Website - Because It Is Not What We See

Header

By Michael Olson
Written 2007-01-15

Notes

This is not meant to be a particularly rigorous statement. It is merely meant to convey an intuition I had concerning the similarities of the "flat Earth question" with the "God question".

Content

When I took astronomy class in high school, I had a teacher who insisted that we be able to defend certain facts about our world, because they were once disputed (particularly by religious folk of the time). One such fact was that the Earth is round, not flat. An explanation for this involved observation: from a lighthouse on a clear day, we notice that ships sink farther than they should when they sail for a significant distance. Another such explanation: we observe that the shadows thrown by sun clocks are of different length in different latitudes at a fixed time and longitude.

One of the most striking explanations, and one that did not require traveling to a high place or several far-apart places, was that It Does Not Match What We See. In other words, we see a round sun, a round moon, and a lunar eclipse with a rounded shadow, so why would our world be either a flat plane or a bounded rectangle?

Obviously, one cannot definitively prove that various gods and goddesses exist by direct observation of said deities. Proponents who wish to defend their assertion that some combination of gods, goddesses, and demigods exist must instead adopt the viewpoint of either:

"The being hides themself from non-believers." A counter-statement takes the form, "Well, I believe in a fantastic <insert description here> Monster who also hides itself from non-believers."
"The being is known by their deeds, which can be observed." A counter-argument is "Well then, they must be a horrendous, malicious being, given the number of children who die from starvation each year, and an incompetent being, given their complete inability to communicate a clear message to all of mankind." If the proponent continues with an argument about this being due to conflict with some other deity, we can add that the original deity must then be impotent.

So would-be proponents are pretty much stuck with a deity who is unprovable by observation.

It seems reasonable to apply to theology the same type of argument that is used to demonstrate why the Earth is not flat: We Do Not See the form of some hierarchy of gods and demigods mirrored in the world around us, except in man-made organizations. If in fact this hierarchy existed before that of humanity's organizations, we would expect to see a much more significant reflection of the God/human relationship in nature. So it would seem that humanity has created its various gods, goddesses, and demigods, rather than any of them creating humanity.

Further, we do not even have significant agreement in the nature of any alleged heavenly hierarchy, which suggests that each nation creates their own deities. This seems to often be done in order to justify the cause of war and the fitness of the government to the constituents of the nation.

While this may not a conclusive argument for some, I hope that I have at least conveyed a plausible reason for not believing in the existence of deities.

An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.

— John McCarthy

Philosophy page

[ Front | Website | Index | Source ]
Last updated Apr. 27, 2007