We Can't Know If There Is No God
About 5% of the people in the world say there is no God. According to the Pew Forum, the atheist population has been increasing at about 220% in America. In an effort to understand atheists and this modern day movement I've started to ask some tough questions. One of the first that came to my mind was, is there a way to know that there is no God? I'm talking about moving beyond belief into concrete testable knowledge. After digging through the different possibilities I've come to the conclusion that there is no way to know if there is no God. Let me explain my reasoning.
The tactic I chose to test this against was to take the situations we could know if there was a God and see how these situations would play out if there wasn't one. I'm not talking about the situations where we would believe there is a God but actually know it.
Gone When We Are Dead
The first situation that came to my mind, and I'm sure many others are the same way, was meeting God when we die. This is a situation that many of the worlds religions claim happens. It's a situation that, if it were to happen, would bring us face to face with God. This would move us beyond belief.
What would happen if there was no God? Well, we wouldn't just not come face to face with God. If we simply die and cease to exist than we no longer exist to even know if there is no God. So, in this situation our question is not answered.
If we move to a different form of reality, as some like the gnostics talk about, and we don't meet God that does not mean that God is not out there. The question is still left unanswered. We may believe or not but we still won't know.
Can't Reveal Himself
A common method, according to religious scriptures and faithful believers in religion, is that God reveals himself to the person. One such situation that I recently read about was when Moses sat in a tent with God and they had a conversation. That is the kind of revealing many of us wish would happen to us in our lives.
If there is no God this situation can't happen. If there is no God there is no one to reveal himself to us. Our question is still left unanswered.
Science, Science, Science
After looking at these two situations where we can know there is a God and seeing what would happen in there is no God I decided to test other avenues.
Science for me is a strong hobby. I'm an engineer which is essentially an applied scientist. Since I was a kid science was always something on my mind. So, I asked myself, can science ever prove there is no God?
The simple answer is no. Science can't tell us if there is no God. Science deals with nature, the universe, the environment, and all this stuff around us. If there is a creator of that it would be outside of the system that was created. This means that science is not capable of testing, measuring, or working it's processes on such a being. God would be outside the scope of science.
Conclusion
I'm left with the realization that we can't know if there is no God. There is no situation in life where we would know the answer. There is no way our best science can tell us. Anyone who says there is no God is making a statement of belief. A statement they will never know the answer to.
Comments
#1 Atheism isn't a belief, it
Atheism isn't a belief, it is a lack of belief. It means without theology. Some people (atheists included) act as if it is a religion or structured belief system itself, it's not.
Faith is by definition an unproved hypothesis. If it could be proved or disproved (known), it wouldn't be faith. So, faith is based on a lack of knowledge, and atheism is a lack of faith. We're all stumbling around in the dark, looking for answers, and either path can lead to wisdom or ignorance.
It's all a matter of whether you try to ask questions, or to state facts.
#2 Not Exactly
This seems more like a conversation of semantics. There are really two things here. There is belief and there is faith. There is an old saying that says, "Even the devil believes in God." To believe something to be true or false and to have faith in someone is different and I think that can often be downplayed.
But, here is how it pertains to this conversation. Athiesm isn't a matter of lack of belief. Being agnostic is when people aren't sure of belief. Atheism is a firm belief that there is no God. If someone says they aren't sure if there is a God or not they are not an atheist, by definition. That would make them an agnostic. Atheism is a belief that there is no god.
Beliefs aren't just for religions. Everyone has beliefs.
Then there is faith. Atheists have a lot of faith. I find it rare to find or hear of an atheist who doesn't have some basis for their stance that there is no god. They have faith in the people who help formulate their stance. They do have faith in others.
I'm just trying to point out that there is faith and belief all around is in the world and in many places that aren't religious.
When you refer to faith being needed in light of a lack of knowledge I think you are referring to what is often called blind faith. This is something that does happen and I'm not a fan of at all. From a religious angle I can even justify that scriptural writings like the bible tell us not to have blind faith.
That being said, there are things we are just not going to know in our lifetimes. So, we have to operate in that world.
On the flip side let's look at a little faith and belief from an Atheist. Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist, has said that we don't know how life began on Earth. But, he believes that it began somehow. There is a belief. He doesn't have information and his theories don't have a foundation.
Faith and belief are part of our lives and are all around us. For the Christian, for the agnostic, for the atheist, and for every person in the world.
#3 Turn the question around
A fair point, there can be no proof of absence. But by exactly the same measure, and according to exactly the same arguments, there can be no way we can know that there is a God.
When we die, either we meet our personal God or we don't. We never come back to tell the tale.
If science does not deal with the question of disproving a God's existence, then it also cannot prove a God's existence.
If a God does not reveal itself to us, then we have no way of knowing it exists.
Your assertion works both ways, and in fact, is equally valid for any deity at all. There is no way we can know that Thor, Shiva, Isis or Zeus do not exist. There is no way we can know that Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer, or pixies, or water sprites, or any other mythological being does not exist.
If we have no logical foundation for either the existence or the non-existence of an entity, then we are forced to rely on our intuition, or our emotional make-up, or perhaps our personal inclination as to whether it exists or not. If our temperament inclines us to the romantic, we may believe in fairies. If our temperament inclines us to the religious, we may believe in a deity. Either way, there is no evidential or rational basis for our decision.
Personally, I regard the issue as a matter of statistics. The likelihood of both a deity existing, and that the deity I have elected to worship is the actual deity in charge of the universe, is as near to zero as to not be worth considering seriously.
#4 Separate Questions
I like to deal with these two as separate questions. I had meant to blog on it from the other way around but never got around to it.
Turning this question around and asking how can we know if there is a god and what is the nature of that God is a great path to head down. The really tough part in this is knowing the nature of that God. We can only know if and who God is by God revealing that to us. The trouble arises in our inability to clearly see or accept what is being revealed to us. This is where statistics becomes an issue. The statistics are based on incomplete observations and observations taken out of context.
A second but similar problem comes up in our expectation to have that revealed in a certain way we desire. But, does that fit with how the deity (if said deity exists) chooses to reveal stuff to us?
To turn this on us as individuals, how many of us honestly seek to know and learn what the different interpretations of God say in context and look at how that applies to our world and lives? And, would we even know what to look for if said god decided to reveal something to us?
#5 An interesting point
Again, worth thinking about. But the inevitable conclusion from what you are saying would seem to be that we will only recognize a God if we are open to recognizing a God (if you'll forgive the tautology). In other words, if we set out to look for something, we will find it.
Although this is an entirely valid pursuit, the danger is that we will interpret any signs we do not understand as confirmation of our own conjecture, our own explanation of the world. This is not "truth" in any context we can use within philosophical discussion, though that does not make it any less true as individual experience.
You say "To turn this on us as individuals, how many of us honestly seek to know and learn what the different interpretations of God say in context and look at how that applies to our world and lives?" and this comes back to my central point. To seek to understand the interpretations of God already presumes the existence of such a being. Starting from the standpoint of complete openness ("I think, therefore I am") gives us no reason to pursue that course of enquiry, despite Descartes' protestations, as it takes a leap of faith to even postulate the existence of a deity. It is extrapolating beyond the bounds of the data at hand, as well as the iron laws of logic.
#6 Logic
Logic is one of my favorite things. It's the engineer in me, I think.
Logic does say some striking things. For example, a point of logic says that everything that has a beginning has a cause. Since the universe/time/space has a beginning (no matter how people will debate it) it must have a cause. What was that cause? This is one of the most basic places to start. It starts asking those logical questions.
If we take this a step further, there has to be something that gave the first thing to have a beginning it's beginning while not having a beginning itself.
When we start to walk through logic the more likely case arises that there is some form of intelligent creator (I wish that term didn't have negative attachments but I can't think of a better term to use), a.k.a god.
#7 Logic
Logic does indeed dictate that there must have been a beginning - at least, according to our current understanding of the way the Universe came into existence. And logically, a beginning implies a creation.
However, there is no reason at all to assume that the force behind that creation was in any way intelligent (and the cynical would say, plenty of evidence to the contrary). The Universe consists of some remarkable patterns, patterns which allow, indeed are necessary, for our existence. However, since if those patterns - or laws of physics - did not exist, neither would we, and we would not be here to debate the cause of those patterns. Perhaps the universe - or one like it - has been created a trillion times, but each time, the laws of physics which prevailed precluded intelligent life, or perhaps even solid matter, and therefore precluded the possibility of debate about the existence of a creator. Perhaps we just got lucky.
The most astonishingly complex patterns can arise from all sorts of phenomena, as a walk along a beach, or through a desert landscape sculpted by the wind for many aeons will demonstrate. But these patterns are merely the happy result of chance, and randomness, not evidence of intelligent design (for want of a better word). So it is with the universe. There is plenty of evidence of a creation or beginning, and plenty of room for speculation about how that creation may itself have come about. But though logic dictates that a creation requires some kind of force causing it, it in no way requires intelligence to guide that force. That is merely the anthropomorphic principle that guides so many of our thoughts and actions, that we have adopted down the years to try and make sense of a chaotic world around us.
#8 What was the force and revelation?
No matter how we look at the beginning there had to be something that existed in an of itself that started the universe, according to logic. What is that thing that exists in an of itself (has no start of its own) that caused the universe to be? I think it's a start to the question of god. Coming to the conclusion of God would be much further down a chain of reasoning.
Did a universe get created under different circumstances millions or more times? Possibly. But, what started each of those? This question gets even more complicated when we think about the fact that time, space, speed, and gravity are all tied together. For example, when there was no universe time didn't exist. So, no time based events could happen. This is part of relativity.
There is reason to think of intelligence from what we see. If you were walking through the woods and found an expensive and intricately detailed watch would you think it just happened or that someone designed it and it was built? The patterns in the universe can get much more complex than that. Statistically speaking, it's more likely that there is an intelligent creator than these patterns occurred out of randomness. Much much more likely, statistically.
Patterns are a tough area to talk about. There are observations, there are beliefs, there are desires, and there are a lot of questions on where they came from. This is an area I have a tough time talking about because I've found that many people have strong beliefs on this stuff and are more likely to debate rather than look for the truth. And, debating only leads to people drawing lines in the sand and fighting for their stance. Which is no good for a search on the truth. Then, throw in that most of what we learn in school on this stuff is hogwash (according to scientists all over the board) and it's an area that is just tough.
In the end, I still come back to direct revelation. I think that's the most powerful thing. And, if you look at the God of the bible... a popular choice he uses.
#9 A Presumption
You pointed out astonishingly complex patterns that you can see as you walk along a beach or in a desert landscape. To say that they just came about from winds and other forces by happen stance is a presumption. You presume there is no intelligence behind them. You presume them to be by chance. This is important because the presumptions and assumptions hold shed light on the glasses we look at the universe though.
To get to the heart of it we need to ask if there is something behind the patterns we see in nature. Are they random or is there something more? Can complex patters come about without intelligence? If so, why and how?
#10 Logical arguments
Please people, get some training in how to formulate logical arguments.