Truth
Why Believe in God?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Thursday, 01 September 2005
The Cruel God
In an ancient American city, priests stretched their victims on a slab to pluck out the still-beating heart and offer it to the sun-god. Mothers had to stifle their distress in thanksgiving. At Cholula a Christian church stood on top of a pyramid where once stood one such bloody Mexican temple. To the Catholics of the district it is a symbol of the triumph of revelation and mercy over human error and brutality. The Almighty Creator God made those brutal humans in those days, as Christians believe He makes us today, but He could have made all of them as wise in an instant as easily as the myriads of years He has taken in His sacred history.
The Church has never demanded the physical plucking out of beating hearts from living bodies. Christian human sacrifices are different. Fr Joseph McCabe recollects that near the Cholula church is a nunnery where priests led prettily dressed maidens to the altar to make a vow of celibacy they understood little more than a babe in arms. It meant their hearts had been rived from them just as much but psychologically. They could no longer live love in a natural way. It was a living death to the heart for most of them.
Disgusting things have been done and grotesque things believed in the name of god. God wants victims. The priests said so. They had demanded senseless sacrifices. Throughout the ages of human history, men and maids have been slain in the name of gods, and gods clamoured for blood only a few decades ago. What was the god of love doing while all this went on?
A petty dictator of a backward country called Saddam Hussein tortured and killed people for not supporting his policies and was eventually decried by every advanced democratic government. They called upon the United Nations to impose sanctions and then a US led task force was despatched to restore freedom from terror. Most westerners support these actions, and the Christian Right give thanks to God that the tyrant had been deposed. Yet the God they thank—the Christian God Himself—is no different from Saddam Hussein. He only shows any interest in those who have faith in Him. Those alone He saves. The rest, those who reject Him and profess no faith in Him, He sends for eternal torture in Hell. Christians delight in images of hell. God would not be God without promising damnation.
Vengeance and damnation lie
On rebels who refuse His grace,
Who God’s eternal Son despise,
The hottest hell shall be their place.Christian Hymn
Here is the Cruel God—the Saddam Hussein God. The God of George W Bush and Tony Blair, Christian leaders who take their cues from their Cruel God.
Christian clergymen send every independent soul to hell just as their God does. They demands obedience just as their God does. The tyranny of heaven is repeated on earth and it is a sign of a tyrant that he quotes God for his authority. Is it credible that anyone today can preach such absurdities, such blind faith, such injustice and cruelty, as the Christian religion? Can anyone believe their own ears when they enter a Christian church?
Almighty vengeance, how it burns,
How bright His fury glows!
Vast magazines of plagues and storms
Lie treasured for His foes.
Can anyone explain how this terrible superstition has obtained possession of our minds? How human beings can be so blinded and lobotomized? What religion in the world sings of a God more cruel than this God? What religion of a civilized people has a more vindictive God? How can human beings sing hymns like these Christian hymns. Some are horrific. Sounding like the Aztecs, Christians sing of blood and yet more blood,
How justice frowned and vengeance stood
To drive me down to endless pain!
But the great Son propos’d his blood,
And heavenly wrath grew mild again.
Cruel sentiments influence the minds of the young more than those of adults. What images does singing of the atoning blood of Jesus kindle in the mind of a child. Sounding like savages, can only scare infants, and that was the intention. Is it appropriate in civilized countries and civilized times? To have faith in a God demanding precious blood, a God of wrath, must brutalize the believer. More songs, or hymns as the Christians call them:
Adore and tremble for our God
Is a consuming fire!
His jealous eyes with wrath inflame,
And raise His vengeance higher.
Those heaps of wrath, by slow degrees,
Are force into a flame:
But kindled, Oh! how fierce they blaze!
And rend all nature’s frame.
At His approach the mountains flee,
And seek a watery grave;
The frighted sea makes haste away,
And shrinks up every wave.
Through the wide air the weighty rocks
Are swift as hailstones hurled;
Who dares engage His fiery rage,
That shakes the solid world?
Thy hand shall on rebellious kings
A fiery tempest pour,
While we, beneath Thy sheltering wings,
Thy just revenge adore.
Man is like the God he worships, and history shows that the Christian church has been as cruel as its God. If God were good, could He have tolerated, in the twelfth century of the Christian era, seeing the cruelty of priests and hearing the cries of their poor victims when their bones were broken upon the rack or their flesh was burning in the flames? If God were good, surely when he saw these priests lifting up their voices to Him to invite His approval for the torture of their victims, He would have raged:
I do not approve. You lie. My command was not that you should murder each other. You are not doing my work. You, not they, are the heretics that you deliberately ignore my commandments and substitute your own.
There was no such response. Either there is no God or he was burnt as a heretic. How can people love hate, vengeance, wrath—even in a God. Christians avow love but must grow into the true likeness of their God. Could that be why wars have got increasingly murderous? Is that why species diversity has fallen as the religious beast waxed. Is that why people savagely rape the earth which succours them? Throughout its lifetime the Christian church has been like its God—full of hate, malice and cruelty. If we must have a God, let us have one that has had the advantages of civilization. Western countries have become civilized and humane to the degree they have rejected the Christian ogre.
The Silence Of God
Christians tell us there is a good god. They call him simply God. Where was God when people were being killed for religious reasons? For centuries, the Christian God looked down complacently from his state of blessedness upon all the grisly ignorance and tortures, yet could have ended the whole gruesome business—or so Christians must believe. “We do not know why”, they say, “but the hour will come when he puts a stop to it”. They dare not ask “when?”. They know there is no reply. When cruel things were done and are still done in the name of God, why is God silent?
God is silent.
- He was silent when women were drowned as witches, and honest people were burned as heretics.
- He was silent when the vengeful doctrine of eternal torment was imposed upon the earth, four thousand years after the founding of civilization, and in his name.
- He is silent when an ignorant preacher tells an agonized mother that the soul of her dead and unbaptized babe burns, and will burn forever, in the most appalling fires the human imagination ever pictured.
People believe most deeply in God where life is most precarious, where poverty bites hardest, where hearts are torn out and sacrificed, albeit metaphorically. A simple black woman thanks God she is still alive when New Orleans lies wrecked about her. The ostentatiously conservative Christian President publicly prays for God to bless the victims of the hurricane. These men and women know less, and are less capable of thinking, than liberal skeptics who do not rely on God to try to beat disease, relieve natural disaster and reduce the burden of poverty. They go about tackling human problems themselves knowing that prayer is superfluous. As conditions improve, belief in God declines. Belief in God is strongest among those who have least to thank God for—it is weakest among the educated and intelligent. It is universal where life is abject and people are too ignorant to see they are not indebted to God.
Belief in God is most stable among backward people and nations, and is extinct among educated people except those of them who have chosen to make a living by gulling the ignorant. Ignorant believers in the USA are a strange anachronism, dependent for their perpetuation by cynical manipulators playing on the fears of country folk, even in the world’s most favoured nation, to hang on to their wicked influence. These country folk are dubbed “backwoodsmen” and “rednecks” because they consider it manly to be ignorant country boys.
People might pray for heavenly help and assistance with their personal problems but God is not invited to solve the world’s serious economic and political problems at Geneva, Moscow and Brussels, only in the White House and the Pentagon. Prayers for divine guidance in these places are pious habits that no one intelligent thinks will have the least practical effect. Does a motor mechanic pray for god’s help before he addresses the knock in our car’s engine? Do doctors rely on praying to God or on their skill and training? Do judges pray for guidance then draw their judgement from a hat? None do, but the President does, and so does the British PM.
God has no place in practical life. He is confined to the church. In our large cities, only a minority ever go to a place of worship—in the UK at least nine out of ten do not. Only those few people whose piety exceeds their common sense plead for God outside the Christian Churches. God is silent. God could still write in letters of fire across the night sky, and no one could disbelieve. He writes nothing, and says nothing. He is silent.
Who Made The World?
From the days of Plato, from the time of Job, thoughtful men have racked their brains to find and formulate proof of the existence of God. Plato, the great Greek Philosopher, gave the world two thousand five hundred years ago what men regarded as the most brilliant proofs of the existence of God. No one sees any force in them today. Aristotle, another great thinker of the same age, gave other and quite different proofs. No one follows him today, either. St. Augustine tried. No one follows him. From those days to this people have been inventing new arguments and none of them agree with another.
The most common argument for God takes the form of a question. “Who made the world?” The answer presumed by the question is, “God”. The question assumes the answer. It assumes the answer because it assumes the world was made, and so must have a maker. Philosophers and scientists do not believe that the world was “made”. It could just be, as Christians assume that God just is. It could have just happened spontaneously.
Christians take it for granted that at the word of God the world sprang into existence. They assume it because Genesis, in its first line, says so, and Genesis is the first chapter of the word of God. But you cannot honestly quote the word of God until you have proved that there is a God, and apart from Genesis there is no ground for saying that the world was ever “made”, so there is no meaning in asking who made it. It is for the person who says that it was made to prove the assertion. Until some sort of proof is given that the world was made, it is useless to ask us to speculate on who made it.
There are things in the universe which exist by chance or contingency, but at the base of all there must be something that exists necessarily. There are causes and effects in the universe, one argument runs, and therefore there must be a First Cause. The idea of cause and effect expresses what we see in Nature. Heat causes evaporation, electricity in the clouds causes lightening and thunder, and so on. And of course you must come ultimately to a fundamental cause or causes—a First Cause.
There are movements in the universe, so there must be a Prime Mover, something ultimate which moves all and is not itself moved. The stars differ in age by billions of years, and some can be seen dying, and others are being born. If, for an eternity there was a void, and then, for some unknown reason, God spoke and the universe leaped fully formed into being, the stars would be expected to be of the same age, but they are plainly being born and are dying, so the universe is evolving. If God created the material of the universe, He made it so that it would evolve.
God is the First Cause or Prime Mover in these ideas, but then left the world to get on with it. Christians do not like it. Having set it in motion, He is not interfering in its evolution, and cannot be answering prayers. God as a prime mover becomes no God in practice. No God worth worshipping. If there is no practical God, no God worth worshipping, then why should there be any God at all?
There are “laws of nature”, they say. Every page of a scientific work talks about them. Good, then there must be a law-giver. A great mind stamped these laws upon the material universe and so set it evolving. A stone, let us say, always falls to the ground unless it is prevented. Why should it, unless there is a law imposed upon it? Nature acts uniformly, or consistently. But if nature is blind and unconscious, ought we not to expect things to act erratically, not uniformly?
Not in the least. It is a fallacy. Consistent behavior is expected from mechanical things. A ball will roll in a straight line unless something interferes with it. It is will, or mind that would act otherwise. It would be a proof of mind in nature if things at times did not act uniformly. The contrary is when we find them acting uniformly.
“Laws of nature” in science have no resemblance to human laws, and need no “legislator” or mind to enact them. That there is a law of gravitation does not mean that there is a code of behavior drawn up in advance which mass must obey. It simply means that mass does behave consistently, and the “law of gravitation” is a shorthand way in which humans describe its behaviour.
Does Evolution Exclude God?
Does evolution undermine or destroy the belief in God?
Certain, particularly US, scientists go about proclaiming that evolution is consistent with religion. They say this as believers, not in the name of science. Science is not concerned with religion, and the vast majority of scientists and evolutionists do not believe in God. No branch of science deals with God or the soul or Christ. Indeed, science is inconsistent with a belief in God and the soul. It begins with skepticism which means no scientist could believe anything without adequate evidence, and so science has to be atheistic.
Theists accepted the Christian religion, while Deists rejected it but believed in God. In the classical world when belief in gods was challenged, religious thinkers had argued that the order, beauty and purposiveness of Nature proved the existence of a supreme God. Atheists disagreed—order was inherent, beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and god was impersonal, but the controversy was suspended by the triumph of Christianity causing Europe to pass into the Dark Ages when belief in God was obligatory on pain of death. From the Renaissance, people dared to think again. They turned again to the old proofs of God’s existence and questioned them. Atheism arose once more, and the dominant theists and deists mustered their arguments. By the middle of the nineteenth century, libraries of books proved that the order of the heavenly bodies and the beauty of Nature pointed triumphantly to the existence of a supreme intelligence and designer. Science seemed to be full of evidence for God.
Then came Charles Darwin. Having almost taken holy orders, Darwin never attacked religion. Indeed, he was cowardly about it. He believed sincerely in God at the time when he wrote The Origin of Species and, although he came some years later to reject the belief, he rarely spoke about it. He was a delicate and retiring man, and he looked on with some bewilderment when less shy men—Professors Huxley and Haeckel—showed that evolution put an end to God and the soul.
Theologians shuddered when evolutionists began to show that things gradually evolved over tens of millions of years. If these structures had come into existence all at once, we would have to consider a creator, but, if they evolved gradually, one form leading to another, the situation is different. Unconscious Nature may do, by innumerable trials and errors in a billion years, what would be a challenge to the greatest concievable intellect—spontaneously cause life!
The religious argument from design in Nature is that no explanation of the organs and instincts of animals is possible except by a divine plan drawn up in advance. No alternative can be possible, if this is to be proof of God. That is how evolution undermines religion. No plea for the supernatural origin of anything is valid as long as a natural explanation of its origin is on the cards.
Moreover, the argument from the supposed order and beauty of the universe was equally undermined. This “order” had been found mainly in the movements of the heavenly bodies. No distinguished astronomer now traces “the finger of God” in the heavens. The celestial bodies have also evolved, and perhaps even whole universes!
As to beauty—the beauty of flowers and birds, of shells and scenery—evolution explains it just as it explains instincts and organs. It evolved. The argument was always very one-sided, for there is as much ugliness as beauty in nature, as much brutality and bestiality as mutual help. Both are now understood, though. Nature knows nothing of order and beauty, or disorder and ugliness. It evolves without a plan. Human beings have a sense of beauty, and the rose or the orchid appeals to it. They too evolved, and over a much longer time than mankind did. The flowers cannot have evolved to please humanity millions of years later.
The entire argument of design, the greatest triumph of the theologians, fell to pieces. The argument for a Designer is as dead as the argument for a First Cause, a Prime Mover, a Creator, or a Legislator of the laws of Nature. And this applies too to “creative evolution”—the theory of Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw and a few others. Their theory is that, though a personal God does not exist, a sort of Vital Force works through matter and finds expression in the myriads of animals and plants and man. All one can say is that Nature has evolved ways of evolving which seem to show a purpose, but it is done through murtation, just as all evolution is, so is simply part of the whole.
Sometimes Theists fancy that they get rid of difficulties by sacrificing the “personality” of God. We read:
There is no personal God but there must be a cosmic mind.
Another calls it a Cosmic Power, another the Energy of the Universe, and so on. Personality means mind or self- consciousness. There is no aspect of Nature today which even suggests the existence of God. There is a very great deal in Nature, as we shall see, which suggests that there is no God, no sort of God.
The Voice Of Conscience
Science gives us a natural interpretation of Nature. The scientific explanation is not revealed all at once by God, but is discovered slowly by a process by human beings asking questions and looking for testable answers. So scientists do not know everything, but our ignorance of natural causes is diminishing. To take some part of Nature which is still obscure and say that the hand of God must be there is a fallacy called the God of the Gaps.
To be valid, such an argument requires, not merely that science cannot today explain some phenomenon in Nature, but that it can never explain it because an explanation is impossible except via God. Popular preachers and Christian writers deceive the ordinary believer in God, mainly deliberately but sometimes because of the limitations of their own education. They pretend that God has revealed a truth, but they themselves only know it because they believe a previous preacher or a parent. None of them can show this Christian truth is, in fact, true. Instead, they use discredited and even dishonest arguments which no objective scholar will admit, but which they use to fool the gullible and ignorant. Regrettably, there are plenty of gullible and ignorant people to be fooled.
The more honest religious writers, like Donald Cupitt, and the better educated clergy, like the controversial former bishop of Durham, do not boast they can demonstrate the existence of God. The glory of God, which was once thought to fill the universe, is now regarded as a purely spiritual thing.
If mankind is God’s pet, as believers actually think, humanity is where divine action should be evident. Human history is now written without the need for supernatural interventions and explanations. Whatever has been accomplished was accomplished by man. The prehistory of man—the millions of years of primitive savagery—is no more brutally godless than present politics. Though humans can now destroy the world, instead of showing restraint, they seem madder than ever. The human world today, which we know so well, nowhere suggests a finger of God.
Another place theologians claim to see evidence of God is in human morality. Humans speak of moral law, and again a law implies a legislator. Though natural laws are shorthand descriptions, moral law is drawn up in advance for humans to obey, and its author is then defined as God. But, the legislators were actually human beings, and believers then have to imagine that God inspired them. Why? Certainly some individual was inspired to write the laws, but why should anyone think it was God who was the inspiration, and not the legislator’s own conscience and experience? Again a supernatural explanation is superfluous when a natural explanation is likely. When a cause that actually exists adequately explains something, then any other reason is unnecessary. Thunder might be the poetic voice of God, and rain His tears, but evaporation of water and electric charge accumulating in the clouds are hypotheses that give us options for testing that have been confirmed, showing the poetry to be metaphorical.
People do not need a God to teach them that justice and honesty are laws or ideals. Every feature of moral life is consistent with the theory that moral law is a code of behavior imposed on the individual by the community. The type of law, its clauses and its precepts point to it. Justice, honesty, and truthfulness are social laws. Social life improves in so far as they are observed, and it is disturbed in so far as they are ignored. Nothing could be clearer than that moral law is codified rules of social conduct. The evolution of morals confirms it.
The earliest peoples of the human family had no need of moral laws because they behaved well enough for primitive society by instinct. Moral law is shaped in harmony with expanding consciousness and its effect on social life. With the growth and refinement of society, instinctive reactions become inappropriate, and moral law had to be refined to match. Local circumstances and needs shaped it differently in different places, but ubiquitous social needs conditioned its lines of development. The different emphasis put on different violations of the law was also generally ubiquitous—because human and social.
Lying, for instance, is, generally when no great harm is done, regarded as a light offense. To get drunk once in a while is not a serious matter. To get drunk habitually and ruin your family is a crime. Murder is the greatest of crimes because it strikes fear into people living in a community. It is all perfectly human. It is social law. The only difficulty is about sex-morals, and precisely on this point the first Christians misunderstood the sexual morality of religious ascetics aspiring to be angels and forced it on society as a whole. This is, plainly, very significant. Jesus would not beget children because he was an Essene leader sworn to chastity and celibacy. So, early Christians thought chastity was the proper way to behave in sexual matters.
It is all chimes with the view that moral law is human law, and it is quite inconsistent with the belief that an autocratic legislator framed the law. Guarding useful moral and social law from unnecessary and socially divisive sectarian additions is difficult. Most people’s standard is a social standard. The aim of social laws is to offer security within society. Does any proposed addition to the law do harm to others? The Golden Rule is the ultimate moral principle. Behave toward others as you wish them to behave toward you. Nothing could be more clearly social.
But the Christian code of conduct contained things which were purely ecclesiastical in origin. So, man had formulated a moral or social law, then the priests took it over and ascribed the law to a divine legislator. Religious creeds perverted the code. The God of the Jews and Christians commands people to kill others.
The Religious Instinct
Learned clergymen rely no longer on arguments from design and First Causes. They appeal to the inner religious sense or instinct. No matter how little trace of God there is in the external world, man has a religious sense or instinct which bears witness to him. Apologists say belief in God is so widespread, so nearly universal, that there must be some instinct or special religious sense in man for perceiving it. Just as one part of a man perceives color, another hears sounds, and another feels heat or cold, so there is a spiritual faculty for perceiving God. We feel his presence, not infer it from Nature, and many believers say that this is their experience.
In view of the collapse of all the arguments for God from the external world there is naturally a tendency to concentrate on and develop this argument. It seems safe against any advance of science. You know more about your own consciousness, you think, than the scientist does. If you feel the existence of God, how can a scientist tell you that you do not?
The first difficulty is that belief is strongest where education is poorest. If God has implanted a religious instinct, why should it grow feebler in proportion to education and generally disappear where knowledge is greatest? In the better educated, most have no such inner sense or belief in God. And in the circles of highest culture, of science and philosophy, the belief is feeblest of all. The more the world grows in wisdom, the less belief in God there is.
Indeed the argument from a religious sense is even feebler than that from a moral sense. We all have a moral sense, a perception of moral distinctions and obligation, and it generally grows with one’s progress in knowledge and refinement. It is just the reverse with this supposed religious sense. It decreases with knowledge and generally with refinement.
Then again, if all peoples that exist or have ever existed, believe in God through an implanted instinct, it is strange that His characteristics change from nation to nation, and sometimes from one person to the next. Believers fall into schools such as:
- One that follows the German philosopher Hegel and believes in an abstract and impersonal God, without recognizable characteristics, which they call the Absolute.
- Another that calls themselves “Personal Idealists” who believe in a personal God, and they find evidence for Him in the human mind and its ideals. But evolution explains man’s ideals without any metaphysics of this kind.
- Then there is the school of Pragmatists or Humanists, which says, our beliefs are not due to reason alone. Our whole nature, even our needs and interests, enter into them. The theory does not help any man who wants to be sure that God really exists. At the most it may approve of belief in God as useful. It is of no use unless it is true.
And so on. All people do not believe in God, and most of those who do, believe in God for false reasons. The human race has until modern times been wrong on most things not obvious. Emerging humans could not believe in God. The belief evolved through consciousness as a primitive way of explaining or justifying inexplicable things. Now, there is no justification for keeping it. The supposed “consent of the whole human race” is a lie.
The believer in God ought easily to understand why so many are now disposed to regard preachers and religious writers as not honest. They constantly use arguments which have been long discredited and are not true to the facts of life. They talk of man as “eternally religious” while they see the educated modern world surrendering religion on a phenomenal scale, and refusing to accept the new religions or versions of religion that arise. The cities of the world have done with religion. To claim a religious sense is to defy plain facts.
As to children, in whom this religious sense is supposed to dawn, the statement is easily tested. Children who are taught neither religion nor anti-religion never show the least inclination to believe. It is the consistent experience of agnostic families, and rather supports atheism.
Atheism and Other Arguments
Must we then be atheists? Let us briefly distinguish a few similar words. A theist is anyone who believes in God and His revelation. A deist is one who believes in God but rejects revelation. An atheist does not believe in God. An agnostic does not know whether there is a God or not. A pantheist is one who believes that God is not a separate reality from the universe. Adelphiasophists are pantheists but consider the universe as a female principle discoverable by human enquiry.
Most people who do not believe in God will not call themselves atheists—those who deny the existence of God—on the grounds that it is not proved. It is a cop out. Even the agnostic does not think it is an open question whether there is a God or not. He has no respectable evidence whatever for God, and has a mass of evidence which disposes him to believe that there is no God. Agnostics hang on to a straw of religion because they have not the courage to totally deny God, believing that as long as they do not, there is a thread of hope left to them should they find themselves being judged after death.
People who once used to believe in phlogiston do not now say they are agnostic about it. They no longer believe it because there are better theories of combustion. Laplace had no need of the hypothesis of God. Why has anyone else? We know things can be explained without the need of the hypothesis of God, therefore why pretend that we might need it. It is true that we do not know whether God exists or not, but all scientific knowledge is provisional. If to know something is to be certain it is true, then we know nothing. If some firm evidence of God should suddenly arise, that is the time to test the hypothesis that God exists. There is no need to half believe it on the ground that it is not disproven. That is not scientific or sensible. Skeptics disbelieve not because they have cause to disbelieve, but because they have no cause to believe. Meanwhile, the case for theism is feeble. The case for atheism is strong.
J McCabe invites us to weigh the arguments in the balance. In one scale are all the affirmative arguments. The ancient arguments of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle. The antiquated arguments of the Christian Fathers and Schoolmen, of S Augustine and S Anselm, S Thomas and S Bonaventure. The arguments of the Deists, of Paley, of Kant, of Fiske, of the poets and philosophers of the nineteenth century. The arguments of Bergson, of the Absolute Idealists and the Personal Idealists, of Kelvin and Lodge and S J Gould. The scale is full of self contradiction.
In the other scale? All the tears and blood that mankind has ever shed, all the pain and disease and suffering that have darkened this planet, all the brutality and injustice ever perpetrated, all the blunders and crimes that wisdom might have prevented.
The modernist preacher and the religious scientist say that evolution is a more impressive revelation of God’s power and glory than creation. Then look at the daily news-sheet of crime, brutality, death, suffering, stupidity, hatred, exploitation, privation, warfare and indifference. Does God see this? Evolution is incomprehendingly slow. Why is God’s revelation so slow?
Fundamentalists are funny when they quote as evidence against evolution the fact that large classes of animals make no progress whatever. Why should they? They are adapted to their environment. They change only when there is some stimulating change in their surroundings, new enemies, new parasites, new dangers, new catastrophes—fresh pain and blood and death. Great changes of climate, Ice Ages, have been a most important part of the machinery of evolution. They led to great advances through suffering and slaughter. Evolution requires species to alter to fit new surroundings. It is difficult and those that fail undergo terrible suffering and ultimately extinction.
Suffering chastens the soul and improves character, some say. If we bear our cross properly, there is heaven for us. If the idea of heaven is an illusion, the entire argument is vicious. But even if there were a heaven, the excuse would cover only a small part of the pain of the world. It does not touch the entire animal world. Why were they created at all if it be a necessity of their lives that hunger shall drive them to seek food and that one-half shall hunt and rend and devour the other half?
Moreover, the argument does not even apply to the human family. If the accepted version of the conditions of admission into heaven be true, the part of the race which suffers most—the majority—will never enter heaven. Of all the men who lived before Christ, during many millions of years, you will expect to meet few in Paradise. Suffering does not generally purchase heaven. It is usually a foretaste of hell.
What other justification of the ways of God will the apologist attempt? Nothing new has been discovered since the days of Job. It is a mystery. It is a mystery if you believe in God. It is no mystery in a true philosophy of life. Nature is unconscious. Out of its dark womb a dull glow of consciousness at last emerges, and living things begin to suffer. But mother-Nature knows nothing of their sufferings. At last proto-humans appear. For millions of years they do not differ from other animals. They know little of the world about them. They foresee no future and have no god. At last self-conscious, civilized humans appear, and science is evolved. Then, with the great powers of the material world at their service, they begin to do things for themselves. Is that philosophy not true to the facts of life as you know them?
One grows weary of following the changes of religious thought and argument of the log rolling Christians. The supposed constant changes of science, which are really, for the most part, developments of what we already knew, are slight in comparison with the changes in theology, and science claims no divine inspirer who might be assumed to have an interest in guarding the race from error.
The latest plea is that, after all, perhaps God is not infinite in power. Perhaps there are limits to what he can do. Perhaps he could not prevent the pain and evil in the world. We save his benevolence, at the cost of his omnipotence.
This theory, which was adopted by John Stuart Mill long ago, leaves us in a state of mind of the utmost confusion. English wits called it, when Mill introduced it, a “limited liability God”. What proof does a Christian offer of the existence of this finite God? The answer is the order and purposivness of the universe, as usual. The finite God is, if not the creator, at least the designer of the universe, the mind guiding the forces of Nature.
Then He directed the forces of life to produce the germs of typhus and cholera, the teeth of the sabre-tooth tiger and of twenty-foot sharks, the lust for blood of the lion and the wolf, the spider and the serpent. If He did not, why do Christians claim that He paints the sunset and the orchid, shapes the beautiful shell, or fashions the human eye?
Believers want to leave the simplest microbes, when they are pernicious, entirely out of the list of things which He guided the forces of Nature to produce and to include in that list the fashioning of such complex things as the human brain and heart. They want to ascribe to their finite God all the good impulses of the mind and heart and leave all the bad impulses as things which his limited power could not control.
Certainly a naïve proposal to make to us! It is like saying that all the good things in Nature clearly require an intelligent principle to explain them, and all evil things, which are just as intricate, do not require one.
But perhaps the believer would like to help out the argument with the hackneyed phrase that evil is only negative. So when your nerves tingle with the pain of toothache or headache or appendicitis, the sensation is merely “the absence of good”. The teeth and claws of the lion are as negative as the pain of the deer, perhaps. The toxins which poisonous microbes put in the blood are negative, and, of course, death is only the cessation of life. Poverty is only the absence of wealth.
Face the facts candidly. This world contains a mass of evidence that it was probably not designed by a God, and there is no serious evidence that it was.
But there is another new apology for God, and it is very proud of itself, because it is actually based upon evolution. We admit, it says, that there have been hundreds of millions of years of pain and brutality. We admit that the finger of God is not obvious in the world today. But a brighter age is coming. A far higher race and better earth will yet appear. The dark tragedy of the past will be crowned by a glorious final scene.
We are only just learning the elements of civilization. We could rise as high above the life of today as it is above the life of the ape.
But the idea that a few million years of happiness at the close justify a process of evolution (if it was consciously guided) which entailed hundreds of millions of years of misery for beings that die before the happiness begins is one of the most flagrant applications I ever read of the pernicious principle that the end justifies the means. Whatever God’s future, we can never forget his past.
Nothing in Nature now seriously persuades us to believe that a God must have made it. On the other hand, there is a vast amount in Nature that favors atheism. Nothing in mankind’s nature compels us to assume that the evolutionary agencies which developed them were guided. His faults and brutality, suggest they were not guided. No finger of God waggles in history from the first page to the last. Mankind’s blundering, evolving intelligence and ideals account for everything, the good and the evil. In the long, torturous, bloodstained process of the evolution of religions there is no more trace of divine wisdom than elsewhere.
Is it worth it?
It does not occur to believers that their fantasies might be in the only place where fantasies ever are. Instead, whenever they are in difficulties, Christians plead that the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite. The truth is that Christianity is in a direct line of inheritance from religions of human sacrifice—remember the story of Abraham and Isaac—and are purely human constructions.
It is said in the bible that God created man in his own image. In ancient times people thought it was literally true because God was a big man. Man was therefore a little god. Who today, though, could believe it? No one. Yet people remain Christians and call the bible infallible. They are not reasonable. Their blind, foolish faith in the bible can only be hypocrisy or even dishonesty. If Christian ministers were honest, and had the courage of their honesty, they would tell the world that the being called God in the bible was no God, only an idol of a rude and barbarous age. Worshippers of this God are a sad commentary on human intelligence and human integrity.
God is an avowal of human ignorance. God does not stand for a person, an object, or a thing. It is something not understood, the unknown, a primitive attempt to explain Nature. God is supposed to be outside the universe but that is to ignore the meaning of words. The universe must mean everything and therefore include God. If something is outside then the universe cannot be the universe. It has to include the God to be the universe. Nothing in the universe mankind observes reveals God. The word fits nothing yet discovered. People who say God are referring to nothing. Literally, they do not know what they are talking about.
Theology is the study of what is not there. It does not belong to the family of knowledge. The foolishness of trying to make God intelligible to human understanding is shown in the creeds of Christendom. Every theology ends in a creed. A creed is a sign that the intellect is moribund. A creed is the grave of thought. People who simply believe have dispensed with their brains. Belief requires no mental exercise. When faith is in, sense is out.
Yet God is omnipotent so He ought to be able to reveal Himself. Christians might say they have seen God in a cloud, or a tree, or the sunlight. Others do not see Him but the natural beauty of the cloud, the tree or the sunlight. That seems to be what the Christian means when they say they have seen God. They have seen something wonderful—Nature is wonderful! Who has really seen or heard God? No one. If anyone says that they have seen God, heard God, and talked with God, they lied. No human being ever had any knowledge of a divine being.
The bible contains nothing particularly good, but a lot that is bad. Reading this book will give false notions, absurd ideas and bad concepts. The injury to the mind of children that read the bible believing it to be a reliable book is beyond repair.
It is only useful as a relic of a barbarous and superstitious age, and to throw light on the evolution of ideas of God. The fact that there should have been such an evolution, and that it can be seen in the bible should be sufficient to disprove anyone’s belief in God as an absolute or almighty.
Those who stand in pulpits and call this book the word of God are simple, seriously deluded or are charlatans. Since, nowadays, every clergyman has the chance of studying all that has been found out about the origins of religion and Christianity, the only conclusion can be that pulpit preachers are charlatans. They have not the muscle to be a labourer and earn a poor man’s living, the brain to run a business or study natural science and earn a comfortable living, or the integrity to earn an honest living, so they repeat this litany of superstition to prey on the doubts and fancies of the grief stricken, the fearful, the sick and the dying.
When the bible is universally recognized as the mythology it is, and the psychological vampires that invoke it are laid to rest, the world will be a better place. People might turn their attention to the here and now rather than dreaming of living forever in paradise, and begin to realise that our world is vulnerable and needs our help.
