If you try and talk about religion on the internet, within a short amount of time a skeptic will appear and tell you there is no good evidence God exists. But surely if there is anything we should be skeptical of, it’s this idea. Because if it’s true there is no good evidence for God, it must also be true that millions of intelligent human beings are misguided but don’t realize it.
As someone who believes in God and has an interest in philosophy, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating the various reasons to think God exists. It’s liberating to have this knowledge, because it removes any doubts about the extent and adequacy of the evidence. It allows me to estimate the education level of any critic and dismiss most of the things said in popular discussion as misguided and uninformed.
In the words of Francis Bacon, who was influential in the development of the scientific method -
“A little philosophy inclines one toward atheism, but depth in philosophy brings one to religion”.
So, what is the evidence for God?
God provides a very powerful explanation for the world we observe. There are many things within the world we might call physical things. But there are also many things that don’t appear to be physical. Things like consciousness, minds, intentions, values and free will. None of these things have mass or dimension or any of the usual properties physical things have. If these things aren’t physical, that means there is more to the world than the physical objects we can detect with our senses. How can we explain why these things exist and why they have the properties we observe?
If we’re choosing an explanation for the things we observe, the best explanation is one that unifies many disparate phenomena under one principle. Newton’s theory of gravity and Darwin’s theory of evolution are considered very powerful explanations because they have great unifying power. These theories appeal again and again to a few basic principles that can account for a great many different phenomena.
This is also true of the God explanation. With one stroke you can…
Explain why the universe exists and the nature of the ultimate cause.
Explain why the universe has regular laws and those laws are capable of accommodating life.
Supply a solid grounding for morality, which secures its non-arbitrariness, its normative force, and objective reasons for behaving well.
Explain what it is for life to be meaningful, and why it is so.
Explain the pervasiveness of religious belief of various kinds in human society, as well as micro phenomena such as religious experience.
Have confidence in things like the reliability of our rational faculties, the existence of an external world, and similar ‘big’ epistemic questions.
Explain the existence of consciousness and the personal aspect of life, values, intentions, free will.
The explanatory power of God is about big philosophical questions. It isn’t proposed as an explanation for natural phenomena like thunder. The idea God is in competition with scientific explanations is a simple category error. None of these points are scientific, they are all important philosophical questions.
Some people might object that while God is an explanation, it’s not a very good one. It’s on this point that the skeptic misunderstands the limits of skepticism. In many questions of life we don’t have the luxury of not choosing what to believe. Our choice is forced because it is practical, we must act as if something or other is true. So even if all the available explanations are inadequate, and we don’t have as much evidence as we’d like, we must choose the best explanation available.
What are the explanatory alternatives to God?
The most comprehensive alternative to God is something like materialism or naturalism. As a metaphysical explanation, naturalism has many problems. It’s not a coincidence these explanatory difficulties are the same reasons which motivate people to believe in God.
Naturalism has no clear definition. It’s not clear precisely what it’s metaphysical thesis - everything that exists is natural - actually means. If we take natural to mean anything described by the current laws of physics, then naturalism is false. We’re left with an explanatory IOU, a promise that future physics will show it to to true.
Naturalism cannot explain the origin of the universe. This question can’t be answered by referring to physical properties or scientific cosmology theories. If something has physical properties, it must already exist. All physical events and causes are within the history of nature. But the question being asked is about the possibility of such a history in the first place. The only real explanatory option for the naturalist is brute fact, the universe exists for no reason, with no cause. In the words of the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, “The universe just is”.
Naturalism cannot explain why the universe has regular and law-like properties or why those laws are the way they are. Given what we know about the laws of nature it’s much more likely the universe would have collapsed in on itself early in its evolution before ever getting going. But it not only expanded it went on to develop such complex chemistry and stability that life could evolve. For the naturalist, chance is the only way to explain why this happened. And chance is another word for no reason to explain it - it just happened.
For the personal aspects of life, naturalism is forced to say they arise from insentient matter. The hard problem of consciousness, the existence of free will and its compatibility with a deterministic world are all things which are difficult for naturalist explanations. These properties don’t fit comfortably within the naturalist world view and philosophical compromises are needed to accommodate them.
None of these points makes naturalism incoherent or unacceptable. But it does show there is no explanation that has all the answers and can claim to be the only rational option. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. In the final judgement, our only option is to choose what we think is the best explanation, the one most likely to be true.
There is a subjective element to this judgement which can’t be denied. It depends on things like our estimation of the strength of each element of the explanation; what strengths we consider important; what weaknesses we consider unacceptable and things like this. The only unreasonable position is to declare that anyone with views which differ from ours is irrational. That’s not only dogmatic and unreasonable, it’s also factually incorrect.
Would it be really a problem to leave in a world without a god ?
God may or may not exist, the answer itself is probably an utopia until a day, in the very end, we met him/her/it or not.
All that goes around the idea itself is although fascinating and has generated so much art, influenced the world in way many aspects of past lives and maybe on our own too (that may depends on geographic location, culture, etc.).
But sometimes, at least to me, feels like a vague echo of something from the past that still keep ringing despite having lost much of it's power and of it's values.