Against Scripture

why God does not exist

Last week I talked about why identifying god with the beyond should be acceptable to atheists. The beyond is that inaccessible, unknowable, aspect of reality that violates the law of non-contradition, the conditions of knowability, and is infinite, singular, beyond space and time, all-present, and underpins all of knowable reality... which is remarkably close to the theoretical concept of "god" from Christian and Jewish theology, as well as Greek philosophy.

I'm not kidding myself here: I know that hardly anyone ever changes their mind about anything based on evidence or argument, and it is good and right to be especially careful about something as important and dangerous as belief or non-belief in god.

Many atheists have at least to some extent formed their beliefs based on evidence--or lack thereof--but it's going to take far more than the kind of sketch of the evidence I've presented to convince them to change their minds. This is especially true because the evidence I've presented is esoteric as hell: simply understanding it requires an having practised the disciplines of probability and having learned to draw strong conclusions from counting statistics.

These disciplines are hard to learn, and most people have not done so. It took me decades of practice to get where I am in terms of probabilistic expertise, and many years more to reach the conclusions I've come to. So I'm not expecting anything other than skeptical looks from my atheist friends, not for a good many years at least, and so far I've not been disappointed. You guys rock.

I'm expecting something quite different from my scripturalist and revelationist friends, who tend not to be moved by theological arguments but who are heavily invested in the idea that they can and do know God (I'll refer to what scripturalists believe in as God with a capital "G"). The God scripturalists believe in is provably not god-as-beyond. They also often have personal experiences that they take as being evidence for their scriptural beliefs, and as you'll see below I understand how powerful such experiences can be. But personal experience, especially when it comes to extreme psychological states, is not a great guide to what actually exists.

It's never easy to get people to accept that they are wrong, and getting people to accept that they are wrong about something they feel very strongly about, and strongly identify with, and have deep social connections around, and have viscerally strong personal experiences with... is practically impossible.

I will never-the-less try.

There are two arms to this argument. The first I have already presented, which is that god cannot communicate with us in the way scripturalist and revelationist accounts of divine experience require, and we know this from the nature of god’s universe.

The second arm is based on the question, "If you want to know god, where should you look?"

Let's suppose that instead of god you were looking for a particular species of lichen. You believe for some reason that this lichen grows everywhere: in all terrestrial environments, under all circumstances. It's incredibly small and subtle, though, so it's really hard to spot.

Where would you look?

A city?

A jungle?

Or a desert?

Perhaps you believe this lichen is literally everywhere because if you wish upon it your wishes come true, and by virtue of a relatively modest effort at motivated reasoning you have become very good at interpreting events subsequent to your wishes as being "proof" that this lichen is all around you. But you've never seen it and you want to. After all, you're not an idiot: you know motivated reasoning exists, so you recognize the possibility that your interpretation of events might be stretched a little so as to make it seem that your wishes, suitably reinterpreted, have come true.

Cities are full of people and jungles are full of life. You're looking for a small, subtle organism, so those would both be really bad places to look. How could you tell if those spots on a concrete wall were soot from traffic smog, or the lichen you're after? You can't. Are those spots on the pavement the lichen, or the spatter of some unfortunate bodily fluid that came out of a drunk last night? And so on.

Likewise in the jungle: life abounds. You might find some lichen, but are they the right ones? Or is that just some kind of mould?

And what are the odds that you'll fool yourself when you encounter something that seems pretty similar to what you expect?

Being human means you are in the grip of motivated reasoning. To say "My desire for an idea to be true has no bearing on how I evaluate possible evidence for it" is not a tenable position. To be human is to be subject to motivated reasoning. I am, and I barely qualify as a member of the species. Fooling ourselves, as Richard Feynman famously said, is the easiest thing in the world.

So if you go looking for lichen, knowing you are a human being and therefore likely to misinterpret anything that looks vaguely like evidence as being "100% certain for sure" proof of the lichen's existence, it would be a really bad idea to go looking in a city or a jungle. Those environments have way too much noise: random unrelated phenomena that get in the way of what you're looking for.

You'd go looking in a desert, where, crucially, there is nothing else alive and very few other contaminants that might confuse the issue.

If you find something living there that looks pretty much like your lichen, you've got excellent evidence of its existence.

Otherwise, not so much.

Analogously, there are two absolutely terrible places to go looking for god: scripture, and the inside of your own head.

The reason for this should be obvious: both of these places are full of human intelligence, which is large and loud and unsubtle, so no matter what you find or experience, you will never--if you're even slightly honest about it--be sure that it isn't just you, or some other human being.

Every scripture anyone has ever read was conceived, transcribed, copied, translated, edited, printed, and published by human beings.

And humans sometimes make mistakes, and make things up, and just flat-out hallucinate. We are subject to a wide variety of distorting influences.

We know this. Believing that some perfectly ordinary human process of transcribing or copying or translating or editing or publishing or even reading is not subject to error, distortion, misinterpretation, wishful thinking, and so on is a declaration of being unqualified to know anything.

So scripture is full of people: human ideas, human needs, human thoughts. This explains its inconsistency and incoherence. Some beautiful poetry, no question, but the word of god? Even if god could have a word--which as I've demonstrated is impossible--scripture is not the place to go looking for it. Way too many people there, all shouting loudly in the ambiguous languages of children of time.

Likewise, the inside of our head, where revelations happen, is full of us. I don't care how deeply someone mediates, what drugs they do, or how profoundly psychotic an experience feels to them. They are there, present. To claim "I was just a passive observer of divine revelation in my own head" is insane. And that's even before we understood that god cannot communicate with us that way.

This is the traditional atheist position: since hallucinations are known to exist and god is not known to exist, hallucinations are a better explanation for divine revelation than the existence of god. Now we know god exists and is unable to communicate with us, the same argument gets turned up to eleven.

We know this: even if you choose not to identify god with the beyond, if the God of your scripture or personal experience could tell us the difference between indistinguishable particles--which any God worthy of the name certainly knows, and could certainly tell us--then the laws of physics would be different (more on this next week) and we would all be dead.

So god exists, but the god that exists is the god of theology, not the personal God of anyone's scripture, revelation, guru, or experience.

Now, this could be seen as an argument against identifying the beyond with god: the word "god" is used to mean different things, and while the beyond certainly fulfills the theologian's definition, it manifestly does not fulfill the average scripturalist's definition.

I could--and for quite some time did--choose to go this route. If I take the word "god" to mean what scripturalists think it means, then the nature of the beyond demonstrates that God does not exist, because the existence of the scripturalist's God would violate the prohibition on knowledge of the beyond, which the scriptualist's God could certainly give us.

It was in fact a chance passage in a book on theology that I happened upon in a used bookstore (Berry and Peterson in Kingston Ontario) that quoted... someone... describing both the theologian's definition of god and a "nevertheless" that went on to the quite incompatible scripturalist's definition of God that got me rethinking things. I wish I'd bought the book, because I've never been able to find the quote, which was from some Medieval Christian theologian. I had thought it was Augustine, but have been through his works with sufficient care that I'm now convinced I'm mis-remembering.

But seeing the definition of god presented in that split fashion, by a thinker who acknowledged the inconsistency of the two sides of their theological coin, I realized I had no warrant to settle on one half while ignoring the other.

So: I am choosing to identify the beyond with god. I believe this is the most honest response to the facts. As I said last week: what warrant do we have for not doing so?

"Non-theologians use the word 'god' to mean something quite different and incompatible with its usual theological meaning, and that meaning should take precedence" is not an epistemological argument, it's a political one, and to some extent, therefore, my decision to reject it is a political one. As soon as one starts talking about god, politics enters the fray. So does psychology.

Religion exists primarily for psychological and evolutionary reasons. The fact that we have religious beliefs, and the specific religious beliefs we have, most plausibly comes from a combination of adaptive features and evolutionary accidents that follow from how the human mind happens to work.

That people have overwhelming spiritual experiences is not in doubt. I've had one myself, and stood naked and alone in the presence of God. I don't know how long it lasted. Minutes, maybe tens of minutes. It was near sunrise on a winter's day and I stood at a window overlooking the ice covered surface of Lake Ontario, out toward Wolfe Island, and the long morning twilight which was just beginning to tinge the ice and sky with the light of dawn--Homer's rodos dactylos aurora--had not passed when it was over and I returned to the world of time and chance.

While it lasted, though, it lasted forever, and in that eternal moment I knew with a certainty beyond reason or doubt that it had always been true that God was present in my life. This atemporal strangeness was one of the most surreal aspects of the experience: the feeling that this presence, which was overwhelming me with the possibility of absolution, peace, and love at the worst moment of my life, had always been with me and I had always known it. For that timeless breath it had always been true that God was with me, and if I accepted God then my every memory, feeling, past experience... everything... would have been changed and it would all have always been changed. In the twinkling of an eye…

If I had accepted what was on offer not only would my whole future have been different, my whole past would have been as well. If I had accepted, it would have always been true that God was with me.

I could have easily surrendered to it. I believe most people would have, under the circumstances, and later said that what they experienced "could not possibly be explained by science," which is false.

And as I've pointed out before, it means nothing that someone "cannot imagine" a relatively mundane explanation for such an experience: our imagination is not very good, and lots of reality is beyond imagining.

So yes: overwhelming spiritual, emotional, psychological experiences happen. The ontology of those experiences is what is open to question, and everything we know about the nature of our own mind, and the lengths it will go to protect itself from intolerable situations, tells us that the odds are very good these experiences are all examples of self-protection, not the presence of the divine. The mind creates an experience to insulate the conscious self from an intolerable reality, or for some lucky few perhaps to find access to an otherwise inaccessible joy. There is a lot of evidence of climbers and other extreme adventurers experiencing a helping companion to get them through their times of physical danger and exhaustion. So it’s plausible that people whose distress is purely internal find solace inside themselves, but experience it as the divine, which is certainly what they need. I did, anyway.

The God of scripture, revelation, and personal experience is a folk ontology, the imposition of a naive, untested idea about what exists onto a substrate unanalyzed, overwhelming, experience.

When we go looking outside of scripture and outside of our own head, when we go looking at god’s universe, where we know there is no human consciousness to interfere with or overwhelm the presence of god, we find the beyond, and the nature of the beyond is the nature of god.

The structure of the knowable universe tells us that what is beyond it is (almost) silent, so neither scripture nor revelation can possibly be inspired by or communicated from god.

This is consistent with the God of scripture and revelation being a folk ontology that has been projected onto various extreme psychological phenomena.

That God does not exist.