Truth
Knowing God, Man, and Morality—Material and Christian Answers
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated:
“Preach About God”
William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, advised a young curate:
Preach about God and preach about twenty minutes.
Is it good advise? Better advise would have been, “Go study something useful, then get a proper job!” Still Stubbs was wise enough to realize that no one knows enough about God to preach about him for more than twenty minutes. Maybe even that is too long, but at least the bishop had some sympathy for his congregations.
For what does anyone know about God to be able to preach about him even for twenty minutes? No Christian has been able to demonstrate that there there is a God, though it is surely incumbent on anyone proposing to talk about Him to do so before they can start discussing what features or properties this entity has. As J S Whale DD says (Christian Doctrine, 1941):
God is not apparent to our senses. Nor is he indubitably apparent to human reason. The most eager theist knows that the classical arguments for the existence of God, even when restated, are arguments rather than proofs. Again, it is not compellingly apparent that God is the only possible explanation of human history—the problem of evil is a monument to facts which seem to deny it…
Dr Whale admits all of this frankly in the introduction to Christian Doctrine, because “belief in the reality of God is the alpha and omega of the Christian religion”. He accepts from the outset that Christianity is utterly unreasonable, to get it out of the way to let him concentrate on its accummulated unreasonableness. Christianity is his job. He earns his daily bread by spreading it if he can, or by preserving it if he cannot spread it. As a professional Christian, he has a strong motive for keeping it alive—at least as long as he is! We have an answer to the question “Cui bono?”—Who benefits?—that we should always seek an honest answer to, when someone is trying to persuade us of anything. For the truth is that Christianity is a house not even built on sand. It is built on hot air!
Knowing God?
• If God is good, why would He expect us to believe in Him when He has arranged the world such that He is not apparent to us? What is not apparent to us via our own senses can make no impression on us, and so does not exist so far as we are concerned. Things can exist that we are not aware of, but they cannot affect us in any way, and so we have not evolved any means of detecting them.
• We are capable of inventing and imagining any number of things that do not exist—like mermaids, bug eyed aliens, banshees, and so on—and God is one of them. Nothing in logic forces us to believe that these imaginary entities and beings have to actually exist—they are not apparent to human reason. We can imagine these things with their characteristic properties, but any properties that impact on the material world would betray their existence. In physics subatomic particles like electrons are detected by their properties, and, similarly, peculiarities in deep space often point to the existence of things we cannot observe directly, like black holes. No one has been able to infer the reality of centaurs, mermaids, or God from their peculiar effects on the world. We have always been able to explain peculiarities materially.
• The “eager theist” knows the popular arguments for God, and that none of them holds up under rigorous logical scrutiny. Believers will sometimes reformulate them, pressing the logicians to reconsider, but, so far, none of them have stood up to inspection. How can they? What argument would prove the existence of, say centaurs? Evidence is required, then the arguments can begin about the interpretation of the evidence, but no apparently imaginary object or being can be proved by logic alone. Even evidence is not necessarily proof. And purely imaginary things leave no evidence in the material world, nor can they ever. So there is no material proof of them.
• History comes into this because the Christian God is assumed to be the God of history. He is assumed to be the Creator, or the Creator of the Universe is assumed to be the same being or entity as the Christian God. Having set the universe in motion, this God then gives it a prod here and a push there to keep it moving in the way He wants. He is postulated as a purely good God, so His will is to promote the good and so He will guide the world in good ways. The problem is evil! The world is not purely good so far as we humans are concerned, or it is not good enough. Innocent people get killed by pilotless drones, or piloted bombers six miles high, or by tsunamis, or lightning strikes, or earthquakes. Moreover wicked people who make a career of killing other people, or persuading and forcing third parties to kill for them, or harming them in lesser ways, get away with no retribution, or just a little. Human history is a litany of needless death and destruction at the hands of other human beings. Where is the good God of history in this?
Dr Whale is right! We have no good reasons for supposing that something we have imagined is real. Doubtless we imagined God because, in the face of evil, it was a comforting delusion to imagine we had a mighty being on our side, able to overrule Nature. God was supernatural—above Nature. He could command Nature to be better for all of us, and He would do… When we are dead!
Christian Answers!
This doctor of the church, Dr Whale, admits that Christian doctrine is entirely built on a false premise—the impossible concept of God, a being above and beyond Nature. He wants us to believe nevertheless—to have faith. It means believing what is manifestly untrue. So, who benefits? Well, professional Christians certainly do, and this one now goes on to tell us why Christians believe despite the illogicality of it and its lack of evidence.
He turns the idea of a God as a figment of imagination on its head, simultaneously flattering us with the idea that we are a sort of God ourselves—God made us in His image, so we are “not an animal at all”. Human evolution from animals is “alleged” only because it is “a theory which the biological evidence seems to require”, and it “does not affect the truth” that the “essential being” of a human is “a word addressed to him by God, his Creator”.
So, the whole edifice of the science of biology is so much bunkum. All of the myriads of scientific papers demonstrating evolution and its basis and inevitable cause in DNA—and therefore the proof offered by the US President, Obama, that Osama Bin Laden was the man they killed in Pakistan—can only be part of the vast “evilution” conspiracy proposed by the Christian creationists. The fundamentalist Christian defence of its own absurd myths as “truth” requires the wholesale destruction of the discoveries of science that gave us our modern comfortable lifestyles. Instead we must accept the crazy idea that humanity exists because an imaginary being, naturally not apparent to anyone’s sense, uttered a word!
What of all that evil? Well, if “salvation is to be real…”
…if it is to be anything more than fiction, it must be the work of Him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.
So, the Christian way out of “moral distress” is to invent a way of escaping it called “salvation”—manifestly a work of fiction—yet only God is good enough to work it. Salvation is a work of fiction wrought by another work of fiction called God. For a Christian, it is reliably logical that one fictional idea should be proof of another. It is much, much simpler to recognize that human moral distress is our own responsibility.
Men, God and Morality
Humans are communal beings, and morality is what allows us to live communally. If we are all free to murder and cheat our neighbors, we have no community, we can trust no one, and have nothing at all to gain by living together. Morality makes it possible for us to live together, and it is that that makes us human, that lets us benefit from culture, education, co-operation and companionship. In short, morality evolved along with the social living habit that makes us human.
Again, Whale responds, No! “Moral evil can never have a purely manward reference”. Immorality is not a private vice, and nor is it a public crime, it is a sin! What is this “sin”? Surely not another fiction? Not for Dr Whale. It is a moral evil in relation to God! But, hang on, Whale, old boy, God is not apparent in any way. He is fictional, so how can “sin”, whatever sort of crime it is, be defined in relation to an imaginary being?
There is no need for morality for any of us to have to relate to anything other than other human beings, our neighbors. Sins are either a type of crime against others in society that the whole society recognises as profoundly antisocial, and will work together to punish, or they are fictional offences against a fictional being, God. Put that way, it is clear that God is, or was, a personification of human society.
