Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Misled by Devils, or Just Your Parents? The True God
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Which is the True God?
Michael Shermer, the noted skeptic, asked an audience he was addressing how many people believed in various gods that he named one by one. Not a hand went up for any of them. He pointed out that all were atheists so far as these gods were concerned. The point he was making was that, if he listed 2500 gods including the Hebrew god of the Jews and Christians, the only one the believers in the audience would accept was their own Hebrew god. He himself did not accept that god either, so he and the audience were within 0.04% of total agreement on atheism.
An internet apologist replied:
So what? For any given truth there may be 2,499 or more similar arguments that are not true. Simply pointing to the 2,499 is meaningless.
That was meant to convince any internet doubters. Yet, even if one of the 2500 gods might exist in some sense and so deserve believing, how can anyone decide objectively which it is? Christians assume their god is the true one and they assume that all other gods are not, but a believer in any other god could take the identically same stance with utter justification. As Shermer concluded, “religion and belief in God is socially constructed, historically contingent, and psychologically driven”.
Our internet auntie replied that “social constructions”, and so on, are not exclusive of divine revelation, missing the point that revelation reveals nothing unless it is certain. We do not know whether any, let alone one of the 2500 deities is the true one, and the fact that we have all been taught father and son, daughter and mother, that a god called Yehouah is the only true one is neither here nor there. Our ancestors might have been misled by devils, or even just humans!
