Does God exist

Does God exist?

Although it is impossible to prove either the existence or non-existence of God, the best answer appears to be two-fold:

1. There is far more to reality than we understand, and perhaps more than we are ever capable of understanding.

2. The part that is real but beyond our grasp is unlikely to include “God” in any traditional sense of that word.

If we look at the intellectual (as opposed to the emotional) reasons why people believe in God, most of them boil down to this: there are aspects of reality that we simply can’t explain without God, so there must be a God.

That, at least, is the way believers tend to understand their own reasoning. What their reasoning really amounts to, though, is something a little less persuasive: if there were a God, this could partially explain some of the things we otherwise don’t understand – so whatever we don’t understand we will attribute to God. This reasoning, unfortunately, is logically equivalent to: if there were an eternal, omnipotent giant toad, that could partially explain some of the things we otherwise don’t understand – so whatever we don’t understand we will attribute to the toad.

In some ways, actually, the toad (or any of a zillion other equally dopey notions) is a somewhat better explanation than God, as traditionally understood. But let’s come back to that after we examine briefly the specific arguments people give for believing in God.

There are three main reasons, though each comes in various flavors. There is the argument that Somebody must have gotten it all started, there is the argument that the universe is too well designed to have appeared accidentally, and there is the argument that only God can be responsible for miraculous events that occur in life. Let’s run each of these around the track a bit.

Somebody must have gotten it all started?

This is one of the classic issues of philosophy: why is there something instead of nothing? Similarly: why is there this something, instead of something else? Most religions have answered these questions the same way: God did it.

If you already believe in God, the answer is obvious. But as a reason to believe in God, there is not really a compelling argument here. We do not know, first of all, whether we should really be amazed that something exists. The philosophical questions can just as easily be turned around: why would there be nothing instead of something? Why should there be something else, instead of what we’ve got?

Second, God doesn’t solve the problem, but just pushes it back one step. If you say that the universe exists because God created it, then you have to ask: why does God exist, instead of nothing? There is no real answer to that question. The closest the theologians can come is some version of: God exists because it is the very nature of God to exist. God cannot not-exist!

That’s cool, but if you can say it of God, why can’t you say it of the universe? We actually have first-hand experience with the universe (or parts of it, anyway), and one of the basic laws of physics is that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. As far as we can observe, that is, what theologians have merely hypothesized about God is actually true of ordinary matter and energy: its very nature is to exist. As for whether that is also true of God, it’s impossible to say, as we have no direct experience with God.

Of course, none of this is any kind of real explanation. All we know is that Stuff Exists. We can’t explain it, and we can’t even be sure it needs to be explained. But if there needs to be some underlying cause or explanation, what exactly can we say about it? Can we call it God?

Sure, we can call it “God.” Or we can call it “Bill,” or “Homer Simpson” – but giving it a name doesn’t tell us anything new. What we need to do is figure out what characteristics such a Cause would have, and see if those characteristics match up with our idea of God. Unfortunately, there is simply nothing useful to say on this subject.[1] We certainly have no basis for thinking that whatever (if anything) caused the universe to exist had the personal and moral qualities we associate with God – or the omnipotent toad, for that matter.

It would be more honest to simply admit that we haven’t got a clue. Maybe someday someone will figure it out, but we are a long way from being there.

If you’ve seen the movie Men in Black, you may recall that at the end, the camera pans back from the closing scene, and keeps on panning back until we see the entire Earth, then the Solar System, then the Milky Way and then the entire universe which, it turns out, is merely a marble in the collection of a creature that looks like a young dinosaur. This answer is probably not correct either, but it’s more imaginative than my omnipotent toad, or God.

Intelligent design?

Probably the best argument for the existence of God is the most obvious one: the world doesn’t merely exist, it positively shimmers. It’s a beautiful thing, filled with wonders. The greatest wonders, of course, are the living creatures, even the simplest of which is a marvel. And when you get to the human brain, you are getting to an unfathomable richness of intricacy and power. If God is not responsible for this, than how did it all come about?

Evolution, you say. Well, OK, but let’s not just make a leap of faith here. Does evolution really explain it? Let’s take it in stages.

Assuming that the universe as we know it started with a Big Bang – which could have been the first event of any kind ever, or merely another round in a cycle of the universe expanding and collapsing and expanding again, or perhaps merely one of countless such events in an infinity of space and time – the eventual development of the Milky Way and the Solar System are not deeply mysterious. Granted, there is a great deal that scientists don’t know, but there is no need to assume anything supernatural.

The development of Earth into a place that could support life is a little more striking. For some people, it is reason enough to believe that Someone must have designed it. First of all, it is impressive that such a thing as “life” is possible at all. We needn’t get into organic chemistry here, but the simple fact is that if it weren’t for the unique properties of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, life could not exist on Earth or anywhere else, at least not in the form we know it.

It is hard to say whether this is meaningful or not. We don’t know whether it is even conceivable that matter could exist in any other form. Mathematics is wonderful, too, full of surprising patterns, and latent with power. But it really does seem that mathematics could not be different. Even God could not make 2+2=5. For all we know, even God could not make matter that did not include atoms in the form that we know them. Drawing conclusions one way or the other is to assume that we are a lot smarter than we actually are.

But the unique suitability of the Earth to support life, particularly human life, goes well beyond the chemical nature of matter. The Earth is peculiarly suited for life by being part of the Solar System, which is dominated by a single star, not multiple stars, and a star that is not too small and not too big, not too hot and not too cool. Furthermore, the Earth orbits at a very suitable distance from the sun – not too close, and not too far. And its orbit, though elliptical, is not too elongated (if it were, we would have extremes of hot and cold). Our planet, unlike others, has plenty of water, and an atmosphere that protects us from much harmful radiation, as well as from most of the debris that wanders in space. One could go on at length in this fashion, but you get the idea. The Earth is, undeniably, a peculiarly hospitable place for human life – although people looking for a decent and inexpensive apartment in Manhattan might think otherwise.

Is this hospitability significant? Again, one can’t really say. One can always look back and realize that a virtual infinity of coincidences had to happen in just a certain way in order to produce any given fact or event. Take the fact that you are reading this now. A thousand things (much more than that, really) had to have happened in your life to bring you to this particular place and time and activity. Similarly, as many things had to happen in your parents’ lives to bring them together in a way that you were conceived. And so on, for millions of generations. A comparably innumerable volume of coincidences had to occur before I could write these pages, and get them to a place where you would find them.

The odds against all this, frankly, are virtually infinite. Must we conclude, therefore, that Someone must have made this happen? That God specifically engineered the universe so that I would write this and you would read it? And if so, how come I couldn’t get a blurb from him?

Seriously, and obviously, the odds of any particular outcome are infinitesimal. Once that outcome has occurred, it is tempting to see it as marvelous. But given that the universe exists, something had to happen. No matter what it was, it was going to be improbable. The improbable, even the remotely improbable, therefore, is not necessarily anything to marvel at.

The same can be said of the Earth. The astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan was the first to promote widely the idea that life is inevitable in the universe. There are so many billions of galaxies, each with so many billions of stars, so many of which could have planets, an untold number of which may, like Earth, be capable of supporting life, and many of which may support intelligent life. His calculations, frankly, were dubious – but his general point is well taken: we don’t know how much company we have out there in the universe, but it is quite possible that we are not alone.

Even if you are not a skilled golfer, if you hit enough golf balls, you will eventually get a hole-in-one. Intelligent life is the universe’s equivalent of a hole-in-one. If you are a universe (and you’re not, so don’t start making plans), and you produce enough planets, it could well be that from time to time you are going to produce one that will become peopled with intelligent creatures. And you can just bet that each of them is going to think that they are special. And they are – but not specially created, just lucky to be one of the random winners. It may have taken a huge number of coincidences for them to get there, but there they are. And here we are – also lucky winners.

Is this a valid way to look at life on earth? Again, to know that for sure, we would have to be a lot smarter, or at least a lot more knowledgeable, than we are. We just don’t know if life is a one-in-a-gazillion long-shot, or whether it happens pretty much every time the conditions are right – or whether it is statistically impossible and had to be the work of an intelligent Creator.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were a number of interesting and promising experiments in which some of the building blocks of life were created in the laboratory by applying energy to chemical mixtures that were intended to mimic primordial oceans and atmospheres. At the time, there was hope that eventually some legitimate form of life might be manufactured in that fashion. After some rapid early progress, though, the whole program seemed to hit a wall.

That could be a sign that life did not really come from nonliving matter. Or it could just be that the laboratories are not big enough. On Earth, life did not arise in the space of a test-tube or the time-span of a few days or even a few decades. The Earth’s oceans and the atmosphere are almost infinitely bigger than a scientific laboratory, and the Earth had hundreds of millions of years to generate the right lucky circumstances that might have enabled the first self-reproducing molecules to arise. Could it have happened by chance, or did it have to be by design? There is simply no way to know.

No one has yet figured out how life could easily arise, step by step, from non-living matter. But a hundred years ago, no one had any clue how even the first step could be taken, and now we do. We are far from having the final answers, and perhaps we never will have them, but that does not mean that it couldn’t have happened. In fact, the whole history of science can almost be read as a morality tale in which things that were thought impossible to do or impossible to explain were, in fact, done and explained. To say: “we shall only know so much, and beyond that we must assume that God is at work” has been a losing position, historically. This may not be the best time to place a big bet on it.

Biological evolution is a great case in point. It had always been known that some plants and animals were quite similar to others, and over the ages there had been speculations about some kind of evolutionary relationship. But no really plausible method of one species changing into another had been proposed prior to 1859, and the Biblical notion that each species was individually created by God seemed impregnable. In that year, though, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection[2] provided the theoretical breakthrough needed to make biological evolution generally comprehensible.

Since those days, the theory has been expanded and modified, and support for it has arisen from many branches of science. As a result, many scientists flatly state that evolution is a fact, and this is true, if by this we mean that today’s variety of living creatures has evolved over time from much simpler forms. What is not a “fact,” but only a “theory,” is that natural selection (and related natural mechanisms) are entirely responsible for evolution.

Is there a credible alternative, though? Not really. Creationism – the belief that God created everything in six days, as the Biblical book of Genesis describes – is simply wrong. The only way creationism could be true is if God deliberately made the world to look like it had been around for billions of years, including radioactive minerals that are in a condition that could only be expected after millions of years of lying about, and including fossils of animals that look like ancestors of contemporary creatures but that in fact never existed. Never mind that so many species of animals have now been identified that it would have been impossible to fit all of them on the ark, or even to get them there, since many are endemic only to Australia or South America or other areas that are a long commute from the Middle East.

In addition, microbiologists have known for a long time that certain non-functional parts of DNA that are shared by many living creatures show a pattern of random mutations that mirrors the evolutionary pattern. Creatures that are closely related have very similar patterns of mutations that have collected over time, while those that are distantly related show patterns that differ more greatly. This is exactly what one would expect if life on Earth evolved, as virtually all scientists believe. But it is inexplicable if all creatures were designed by God, unless God is deliberately trying to mislead us. And if so, God is a lot less divine than we would have a right to expect.[3]

So creationism does not need to be taken seriously. The more faddish contemporary alternative is that evolution by natural selection and similar means has occurred, but that at critical times, God has intervened to help the process along. Hence evolution is not really random or entirely materialistic; rather, it is a manifestation of “intelligent design.”

This concept has a certain basic plausibility. It is certainly surprising, for instance, that a mechanism as intricate as the human eye could arise step by step, through chance mutations in chromosomes. (The eye has been the favorite example of anti-evolutionists almost from the beginning – for that matter, even before Darwin.) And I am not going to pretend that it can be fully explained here and now. However, scientists have been able to produce a general picture of how even such a complex structure could have arisen step by step, starting with cells that simply became light-sensitive (as even many plant cells are), and that obtained a better chance of survival with each small improvement.

Although “intelligent design” proponents argue that it doesn’t make sense that a structure or process that has multiple inter-dependent parts could arise one step at a time, this betrays a failure of imagination on the part of the intelligent design people rather than imposing any real limitation on natural evolutionary processes.

If you read mystery novels or have ever seen a magic act, or even witnessed something you couldn’t personally explain (such as the launching of a rocket headed for the moon), you have been part of a similar phenomenon. When you don’t know how something has been done, you may be amazed. You may even be unbelieving until someone explains it to you. But your amazement and unbelief does not disprove what is, in fact, explainable. And your personal inability to explain, whether temporary or permanent, does not make the facts untrue.

In the case of biological evolution, we have only partial explanations. We are far ahead of where our peers were a mere two hundred years ago. If human civilization lasts another two thousand years or so, imagine how much more will be known! And yet, are we to stand here today, saying that evolution could not produce an eye (or a cell flagellum, or whatever) just because we don’t know how every step happened? One has to have a lot of confidence in one’s own omniscience, never mind God’s, to take that position!

But there is one more very important thing in this marvelous life that we haven’t discussed yet: the human mind. For one thing, how does consciousness arise out of dumb matter? For another, how does it become so rich, the way humans experience it? The godly have the answers for us: if consciousness is not a property of matter, but of a soul, a soul created by God, then it makes at least a little bit of sense. Otherwise, what could the explanation possibly be?

Nobel Prizes are going to the people who can first provide a solid answer to these questions, and they haven’t been given out yet. However, even here, we have some clues. The best people wrestling with this problem seem to be coming to answers that amount, in summary, to this:

First, we have to stop thinking of “consciousness” as a “thing.” We are conscious, but we don’t possess consciousness – not in a literal sense, at least. If you are a fast runner, for example, you can say metaphorically that you “possess speed,” but that is not a good literal description of what you have. What you have is the ability to run fast. You do not possess, as if in a bottle, some entity called “speed.” (And if you do, the police want to know about it!). Likewise, your brain is capable of processes that make you conscious of yourself and some of what happens around you, but you do not “possess consciousness.”

Second, these processes are part of the brain, not part of something outside the brain. What we call the mind is, like consciousness, not an entity in and of itself. Nor do we need to assume that each of us has a “soul” that somehow gives us life and consciousness. We are accustomed to think of our minds as somehow separate from our bodies. We tend to think, sometimes, even that we “are” our minds, and that our bodies are along for the ride, or at least that our bodies are just the necessary vessels for our minds, while our minds constitute the essence of us.

But this is probably wrong (not that anyone can know for sure, yet). Here’s a more up-to-date way of looking at it: our minds are really just our brains in action. When our brains are working, they are aware of reality around them. It seems that our minds are separate from our brains mainly because the brain has no (or very little) direct perception of itself as a physical organ. That’s because, like other physical organs, it evolved over time, and it did so for the purpose of helping us survive better in a hostile environment. The brain needed to learn to react to the world around it, but it did not particularly need to learn about itself. Since the brain does not directly perceive itself, its activities seem disembodied. But that is a mere blind spot. The mind is not disembodied. It is the brain doing its job.

Although we have true knowledge of consciousness only in ourselves (it is a fun little philosophical puzzle to think about how you can be sure that anyone other than you is actually conscious) – we each do have quite a variety of conscious experience. We see that our consciousness varies over time (from infancy to adulthood and then often into senility in old age). We experience how the intensity and other qualities of consciousness vary with things that happen in our bodies. Weariness, fever, drunkenness, fear, concussion, passion, drugs, pain, brain surgery, and various other physical or chemical circumstances dramatically change our conscious thought.

That’s because they affect our brains, while our minds, our thought, our consciousness is just our brains in action. When you affect the brain process, you affect consciousness. If the mind were part of a soul that had some kind of indestructible existence apart from the brain, this would be perplexing. But it is perfectly sensible, and in fact is exactly what we would expect, if mental activity is nothing other than brain activity.

Furthermore, we can observe that in the animal kingdom, mental activity (and probably the quality of consciousness) correlates with the sophistication of the physical brain. Advanced animals – such as chimps or dolphins – with relatively complex animal brains, are capable of behavior that is considerably different in degree but not all that different in kind from human mental activity. It was once believed that that no animal was capable of tool-use, or tool-invention, or language, or insight. We now know that these presumptions are false. We’re far better at these things, but certain other animals are at least in the game.

Yet as you move down the evolutionary ladder, mental capabilities decrease, and somewhere along the line they become undetectable. Most people today – certainly most dog owners – understand that dogs, for instance, are not mere organic machines but are conscious and even have personalities. One has to believe that less mentally developed animals such as, say, chipmunks and birds are conscious as well, as are, presumably, lizards and fish, whose mental lives are presumably less robust, perhaps more on the level of rugby players (just kidding, guys – please don’t hurt me!) What about insects? Now it’s getting hard to tell, though it’s probably a good bet that they have some kind of dim consciousness. Yet at some point lower on the scale – certainly by the time we get to bacteria and viruses – we have to be highly doubtful that anything we would call consciousness exists, and these creatures are about as conscious as a computer is, if that.

No, we are not nearly smart enough yet as a species to explain what our own magnificent brains are producing. But what we do see is entirely consistent with the notion that the mind is merely the activity of the brain, not a separate entity, and that the brain-mind evolved just as the rest of the body evolved over billions of years of life on Earth.

Yet wouldn’t divine creation be a better explanation? Yes, in the sense that it would be simpler. But it is simpler only because, while we know very little about how the mind could be a product of the brain, we know nothing at all of how God could make a mind and somehow link it up with the brain. We’re just slapping a label on a big empty box and calling it an explanation.

In the end, there are three main problems with assuming that God is a good explanation of what we observe in the world around us, whether physical or mental.

First, the further that human knowledge progresses, the fewer and smaller the gaps in our own understanding of reality, and the less place there is for God. Yes, there are still places where gaps exist, even big gaps, but “the God of the Gaps,” as the “creator” has been called by others before us, has a smaller and smaller role the smarter we humans get. We end up with The Incredible Shrinking God, which is not particularly inspiring as a basis for belief and worship.

Second, divine intervention is not an explanation. It is the absence of an explanation. It says in effect: if you can’t explain X, then I will attribute X to God. That’s cheating, because I can say: it’s not God, it’s the omnipotent toad – and my reasoning is just as sound as the theist’s, which is to say, it is total hooey. You cannot properly argue from ignorance to answers. My inability to completely describe how the eye evolved or how the mind works does not prove that any particular competing hypothesis is correct. It only proves that I don’t have all the answers (which is not exactly a revelation).

Third, and I think the most important point in the end, is that the logic is twisted inside-out here. Just as we saw with the philosophical argument, the scientific argument should not be posed as: there’s a missing part, so it must be God. Instead, even if we grant that there is a missing part (and we don’t really grant that anything is missing, only that it is currently unknown), the proper next step is to say, if an outside being or force is assumed to fill the gap, what can we deduce about the characteristics of that being or force? Would it be “God” – or something else?

In the present context, what we are asking here is: in the event that the world as we know it is the product of some kind of external design, what can we say about the designer?

The answer almost has to be: if there was a designer, it was something unworthy of our worship.

On the positive side, we have to admire the apparent power and intelligence behind the effort. If some impressive being (whom we shall call “Mr. Big,” pending further identification) conceived all of this and somehow imagined it from the beginning and either set it in motion to happen by itself, or else intervened from time to time to redirect the process, this is a really impressive production. So, A+ for skill…

But hold on a second. What if Mr. Big was trying to create a good world instead of the mess we actually live in?

The world is indeed rather thoroughly bungled. Admittedly, it possesses grandeur and physical beauty. There are many impressive, even awe-inspiring, elements to it. There are even some that are funny.[4] Frankly, if I had created the world, there are a lot of things I’d be proud of.

Still, I couldn’t defend every aspect of nature. For there is ugliness as well as beauty. There is pain and cruelty. There is illness and death. There is waste and destruction.

Theologians have grappled forever with the “problem of pain” and the “problem of evil.” If Mr. Big were actually God, how could the world contain so much pain and so much evil? After thousands of years of mulling this over, the answer has finally come in: nobody knows.

There are lots of partial answers. Sometimes what appears bad is actually good – true enough. Or sometimes a temporary evil is necessary to bring about a greater good – true enough. Or perhaps we are just being put on trial to see if we deserve to move on, after death, to a greater and perfectly happy existence – whoa, there: time to hit the brakes!

Never mind that there is very little basis for believing that this last statement is true – we’ll come back to this a little later. But look at it again: it’s actually an admission that the world as we know it is not very good after all. If this were really the best of all possible worlds, we wouldn’t need another world after this one. The fact that almost all major religions postulate some kind of existence after this one is as clear a proof as we can get that this one is not nearly good enough, even (especially?) for religious believers.

Let’s not misinterpret the religious position here. They are trying to save the situation by saying that this world is only part of the picture, and when you take the rest of the picture into account, it is wonderful indeed. This position may or may not have merit, but it is at least superficially coherent, and it somewhat excuses Mr. Big.

But our job was not to excuse Mr. Big, but to evaluate him[5] on the basis of his work. And even believers seem to agree that the work we can see is so bad that we have to hope that there is another part of it that we can’t see.

So in the end, even allowing that some of what appears on the surface to be bad or evil may be for our own or somebody’s ultimate good, there is too much left over. The cleverest theologians have not explained how it benefits so many infants to be born into brief, miserable lives, and to die before they ever grow old enough to learn any lessons from this or to benefit in any other way. Even if they go straight to heaven when they die, what was the possible point of their being born, suffering, and dying? Why not skip all the ugly middle steps and send them right to heaven in the first place? God couldn’t do that? Maybe God could, but Mr. Big couldn’t, or at least doesn’t.

It isn’t just people suffering, either. You can always argue, whether plausibly or not, that there is some moral purpose to human suffering, or some reward in the end. But why do billions, probably trillions at any given moment, of sentient creatures live in almost constant alertness and fear, and usually die in pain, for no evident purpose other than to perpetuate the cycle? It all makes sense if the living world evolved by natural, unintentional processes. But if someone went to the trouble of designing all this, what kind of cruel insanity drove such a designer?

For that matter, what kind of sadistic mind invented the mosquito? Yes, it’s a marvel of engineering, but so were the Nazi death camps. Maybe a mosquito serves some positive purpose somewhere, but its predominant roles are (a) to irritate, and (b) to kill (by spreading yellow fever, malaria, etc.). It’s hard to believe that Mr. Big thought that life wouldn’t be hard enough for us without mosquitoes.

If mosquitoes are really good for us somehow, does that mean that there will be mosquitoes in heaven? Will there be leukemia and crack babies in heaven? Will there still be sin and evil, and will genocide still be possible? The answer to such questions is, supposedly, No. But if heaven can exist without pain and evil, why can’t earth exist without pain and evil? Why didn’t God create heaven on earth, instead of something that resembles more of a mixture of heaven and hell on earth? If there is a good answer to this, it has yet to appear in print, or to be spoken in church.

If God designed this world, he either couldn’t do a good job of it, or else chose not to. But either way, such a being cannot really be called “God” without stretching the concept in a direction nobody wants to take it.

Based on what we see and experience, therefore, we don’t have any really compelling reason to believe that there is a supernatural Designer out there. And if there is, it isn’t the good and benevolent God that some people like to pray to. In fact, if we were simply to look at the world, assuming that we wanted to attribute it to supernatural causes at all, the most sensible conclusion would probably be that of the ancient Greeks and Romans: the world is too chaotic to be the work of a single god – there must be multiple divinities, who don’t play well together, and apparently they are working their problems out on us. Not that we should believe that either, but it makes more sense than attributing it all to someone called “God” whom we are then supposed to admire.

For that matter, the omnipotent toad is a better explanation. At least no one ever claimed that toads are particularly benevolent.

Is God active in our lives?

People today will believe in almost anything (ghosts, psychic phenomena, the Chicago Cubs). Miracles, though, are a little out of favor in most circles. Yet not in all circles. There is a fascinating subculture of religious enthusiasts who still believe in and sometimes practice faith healing, exorcism, and other wonders. Then, of course, we have all the Biblical miracles, as well as many others reported in the interim.

If real miracles occur, and if they occur in the name of God (and only in the name of God), then this would certainly be evidence that God exists and perhaps should be paid attention to. Certainly, people who believe they have seen a miracle, or personally undergone one, feel that they have sufficient reason for faith in miracles, and in God. But the rest of us are hardly compelled to go along with this. To cite quickly the main reasons why skepticism remains the best position:

(a) There’s a fundamental problem of reasoning here. Either miracles are violations of the natural order, or they are not. If they are not, then they are not really miracles – just coincidences or surprises. But if they are indeed violations of the natural order, then, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, they are virtually never believable. Why? Not because God couldn’t override the laws of nature, but rather because in any given instance, we should prefer a natural explanation to a supernatural one, and natural explanations can never be completely ruled out. Even if the miracle story is sincere, even if it is documented, it is easier to believe that someone was mistaken, is misremembering, failed to understand what was actually happening, was deluded or hallucinating or tricked, or is even lying or faking it. Even if such explanations seem improbable in a specific situation, it is always more improbable that the natural order has been violated.[6]

(b) Miraculous phenomena have rarely been tested scientifically, and not conclusively. Faith healers claim that hundreds are cured in a single evening. Would it be all that hard, then, to set up a double-blind, controlled experiment to see whether these miraculous powers are real? There is nothing mysterious about the protocols for determining whether a procedure really works or not. After thousands of years of supposed miracles and hundreds of years of science, we still have no rigorous scientific studies indicating that miracles occur.

(c) Curiously, whatever “supernatural” power is responsible for miracles seems to have odd limitations. Certain kinds of conditions are unusually susceptible to “miraculous” healing, among them twisted joints, heart problems, skin problems and, frankly, pretty much any illness that is known to have a psychological origin or a frequent psychosomatic connection. Meanwhile, other conditions are never cured dramatically. For example, there does not appear to be a single case of the miraculous regeneration of a severed or amputated arm or leg. There have certainly been plenty of people suffering such losses. Is God incapable of this kind of miracle? What kind of God are we talking about here?

(d) What kind, indeed? What kind of God allows human suffering to swell to such proportions that miracles are needed to relieve it, and at the same time, having the power to heal our wounds, uses this power so sparingly and apparently arbitrarily? Religious teachers will tell us we have no right to question God about all these matters. But we are not questioning God. We are questioning the source of these phenomena, assuming that there is actually some outside source. What kind of being would work this way – is it a god or a demon? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. If you worked for a large company where the owner made everyone’s life miserable in blatantly arbitrary ways, and then equally arbitrarily gave certain people reprieves (usually temporary) while refusing to do so for the majority, would you think that this was a great boss because once in a while he did something nice?

(e) “Miraculous” occurrences are not exclusive to the Christian religion, to the major religions, or to religion at all. All cultures report these things happening, whether at the hands of priests, or medical doctors, or kings, or witch doctors, or even spontaneously. Miracles almost never occur with any kind of explanatory text. Gods and demons don’t leave calling cards. What are we supposed to conclude about whoever or whatever is doing these things? It’s a stretch to answer, “God.” It is much more reasonable to assume that natural processes are occurring here. In a world this big and complex, astonishing surprises are going to happen sometimes, and there is a still a lot we don’t understand, especially about the workings of the human mind and body. Let us not keep falling into the same trap of attributing every unusual (good) thing that happens to God – especially if we are going to ignore all the unusual bad things that happen.

This is really just one more instance of the same thing we saw about the First Cause and about the Intelligent Designer. It is not evident that anything is going on here that requires supernatural explanation. And if there were, it would not be at all clear that the spiritual or supernatural cause resembles anything we think of as “God.” On the contrary, if there is a supernatural being involved, it does not appear to be entirely competent or benevolent.

We are not saying, however, that belief in God is incoherent. In the end, the theologians come down to the same answer that the secular philosophers and scientists come to: there are questions whose answers are simply beyond us.

In the Bible, the Book of Job raises the question of how God can allow good people to suffer. Although various answers are proposed and rejected in the text of this brief and entertaining book, the final answer is, appropriately, a question. God speaks to Job and says, in effect, how dare you ask? “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” he challenges Job. Undeniably, if there is a God, his understanding and his reasons are far beyond our comprehension. We should no more expect to understand Creation than we should expect a puppy to understand the stock market pages of the newspaper – no matter how much it pours over them. So God, if there is one, gets a pass.

But that’s the whole point: is there a God, or is there any reason to believe that there is? And the answer is: as far as we can tell, apparently not, at least not a God of the traditional kind. Hypothesizing God not only fails to answer the mysteries of our existence and of the universe, but it raises new questions and problems.

If, in the end, an assumption that God exists still leaves us with the same kind of mysteries we started with, we are probably better off without that assumption. We have mystery enough already. Why can’t we just be satisfied to admit that the state of human knowledge is such that there are many questions we can’t answer? We can even further admit that the human brain may never even be capable of understanding certain things. The puppy will grow up and may manage a few tricks, but it will never manage a stock portfolio.

So the conclusion here is not that God’s existence is an impossibility, but simply that it is not a very good or very helpful hypothesis, either. Although the idea of God can be comforting at times (scary, at others), if we are seeking the truth, we are certainly justified in putting aside the idea of God, based on contemplation of what we see around us.

What if you still want to believe in some kind of God?

If you do, then that’s OK, up to a point. In the end, we don’t have any fully satisfying explanations of how the world as we know it came to be. If you find the idea of God more comforting than scary, and if you want to believe in some form of divinity out there, or in here, somewhere or everywhere, there is certainly no proof that you are wrong.

On the contrary, while the idea of a traditional benevolent and powerful God does seem to fly in the face of reality as we experience it, other less implausible concepts of God are available. The “deistic” idea is that God was responsible for setting the universe in motion, but that after that he lets it pretty much run its own course. Other people believe that there is no God who resembles a “person” who watches over us, but that there is a spiritual being of some kind, or perhaps just a spiritual side to the universe.

There is nothing in most of these ideas, or others like them, that contradicts science or logic. Of course, there is little reason to believe that any particular one of these ideas is true, but there is just as little reason to say that none of them are true. Godless materialism itself is a form of “faith,” in that it comes to a conclusion that simply cannot be proved. In the end, we are all just left with whatever guess feels right.

This gives us some freedom to choose the beliefs that work for us, but it does not give us the freedom to be certain and dogmatic. It also does not give us grounds to stack one unproven guess on top of another, until we have a whole creed full of beliefs that are pretty much baseless. Where knowledge leaves us in the lurch, we can fall back on guesses or “faith,” but it is a false move to pretend that faith is itself a form of knowledge. Our ignorance should make us intellectually humble, not intellectually arrogant and presumptuous.

So if you feel better believing that there is some cosmic spirituality or some hidden divinity, by all means go ahead and believe it. This may make your own life easier to deal with, and it will do no harm. Just don’t start thinking that you understand how this divine or spiritual form of being works, or what it thinks or wants. Otherwise you are wandering into very dangerous ground.

Which leads us to our next subject…

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[1] Check out Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae if you want to see what kind of embarrassingly illogical arguments get made when a determined and wonderfully clever mind is applied to this hopeless effort.

[2] The same theory was thought of independently at about the same time by Alfred Russel Wallace, who is rarely remembered any more. Perhaps people figured that if he couldn’t even spell “Russell,” there was no point in giving him credit.

[3] Memo to self: do not buy a used car from God.

[4] The platypus or the mongoose is always good for a laugh – unless you happen to be a platypus or a mongoose, or a platygoose, which is….oh, never mind.

[5] Sorry about the “Mr.” and the “him,” by the way, but it’s hard to believe that a woman would create a world like this!

[6] Anyone can be fooled. Who, for instance, would think that a brilliant, pragmatic philosopher and scientist like William James could be taken in by phony spiritualists – but that’s exactly what happened, as events later proved. Not that all miracle stories are traceable to fakery. There are lots of other possibilities.