Given the extraordinary failure of supernatural entities to show themselves in the world under modern conditions for verifying and falsifying beliefs, the likelihood of supernatural entities actually existing is extremely low. Well, well below .001%. With hundreds of millions of people walking around with camera phones now we still have no photographic evidence or films of supernatural agencies that are not laughably easy to debunk? Double blind tests have been done on prayer. It doesnt work. Etc., etc. And now that we have seen the power of naturalistic explanations to make astounding counter-intuitive but true predictions about the world, we have every reason to think that the only agencies in the world are natural ones that adhere to the seemingly binding natural laws of the universe. I believe there are no personal gods intervening in the world. Better yet, the degree of evidence is so overwhelming against the gods hypothesis, that I have no hesitation in saying I know there are no gods. Just as everyone readily says there is no Aquaman and there is no Zeus, it should be just as easy for everyone (and especially atheists) to say there the God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition simply doesnt exist. It is only cultural conditioning that makes people hesitate and treat that as a harder question than those of Zeus and Aquaman when, evidence-wise, it’s plainly not. Well, cultural conditioning, and this irrational fear that if they disbelieve in God they’ll somehow be just as much a faith-believer as believers in God. Which is bunk. Finally, the other reason atheists might hesitate to say they know there is no God is because of a long standing, deeply confusing, and insidious equivocation the major monotheisms have foisted on us for centuries. They conflate the metaphysical concept of a “ground of all being” principle with the personal, interventionist gods of their religious traditions. It is incoherent to think of it as a personal being given everything we have ever experienced about personality, which shows it clearly to be a spatio-temporal experience of complex organisms and not at all the kind of thing that can exist outside of space and time. In fact the problems with talking about God as personal were known all the way back to the ancients and have always been known and acknowledged by the most sophisticated theistic philosophers, even as the latter have engaged in all sorts of unconvincing ad hoc explanations about how the impersonal god of philosophy can somehow be reconciled with their faith traditions’ baseless and anthropomorphic beliefs about gods who act in history. It’s as absurd to say that a God is personal as it is to say “gravity” is personal. It’s sheer confusion.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:54:21 +0000
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