16 August 2018

God: non-existent but important

God for Atheists.

Dear X,

I find it frustrating to hear you expound yet again your problems with Faith and Doubt and to be unable to comment. So here I try to begin a dialogue. My challenge to you is to see how far down the page you are willing to read. For, as you have nurtured your doubt for so long, I suspect you ‘need’ it and will not welcome a re-thinking of your position. 

I want to expound a view of God which I do not claim is unique to me, but which I have not heard expounded by anyone else, except in parts. My thesis could be called “God for atheists”; the title of my recent book (***). I suppose I started writing it as an apology to my children for my not being as dismissive as they of the whole religious business. But that was more than 20 years ago.

So I am talking first to 'atheists' to say “Not so fast! Do not dismiss this whole bundle of ideas, hopes, and myths, which has loomed so large in the history of mankind since the beginning of thought itself. You may be 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'!” 

But secondly (and this is the more difficult part), I am talking to those who do 'believe in God', and who practice religion. I wish to ask, with sufficient humility and politeness, could it be that you are misunderstanding the nature of God, asking perhaps the wrong questions, accepting too literally the answers provided by previous generations. 

The logic of my argument can be stated succinctly, though to convince an audience embedded in a different world of ideas my exposition would need space; space to introduce ideas gradually, with repetition and illustration. The following is only the bald logic of my argument.

[1]  God surely does not exist. If he did, he would resemble everything else, and we would face the 'regression problem' of who ‘created’ God.
[2]  What, in any case, is existence? We do not know any thing that does not exist. Every THING we know has mass, extension, and duration. It is difficult (nigh impossible) to talk of types of non-existent reality. Take a knotted string; the string exists, but what about the knot? It contributes no extra weight. Yet different observers can view it objectively. We hesitate to say that it does not exist. Take pi, or infinity, or guilt; they certainly do not exist in the way that stone does, or magnetism.
[3]  So there can ‘be' things that do not exist, and they can be discussed objectively, and have meaning; like a unicorn; like patriotism.
[4]  ‘God’ for Newton was the total mass of the universe; for Einstein perhaps the total energy of the universe. It is fairly easy to go along with such definitions even if we do not understand them, but it is quite clear that such concepts of God lack all the human features that made God feared, obeyed, loved, and indeed worshipped. Man has clearly made God in his own image, for God commands, judges, and forgives. 
[5]  Let us make it quite clear that we are now talking about a third and altogether different concept, a Humane God; not the God of Magic (which is incredible), nor the God of Physics (which for most of us is incomprehensible, and in any case does not care sufficiently about us personally). We make this clear to get Richard Dawkins off our backs. 
[6]  Many people, perhaps most, will acknowledge a sense of right and wrong, contrition, a hope for forgiveness, and gratitude. There is (objectively) a cloud of ideas in the collective heads of mankind which we have projected onto the God of Magic. Like the image of a man behind the mirror, it is meaningful, can be discussed objectively, but does not exist; at least not there – behind the mirror. 
[7]  Yet the cloudy 'Humane God' is terribly important for man as a thinking, social, animal; it is needed as the foundation for morals. 
[8]  If you ask yourself, “Who says abortion is wrong?”, or “To whom can I turn for forgiveness?” the answer emerges very clearly that our 'Humane God' resides in the heads of our fellow men. “Whenever two or three of you come together in my name, I am there with you.”  See, for example, the Quakers, who conduct all their business “in the presence of God”.
[9]  How much better is it to have a concept of God that can be easily accessed for advice, and love, and that cannot be doubted, compared with a magical God who spins matter out of nothing, who raises souls (and even bodies) from the dead, but who covers thousands of innocent believers in mountains of mud, and who in any case we cannot believe in? 

(*** God for atheists” (2019) by Ian West, ISBN-13 : ‎978-1728393995; available online from Amazon, Blackwells, Biblio, or any good bookshop, or direct from the author. )

Yours sincerely, Ian West

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