The Theory Of God

The Theory of God By Steven Shafer I figure people checking out my profile will soon discover I am far from religious, in fact, I am Athiest. I wanted to give people the opportunity to hear why I am (and why you should be) an atheist as to avoid the same questions over and over again. First, if you are religious and you ask me "Why don't you believe in god?" I will say "Why don't you believe in unicorns, leperchauns, or any of the thousands of other gods out there?" What is your answer? Because there's no evidence? Because it's a centuries old legend? Because everybody knows that no matter how hard you look you will never find real proof for their existence? Well these are the reasons there is no god. There is no god, religion is a mythology, it's blunt, but I'm suure you don't want me to beat around the bush. You may say "But there is evidence!" let's take the time to define evidence and it's purpose. Wikipedia defines evidence as... Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. ... Now, I would like to point out some things that are most certainly not evidence. Holy Books: Although they can be used to determine historical accuracy and specific laws for specific religions, it does not prove god. Holy books are religious and political propaganda, and every holy book states that A. Their god exists and B. Their god is the only and/or best god. For these reasons we can not use the holy book itself as evidence for or against god. Feelings: If you believe what you believe based on feelings to me your belief is delusional. I don't mean to offend, but doesn't a man get locked away for trusting in his feelings and killing another man? Feelings in no way determine truth, it doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong, but they are completely personal thus they can not be used as evidence. Tradition: This one should go without saying, but if you believe what you believe because your parents do or because you have some obligation put on you by family, friends, or any other group, this is not evidence. It also does not matter what your particular religion has done for the community or society as a whole, this can be used as evidence to determine the morality of your particular religion, but not as proof of god. Furthermore if your parent's are the same faith as you, or if you have been in your religion since you were a child, you may want to step back and question as to whether or not you have been indoctrinated, I was, and it was impossible for me to see otherwise until I broadened my empathy by, ironically, trying to prove god. To quote an old priest (I don't know the exact source or even the exact phrasing and I apologize): "Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the faithful man." This quote literally scares me. Faith: Faith is by definition the complete belief in something which does not have evidence. Thus, obviously, it can not be used in a debate (how can you determine truth against something that by definition is untrue?) To quote one of my heroes Richard Dawkins: "The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that

something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'." For the religious readers, I ask you: What would it mean, for you specifically, in your personal life, to deny god? Would nothing change? Interesting. Although that could be the case for some I doubt it is the case for you. If you are anything like me when I was a christian, I had all sorts of ties to the church. People who would constantly ask how my faith was. Great friends who all shared the same belief, a loving family who viewed god as the end of all means. It was very difficult to "come out of the closet" to announce there was no way i could believe in god anymore. I was very religious, truly religious, I assure you I was no faker. I truly believed in god with all my heart, mind and soul, I loved it and the "things" it had "given" me. I was planning on growing up to be a youth pastor, but I had a tiny little bit of doubt. Just a tiiiiiiiiny little bit. No one even knew about it. But never the less I had to get rid of it. I began asking questions that seemed to burst out of this doubt. With no satisfying answers, I turned to the internet. Soon I discovered that these questions were so hard to answer because they were based on the ultimate false deichotomy (namely that god exists.) I find it interesting that one day, sitting in a pew, listening to the pastor, I had the thought, in my head, that the only way I could not believe in god is if god itself told me it did not exist. (as a purely anecdotal fact I depicted god as a floating head very similar to Andros of the Star Fox video game series, that was just for giggles) Interesting that this is actually how it went. I prayed, studied, learned, talked, asked, and questioned, I WANTED TO BELIEVE SOOOOO BAD! Eventually I ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and life has never been so beautiful and clear. Funny, that the start of the christian belief in original sin was such a metaphorically accurate description of my "conversion." I had the opportunity to live in the "ignorance is bliss" garden of eden, where all my friends were set up for me, I would probably have continued my fathers business, would have gotten married young and had a family, ignoring truth until my kids start asking the same tough questions AKA the vicious cycle AKA business as usual. But I had to eat the fruit! I didn't think it was fair to just believe in god without going after the hard evidence. I wanted to be able to tell people why I believed in god, not just because of faith. I soon discovered this was literally impossible, and I had to make a choice, insanity or sanity. Faith or Reason. Reason baby, all the way. If you believe in god 100% because of faith you have gone too far, and you might as well turn back, your unfortunate viewpoint will not allow you to see the true wonders of the world, and I do not mean to demine you, I am simply saying I feel so, so sorry for you. If you claim that NOTHING can change your faith you are beyond the point of reason, and there is no need to continue further, it will just annoy you and cause you to get angry with me. Just move along cowboy. But if you have even a little bit of doubt, you owe it to your god to extinguish it, if it does exist, I'm sure it wouldn't want a bunch of people believing in it based on the fact that they'll go to hell if they don't, you gotta know why you believe in it, if you don't care about that aspect then you're probably also too far gone. I hereby announce that if you can disprove my views on god, I will humbly accept and change my views. The difference between a scientific and faithful mind is that the scientific mind

has a theory, discovers evidence then adjusts and denies the theory to meet reality, while the faithful mind has a theory, discovers the evidence then adjusts and denies reality to conform with the theory. I fall strictly in the former, as I challenge you all to do. First let's look at some facts: It is important to note that approximately 84% of the world follows some religion. Religion really does not concern this article, but I think it is important for you to see the facts of the situation. Approx. 80% of united states citizens are christian. 1.6% are atheist (yes that's a point in there.) As Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" shows it is currently almost impossible for an atheist to be elected into any office, let alone presidential office. So far it is approximated that 800 million people have died in religious wars (wars declared for religious purposes) while no atheist has ever killed another man in the name of atheism. A common example religious people use of an "Atheistic killer" is Joseph Stalin, but we all know this just doesn't hold water because the wars caused by Stalin had nothing to do with atheism at all, but the idea of comunism, which I consider a materialist religion that replaces "god" with "society's well being" but that is the subject of a future article. Hitler had a strange mixture of his own made up belief (of course tell me of one religious belief that isn't made up) mixed with weird science that had nothing to do with reality. Today, it is considered "normal" for children, who are too young to make any serious moral decision, to be catagorized as a particular religion by being baptized, saying a prayer, or just having the misfortune of being born to religious parents. This is surely the most disgusting "social norm" I can think of, and you should get infuriated everytime someone calls a small child christian, muslim, or even atheist for that matter! Stop it! Now, it has just occured to me that my article is running too long for my taste so I'll get to the point. By definition god, if it exists, lives on another plane of existence, one which we can never see, never measure, never understand, never compare or contrast to our own plane of existence and never be able to confirm. Thus by definition god does not exist. Of course this answer will not satisfy the religious "intellectuals", or anti-logicists, so you can ignore that basic fact if you desire. Let us compare a young girl's belief in santa claus with an adults view of god. Now, again, I am not trying to demine religion, but this is truly an accurate way to look at it, and I feel it will broaden your empathy to look back at a similar experience you've probably had in your lifetime to a "more important" view you may have now. Plus it's very dificult to speak honestly about religion without it sounding silly and for that I apologize. I will repeat, it is almost impossible to get a realistic perspective of your religion if you are still indoctrinated by it, I speak from experience. So this girl, let's call her Sally, has been taught that a man who lives in a place she will never see watches her, 24/7 checking down things that are "naughty or nice" and once a year visits every child in the world (remember this is what she is taught, not the reality of the situation or even the myth itself) and rewards or punishes them accordingly with either gifts or coal (lack of gifts in same families.) Now the child meets another child, let's even say he's a bully, who tells her that santa claus, in fact, does not exist. Sally cries and runs home, exclaiming what the bully had said and how hurt it made her feel. "Was it true what he said?" she would inevitably ask. Now, as long as her parents stick with their origional story, that santa does do the things they describe, she will continue, perhaps grungingly to agree. At this point, many children will only stop to believe about santa when their parents admit that they lied to her.

Now imagine if the parents continued to tell the child that santa, in fact, did exist. Then when she comes home telling of another bully the parents harshly exclaim that the bully is a soldier of the anti-santa and that his argument was a sneaky tool used by asantaists and by the anti-santa himself to trick her into falling into his trap. Now imagine the parents sending her, every week, to special meetings that exclaim all the legends of the holy santa claus, that he brings joy to those who love his and eternal coal to those who don't. Now imagine if the speakers at these places said specifically that there were, in fact, very logical arguments against the validity of santa claus but that those were specifically put here by anti-santa and that those are the oldest tricks in the book to get kids to live a life of evil asantaism. Now imagine the parents, like many religious parents do, including my own, actively sorting Sally's friends and boyfriends, making sure she knows that the santaists are good for her and the asantaists are bad. And that any or all of those friends can or will lead her to a life of eternal coal. And that the kindness of the asantaists is just a trick they so cleverly use to devour the good guys. Now, for even more on the psychological aspect, imagine every time the child brings up a perfectly logical question like "How could santa possibly go to every house in one night, and how did he get those reindeer to fly anyway?" she is either laughed at, sent to a santaist teacher for indoctrination, told that those thoughts are specifically evil and tricks of the anti-santa or she was just plain ignored. Or perhaps she is just told that those questions are purposely impossible to answer. If she persists, phrases like "you're hurting your mother with that kind of talk" start popping out of the parents mouths and the tool of guilt gets it's final foot in the door, so that just incase the girl deep down understood that there was no santa, she would also understand that she was seen as evil in the eyes of her parents. Now, for an added bonus, imagine that the modern schools of thought in her day proudly proclaimed the baulderdash that there is no truth. That, in fact everyone has their own truth, and there was no real way to determine one belief from another. (One day I will cover the fatal flaws in the Kantian post-modernist philosophy.) Surely this does not describe your exact situation in relation to santa claus but I challenge you to jump into Sally's shoes. Is it fair that her parents should do this? Would you suggest Sally to temporarily jump out of her particular view and see the world before coming to a final decision and teaching her children the same things? If not, then I must say you are lying to yourself and do not bother replying because I know the conversation will go nowhere. Once again I must repeat it is almost impossible to determine whether or not your belief is true, if you are still in it. As Stefan Molyneux has geniusly observed, people some how tend to genuinly believe their local sports team is somehow "the best." Now, as for why god does not exist. To quote one of the goddesses (poetic terminology I assure you) of philosophy in my view, Ayn Rand, "We are never called upon to prove a negative. The burden of proof is upon those who wish to prove a positive." This is the most important phrase I can try to get across, read it again, read it a million times if you must, it is so important, and it is as simple as that. If this were not the case, literally anything could, and would be true. Specifically, disagreeing with the above quote means that anything we cannot prove DOES exist, we just can't prove it. This creates so many paradoxes it may be dificult for you to keep your balance while

thinking about all the possibilities this leaves open. God can exist, fairys can exist, zeus can exist, it puts them all on an equal possibility of existence. If you want to claim any of these things actually exists, it's easy, all you have to do is prove it first. It doesn't work the other way around, you have to prove god to me, I do not have to disprove it to you. If you think this is an unfair argument, take time to think of all the worlds religions, beliefs, and cults and you will see that if the aforementioned quote is wrong, they all must be true. And I think we can all agree this cannot be the case, considering every religion contradicts every other faith. The theory of god has been around for thousands of years yet not one man has been able to prove it. Yet darwin was the first man to come up with his theory of natural selection and he was easily able to prove it. Why is that the case? Because there is no god. Now, people will say "but god, by definition, is unprovable, that's why it's called faith" then may I ask you why you do not believe in the greek gods? Or one of the hundreds of other gods that are probably in different sects of your own religion? It's simple really, those other ones just aren't convenient for your in your personal life like your god is. Mix that with a couple emotional experiences and probably the first 10-18 years of your life having some form of religious indoctrination, and bam you have enough "proof" (lightly used) to convince close friends and relatives, and possibly yourself, that god has intervined in your life. Once again, not meaning to offend anyone, this is just, unfortunately, how most faithful people maintain their faith. There is really no "evidence" against god, I can't find the footprint made by the lack of a bigfoot, the rationalist must simply sit back, relax, and wait for the evidence to come to him, religious types have been given plenty of opportunities to do so. There are plentiful videos on youtube that one can find that will show how science contradicts the many theories that god puts out, but as an "aspiring philosopher" as apposed to a scientist, I am more concerned with the overal possibility of the argument of god, not the individual ideas put out by religious folks. As for those who would like to argue the moral value of god, I will adress this issue in a future article. But I can imagine that if a faithful person takes the blame for all their failures while praising another (nonexistent) entity for everything they do well, their self esteem will be dramatically effected. Now, for the challenge, look at the evidence for yourself. Don't take any of this as instant truth, just as I wouldn't want you to read a holy book and instantly accept it. If you are rational, and patient, the truth will help you set yourself free. Good luck, this is a beautiful world, and life, and you do not want to wander through it in a dazed fog of uncertainty, I really comend you for taking the time to read this brief article and I would love to hear any comments or criticisms you may have on it. Thank you for reading, Steven Shafer