Truth
John Hick proves God
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 03 May 2004
Verification
A proposition p is verified by its prediction or use value. If it is useful for showing what will happen if p is true then it verifies p, but otherwise p is false. The process of verification requires the prediction to be observed and reported. If it has not been, then the proposition has not been verified. It will not do to predict what will happen in 100 years time and claim a proposition has been verified. Someone alive then must be willing to check the prediction, and even then it must be substantially better than what pure chance might produce. Thus it is confirmation of the prediction that is verification, not simply making a prediction.
For a prediction to be verified, someone has to do it, and, even then, a single person’s confirmation is often not enough. Several independent checks have to be made to be sure. Errors of method and observation are possible, so that scientific verification requires multiple confirmation. Verification therefore is a public activity in the sense that the circumstances of it are published for anyone to read and repeat for themselves. Naturally, proposition p might not be true under all conditions, so verification requires a statement of the conditions pertaining at the time.
The prediction made from p must be one which could be wrong, so that given p then x, but not p then y. The possible outcome must be x or y, x confirming p and y refuting it. It is not scientific, finding y, to then argue some other circumstance to preserve p, except to delineate p as being true only within certain bounds. Then the circumstances must be understood beforehand, and be part of the conditions for which p is true.
So, when a Christian says, “Pray and your prayers will be answered”, you pray, and your prayers are not answered, then the Christian replies, “You did not believe”, the Christian is changing the goalposts, setting new conditions, finding excuses. It is not scientific because when their prediction is proved false, they find an excuse they had not told you in advance was a condition. Moreover, it is not scientific for a more subtle reason—there is no way of testing their condition, except by their prediction. Really, they are saying your prayers will only be answered if you believe. For this reason, Christians will brag that their prayers are always answered, to prove that they really believe, and think that God helps them unclog their drains and start their cars.
Belief and its Tests
At one time, religious people in the ancient near east thought that if they did not sacrifice a lamb or a bull, the sun would not rise, or would keep declining past the winter solstice and disappear forever, leaving everyone to die. The priests persuaded everyone that only their sacrifices and bonfires made the sun return, and so they felt obliged to do it. “Look! It works!”, they claimed when the sun returned! They were duped into thinking that the sun rising was a test of the efficacy of their sacrifices, when the sun would have risen anyway, and had done for countless previous years until the priests, those honest fellows, told them otherwise. Needless to say, the sun rising was not a test of the power of sacrifice, though religious people still back up their faith with such silly conceptions.
The whole aim of a scientific test of an hypothesis was the attempt to falsify it, not to verify it, because any number of verifications will not allow for the set of conditions pertaining in which the test would fail. The test of the truth of p is that its prediction will occur or not according to the truth or falseness of p. The best hypotheses are those which can be tested in this simple yes/no manner, and successful empirical scientists are often those brilliant at devising simple but conclusive tests.
It is not a verification of p if what it predicts will happen whether p is true or not. The return of the sun at the winter solstice is not a verification of the efficacy of sacrifice, as the omission of the sacrifice would prove. Of course, the believers dare not do it, and even if it happened by some accident or disaster, the priests would have their excuse ready, which all the believers readily accepted. It was God’s grace or compassion or understanding or the priests’ prayers or their promise of an extra sacrifice, or their promise to change the king, or whatever. This is why science and theology are not compatible. Theology is the excuses of priests for the failings of their holy hypotheses.
Armchair Religions?
Nowadays, the fear is not that the sun will not rise, but that of not waking up alive in heaven after you have died. Some propositions involving the infinite series of surds or time might not be falsifiable in finite time, and Professor John Hick, an English theologian, suggests that it is impossible also to falsify the proposition that the conscious personality survives death, yet it might be true. Karl Popper wanted a criterion of what was scientific, and that is why he hit upon the principle of falsifiability. What cannot be falsified is not a scientific proposition.
Generally, what is not scientific is absurd, and pursuing any such question is like a dog chasing its tail. It might seem all very active and exciting but it gets you nowhere and is of no consequence. The survival of an individual personality without any physical body can only be verified by that individual alone, but what is true only of an individual and not verifiable publicly is not scientific. What science does is look for signs of life and corruption in physical bodies and when there are no signs of life but there are signs of decay, then the conclusion is that the body is dead. No external signs of conscious personality have ever been displayed by dead and decaying bodies, despite plays like The Monkey’s Paw, and modern horror movies, and everyone should be glad of it.
The human imagination is capable of inventing impossible situations through its creative abilities or feverishness when ill. Humans can imagine what is impossible like dying and coming back to life either in a revived body or as an incorporeal spirit. They can imagine they are Napoleon, or that their wife is an armchair. They can imagine they are an almighty spirit transcending the whole universe, or that the invisible being they collect for and provide free accommodation for in their church is. What people imagine may or may not be testable, but when there is no other evidence for far-fetched propositions, the proper scientific view is skepticism.
It is possible to test a man’s wife to prove that she is not an armchair, should someone think it needed demonstrating, but when the man believes she is, the test will not convince him otherwise. He is insane, and those who hold such beliefs despite contrary evidence or without evidence at all, are just as insane. It might not be possible to devise a test for post mortem consciousness or the existence of God but the sensible attitude to all such unverifiable beliefs is to be skeptical. The proper reply to all such suggestions is, “Yes, and my wife’s an armchair”! “God dwelt in the Ark of the Covenant.” “Yes, and my wife’s an armchair”! “Have faith and we shall live forever and ever when we are dead.” “Yes, and my wife’s an armchair”! “Jesus lives!” “Yes, and my wife’s an armchair”!
A Parable of Post Mortem Verification
Hick is not impressed by the armchair response. He insists that the hypothesis that our personality survives death is meaningful because, if it is true, it will be known to be true. He argues we can make future predictions. The prophesy of the End of the World on Good Friday, 2033 AD, believed by many Christians, will be known to be true, if it is true. It has no value as a test of any proposition until then. If, in the meantime, a nasty virus carries off all human life, then it will not be verified at all. The Christian view, if that is what Hick expresses, is that it will be verified by the living dead!
Immortality—is an empirical hypothesis, because it possesses logical verifiability. It could be verified by the following proposition: “Wait until you die!”Morris Schlick, cited by John Hick
At this point in this long waste of time, Hick yields to the Christian temptation to speak in parables. He allegorizes life to a long journey along a road. Two men are companions on the journey. One thinks it leads to a wonderful city with a benevolent king, but the other thinks it just goes on, leading nowhere. It is the only road there is and so has to be followed with all the joys and sorrows it brings, but one traveller considers he is on a pilgrimage and sees the joys as divine encouragement, and the sorrows as divine tests of determination and faith, all intended by the benevolent king to prepare the pilgrims for citizenship. The other “believes none of this and sees the journey as an unavoidable and aimless ramble…” There is no purpose in this man’s journey and he has to make the most of the joys and endure the sorrows in what seems to be a pointless tribulation. When they turn the last corner, one will be proved right and the other wrong. The final turn is the test of the two men’s propositions. Only at the end of the journey is the test of the propositions made.
Hick admits the parable is imperfect, and hastens to say it has only one object, to illustrate his post mortem test of life’s expectations. It does that, of course, but it is dishonest to pretend that the parable is essentially neutral in its presentation of the objective. It is shot through with Christian assumptions.
They are following a road for a start, and all human roads have a purpose, so the skeptical traveller is made to look obtuse. No one knows whether life has a purpose. Christians think so, but with no evidence, and once a supernatural purpose is discarded, the purpose of life is contained within itself. It is what you make of it. Why then should the skeptical traveller be made to see the journey as an aimless ramble? Since he is travelling a road that is plainly travelled by many others, he can decide to do whatever he can en route to help other travellers. He repairs the road, puts up signs warning of danger or pointing to orchards and springs, and writes a guidebook that he one day hopes to publish. That is the view of life taken by all of those who do not believe in supernatural fathers and their post mortem sweeties for good children.
The author has a central purpose in the parable, but there are other purposes in it, and it is typical Christian dishonesty to present the parable in such a grossly distorted way. It is meant to dispose the unwary and uncritical reader to the Christian view of life’s journey, whether they follow Hick’s tortuous logic or not. It could have been presented in such a way that the supposed pilgrim was really an escaper from an asylum.
Moreover by speaking of the final turn, the parable assumes the Christian traveller is right. There is no final turn if the journey led nowhere because it goes on and on. This parable must have a final turn, though, because it stands for death. But a necessary final turn might lead to the edge of a cliff or into a field full of of sheep. This latter will be the final destination of the Christian travellers—the city of sheep!
Interestingly, the king of the city might welcome in the humanist and sling out the Christian on the grounds that the humanist did something useful on the journey whereas the Christian wallowed self-righteously in his own superior conviction, while boring everyone with his sermons, tedious hymns and proselytising habits. If there were to be a city, there are few Christians who doubt that they will be admitted, never imagining that the king does not want smug preachers but practical helpers. The very smugness of Christians, in fact, excludes them from their own heaven. Or so their own God said!
Verifying the Afterlife
Schlick’s “Logical verifiability” seems to mean “illogical verifiability”. It requires us to suspend all our experience relating to the hypothesis except its own supernatural logic, then the hypothesis of immortality can be tested. But the argument is a tautology. It is circular. To test the hypothesis of immortality, we have to be immortal. If we die at death and do not recover our personality and senses in some other state of “life”, then the hypothesis is not empirical because it cannot be tested. It cannot be a scientific test that the test should depend on the truth of the proposition because then it cannot be falsified. It is just as we thought before Christian philosophers asked us to suspend all reason, as Christians always do, to win arguments.
When we do not suspend our reason, it seems plain to us that something that requires each of us to die to verify cannot be verified, and can only be a confidence trick. It amounts to:
Believe in the Christian God, and give money for us to invent theological excuses, eat scallops, fillet steaks and quaff best claret, and you will survive death, my child! We can prove it. It is entirely empirical. But do not do it and you will not survive death, and you will never even know!
People unless they are suffering torment of some kind, do not want to give up life. So, this is an easy and cruel scam.
Now, the plain fact that our personality is entirely the way our brain has adapted to the peculiar set of materials and circumstances that constitute the living body has been a tough one for Christian tricksters to deal with, and Hick returns to the original Christian belief in the resurrection of the physical body to deal with it. The pseudo-spiritualists who think they will live a spiritual post mortem in a non-material dimension are not quite right. People who are resurrected get a body and its surrounding circumstances just like the old one, but presumably perfect, though Hick cannot say so. We should presume, too, that those who do not benefit from God’s grace are also resurrected, but into a permanently imperfect state of continuously being dissolved in a lake of boiling sulphur.
Hick’s is a “Beam me up, Scottie!” idea of resurrection, whereby God, being almighty creates a copy of the original one, complete with all its thoughts and experiences and its full surroundings in a new existence that precisely matches the previous one. It might be a schoolboy’s concept of heaven but it cannot be a philosopher’s. Heaven is, Christians tell us, a perfect place, but this one is an identical copy of the one we just left. It cannot, therefore, be perfect.
Moreover, as noted elsewhere in these pages, a perfect and eternal afterlife like that traditionally supposed by Christians cannot involve time or motion. Motion implies imperfection, and eternity necessitates the absence of time. Both coalesce in that a timeless place cannot involve motion which requires time in which to happen. Heaven is therefore necessarily static, and cannot in any way be what we have known, or indeed what most people expect of anything called life.
Plain and simple death is closer to “life” in the static and immobile heaven than any supposed imitation of natural life. The dead person “rests in peace” unaware of anything at all for the rest of time. That is what heaven is! Why then do Christians want to invent vast complexes of pure fantasy and conjecture to explain what needs no explanation? What Hick calls the “resurrection body” and S Paul the “spiritual body”, not an incorporeal body but an incorruptible one, is needed in Christianity purely as a sop to those who cannot bear the thought of the world without themselves in it—those who cannot bear to admit they will die! The “afterlife” is the carrot for the Christian donkey.
Hick has to suppose that a “resurrection world” continuous with the physical world is not self contradictory, but, if it is continous with and identical to the one we just left, then we cannot awake in this heaven for we would immediately die again. If not, surely that is a contradiction. He wants to show how his postulated “Beam me up, Father!” copy world of heaven upholds the belief in life after death, but these copy worlds have the same properties as physical space. Theology is endless pointless speculation with no way in life of proving any of it, but Hick wants somehow to get to his posthumous method of proof. So, he has to reject the idea that heaven is perfect, and cannot be eternal because its properties are the same as physical space. Thus, he can have his proof, and from that prove the existence of God.
The Eschaton as Proof of God
Mere survival of death is not itself proof of God, because we might be like caterpillars, undergoing some unimagined type of perfectly natural metamorphosis. Hick’s supposed afterlife is an extension of life in every respect, and so cannot be a sign of there being a good God, nor any vindication of Christian belief in God. The hypothesis of God’s purpose is not verified by what has so far happened in this mind game. It has not been falsified either and might yet be fulfilled in the future life of the afterlife! Ho hum! It is getting tedious, indeed, but eternity is a long time, and Hick tells us Christian teaching puts no time clause on its eschatological predictions that really would be the verification of Christian belief.
It so happens that this is a plain lie, accommodated in Christian belief by the simple expedient of ignoring it, or finding fatuous “interpretations”! The plain words of Jesus, the Christian God, in his gospels, when raised, a thing that Christians politely refrain from doing, turn out to mean something other than what they unquestionably say. It is the usual trick of the shepherds of fooling the sheep by making out that God is an idiot, and trusting that the sheep will not notice, being idiots too. Their trust has so far been utterly justified, and the shepherds still enjoy their claret still.
Jesus clearly predicted the kingdom of God in the lifetime of his own audience, 2000 years ago. In fact, any honest and critical reading of the gospels makes it crystal clear that Jesus expected the hosts of heaven when he and his main disciples waited in Gethsemane. Of course, if Christians had realised this, they would never have been Christians, but the disappearance of their leader’s body was thought by some of the ignorant Nazarenes to have signified that Jesus had been resurrected as the first fruits of the dead in the expected general resurrection at the eschaton (Hosea 6:2). So, in the way of religions, even though Jesus had physically proven that his idea of the coming kingdom was wrong, his disciples contrived to maintain the concept as a scam, once they realised that the ignorant masses still believed nevertheless.
They had to argue that Jesus had been slightly wrong in thinking the hosts of heaven came before the raising of the dead, but after the dead had started to be raised, with Jesus. It was simply a mistiming, an excuse that the clerics kept having to revise over the next 2000 years but Christians, with their heads in buckets, never notice. The kingdom would arrive in forty years, within the lifetime of this generation, within the lifetime of the oldest living member of any audience Christ addressed, it would take a millennum, then the date of the start and end of the millennium was subject to revision, then the legend of the wandering Jew was invented, a man who could not die until Christ came, the ultimate condition because it leaves the condition dependent on the event, as usual!
So, now there is no time limit, as Hick says, but that is not what Christ said, and the shepherds have had to use every ingenuity to explain the delay to the flocks. Throughout all these pious revisions of the supposed word of God, Christians faithfully chorus, “It will be soon!” On eternal timescales “soon” means “never”, so they are right again! Every revision of the timescale was a falsification of the prophecy, so the main Christian prophecy has been multiply falsified, but the obsessive disorder called Christianity persists. Hick is a professor of theology, admittedly not a neurosurgeon or a theoretical physicist, but a clever man, and he knows all this. But being a professor of theology is a more comfortable life than digging coal, swilling out pigstyes, or even selling second hand cars, something he would have been good at.
Recognizing an Encounter with God
Hick wonders how anyone can know they have encountered God anyway. It is undoubtedly worth asking because Christians see God in the most trivial events. An encounter with God, one would have thought, would be self-evident, as most Christians would think too, because it would be remarkable—amazing even! Yet Christians think God gives them comfort in bereavement, in good fortune or in human assistance, even benefit checks! A Christian mechanic thought God helped him unwrench rusty nuts in engine blocks. It sounds cute but it is crazy! Hick attributes it to the Incarnation. God revealed Himself in Christ. The existence of God is verified when it removes all doubt about Christ.
You know what all this has brought us to? Faith in Christ is proof of God! So proof of God ends up in the authenticity of the New Testament. And at this point, Hick refuses to “enter into the vast field of biblical criticism”, and falls back to the happy clappy answer that God is verified by the Incarnation through the Christian’s contact with the “person of Christ, even though this is mediated through the life and traditions of the Church”. So, Hick’s long essay in verifying God comes down to the same old cobblers we knew about anyway. God exists for those who believe He exists!
Hick thinks his proof is adequate but that obstinate people will not accept it as a proof. It is because of Free Will, yet another Christian grease band to keep out nasty doubters. No one has to believe, and God is verified only to those who do. Hick ends up in the perpetual circularity of Christian apologetics. Only the believer can find proof of God. Only an idiot will buy a second hand car on the say so of a second hand car dealer without a thorough inspection to determine the worth of the bargain. Bargains in second hand cars too often prove to be a heap of worthless scrap.
