A Statement of My Position on Religion

1-26-00
by Matt Landreman

When people ask me about my religion, I am reluctant to say I am an atheist. I do not feel quite at home among many of the atheists I have encountered in person or through writing. Many atheists will give a philosophical argument or cite scientific findings to "prove" that God does not exist. While agree that religious believers are largely mistaken, I have my own approach. I do not claim to use any watertight logic, and I do not think a strict proof or disproof is possible. Instead, I believe the concept of God that most people use is very unlikely to be a part of the world. I do not think the word "God" is especially meaningful in its common use. Do not read this essay then, waiting for a proof because there is none. I rather present some problems that I find with some common notions.

I would like to begin the discussion by asking what a God would do in the natural world, supposing He exists. Many people in past centuries, and a smaller but significant number today would point to events of the sort that one could observe. God healed the sick. Jesus rose from the dead. The Virgin Mary appeared to some individual. The fact that such notions are less common today is attributed usually to "Science." This response is too imprecise to be satisfactory, but it is on the right track.

The scientific method stresses that repeatability is very important in determining how the world works. If a scientist claims to have observed something new, then others will try to recreate the situation closely enough to produce the same occurrence. If the anomaly is observed, then most will be convinced. If it does not, then the claim is questioned. Perhaps there was an important property of the situation that was not the same in the two experiments. If, however no amount of tinkering can reproduce the event, the claim will be forgotten. There is an assumption that there are constant rules through which the world operates. In two identical situations, the same rules apply, and the same result is found. As science has demonstrated its success through the advance of technology derived from it, it does not seem unreasonable to apply the scientific method to claims of God’s tinkering with the world. It is the nature of miracles, however, that they cannot be reproduced for verification. We dismiss the miraculous claims then, following the method of science.

What precisely are we doing? We are using the empirical success of science in prediction (microwave ovens, designer drugs, atomic power) as a rationale for trusting the paradigm of science. This paradigm holds that the world is like a machine. There are parts (subatomic particles) and constant rules for how the parts work (laws of nature). One can imagine a world in which this statement does not apply, so is this an unreasonable assumption? There is perhaps no better reason to believe any such paradigm than the empirical success of science. The belief system of the Australian aborigines has not demonstrated anything like 20^th century Western technology to support itself. However, predictive power does not prove truth, so already we have to make a concession. While it seems unlikely that God reveals himself through visible intervention in the world, we cannot prove that He does not. I have not personally observed anything to make me believe otherwise, but that does not say that it will not happen in the future, or that I am simply oblivious. For now, then, let us say that it is likely that the world operates on constant rules.

Some believers in God have accepted this argument and retreated, only to take up a slightly smaller claim. "God may not interfere with the natural world," one might say, "but I can feel him give me strength and guidance." In other words, God affects us through our minds, in a real but invisible way. However, the prevailing belief among scientists who study the brain and mind is that the mind is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. It is purely physical. If I programmed a computer with the connections between all the neurons in my head and the rules by which they fire, I would create a new consciousness in the computer. If it received input from a robotic body that resembled a human, it would possess a mind in no way different from a human mind. Everything that happens in the mind, then, has a physical neural correlate. Anything I feel or observe or think can in principle be defined in terms of the neurons in my brain and their behavior. For me to feel inspiration from God, then, God must be physically manipulating my brain. Only through changes in the connections between neurons, the concentrations of change carriers, etc. could my mind be at all affected. Such changes are merely miracles on a smaller scale. It is thus irrational to claim that God will not cause miracles at the visible scale but does on the molecular scale, which could in principle be observed as well.

Of course, we cannot say "God does not affect our minds" simply because we have not observed such manipulation. Maybe someone will tomorrow. This possibility is another loophole in the "disproof" of God. There are others as well. Perhaps God affects the world through quantum mechanics by selecting which possibilities are realized in quantum uncertainty situations. You can see why I am hesitant to cite the above evidence as a proof of anything. The above discussion can be only a practical guide to belief, and nothing more.

However, already we depart from what is probably the majority view among Americans when we suppose that there are no miracles or divinely inspired thoughts. If our supposition is true, even if God "exists outside the natural world" somehow, He can never affect me. My life will never show any evidence either way of His existence or non-existence. If God does not intereferes with the world, then probably the alleged interference recorded in the Bible would be false as well. If I still choose to believe in God, it would be based on absolutely no positive information. It would be a purely arbitrary decision. It is as if I decided to believe that at 3am on Jan 25, 2000, I had a blue dot on my forehead for 2 minutes. There is no way to show if I am right or wrong since I was asleep. But why decide to add such a thing to my belief system, which contributes nothing to my life? Of course, with religion we have people around us believing the same thing, so it is psychologically easy to do so. However, we have just said it unlikely that anyone would have any information about God, even those others who do believe. Their beliefs are baseless as well.

Even if we are wrong about God’s non-intervention, though, the story does not end. Even if God interferes in the world, we think of Him as being "outside the universe" as well. God cannot be God in any commonly understood sense if He did not create the world. What exactly does it mean to "create" the universe? Creation refers to something that does not exist in the universe beginning to exist. The idea of creation is part of the universe. For God to "create" the universe, He would have to "create" the very notion of creating. This is a thought that the human mind cannot handle. Every thought we have is related to experiences in the universe. The idea of something outside the universe is not conceivable. It is an unfortunate by-product of language’s power that one can form seemingly meaningful phrases that do not really mean anything. "Creation of the universe" is like "suave napkin." The words fit together in a grammatically correct manner, but they do not mean anything. Because we are used to seeing things created, we think that the universe can be created as well. However, the universe is not a thing. It is matter, the laws of physics, and even more fundamental concepts like existence, causality, quantity, etc. To create creating, cause causality, is not a coherent notion.

Perhaps this is part of the mystery of faith. We are not meant to understand God, so the best we can do is speak in these metaphors. Again the "disproof" has a loophole. The point, however, is not to create a proof. I cannot prove that I am not really a plaything of Descartes’ demon, and the whole world is not an illusion. One cannot wait in life for proofs. Rather, one has to live according to the best knowledge available, with the humility to accept that one might be wrong.

When I think then about God, I consider the following factors. Based on what I know, science seems to be real, and the scientific paradigm appears to work rather well. I have not observed anything "miraculous" that seems to contradict it, so there is probably not any sort of interference in the world by a divine power. The notion of God that people talk about is something inconceivable, which does not affect my life in any observable way. Considering also the great variety of religious belief around the world, which requires that there is no convincing evidence or argument to believe any particular faith over all the others, it is very difficult to be religious. It seems as arbitrary and silly to add God to my belief system as the notion about the dot on my forehead. This argument is not a proof, but it is the best information I have to go on.

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