“Show Me A Sign, Then Will I Believe”
On Evidence and Sign-Seeking Mentalities
It should be uncontroversial to state that being an atheist has everything to do with abandoning faith given the entire lack of evidence for a god. If God exists and He influences reality, we should be able to detect Him in some way. The evidence should be there, placing the burden of proof on those who make the positive claim of existence. This familiar line of reasoning common to atheism rests on the assumption that signs (or evidence) have the power to compel human behavior to change. “Show me a sign from heaven first,” says the atheist, “then will I believe.”
Wanting evidence for religious claims is understandable. But it also may be overlooking the function of religion and faith in general. For example, we might ask if it is unreasonable to demand evidence before a person can believe anything due to the fact that a priori evidence is often not required to make everyday kinds of decisions. Take faith for example. Were it not for faith we would never do anything — never get out of bed, never make marriages, pursue friendships, alliances, and so on. If we required proof for everything we would never believe anything. No one has enough time to completely — and I mean completely — justify the conclusions he or she draws. That’s why we’re masters at drawing conclusions from incomplete information. We assume, we hunch, and make educated guesses, and granted some conclusions are better than others.
It takes faith — that is, intelligent, moving action — to make these day to day decisions given the lack of proof for their outcomes. Even atheists have many unproven aspirations whose realization depends substantially upon their trust in their capacity to realize them. Put differently, if you duly consider within yourself what principle initially excited you to action, or gave energy and motivation to the desires you pursued, the answer would be that you held the assurances necessary, in consequence of your belief, that you would be able to obtain that which you desired but which you had also not yet seen fulfilled. This, we might say, is faith in its most pedestrian, rational form. It is a guiding principle that implies such confidence and conviction as will impel to action. As my friend Lincoln Cannon put it: “We must all act in faith, from premises that are themselves unproven.”
The kind of faith I’ve described here I learned as a child growing up in Mormonism. It is this same definition of faith that continues to resonate with me as I think about human potential. Whenever I try to define faith in these terms to atheists online, I am often met with criticism claiming I’ve conflated language by muddying the foundational differences in the claims that atheists are responding to.
I admit there is some truth to this.
For example, there are differences between the tenets of religious faith (existence of God, resurrection, feeding the five-thousand, etc.) and faith defined as some act that is committed in the present that will lead to future success without evidence apart from emotions. Many atheists I’ve debated will admit that this latter kind of faith is required to lead a healthy and rewarding life, but they will not use “faith” to describe it. The word has too many connotations that can easily be avoided by using words such as motivation, desire, optimism or hope. Atheists do not require physical or natural evidence for hoping that their actions will lead to desired future outcomes. They don’t require evidence for optimism, in other words.
This might seem completely obvious, but the reason why it is important is because atheists are not using “faith” in the same way that some religious people have faith for God (a being that exists right now and has existed for all time as we know it). When religious people use the word “faith” they are generally using it to defend a claim about a present (and past) truth about the universe. God is a being who influences reality and therefore would and should leave evidence of His existence in reality. Hence, there is a foundational difference in the faith-claims that atheists are engaging. The first is some future personal outcome (a positive relationship, a good day, etc.) the other is a physical being or natural act (God, Jesus walking on water). These two types of claims require different forms of evidence, so expecting different standards of evidence should not be surprising.
But again, the function of religion and faith in God is being overlooked.
Usually at this point I have learned it is important to point out that for me the existence of God is dramatically less important than having faith in the function of God, or having faith in human potential. That sentence probably makes little sense to those lacking my religious background, or to those who want to engage me in constructive, meaningful ways. I sympathize with these reactions, I do, but bear with me one moment while I try to explain.
God, as I have learned from Mormon prophets, is what evolving humanity is striving to become (I have also elaborated on this point here). God represents intelligent human beings as a work-in-progress, moving towards greater and greater understanding, barring not the assumption or possibility that other intelligent beings have already taken control of their evolution and have become posthumans. This position of course does not prove the existence of God whatsoever. It should encourage us, however, to recognize that if we trust in our human potential to become radically more enhanced than what we currently are today, even as we trust we will exceed contemporary capacities to become more benevolent, compassionate and enlightened, then that kind of faith should lead us to have faith in a particular kind of God.
In this sense, it frankly doesn’t matter if some intelligent form of life or being or even god has already achieved this benevolent, compassionate, enlightened state of existence. It doesn’t matter, in other words, if God, defined as some ontological, glorified man, exists or not. That for me is not entirely true, but it can get distracting if dwelled upon. What matters more to me is that short of convincing evidence that such a possibility has not already been realized we would be foolish to turn our attention to lesser options that distract us or prevent us from moving forward and embracing a radical humanism that inspires in us our very best selves. As Lincoln has said elsewhere: “To the extent God already exists, we should discover and join them. To the extent God does not yet exist, we should create and become them.”
There are indeed underlying differences between religious and pedestrian forms of faith. However, the obsessive preoccupation with evidence for religious claims overlooks the function of religion and faith in general. Religion is not about epistemology, or using logic and theorems to “prove” the existence of some ethereal old-man-in-the-clouds. Certain theological schools following Aquinas, Pascal, Anselm, etc. attempt to do so, but in my estimation this wildly misses the mark because it distracts us from the more important question — How shall I live this day? — which no amount of evidence can answer or compel change for human betterment. This doesn’t mean that epistemology is unimportant. It just means it is less important than the function and role of esthetics in religion, which is another way of saying it is existentially more important to become something than it is to merely know something.
Religion needs to be viewed primarily as a form of esthetics, wherein religious claims gain meaning and legitimacy in relation to the quality of being, becoming and potential they inspire. To the question, where is there evidence for God, it may be returned, where is there evidence for superintelligent potential? If you have trust in human potential to become superintelligent, benevolent, fair-minded and radically compassionate, then this qualifies in Mormon theology as having faith in God. This view is quite consistent, too, with past and current Mormon tradition[1], even as it expresses thoughts about absent things unrealized, about past and future things, about generalities, probabilities and impossibilities, and about potentials yet to be developed by those willing to hope and proceed without perfect knowledge.
Footnotes
[1] Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, taught that God is a glorified, exalted human who “was once as one of us,” who has a body of “flesh and bones as tangible as man’s,” and that the human family is likewise “susceptible of enlargement” (The King Follett Sermon, D&C 130:22–33). Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the church, declared in June of 1840 the famous Mormon couplet: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” Both God and Man, taught the apostle Parley P. Pratt, are “of one species, one race, one great family” (23). The difference between them is one of degree, not kind, since one is self-realized and the other is still awakening. In harmony with the evolving universe, divine beings and divine communities are twined in flesh and bone and are “the result of cosmic evolution spanning eons of time,” to which we ourselves are beginning partakers (Givens 135). We “have got to learn how to become Gods [our]selves,” Smith said, if we are to see the fulfillment of what religion has meant to inspire in humankind (The King Follett Sermon). Snow complemented this principle as well: Children at play who currently make mud worlds will soon develop in knowledge and power until they learn to organize worlds as gods themselves (658–59). We humans are thus striving towards a model of excellence the gods already embody.
