Over the last few month I’ve provided some of the common reasons why many people fail to believe in gods or God. I’ve talked about different kinds of atheism, about how evidence and how it does not lead to God, about how God isn’t necessary to living, about how some of the common argument for God are not convincing for me, the Problem of Evil, science as a better way of explaining things and about the lack of meaning in the term “God”. There are a few more reasons to go and this is one that I personally put a good deal of stock in.
Religion exists throughout almost all cultures on Earth. To my mind that leads to three possible conclusions.
The idea of a shared culture I think is safe to rule out. I doubt that any faith would accept that their interpretation is a corruption of a central idea and I doubt that there is evidence of humanity diverging geographically at a cultural stage where gods were a commonality. The differences in god ideas throughout history and cultures is proof that their is no central idea beyond a belief in a cosmic “something” and that is too vague to be satisfactory.
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In reading and discussing scripture I often find myself at a loss to understand the meaning of what I am reading. It isn’t that the words and teachings don’t make sense but that there is an underlying assumption that I have somehow missed. Talk of God’s grace and goodness confounds me because I have no basis other than the text and conversations to understand this and this is precicely where I find the confusion.
Religious language is rich with these assumptions. As a technical person I classify religious language as a kind of jargon. Jargon is wonderful. I love jargon. It is a way of passing information to others in your field quickly and efficiently. The problem that many have with jargon is that to requires a considerable amount of time and effort to comprehend and use. You need to be proficient in the jargon to use it. My lack of understanding of scripture may well be due to my lack of proficiency in the jargon of faith. However, I’ve been reading and talking about religion for long enough that I should have picked up the basics by now, no matter how obtuse I am.
There is another explanation supported by Relative Philosophy. Religious language, according to relativism doesn’t mean anythign at all. As it lacks any form of meaning there is no point in seeking answers to the questions that it raises. The God question is blithely dismissed as meaningless. Of course relativism can be contrasted by absolutism and monotheism can certainly be interpreted as a form of absolutism. So when Genesis 1: 1 says
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
a philosopher can apply relativism to it and state that it is neither true nor false, that it is without meaning.
In philosophy relatism is hardly alone in dismissing the idea of God as lacking meaning. Logical Positivism does more or less the same by applying a kind of logic test to the text. Can an assertion be tested by an experiment or can it be true by definition? “God” does not fall into these categories and so can be dismissed as meaningless. There are no tests to verify the existence of God and God is not true by definition in the same way that “green is a colour” or “a square has four sides” is true. To a logical positivists the question is meaningless since it could not be answered true or false.
By extension any metaphysical discussion centred around God is also meaningless. I find this to be unhelpful as I don’t like to dismiss an argument until I’ve explored it thoroughly. Logical positivism and relativism in this regard make no effort to explore metaphysics but dismiss them utterly. Personally I like to know what I’m rejecting and actualyl enjoy tying myself up in knots before I realise that I should have rejected the question to begin with. That leaves us to explore what is meant by “God” and whether what we mean by “God” actually exists. Which is much more fun. However I can see how an apatheist could use logical positivism or relativism to dismiss these questions.
If you explore logical positivism you’ll quickly find A J Ayer’s objection to it.
We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express-that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
“Freddie” acknowledged that no physical proof is ever completely conclusive. There are margins of error, false positives, experimental error, etc to contend with not to mention the philosophical idea of deceipt that cannot ever be fully rejected. If evidence through experimentation is not conclusive as an absolute then everything that we purport to know about the world becomes meaningless.
Those interested in the philosophy of science may also follow Richard Dawkins’ arguments on the improbability of God although he centres his point on evolution and ignores as irrelevant metaphysical questions. A J Ayer is much neater in his dismissal:
Posted in A Cacophony of Posts, Jason | 5 Comments »…There can be no way of proving that the existence of a god…is even probable.
“For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.
“But in fact this is not possible…For to say that “God Exists” is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false.
This post is a response from Chris C to Science does a better job.
The statement in the previous topic ‘Science does a better job’ begs the question: at what? Well, obviously, at understanding the way the world works. This shouldn’t be surprising for God gave us the skills to do this and told to get on with it (Genesis 1: 26-28). That’s why He didn’t bother to put any of this understanding into scripture. Yes, sure people have tried to use the Bible to understand the way creation works, as they have done with many things. But, as that was not the Bible’s function, it’s hardly surprising that they have come up with poor answers. People have always understood that the Bible doesn’t deal with applied science (engineering principles, agricultural techniques etc) except where these have had significance in drawing closer to God (which is the whole purpose of scripture). So I’ve never understood why they should assume that the Bible was going to answer pure scientific questions, when clearly we can manage these ourselves.
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