Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Evolution’

Originally posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Recently, I’ve been seeing fliers and posters everywhere. They’re all about some “Does God Exist?” debate between some foreign theistic prof and a UofT atheist prof. After quick glances at the website of this debate, it became clear that once again, we have a debate that tries to go into every detail to answer a question that is of questionable importance in the first place.

“Does God Exist?” certainly sounds like an important question. I too once believed that this is the central, unanswerable question that allows reason to let pass religious extremist militants and religious fundamentalist idiots. I too once believed that because we can’t answer such a question, therefore our prejudice against such behavior are merely individual, subjective, opinions. I mean, certainly, if God doesn’t exist, then nobody would be right in using God as an excuse to perform undesirable actions, whether creating murder in the world, or messing up educational systems, or just being plain idiots. On the other hand, certainly if God does exist, then it doesn’t matter how evil or stupid of actions we perceive them to be, they must be right actions if they are required by God.

As it turns out, the whole topic of religion is one huge unorganized and complicated mess. The question of “does God exist?” is like a figurehead – everyone think it represents the topic, but it’s nowhere near the real important questions we should be asking when dwelling in the topic. In most “Does God Exist?” debates, what ends up happening is that the defenders and attackers of God constantly makes arguments towards various principles of philosophy and science – they go anywhere from evolution to philosophy to thermodynamics and high-energy physics, talking about topics like probability, chance, the Big Bang theory, the beginning of the Universe, etc… It takes people who are well-versed in many disciplines in order to hold ground in such a debate, but for what? Usually, the final goal of the theistic side is to prove that some “intelligent, immaterial, powerful, changeless being existed in a timeless, eternal state beyond the beginning of the universe,” and the atheists obviously want to argue otherwise.

So yea, all that effort, and regardless of which side wins, in the end all we can conclude is that “some entity” with “a few stated properties” exists or does not exist. Very useful… very useful indeed. Of course, this is not to mention the implied uncertainty with terms like “timeless, eternal” which are concepts that theists themselves admit to be absurd and not found in observable reality, and thus only attributable to God, who thus by definition lives in an environment outside of our observable reality (and maybe only in our imaginations). But nonetheless, even if we can answer “Does God Exist?” What good would it do for us to know that some entity of certain features exist or doesn’t exist?

See, a much more relevant question is not whether this “entity” with “a few properties” exists, but rather the question of “What exactly is this entity?” What if I say that “yep, God exists, but is a badass-looking dragon, or a girl named Suzumiya Haruhi.” How would a theist respond? “Absurd?” Maybe, but can you prove that it’s definitely false? Obviously not. Nothing is definitely proven, you say, I’m fine with that, but can you prove that it’s significantly less likely than any of the dominant religions in the world? That becomes much more complicated. Note that I did not ask whether it’s just less likely, I asked whether it is significantly less likely, and many theists fumble here; they either lose reason, or create an argument so large and complicated that few people can truly prove the argument’s validity or falsehood. This question of “Which God?” is much more difficult to answer, and much more relevant than “Does God Exist?” Yet, when I type in “Does God Exist” into Google, I get numerous debate sites, discussion articles, and the like, and when I type in “Which God is Real” or merely a more generic “Which God,” the results are much more ambiguous and random, clearly the less popular of questions.

Why is it that I never see a debate between Christians, Jews, Islamists, Hindus, etc… over whose religion is more likely to be true? Perhaps they can compare evidences and miracles and argue over things like whose holy scripture is more internally consistent. Although, a proper debate would be large and complicated indeed. The world isn’t divided between atheists and theists. The world is divided between atheists, theists of belief 1, theists of belief 2, theists of belief 3, etc… and every gradient in-between. Even within Christianity there are over 38,000 denominations of which many take dramatically different interpretations for how one should behave. And let’s not forget the religions like certain Chinese traditional religions that treats itself more like a philosophy (some “guide to life”) rather than divine, absolute truth. Certainly not all religions adopt a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude. Surely some religions openly encourage the belief in any religion, and surely there are other religions between these extremes as well.

Now, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that all religions in the world does in fact claim a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude, this logically leads to the conclusion that if any religion turns out to be right, all the rest would be automatically wrong. So then, all we have to do is compare evidences, find the most likely religion, and that’ll be our best bet, right? Not likely. Let’s remember what God at this point is. The people who debate “Does God Exist?” tend to define God as some sort of entity that has a few generic properties (e.g. intelligent, immaterial, powerful, etc…), and that’s all we know about God. With such a vague definition of God, we are not very certain about anything as there are endless possibilities. So therefore, even if some possibilities are judged to be more likely than others, we still do not have the ground to say that any possibility is sufficiently probable to make believing in it worthwhile.

Remember, even though religion A might have more evidence than religion B, it does not mean religion A has sufficient evidence to justify belief. In fact, if all we know about God is that God must fit a few general properties, then the possibilities for potential Gods are endless, and the more potential Gods we have, the smaller the “truth probability” of each God becomes. So therefore, if everyone adopts a “we are right and you are wrong” attitude, then the world is screwed, for every single person would have only a tiny probability of ending up in a good afterlife.

It seems that if God exists and is judgmental, then either God has to tolerate other religions, or we’re all pretty much screwed.