>Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 06:29:50 -0600 (CST) >From: Tibor R Machan [A version of this essay was published in THE AMERICAN RATIONALIST] Reflections on Whether God Exists Tibor R. Machan I do not believe that God exists. I am, therefore, an atheist. There are other atheists who claim that God does not exist. I take that to be an unjustified claim because I am not sure what it means, not having a clear idea of what the word "God" means. There are those who believe in God, although they would not claim that God exists, not at least in any sense of the term "exist," whereby such a claim would have to be backed up by some demonstration, proof, evidence or whatnot. They believe in God and they mean by this that they accept God's existence on faith. I am not one of those people. I have no faith in God or anything much, although I do trust my friends and colleagues in most matters, as well as most people whose products and services I make use of. Faith, as far as I understand it, is belief in the incredible and while now and then I may believe in the incredible, I regard it as a fault. For example, I once believed that someone I loved very much would come to love me and it was really quite incredible, from what I am now willing to admit about that person, that this should have happened. And I blame myself for not thinking the matter over more clearly, letting some impulse or need dictate my actions instead of clearer thinking on the matter. When I am asked whether I believe in God, I first ask what "God" means. Then I ask whether what "God" means exists. If I could answer this in the affirmative, or even as a credible proposal, I would believe in God. That is in fact how it went with me when I first seriously considered this issue in my life. What I am saying about this matter is not something I just came upon or figured out, but there was a time when I was struggling with the issue because I, like so many millions of others, was told by my elders - parents, teachers, priests - that God exists and is watching me and I need to pray to God and I am expected to obey his will, and so forth. So for a long time I just accepted all this. But then, after a while, I started to reflect on what I believe, especially about important things that would guide the rest of my life. And at that point I began to think about the question of God's existence and eventually answered that I could not believe that God exists. But here are some of the details of my thinking as it occurred over 35 years ago, when I was twenty one or so. In my view, when asked the question about whether God exists, to answer it one needs first to know what the question means. This is so even though we are faced with a very ancient question. Each of us could face the task of attempting to answer it afresh. To ask whether something exists is to ask whether we have reason to conclude that this something is part of the world that contains whatever exists. Yet in this instance this is a troublesome way to begin because of what "God" is generally taken to mean. By "God" we tend to have in mind something that is not simply of this world, if it exists, but prior to the world, transcending it, and very different from anything of this world. "God" is generally taken to mean a being that is eternal, timeless, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. This, at least, is the way the idea "God" has been understood in most monotheistic religions and theological systems. So now we need to consider what would establish the existence of such a being. Clearly, we could not learn of its existence the way we learn of the existence of beings of this world, namely, by means of experience or inference, the way we learn of the existence of a new species of mice or of black wholes, respectively. Rather, we are often told, what we need to do is believe in the existence of God, independently of experience or inference. Here is where my first problem arises with our question. I have no clear idea how to form a belief in something that I not only have not experienced but could not experience and am unable to infer from a sound theory. Rational belief formation - for someone whose faculty for learning about the world happens to be rationality (that is, the capacity to experience the world and integrate such experiences into theories from which inferences about possible or probable experiences may be drawn) - does not yield an answer to our question. That is my first and main reason for not believing that God exists. Similarly, I do not believe that ghosts or miracles or extrasensory perception exists. But with at least extrasensory perception I can imagine that I will come to believe in it because when characterized in certain ways it has some plausibility. Science fiction stories capitalize on this, although often enough they also invoke impossible ideas - that's one reason I have difficulty in taking them seriously and treat them more like fairy tales. There is another reason why I do not believe God exists and this reason is a bit more decisive. It has to do with the definition of the idea "God" sketched before. When I was very young I had asked myself the question of whether God could build a rock so large that he could not lift if. It probably wasn't an original question with me but I recall asking it and finding no satisfactory answer because if God could not build such a rock, he would not be omniscient and if he could then he would not be omnipotent. But that was only the beginning. Later, after I studied the various arguments for God's existence and found all of them wanting - the ontological, design, first cause, cosmological and other arguments - and then it was suggested that what I need to do is have faith in God's existence, I considered the problem of evil. This problem may be put simply as "How could there be a being that is all powerful and all good and yet tolerates all the bad things that happen in the world?" Most recently this idea recurred to me when I read about a member of the Detroit Lions football team whose car broke down on the way to the airport where he was planning to board a plane that crashed with over a hundred fatalities. He told the press that "It must have been the good lord who prevented him from getting on the plane." I reflected, admittedly in disgust as well as amazement, how could this man believe that a good lord would save him but tolerate the death of those who did board the plane. At least, I thought, the event should not lead anyone to think that the lord in question was good on account of saving this one man. Such a lord must be extremely capricious, to say the least. The problem of evil - or, more precisely, the paradox of the existence of an all powerful and all good being alongside a world in which massive injury and hurt to innocent beings obtain - has never been solved to my satisfaction. Nor have I found any sound argument when it comes to trying to establish the existence of God. I have, of course, been told that one of the achievements of believing that God exists is precisely to believe against all reason, to accept it on pure faith. As I noted before, faith is not the same as trust, which comes from past experience of decency and good will on the part of other persons and even oneself. Faith is acceptance of the impossible - such as a miracle. This point ascribes to ordinary beliefs, based on experience and inference, a quality of under achievement. The idea is that it would count for a lot more to believe in the unbelievable. Apart from what I have already said - about how it seems to me entirely unreasonable to do such a thing - let me conclude with a point about this issue of taking God's existence on faith that has always struck me as somewhat interesting. As I said, at age 21 I had struggled personally with the issue of whether God exists. I was not a student of philosophy yet but a member of the United States Air Force and I was concerned about what I should or should not believe about matters of religion. I was raised a Roman Catholic and at this point of my life was trying to make sense of the foundations of my belief. I had a close friend, Father William Novicky, who is still a prominent member of the Roman Catholic clergy in Cleveland, Ohio, who held a Ph.D. in philosophy from Fordham University in New York City. He and I discussed the issue of God's existence by mail and in person, when I visited him. But nothing he told me ever quite clinched the issue. One night I was performing in a play, Harvey, and I did a very bad job with my lines, partly because I was really worried about the God question. After the play I phoned Father Novicky to tell him how doubtful the idea of God was for me and all he said is "God is putting you through a great test." This was no help since it begged all my questions - I wanted to know why I should believe that God exists before I formed beliefs about what God does to me or anyone else. Late that night I went out on an abandoned runway at Andrews Air Force Base, where I was stationed near Washington, D.C., and I walked around - praying or talking to myself or whatever. As I was talking out loud at one point I looked up and said, somewhat confusedly, "God, forgive me but I cannot believe in you." Why did I reach that resolution? I was indeed confused but by that time also resolute. Among all the doubts I had it finally also occurred to me that even if in some incomprehensible, mysterious way there is a God, then, if all that is said about his creation of the universe and ourselves is true, God would be insulted if we believed in him. After all, it is supposed to have been God, according to this story, who equipped human beings with a rational mind, the faculty they need most to make a success out of their incredibly complicated and varied lives. Such a being would not commend us if we abdicated and invoked faith instead of reason in reaching such a momentous conclusion as that God exists. And this is crucial to understanding how I go about this matter. I ask myself whether I ought to believe in some important matter such as God's existence as a matter of faith and answer that it would be wrong - yes, morally wrong - to do so. I would abdicate my role as a rational agent if I believed simply because I wanted to or felt like it would be good or comforting or pleasing to friends or whatever. I need more than that - indeed, in nearly every other realm of life everyone else also believes that more is required. I recall that in 1963, when truth in labeling laws were enacted, I walked past a church in Claremont, California, and saw the big sign, "Jesus Saves," and thought what if we applied the strictures of medicine and product liability law to religion! And I also thought, others may find religion less important than health and nutrition, but I don't, since it aims to address the whole of one's life, guide one in every realm of conduct. I still don't understand why others do not insist on this for themselves. I really don't. So not only have I no reason to believe that God exists; not only do I suspect that what God is supposed to be is impossible; I also think that if anything like God did exists, He would be offended if we believed in him in the face of lack of experience and theoretically valid inference. In short, believing in God is in violation of those principles of conduct implicit in our human nature, principles that rest, primarily, on the fact that we are all rational animals and can only flourish if we realize the capacity for rationality in our own individual lives, especially when it comes to the most vital questions we need to answer. And if God is our Creator, it would be to betray Him to refuse to use our minds in the matter of his identity and existence, given that He is supposed to be even more important than our actual parents about whose identities we often concern ourselves and in connection with whose identities we consider misinformation extremely disturbing. There is a final point about this that's worth noting. Some people consider it hubris to render an opinion so contrary to the opinions of the vast majority of human beings throughout history. We should, they hold, trust our fellows' inclinations and not charge ahead with a view so contrary to them. To do so betrays an inflated self-regard, a belief that one is up to dealing with these matters on one's own. But in fact we are always put in the position of having to make a decision about what the rest of humankind thinks. We have so many different ways of life to choose from that the advice: "Trust others," simply does not help as the central point to heed. It is precisely our human task to choose and sometime this leads us to swim against massive tides. No doubt, our ability to question owes a lot to what we have leanred from others - as individuals we have very few facts about the world that we know on our own, without help, but still, there are something bits and pieces of stuff that gives us veto power. So not only don't I believe God exists but I consider it morally suspect when people believe that He does exists. This does not mean that I never reconsider the issue - I am committed to doing that both personally and professionally. But thus far I have not seen any reason to embrace belief in God's existence and I admit not being able to fathom doing so very soon. It seems to me, also, that this is the right approach to take for me - anything else would be self-betrayal, going directly against my identity as the human individual who I am. As to what I think about religion to date, I believe W. Somerset Maugham expressed it well when he tried to address the topic at age 43: I have read much philosophy, and though I do not see how it is possible to refuse intellectual assent to certain theories of the Absolute, I can find nothing in them to induce me to depart from my instinctive disbelief in what is usually meant by the word religion. I have little patience with the writers who try to reconcile in one conception the Absolute of the metaphysician with the God of Christianity. But if I had had any doubts, the [First World] war would have effectually silenced them. (A Writer's Notebook, p. 145)