I am more excited about Divinity of Doubt: The God Question than any other book in my entire career, and I've had seven New York Times bestsellers, three of them reaching number one. Why? Apart from the fact we can all agree that there cannot be a more important subject than God, the main reason is that we're talking about a 2,000-year-old conversation to which nothing significant has been brought to the table for a great many years. The religious terrain is so barren that we typically have light-hearted fare like recent books on sex and desire in the bible; Noah's Ark; does our body or soul go to heaven; a 3-year-old boy, during an appendectomy operation, meets Jesus in heaven; and, not too long ago, The Da Vinci Code claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and they had children.
At such a late date (2,000 years), who would have expected anything game-changing now on God and religion? Frankly, not even yours truly. I had read the Bible and done much thinking about God and religion in earlier years, but I decided to go beyond this, take two years out of my life, and completely immerse myself in the subject seven days a week, approaching it in the same way I did my investigation and prosecution of a major case: objectively look at and draw powerful inferences from the evidence, my only master, to see if almost universally accepted, centuries-old religious beliefs had any merit to them. What I discovered is so startling that if anyone who reads Divinity of Doubt is not stunned, they would be the type who wouldn't be surprised if they saw a man jump away from his own shadow.
Before I get to theism, let me briefly discuss my fine-feathered friends, the atheists, whose arguments have only convinced me of the embarrassing indigence of their thoughts. Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur. Certain of evolution (that bacteria actually evolved into a Mozart), they then argue that this eliminates God as the creator of the animate world. But this non-sequitur presupposes that God did not create these original life forms, and evolution took over from there. Leading atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris completely embrace the non-sequitur that if they can slay the dragon of organized religion, an unworthy opponent, they have slain God. But the opposite of God is no God, not no religion. Polls have shown that millions of people reject religion but are still firm believers in God. The world's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, actually believes (I am not making this up) that God doesn't exist because the universe is extremely complex, and God, to have created it, would have had to be even more complex, which he finds too "improbable" to believe. You mean you can dispose of God that easily (and vacuously)? My, my.
It may very well be true that there is no God, but atheistic dogma doesn't lead one rationally to this conclusion.
As far as theism is concerned, its fundamental weakness, of course, is that since no one has seen God, a belief in him has to be based on faith, since the very definition of faith is that it is a belief in something without proof. But why should we have so much faith in something for which there is no proof? And why, in so many ways, should we want to see by faith what the eye of reason rejects?
We can know that the Christian God cannot exist. If he is all-powerful and all-good, as Christians maintain, there would not have been, for instance, the Holocaust. This is an inherent self-contradiction. So if Christians insist on having a God, they can do so, but if they have any respect for logic they'll have to redefine who he is.
Because the Christian God cannot exist does not mean, however, that there is no God who created the universe. Although, in Divinity of Doubt, I destroy through simple logic Christianity's main non-biblical support for such a God, Intelligent Design, I conclude that the other principal argument for his existence, First Cause, is very difficult to get around and goes in the direction, though not conclusively, of a Supreme Being.
It is when we look closely at the pillars of theism that Divinity of Doubt literally shakes the very foundations of Christianity. Let me briefly touch upon just a few of the many shattered pillars I discuss in Divinity of Doubt. Without a belief in free will, Christianity (and Judaism) could hardly exist, since God's justice in punishing evildoers could not be explained without it. But contrary to belief, when we look at the bible, not only don't we find any scriptural support for free will, we find, astonishingly, the exact opposite: that the bible supports no free will. For example, Isaiah 63:17 says, "Why, Lord, do you cause us to stray from thy ways?" Romans 11:32 goes so far as to say that "God consigns all men to disobedience so he may have mercy on them."
On the virgin birth of Jesus, in Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah used the word almah to describe the mother of a child Christianity says was the messiah. But almah means "young woman" in Hebrew, not virgin. (The word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah.) Although some biblical scholars have made note of this, they fail to go on and develop the enormous implications of the matter. The notion of a virgin birth first appears in Matthew 1:18, 22-23, where Matthew says the virgin birth was a fulfillment of a prophecy by Isaiah in 7:14. But not only didn't Isaiah, as we have seen, use the word virgin, which all by itself refutes Matthew's virgin birth of Jesus, but the very context in which Isaiah was speaking absolutely precludes the notion of such a prophecy by Isaiah. I elaborate in my book, Isaiah told Ahaz, the king of Judea, that by the time the child of the young woman, a boy, was old enough to know right from wrong, Ahaz's enemies, the kings of Israel and Syria (Pekah and Rezin) would be dead. And the two kings died around 731-732 B.C. So the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy in 7:14 took place close to 800 years before Jesus was even born, conclusively negating Matthew's averment that Isaiah's prophecy pertained to the virgin birth of Jesus.
Another shattered pillar is that in view of the physical mortality of the human body, if the soul isn't immortal there is no life after death, and hence, no heaven and hell of Christianity. But, again, astonishingly, there is no scriptural support for the immortality of the soul. It turns out that it all started with Plato who employed four absolutely foundation-less presuppositions to conclude the soul is immortal, and Judaism and Christianity accepted without question this doctrine that has greatly affected the lives of billions of people. How nice.
The destruction of pillars goes on and on in Divinity of Doubt. This is why the consensus of those who have read it is that no one who reads it will ever again feel the same way about God and religion.
Though not being literary, Gertrude Stein described the essence of agnosticism well: "There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer."
I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension. As Einstein, who was an agnostic (so was Darwin), put it: "The problem is too vast for our limited minds." But even if it were not, doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth, thereby opening the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. And as knowledge increases, faith recedes. Even though I don't feel that a belief in God (theism) or disbelief in him (atheism) is unintelligent, I do feel that a certitude about either of these two positions, even a strong belief in them, which is so extremely common, is, perforce, unintelligent. Put another way, since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God. I have always liked Clarence Darrow's observation about the existence vis-à-vis non-existence of God: "I do not pretend to know what ignorant men are sure of."
The whole matter of God can perhaps be distilled down to this. Is there a God who created the world? Or is God a word we use to explain the world? In either event, God should only be a question.
Sam Harris: Morality Without "Free Will"
Bugliosi probably lives his life as though there's no god as well, but in this article/advertisement for his book and in his book he portrays himself as a maverick - better, smarter, and more humble than theist or atheist. He offers no new arguments from either of those points of view. While I enjoyed his previous book, I highly recommend skipping this one altogether. If you're really curious, check your local library.
As for his parting paragraph, which ends:
"...God should only be a question."
...he stole this argument, such as it is, from theologians. Saying "God is the question, not the answer" is as meaningful and useful as saying nothing whatsoever...but it sounds profound! That is, until you actually think about it.
The odds for a god? One in a million billion at best. I'll take the no god odds.
If you wanted to know about the truth claims of Islam, would you ask other Muslims, Christians, both, none, or others? Why or why not? The answer to this question made me look outside of apologetics if I wanted to claim any semblance of intellectual honesty when looking into the truth claims of Christianity.
It's just funny when "atheists" use claims of scientific method to deny god. How many times did you apply the scientific method to love your wife? What about to love your kids? Or perhaps to determine what food you like best? One only needs to go past his rational thoughts to notice there's more to life than logic.
But we can only blame abrahamic faiths for denying logic and separating it from philosophical systems of yoga (religare). Now we need to have these silly debates. Sigh.
"You can only say that you have never had such a [religious] experience, whreupon your opponent will reply: “Sorry, I have.” And there your discussion will come to an end. No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning and beauty, and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such an experience is not valid, and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about the ultimate things than the one that helps you to live?"
Either a god exists or it does not (or many gods). This is a truth proposition that can be tested by examining the evidence of the universe and comparing it with the statements believers make about their god(s) and the effects he/she/it/they should have on the world. The evidence does not line up with the stated beliefs, no matter how much you may wish it to be so.
And as an atheist (and former theist), I still have "oceanic experiences".
There are theists and spiritualists that disagree. For them life itself, the organization of the microcosmos and the macrocosmos is not even just proof of God, but God itself!
But I was not trying to prove god with those examples, I was demonstrating that logic isn't the only cognitive function and shouldn't be the end all be all to accept or dismiss something as true or false.
"This is a truth proposition that can be tested by examining the evidence of the universe and comparing it with the statements believers make about their god(s) and the effects he/she/it/they should have on the world."
Well, actually, I think all religions states very clearly that God would be beyond sensorial perception and beyond the material world (unless you're talking about some abrahamic misrepresented misunderstood concept), that alone would be enough for logic to not even try to disprove, because it isn't even logically proved in the first place.
That's one serious mix up of archetypal religious beliefs with scientific truths, that exists once again because of abrahamic faiths.
Take Hinduism for example, it never claimed that the Earth was flat or 6000 years old. As a matter of fact, it's respected by serious scientific minds like Carl Sagan:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
"How do we make an objective observation independent of an interpretation of our experience ? "
The scientific method is as good as we can do. It's not perfect.
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You didn't get past the second sentence, and you lost me. You don't seem to understand what an atheist is, or isn't.
Technically, any combination of beliefs is "true" atheism so long as there is a lack of belief in god.
It includes both those who don't believe in god due to lack of evidence, and those who assert that we can know that no god exists. Both are true atheists.
Asserting that you can know for certain whether or not there is a god is not a matter of belief and therefor not a variable in the atheist definition. The question of what we can and can not know falls into the gnostic/agnostic definition. You hold a gnostic atheist position.
I did.
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
Neither one can prove it. That's the point of the article. He's arguing for agnosticism, which is simply respectfully saying that no one has convinced him on either side.
Meanwhile, I'd like to complain about the 16,000 little children who will die of starvation-related causes today. And 8 million children born with birth defects every year.
I support a number of charities, but it seems like a god who could create the entire universe could step up to the plate, here, and help us out.
If 8 million children are born with "birth defects" every year, what human elements were involved? Did their mothers get the necessary pre-natal care they needed to prevent these birth defects during pregnancy? Were the mothers malnourished, like the starving children you describe? Are these defects life-threatening?
Think about what God provides in the way of abundant crops & rich harvests that keep all but these children from starving each day & to ensure their happiness & well-being. Think about medical science that works to understand & prevent birth defects & the hundred of institutions that work to correct and/or cure birth defects.
Your complaints against God because of suffering caused by humans or that can be alleviated through human intervention does not make the case against an omnipotent & loving God.
Personally as an atheist I don't think there is any kind of inherently damaging aspect to belief in God. Not at all.
However, I do object to any belief system, including the organized religions, that encourage people to hurt or limit the rights of others. And this is not uncommon.