by Lex Bayer
Good luck, and have fun!
My Ten Non-commandments as Written by _______________ on _______
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Justifications and Evidence to Accompany My Ten Non-commandments
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Appendix A
Common Religious Objections
The truth springs from arguments amongst friends.
—David Hume
Earlier in this book we used a core concept to conclude that God does not exist—that no reliable means exists to determine the relative validity of the various descriptions of God. So believing that any one view of God happens to be the correct one, and that (in most cases) it happens to have been the one you were born into, is equivalent to believing you hold a winning lottery ticket before the results are announced. This is playing the “religious lottery.”
Four common objections are often raised by religious believers to discredit this analogy. The first is the unified theory of God, which argues that the apparent perceptions of different gods are really just different views of the same God. As a result, goes the reasoning, there are millions of winning lottery tickets, so you probably are holding a winner.
The second objection uses a pseudoprobability argument known as Pascal’s Wager, which claims that since the jackpot is so large—a place in heaven—and the cost of the ticket is so small, the mathematics of probability dictate that you should buy a ticket just in case.
A third reason provided for a belief in God is evidence in the form of miracles. Miracles take the form of events that contravene the laws of nature and, therefore, are used to show that some other being must exist beyond the boundaries of the natural. Some religious believers even claim to have directly observed God, heard his voice, or seen his image.
Fina
lly, the fourth reason is psychological comfort. Some proponents of a belief in God say that while they acknowledge that there is no evidence for God’s existence, we should nevertheless believe in God because of the social benefits and psychological comforts such a belief provides. A belief in God gives us hope, makes our suffering in the world more tolerable, and motivates people to be moral.
We will address each one of these pro-God arguments in turn: the unified view of God, Pascal’s Wager, miracles, and psychological comfort.1
A Unified View of God
Many liberal, spiritual, or nondenominational believers hold the unified view of God, where the gods being worshipped by the various religions are actually the same singular God. Philosopher of religion John Hick explains this unified theory of God and why contradicting claims of various religions might exist by drawing an analogy to the parable of the blind men and the elephant, often attributed to the Buddha:
An elephant was brought to a group of blind men who had never encountered such an animal before. One felt the leg and reported that an elephant is a great living pillar. Another felt the trunk and reported that an elephant is a great snake. Another felt a tusk and reported that an elephant is like a sharp ploughshare. And so on. And they all quarreled together, each claiming that his own account was the truth and therefore all others false. In fact, of course they were all true, but each referring only to one aspect of the total reality and all expressed in very imperfect analogies.
Now the possibility, indeed the probability, that we have seriously to consider is that many different accounts of the divine reality may be true, though all expressed in imperfect human analogies, but that none is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” May it not be that the different concepts of God, as Jahweh, Allah, Krishna, Param Atma, Holy Trinity, and so on . . . are all images of the divine, each expressing some aspects or range of aspects and yet none by itself fully and exhaustively corresponding to the infinite nature of the ultimate reality?2
The pluralistic view of God has three main flaws. First, it ignores the problem that certain descriptions of God directly conflict with each other. If two blind men were both feeling the same tusk, and one claimed that the tusk was soft and the other that it was hard, even with a larger knowledge about an entire elephant, the blind men could not both be correct.
In reality, views of God by the various religions do often propose directly contradictory views. Christians believe Jesus is God. The Jewish view holds the inverse—that this same Jesus is not God. No matter how you look at the big picture, both these views of God cannot be true—only one can be true, or neither.
The second main flaw with a pluralistic view of God is that it does not specify what to exclude. It assumes that all the blind men are touching and describing an elephant. What if one blind man was instead touching a giraffe, another was touching a bear, and only the third was touching an elephant? The parable assumes that the elements being described are connected, but they might not be. The assumption that all versions are automatically correct is the least likely and least satisfactory of all.
The third flaw with a unified view of God is that it misses what the religious views of God actually are. Different religions do not claim only to have some vague notion of God. Rather, each religion affirms that its particular beliefs directly reflect the will of God himself. For example, Judaism believes that the words of the Bible are the precise words of God. The Bible is not claimed to be a vague description written by some blind man about his experiences with some God. On the contrary, the core of Jewish belief is that God himself gave the Bible to humankind. To continue the analogy, here the “elephant” wrote its own description of what it is and gave it to the blind men.
Most religions derive their doctrines from God directly—which is why religions profess to know the truth, not merely a part of the truth. If we reject the claim that the Bible was given to humankind by God, there is simply no reason left to believe that the Bible explains “the truth” because it has no divine source. It is for these reasons that David Hume famously asserted “that, in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary.”3
Pascal’s Wager
We have relied heavily on the laws of probability to demonstrate that holding a particular view of God when faced with so many equally plausible views of God is not rational. But probability too has been used to propose a counter argument for a belief in God—the most noteworthy being Pascal’s Wager, which can be summarized as follows: as long as there is some small positive probability that God exists, it follows, since infinity multiplied by any finite amount generates an infinity, that the expected utility of believing that God exists swamps that of disbelief.4
The argument here is that no matter how small one takes the odds to be that God exists, the act of believing that God exists carries an infinite expected utility (eternal afterlife). Thus one could maximize one’s potential outcome simply by believing rather than disbelieving.
While Pascal’s argument purports to show that probability could be used to justify a belief in God, on closer examination several flaws become apparent.
One problem is that Pascal assumes that belief in a certain religion definitely leads to infinite bliss. But religions frequently damn each other mutually, so it’s equally possible that believing in a religion that turns out to be false could send a person to one of the various hells that have been imagined. Furthermore, if we accept Pascal’s way of thinking, we could use it to justify any behavior, as demonstrated by the following extreme, but still relevant, example:
Either (a) there is a God who will send you to heaven only if you commit a painful ritual suicide within an hour of first reading this, or (b) there is not. We cannot settle the question whether (a) or (b) is the case. . . . But (a) is vastly preferable to (b), since in situation (a) infinite bliss is guaranteed, while in (b) we are left in the usual miserable human condition. So we should wager for (a) by performing the suicidal ritual.5
As soon as we remove unfounded assumptions about the qualities of God (such as only granting eternal bliss), Pascal’s argument can be used to condone any action—even suicide.
Miracles as Evidence of God’s Existence
Some theologians cite miracles as evidence for the existence of God. These most often come in the form of human testimony of either direct communication with God or witnessing miracles performed by God. Miracles in the Old Testament include God’s creation of a fire in a bush that never burned,6 God stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua to do battle,7 and, in the New Testament, Jesus walking on water.8
Modern-day “miracles” include accounts of terminally ill patients surviving a disease or infertile couples becoming pregnant. In India, Hindu swamis claim to perform miracles such as turning barren lands into forests. These miracles are typically explained as spectacular manifestations of God’s direct intervention to alter the laws of nature to promote a divine plan (oftentimes brought about through prayer).
First let’s examine the eyewitness accounts of people who claim to have witnessed miracles. Human testimony is a form of information we encounter routinely in our lives when evaluating what to believe. Based on our prior experience with the accuracy of various sources of information, we choose to classify sources based on our perception of their trustworthiness. Human testimony is no different. We also evaluate the content of the testimony by comparing it to knowledge we may already have from our own direct observations or from other sources.
How should we establish the credibility of witnesses who claim to have seen violations of the laws of nature in the form of miracles? The philosopher David Hume, who dealt extensively with the topic in his essay On Miracles, suggests the following method for evaluating testimony about miracles:
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to
establish. . . . When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.9
In other words, we should evaluate any testimony about a suspension of the laws of nature against the testimony of the laws of nature itself and decide which is more probable. The regularity of nature is itself a proof. Laws of nature are laws that have repeated themselves endless times without alterations. We should only believe in the account of a miracle if it would be more miraculous that the person giving the account was in error, than that the miracle itself did not occur.