To God or Not to God

Sadly, it looks like my blogging my mainly occur on the weekends for the now. Getting up before 6AM every day takes a lot out of me. Perhaps my body will adjust but I will not assume it will. The Mets are playing on the West Coast, so I didn’t get to sleep until after 1:30, I slept to 8:00 but then fell asleep again while on the computer this morning. Perhaps even more important I’m now spending 10 hours a day between work and commuting. I used to be time rich and money poor, now my life is the reverse and I have to make adjustments. My daily walks are gone other than that involved in commuting. It turns out I’m still getting my steps in. I might start taking cabs sometimes when doing things like shopping or going to the doctor. I have an infusion appointment on Monday. I might take a cab home as I also work shopping into my trips there.

I didn’t get out at all this week, unlike the week before there were no concerts and the Mets were out of town. The biggest things I spent time on were watching the Mets on TV and preparing Gord’s Gold. Last night I programmed next week’s show. My newfound economic freedom has allowed me to buy music.

The big excitement in my life is that I’m going to the Black Bear Music Festival on Columbus Day weekend. I’m not going as much for the music as for the people I’m camping with. This is a gathering of the tribe. Right now, we are figuring out the logistics. I stepped out of the conversation to blog. I am feeling planning/time anxiety so I’m doing the thing that is easiest, blogging.

Now I’m going to change the subject to something I used to write about quite a bit but haven’t for ages, religion. There is a question that I would love to know everyone’s answer to; how the observable world would be different if god or gods did and did not exist. I’m going to be thinking mainly in terms of the Abrahamic god as that’s the one that almost everyone I know would be considering. I will bring some gods in from other religions as they are part of the cultural heritage and can shed light on how people think of deities.

Most arguments for atheism and agnosticism revolve around lack of evidence for god. It’s the argument that I most often make. The burden of proof lies on those exerting God’s existence. In some sense I don’t believe in God for the same reason that I don’t believe that there’s a purple space cow named Edna in orbit around a planet orbiting Alpha Centuri A. I would strong evidence to even spend time considering the proposition, evidence that doesn’t exist. Terry Pratchett put it very well, “There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”

Hidden in that statement and the others is the idea that there is no evidence that God exists. That’s the part I’ve spent considerable time thinking about. It’s deeply connected to the notion of what’s constitutes being supernatural. If ghosts existed wouldn’t that make them natural? If God exists, isn’t he part nature? I’m using “he” for simplicity, but I have never understood in what sense Yahweh has a gender. He’s not even considered to have a body. He doesn’t sexually reproduce. We have all these notions that we have inherited from the time when deities, including God, were thought of as being corporeal beings. I’m sure there are still people that think of him, and for them him makes sense, that picture him like that.

I’m making this clear because I know that there are intellectual deists that think that all atheists think that God is only thought of as an old man with a white beard. I am not assuming that’s what God means. I’m thinking of God as a conscious entity that controls the universe. Now the question is how would we observe God? In every religious text or oral tradition, I’ve encountered God is involved in human affairs. God did not create the universe then ignore it. We could imagine a member of some super-advanced species that created the universe as for a science fair and probably lost to some kid that made a Papier-mâché volcano then put it in a closet. Would be consider that kid god? I think not. We certainly wouldn’t worship her as there’d be no point. The fact that people worship God and other deities shows that they keep track of our doings. That’s the key to what the world with a god would look like. The universe would care about people. The Abrahamic god spends much of its time punishing and rewarding people. Plagues and natural disasters wouldn’t be the random events we find but tied to moral behavior. We don’t see that at all. Nothing seems to happen for the convenience of humanity or harm of humanity. The universe goes on its merry way no matter if there are people around or not.

I know some, I know specific people, who would say that I have a naïve vision of God. But I share this vision with most religious people. Even those that say they don’t share it act like they do if they worship god. They think that somehow makes a difference. Perhaps they think it only makes a difference to how they feel. Great, that’s exactly what I want to know. Then god is not an objective reality but something personal. Could such a god exist? Sure, then I fall back on what evidence is there? People believing things because it makes them feel better is common. If it doesn’t involve interacting with reality, it’s harmless. If people use them as a director of action that’s bad. As an example, most forms of bigotry involve people thinking that their race, ethnic group, gender, social class, etc, is better than others. Why do they believe it? Because it makes them feel better.

I’m writing about me but that’s not what I care about. I care about you. I would love to know how religious people think the world would be different if there were no god. Saying that there would be no world is a cheat. If you say that the world cannot exist without a God to create it, where did God come from? You still believe that something can exist without a conscious creative entity. Plenty of people can conceive of a reality without a God. My question is how yours differs from those.

OK. Now to get ready to go out and see Robinson and Rohe at the Common Ground Coffee House in Dobbs Ferry.