic Lawrence Kushner. (I am neither jewish nor mystic, but he agrees with you.) And much of what you consider science, he calls God.
@Grunchy
this however is why we need a savior
I like George Carlin's take on God and organized religion. "God is all powerful and all knowing but he needs money. He just can't handle money."
5
I don’t think these arguments really work. Think of “God” as a video game designer as viewed from the point of view of a NPC. Could “God” created a stone so big that even he/she couldn’t lift it? I don’t think the question makes sense and is similar to Russel’s “the set of all possible sets” paradox. Meta.
2
Scientist's and astrophysicist's are narrowing-in on strong evidence that supports the concept of a multiverse. The math and evidence for this (dark matter, black holes) are being worked out today. So what of life and death and 'God' as seen through the lens of a multidimensional reality? An analogy: Imagine a protozoa, scooting around on the back of a tick. Now imagine that tick is on the back of a bird that is flying. With respect to orientation (and thereby knowledge of the limits of travel in the world), the bird knows what the tick knows, the tick knows what the protozoa knows. However go the other way in this hierarchy, from bigger to smaller: The depth of perception (and consequently the definition of reality) decreases the lower the dimensional world the living thing survives within. To put it simply, the protozoa knows nothing of jumping, and the tick knows nothing of taking flight on the air. Taken to its logical end, how arrogant of humans to concoct an epistemology that abruptly ends with their own range of sensory data!!! God is the final word for that which we have no words for, and using human language to isolate logical and moral inconsistencies so as to make truth claims about it all is just as insufficient a methodology as a tick trying to imagine having feathers, and what it would mean to fly.
3
Yeah, and let's remember that an all-knowing entity cannot learn, so doesn't know what it's like to learn something new, has no conception of “something new”, and cannot experience or understand change of any kind.
Not an enviable intellectual limitation, at least from this human's perspective.
3
All the questions posed in this article are answered in the Bible.
2
Simple.
I find it useless to believe in any doctrine.
That allows imagination to fill any need.
3
All this deep thinking and hand wringing over something invisible and unproveable.
As Christopher Hitchens once wrote.“Take the risk of thinking for yourself , much more happiness , truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way ..”
8
The American conception of God — especially as held by most evangelicals — is childish and self-serving at best. Sadly, I don’t think that most of the folks who hold these beliefs are much interested on consistency, logical or otherwise.
23
“Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense?” No, of course not, the idea of God makes no sense at all. That’s because we made him up. All of the author’s questions are rather silly, but they become much more understandable when you preface them with the caveat, “Okay, human beings created a God because humans are are frail and insecure creatures, and they need super heroes.” Take any of the author’s questions, such as “Does it make sense that this fabricated God is all powerful, yet permits evil?” Of course not, but this fabricated God is chock full of inconsistencies, because we made him up! Humans didn’t think the whole God thing through. God is not logical, or real. Stop looking for reason in these human fantasies. Sheesh.
24
Philosophy and religion don't mix. You either believe in God or you don't. All the philosophizing in this article reminds me of a shell game--now you see it, now you don't.
I'm an agnostic. I don't care if there's a God or not. Trying to convince me whether there is or isn't one is, to me, laughable.
4
My viewpoints on atheism, theism, agnosticism, etc. were best summed up by a movie character:
“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off people.”
― Ferris Bueller
Someone very old said to me when I was very young:
“If the Deity exists, then by definition there in no-one above him, and therefore he is a hard-line Atheist, and if he is good, he would not want you thinking any differently than he thinks himself.”
3
The mental contortions that are necessary to explain anything about God can only bring us to the conclusion that God is unknowable, and as such only exists in the imagination of people, be it for evolutionary or historic reasons.
5
Yes. Human reason is insufficient to understand “God”. It cannot reconcile the existence of evil with that of an all-powerful, all-loving God. The early ideas of God avoided this problem, because Gods were as malicious as we are. But once God became “loving” the problem arose.
Scientific materialism avoids all the God problems by simply getting rid of God. The universe is an unconscious machine made of matter and nothing more; consciousness is an illusion produced by neuro-chemical reactions in the brain. There is really no way for religion to prove this framework wrong. It just works.
Except. There are some nagging problems with scientific materialism, too. First: In order for it to work, SOMETHING had to come from NOTHING. Or, something was always there, UNCAUSED, which seems unscientific.
Second: there are these pesky reports, which have been CONFIRMED, (see Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death) of phenomena that show with convincing evidence, that consciousness can exist independent of the brain. These have to be vehemently denied and debunked for the scientific model to hold up. And they have been, but not to everybody’s satisfaction- (see University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies).
Advaita Vedanta has a non-dual solution: Brahman, or “existence/consciousness/bliss” underlies everything: the material world is merely a dream, APPEARING in this consciousness. This one consciousness, which we ARE, is God. Neat, but can’t be proved.
3
"But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them."
I have never experienced lust, which is excessive sexual desire, but I have experienced envy. It does not follow that I know envy better than lust.
These exercises in trying to understand the supposed creator of the entire universe and all in it in humans terms are ridiculous. Imagine a mind so vast and so powerful as to be able to imagine all that is and cause all of that is to exist. The idea of understanding the ethics or morality of such a being as applied to humans is impossible. You might as well ask an individual virus to understand the human body and human mind and all their physical and intellectual workings.
4
I’m not going to take on the larger question, but I have definitely watched a domestic kitty cat torture a mouse. Practicing hunting? Maybe. Maybe just bored. Certainly not hungry. But it sure looked gleeful.
When Cantor proved there is no such thing as a largest set, he proved that classic Gods don't exist. Of course Gods of limited intelligence can exist. Since man is made in God's image, the conclusion is obvious.
2
There is no God and most likely there was no historical Jesus.
So it all is just hooey for the gullible and the shrewd.
Truth is, all empires rise on myths, and when those myths are found out, and the priests seen to be liars, the empire falls, for the rich, by then have made the religion of a god really about them.
This American empire is built on the backs of the poor for the future of the...well, the Trump kids. People who are of the 1% of the 1%.
The future will be like the past, though with the internet, as long as it lasts, it will be quite entertaining.
Odd how pessimistic I get as I age.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
8
@Hugh Massengill, but who needs him anyway? Which is why, thank God, we have Trump in the flesh to lead us through the wilderness. A known hooey or an unknown hooey, you tell me which is more of an insult to our precious intelligence.
My dad (RIP) gave me the perfect answer to whether God exists: You'll know in the great bye & bye. Still didn't answer my question about how could Cain find a wife in the land of Nod if his parents were the only people God created... guess I'll have to wait on that one...
5
Maybe the point is humans can’t be certain of anything considering the sin was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and the sun was created after three days and nights. Maybe it means think for one selves and pursue knowledge.
Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? Depends on who’s doing the lifting.
The better question would be: can God create a stone that he can’t lift? The answer: obviously, that’s why he created it there rather than trying to carry it over there.
God’s no fool, which is why that’s all he created. So maybe he’s a little insecure however. Everything is relative, but he’s all we got.
So much discussion about a God we created to our specifications...so to escape death. Quite frankly, I do not believe we humans are smart enough to know whether there is a God or not. And believing is not knowing, a humble reminder of our arrogant stance. Incidentally, the Bible was written by ignorant and prejudiced men, many of it's assertions way out of sync of what is easily proven false nowadays, written by multiple authors some 3 to 4000 years ago. Theistic religions abound, some more authoritarian than others, many of them ther cause of untold pain and suffering due to intolerance, even fanaticism, against each other.
6
Can Man, with his/her/its limited intellect every truly understand the supernatural, all powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, nature of the Easter Bunny?
The question is meaningless unless the existence of and nature of the Easter Bunny are already accepted.
1
This article assumes that God created the physical universe that we find our bodies in. [I know, that's what the Bible says, but that's not the only possibility.] If the universe is manmade that explains a lot of how messed up it is.
Ask someone who has had a near-death experience, or wait for your own inevitable death to find out. Otherwise, do good.
[If you wanted "fair" you came to the wrong planet.]
2
All those arguments sounded like a parent telling “cuz I said so” which we all later learned usually meant the parent (or theologian or theocrat) maintaining their righteousness. There is no logic in a being that doesn’t exist no matter how rhetorical you get.
1
That's why it's called a "mystery" (the theological term).
1
All this appears to based on the notion of God being another singular being, however omniscient, or omnipotent. Rather than the ground of all Being; Being itself.
3
I always found it preposterous to hear the religious justification for something that is unjustifiable, unexplainable and illogical.
“God works in mysterious ways!” The universal religious “cop out!” Its infuriating when someone actual says that with a straight face!
4
If there is any doubt about there not being a God, then the statement that God wanted DT elected, puts the icing on the cake. If the universe with its E=mc2 makes sense, none of DT's policies make sense at all. No, the nature of the human animal is both as a sexual predator, and likely to kill another human animal, something we see, not only in this country, but around the world as well. Our world, is a place of civil war, misery, poverty, overpopulation, refugees, too many ruthless dictators heading too many countries, and then, a modern society bent on destroying its environment. God in the mix of it all, not so much!
4
There are moral religious people and immoral religious people.
There are moral agnostics and immoral agnostics.
There are moral atheists and immoral atheists.
Live and let live.
3
"I shall here ignore the argument that God knows what it is like to be human through Christ, because the doctrine of the Incarnation presents us with its own formidable difficulties: Was Christ really and fully human? Did he have sinful desires that he was required to overcome when tempted by the devil? Can God die?"
Uh ... since WHEN is it philosophically justified to simply "ignore" the arguments of those with whom at first sight you disagree with ... ?
The answer to all these questions is "yes", from the point of view of Christian philosophies.
In the Middle Ages already, Christian philosophers invented perfectly coherent philosophies answering those questions.
What you need here is a concept of WHAT it means to be human and to be divine.
Jesus had both a human essence and a divine essence, combined in one single being.
His human essence made him feel suffering - both physical and psychological, whereas his divine essence gave him the psychological tools to deal with them in the most morally responsible way.
That's how he became an "example" for all human beings to follow. He shows the real, morally justified path out of suffering and sinning.
So no, God cannot die. What Jesus has shown is that even human beings don't really die, as both their spirit and body will be resurrected, AS did Jesus's body and spirit.
Now you can decide not to BELIEVE the philosophical assumptions behind it, but that doesn't mean that these philosophies aren't "logically coherent" ... !
4
I'm more concerned that here in the USA, most self-styled Christians worship the "one true god", when at the same time they believe in the Devil, and a host of named Angels. All of whom are apparently immortal, indestructable, can be invisible and/or also take any human form at will.
To me that's a crowd of many other gods by definition as well. And BTW, In the ten Commandments, who (or what) is it that God is needfully jealous of???
2
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It turns out that 'God' is a cruel manmade invention used to wield power over innocents, a fairy tale for vulnerable, naive and frightened minds to be duped by its fancy buildings, its organ music, it costumes, its pageantry and the irrational fear of mortal death.
There's a cruelness in religion that teaches people to live for the next life while ignoring or shortchanging the current life.
Have you ever seen anything more irrational than belief in the supernatural and religious fairy tales ?
It's all so embarrassing, so childish and cruel.
Off with your mindless head, organized religion.
16
The last words spoken by the pilot were ‘God is great’ as the plane plowed into the ground. With this, and all the wars, all the scandals and abused children. God is not great.
4
If God created everything then he, she, or it is responsible for
onchocerca volvulus. I prefer to have nothing to do with a deity
that monstrous.
2
Science, reason, common sense and observation absolutely point to there being no supernatural Being of any sort. Theology? There is no THEO to ologize about. Religion is the bane of humanity.
6
I have been reading the comments. I never saw so many normal people (aka atheists) in one place before.
I'm am atheist. And sublimely happy that I am. Religious people seem like they are living in a state of twighlight, so consumed by the emotionality of their faith that they are unable to see things rationally or calmly.
I think religion was founded as a way for pathologically disturbed men to take and maintain power and money, control women and poor, and create a world of their making -- and the world is a pretty sick and disturbed place.
3
The thought that god exists in the form Atterton configures him makes the thought of the existence of god a frightening one.
Perhaps there are answers to your questions that you (all of us) lack the intellectual capacity to uncover. Certainly, the difference between the intellect of a god that created the universe compared to intellect of a professor of philosophy is far greater than the difference between the intellect of a professor of philosophy and that of a dung beetle. I encourage your questions, though. Keep asking them.
2
The arguments in this article are shallow and pale. These are objections raised by a smart 14 year old who recently discovered Sam Harris. Apparently the author thinks that Christians and Jews have not encountered these arguments in the 6,000 year history of our faiths, which are based on oral traditions that some scholars estimate to be 25,000 years old. Read Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart to cleanly sweep away this amateur op-ed by a lightweight arrogant philosopher, the stereotypical new atheist. The Doors of the Sea also by David Bentley Hart powerfully and cogently answers the problem of theodicy.
6
What is even more astounding than the obvious evidence that all these illustrious philosophers whom you quote came up with such blatant inanities on the existence of a god, is the bewildering fact that you have wasted your entire life studying what they wrote. Teaching this silly stuff to intellectually vulnerable students makes you an enabler for the God Conspiracy.
"God exists but He is not part of this existence" a believer once told me. Apparently, his is a God of Semantics.
1
There are so many ways to discuss this subject. From the start, omnipotence can refer to maximal, as opposed to absolute, power: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/ .
This conversation has been going on for millennia. It has yet to conclude.
The universe, which upon latest count contains two trillion galaxies, is not human; not the least bit human.
One galaxy is beyond us, and we're inside it.
3
God might be all-knowing, but does she care about the idiocy so relently pursued by Her microbial minions here on Earth? She has a lot of planets to surveil in our fantastic, ever-expanding universe.
Time spent worrying about us is time totally wasted. Come to think of it, what is "time" anyway?
I think I'll just stick to what CS Lewis once said: "“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
6
Why cast this understanding of God as the belief of Western (ie white) people? Muslims and Jews and any non-white believer in an Abrahamic faith - ie hundreds of millions of Africans, East Asians, and southeast Asians - believe the same thing. If the author wants to tear down the basis for “Western” civilization, that’s fine, but he should acknowledge all the non-Western (ie non-white) people who adhere to it and use more precise terms.
Even as an atheist, I find these word games by philosophers shallow.
7
Captain Kirk said it best: what does god need with a starship?
1
There is nothing coherent nor logical nor rational nor realistic nor natural about any supernatural mythical supreme being born of scientific ignorance and stupidity.
The God Problem is that there is no God that every faith defines and accepts in the supernatural realm. And reality and facts and truth and objective logic cannot resolve the conflicts in the natural world.
3
Christians for Trump is all I need to know about them and their God.
3
@sjm
I am an Epicopalian socialist, and have never voted for a Republican.
Personally, I’ll take the ‘god’ of Christopher Hitchens, I.e. no such thing/entity/power.
1
Mary Baker Eddy is ignored as a philosopher, but her book after spending 30 years studying Jesus teachings and healings answers all of the questions you raise. Her conclusions in “Science and Health with Keys to the Scriptures” are rational and logical when understood. You would find it interesting if You studied and gave it a chance to change your perspective.
I simply say, all said here in this article is amazingly simplistic.
I trust the author does not teach that this is a good summary of the G-d question.
4
This comment will not satisfy the author or most Times
readers, but it conveys cosmic truth. For an orthodox
Jewish man or woman educated in the depth of
foundatiional Jewish toought and belief-- and especially
in the profundity of chassidic thinkers and teachers-- this columns is like a high school term paper. Secular philosophers simply lack the the entire perspective and intellectual framework to deal with the reality of G-d. I
credit Professor Atterton for at least giving the study of
G-d serious thought, and really do not mean "term paper" as a insult. However in Torah-based Jewish thinking, at least, the very language and intellectual scaffolding of the most intelligent secular men and women trying to deal with these issues are utterly insufficient for reaching even the ABC's of real comprehension.
3
Whenever someone looks at me and says “hi, I’m a philosopher” I look for exit signs
Jerry W N E Kingdom VT
If God existed why would we have cancer? Autism? O.J. Simpson walking free? We need no further proof.
1
Nope.
I do my best to avoid abusive relationships.
Be they work, love or play.
Anyone that swears they love me; …but... if I don't profess my love and devotion in just a such manner, then I am condemned to everlasting hell fire.
But he/she/it loves me!!!
And he needs my money!
Nope!
I'll take a hard pass on that one.
NO THANKS!
Please don't knock on my door.
Don't pass laws based upon your religions to rule over me.
Stay out of my life; I'll do my best to stay our of yours.
7
There is no god.
2
Why do we need a god figure. Just because we want an external authority doesn’t mean there is one. Each of us creates god in our own image. Some of us grow up and realize we don’t need this.
132
@Alison Cartwright
There is no reason that we shouldn't be amoral nihilists. If you are a materialist/atheist and not a nihilist, you are not thinking hard enough. Ideas about good and bad, let alone good and evil, are mental constructs that are meaningless outside of human society. If science is right, we have no free will and are just automatons, and all human action is governed by the survival instinct.
Some will say morality is needed for the survival of the species. This is probably true, and a product of our survival instinct, but the survival of any species is not, in and of itself, good or evil. That is just a human value judgement.
BTW, I am a mainline liberal Protestant with little in common with Evangelical Fundamentalism. Though hanging by a thread to my faith, I'm a political leftist because of this faith. Pascal was right.
14
@Jonathan Swift
Pascal also compared belief in God's existence to a wager. If you believe in God and God exists, you will have gained eternity. If God doesn't exist, you will have lost nothing. Pascal preferred hedging his bet. I prefer honest atheism and altruism
33
A God problem? Maybe God has a people problem. When he looks down upon our earth today he probably asks himself how can people behave in such an evil way. There is so much inhumanity to man. Do not blame God for this. God is not responsible. It is the people who are responsible for so much of the bad things that occur today.
66
It seems obvious at least to me that we created gods in our own image and they have changed dramatically as our needs have changed and as we learned more about science, etc. Why would we expect these old gods invented by semi-literate people to be logical, consistent, moral or real? We are all agnostic about the other thousands of religions that have come and gone.
Harari argues that religion was useful in holding large groups of people together and that a lot of human constructs are useful although not real, e.g. money, country boundaries, LLCs, religion, etc.
What concerns me is that many religions are lying to children, creating guilt and extracting large sums of money from the gullible with the promise of things they have no right or knowledge to promise, in this world or the next. If they were selling snake oil, they'd be in prison. If they sell religion, they don't even have to produce a tangible product and they avoid taxes.
People can believe whatever they want if they don't harm others but dogma is evil and we pay a huge price in senseless religious wars, fighting over our religious books.
Banning contraception creates so much misery and poverty on a planet that has too many people already, leading to climate change. Surely, we are better than this.
6
There is no reason that we shouldn't be amoral nihilists. If you are a materialist/atheist and not a nihilist, you are not thinking hard enough. Ideas about good and bad, let alone good and evil, are mental constructs that are meaningless outside of human society. If science is right, we have no free will and are just automatons, and all human action is governed by the survival instinct.
Some will say morality is needed for the survival of the species. This is probably true, and a product of our survival instinct, but the survival of any species is not, in and of itself, good or evil. That is just a human value judgement.
BTW, I am a mainline liberal Protestant with little in common with Evangelical Fundamentalism. Though hanging by a thread to my faith, I'm a political leftist because of this faith. Pascal was right.
2
I've had many fine conversations with believers of all faiths up to the point that I ask, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" At that point I am told that I wouldn't understand.
Too true. I will never understand the rationalization of evil and pain and suffering inflicted for any reason that can be discerned, let alone justified.
Much easier it is to reject the notion of a personal God altogether. Occam's razor, you know. Bad things happen to good people because no one is in control and bad things happen to all kinds of people, regardless of what they believe.
Good things happen too.
3
With others here, I find it quite odd that so many otherwise apparently intelligent people take this kind of discussion serously. The universe is very difficult for humans to understand and many find life difficult. However in my view, the only really firm progress in human understanding has come from evidence based reasoning about repeatable observations. That of course is science, to which a few commenters make passing reference (often inaccurately). Whether logically consistent by one system of logic or another or not, any concept of a deity which basically a human writ morally, intellectually and powerfully large is, I think, on the face of it, totally implausible. We have recently evolved (around 100,000 years of about 13.8 billion known years of universe history) on a tiny planet in a universe at least 10 billion light years in extent where there are likely to be millions of similar planets (more discovered everyday). To nominate a superhuman as ruler of that vast cosmos seems an exercise in amazing delusion and narcissicism. We have more serious things to think about.
8
I'm afraid I find much of the reasoning in this article rather silly. If there is a God, does the author think that he, with his human mind, could logically figure out the nature and ways of such Being?
One of the biggest mistakes made in thinking about God, whether one is a believer or not, is to make God too small. We tend to refer to God as though He were another created being like ourselves. We think this way because we cannot imagine Being itself, Being that creates and maintains all that is - from the immensity of 100+ billion galaxies down to the tiniest workings of my body's cells. Such Being belongs in an entirely different ontological category from everything else.
If there is a God, certainly He is unknowable to us, i.e. we can never comprehend Him through our own efforts. God can only be known if God wants to be known and then only incompletely. When we question whether God could be all-loving, it assumes that we ourselves know what love is. Looking around, I don't think we do.
Yet if Christianity is true (and I believe there is considerable evidence that it is), God reveals Himself and wants to be known. And what He has revealed is something quite extraordinary - how to live in the Way of love, a Way we have stepped out of because we'd like to be gods and in charge of ourselves. Needless to say, we do not fill the role well.
The failings of people and religions are not effective arguments against Truth. Rather they are evidence of how much we need it.
5
@drmaryb
Another created creature like ourselves?.............YES ...........We created him to sooth our fears of nothing ness..
@drmaryb: There is no "salvation" from death. It is the inevitable high cost of living.
The arguments expressed in this article are rational, ancient, and absolutely unoriginal. The parenthetical paragraph near the end is where things break down, if one believes via faith in the Jesus paradox. Atheism is boring. God. if there is such a being, is arbitrary and unknowable. But I choose to wrestle with the angel, rather than be content with a self-satisfied "objectivity".
1
@Robert
Lol. Because the arguments presented are "ancient and unoriginal" - that doesn't make them irrelevant. In fact, it makes them more relevant, because "we" keep having them, they never reach logical conclusions. Over and over we go these same old dead horses. And never do we move the ball from the receiving teams goal line. It just sits there, while the players argue over the play and what the calls mean...and if the other team should even be on the field.
Atheism is in no way boring. In fact, it makes this world and the universe in which we're are but a sliver of a piece of a grain of sand. Not made real by the "poof I created it" due to the whims of a God.
Why should a Being that wants us to believe in it and follow its rules to the letter - not be knowable, and be arbitrary...? Makes no sense.
1
One other thing to note is that atheist philosophers, by and large, still discuss their ideas in terms of theology. The idea of "evil," for example, doesn't exist without theology. It should have no place in atheism. I remember a serious atheist philosopher once saying in effect that " Richard Dawkins thinks of everything in terms of God and religion--he imbibed it with his mother's milk." Instead of working within a religious framework in order to disprove religion you should abandon the framework entirely, if you truly want to pursue a nontheological philosophy.
3
@Benjo: Yes, wise atheists leave "morality" to theists. Ethics can be practiced without resort to God.
1
I am not talking about morality or ethics when I mention the theological concept "evil."
I would like to mention that the philosopher I was referring to in my original post was Adolf (unfortunate name, he was Jewish) Grunbaum. A very important natural philosopher who said "That there is a universe is no mystery." "Mystery," by the way, is another theological term atheists have imbibed.
2
The problem is with the idea (1) that God is a magical person with the aforementioned properties, and (2) that faith is just belief in the existence of such a person without evidence.
But once you translate religious terminology into the concepts of ethical humanism you don't find yourself in such difficulties. In this way of looking at it, "God" represents the values that give our life meaning and our sense of self integrity. "Faith" is the commitment to those values despite it being impossible to prove in any final sense that a life lived according to those values will bring us inner peace. "Sin" is what turns us away from those values and towards more transitory goods. And "idolatry" is devotion to an inherently sinful set of values, that is, a set of values that necessarily limit our spiritual development.
There are a lot of false idols, but tribalism - whether religious, political, or racial - is probably the most dangerous today, and I don't see organized religion doing much to combat it. If anything, the opposite is true.
A lot of atheists are pleased to see the "nones" multiplying so rapidly, but as an atheist myself I worry people are just giving up one false idol (religious tribalism) for another (political or racial tribalism). There is an opportunity here for humanists to speak to what is missing in Americans' spiritual lives, but that will take more than slaying false idols with clever reductio ad absurdums.
7
Many of the defensive comments here from Believers are based on assumptions and dogma that are stated as incontrovertible fact (i.e. God is this..., God is that... The Bible says, etc...). In other words, circular reasoning -- deploying their assumptions to demonstrate that their assumptions are true. Yet they also state that God is unknowable, beyond human comprehension (a convenient special pleading, a get-out-of-argument-free card), therefore logic does not apply. So, how can they know any of these attributes of God if God is unknowable?
10
I am an avowed atheist, and have been so since my teens. Like many atheists, I would describe myself as objectively agnostic and subjectively atheist. This can be captured in the phrase "there is almost certainly no god", and in the notion that one can't prove or disprove that which lacks material evidence. People believe because they need to believe because their biology provides them the blessing and curse of foresight. We see the eventuality of our own deaths, and we have a need for or lives to have meaning. It is difficult to get beyond that to a rational view that we are riding on a mote of dust in a cosmos whose size is beyond practical comprehension. Science may someday reveal the origins of the cosmos, but I feel comfortable saying it was almost certainly not one of the thousands of deities that we've contrived here on Earth.
7
I like pragmatism. God isn't a matter of belief, but of experience. No matter what the divine experience may or may not portend in an absolute sense, I, like William James, find the divine experience to be important in itself.
11
Of course, this essay depends on one believing in a personal God. If one does not, then the essay is merely a thought exercise. Can we construct the mental image of the benevolent, creative ideal?
1
Sigh---yes--and every particle is simultaneously a wave, and Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive, and electrons are a probability wave in Hilbert space, and nobody has any idea what energy or gravity are.
And the entire physical universe was created from nothing 13.7 billion years ago.
Tell me more about logical inconsistency......
24
I think it's best not to mix scientific models and religious/philosophical thought. They typically answer different types of questions and need not be mutually exclusive.
2
@ras---Quantum theory has been proven by many experiments--despite its paradoxes--to be the most accurate picture we have of the physical world. What are the proofs of the existence of a god?
10
The word God, to me, is short-hand for the divine creative intelligence life-force that permeates all that is. It's in you. And me. And that rock. And the hamster over there. It doesn't judge. It doesn't send to heaven or hell. Rather it's metaphor for what we create right here right now through our actions and beliefs. It doesn't need us to worship it, but when we express gratitude to the life-force it is rejuvenating to us, ourselves.When violence or cruelty happens it's not because there's 'not God' but because the person perpetuating the violence or cruelty lacks a sense of the divine (empathy, compassion, etc.). My personal opinion/spirituality. I've not doubt others disagree. That's okay. To me, the divine is deeply personal. Not about dogma or human intermediaries.
7
Wow this is extremely stupid. Atterton never explains why knowing and experiencing are the same thing, likely because they are not! The absurdity should be obvious. Would anyone argue that God can't know everything about someone because he hasn't been that person?
I think its safe to say faith is supra-rational or above reason, but the God of the Philosophers cannot be so easily refuted.
2
Excuse me while I gaze into my navel.
4
The most illogical doctrine we come across in the Bible is that God cannot simply forgive sin. He created the world in all its glory, but nevertheless, punishment has to go somewhere. According to the New Testament, in order to spare humans from eternal punishment, God had to come to earth in the form of His own son in order to suffer for the sins of mankind.
If Judas had not pointed out Jesus to the Romans, Jesus wouldn't have been crucified. Everyone would have to go to Hell. Christians should be profoundly grateful to Judaw for enabling Jesus to suffer on the cross in order to save us from damnation.
2
Jesus was a known "problem" for the Jewish powers that were. He had been a pain in the neck for the corrupt temple bureaucracy.
So, whether it was Judas or someone else in league with the Sanhedrin, Jesus would eventually become the target of assasination or arrest.
@George Jochnowitz "Christians should be profoundly grateful to Judaw for enabling Jesus to suffer on the cross in order to save us from damnation."
Did he know this is what he was doing?
@George Jochnowitz Yeah, Christianity would seem inseparable from its Gnostic history, considering the need for the Logos and Demiurge conflict.
For some of us our belief in God was passed down to us by our parents which was passed down to them from their parents, etc. We followed their example because we experienced the power of God in our lives. We needed to have presence of a higher power.
God said if you have faith as big as a mustard seed, you can move a mountain. Belief in God is a given and somewhat of a mystery for many. There are so many unanswered questions but all I know is he is the most important person in my life. I could not survive without him which is not to say I use him as a crutch.
Some say hell does not exist and for some people this appears to be the case. When you see the evil people do, you have to wonder that this is what many people believe. I do think there is a hell reserved for the worst of mankind. When judgement day arrives, I hope he will be merciful and allow the deserving into heaven.
And what is your version of hell? Fire and Brimstone? If so, you can thank Dante Allegheri for that image. Hell may be the absence of full Love of God, since why would a truly loving want to see any aspect of his/her creation suffer in the spiritual world?
1
Of course the following ignores whether there really is a God, as in some form of superior form/force.
The concept of God exists as a foil, so to speak, to reality. Reality being what we sense as human being. It enabled the explaining of the unexplained. And continues to do so.
3
I don't claim to be either philosopher or elevated in religious thought. But there seem to be so many holes in these arguments that you could run a truck through them all. The primary problem with this opinion piece is the way "God" is described, as omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect. I think there is an argument that none of these adjectives describe what is generally considered to be "God." How about vibration or energy of love so powerful that it connects everything, literally everything that exists and upon that background man acts well or not well as his free will dictates? Anthropomorphizing God seems as useless as doing the same with animals.
4
As noted in the article, these arguments are not new and they have been dealt with by Christian theologians for centuries. Also, I think most Christians would agree that it is philosophically indefensible to leave Christ’s incarnation out of any serious discussion of Christianity—the author simply defines away the answer to his question instead of grappling with it.
Thus, although I am all for a serious, reasoned discussion of philosophical questions, this article is not particularly persuasive. Furthermore, it has almost nothing to do with the experience of the numinous that many people have in their lives. It is no answer to those who believe they have partaken of the sacred that the experience was illogical (even if this article was successful in identifying such illogicality).
6
I assume that when people go into a church, mosque or synagogue to pray, that they are confident that a deity is there to listen to those prayers. But where was that deity when shots rang out recently at churches, mosques and a synagogue, as people were saying their prayers? If their God cannot or will not protect them when they are in conversation with him (or her), what's the point of praying?
11
@David I suspect people can't endure the notion that there's nobody driving the bus (and that the bus is driving around in circles).
4
Maybe it isn't about what you can gain materially from it.
2
Philosophical games are fun. But God is not a philosophical concept; He has revealed Himself to us and, as nearly as we could get the message, He said we should think of Him as omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely good and infinitely merciful.
And, to really blow tiny little philosophical minds, He revealed that He loves us and wants to help up to attain holiness.
The rest of the message can only be learned by dedicating oneself to Him and living in Him, not by philosophical word games, not by politicking, not by calling people rude names on the Internet.
3
Professor Atterton, thank you for your cogent writing here. Once again, we have a demonstration of how silly all this speculation about the existence of god is - especially its multitudinous accompanying dogmas.
All of the history of our evolution demonstrates that once human self consciousness emerged we had to ask where did it come from. Since the earliest assessments was that humans could not have evolved consciousness out of our own spectacular brains the next best explanation everywhere was it must have been god in all his and her myriad forms. Everywhere, in all cultures, local humans invented god.
Humans' capacity to imagine anything clearly includes the imagining of god. We haven't yet properly got to the implications the awful realisation that we - all sentient humans everywhere for all time - are god - and that we are responsible for everything that emerges out of our consciousness. What happens to us in our world is our responsibility. It has nothing to do with any invented God anytime anywhere.
6
Since you believe the concept of God is silly, please explain to us how physical existence came into being. How did the universe begin? What caused the "Big Bang"?
@Tony Pratt
I agree it is silly to think that God can be contained by the logic of this world.
1
@Tony Pratt
The concept of god that this author rejects is ONLY "silly" when you decide to take his own subjective beliefs for some kind of absolute truth - as you're doing here too, apparently.
Philosophizing doesn't mean rejecting philosophical (or scientific) concept because they're incompatible with your own subjective beliefs. It means having the courage to QUESTION your own beliefs, investigate them so that you discover the implicit assumptions that support them, question the truth of those assumptions etc.
The fact that human brains invented a CONCEPT of god isn't proof at all that god doesn't exist - from a purely rational point of view.
And a PHILOSOPHICAL concept has nothing to do with being true or not, as it's the logical consequence of certain philosophical premisses, which by definition cannot be proven to be true or false.
As to your suggestion that "we are god": MANY very solid philosophies have turned that into real philosophies already. Spinozism does so, for instance...
Years ago, I visited a Fifth Avenue church where the minister preached an excellent sermon, which I've mostly forgotten but had an unforgettable title: "The God That Atheists Don't Believe In Doesn't Exist." His point was that atheists reject the Santa Claus or Sistine Chapel images of God, while most of us grow out of such mental pictures and accept the far more complex idea of a spiritual entity that can't be fully described.
23
After reading in a National Geographic magazine entitled "The Birth of Religion" that religion was created in southern Turkey to keep social order, I felt a sense of relief knowing that it's man made and is inherently flawed. I just wish I didn't spend so much time in my life reading about the many sides of religion.
9
Don't confuse the existence of God with the existence of religion that create their own rules to honor their perspective of God.
1
If I am a King, or a Preacher, I definitely want an all powerful God defined.
God so defined, when I tell "God's people" what God wants, that same God who speaks only through me, then, hey, they better hop to it.
Or else.
And don't forget to be back next Sunday and tithe.
26
"As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect."
Nonsense.
Many philosophers answered this question in a perfectly coherent way.
Let's take Spinoza for instance. In Spinozism (working with an all-powerful, all-knowing god too), lust isn't a sin, to start with. It's merely a human emotion, which can lead to good or bad things according to how we use it. If we decide to have sex with someone in such a way that it increase our freedom (and he has a specific, very original concept of freedom), then that's absolutely perfect.
Envy, on the other hand, is an "inadequate idea", and a "passion", so something the envious person undergoes and that reduces his power. So it's something that we better avoid or try to get rid of. How to get rid of it, by creating an adequate idea of envy in ourselves.
In God's mind, however, there only are adequate ideas. Does that mean that envy isn't part of his mind? No, it is. But is it only part of his mind as part of the adequate idea about envy.
And this is only one of the MANY ways to coherently combine an all-knowing god with ignorant, "sinning" humans.
ONLY when you take this question out of any philosophical context does it loose all sense ...
2
"But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect."
Temptation is not sin. Jesus was tempted in every way we are including feelings of lust and envy, but did not sin.
1
So people shouldn't believe in God because God can't create a stone that can't be lifted, or draw a square circle, or possibly relate to human feeling of lust?
I am surprised at the NYT articles on religion, and the comments they inspire. In a community that is so often inclusive and compassionate, these are uncharacteristically antagonistic and arrogant.
I know caring and wise Christians and I know caring and wise Atheists. What does it matter how they find comfort and purpose? And who should judge them for their beliefs?
20
@Mike M It matters.
Stem cell research is prevented. Birth control is prevented. Wars happen. etc. All because some folks are gullible and some folks are too nice to point it out.
3
God is a hypothetical alternative to no answer at all. However, it is no more plausible than - no answer at all. Please don't suggest that it exists simply because some delusional people claim to have conversed with it. I truly sympathize with those who are desperate to know why there is something rather than nothing. Or, maybe there isn't.
2
The philosophical exercise is amusing, but it misses the fact that imaginary things do not have to follow the rules of logic or reality. There is nothing illogical about the fantasy of an omnipotent, omiscient, and all-good being.
5
@Paul
I think Paul is right. And I think all the other commenters are right, too. I also think God is right. Now I ask them all, including God: Do you believe your point of view because it is true? Or is it true because you believe it? That is, what makes truth true? Either way, it's inescapable that you are the author of truth, which may satisfy your logic, your gut or some other aspect of yourself.
As a philosopher, you should know better than to make a claim such as "a universe in which evil does not exist seems to be logically consistent" without backing it up logically. First off there is the question whether "evil" has any real existence per se. Also, I don't see how a universe containing human beings can be without evil, and if humans weren't here, the concept of "evil" would hardly make any logical sense.
12
I find it somewhat confounding that human beings think they can decide whether they believe or don't believe in something undefinable, or that has been defined in various ways by other human beings who claim (sometimes with less-than-spiritual intentions) some kind of knowledge that the rest of us aren't privy to. My first thought upon reading this was about the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:
"The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and
unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and
unchanging name."
Knowledge of God is ultimately a personal quest, if one chooses to make such a quest.
If nothing else (although I personally believe that there is a benevolent yet extraordinarily complex divine spirit or presence, based purely on my own experience), it seems to me that if there is no God then everything is God.
I was raised Catholic, but even as a child I never believed that one group of people could be "right" about God (the bearded white guy in the sky with a "naughty or nice" checklist), while the rest of humanity has it all wrong. I used to sit in church and go silent as we were expected to say, "I believe in one holy and apostolic Church," etc.
As I see it, God can be anything.
5
The one thing I know for sure is that I am not the most powerful thing in the Universe; hence, there is something greater than I, greater than all humanity. At the same time, I’ve always been enchanted with the notion of ineffability - another one of the characteristics associated with “God”, along with omnipotent, and omniscient. Which means that anything I might think “God” is, cannot be God, because I am thinking it, so why waste my precious time trying to develop or argue a definition? A friend in Al-Anon said to me, in response to my struggle with the whole “Higher Power” notion that seems so central to all 12 Step programs, “it is what is is.” That is good enough for me.
4
I hope if opinions like this are welcome, theological ones are, too. As a disproof of God, this is clever commentary. Like most clever commentary, it's not very substantial.
The short form of Aquinas' counterargument is that God is not ridiculous, engaging in farces like circular squares. If you need the self-contradictory to be possible, check quantum physics.
God did not offer a world without suffering. He DID offer a world where suffering was shared through Christ, leaving forever the interpretation (and any responsibility thereto) up to us. Christ asked for no vengeance, and instead gave love and forgiveness, defining the infinite power of grace, inherently undeserved. That's our example of how we might emulate the infinite.
Indicting God over not creating a morally perfect world assumes it's both possible and desirable, despite our long track record of doing little to create a system sans suffering. Is the Earth not a fine present? What would you like to do, give it back?
As to omniscience, don't conflate having feelings with having knowledge, and thoughts of sin are not sin per se.
Finally, you assume knowledge cannot be obtained by witnessing rather than enacting. God witnessed malice in man and devil - it's merely revenge, enacted for covetousness held up as virtue, unsatisfied. God doesn't know malice by your premise merely because the premise is a farce.
He who indulges is no longer tempted - maybe the man who succumbed to no temptation knew the most of all.
18
Cats play with mice and small birds and they do so with the same intensity that a toddler plays with a wind-up toy or an 8 year old plays with a remote controlled car. I know this because I, being a cat owner, have been brought many tailless mice still very much alive, to play with or poor little birds the size of my pinkie finger. By the opposite side of that same token, my toddler to pre-school children brought me stuff toys that needed ears sewn back on or a missing eye replaced or a wind-up toy whose gear had slipped because of over winding.
That is the sorts of experiences that taught me that the concept of 'GOD' is not understood by philosophers nor is it understood by so-called religious authorities. God to us humans is some one who consoles us and makes us useful again.
1
Pretty clear that Schopenhauer didn’t have knowledge of cats and mice. Or wasn’t that awful perceptive.
1
"God can only do that which is logically possible."
If that is the definition of omnipotence than all of us are omnipotent, since we can ALL do anything that is logically possible. Thus, the reason why I cannot fly is that, according to the laws of physics, that is simply not possible. The reason that I cannot walk through walls is that, again, according to the laws of physics, that is not possible. The reason I cannot create my own planet is that, according to the laws of physics, matter can neither be created or destroyed.
2
Brush up on the first law of thermodynamics and revisit your last sentence.
3
I guess I can't see the point of talking about the Easter Bunny's nature and qualities, when it is not known whether the Easter Bunny even exists. To try to prove or disprove the existence of the Easter Bunny through a discussion of its nature and qualities seems to be going at things backwards.
In the words of the immortal Joe King, "It's a question of which came first, the cart or the horse."
9
The question of whether God can be perfect, all-powerful and all-knowing seems in my opinion not to need so much mental gymnastics. It was dealt with quite extensively in Rabbi Harold Kushner's book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" all the way back in 1981. If we substitute "all-good" for "perfect," then what is a "perfect," all-knowing and all-powerful being doing allowing so much misery and suffering to occur to sentient beings? Obviously, either the conception of God as such a being is false to begin with, or one of those three qualities has to be false. Any other formulation, any other Olympian positioning of God, minimizes and denies suffering in some way and excuses our own hard-heartedness.
4
Dear Peter Atterton,
today, as any philosopher is supposed to know, we have Aristotelian logic, we have paraconsistent logic (and mathematics), and so many other systems of logic.
In paraconsistent logics, Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction is no longer valid.
So if you want to continue to use this principle, you should JUSTIFY that decision, as a philosopher.
Instead, you don't do so, you do something much worse: you take your own unquestioned assumptions (as an atheist, apparently) for proven truths, and then call the obvious logical incompatibilities between your subjective beliefs and certain monotheistic philosophical god concepts as "proof" that those concepts THEMSELVES must somehow be "incoherent".
All that you've shown, however, is that there is an incoherence between your assumptions, and those of the philosophies that you're (extremely superficially) referring to.
HOW on earth can you call such an exercise "philosophizing", rather than what Plato called its opposite, namely "doxaphilia" (the love of subjective opinions) ... ?
Any arguments?
From a fellow atheist philosopher.
8
@Ana Luisa
Why would an atheist philosopher waste time debating what they believe to be false
@Alison Cartwright
Because philosophy is about NEVER confounding personal, subjective belief and proven truth, on the one hand, and because the history of philosophy has shown that from a philosophical point of view, many different concepts of god are conceivable and lead to highly interesting philosophies.
1
72 years ago, the story in my family runs, I met the pastor of our Baptist church somewhere, and looked up at him and said, with a child's lisp, "Ithn't God's love wonderful?" .... and pleased my parents with my devout views. I've lived much of the intervening years with that as my faith.
Many of the comments speak of god as man's invention. But isn't the story told by Jews one in which God revealed himself to a small number of their ancestors? Let's--just for a moment--consider the possibility that god "introduced" himself to mankind as the creator. It's easy to be superior and say that science has dispelled such child-like ideas.... but we're still left with many unanswered questions.
Lately a conversation Jesus is said to have had has bothered me: He said that god knows when each sparrow falls.... and he added "You are more valuable than many sparrows." I can no longer square the idea of a loving, omniscient, powerful god with what is going on in the world. If god is as loving and powerful as Christians assert, how can we account for his apparent indifference to thousands of kids starving in Yemen? The easy answer is that he has a grand plan that contains all that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I can no longer accept that as a sufficient response. So now, 72 years later, I'm wondering.... puzzled.... no longer sure of the evangelical "answer." I'm hopeful.... but not confident.
6
The opposition of Darwin to Plantinga on free will presumes a discontinuity between human beings and other animals. If instead we look to Peirce and assume that all living things are continuous with each other, we face no logical barrier to the idea that all of the universe is evolving in accord with a divine plan that includes widespread ability to make choices. Darwin's personal religious beliefs may have been in favor of a discontinuity between human beings and other animals. Evolutionary science is not.
If philosophy is concerned about the meaning of existence, it should be less concerned about tearing down theology and more concerned about discovering the reality that it is trying to deny.
3
Plenty of philosophy has been theological in nature.
1
I am not trying to proselytize or anything, but many of these objections are actually quite resolved in the theological tradition of the Orthodox Church (but perhaps that doesn't count as "western"). The whole creation (cosmos) was made fundamentally good and beautiful, if imperfect (i.e., incomplete and lacking a full communion with its Creator). Humanity's role is that of priest-king made in the image of God (hence, including attributes such as capacity for reason and freewill). The Transgression (the "Fall" and Original Sin are constructs of the Latin-speaking Church; the difference is not insignificant) had cosmic consequences. Thus, the brokenness and evil in the world is largely a symptom of a deeper cosmic systemic illness. That might raise difficulties with notions of perfect justice, but these are resolved by the notion of communion and also by the incarnation (despite this author's assertions about the difficulties raised therein). None of this is to say that faith is easy or even entirely rational, but it isn't so simply dismissed, either.
7
It's almost like if you make up imaginary rules for your imaginary friend then it doesn't make much sense when you then try to apply reason. How strange.
Philosophy should not be confused or conflated with theology.
17
@Neill
Philosophy proposes new concepts and coherent relations between them.
Since it exists, it has proposed many different concepts of god. More than 50% of the time, it worked with concepts of "finite" gods (including in Christian philosophies).
It's useless to want to try to get rid of religions by simply declaring that they shouldn't philosophize ...
2
@Ana Luisa
I did not declare they shouldn't philosophize, it would do them good. I'm observing that what they do instead is theologize. There is a reason we have different words for these things.
Philosophy is enquiry into open questions, theology is trying to explain your starting conclusions.
4
@Neill
ALL philosophies have answered the questions they invented - including all monotheistic philosophies.
Many theologies, as a consequence, are philosophical (as many theologians received a very solid training as philosophers before they became theologians).
That some of them are not is no reason at all to prohibit religious philosophers to propose philosophical concepts of god - as from the very beginning both Christianity and Islam have done.
A theology is a theory about god. It can be philosophical or not. NO single concept in itself can ever allow you to declare an entire theory philosophical or not.
2
The following sentence struck me as the crux (pun) of the flaw in the essay. "A morally perfect being would never get enjoyment from causing pain to others." According to what system of morality? God's or Man's.
3
There is no god. There is only an inability for humans to reconcile suffering and cruelty as random or intentional events in the natural and emotional worlds they inhabit. Religion is a for-profit corporation with highly effective emotional marketing.
102
@Misplaced Modifier
Not only is religion (at least organized religion) a for-profit venture, it's the most heavily tax subsidized industry in the United States.
11
Look, I'm a philosopher and atheist, but I have to admit that I hate reading "opinions" like this.
What the author calls "logical inconsistencies" are actually simply questions that he admits he can't answer without having thoroughly studied the many great Western philosophies that answered them, which he obviously didn't do yet.
It's absurd and profoundly anti-philosophical to take philosophical concepts totally out of context and then pretend that they don't make any sense.
Pascal, for instance, has CREATED a concept of reason that no longer allows him to give "rational" answers to this kind of questions, and then your concept of "faith" becomes not irrational, but a-rational.
Many other Christian and Muslim philosophers created totally different concepts of reason, where faith is entirely "rational", and where coherent answers are given to these questions.
This author LEAVES philosophizing as soon as he decided to blatantly ignore all the philosophies that work with this kind of concept of god, and instead take his own, subjective, impossible-to-prove opinion (= that there is no omnipotent and omniscient God) as basis to reject concepts of god based on the opposite assumption.
As an atheist and philosopher, I know tons of people doing this to "philosophy" today. And I immensely regret it, as only philosophizing, in the real sense of this notion, is what will allows us to develop a RATIONAL attitude towards religions and combat both religious abuses and fake news.
22
the divine to me is the totality of infinity to include all things that the human mind can and cannot comprehend to include paradox. Ohr Ein Sof.
All those arguments just go away when there is no longer any conflicts. Evolution, science, omnipotence and on and on are all part of the infinite.
1
@Armisis: Huh????
@Larry "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Try reading books which you instinctively disagree with upon first glance and are not part of the standard curriculum of right brain heterodoxy. It'll give you a wild ride you could never imagine if you allow yourself to be open to it! <3
@Larry "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Try reading books which you instinctively disagree with upon first glance and are not part of the standard curriculum of left brain heterodoxy. It'll give you a wild ride you could never imagine if you allow yourself to be open to it! <3
"But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned"
Says who? That is one particular religious viewpoint. Another perfectly valid viewpoint is that feeling lust or envy is not sinful; acting upon those feelings in ways that harm others is what's sinful.
23
@Roberta
Of course.
And that's only one of the MANY possible objections here.
You can't get rid of "religious" by claiming that it's by definition philosophically incoherent, precisely because religions created their OWN philosophies, and the "coherence" of a philosophical concept is always that between the definition of that concept and the philosophical inside of which that definition was created. ALL great philosophers were philosophers who managed to invent definitions coherent with their entire philosophy.
Take those definitions OUT of the philosophy that created them, however, and start comparing them to other philosophies or, as this author is doing here, comparing them to mere subjective opinions, and then of course the initial coherence is gone.
That's not because those philosophies are "logically inconsistent", it's simply because the author took the totally anti-philosophical decisions to start defining "logically coherent" as "what is compatible with my own subjective opinion" ...
Conclusion - and with all respect: this op-ed is FAKE PHILOSOPHY.
4
This article presupposes a picture of "God" that would in fact more accurately be called a demiurge (cf. David Hart). It is not hard to challenge the demiurge. But in philosophical terms, God in classical western theology is "the ground of Being"--very much akin to what in Eastern metaphysics is called the Tao. The important philosophical questions have to do with the relationship between contingency and necessity, immanence and transcendence, and finite being(s) and Being itself. It would be interesting to hear Atterton rehearse some version of the arguments in this piece as an attempted refutation of Lao Tzu's statement that "The unnamable is the eternally real." One suspects that the rehearsal would primarily establish not that Taoism is incoherent but rather that Atterton had no understanding of the basics of Taoist thought.
7
@Ronald Osborn ouch! Love your point!
Of course, there is a God, and of course, it is the saints who are the sinners who keep on trying. With thanks for the assist from Robert Louis Stevenson.
2
@Rob Clemenz:Of course, there is a God. Prove it.
@Rob Clemenz: I don't know about a god, but Geaux Saints!!
"Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?"
Of course not. It doesn't have to. It's RELIGION. That does not require it to make sense, only that those who wish to believe in it.
Do you attempt to explain apples in terms of oranges?
2
@Joe G.
There is NO logic on the entire earth that allows you to declare this concept illogical.
As this op-ed shows, it LOOSES all sense as soon as you project onto it many other assumptions that are logically incompatible with it.
Fact is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have produced OUTSTANDING philosophers, for centuries and centuries, who have come up with all the assumptions needed to make those philosophical concepts perfectly coherent.
And nobody ever managed to prove that those assumptions are wrong, nor does Peter Atterton here.
In fact, he doesn't even TRY to do so, he merely takes his own subjective opinions as being somehow by definition true, and then observes that they aren't compatible with certain philosophical concepts of god...
3
There's more than a little irony in - rationally and reasonably - questioning God's existence, but calling God "He" as you do so - without any supporting argument or evidence of reflection to justify doing so. So you're sure that God does not exist but that God is male - is that right?
"The calling of God 'He' is the seeking to make a man of God and gods of men." It's the best evidence that God is only a (male) human invention in my opinion. They really didn't see me coming - did they?
7
"But to say that God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others is to say that God is capable of malicious enjoyment. However, this cannot be true if it really is the case that God is morally perfect. A morally perfect being would never get enjoyment from causing pain to others. Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human."
First of all, for Christians God himself became human and died on the cross, so of course experienced firsthand what getting enjoyment from causing pain to others means. There's nothing inherently "incoherent" about this.
Secondly and more importantly, it's this AUTHOR who - contrary to all great philosophers - proposes to define "morally perfect" by "never personally feeling joy when causing pain to others", without giving ANY philosophical foundation for his choice of this kind of definition - and that in itself makes his statement non-philosophical by definition ...
Obviously, philosophers who work will an all-knowing god concept work with a totally different definition of "morally perfect".
The only MORAL reaction to seeing people feeling joy when inflicting pain, in that case, is to UNDERSTAND WHY this joy can happen. And that means to understand that that person has suffered so much in his own life that now only inflicting onto other what he has suffered himself, creates a kind of well-being. THAT, however, is not REAL well-being, but merely ignorance - as Jesus said: "forgive them because they know not what they did".
2
The author of the article and the cited philosophers are using a system of logic invented by human beings to reach conclusions about something(s) that is (are) metaphysical.
This artificial logic fails even in some environments that we've arbitrarily labeled as "real". Human systems of logic, whether inductive, deductive, "fuzzy", or , any other system of human logic, is not easily applied to Quantum Electrodynamics.
"Probably" or "except in the case of" must sometimes be used to describe events on the quantum scale which seem to defy our logical analyses. "The math can be used to prove that this (these) event(s) is (are) logical". Yes, human-invented math does say that. Good thing we invented math, too.
Can any aspect of an incomprehensible "god", or "gods", or neither, or all three, or something else, be understood by applying human logic? "Logic" says no.
Oops. I should have said, "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem" says no. Unfortunately Godel was also human, and used human logic to formulate his theorem.
I give up.
3
The very fact that we are still having this debate after centuries of the best philosophers arguments and debates only establishes one thing - there is no valid reason to believe in any of the religious claims, or that there is somebody outside of time and space(whatever that means!) looking over us. If there was a way to rationalize, we would have already done it.
2
@Guest
And there is no reason that we be shouldn't be amoral nihilists. If you are a materialist/atheist and not a nihilist, you are not thinking hard enough. Ideas about good and bad, let alone good and evil, are mental constructs that are meaningless outside of human society. If science is right, we have no free will and are just automatons, and all human action is governed by the survival instinct.
Some will say morality is needed for the survival of the species. This is probably true, and a product of our survival instinct, but the survival of any species is not, in and of itself, good or evil. That is just a human value judgement.
BTW, I am a mainline liberal Protestant with little in common with Evangelical Fundamentalism. Though hanging by a thread to my faith. I'm a political leftist because of this faith. Pascal was right.
3
LIke many others raised in the Western intellectual tradition, I grew up with a concept of God derived and filtered throught the Western European concept of religion which is fact is largely derived from Roman Catholicism, itself a synthesis of Greco-Roman Paganism and Judaism. This is a source of a theistic idea that God is somehow a separate entity from oneself or Humanity in general, a very nice, neat and easily conceived and articulated concept of God in the Roman cultural and political tradition. Hence, God is a kind of Supernatural or Supreme Being or Deity. And growing up having absorbed that tradition, I have also been an "atheist" as long as I remember. Lately, for reasons far too complex and personal to include here, I come to the realization (intuition? insight? revelation?) that "divinity" is both inside us and outside of us. This "Oneness," characterized and celebrated in the Hebrew Prayer (She'ma), is paradoxical and makes perfect sense (too the extent something can be paradoxical and still make perfect sense.) God then becomes something to which we contribute and on which we depend. God includes the individual, free will but also personal collective history and "inheritance" or Karma. It also includes community and fellowship. It includes the past and the future even as we contribute to that future. When on appreciates the inter-dependence of God, self and each other, the effect is both empowerment and humility.
10
@RNW so beautifully put. Thank you! Especially this: "God then becomes something to which we contribute and on which we depend."
2
@RNW: Humans resonate between cooperation and competition.
1
As a girl, I was raised in a very traditional Roman Catholic house with a father who expected my mother to obey him because that is what she said in her marriage vows to him in the 1950's.
I figured out as a teenager that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and of course male God was most likely created by men to prop up the patriarchy. That the Catholic priesthood was/is all male only cemented the theory for me that the idea of God was made up by men to keep women subservient to them.
167
Perhaps best to believe what God is, the same way as to believe what Trump says...
Metaphorically, not literally...
A species that can construct cathedrals around crucifixes – and cities around cathedrals – can conjure up a God or several, as needed...
And murder them off as appropriate, too...
Mike Pence gets a lot of flak from the opposing team because of some of his beliefs and behavior on personal relationships and intimacy...
I actually share a lot of those views...
What I don’t share is a belief in imposing them on other people...
Let them find their own way – and their own God...
As far as those who’d hector me to believe more deeply, just in case...
In that case, I intend to sneak across an unguarded part of the border – with the optimistic belief that there’ll be sanctuary cities in Heaven...
Literally...
6
What is the point of this article? It was barely relevant 300 years ago. Surely Philosophers have other issues to think about.
8
@Steve Pomerantz Amen, no pun intended. And furthermore, what is the point of philosophers? To codify handwringing?
1
A philosopher said, "one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them." God replied, "Says who?"
4
@Thomas Zaslavsky —which philosopher said that? For that matter, which God?
@Larry D
It's a parable.
Oh for God's sake!
I say this emphatically as a response to the philosophers and those now who stroke their wise chins and opine long and loud.
We will never, and can never really know the somewhat ridiculous parsing of detail and paradox that is on display in this article.
I say this as someone who deeply believes in an Almighty as well as a Spirit World, however, I do not for a moment ascribe 'rules' and behavior concepts to my belief.
I see God at the most fundamental atomic, and sub-atomic level, including and especially the so-called Dark Matter' which holds all that enormous energy in it's stability. This is where the deepest of all Mysteries reside and to me is a way of realizing that God is indeed everywhere and everything, including time and space.
For all you Human Chauvinists out there, we are not in a zoo.
6
@Stephen Csiszar: "Dark Matter" is the "ether" of classical physics, an energy storage and propagation medium. In quantum mechanics, everything is waves,
1
The idea that "god" would create a universe which he/she/it would then proceed to watch over, listening to its inhabitants' (i.e., "our") every thought and observing every action—effectively rendering this divine being more a servant to the universe rather than its master—has never made sense to me. Not to mention countless other inconsistencies in the narrative (Where did god come from? Why would he be compelled to create a universe in the first place? Was he bored? Etc.)
Much more likely that we invented god—an idea which fits well with our quite natural narcissism.
45
I don’t think reaching a conclusion has ever much been the point of pondering godness, which I personally see every where at all times in all forms ultimately unknowable. The journey is the gd too. Wait what?
1
I think we got stuck with a baby God. Maturity is a ways away given the time scale of infinity. In the meanwhile, all bets are off.
4
The smug complacency of philosphers telling us that God cannot know something without experiencing it, to me seems proof of the existence of intellectual stupidity. Sorry to offend, but please give me one argument for it.
Remember that God is not a superior type of human, but an unknowable being. "Unknowable" does not mean anything can be true, it means precisely that we cannot know what God is like. There are two reasons to support this opinion about knowing God. First, we don't know what kind of being God is, so we can't know how God's mind works. Second, even if we did know what kind of being God is, we have no data on which to make conclusions about how God's mind works.
But if God is thought to be a superior type of human, thus similar to humans in the working of his/her/its mind, then we are back at a childish notion of God. This notion seems incompatible with omnipotence, omniscience, and perfection.
5
A lot of atheists do not claim that there is no god, just the fact that they cannot believe in such things without compelling evidence.
Children grow out of believing in Santa Claus. No matter how disappointed they are at discovering the truth, they have to accept that there is no such person because no matter how hard they look, they cannot find the evidence.
So too should humans grow out of the belief in a supernatural deity. No matter how disappointed you feel, if you cannot find the evidence, or rationalise such a belief, you must let go. This belief has been a crutch for far too long, and caused so much suffering.
112
That God could not create a world without evil and suffering is inconsistent with the idea that there is a heaven.
6
"What a piece of work is man." -Hair
"father, son and the holy ghost" -New Testament
Reading the male, ego-drenched pomposity of this philosophical macho-god-bro-love, its easy to see how misogyny entered into the frame. Apple anyone?
6
@martha hulbert—actually, “Hair” lifted that from “Hamlet”. Not that it would matter to you, since Shakespeare was just another of those dreadful “ego-drenched macho bros”!
1
@martha hulbert "What a piece of work is a man..." HAMLET!! Act 2 Scene 2
2
@martha hulbert
Sure is, indeed, easy to see how misogyny entered into the frame. It does seem to BE the frame, at times.
2
Aren't we past the point where this kind of thing is taken seriously? People need to focus on the real world.
7
@JackC5
The vast majority of people now and in the past have believed in a transcendent reality we can call "God".
Their evidence ? The real world.
1
It should be self-evident to any rational and literate person, unclouded by either indoctrination or wishful thinking, that the kind of god described in the first sentence does not and cannot exist. Nor do those who profess to believe in one really do so, for the god of the Abrahamic religions is evidently jealous, petty, vengeful and indifferent to suffering. Let's not even talk about the stuff he supposedly did in the "Old Testament." No (sane, human) parent would ever conceive of burning his or her children for a moment for any crime, even murder, much less burning them forever in unquenchable fire. Yet their god threatens just that for much less justification. Nor is there the slightest bit of evidence that prayers work with any greater frequency than the laws of probability would dictate.
19
@Publius. Think of it more as a parent desperately and constantly reaching out for a child who will simply not turn and grab the parent’s hand. God wants us to be fully human. Our tendency to sin is what makes us turn away from God and makes us less human (spell it humane if that helps). God is always reaching for us with open arms. He wants us to treat each other and our environment with loving care. When we turn away from our fellow human beings (and God) through our lies, hatred, gossip, greed, anger, impatience, etc, etc, we are less human. When we see the humanity of our enemies, we are more human. The Hell of which you speak is simply when you have so turned in on yourself, into the depths of your own ego, that you are no longer with God at all, and also are the least human you could be. If instead, you choose to be fully human, you embrace the love of God, which, in perfection, is represented by a bunch of humans loving each other as much as God loves us, for eternity, Heaven. Read the Bible more as a study in Inuit parenting techniques per the recent article on NPR. A bit of scare tactics, but underneath and throughout, a loving desire of the parent to raise calm, thoughtful, kind humans who know how to live well together and love each other.
1
It CAN hold together with the right twisting. God creates everything possible, and that can only be called omnipotence. But that comprehensive Creation implies new possibilities, which must then be created. Thus we have time, constant new creation orthogonal to existing creation in infinite new ways. God is limited only by Its own compulsion to create infinitely, which impairs Its will to promote the success of intelligent beings (because they aid in improving and creating since they magnify input, and that is needed because the constant new comprehensive creation includes massive imperfection that needs to be corrected). God is benevolent in the sense of having goodwill to humanity generally, but not necessarily in the sense of having infinite love for every individual. Obviously. And is technically omnipotent. So God is a consequentialist with a compulsive addiction.
The absolute incoherence of the omnipotent traditional Western "God" is more than overcome by his billions of followers running around moving goalposts in every rational argument involving the "man upstairs." Don't even bother.
21
I am sorry, but as a former graduate student in philosophy, I find this essay extremely lightweight and dismissive, in a few paragraphs, of major discussions of the nature of God by Western philosophers over many centuries. God cannot be dismissed so easily! It is simply not true that current professors of philosophy all agree that "God is dead" or that the concept of God (which concept is differently defined by varied philosophers) is self-contradictory. Book after book has been written on the topic. I believe that if the Times publishes an agnostic-atheist opinion piece like this it has a duty to present an opposing essay by an upholder of God's majesty and non-contradictory reality. Let the readers decide on a topic of this magnitude, rather than the editors, please.
26
@Vivid Hugh God is Dead! Long live God!!
2
“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.” Henry David Thoreau.
It’s now 2019 - aren’t we past Bronze Age lines of thought?
9
The view of God argued here does not conform to that of the Old Testament; it is a later Christian view, infused with neo-Platonism and Hellenism.
2
God does not think in human terms and does not understand human emotions in the way people experience them. In Genesis God chastised Cain for not giving Him a proper offering. He did not recognize that Cain was depressed and needed patience and understanding. The result was an explosion of narcissistic rage from Cain directed at Abel, resulting in the first murder. If God understood Cain's emotional needs he would have been more sensitive to him. Also, Jews do not believe that thoughts are sinful, only actions.
2
The harder part, for me, is not so much believing in God as believing that God should care about us. That's what really requires faith.
6
Any god is a product of human imagination. There’s neithe one nor any one all encompassing god being. It’s a matter of faith and convenience. You have only considered western Christian dogma. The label of god itself is problematic! Tha’s why there’s diversity in the world. To each it’s own.
3
There are a number of issues which merit further exploration. The inherent dimension of “ all knowing,” is information about... It is not understanding! Of whatever type, level or quality. Is Western “God,” of whatever theological underpinning even adequately understanding? What, for example, did/does God understand about a human toxic, daily, empowered WE-THEY culture which enables, and even promotes violating, by words and deeds, created, selected and targeted “ the other(s)?” Lives. Limbs. Psyches and souls! God is moral? Playing with numbers, arbitrarily, in a dialogue with Abraham, about adults, children,unborn fetuses, guilty of what sin, non-human creations in and f Sodom, including its very earth, all holocausted! God is moral? During the Holocaust? Man’s search for God, and God’s search for Man, a la Rabbi-Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel, is much too important to be constrained by a one-time newspaper article, of whatever length and depth, or to be framed only within philosophical dimensions.
At least she roots for my football team after we go to so much trouble to pray for her support. The other guys are just stinky-faces pretending to pray.
4
To paraphrase Thomas Paine, "Humanity is my sibling, the world is my country and to do good is my religion."
15
Consider the possibility that a human mind isn’t capable of comprehending the full Being of God and that, while our philosophizing on Him may bring a closer understanding, it is foolish to think God is constrained by our human reason.
1
@Jon F
Why, "Him"?
This all-loving Christian God hates LGBTQ folks. Here in Texas (ugh, I know), our all-loving Christians are trying to pass laws allowing people with "strongly held religious beliefs" to discriminate on the basis of gender. Can't square that by saying, "Oh, he really doesn't; he just doesn't approve of their lifestyles." There's got to be a better God than the Christian one. There has to be. If there is a God, it would be impossible for there not to be a better one. The bar's so low that any deity is better than the one they worship. It's time to move on to a better God. She's out there somewhere . . . maybe. Otherwise, we ought to do what's innately right: treat each other the way we'd like to be treated. The presence of that innate feeling of equality and goodness is proof that the Christian God is false.
8
And God, at least in the view of many Christians, could send you to a really bad place where you will burn forever if you simply deny his existence or refuse to kneel before him in worship.
What if the parents of a child did things like this to that child? We wouldn't be very happy with them. In fact, we would likely hate them and seek serious punishment.
But not God. He is infinitely good, but he is also apparently so narcissistic that he demands worship, and he'll burn you if you fail him. Lunacy!
39
A Stone Age superstition still “compelling” dimwits to commit very “ungodly” acts against man and beast. Someday when the last place of worship falls on the last “man of god” we will truly have a Golden Age.
10
If God is all powerful, God can’t be prisoner of human logic, God is beyond human logic (Descartes, creator of analytic geometry, and Pascal, a creator of calculating machines understood this). Thus God can lift an unliftable stone. (Saint Thomas had a petty vision of God, as subject to human logic.)
The problem with evil is exactly the same: God and evil co-exist, it's nothing humans can understand (that exact argument is held by God Itself in the Qur'an). The very co-existence of a good God and Evil is a proof of the existence of God, as it shows something is beyond human logic, thus all-mighty.
If Man can find pleasure in tormenting, Man will be capable of exterminating other conscious beings. The latter is fundamental not just to ecological balance, but to the survival of the genus Homo. Infliction of pain is justified beyond the individual, the group, or even the species.
What wisdom did Pascal find in the God of Abraham? In that apparently cruel, illogical, somewhat demented, sometimes smart and good, Creator? Well, the inner logic of our own ethology: we are all children of a creative process we are made to abandon ourselves to, because we have no choice: creation itself, biological evolution, a process we don't understand, but which certainly exists, and has all the characteristics of "God".
Thus inventing God was a preliminary to discovering evolution. (More prosaically, "God" was simply how late Roman emperors justified their God-like tyranny.)
3
God doesn’t have to explain Himself to you. He has told us only so much as He was pleased to. And there’s no reason to imagine that there’s more to this world than there appears to be. What you believe and practice is your affair; He’ll go on about His business. The consequences are yours.
1
Just read Job. The "problems" outlined here are all about language, definitions, rhetoric, and limited logic constructions. These are human issues.
1
The conclusion, is that like Pascal one should root his beliefs about God in the Bible.
Pascal, Newton, and ultimately Einstein, acknowledged Him.
Much greater philosophers have grappled with these questions, Maimonedese and much of Talmud come to mind.
After one exhausts those wisdoms, maybe one is qualified to write an op-Ed. Until then, it is drivel.
1
We're constantly told that the Christian God is 'all good' and before creation presumably all alone, so only 'good'. Surely the universe this being created could only be 'all good', hence his Adam and Eve could not 'choose', what did not exist i.e. evil. Why would a God like this inflict evil on his 'loved' creations? Nice guy.
6
There is no evidence for the existence of any god. The sooner religion is rejected by mankind the sooner we can truly progress.
6
There is no God.
It's really obvious.
Get used to it and start working for a better world using your talents.
6
This article explains quite well how and why Religion is a declining force in American Life.
1
Sapien means wise. Religion is the enemy of wisdom.
4
@al
I'm with Dawkins on the subject of god. Considering the thousands of gods that existed throughout human history and have long ago been cast aside, both believers and nonbelievers are atheists. “I just believe in one less god than you do.”
There is a huge moral repugnance to the idea that the existence of evil allows men and women to do evil in order to give them free will to do good or evil, in the context of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was allowed in order to give the German perpetuators of the Holocaust the privilege of free will to do good or evil?
That is really an evil obnoxious repugnant thought and sentiment.
13
No god, know peace.
4
It is enough to know that Jesus, while suffering for a day, on the cross and knowing he was omnipotent and would soon have everlasting life - lamented - "Father - Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?" Then 1600 years later in Jesus's name, the Christians take Giordano Bruno - imprison him for 8 years, endlessly try to break him, tortures him - and he never yields, he stands with his own beliefs that there suns and other worlds throughout the universe. Then at last being taken to his death by fire, nails driven though his tongue and pallet - he rejects the cross or Bible at the end.
When mortal man far exceeds a God in their capacity to demonstrate courage of their convictions - then did the God cease to exist. We ought honor Bruno and not Christ. Homo insipiens would better be our title.
3
Could there be a theology in which reason is "a basis for faith"? If there were, it would be difficult to know whether it was reason which was the basis for faith or the reasoner. That reasonable people arrive, through reason, at contradictory conclusions should give a theologian pause. Theology should be thoroughly reasonable, a point Pascal makes. But it would be unreasonable for theology to be based on reason. Only God can disclose God. If, apart from God, we discovered God, faith would rest in our powers of discovery.
Pascal wrote that "there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him." He also wrote: "It will be one of the confusions of the damned to see that they are condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion."
1
@Gary: Are there any good reasons at all to believe things that cannot be proven or disproven?
The human mind is incapable of appreciating that which is impossible to perceive.
G-d is a Western, Christian concept.
There is no word for G-d in the Torah. Other names, kinuim,are often to be found, which are all derivate of the Name havaya, which is impossible for any human to comprehend with our limited, division based, conceptual mask.
You can chase the G-d which you speak of. You will do so in vain.
The G-d you describe is a mere figment of your imagination, your conceptual mind which believes, in vain, that it can comprehend Reality.
Good luck.
2
Why is God necessarily a He? She could be a They as easilily as a male. Why personify God at all? Why not refer to Gaia or Allah — or whoever/whatever one’s God is — as It?
1
@Passion for Peaches
AT LAST. Thanks for pointing out the obvious.
1
My last comment. It's too easy to get sucked down this rabbit hole.
Can Man, with his/her/its limited intellect every truly understand the supernatural, omniscient, omnipresent, nature of the Easter Bunny?
5
The idea of the deity ...is “not coherent”. Not coherent!!! How about “deliberately fraudulent,” promulgated by generations of avaricious hucksters, power-hungry politicians, and unscrupulous con men (and con women.)
The biggest fraud of all is the Biblical attempt to link a god to the creation of the heavens and the earth—or the creation of life. Modern cosmology has demolished that myth. Read Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and the quantum theorists—not the ignorant Bible. The creation of the universe was a natural process, whether you believe or not. Moreover, it is probable that universes outside our own have already been created an infinite number of times.
4
How can a morally perfect god create a world in which suffering exist?
It's a question that many Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers have asked for more than 1,000 years.
ALL great philosophers, in ANY of those traditions, have come up with philosophers that give, WITHIN those philosophies, perfectly rational, coherent answers.
It's only when you ask this philosophical question OUTSIDE of any concrete philosophy that we seem to ignore the answer.
My advice to the author of this op-ed - as an atheist philosopher - start studying Thomas Aquinas seriously. That means: spend a couple of years trying to reconstruct and "deploy" his philosophy, and THEN you'll understand why his answer to this question is perfectly coherent.
Then do the same with all other great philosophies created in the past ... ;-)
1
Nobody knows the origin of matter and energy in the universe, nor the origin of physical laws, including biological evolution. Science is doing a modest job of revealing underlying laws, symmetries, and mathematical relationships behind energetic processes that lead to galaxies, stars, and sentient beings. But it has been said ‘as the circle of light grows so too does the perimeter of darkness’. Western God notions – omnipotence, omnipresence, moral perfection- and their contradictions, are spurious leftovers from puzzled thinkers of long ago that had no astrophysical/cosmological knowledge. (e.g. even positing the notion of an ‘unliftable stone’ is foolish, given what we know of gravitational force). Why is it so hard to admit that the universe is vast, complex, and still far beyond our ken at this time?
4
"The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible."
What gives its sense to this philosophical question is the context in which it's asked.
That context, in the case of Aquinas, was: how to think about definitions of existing things, and their relationship with logic.
In other words, WHAT kind of logical rules did God create? Rules that include Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction (A and non A cannot be true at the same time), or not? As Aquinas' God also has absolutely free will, he can of course decide which kind of logic he'll use to create the world.
Aquinas decided to work with a concept of God where God decided to place the principle of non-contradiction at the very heart of the definition of each kind of thing. From then on, a square circle becomes an object that cannot LOGICALLY exist, as its definition contains a contradiction. That in itself, however, doesn't exclude at all that one day, because of his free will, God decides to create one, as HE's the one who invented logic in the first place, so he can also decide to make an exception here or there.
What this shows is that it's ALWAYS possible to obtain a "coherent" concept of god, everything depends on the context in which you put it ...
3
"As a philosopher myself, I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?"
That's not a PHILOSOPHICAL question, that's a matter of subjective opinion.
"Logic" in itself doesn't tell us what is true and what not. It's only a tool to draw valid and true conclusions from premisses that have been proven to be true too.
And OBVIOUSLY, any philosophical concept of a god receives its meaning from and as a consequence is only coherent WITHIN the specific philosophy that invented that specific concept of god. There is no such a thing as a philosophical concept that would be coherent "in itself", regardless of ANY philosophical context.
So yes of course, when you build your philosophy on certain assumptions (premisses that can't be proven to be true or false, and are often metaphysical), then the notion of a morally perfect, all-powerful and all-knowing God makes perfect sense.
If you reject those premisses, however, you'll have to build other ones and the see whether you can obtain a coherent philosophy again.
It's absurd to declare a concept "incoherent" without looking at the specific context in which that concept makes sense ...
7
I'm an atheist, but even I can see some of the logical flaws of the arguments the author brings up. The author states as fact that one can't know what malice or other negative emotions are like unless one has felt them himself. That may be true of humans, but isn't God supposed to be beyond us? Why would you use human measures to measure an omnipotent being?
52
Philosophy is the rational, logical minds attempt to explain something that it is incapable of understanding.
Nothing enters consciousness without first being translated into the language of consciousness.
Take the names away from everything to see the world with new eyes.
It is not a question of whether or not God exists, but a question of whether or not we exist.
I went looking for God and I found myself. I lost myself and I found God.
4
The plethora of religions (not to speculate on the number of sects within each of them) makes a rational discussion of supernatural "beings" and circumstances impossible. Most worthies of religion have for so long attempted to refine and redefine their proclamations and other mysteries that their believers are convinced that there are no inconsistencies or other flaws in them ; at least ones that cannot, with a little imagination and verbal manipulation, be accepted as consistent and quite logical. Each devotee lives in a peculiar world-a community of believers, charmed by and at home in it. Wittgenstein’s aphoristic observation is again-and-again appropriate in discussing such matters: Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
2
" if applied to non-Western contexts, the definition would be puzzling, but in a Western context this is how philosophers have traditionally understood “God.”
I'm sorry, but it isn't.
Infinity was a negative thing for ancient Greek philosophers, so their definitions of God were, "by definition", based on a FINITE God.
Infinity only became a positive characteristic during medieval philosophy. That means that more than HALF of the history of Western philosophy does NOT work with the concept of an infinite God.
Secondly, major Western philosophers rejected the notion of a "wise" or "moral" God. Spinoza for instance (17th century).
A MAJOR problem with American philosophers today - with all respect - is that they don't have any serious method to read the history of philosophy anymore, and as a consequence totally ignore it, and then systematically project what they themselves, subjectively don't understand at first sight and as a consequence reject as false, incoherent etc., on all those philosophers of the past that they didn't even read.
And without serious philosophy, how to fight against fake news? Imho, you can't.
8
One could argue that a truly omnipotent being would not be constrained by the rules of logic, e.g. God could create a stone so large that he himself cannot lift it, and then he could go ahead and lift it anyway. Similar arguments could likely be made regarding omniscience. Still, violating logic in such ways is not a promising start for a God.
Probably the most toxic precept in a religion is the notion that one cannot be spiritual unless one totally accepts their notion of God. As an atheist, I believe there are many paths to spirituality, and all of them are valid.
10
The original concept of God/gods, the cave and rock painters from approx 20-50 thousand years ago, had the right general idea: everything is infused with spirit. It's unfortunate that we don't carry a bit of this with us today. Maybe the environment wouldn't be in the shape that it's in today.
13
God was created in Man's ideal image, reflecting our values. We prize knowledge, power and morality; therefore God is the absolute best in these attributes. The way - not only what - we know is based on the facts and limitations of human cognition which is the result of the way our brain and senses function. We should not imagine that ours is the only way to know. If we could process infrared wavelength with our eyes or hear higher frequency sounds, we would be aware of a different universe and understand the intricate connections within it differently.
Similarly, our morality is an evolutionary response to our social existence. A solitary God would find our moral landscape and our moral imperatives entirely irrelevant.
4
The top comment asked if the world would be a better place if everyone were atheist, without answering the question. I won't answer here. But I will flesh out the question with an observation.
If Atheists are right and there is no God, then God and all that goes with it are fundamentally human creations, and as such, are essentially human in nature. If we make the claim, as many do, that religious beliefs are behind much conflict in the world, especially things like wars due to ideology, then we must admit that the human impulses at work are part of human nature, EVEN THOUGH no God actually exists.
So if we suppose that all humans were suddenly to become atheists, human nature would not have changed, only the belief systems would have changed. Greed, hatred, anger ... All this would still be part of human nature.
I believe that if we were all suddenly to become atheists, we would still be surrounded by conflict. Only, that conflict would find other justifications.
Maybe instead of ISIS rampaging through the Middle East we'd have bands of soccer hooligans.
I believe that humanity needs to move and is moving towards a more rational view of Nature. I believe this is part of our evolutionary development. And over time that transformation may reinforce the importance in our survival that qualities such as empathy and cooperation provide. But anger, greed, hatred, these will all still be within us as well and we will still need to face them and learn to control them.
51
You are so right. This resonates.
1
Western thinking is still affected negatively by Genesis. There are surely important parables therein and historical notes. But modern biology equally surely tells us that humans were not a "special creation" and that the "soul" is a product of matter. Equally, we must realize that we have no justification for continuing the notion that humans are at the peak of "creation." We don't know what lies ahead and what may replace this mixed bag that we call humanity. Good and evil are human constructs. Applying them to another human construct, a "god," is a circular process.
5
On the question of God's knowledge: knowledge, broadly, is the possession of a form (what makes something to be what or how it is) in a way otherwise than as giving actuality to a material subject (the form of color in paint makes it colored but in my mind constitutes knowledge of color). If God indeed causes everything to be from nothing, and so nothing that exists has any other ultimate source than God, He must know everything. For nothing can cause or give what it does not itself have; thus God, giving being to all things, would need Himself to possess the being that they have, albeit in a supereminent mode. Even evil things are covered by this description, for evil is a privation of the being that a thing should have; and God would know how far any evil thing falls short of its proper being, since He is the cause of it and knows how much being it has (He is also the cause of the essence of that thing, so He knows how much being is "proper" for it).
A strange point in the article is the claim that knowledge of lust, for example, requires experience of lust. The author seems to grant the distinction between knowledge and experience, but asserts that the one in this case depends on the other. But if I understand a nature completely, "from the inside" (as God, our Creator, does for us), then I also know the things to which it is subject. If I build a robot, with perfect comprehension, I will understand its malfunctions without "experiencing" these within myself.
6
@Peter
You probably won't understand most of the robot's malfunctions. (Have you tried to debug a computer program?) However, as you aren't God, that's irrelevant to the discussion about God.
This op ed resembles the plot of a Ben Affleck movie where he and Matt Damon were going to trick God and open the gates of Heaven; it was a pretty bad movie. God is a being outside our space-time, a construction of our universe, and can know all and be anywhere. If and then, basics of logic, do not work if space and time do not apply. His interactions with us follow most laws of the universe because otherwise we would not recognize them. That does not mean God has the laws as limits. We have the limits.
A similar idea is the question of how galaxies can be receding from us faster than the speed of light. The universe is a lot bigger than 2 x 16 billion light years where 16 billion years is the time since Big Bang. Nothing can travel faster than light in our universe. The answer is the universe creates space between the galaxies. The galaxies do not actually fly away from each other. When you are creating space and distance, the laws of relativity do not apply. God, as we have faith, is lot closer to the root process than the Hubble Flow. He gets cut a lot more slack.
14
@Michael Blazin
Surely you meant It and not He. The universe creates space. Then the creator is an It after all.
1
@Michael Blazin: About 13.8 billion years, actually, to current knowledge.
1
The universe did not and does not create space or time. The universe is an end result after the continual creation of space and time, a process that started 13.8 billion years (I stand corrected) ago, continues to this day, and likely will continue for tens of billions more years.
3
I, too, am "a philosopher"--though I would prefer to call myself a student of philosophy, since there's always more to learn. I'm also very definitely not a believer. But this supposed "argument" against the existence of God is simply riddled with slippery and shifting definitions, under-clarified assertions, and poorly reasoned conclusions.
For instance: Clearly, there are (at least) two distinct senses of "knowledge" operative here: scientia (à la omniscience) and something like 'experience' or 'familiarity.' (In Spanish we might distinguish between 'saber' and 'conocer'. ) The former, scientia, pertains to the kind of knowledge attained by science: an explanatory understanding of how things relate to one another independent of any observer. The latter pertains to descriptive existential familiarity. We might call the two 'knowledge', but anyone can see that we have in mind here two fairly different types of knowledge. It is simple intellectual dishonesty to speak of God's omniscience as incoherent, while addressing only the kind of knowledge that is very definitely not scientia.
Again, this is coming from someone who does not believe in God, and who thinks there are valid arguments against God's existence. Simply put, this is not one of them. It is sophistry.
10
@Dan Thank you, and well put.
Can GOD create a square circle?
Can the irrational be rationalized?
ummm ... no
One either chooses to accept and live by the irrational or one chooses the rational.
I chose the rational because human survival (in fact the survival of any species) depends on being able to adapt to the environment, and the better and more accurately that environment is understood, the better are the chances of recognizing its dangers and avoiding them. Rationality seems to provide a better framework than irrationality, in understanding the environment.
The study of religion has value in helping to understand human nature. As manifestations of the human mind in its attempt to understand the order of the universe over many millennia, the various myths and religions suggest social developments, evolving, and sometimes devolving, sophistication of mental tools.
The study of GOD is the study of Man. As such, it is worth studying. As anything else, it is a pointless game.
18
Is this author seriously trying to impose his logic on a matter of faith?
5
@Jake Goldman: Sure, why not? Why does "religion" get a pass?
The idea that the notion of 'god' somehow became anthropomorphized into a white male is, well, kind of convenient- for white men.
109
@r mackinnon and further evidence the whole tale is man made as well.
6
I doubt God will be overly bothered by your arguments.
31
Yeah! The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't care either!
9
I never understood why the concept of God required that he be all-knowing and all-powerful in the literal sense of the words. Humans have the option of choosing not to know, why can't God? Humans also have the option of not exercising all of their powers, why can't God?
4
That God and gods' relationship with human beings is perpetually fraught with misunderstanding and doomed to erroneous reason is practically a hallmark of existence. One might say it is impossible for human beings to comprehend God/gods from the human perspective at all. Humans, at best, attempt to avoid totally anthropomorphic characterizations of preferred deities by acts of intellectual negation. Humans are finite. God is infinite. Humans are flawed. God is perfect. Humans have limited knowledge. God is omniscient. Humans move in place and time. God is omnipresent, and eternal. It is no wonder theoretical physicists sound like they are describing God with their concepts. In this, humans can be absolutely right, and absolutely wrong in all that they say... mutually exclusive truths can obtain simultaneously as the material dissolves in the mystical, and quantum worlds; the object points to the symbolic representation in abstract, and the artist charms the life of a quark as humanity strives to understand what is only a vague sense that their is transcendence beyond our most creative ontological concepts.
3
These sort of arguments always remind me of Zeno’s paradox - to reach point b from point a we first have to go half the distance to point b, then half the remaining distance again and again, so we will keep getting closer to point b but never reach it. So you can never go anywhere, neither can God do anything without some logical contradiction.
Very clever and hard to say why it’s not quite right, but experience of myself and others (I can rely on others experience to “know” things, such as heroin is addictive — I don’t have to try it for myself) and reading the Bible reveal a loving, personal, good and powerful creator, but I cannot prove it — but neither can I explain to you how you can literally go anywhere without logical contradiction.
2
@Luke Bruckner In his book "Everything and More" Charles Foster Wallace explains that the simplest refutation of Zeno's paradox is to point out that the sum of a geometric series is not infinity, it's 1.
2
@Robert David South David Foster Wallace. Charles Wallace is a character in A Wrinkle in Time. Oops.
@Robert David South let's be generous and consider both-- together!
I think that it was the early and middle Christian theologians and their attempts to transform Platonic ideas and Aristotelian logic into theology who let their logic run away with them.
Everything they saw as good, god had to have, and to have not just some, but all of it. It was unacceptable to them that god could have foibles or shortcomings, although Greeks, Romans, Norse, and all the so-called unenlightened pagans had no trouble with gods being less than infinite.
When this impossible perfection became dogma, there was no turning back. So now they have a god that proves its own non-existence.
No amount of squirming will get them out of this jam. But, of course, being human they don't care. As long as they can kill in the name of it, it doesn't matter whether it's anything but a name.
8
I mean, any argument with the premise "God exists" has already failed step one. Your postulates need to be proven first.
That said, the idea of God, our conception of Him (note the arbitrary male pronoun), is certainly as fallible and subject to contradiction as we ourselves are. I support the idea of working through the logical contradictions of that ideal, as it may result in positive real-world effects.
2
"Perfect. All-powerful. All-knowing. The idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent."
And this is new?
I pretty much knew belief in God was about as rational as believing in Santa Clause when I was 10 years old, though it took a few more years to fully realize no one was home at either the North Pole or Heaven.
This doesn't mean there isn't a spiritual side to life, just that it doesn't include supernatural beings.
But all this and what the author has written is old hat. I'm sure some reading the essay are encountering some or all of the arguments for the first time.
So why this article and why now? I'm all for challenging people to think, but if this piece is supposed to be more than mind candy, some context should be included.
1
As an atheist, few things annoy me more, where religion is concerned, than evangelical atheists. I don't care what anybody believes, as long as they leave me out of it.
I also am convinced that arguing from a logical perspective against the existence of God amounts to preaching to the choir. It might give some satisfaction to existing nonbelievers, but that's about it. It's not even fun as a purely logical or academic exercise, since faith by definition is not grounded in logic or reason.
I also can't help thinking that if the NYT ran a piece by an evangelical Christian, explaining why s/he believes in Jesus, most readers would be horrified. But this is OK, apparently.
57
@Dave
How about a piece by a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or ...) philosopher, explaining why s/he believes in the re;evant god(s)? I don't think that would horrify most readers.
2
@Dave
Well, extremism is annoying. In atheism, in evangelical (fundamentalist?) Christianity, in any other religion/ belief system.
Belief is a personal matter. Forcing beliefs--or policies derived from them-- on others is no longer personal; it is contradictory to our rights as humans. All humans.
2
The philosopher author asks, "As a philosopher myself, I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?"
After many years of parochial school education, including forays into Aquinian logic, I'd be inclined to rephrase the learned author's question thusly, "Can man, with his puny intellect, understand God?"
The answer always was, and continues to be, a resounding "NO!"
But that never seems to deter man from continually trying to create an image of God in man's own image and likeness, with all of man's inherent virtues and vices.
14
It's one thing to consider god as a metaphysical category. Another completely different thing is god as a theological (religious) entity.
The first is a mere tool of thought. The second is a political-ideological weapon.
2
When you believe in fairytales, you get what you deserve.
45
An interesting article. However, many of these issues are due to an image of God which is woefully out of sync with science (including cosmology, origin and evolution of life). Religion and "God" need a major, modern redefinition.
5
@pjd
God cannot be "redefined." We can have no "image" of God, for He is wholly "other," save for the revelation of the second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, through His Incarnation. Moreover, God cannot be "out of sync" with science, given that science and all that it subsumes consist within His creation. There is no conflict between science and faith. That's an invention of those who wish to rationalize creation.
God is eternal, uncircumscribable, and ineffable. He is neither "modern" nor "ancient." He simply Is. So a "major, modern redefinition" only amounts to an attempt to fit Him into a box of someone's making.
Attempting to "define" God, Whom we cannot comprehend, will serve only to break your brain. I recommend against it but you're welcome to have at it.
The existence of God is unknown and unknowable. For now it is a construct of each person to fill a need to get through the day. If they are not trying to impose their belief on you, arguing against belief is simply mean and unnecessary. May I suggest a better use of our time is avoidance of the hypocrisy of ignoring, or intentionally misinterpreting the teachings that could make the world better, e.g., do no harm; turn the other cheek; the various versions of the golden rule found in most religions; humility; generosity. Let’s intellectualize about the best word or lessen to guide our actions – I suggest kindness. So much can be wrapped up in that simple word.
67
Psalms 14:1 tells us " The fool says in his heart ' There is no God'. Considering that we do not even know what consciousness is, how can we expect to know and understand the complexity of God? It is likely that more will be revealed to us in the life which comes after our time on earth.
25
@Aaron Adams
At which time it will be too late to reform our behavior.
1
@Aaron Adams
Dream on.
2
@Aaron Adams The existence of God does not imply the existence of an afterlife. Even some Jews don't believe in an afterlife (some certainly didn't in the time of Jesus!).
1
There is no such thing as a god that is both loving and omnipotent. Perhaps one or the other, but not both. There is too much needless suffering in this world for it all to be happening “for a reason.”
40
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
5
Lucrete recognised it quite early.
2
And this is why I like the Greek concept of the gods, at least as I learned about them when I was a kid. They weren't perfect. They were fully capable of every sort of human feeling, good and bad. Some were lustful, some proud, some wise, some talented, some arrogant, some foolish, some vain, some kind, some logical, the whole human gambit from soup to nuts. In this way, they elevated human thought, human feelings and human beings to somewhat divine status. And even better, you could blame them for your misfortune without mentally ducking for cover. Not a bad deal at all!
29
A merciful god? No. There is enough suffering on earth to conclude the christian god is not merciful.
To believers, god must be indifferent to human suffering or impotent to affect it.
I choose the third option: god is nonexistent.
201
No one, no thing suffers more than God.
1
We need more conversations like this one. Religion has claimed a special exemption in the marketplace of ideas, and it’s long past time for that exemption to end.
263
Tax churches, synagogues, mosques and any property that is non-secular.
17
@Scott
I think the exemption IS ending - more and more Americans consider themselves non-religious all the time.
8
These objects have been thoroughly and repeatedly refuted for centuries, many of them by multiple inter-consistent routes, and yet we are to draw a definitive conclusion from a treatment of a few hundred words? This is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty. The question of God is just as philosophically alive today it was 2400 years ago when Plato first demonstrated the existence of the God in question.
18
I profess neither belief nor disbelief in God. But the idea of God, as I understand it, is important to human life. That idea is, simply, that there is a way of squaring the physical reality we live with the moral reality to which we aspire. That if the story of reality & eternity can be told, evil and suffering will be contextualized & redeemed. It goes without saying (or it should go without saying) that such a squaring or such a story would by definition transcend the evidence, the logic & the understanding of which we are capable, except in the broadest metaphorical sense. Such a God might or might not be "real," but even the most doctrinaire atheist behaves as though she is, because he has standards of behavior that he takes on faith. To me, these literal-minded arguments against God just are as silly & beside the point as the arguments of "fundamentalists" & of believers in the "literal" meaning of religious texts.
8
When you walk through a field of daisies, with swallows gracefully swooping overhead, you are surrounded by continual slaughter. Everywhere, from the bacteria in the soil to the mosquitoes in the bellies of the birds, living creatures are being eaten alive. It's an ongoing massacre and has been since the Precambrian era.
It's hard to imagine that a loving god would deliberately have set this up. And yet, the idea of a deity who has no concern for the suffering of his creatures is troublesome.
29
No one, no thing suffers more than God.
1
@Matthew Hughes Everything that lives will die. The method of dying is not extremely relevant. I think God is concerned about all living creatures but He has limited Himself with His creation of physical laws. One can jump off a tall building and pray all the way down but will still die. The physical laws are necessary to keep His multiple creations functioning.
@Arlene Nash
Okay, then it's self-inflicted suffering. He knew how it was all going to go before he wound up the spring.
4
The god delusion has been successful at propagating fear and ignorance. Look at the major world problems: overpopulation by humans; wars over religion and hatred; poverty; and destruction of the natural world including massive factory farming and unsustainable consumption of oil and other natural resources. Religion does nothing besides create false comfort and tribalism. Christianity, Islam and Judaism collectively contribute nothing to the betterment of our real world. The path to human development must begin with the wholesale abandonment of religion.
210
@JCX
Gee whiz....all this time my family and I have been serving God (and our neighbors) by working in the community through my church; food drives, blood drives, scholarships, a sister parish in India, feeding the homeless and street people, hosting seminars and meals for prison inmates....what a fool I am.
And I readily accept that I am still a sinner and no better than anyone else.
6
@JCX The problem is not intrinsic to religion. It's that religions experience an evolutionary process that selects for bad characteristics. The religions that have conquered are conquering religions. The religions that have become rich are greedy religions. The religions that retain followers well are very cult like. Demands for abandonment of all religion are very religion like.
16
@JCX
One may find belief in God logically silly, but it is not the root of all evil. Believer or Atheist, there are numerous examples of each at which to point a finger.
Don't kid yourself or the rest of us. I will concede religion is an easy target, but one can use most any system of human conduct and belief to excuse the worst crimes.
5
When I started asking questions like these as a teenager, the response I usually got was, "God works in mysterious ways." It wasn't a very satisfying answer, sort of like a theological shrug of the shoulders.
It's always been interesting to me that Old Testament God and New Testament God are very different. Old Testament God is almost corporeal, occupying time and space, experiencing and expressing emotions (being pleased, being angered) - God's wrath, we're told, accounted for mass disasters like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Noah's flood.
Also, the Old Testament describes God as not all-knowing, for instance with anecdotes about people "hiding" from God - starting with Adam and Eve, who hid from God as God took his morning walk through Eden.
New Testament God is merciful, less inclined to obliterate whole populations for the prevalence of sinners among them. New Testament God is not corporeal, but mystical - He is everywhere and nowhere; all-powerful and all-knowing, but still allowing us to act as we choose, for good or for evil.
Even the consequence of sin changes from Old Testament to New Testament. Old Testament God destroyed cities to obliterate the sinners in them, but New Testament God, through his son Jesus, tells us that we are all sinners. We're told that God sent Jesus to absolve us of our sins, leaving us to wonder why pre-Jesus sinners were less deserving than post-Jesus sinners.
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@Ecce Homo
I have also noticed the very different temperaments of God in the old versus new testaments. The contradictions seem to make one thing obvious to me: The Bible is just a book, and the New Testament is the reboot. Or perhaps the NT is a rebranding campaign by the Christian church.
The Old Testament God is just cruel, manipulative, and vengeful. Who would find comfort in such a deity? New Testament God has Jesus, a super chill fellow (but like, totally the same God, but not?).
I don't have a problem with a deity that is indifferent to human suffering; seems to me like a being powerful enough to create the universe would look upon that creation with mild interest, at most--like a kid with an ant farm, I suppose.
I think the Bible is a collection of stories. Every age has that blockbuster series. Millennia from now, people might follow the Harry Potter series as gospel. As long as there is some moral theme, mysticism + tragic hero, you can build a religion around it.
Maybe I'm a cynic, but I was raised in a Lutheran household and did all the Lutheran stuff and ceremony and could never get on board with a book that said slavery was a-ok and women should be subservient to their husbands. My faith, if ever I had it, was exhausting; I had to convince myself that I was convinced. Eventually I gave it up and I find my moral compass is easier to follow. Now it is based on what I feel is right, not what I must grudgingly tell myself I believe is right.
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@Ecce Homo The same inconsistencies exist in the Koran. The early chapters (dictated by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed while in Mecca) portray a more wrathful god than those revealed to him later in life.
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This is why, speaking as a Jew, I find the term Judeo-Christian to be, at best, laughable.
My G-d is clearly not the same as the ones Christians worship; and that is before we come to question of their Christ or the Trinity.
I recognize much more of Elohim in the deity of the Koran then in the Christian's New Testament.
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The problem is not with God and never has been. The problem is with man's childlike examination of his own existence and ridiculous contemplation of God's. Questions such as "Why doesn't God create a world in which evil does not exist?" The answer of course is that he could, but that would negate the gift of free will. Deeds are not worth anything if you have no choice in the matter. Also ridiculous thoughts such as, "If God existed then bad things would never happen". As if mankind can only conceive of God as some doting parent stopping you from riding your tricycle into the street.
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@Archon - Exactly. And if these these are the types of questions Professor Atterton is supplying in his classes, God help his students.
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@Archon
I think a strong case could be made for eliminating free will for all of mankind if one weighs the death of evil against the death of free will. I would gladly give up the option for choosing from 25 kinds of mustard at the supermarket for a more humane and peaceful world.
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@Archon
You got mixed up and lost the argument by conflating "free will" with "worth anything".
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I have wrestled with the notion than man may not have freewill at all, or it is limited. Many human's call to God's will. In thinking God is in everything, including man, God is responsible for both pain and pleasure- good and evil.
If man has no freewill then God controls and is responsible for mindless killing such as the young students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Modern functional MRI scanning shows a split second interval between man's unconscious state and a thought or action where God's will would prevail leaving man notresponsible and without freewill.
Stop worrying and know that God is responsible for all that happens in this world and when one dies, God alone will decide on any future your spirit might have.
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Since humans first swung out of the trees, history is filled with thousands of gods that humankind has created for itself. Starting with the first one they have all been real until the next new god came along and made the previous gods obsolete, right up to the present day. Gods provide simple answers for difficult questions and are provided with mystical and magical powers to rule over everything. Humans have always wanted to believe this nonsense despite the lack of a shred of evidence to prove what they believe. Just remember all gods and religions have been created by man with no proof of their existence. Humankind has been very foolish for millennia.
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@Bruce Northwood
And all moral are a purely mental constructs.
When will the western world figure out that there is no One God, but millions of them (actually a hierarchy of them)?
The Earth has its own God - he is the one Jesus called 'Father', but each planet in our solar system has its own God and they all 'report' to the Solar God.
So our God may know everything about the Earth but he is not omniscient about the whole Universe!
This truth will be understood only after the Christ returns and proclaims it.
@David Gold
You left out the sub-gods of continents, and within continents the subgods of separate mountain ranges, plains, forests, and so on down to the sub-sub-gods of meadows, individual flowers, each eddy in the river, the bacterial communities, ...
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@Thomas Zaslavsky If you would like to understand the whole scheme, go here: http://www.sentforlife.com/worldorg.htm
@Thomas Zaslavsky Those 'sub-Gods' would angels. Only those in charge of a Planet or Star would 'qualify' as Gods. Jesus incidentally is not a God. He reports to the Earth 'God'.
“ malicious enjoyment “. The best description of Trump and his actions I’ve ever heard.
Seriously.
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If I have felt envious in the past, can I know what it is like to feel envy even if I am not presently feeling envious? Most would answer “yes,” since they think the memory of feeling envy gives me knowledge of what it is like to feel envy. But could an engineered, simulated memory of having felt envy, which didn’t correspond to an actual past event, also give me knowledge of what it is like to feel envy? I don’t see why not. (Someone who insisted that the relevant knowledge requires actually having felt envy would have to say that the knowledge of what envy is like somehow depends directly on the past experience rather than on the present brain state that recorded and represents that experience to the present knower. And to think that the past directly affects the present in this way would be somewhat bizarre.) But if a simulated memory of feeling envy can convey knowledge of what it is like to feel envy, then there is no reason to affirm, as the author does, that God must feel envy to know what it is like to feel envy. God could have something analogous to a simulated memory, one that reliably mimics the real thing. (If the author thinks that such a simulated memory would morally taint God, then it would seem to follow that my memory of what it was like to feel envy somehow taints my present moral character. And that’s not an especially plausible view.)
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The existence and nature of God can neither be proven nor disproved. This article does not disprove the existence of God although it calls attention to logical complexities regarding the deity as initially defined. It is possible to imagine a non-Euclidean, supra-temporal deity untroubled by these logical contradictions. Recall that Achilles could never catch the tortoise until the infinitessimal calculus was invented.
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@Ivan Light Yes, God is infinity with a mind. It makes worlds where paradoxes are true. Just not many of them. The worlds that lead to more worlds are more numerous, and thus more probable.
@Ivan Light
Ridiculous. Theists make truth claims about the world, including their god intervening in it, and these can be falsified. Your claim is ridiculous.
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@Robert David South
You've come by this knowledge how?
Are you certain?
Or is it like when the adults in my life used to say "Because I said so."?
I do not understand the purpose of this article. I don't believe in god, and I think tying philosophy to god is pointless. I believe in a universe that is so much bigger, older, and more impossible than I am, that I can't possibly understand. All the questions that you are asking are actually attempts by humans to understand something so outside their grasp that they create a mythology that tries to explain it in human terms. So logic is the language of god only if god is basically a glorified human. And yes. Contradictions abound. Pascal was right. Religion is religion, and philosophy philosophy and they are not, nor should they be linked. There is no proof that god exists, nor a proof that it does not. The only thing that you can really say about religion is that it is a personal thing, and can be tolerated until someone starts imposing their religion on someone else which has led to more wars and atrocities than anything else.
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@smcmillan Part of the theist claims is that there is a god with certain attributes - he loves, he wants to be known, he intervenes. The fact those things are: incoherent, inconsistent with what we see in the world, and under scrutiny found to be false (eg: prayer studies) means that indeed, there can be evidence specific gods do not exist.
In fact, it is trivially easy to dismiss all gods that have something like these properties. The only ones that can't be trivially dismissed are ones nobody cares about because they don't comfort one contemplating the solitude and finality of death.
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@smcmillan "questions that you are asking are actually attempts by humans to understand something so outside their grasp that they create a mythology that tries to explain it in human terms. "
That could be restated as, "the author of the article and the cited philosophers are using a system of logic invented by human beings to reach conclusions about something(s) that is (are) metaphysical."
This artificial logic fails even in some environments that we've arbitrarily labeled as "real". Human systems of logic, whether inductive, deductive, "fuzzy", or , any other system of human logic, is not easily applied to Quantum Electrodynamics.
"Probably" or "except in the case of" must seomtimes be used to describe events on the quantum scale which seem to defy our logical analyses. "The math can be used to proves that this (these) event(s) is (are) logical". Yes, human-invented math does say that. Good thing we invented math, too.
Can any aspect of an incomprehensible "god", or "gods", or neither, or all three, or something else, be understood by applying human logic?
"Logic" says no. Oops. I should have said, "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem" says no. Unfortunately Godel was also human, and used human logic to formulate his theorem.
I give up.
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@Ben Alcobra
Please forgive my umbrage, NYT. I'm going to post this as a standalone message rather than a reply to another message - just for visibility (and there is my umbrage). Axe the standalone if doing so isn't logical.
This article is interesting but it is flawed by an underlying judeo-christian set of assumptions of which the writer seems unaware. And the perspective is also flawed by an ethnocentric approach that unconsciously applies and extrapolates man’ earthly logic to “god”. In reality it probably would be fair to assume that the logic of the Universe is the same logic used by men - which cannot be. But in the end, the writer arrived at the right conclusion: a god defined as a “being” probably doesn’t exist. What probably exists is an all encompassing consciousness that is energy-in-movement. We live in a free-flowing creative universe.
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I love the Jordan B. Peterson’s Biblical Series. After watching them, I felt much more connected to the mythological roots of Western Civilization and was not so contemptuous of them as I had been before. He did a great job of explaining why they mattered even if one is not religious. Oddly enough, I feel that life has even more meaning after watching them and I am so looking forward to his new series on Exodus this fall.
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The question about God can easily be reasoned by the simple word of "Why?"
Why believe in a God or even gods? My faith is in my fellow human beings.
I reference the beginning of the statement from the American Humanist Association: "Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, guided by reason, inspired by art and motivated by compassion".
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@babaD
If you are a materialist/atheist and not an amoral nihilist you are not thinking hard enough. Humanism is just as delusional as any religion.
As a psychologist, I work with people who are uncomfortable. One major source of discomfort is uncertainty. When people are uncomfortable they tend to search for ways to ease their distress such as making up explanations to dispel uncertainty. If life is full of uncertainty and unpredictability it would seem to ease discomfort to invent an explanation that offers certainty. This seems to me to be the reason to invent a god, particularly one who is all knowing and all powerful.
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@James Claiborn Your statement is borne out by ample research which has shown that people, if given a choice, will choose to endure greater pain that is predictable over less pain that is unpredictable. People prefer the certainty of misery over the misery of uncertainty. It's the anxiety of the unknown, like living in a chaotic household with unpredictable caretakers.
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@James Claiborn I think you pretty much nailed it. Christopher Hitchens said that religion was man's first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology, at astronomy. All are efforts to understand the unknown.
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@James Claiborn Most people in the world and throughout history and prehistory believe some sort of religion. Maybe it's because of what you say. Or maybe there's something real out there that they are all struggling to explain. Isolated peoples come up with the same stuff over and over. Probably instrument error.
This article is what happens when a third dimensional human mind attempts to discern and understand the ineffable. Most of us have little experience with unconditional love except through our beloved pets who adore us despite our failings, our bad days, etc. If we tried to explain this kind of devotion to someone unfamiliar, they would look at us just as philosophers look at people of faith. One final thought and that is, there is no judgment about what we do, so all our impulses are viewed just as us being human. We create the judgment by trying to bring God down to our third dimensional level.
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In my view, faith is not logical process. Contrary information is regarded as a "test of faith" rather than a reason for revision. The existence of God, or even the qualities and abilities of a God, can not be debated in a true sense with a person of faith, as there is no argument, regardless of logic and fact, that would have any sway.
Of course, there are exceptions, people do gain or lose faith or adopt a new one, but in general, this is a pointless exercise. Unfortunately it this propensity extends far beyond religion. Scientific fact is often regarded as an article of faith by those who hold a certain view, for instance," Do you believe in evolution?"
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@BH One argument lies in the existence of logic itself. In an atheist universe, how does one justify universal abstracts such as the laws of logic?
Good article pointing out some of the inherent contradictions in the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.
It is amazing the time and mental effort philosophers, scholars and believers have spent over centuries trying to justify, rationalize or explain their belief.
The only logical conclusion is that belief in God is illogical. Pascal was right that reason cannot be applied to faith.
I don't know if the world would be a better place if everyone was an atheist. It certainly would be if more people could behave rationally, and, especially, not try to impose their beliefs on others.
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@Eric. I agree that if everyone were an atheist there would be a little more rationality about some things, but we would still find reasons to fight. We would still fight out of greed, desire for land, control and tribal hatred.
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@Eric, you wrote, "The only logical conclusion is that belief in God is illogical."
Not quite. A logical conclusion is that belief in THIS god is illogical and should not be held. And not because faith must transcend logic. But because faith in the impossible is delusion.
If you want logical gods, look to the polytheists or to the non-personified religions. Plus, their myths are a lot more fun to read.
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@Eric You’re preparing to leave a hotel in a city you’re sure you will never visit again. Do you leave behind a tip for the maid?
Logically, no. But is there any doubt this would be a poorer world without such illogical actions?
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This is why I don't get into debates on the subject with my parents. Debates imply logical argument. But the foundation of their faith has no room for logic. And so, we happily eat Thanksgiving meals talking about board games and grandchildren and sports. I privately consider them happy fools, they quietly pray for my soul at night, and we all have a great relationship.
I wish all all religions and anti-religions could exist so peacefully.
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Amen Brother
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@htg well, not all theists limit themselves to quietly praying for loved ones. Some want things like exemptions from taxation and legislation about medical care.
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@htg Curious. You say your parents have no room for logic. But logic is not material. It's an abstract universal. How do you justify the laws of logic from a materialistic worldview?
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Get out of your head into nature; you'll feel much better.
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@Loki
That is the place where everything makes sense.
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@MG It's possible that nature is more god-like than any words in any book can ever be.
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"God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."
~ Nietzsche The Gay Science (1882) aph 108
I guess that we still have some work to do!
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@SteveRR
Nietzsche was one of the philosophers who inspired the Nazis. He looked forward to the massive wars of the twentieth century with pleasant anticipation.
Nietzsche was a coward trying to sound tough. He wrote, "Are you going to see a woman. Do not forget your whip."
Bertrand Russell's response to that was, "Most women would have gotten the whip away from him and he knew it."
All this assumes a god exists. God is as real as a Ford. Fords were created by humans to meet specific human needs. Because not all humans are alike, not all Fords are alike. In fact, humans are so diverse that there are many competitors to Ford, each designed and priced to satisfy a different group of people. So it is with any of the millions of different gods out there. Each has been customized to the needs of its user. The diversity of God-images only makes sense if God, like Fords, is a human invention.
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@Richuz – About individual customization; I’m reminded that Henry Ford is said to have promised that each customer could get their car in whatever color they wanted … as long as it was black.
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@randyman Yes. This turns out to have not been a good business decision, though, and was ultimately abandoned when people couldn't get the colors they wanted and chose a competitor. There is a lesson there.
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@Richuz
I love this explanation!
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One difficult thing to wrap one's head around is that this God is also supremely more intelligent and capable than humans are. As such, it is possible that an omniscient and omnipotent being would also process information and abilities in a different sense than we can. It doesn't make the idea any less vexing or difficult for us to grapple with, but a being on a different plane of existence might view everything in a much different way than we are capable of even imagining.
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@Martin Your argument is an easy way out. One can always imagine god to be greater, more powerful, etc. than anything we can comprehend. The rationalization that "God moves in mysterious ways" is ultimately rather hollow.
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@Martin, your argument is the paradox that keeps me from deciding if I believe in a higher power or not. I will definitely concede that if there is a deity, I'm not capable of understanding it; but that itself does not prove or disprove anything. Thanks for sharing!
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As one who has left all these issues beyond in the last few years I can say that reading some more theology is helpful, and it has become some of the most rewarding reading I've done in a long time.
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Not to pick on a 19th-century German pessimist, but humans are most certainly not the only animals to inflict pain on others without purpose. But that's neither here nor there. Pain and suffering exist and if there were a god, s/he created it out of thin air for all of us to experience. I much prefer the idea of a vengeful god, as it at least comports with reality.
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