God is not a good theory
For the past decade, in what could be considered for brevity’s sake as the New Atheist movement, there has been a pedantic but important detail bothering me. The issue is that New Atheists, which I consider myself to be among, place a high emphasis on science and, more broadly, evidence. We constantly demand believers for evidence to back up their beliefs and, when they fail to produce it, we (correctly) disregard their beliefs as unfounded.
In the new approach put forward by Peter Boghossian since a couple of years ago, openness and the willingness to change one’s belief on the basis of reason and evidence is implemented in a scholarly but straightforward method. A way to test the openness of a believer to having his or her mind changed and, by implication, to test whether or not they have reason and evidence at the core of their belief, is to ask them to envision a scenario in which their belief would be proven false. Here, people of faith give a whole range of responses, ranging from unshakeable certainty (in which case their mind is diagnosed as shut), all the way to very specific situations: a corpse belonging to an (unrisen) Jesus, for example, complete with ancient Roman documents to certify the identity of the body, would do it for many Christians.
In turn, atheists have been asked to produce their own scenarios under which they would reconsider their non-belief. Perhaps a single situation would be insufficient to make a Christopher Hitchens or a Lawrence Krauss drop to his knees and accept Jesus altogether, but there are hypothetical scenarios that would give them pause. Among them is the discovery that the stars have aligned themselves to spell out “Yahweh” in ancient Hebrew, or the sound of a booming voice from the sky exclaiming “I AM JESUS!”. Then, it is said, the atheist would at least reconsider.
But there is one difficulty in this approach, as I think is perceived by the other side. The issue is that over the past few years, atheist thinkers have now moved to the position that, even if the stars were to realign themselves into a message from God, that wouldn’t mean the divine was involved; maybe, it is said, we just don’t understand celestial mechanics as well as we thought. In the case of the voice from the sky, the explanation could always be that we are schizophrenic, or a third party has fooled us by more conventional means. This is fine, as far as we atheists go, but believers see it differently: we ask that they change their belief in response to evidence, and even ask them to come up with that hypothetical evidence themselves. But when it’s our turn, it appears, we shift the goalpost and declare that no, actually, no evidence will change our mind. Believers perceive this as unfair and hypocritical.
Of course, they are wrong about that, and the reason they are wrong is the pedantic detail I want to mention now. It has been implied, though never explicitly stated, that the supernatural is not well-defined. But someone needs to spell it out for the faithful: religion is not a good theory. By theory, I mean a body of ideas that mesh together, are self-consistent, self-contained, and build on certain premises. The conclusions arrived at from those premises, which could be considered the “theorems” of the theory, agree with one another and complement each other well. A successful theory is one that manages to make the jump from this logical structure onto the real world and survive.
In the case of Abrahamic monotheism, for example, one of the premises is that God is omnipotent — but that already gets the believer into trouble. The atheist, playing what seems an innocent and annoying word game at first, asks: “If God can do anything, can He make a stone so large that even He cannot lift it?” If God can make the stone, then He is not omnipotent, because He can’t lift it; if He can’t make the stone, then He is not omnipotent either, because he cannot make it. As far as a straighforward (think mathematical) analysis goes, the concept of omnipotence is dead right then and there. If that were a theory of physics, it would go right in the trash bin at that moment. God is not well-defined.
The next step is for the believer to retort: “Your concept of omnipotence is naive. Obviously, God has many other attributes that make your rock example silly. If you were more theologically sophisticated, you would know that God is perfectly logical, and so He wouldn’t bother with silly rocks, or square circles, or climbing stairs downward, or any stupid thing like that. He always works within the boundaries of the logical.”
But they shoot themselves in the foot at that point, for the atheist can then respond: “In that case, there are no miracles. If a miracle is a suspension of the natural, that is, the logical order of things, then God doesn’t intervene. How is He going to make a virgin conceive, or a corpse rise after three days, if He can’t make even a square circle? How is He going to do anything at all that would qualify Him as godly, if He always has to stay inbounds, as far as logic goes?” And so, omnipotence is dead a second time, with the added bonus that God is actually rendered impotent. At this point, believers usually change the subject or walk away.
The same happens when we approach other godly attributes, such as omniscience (does God himself have free will, if He knows everything?), objective morality (remember the Euthyphro), and all the other arguments that atheists know by heart. The point is this: before you get to think of evidence that would make you accept a theory, you first have to make sure that the theory is well-posed in the first place. And so, what I wish prominent atheists would say when asked what evidence would change their mind, is that a better theory of God is needed before any evidence is considered.
No matter how many times I could hear the voice of Jesus in my head, I won’t turn into a Christian. Not because there’s a possibility that I’m hearing things, or that I’ve been deceived by a third party, or that I’m epistemically closed, but because Jesus is nonsense. What the stars spell is garbage if they point to a garbage theory. Just like we (should) discard homeopathy before we actually go into the field and do studies to see if it works, on the basis of its mere theoretical implausibility, so should we refuse to waste our time looking for evidence of a God that doesn’t make any sense.
And there’s a second, final point to be made about this matter: it is not enough that the God theory is well-formulated. Indeed, once internal consistency is achieved, there is still the question of how to tell it apart from other God theories, of from the Null theory. This is where so-called sophisticated, “ground of being” theories of God fail: they trip all over each other, and all are guillotined by Ockham’s Razor before they get off the ground.
In conclusion: evidence for nonsense is not evidence. Theists, sophisticated or not, have to fix their theories before anyone can be bothered to consider any evidence.
