A Refutation of Religion

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

- George Orwell

What I believe:

I am an atheist. I do not believe in the existence of God.

God may or may not exist. I can neither prove that God exists, nor prove that he doesn't. However, in the absence of positive proof that God does exist I will not believe in him. God may exist, but I don't know that he exists, therefore I do not believe in God. I am not categorically saying that God does not exist, simply that it is meaningless to talk about believing in something when you don't know for certain whether it exists or not. In a sense, therefore, I am also an agnostic.

Throughout this text I will refer to those who believe in a God, or Gods of any kind, as theists. This discussion is intended to be general and will therefore not address any religions in particular but merely the concept of God (which is common to most of the world's religions, with the notable exception of Buddhism). I will refer to God as ‘He’ throughout this text, even though ascribing a gender to a supreme being is completely meaningless, because it is traditional to do so. The text is in the format of a series of points made to me by religious friends of mine with whom I have discussed religious belief, and my refutations of these points.

Refutations:

1. If God does not exist, prove it to me.
2. If God didn’t create the Universe where does it come from?
3. If God does not exist why do so many people believe in God? How can all these people be wrong?
4. You cannot treat God as an object - God is an abstract concept.
5. God is in everything and everything is in God.
6. But I can feel God in me and in everything around me.
7. What about Soul? What happens to your Soul when you die?
8. What about all these amazing occurrences?
9. Without religion and belief in God the world would be an anarchy.
10. Why do this? Why can you not respect other people's opinions?

Other points to consider:

1. The problem of evil.
2. The incompatibility of the concepts of fate, free will and God's omniscience.
3. Can God change the rules of logic? Can God make 2+2=5? How do you define omnipotence?
4. Why do you think that you are special?
5. God is defined anthropomorphically.
6. Assume that God created the Universe. Well, then how?

1. If God does NOT exist, then prove it to me.

Proof by elimination - if you can't prove that God doesn't exist, then therefore God does exist. This may seem fair enough. However, it is patently impossible to prove that God does not exist if one assumes that God is omniscient and omnipotent. If I were to come up with any convincing proof of God's non-existence it would be perfectly reasonable, given the definition of God above, for a theist to retort that God is merely letting me come up with that proof (because he is omnipotent) to test me.

The important point is that there is no proof that God does exist either. In the absence of positive proof for the existence of something one cannot merely assume it's existence. If I were to tell you that the screen you are reading at the moment is not merely a screen, despite its appearance, but actually conceals an advanced video-camera being used to spy on you, you probably wouldn't believe me. You would probably, quite reasonably, ask me to prove it. I could, however, just as easily ask you to prove to me that that screen didn't contain an advanced spying device. The obvious rejoinder would be to say that it looked like computer screen. I then claim that the device is cunningly concealed. You may then go through a whole series of scientific tests - taking the screen apart, analysing its components. You still find no evidence for this spy device. No matter, I say - there is no way that you will be able to detect it because it is cloaked by a 29th century cloaking device. Now you are stuck. Because of the nature of my defence it is absolutely impossible to prove that this screen is not a cloaked spying device.

The theist's defence of God is exactly the same. If I look at the Universe I do not see God, I merely see the Universe. You tell me that there is, in fact, a God out there, even though I cannot see one. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of a God (the equivalent of the tests I just proposed on the piece of screen) so I still do not believe you. However, I cannot disprove your assertion simply because of the way you have defined the problem. It clearly makes no more sense for me to believe that there is a God than it does for you to believe that your computer screen is a cloaked spying device.

2. If God didn't create the Universe where does it come from?

I do not know where the Universe came from. Neither do you, hence your need to postulate God as having created it. I then ask you - where did God come from? You, as a theist, will then tell me that God does not need to be created, he just is. Now to me, thinking rationally, this seems merely to be complicating the problem unnecessarily. I do not understand where the Universe came from so I postulate the existence of something else to explain the Universe which, in turn, I cannot explain. Following that argument I could end up with an infinite series of Gods, which is simply an absurd way to deal with the problem (besides which there is absolutely no evidence to support such a thesis). Why not just say that the Universe itself did not need to be created, rather than move the problem up a level? It is meaningless to concoct a rule - that everything needs a creator - and then, arbitrarily, to make God an exception to it.

If one does not understand a problem and has no information upon which to base a judgement of the problem then it is meaningless to make up a theory about it and just assume it valid until someone proves you wrong. By doing that you are pretending to know something that you do not and you lose the drive to understand the problem. Surely it is better simply to admit that you do not understand the problem and try and advance your knowledge by meticulous research. Not only do you edge closer to a real understanding of the problem, but you will probably discover many interesting things in the process. This is how science and technology advances (notwithstanding Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions").

3. If God does not exist why do so many people believe in God? How can all these people be wrong?

The vast majority of people do believe in God, it is true. But so what? Let me turn this question around. Why do you believe in God? Where did the belief come from? Were you born with it?

No.

Everyone, in a practical sense, is born an atheist. A baby knows nothing. It has no conception of God, or it's mother, or even the fact that it is an infant human being. Knowledge and awareness come from experience. People, in general, gain their religious beliefs from their upbringing. If this were not true demographers (population statistics scientists) would not be able to draw those pretty coloured maps you see in most atlases and geography textbooks showing the distribution of world Religions. Religion is commonly taught in school, religious practice is entrenched in society and even in those people who are not 'religious' the idea that there is a God in the sense of some kind of 'higher reality' is nonetheless very common.

I am not claiming that all the people who believe in God are stupid. Religion is a social phenomenon, and social phenomena are very difficult to change. Let us take another example. Until relatively recently it has been almost universally believed (in all cultures, though some often deny it) that men are intellectually superior to women. There has, throughout history, been a male role and a female role, and the male role has always been dominant. Even today this is largely the case (how many Heads of State are female?). To most of us today this attitude is not just patently wrong, it appears to be plain stupid. Using the argument that since time immemorial man has always believed that there is some higher force and that therefore such a force MUST exist one is forced to conclude that the historically inferior position of women, too, must be valid. Changing the latter attitude has not been easy and over the last 2 centuries though a lot has been achieved in setting the myth of inborn female inferiority to rest the problem still exists. Changing beliefs about religion is no less difficult, people are changing. But it is happening slowly, and it is a struggle.

Just to further illustrate the silliness of this argument, let us consider the flat earth model. The earth basically appears flat when you look at it (if you don't consider 'the horizon'). This had long been considered to be the case until Ferdinand Magellan proved that it was not true by sailing all the way around the planet. Even then he wasn't believed. The Catholic Church denied his claims (as they later did when they jailed Galileo Galilei for advocating the hypothesis that the Earth orbits the Sun). It took a long time for the socially imprinted notion of a flat Earth, or the Earth as the Centre of the Universe, to wear off. Yet it is ridiculous to claim that all these people were just stupid. Society and received wisdom are very powerful forces upon human thought, especially in the uneducated. One tends to find that in religious societies the prevalence of atheistic and agnostic religious beliefs in highly educated groups is much higher than it is in the general population.

4. You cannot treat God as an object - God is an abstract concept. We are an aspect of this abstract concept, in the same sense that say happiness is an aspect of Mind (another abstract concept). Nature too is an abstract concept. Do you deny that Nature and Mind exist?

What is Nature? Nature is a descriptive term for the complex interactions of all the life-forms, environments, forces, laws of physics and events that are beyond mankind's control. Mind is similarly an abstract concept that describes the complex interactions of all the neurones of the human brain that together are responsible for such properties as perception, memory, thought and emotion. Both these abstract concepts do not intrinsically exist. They are not entities in themselves. They exist only in that they are an emergent property of a complex interactive system. Mathematically similar (though much less complex) situations are beginning to be explained by chaos and complexity theory. If one were to liken God to nature and the mind then that implies that, without the Universe, God cannot exist, because God is a property of the Universe. How can an emergent property of the Universe then be responsible for its creation?

5. God is in everything and everything is in God.

This statement is nonsensical. It is a tautology - it merely says that "everything is everything", but in a few more words. If you think about it, it doesn't actually mean anything, except equating God with the Universe and we have already dealt with that in the first point. This view of God is known as pantheism.

6. But I can feel God in me and in everything around me.

You can feel God. Fine. But what does that say about reality? Your emotions do not affect external reality and to assume that they do is to take a very self-centred view of the Universe. As the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "A stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything". The fact that a schizophrenic believes that everyone wants to kill him does not prove that this is in fact the case. And how different are you from a schizophrenic. They have a chemical imbalance in their brain which is responsible for the unusual belief systems. However, no brain is the same, and to some extent one could say that everyone has a chemical imbalance in their brain. Your faith, your beliefs and your feelings are no more valid as an indicator of external reality than a schizophrenic's.

Secondly, even if you can extrapolate from the subjective experience of what you feel to the objective nature of reality, then what is there to say that your subjective feelings about God are any more valid than mine? There is clearly not just the one feeling about God on this planet, and this simple fact totally invalidates the argument. God cannot be a pantheist's omnipresent higher reality at the same time as being, to a young Christian child, a tall, bearded father figure and to an atheist an a priori non-existent being. The ideas are logically inconsistent.

7. What about Soul? What happens to your Soul when you die?

What is soul? What do you mean by it? Most people are vague about this but usually use the term to mean human personality. Where does human personality come from? There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that it is a property of the brain. If you damage areas of the brain here you can grossly alter someone's personality. When you die what happens to your brain? It rots.... that's pretty serious damage. Starved of oxygen your brain cells die, and the electrical impulses and chemical transmissions between the cells of your brain that are what constitutes your thoughts, your knowledge, your memories, your emotions and your personality cease to exist also. As a 'person' you no longer exist. And there is nothing of your 'soul' left.

Secondly, if you believe in an immortal soul, what is it that is becoming immortal? We have just shown that 'what you are' - your beliefs, personality, feelings etc. - cease to exist after death. Is there some mechanism which carries these complex attributes away to the after-life? Well, what is it? How can one claim that such an amazing event occurs and then not even begin to try and explain how? Furthermore, your 'soul' is not constant during life. Which soul is preserved in eternity? Your soul at 6? 16? 60? Whatever stage your soul is at when you die? What if you die after developing schizophrenia? Is it the pre-schizophrenic soul that becomes eternal or is it the schizophrenic? From one moment to another you are never the same person.

If soul is something deeper than beliefs, personality and feelings, what do you mean? Beliefs, personality and feelings are what make you individual as a person. If you mean that something deeper is preserved then you as an individual are not preserved, it is merely some universal common factor in all people and so it is not 'your' soul but just some general 'life force'. Such a 'life force' is a totally discredited concept, completely negated by the quantum leaps made in the 20th century in the modern sciences of molecular and cellular biology.

And then there are further questions to be answered, many of which are not even considered by those who believe in an afterlife. What does this soul do when it is made eternal? What does it mean to be eternal? Does it get reincarnated? If so, what aspect of a person is reincarnated? A person's beliefs, personality and feelings are affected profoundly by their life experiences. No two people, let alone two people living in different ages, are going to have the same life experiences, so how can you say that they have the same (reincarnated) soul? Or is it just the karma - the relative weights of your good and bad actions - that is brought across into this new life? If you believe that the soul becomes one with God what does that actually mean? How can one believe in such a complex notion, without any evidence, without considering all these questions?

The vast majority of people who believe in such things do so without even the vaguest conception of what they mean. In summary, there is little point in worrying about an afterlife, when there is nothing around to do the 'afterliving'.

8. What about miracles and other amazing occurrences?

People go through life noticing coincidences. These experiences are unusual and so make an impression and so people remember them. You go through life collecting these memorable coincidences and forgetting all the times when amazing things don't happen. When these coincidences are collected together in books on the supernatural, or UFOs etc the weight of these coincidences seems very persuasive, but one MUST consider the number of times these coincidences didn't happen. Situations contrive to produce coincidences. In addition, a lot of these occurrences are often proven to be hoaxes. People, unfortunately, are very gullible. There is a society in England which offers a reward for any evidence whatsoever for any supernatural occurrence, however small. Not one person has come forward to claim this prize. One must ask oneself why? Why is it that no mystic or astrologer or clairvoyant has ever had their abilities proven by the scientists (parapsychologists) who interest themselves in these phenomena. Public interest in these matters is so great that any proof of this would spread through the media like wildfire.

Chance, luck and randomness are amazing things, and sometimes so amazing that it is very difficult for humans to put freak occurrences down to chance. But randomness is inherent in nature, enshrined in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Even Albert Einstein, possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived, spent much of the latter half of his life trying to refute the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and much of the rest of the Quantum Mechanics (the field of physics that describes the interactions of very small particles), making the oft-quoted remark "God does not play dice". He was eventually forced to admit that he was wrong and accept the theories. If he was wrong about that, he could have been (and, in my opinion was) wrong about his belief in the existence of God.

9. Without religion and belief in God the world would be an anarchy.

An interesting and commonly expressed idea, this. The argument in itself contains its own refutation, for it implies that religion functions as a tool of social control. The inhumanity of this attitude was well condemned by Albert Einstein, so I shall use his words:

"A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectively on sympathy, education and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

Religious compassion, if it is motivated purely for the above reasons, is merely a hypocritical form of pious selfishness. Obviously, this is not usually case. Mother Teresa, for example, clearly had a genuine concern for the suffering of those she and her Sisters in the "Missionaries of Charity" helped in Calcutta. But it is precisely this genuine concern that makes her a considerate, caring human being. Not her Catholicism.

How many people have been killed in the name of religion?

The notion that a Godless society is an evil society is naïve and patronising. To care for another human, to care for all other humans, simply because of their humanity - purely out of compassion is surely the greater good.

10. Why do this? Why can you not respect other people's opinions?

This is a very simple thing to explain - you cannot have a subjective opinion about reality. Reality is either one thing or the other. God can either exist or not exist. The existence of something is a matter of logic. It is not a thing like beauty. People may have any number of opinions on whether, say, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is a great book or not. But it is not valid for them to have many opinions on the existence of the book. The book either exists or it does not, and only ONE of these two opinions is valid. In the case of the book the existence or otherwise of the book is arguably trivial (it isn't to me, because I happen to think that 'Alice in Wonderland' is a great book, but this is merely incidental). In the case of the existence of God no-one can refute that it is a very weighty and momentous question indeed.

A further point is that no opinion deserves respect purely on the basis that someone holds it. Many (in fact, from my own experience, most) people hold opinions which they have simply inherited from other sources and have not really examined for themselves. Such an uncriticised opinion is worthless, as is an opinion that does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it necessary to accept Adolf Hitler's opinion of the Jewish community solely on the basis that it is his opinion?

Other Points To Consider

1. The problem of evil.

Most people who are religious believe in the existence of evil. Even if you don't believe in the existence of evil there is the obvious question of suffering.

A central tenet of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is that there is one God. He is all powerful, all knowing and all good. If someone is suffering, then, how can a good God allow that suffering to continue? If a human being has the means to help someone who is suffering and fails to do so we would certainly not call him wholly good.

God is aware of the suffering of all human beings. From that of a young child sold into bonded labour in a Pakistani carpet factory to that of a millionaire dying of cancer in an American private hospital to that of the woman who is beaten every evening by her drunken husband. All these things he knows. He also knows how to stop it from happening, since he is all-knowing, and can do so, since he is all-powerful. If he is all good then he should WANT to do so. So why doesn't he?

No God who can permit such suffering (and of course there are much more intense forms of suffering than those I have described above) when he has the ability to stop it can be considered to be good. God, under this scrutiny, has failed to live up to even the most basic moral standards. The statements 'God is omnipotent. God is wholly good. Evil exists.' are logically inconsistent.

2. The incompatibility of the concepts of fate, free will and God's omniscience.

Western religions - Islam, Christianity, Judaism - believe in the concept of judgement. We will, when we die, be judged upon on our behaviour on Earth. This implies that we have free will - God made us free to make our own decisions, or else how could he judge us?

This, however, begs a further question. If God is omniscient he knows everything. Absolutely everything that you ever have done, are doing and will do. In a sense, therefore, you cannot really have any free will at all - in that since God knows 'the future' nothing you do with your 'free will' makes any difference. The future is predetermined because is it is already known (to God). For the theist, therefore, everything, logically, must be determined by 'fate'. Hence, it begs the question, if you don't have any real choice in your life, how can you be judged on the basis of the way you live it?

Again, we have to cope with inconsistency. The notions of an omniscient God and human free will are logically inconsistent. And yet the theist claims both to be true.

3. Can God change the rules of logic? Can God make 2+2=5? How do you define omnipotence?

This may seem like a silly question, but it isn't. 2 + 2 can never be 5. Unless you change the meaning of the word "five" to mean 4, in which case 2 + 2 is still 4, but you are just calling 4 by another name. To quote Shakespeare, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." 4 apples are 4 apples, even if you choose to call them 5 apples, 6 apples, or 25 apples. The semantics doesn't alter the reality.

If I have 2 apples in one hand and 2 apples in another hand is it possible for them, by the simple act of considering them together, to become in reality 5 apples? I doubt that anyone could seriously argue that they could (though someone, I'm sure, will do so just to prove me wrong). So we cannot simply say that God is omnipotent. We must say that God is omnipotent, but constrained by the rules of logic. So is logic an external truth created by God that he then had to obey? Or does logic exist independently of God?

If God must obey the simple rules of logic, perhaps he must also obey the rules of Science. It is arguable (and I would argue) that Science is merely an extension of logic. The laws of Science, in our experience (and what else do we have upon which to base our knowledge but our experience), are as immutable, as unbreakable as the laws of simple arithmetic. It is just as impossible for an apple I drop to float over the Earth, or for light to escape from a Black Hole, or, for example, for Jesus to have fed the 5,000 with his limited amount of bread and fish as it is for 2 + 2 to equal 5. So God becomes just a silent observer - a parody of a God, helpless to interfere in the world as a consequence of the laws he himself created. Enslaved by his own creation like Frankenstein by his monster. This view, that God merely created the Universe and after that left it to it's own devices, is known as Deism. It is the only logically consistent form of theism.

4. Why do you think that you are special?

People often do not look at themselves relative to the enormity of the universe. You are one of about 6 billion humans on the planet at present. The planet Earth is merely one of 9 large bodies that orbit the Sun, a medium-sized star in one arm of the spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. The Milky Way contains some 400 billion such stars together with pulsars, black holes and all kinds of wondrous objects. And then there are all the other galaxies in the Universe, approximately 100 billion of them, with an average of 100 billion stars each. And new stars are forming all the time. The Universe is continually expanding, from it's starting point at the Big Bang.

How significant are you? Why do most religions assume that we, on this planet - one species of a million - are chosen? And why do we assume that we are the height of evolution? Admittedly we are by far the most complex organisms upon this planet, particularly in brain structure and function. However evolution hasn't just come to an end - it is a continuous process, although it is somewhat complicated by the fact that mankind doesn't just need to adapt to its environment but adapts its environment to suit its own needs.

5. God is defined anthropomorphically.

According to Christianity, Judaism and Islam, God made man in his own image. What can that mean? Is there really a God out there who is humanoid? Why should he be humanoid? What possible function could eyes, ears and a nose - organs of sensory experience - serve a God who knows everything anyway? Does God have an appendix? These questions are, of course, rather frivolous, but there is a deeper point.

God is held to be totally good. God is held to be kind, compassionate. To forgive (at least by Christians). The God of Western Religion demands praise and worship. He visits suffering on those who 'sin'. There is a pattern here. In this sense God is defined very anthropomorphically. Kindness, compassion and goodness are all human properties. Certainly demanding praise, and exacting punishment are human qualities, and certainly not qualities which are praiseworthy in a human, so why should they be so in God?

The very fact that we describe God anthropomorphically suggests that we created him. Or at least ascribed to him attributes which he does not, and cannot, have. It's like someone saying that they think that their pet goldfish is happy. Goldfishes are not capable of being happy, they don't have the neural circuits in their minute brains to do so (they, famously, only have 5 second memories anyway - even if they were happy they'd forget what they were happy about pretty damn quickly!).

6. Assume that I accept that God created the Universe. Well, then how? Surely, even if we assume this hypothesis to be true, we should try and find a mechanism.

Even if we were to accept there was a God that really makes no difference to the questions I ask about the origin of the Universe, where it came from and why it is the way it is. To say that "God did it" is the vaguest possible answer, like identifying the killer in a "whodunnit" thriller but without supplying motive or means. Sherlock Holmes would not be impressed. Any 'believer' should surely be interested in how God did it. If one saw a magician produce a rabbit from a hat, and one was convinced that this wasn't just a trick, that it didn't just seem that the rabbit had been brought out of an empty hat but that in fact a rabbit had been materialised out of thin air, then any intelligent human being would surely not just sit there and say "Wow! He created a rabbit out of thin air". He or she would want to find out exactly how this magician made this rabbit appear. And so it should be with the notion of God's creation of the Universe, for this is surely the greatest conjuring trick in history. Of course, I do not believe in the existence of the magician.

The End

God is Dead

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worth of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); from "The Gay Science", 1882.