Way of the Mind

This is, in a way, a response to a pair of comments by Jon in my previous post. Jon agrees that the theists’ gods are too small and obviously man-invented, but that that doesn’t discount the possibility of a “real” god, a much greater intelligence, to which we are like amoeba are to us, and therefore incapable of understanding.

I could write about it, but I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel :), and, besides, there’s an essay at Ebon Musings that is better and clearer than what I could write right now. It’s called A Much Greater God, and I will quote from it (it’s much longer, and doesn’t start with the part I’m quoting; I really suggest you read the whole of it.)

Consider honestly the possibility that you might be wrong, accept the opposing viewpoint for the sake of argument, and then ask yourself: Does the evidence make more sense from this perspective? Is the world I live in the one I would expect to see if this hypothesis is true, or is this the world I would expect under its negation?

As an atheist, I too must face this possibility. What if I am wrong? What if there really is a deity somewhere out there?

I cannot discount this possibility out of hand. Granted, I have never seen any supernatural event occur, and the regularity of natural law gives me strong reason to believe none ever have or will, but that is an inductive argument, and induction by its nature can never give absolute proof. Even if a proposition has always held true within the realm of our experience, we are never justified in concluding with complete certainty that the same will always be true at all places and all times.

However, given that there is a bare possibility I could be wrong, the question arises - what next? That possibility alone offers no guide to finding out what the truth actually is. Assuming one of the religions in this world is correct, how would I find that out? Where would I begin my search? Without any a priori judgment as to which religion is correct - which is, after all, what I am presumably trying to determine - it seems the only thing to do would be to select and examine them randomly, but this is clearly unsatisfactory. Even if one of the religions in this world was the true one, I would probably never find it by this method. As “The Cosmic Shell Game” argues, there are so many religions on this planet that one lifetime would not be enough to examine all or even most of them in any acceptable level of detail.

Nevertheless, of the ones I have studied so far, my preliminary conclusion is that they are all incorrect; I have examined them and found them wanting. Most religions championed by people were obviously invented by people, and the tenets of their belief betray their origins. Their gods are just like human beings, only slightly larger. They become angry and then forgive, they show jealousy and favoritism, they can be surprised, disgusted, grieved or dismayed, they bear grudges and love those who stroke their egos, and they are capable of both tremendous good and terrible evil. The way most religions reflect the prejudices of their creators is all too obvious: what these people imagine to be a window through which they can see God is in truth a mirror held up to their own faces. We human beings are the contingent result of millions of years of evolution, our emotions arising from neurotransmitters secreted by our glands, our behavior influenced by primitive impulses of territoriality, kinship, pleasure and aggression, and our brain shaped and conditioned by countless thousands of chance events during our species’ history - and we have the temerity to believe that God would think and act just like us?

These anthropomorphic belief systems can be safely discounted. In fact, I would confidently say that all the religions propounded by human beings so far throughout our species’ history are most likely false. I have not examined each and every one of them in exhaustive detail, but as one belief system after another falls before skeptical scrutiny, as supernaturalism fails test after test, there comes a point when we are justified in forming an inductive generalization. Until and unless better evidence for one belief system turns up, we are within our rights to consider them all untrue.

But just because the religions created by humans are false, it does not logically follow that there is no deity at all. What if there is something out there, something that no one has discovered yet, something we have all overlooked simply because it is too vast and too unlike us? Beyond the savagery and the madness, beyond the fervent hopes and hot-headed delusions, beyond the pretenses and the postures - beyond the human-created religions that are above all else too small, viewing this world, this dust speck, this pale blue dot - or even one small local region of it - as the all-important stage on which the cosmic drama is played out, while the entire inconceivable vastness of the rest of the universe is simply a backdrop - beyond all this, could there be a much greater god? Could there be an entity “whose dreams are constellations”, as Robert Ingersoll put it, and whose individual flashing neurons are suns? When we look into the night sky, could we be viewing the latticework of thought on a scale beyond our comprehension? Could the entire universe be merely a fleeting idea in the mind of a being so vast we could not recognize it for what it is any more than an ant could recognize a skyscraper as the product of design?

This is the god of the cosmic microwave background radiation, of the universal expansion, of the vast star-forming nebulae and the cataclysmic explosions of stellar death, of the great walls of galaxies and the even more enormous voids. If cosmologists ever find a god, it will be this one, not the tiny god of Moses who thought that parting a miniscule amount of water on an insignificant planet so a single tribe could pass unhindered was a great miracle - that god is a child making sandcastles on the beach. This god, if it exists, would be large enough to fit the universe.

Near the end, he goes on to say:

I am not saying I believe in the being outlined in this essay; I do not. The disadvantage of a god that is too vast for us to recognize is that we cannot recognize it. It is difficult even to imagine what would count as evidence for the existence of such a being, and in the absence of such evidence, logically we must go with the simpler explanation. I acknowledge the possibility that a greater god exists, but possibility is not the same as proof, and until truly convincing evidence turns up, I will and must remain an atheist.

Note: I usually don’t quote so much from other sites, but I believe that, in this case, it’s more than deserved. If you have the time and inclination, I suggest you read the essay in full, it’s worth it.

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Related posts:

1. Why Atheism is not a religion, part 2
2. Accepting the opposing viewpoint for the sake of argument
3. FAQ: To say "there is no god," you need as much faith as to say the opposite.
4. Awe: religion and science
5. FAQ: What if you’re wrong, and God does exist?