Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
The Three Worlds of Karl Popper and the Idea of God
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Three Worlds
Sir Peter Medawar in his small book, The Limits of Science, says we do not believe in God because He exists, but He exists because we believe in Him. God did not create mankind but mankind created God—and in man’s image! Karl Popper decided that human endeavour occurred in three distinct worlds, the material world, the world of individual thought, and the world of ideas shared with other people. God is one of the shared ideas of the latter world. The world of ideas can be tremendously influential, and God is, but it should not lead to intelligent people thinking there is any sort of independent entity that acts of its own volition in the primary world, or indeed independently in their heads. God is a property of the mind. It is a common property, but the particular idea that any individual has of God can only be their own.
If there were good scientific or philosophical reasons to believe in an independent God then all scientists and philosophers would believe. There are none, and there is the perfectly good explanation offered by Popper for the idea of God being around and important, even though it does not exist in the primary world. Even so, it will not do for “believers”. They insist that God and their Jesus somehow exist in the material world, even though they are incorporeal spirits themselves!
People who believe in God, believe in the idea of God, and might well be willing to trust in Him as if He were an independent being. We have seen recently that God does not look after tower blocks full of people in the USA, does not look after little girls playing in the UK on a Sunday evening, and does not look after anyone in the countries that the leadership of the Christian world decides to bomb out of pique that the Christian God is not doing the job they suppose He should be doing.
These clever men do not understand that ideas per se do not act, and they have not grasped that God is merely an idea. What ideas can do and do do is stimulate human beings to act. It stimulated some Moslems to destroy tower blocks and it stimulates Christian Presidents to take their revenge for it. That is the trouble with the idea of God. All believers are convinced that their own idea of God is the correct one. Some of those are sufficiently passionate about it that they decide that every other human being should have the same idea of God as they do. They turn to force to make it happen. The idea of God can do nothing by itself, but those who get it are often infected with a deadly virus—deadly to other people who have not got it.
Thus the idea of God has caused untold suffering, and any individual acts of kindness that some people might attribute to their idea of God simply cannot add up to the mass destruction that the God virus causes. Moslems murder Christians, Christians Moslems, Hindus Moslems, Moslems Hindus, Jews Moslems, Moslems Jews, Catholics Protestants, Protestants Catholics. It goes on. All of this murder and mayhem is justified by the ideas of God that these people have in their heads and nothing else. Those who do not share it are labelled as evil and therefore not fit to live! What is evil is an enemy of God.
Never mind that God is supposed to be the creator of the world and able to destroy it as easily, the idea of God is defenseless and has to have human guards. Shouldn’t that be a clue that God does not really exist in the way they think? If some know this they will not let on, because they are the ones who get their comfortable living out of religion. They are the ones who know that the most effective way of making sure that everyone has the same idea of God is to kill off those who do not hold to it.
Jews, Christians and Moslems have held to this view in much of their respective histories. These sordid and blood besplattered histories have left these patriarchal religions with no moral authority to dictate to the rest of humanity what they should think. It shows that Christians, Moslems and Jews are incapable of judging right from wrong, and have no authority to issue death penalties to others.
