Proving God: A Christian’s Arguments

A Mr Dale writes online:

1. Any declaration of truth, like: my hair is brown or God exists or there is no God requires evidence.

   Not so. These are apples and pears. “God exists” requires evidence, as does a statement about the colour of something, but “there is no God” neither requires evidence nor can there be any other than the absence of evidence that there is a God. When something is imaginary, it does not exist in the material world and so there can be no material evidence of it. When there is no material evidence of something, then the skeptical attitude at the base of science declares that it does not exist. If material evidence arises, then science is corrigible. It can change its previous conclusion. Meanwhile God does not exist because there is no evidence He does. If Christians demur then they must produce the evidence for God.

2. What evidence does anyone have for atheism? What evidence could be provided to support it? How do you measure spirit? It’s impossible to measure fully the states of an atom, which is a material construct. How then can you disprove something which is immaterial?

   Something immaterial, like spirit, can have no effect on the material world. So far as we material things are concerned, spirit does not exist because there is no material evidence for it, nor can there be unless spirit is in some sense material, in which case we can detect it. No one has, and the skeptical view is that it does not exist. See 1.

3. As pointed out, time and again. There are many arguments for God’s existence. There is physical evidence to support the general historicity of the Bible, esp. the New Testament. And there is God’s promise of self-revelation to the earnest seeker.

   None of the “many arguments” are given. The historicity of a book is no proof of God, and God’s self-revelation is not a self revelation at all but merely a statement of certain authors and preachers, all men.

4. But even if you could dis-prove the theist’s arguments that’d still only lead you to agnosticism.

   Not so. Agnosticism is sitting on the fence. The skeptical conclusion from a lack of evidence for God is that there is no God.

5. Consequently one has to ask; how can anyone hold the strong belief: there is no God, in the absence of any suporting evidence. Surely the best any rational person can do is say. I don’t know if God exists.

   Not so. See 1 and 4.

6. On the other hand the Christian can look at the argumentation. Can balance the evidence and can receive God’s self-revelation and consequently, rationally state: God exists.

   Not so. Mr Dale proves that the Christian does not look at the evidence, or the arguments, and does not balance the evidence but counts as evidence that which is not evidence and that which is irrelevant. In short, they are indoctrinated and deluded.

7. Considering human beings are pre-programmed to believe, something long, argued for by Christians and the rationality of Christian belief as opposed to the no-God hypothesis, would it not be rational to actually look for answers to some of these questions?

   Rationality is something Christians like Mr Dale should try.

The War Between Science and Religion

It is a shame how some apparently learned men will show themselves to be little more than idiots savants for the sake of God. One such man is Nigel Cutland, now professor of mathematics at the university of York. Cutland is a Christian but teaches abstruse mathematics at about the standard Newton and Liebnitz reached 300 years ago, but made trendy with a smidgeon of added philosophy. As a Christian, he feels obliged to defend God. Though God is a far better mathematician than Cutland, he feels the need to defend Him against some non-mathematical critics, presumably because he is not sure God can stand up for Himself.

He says that Richard Dawkins “buys into the mistake that science and religion are at war”, and he does not want God to believe any such thing. As proof, he tells us “there are many scientists, some very eminent, on both sides of the theist-atheist divide”. Well, indeed there are, and there are some scientists who smoke cigarettes and have sex with other people’s wives, but being eminent scientists does not justify their bad habits. And, in any case, it remains true that an overwhelming proportion of the topmost scientists have always rejected God. As the degree of eminence declines, the proportion of believers increases, but never gets to the levels of the general population. Scientists are always less religious than the masses. The exceptions of certain journeymen just prove the rule.

So, Cutland has convinced himself that there is no war between science and religion, even though science demands evidence, and religion demands faith—belief without evidence. Nothing could be more opposite, though Cutland has not noticed it, despite his professorship. As further evidence, he cites John Lennox (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?), a book he greatly admires, no doubt because Lennox is a fellow Christian mathematician, a pastor of Green College, Oxford, and doubtless his chum. Lennox does not think science can decide between two alternative “world views”. One is naturalism-atheism—there is nothing but nature and the material world. The other is supernaturalism-theism—there is a God. Even so, Lennox has decided that God is necessary because there are plenty of gaps remaining for Him to exclusively fill. God is the Intelligent Designer!

It is a view many scientists are happy to accept, mainly because they are unwilling to debate with unreason, and consider that the winning entry will eventually be clear without them having to intervene. It is a naïve view, but like other normal people, most scientists are naïve outside of their own skills. Scientists rightly think that they have a method for showing what is true and what is not by painstaking testing. Whatever fails the tests is ruthlessly abandoned, like the notion of space being filled with a fluid called ether. Progressively science is proving religion wrong. Germs not demons cause disease, and Jesus could only have been acting the magician to drive out demons when none were there, or needed to be. Science has shown it can explain the world, and find answers to problems without the need for a God. God has left no traces in the world, and shows no sign of interfering in it. The evidence is the same as that He does not exist. The hypothesis of God should be abandoned. God is superfluous.

Though, science has being replacing the rickety ladder of religion with a solid staircase to greater knowledge, religion in extremis will destroy everything to stop itself from being destroyed. It has happened before. Look at the Cathar genocide, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the countless religious wars of unbridled malignity. Fundamentalism has been attacking science for a hundred years, and judging by history, it is never safe to think that religion will go quietly. Look at the ferocity of Moslem fundamentalists. They feel under double attack, by science and by the western lifestyle. Then listen to Christian fundamentalists. Religious fanatics would rather destroy the world than admit they are insane.

In his researches, Cutland has discovered that “scientists on both sides believe that science supports their own faith”. He declares atheism to be a faith because it is impossible to disprove God. It is just as hard to disprove the Wizard of Oz, Santa Claus, the Loch Ness Monster or ET. As they are all imaginary, there is nothing about them to prove. You do not need to prove Santa Claus to a child—they accept him as the source of their Christmas presents. But once the seed of doubt is planted, you have nothing to counter it because Santa is as imaginary as Tinker Bell and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Just how does God differ in practice from these other entities? If I am grown up enough to realize that Santa Claus is imaginary, do I have some peculiar faith? The Mighty Calculus thinks so, but it is patently absurd, and simply demonstrates how Christianity destroys reason.

Cutland thinks his hero, Lennox, has shown that science is consistent with theism because it explains “the rational intelligibility of the universe, without which science cannot begin”. You have then to believe that either God thinks much as we do, and admittedly that is what Christians do think, or, as a vastly superior being, he thinks in a vastly superior way, in which case there is no reason why we should find anything He thinks as intelligible, and a more likely case for a God! One cannot expect an idiot savant to think subtly outside of his intellectual cocoon.

Cutland admits that “the unthinking blind faith and fanaticism” of some believers is deplorable, but adding that “it is unscientific to generalize from some to all”. I hadn’t noticed that Christians were so discerning in their long history. The Christian leaders of the US and UK not long ago felt no need to distinguish innocent Moslems from terrorists. Far from it, all were treated as if they were terrorists, and many are still not getting access to justice. Generalizing about Christians seems a proportionate thing to do in view of their own chosen behaviour, well reported as it is in history for those who want to read it. No one is obliged to be a Christian, any more than anyone is obliged to be a Nazi. Those who choose to be Christian do it with the full knowledge of its appalling record as an institution, a record that individual duty can hardly scratch. It is safer for non-Christians to assume that any Christian would willingly kill them to save their soul, since that is what they have willingly done in the past.

God’s Own Summary of the Bible

I read a summary of the bible in God’s own words on Mountainman’s fascinating website, but I think it missed the most important point, and that is that both of the commandments that Christ gave are the same one. I explain it here (http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b11fscollins.php) in a criticism of a book by F S Collins:

We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two commandments he gave are the same one, to Love God and to love your neighbour. It is a clear indication that God, in practical terms, is your neighbour, your fellow human being on this planet. Just in case anyone should doubt it, let them read Christ’s description of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25:33-46. God says to the sheep at his right hand whom He has blessed:

“I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.

The virtuous say to him in reply:

Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?

And God replies:

In so far as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.

To the goats gathered at His left hand God says:

Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food. I was thirsty and you never gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.

And they too will ask:

Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help.

And again God will answer:

In so far as you neglected to do this this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.”

If you are a Christian and consider Christ to speak with the authority of God, because he is God, then just what could be clearer than this description of how to be saved. And what could be clearer than that God considered any human being, even the least of them, as being Himself. To abuse or fail to help any human being is to do the same to God, and only by helping your fellow human beings are you displaying your love of God.

So, to get the full meaning of God’s shortest bible, a little more needs to be read, but I cannot see how Christians can miss the interpretation. It shows clearly that most “Christians” are nothing of the kind, particularly those who are most demonstrative of their beliefs like Bush and Blair, the Constantines of the modern day, maybe.

God incarnated as Christ has nothing to say about attending mass, or saying prayers, or having faith, or lighting candles to be saved. It is altogether more moral than all the mumbo jumbo. God is Everyman! You cannot separately love God, you can only love Him through loving people!! He says thou shalt. It is an order. Faith and all the rest might help, but it cannot replace what Christians must do to be saved. They have to love others. Full Stop! Why do Christians confuse this simple message with all the mumbo jumbo?

Einstein and His God

Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some, aware of his statements such as that God does not play dice, to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic.

Thus I came—despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude… which has never left me.

Albert Einstein

Boston’s Cardinal O’Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism” and “befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation.” On April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask:

Do you believe in God?

Einstein’s return message is the famous statement:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist… I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.

The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein’s God:

However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to… clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism… This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.

Do Christians think God is trying to Trick them?

It seems that no Christians dare. No one has replied.

clipped from mikemagee.wordpress.com Do Christians think that God is trying to trick them in making history seem different from the myths in the so-called holy books? When the holy books are so much at variance with scholarship, would it not be more sensible to realize that dishonest people in the past have lured honest Jews and Christians into believing falsehoods? How do they know that God has been trying to persuade them of their errors but the Devil has such a grip on them that they will not listen? I have a lot of relevant analysis of these matters at the askwhy website. Take a look, even you Christians, if you dare!

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