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Extraordinary Claim: God

Rand, David

A brief analysis of the extraordinary claim of the existence of "God".
Carl Sagan once famously said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" thus echoing a sentiment expressed previously by many others, as far back as Euclid.
Is the "God" claim backed up by the necessary evidence?

2010-11-19

The Claim
The Evidence
The Counter-Evidence
Conclusion
Links

The Claim

God, creator and ruler of the universe, exists. (This is the "god-hypothesis".)

The Evidence

There is absolutely no evidence for this hypothesis.

Many arguments have been put forward in an attempt to prove logically that such an entity must exist, but most are completely vacuous, such as the argument of a first cause. Even those arguments which might, at first glance, appear to have some merit are easily dismissed. The argument from fine-tuning of the universe (if the fundamental constants of physics were even slightly different from their actual values, life as we know it would be impossible: therefore "God" exists) is just a variant of the argument from design (this flower is so beautifully complex: therefore it must have been designed by "God") which in turn is just a variant of the argument from ignorance (I don't know the origin of this flower: therefore "God" created it).

The Counter-Evidence

The evidence and arguments contradicting the claim are many, varied and convincing. Here are a few:

The claim is often made in the absence of any clear definition of "God". This vagueness can be so extreme as to make the claim effectively meaningless.
The god-hypothesis is unfalsifiable. An hypothesis is meaningless if nothing could ever disprove it. The definition is frequently changed to avoid the possibility of falsification.
When the definition is clear, various claimants provide a multitude of different and often mutually contradictory (and sometimes self-contradictory) definitions. Consider the three major monotheisms. Orthodox Jews claim that they are the chosen people of god and await their messiah. Christians reject that claim and assert that the messiah has already come, in the person of Jesus who is both god incarnate and "Son of God". Muslims say that their hero Mohamed is god's last and greatest prophet but not himself god, and indeed they consider any claim that god could become incarnate to be an abominable heresy; and they tend to despise Jews as anything but divinely chosen. These three belief systems cannot all be right, but they can all be wrong.
All major forms of god-belief originated as mythologies invented by scientifically illiterate tribes of antiquity. Some beliefs have survived (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) while others (belief in Baal, Aphrodite, Thor, etc.) have not; yet the former are as unsubstantiated as the latter.
The god-hypothesis is the quintessential example of philosophical idealism. It is a claim based not on observation but on the idea of something. The idea of "God" certainly exists, or rather many ideas of "God" exist, but that does not imply that "God" exists, any more than the ideas of levitation or ESP make them realities.
The occurrence of what the religious call "evil" is incompatible with the hypothesis of an infinitely good, omnipotent, omniscient god.
The concept of the "will of God" also contradicts the hypothesis, because wanting implies dissatisfaction, and how can an all-powerful, all-knowing diety be dissatisfied with any part of its creation?

Conclusion

The expression "God of the Gaps" is often used to describe the postulate that "God" is responsible for phenomena for which our current scientific knowledge provides no satisfactory explanation. But in fact every god is just such a stop-gap, a personification of our ignorance. Unlike the ancients, we no longer consider lightning to be the action of a god. Similarly, we now know that the birth of new species does not require divine intervention. Every scientific discovery is a refutation of the god-hypothesis. In the final analysis, the idea that any phenomenon could be explained as an act of "God" has the same merit as responding to an accusation of wrong-doing by saying "The devil made me do it!"