There is one weird fact that solves every difficult theological problem that has ever been posed. Once you know and understand this one crucial fact, you become a Maser Theologian and can answer every question about God easily and without contradiction.
1. Is God a male, a female, or a gender-less oozy gastropod of some sort?
Answer: Neither, because gods aren't actually real things at all.
2. Did God create evil?
Answer: No, because gods do not exist.
3. Will God forgive me?
Answer: No, because God does not exist. Forgive yourself and try to be a better person.
4. How is it that God and Jesus are the same being?
Answer: Because neither of those things exist. Jesus was never a real person, and there never were any gods at all.
5. Did God create our spirits and give us free will?
Answer: No, because there never were any gods at all, and the evidence is strongly against the existence of spirits.
6. Will I meet God when I die?
Answer: No, because no gods exist, and neither do you after you die.
7. Does God know everything?
Answer: No, because the idea of an all-knowing god is a testable proposition that fails on the basis of evidence.
8. Is God all-powerful?
Answer: No, because an all-powerful god is a testable proposition that fails due to the proposition being inherently contradictory and therefore absurd and self-negating.
9. Does God want me to believe in him?
Answer: No, because there are affirmatively no such beings in existence.
10. Didn't God give us the bible to tell us that he exists?
Answer: No, because gods are not real things. The bible is as much a proof of a god as Marvel Comics is proof of a Spiderman.
11. Did God send the angel Gabriel to instruct Muhammad?
Answer: No, because there never were any gods or angels at all.
12. Is not the Pope God's actual representative on the earth?
Answer: No, because gods are not actually real things that exist.
13. Which religion is the right one?
Answer: Religion is wrong. Religion is entirely a wrong thing, period. Religion is a wrong process reaching wrong conclusions, and is full of wrong ideas and wrong people. Religion is wrong about every single thing that makes religion unique.
14. Did God empower Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt?
Answer: No, because there are no gods. Also, Moses was a fictional character invented around 700 BC based unimaginatively on half a dozen previous fictional characters and popular stories known from antiquity.
15. Did God create Adam and Eve?
Answer: No, because there never were any gods at all.
16. Does God prefer that we worship on Sunday, or on Saturday? Which is the correct Sabbath?
Answer: Neither, because god isn't a real thing and worship is a wrong thing to do, being based on demonstrably false assumptions.
17. Why does it seem like God allows terrible things to happen?
Answer: Because there is no such thing as gods. You might just as well agonize over why the underpants gnomes are allowing so many bad things to happen.
18. Does God hear and answer prayers?
Answer: No, because there never were any gods at all. Also, telepathic communication is disproved bullshit.
19. Golly gee whiz, I'm pretty sure there is a God. My feelings and my church says so.
Answer: There isn't. Examine why you think that, and look critically at all the evidence. Lots of people have walked away from those unfounded beliefs once they realized that there was nothing in it. They're just fine, and you will be just fine, too.
20. But what if you're wrong? Huh?
So - you're a gambler, are you? Pascal's Wager, is it? OK - let's play that game. Given all the evidence, the probability of any god existing is vanishingly small, and the probability of that god being precisely the one you think it is, is again vanishingly small out of the infinity of all possible gods that might exist. Now then, of all the possible gods, how many would be offended and angry if you guessed the wrong god? Therefore if any gods exist, there is a high probability that you will have disastrously picked the wrong one.
Or you could just not play silly games of chance and follow the evidence where it leads.
21. But couldn't there be a something, somewhere, and you can't prove there isn't!
Is that what you believe in? A vague notion of a "something, somewhere?" A non-interfering god that refrains from modifying the universe in any measurable way so as to remain undetectable? Such a being is indistinguishable from the wholly non-existent, so it makes no difference whether you believe in it or not.
But all the specific gods, who believers claim must always modify the universe early and often and in specific ways, expose themselves to objective, empirical examination through evidence. All the evidence is concordant with the non-existence of magic, the supernatural, or of gods, devils, spirits, ghosts, fairies, or leprechauns. Most of the evidence directly implicates these facts, while some of the evidence (to which theists cling) merely bears multiple explanations.
But the simplest explanation that is consistent with all the evidence and which provides the simplest, most believable and coherent answers to all theological questions is that there never were any gods at all.
Oh good. The tired old arguments get trotted out again: "God is not a falsifiable proposition, and that means you can't disprove God!"
ReplyDeleteOk, smartysocks, what makes it so? Is your idea of god unfalsifiable because it does not measurably influence the universe in any way including the organisms within it? Or is it because you claim that god is an active agent magically concealing himself from our view?
"It's the second thing - yeah."
Well, criminals also actively seek to conceal themselves from the fuzz, and quite often they get caught. Actions leave evidence of those actions.
"Aha! but some really smart criminals never get caught. And my God thing is infinitely smart, so you'll never catch him in the act of modifying the universe!"
But the cops don't need to know the identity of the criminal to know whether a crime has been committed. If the universe has ever been disturbed from its natural order, and particularly if this is happening at anything like the regularity with which the deluded masses seem to think it is, then the effects of those actions must be measurably at variance to the natural world and random chance. And this is what we do not see. We are staring directly at the spot where you say the gods are, and we see nothing because nothing is there. Nothing is acting on the universe besides nature itself.