Outline Of My Case Against God

1) The word “God” denotes an incomprehensible concept. A nonsensical concept. A concept as contradictory and absurd as “married bachelor” or “four-sided triangle.”

D) “God exists” is a meaningless phrase. Saying it is an abuse of language. Comprehending it is essentially impossible. Believing it is absurd.

Let us consider just the first half of the phrase:

—– Before we can say “X exists,” we must know what X is. This involves our being able to clearly separate X from not-X and our being able to draw up a list of clear, understandable characteristics which distinguish X. But as was made clear in points A through C, this simply is not possible with regard to “God.” In light of this, it is no more meaningful to say “God exists” than to say “Goj exists” or “Gok exists.” Indeed, it makes no more sense to say, think, or believe “God exists” than it makes sense to say, think, or believe that any arbitrary, undefined collection of three letters represents something which actually exists.

One cannot know that something exists unless one knows what it is that exists.

“To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself. A being without qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind, and such a being is virtually non-existent.” – Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 14

If one makes an exception for “God,” one must make an exception for an infinite number of similar concepts and entities in order to be logically consistent. This is another way of saying that one must abandon the realm of rationality and enter a realm of absurdity, madness, and delusion.

—– Many theists agree that “God” is essentially beyond our comprehension. When asked, many will tell you that “God” is inexpressible and unfathomable – a profound mystery beyond the human mind’s ability to envision or understand. But as George H. Smith makes clear in his book, Atheism: The Case Against God, “To posit the existence of something which, by its nature, cannot be known to man is to submerge oneself in hopeless contradictions…. If god cannot be known, how can god be known to exist?… To assert the existence of the unknowable is to claim knowledge of the unknowable, in which case it cannot be unknowable…. When one claims that something is unknowable, can one produce knowledge in support of this claim? If one cannot, one’s assertion is arbitrary and utterly without merit. If one can, one has accomplished the impossible: one has knowledge of the unknowable” (p. 44).

—– Some theists openly embrace an absurd conception of “God.”

My Catholic Catechism does so when it states, “The mystery of the Blessed Trinity is the mystery of one God in three really distinct Persons.”

Hindus do so when they assert that “God” is Brahman – the unseeable seer of all sights, the unheard hearer of all hearing, the unthinkable thinker of all thinking, the incomprehensible understander of understanding who is all of us and none of us, everything and nothing.

Taoists do so when they basically equate “God” with Tao and say things like “The Tao which can be conceived is not the real Tao” and “Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.”

Huston Smith sums up this approach when he says that such theists claim that the problem is not that our minds are not bright enough but that our minds are simply the wrong kind of instrument for comprehending God. In this view, trying to understand “God” is like trying to capture the ocean with a net or the wind with a rope. “Man’s mind has been evolved to facilitate his survival in this natural world. It is adapted to deal with finite objects. God, on the contrary, is infinite and a completely different order of being than what our minds can grasp. To expect a man to corner the infinite with his finite mind is like asking a dog to understand Einstein’s equation with his nose…. If you go through the length and breadth of the universe saying of everything you can see and conceive, ‘not this… not this,’ what remains will be God.” - The Religions of Man, p. 71-72

But if the mind is not the right instrument to comprehend God with, what is – the elbow? If God is “not this… not this… not anything,” exactly how does that differ from saying that God is nothing at all? Why waste our time discussing the unknown, undetectable, incomprehensible attributes and significance of a phantom? Exactly how does that differ from an inmate in an asylum who insists on discussing the attributes and significance of his imaginary friends?

—– For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that I’m wrong. Let’s assume that some incomprehensible, unknowable God somehow does exist somewhere beyond all understanding. What possible significance can such a God have? How is the universe any different? What practical difference does believing or not believing in Him/Her/Them/It make?Unless something can be known about His/Her/Their/Its nature beyond “He/She/They/It somehow, somewhere exists,” what difference can that existence possibly mean to me or anyone else or anything at all? Unless we can say or learn what “God” or “Goj” or “Gok” is or wants (which incomprehensibility precludes), we may as well not say anything about “God” or “Goj” or “Gok” at all.

—– Over the centuries “God” has been conceived of as the sun, the moon, the stars, a wide range of other natural and supernatural entities, and as an endless number and variety of “super” human beings. (Hundreds are listed in Anne S. Baumgartner’s book, A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Gods.) No evidence exists to back up any of these conceptions. The vast majority are mutually exclusive. On what basis are we to prefer one conception over another? On what basis are we to avoid dismissing them all as mythic creatures beneath serious consideration?

As Stephen Roberts once said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”