I have great respect for people who exert some intellectual energy and come to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist. It’s not as if one can open a flap in one’s scalp and change the setting from atheist to theist. People believe what they believe. Some people get miffed in life and then back into that conclusion. Believers aren’t the only ones with a tendency to presuppose what they claim to prove.
I’m sure there are atheists that do that, just as there are theists who do that. If we want to take such a question seriously, though, we entertain both hypotheses as
provisionally true, and make our predictions and analysis from that. What would the world look like if it was godless? What would a godful world look like. As it turns out, just even going there reveals serious problems theism has, epistemically. It’s got problems just being coherent, being something that even
qualifies as meaningful in terms of “true” or “false”. And even if we set aside its incoherence, we are still left with God as not only an unfalsifiable proposition, but an infiinitely plastic concept. There isn’t
any state of the world that we could not suppose was that way “because that’s what God wanted”. From an apparently godless universe (God hides, and wants to see who will embrace him in spite of the godless appearance of the universe) to a kind of immanence where God’s reality is as directly apprehended as the hand in front of one’s face, it’s all amenable to theism.
There is no “state of the world” that qualifies as godless to the theist, no way the world could turn out that would cause one to reject theism because it conflicted with the idea of God.
On the other hand (once again), a godless universe is not plastic like that. An evident being that can demonstrate to the satisfaction of any number of objective observations that it has substantial control over the laws of nature, and can mess with reality so completely that “law” seems a silly term to apply to this being, would be a world that only a fool would call “godless”.
Reality, then, is not at risk of being godless for the theist. There is no “godless outcome” that is compelling to the theist. But the atheist is ever at risk of a God becoming known, evident, present, demonstrated as actual. The atheist view is at risk, which gives it a solid intellectual advantage over theism, which wallows in the warm bath of its own unfalsifiability by
any means.
All of which to say, we hold both hypotheses as
provisionally true, each in turn, when doing our analysis. Presupposing either the existence of God or the non-existence of God in an axiomatic way is foolishness.
An argument can be made that God cannot be detected in a strict logical sense because He exists outside of time and space and therefore is beyond the reach of instruments and logical processes locked in a reality dependent on before/after and to/from dimensions.
Yes, but that’s an exceedingly anemic argument. Unicorns might exist on the very same grounds: they just cannot be detected because they a type of fauna that exists beyond time, space, and the reach of any and all instruments. But they’re still
real!
I do grant that can be advanced, but I suggest once you have to argue on those terms, you’ve given away the store, and there’s nothing left to defend, intellectually.
Just because one’s yardstick cannot detect barometric pressure does not mean it doesn’t exist. The process of atheists and theists reasoning together is all too often cut short by one of them doing an undeserved victory lap.
Yes, but please not the form you have been forced to take here, a kind of “intellectual litote” gone bad – the Double Negative Argument for God. That is, the retort that
you can’t show God does NOT exist.
Which admittedly, I cannot not, and no one can. But no atheist claims there is such a heuristic available, a yardstick of instrument particular that if we fail to see God with, falsifies God’s existence. The theistic claim is
way too plastic to be bothered with that, and for any (and all, as you’ve noted here) instrumentation, we can just conveniently suppose God obtains in some
other way. Since we are not omniscient, there is and will always be gaps in our knowledge, pools of ignorance in which we can source God.
And that does bring it back, crucially, to the tie. Many theists simply think God exists “by default”. We can’t falsify the idea, so, that’s all you need! But the same folks, if asked, regularly doubt the existence of unicorns and garden pixies and celestial teapots, all of which are ideas as bankrupt evidentially as God is. There’s a pronounced bit of gerrymandering that humans do, dismissing claims which are conspicuously fantastic and proportionately bereft of supporting evidence for so many things
except God.
It’s not hard to imagine how that happens, though, especially for me, previously a Christian for a very long time. We simply
want God to exist, and many of us were raised in a way that we have difficulty even
thinking outside of that box – theism as not only a natural intuition, but an idea that gets trained into us by our parents and family.
I know many atheists who think God does not exist simply because they’d rather he
not exist, which is the same foolishness in reverse. But if we wish to reason in a serious way about the question, we begin in a state of agnosticism, noting that God does not appear to us in any way that we might not simply dismiss as imagination. God may exist, but at the start, we have to justification for such a belief, and this puts the onus of proof on the theist, just as you would expect a Unicornist to carry that same burden in claiming that unicorns really
do exist.
-TS
