Continuing with the case against God which I outlined here:

2) “God” – to the extent the term makes any sense at all – seems to be a purely hypothetical entity which is completely undetectable by human senses and scientific instruments alike and for which no convincing physical evidence has ever been found. For all practical purposes, this renders “God” synonymous with “non-existent.”

B) Virtually anything can be airily hypothesized in the abstract – even unicorns and four-sided triangles. Unless and until a thing is detected in some way, it is nonsensical to say that thing exists. “God” has not and cannot be detected. Unless and until that changes, it is nonsensical to say “God exists.”

In previous entries I’ve shown that the “God” concept is more like a four-sided triangle than a unicorn – a thing undetectable in theory, let alone practice. Let us now assume, however, that “God” is at least as detectable as a unicorn. Does this assumption lead to belief in “God”? No.

It seems to me that when we say something is “detectable” we mean that it’s a) recognizable; b) verifiable; and c) falsifiable. Taking these things one by one:

a) Detectable things are recognizable. If someone claims “Unicorns exist,” we know what they mean (“Horse-like creatures with a single horn on their foreheads”) and we’ll know when we find a creature that proves the claim. When people claim “God exists,” however, we really have no idea what they’re talking about. Do they mean a being? A thing? A force? All of nature? None of nature? If we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, exactly how are we going to know when we’ve found it?

b) Detectable things are verifiable. If we see a horse, we can probably smell it, hear it, and touch it, too. Others can see it. We can take a photo of it. We can take a mold of its hoof prints, collect samples of its excrement, and send bits of its fur to the lab for testing. If we see a horse once, we’ll almost certainly see a horse again. It makes sense to ask where it came from, and where others of its kind might be found. Horses – like virtually everything else that actually exists – don’t exist in a single moment, place, or way; neither do they exist for only a single person or group. If unicorns exist, we can expect them to exist much in the manner that horses exist. Things which actually exist fit into a broader context, and affect that broader context in objective, logical, testable, and reproducible ways. Things which don’t fit in with the rest of reality, exist for only a single person, violate physical laws, and cannot be tested or detected again are indistinguishable from hallucinations and ought to be treated as such. If someone claims a unicorn just popped into view and then popped out again, we would not think it reasonable to conclude that unicorns actually exist. It behooves us to hold theists who say “God” exists to this same reasonable standard.

c) Detectable things are falsifiable. For “X exists” to be meaningful, “X does not exist” must also be meaningful. In order for us to say “This is X,” we must be able to say “That is not X.” In order to indicate “X exists here,” we must be able to indicate “X is not there.” Many theists, however, say things like “God is everything” or “God is everywhere” or “God is existence itself” - statements which are virtually impossible to distinguish from their opposites. Instead of offering any evidence that God exists, many simply announce that “God cannot not exist.” Instead of proving the existence of their “God” by presenting Him/Her/Them/It to us, they assert that their “God” (like an infinite number of other absurd things) cannot be disproved. Such theists seem to be under the impression they’ve won the debate when they’ve actually removed themselves from the realm of serious debate altogether.

The simple fact is that the “God” hypothesis is far inferior to virtually every other hypothesis I’ve ever heard seriously put forth by anybody.

Consider:

—– Most hypotheses are put forward to explain something. The existence of the farthest planets in our solar system, for example, were hypothesized before their discovery in order to explain perturbations in the orbits of known planets. Exactly what is it that “God” explains? Evil? Existence? Death? Alas, the “God” concept fails to adequately, convincingly, or even coherently explain any of these things. It is, at best, merely one big, insoluble mystery put in place of many smaller, potentially soluble ones; a mystery which has retarded the discovery of real answers whenever it’s been hypothesized in the past. After all, if God makes the lightning, why investigate lightning further? If God makes my arm rise when I want it to rise, why dissect the human body and discover the nervous system? Seen in this light, the “God” hypothesis is actually much worse than no hypothesis at all.

—– Untestable hypotheses are worthless. We could hypothesize that we all popped into existence out of nothing a mere five seconds ago, complete with pseudo-memories. Wecould hypothesize that permanently undetectable unicorns are all around us, controlling our thoughts with their sighs. We could, in fact, hypothesize an endless number of absurd things which are incapable of being tested in any way – but what would be the point? Such hypotheses are little more than distractions from reasonable, testable hypotheses which might actually lead to an improvement in our lives. “God,” in contrast, is as pointless and unfortunate an hypothesis as “The color red conspired with middle C to cause the Great Depression.”

—– The “God” hypothesis doesn’t merely fail to explain anything – it actually renders all meaningful explanations impossible. Hypotheses, after all, only make sense within the context of logic and science. But “God” – an allegedly all-powerful entity – is not bound by logic and science. If such an entity exists, everything we perceive and think might be nothing more than an illusion induced for malicious or capricious reasons – or no reason at all. It only makes sense to come up with hypotheses in a stable, God-free universe. The “God” hypothesis – far from explaining anything – in effect removes the universe and everything in it from the realm of the rationally explainable.

—– Occam’s Razor (a.k.a., the Law of Parsimony) tells us that assumptions ought not to be multiplied unnecessarily. The more assumptions we make, the more likely we are to be wrong. Unless we have good reasons for positing X, we should not believe X exists. There is simply no good reason to assume the existence of “God” – an unnecessary hypothesis which explains nothing.

Go to Part 3