I was looking back at the post
"What it would take to convince me" and found it unsatisfying. It was
a bit rambling and unfocused, so I decided to do a second take. I'll leave the
first post up because it does address the issue and there is nothing I said in
it that doesn't represent my views. However, I wanted to revisit this important
topic in an effort to make it more clear and concise, and also because I
continue to be asked this question in comments from people on Google+ and YouTube.
Here is my attempt to craft a better response to that question, "what would it take to convince me that Yahweh is real?".
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| Obligatory God and Adam fresco |
1. Miracles
If a deity is manipulating natural laws to answer people's prayers, it is reasonable to expect that we would have documented miracles that defy natural explanations. If the god of the Bible was responsible for the miracles, I would further expect miraculous answers to prayer when Christians pray and no miracles/answers to prayers when they were offered by adherents to other religions. I don't expect Yahweh to to answer everyone's requests with his infinite magical powers, but, as far as I'm aware, there are no miracles nor have there ever been any verified/verifiable miracles. There was nothing in my 30 years of belief that was miraculous, and I have looked on the internet and asked people I know and who I have met, and I have turned up with nothing that could not be explained by way of natural phenomenon. This complete lack of evidence suggests to me that there is no god intervening in our world on behalf. I see no evidence that a deity of any kind is manipulating natural laws.
There are some believers, identified as "cessationists", who believe that Yahweh has ceased performing miracles after the New Testament was written. For myself, I find no support in the biblical text for believing this would be true, and there are several passages that appear to me to suggest that believers can expect miracles any time they ask, as long as they aren't asking for things that are sinful or otherwise outside of Yahweh's plan. The cessationist position seems to be an ad hoc explanation for the lack of miracles and nothing more than an attempt to deflect the objection.
The other deflection is contained in the caveat that I referenced above. In order for Yahweh to grant a miracle, it supposedly has to align with his will. It can't be something selfish, nothing that would cause harm to other people (though I think this is negotiable depending on how you understand the Bible and how you perceive the people you might want visited with harm). The miracle also has to serve the larger purpose of "advancing Yahweh's eternal plan". For example, when the young men from my church youth group contracted HIV/AIDS due to contaminated blood they received as treatment for their hemophilia, the lack of healing and their eventual death was understood to be part of the "perfect plan" that we can't conceive. Well, the last part is certainly right. While I was a Christian, this justification seemed reasonable to me. However, after years of applying this rationalization every single time I prayed for Yahweh to show his power and mercy for some person so that I could testify to his glory (whatever that means), there was nothing and I had to swallow it with a dose of Yahweh must have had bigger plans... for the young brothers who died of AIDS, for the baby who died of a malformed heart, for the wife and mother (two different people) who died of cancer, for the pastor who died of a rare heart disease, etc etc etc. Not once did I witness a miracle in my life.
If a deity is manipulating natural laws to answer people's prayers, it is reasonable to expect that we would have documented miracles that defy natural explanations. If the god of the Bible was responsible for the miracles, I would further expect miraculous answers to prayer when Christians pray and no miracles/answers to prayers when they were offered by adherents to other religions. I don't expect Yahweh to to answer everyone's requests with his infinite magical powers, but, as far as I'm aware, there are no miracles nor have there ever been any verified/verifiable miracles. There was nothing in my 30 years of belief that was miraculous, and I have looked on the internet and asked people I know and who I have met, and I have turned up with nothing that could not be explained by way of natural phenomenon. This complete lack of evidence suggests to me that there is no god intervening in our world on behalf. I see no evidence that a deity of any kind is manipulating natural laws.
There are some believers, identified as "cessationists", who believe that Yahweh has ceased performing miracles after the New Testament was written. For myself, I find no support in the biblical text for believing this would be true, and there are several passages that appear to me to suggest that believers can expect miracles any time they ask, as long as they aren't asking for things that are sinful or otherwise outside of Yahweh's plan. The cessationist position seems to be an ad hoc explanation for the lack of miracles and nothing more than an attempt to deflect the objection.
The other deflection is contained in the caveat that I referenced above. In order for Yahweh to grant a miracle, it supposedly has to align with his will. It can't be something selfish, nothing that would cause harm to other people (though I think this is negotiable depending on how you understand the Bible and how you perceive the people you might want visited with harm). The miracle also has to serve the larger purpose of "advancing Yahweh's eternal plan". For example, when the young men from my church youth group contracted HIV/AIDS due to contaminated blood they received as treatment for their hemophilia, the lack of healing and their eventual death was understood to be part of the "perfect plan" that we can't conceive. Well, the last part is certainly right. While I was a Christian, this justification seemed reasonable to me. However, after years of applying this rationalization every single time I prayed for Yahweh to show his power and mercy for some person so that I could testify to his glory (whatever that means), there was nothing and I had to swallow it with a dose of Yahweh must have had bigger plans... for the young brothers who died of AIDS, for the baby who died of a malformed heart, for the wife and mother (two different people) who died of cancer, for the pastor who died of a rare heart disease, etc etc etc. Not once did I witness a miracle in my life.
2. Genuine Moral Insights in Bible
If an all just deity existed and was responsible for inspiring people to write a text as a message to mankind, I would expect that book to contain exceptional moral insights that were not found in other religious teachings and texts. Instead, the Bible appears to contain internal contradictions and, in many passages, to have immoral judgments and actions that are praised as morally good. This is true both in the OT and NT (click here to see my posts on OT injustice and NT injustice). The Bible also advocates slavery and does nothing to revoke the immoral institution, even in the NT. For this reason, I find it impossible to believe that a maximally good deity was responsible for inspiring the writing of the Bible.
3. Genuine Intellectual Insights and Wisdom
I would also expect an omniscient deity's book to reflect keen insights and no logical contradictions. Unfortunately, Yahweh seems just as inept as the people who were writing his text for him. Read through the account of the Egyptian plagues in the book of Exodus. They don't make any sense, they punish people in Egypt who had nothing to do with the enslavement of the Hebrew people, and assuming Yahweh was truly omnipotent, they were completely unnecessary. Why not just change Pharaoh's mind and let the people walk out without incident? No need to cause suffering of innocent people, no need for slaughter of the first born in the land. In Judges 1, Yahweh wasn't powerful enough to defeat a culture that had iron chariots. In Judges 20, Yahweh guarantees victory for the tribes of Israel who are taking revenge for a murder, but they fail 2-3 times before they gain the victory, and the sum of the loss of their own warriors even after their "victory" was greater than the sum of the losses from their enemies. In the next couple of chapters in Judges, they tribes slaughter all of the women in the enemy tribe and then feel bad about it, so they go out to a neighboring town and kill the men, capture the women and give them to the enemy tribe to make up for killing their wives. The author of Judges explains this incompetence by suggesting it was due to the fact that they did not have a king. However, when the people of Israel ask for a king in I Samuel 8, Yahweh is sad and discourages them. They were rejecting his prophets and the system of judges that he established as the best form of civil government for the people... even though it apparently caused chaos and mayhem as seen in Judges? Complete nonsense.
There are bits of wisdom in the Bible, but if you have read other religious texts, you know that they all have some ideas that are good and some ideas that are dumb/bad. The Bible is no different.
4. Evidence of Direct Human Interactions an Omniscient Being
I would expect evidence of an omniscient being in the form of insights and information coming from people who believe they are in a relationship with him. I don't need to see an apparition of Jesus or a glaringly bright figure or a shrubbery that seems like it is burning longer than it ought to be burning. I am willing to accept an internal manifestation from a being who is not material. When I was a believer, I used to think that I was hearing from Yahweh when I prayed and I would get a thought in my head that didn't contradict the Bible. I later came to realize that this was a very poor standard for evaluating whether or not I was interacting with an actual different being. But this does not exclude the possibility that I was merely conversing with myself in my mind. How could I tell if there was a second party involved in the conversation
Matt Dillahunty has argued against hard solipsism by observing that if his mind were the only mind that exists, it would mean that he was responsible for all of the works of art and music and writing etc. He argues that he does not have the ability to create those great works of art, and therefore there must be other minds that were responsible for their production. I would apply a similar standard for evaluating whether or not an omniscient being is actually speaking to me (or to someone else). For example, I have occasionally asked a believer who was witnessing to me to petition Yahweh for some bit of information about me that could only come from an omniscient being. There are things about me that no other human being would know. If a person told me that Yahweh revealed one of those facts to them and correctly conveyed that information to me, I would find that to be compelling. I would also be compelled to believe if I perceived a being communicating with me (even if it was only through my own thoughts) and that being conveyed information to me that I know I could not have known or come up with on my own, like the great works of art, music, and literature that I know I do not have the ability to produce, I would find that compelling as well.
People frequently tell me that Yahweh that loves us unconditionally more than any other person. They tell me of a relationship with this being. If that is true, it seems completely reasonable to expect that this being would reach out to me/us in such a way as to be undeniable and firm.
The other issue related to this is love. If I love someone, I want to communicate with them as clearly as I can. If I was omnipotent and had no limitations as to how I could communicate, I don't think I would leave it up to a book that was cobbled together in dead languages, hand copied (poorly) several thousand times, and have that be the "perfect revelation" for the world. If Yahweh could produce a disembodied hand to write on the wall in Nebuchadnezzar's palace, why can't he leave us an original
note each morning in our own language? Why not give us messages in an audible voice that other people can actually hear and independently verify?
There are people who will claim that Yahweh couldn't be that direct because we wouldn't have free will since the evidence would be so compelling that no one could not believe. This argument fails because the Bible says that even the devil believes that Yahweh exists (James 2:19). So you can obviously believe and have free will to sin and rebel.
The only other reason I hear people give is that it is somehow "better" for Yahweh to withhold that kind of direct interaction, and we're too dumb to comprehend it. This seems no more than the same kind of rationalization used to excuse the injustices in the Bible. In any other context, you would not accept this rationalization and you would be completely justified. This nothing more than a safeguard against having to actually admit that there is no good reason to believe that there is a deity in existence that fits the description given in the Bible.
____________________________________________________________
There are other things that would also convince me that the god of the Bible was real, but I think this list encapsulates some of the more important evidences that I would accept. Basically, if you were to sift through the posts that I have made that explain the reasons that I came to disbelieve and change the negatives to positives (eg, if the Bible WERE moral, if there WERE evidence for divine intervention in the world, if people in the church were generally more virtuous than people outside the church, etc) you could piece together a decent picture of the things I would accept as evidence for the existence of the god of the Bible. The more of these kinds of evidence I could find, the stronger the case for the existence of Yahweh. The fact that none of these seem to be manifest in the world, as far as I have seen, makes a pretty strong case than no such being exists.
In the original post, I began with the disclaimer that belief in the existence of a being called Yahweh is distinct from the belief that this being is good or just or worthy of devotion and service. It was the lengthy disclaimer at the beginning of the article that I believe made it unclear and worth revisiting. However, I still believe that it was an important idea to express. If I did come to believe that Yahweh was a real being, I would need further and extensive explanations as to why we should believe that Yahweh is moral when he seems very immoral.
Thanks for stopping by. I have about 3 other posts in the works in the short term. They will probably take a while and I have resigned myself to just write here as time allows and publish when I feel like the content is ready. All that is to say, subscribe or stop back every so often if you are interested in what has been brewing in my mind.
Please comment or leave any feedback.
Cheers,
Gavagai
If an all just deity existed and was responsible for inspiring people to write a text as a message to mankind, I would expect that book to contain exceptional moral insights that were not found in other religious teachings and texts. Instead, the Bible appears to contain internal contradictions and, in many passages, to have immoral judgments and actions that are praised as morally good. This is true both in the OT and NT (click here to see my posts on OT injustice and NT injustice). The Bible also advocates slavery and does nothing to revoke the immoral institution, even in the NT. For this reason, I find it impossible to believe that a maximally good deity was responsible for inspiring the writing of the Bible.
3. Genuine Intellectual Insights and Wisdom
I would also expect an omniscient deity's book to reflect keen insights and no logical contradictions. Unfortunately, Yahweh seems just as inept as the people who were writing his text for him. Read through the account of the Egyptian plagues in the book of Exodus. They don't make any sense, they punish people in Egypt who had nothing to do with the enslavement of the Hebrew people, and assuming Yahweh was truly omnipotent, they were completely unnecessary. Why not just change Pharaoh's mind and let the people walk out without incident? No need to cause suffering of innocent people, no need for slaughter of the first born in the land. In Judges 1, Yahweh wasn't powerful enough to defeat a culture that had iron chariots. In Judges 20, Yahweh guarantees victory for the tribes of Israel who are taking revenge for a murder, but they fail 2-3 times before they gain the victory, and the sum of the loss of their own warriors even after their "victory" was greater than the sum of the losses from their enemies. In the next couple of chapters in Judges, they tribes slaughter all of the women in the enemy tribe and then feel bad about it, so they go out to a neighboring town and kill the men, capture the women and give them to the enemy tribe to make up for killing their wives. The author of Judges explains this incompetence by suggesting it was due to the fact that they did not have a king. However, when the people of Israel ask for a king in I Samuel 8, Yahweh is sad and discourages them. They were rejecting his prophets and the system of judges that he established as the best form of civil government for the people... even though it apparently caused chaos and mayhem as seen in Judges? Complete nonsense.
There are bits of wisdom in the Bible, but if you have read other religious texts, you know that they all have some ideas that are good and some ideas that are dumb/bad. The Bible is no different.
4. Evidence of Direct Human Interactions an Omniscient Being
I would expect evidence of an omniscient being in the form of insights and information coming from people who believe they are in a relationship with him. I don't need to see an apparition of Jesus or a glaringly bright figure or a shrubbery that seems like it is burning longer than it ought to be burning. I am willing to accept an internal manifestation from a being who is not material. When I was a believer, I used to think that I was hearing from Yahweh when I prayed and I would get a thought in my head that didn't contradict the Bible. I later came to realize that this was a very poor standard for evaluating whether or not I was interacting with an actual different being. But this does not exclude the possibility that I was merely conversing with myself in my mind. How could I tell if there was a second party involved in the conversation
Matt Dillahunty has argued against hard solipsism by observing that if his mind were the only mind that exists, it would mean that he was responsible for all of the works of art and music and writing etc. He argues that he does not have the ability to create those great works of art, and therefore there must be other minds that were responsible for their production. I would apply a similar standard for evaluating whether or not an omniscient being is actually speaking to me (or to someone else). For example, I have occasionally asked a believer who was witnessing to me to petition Yahweh for some bit of information about me that could only come from an omniscient being. There are things about me that no other human being would know. If a person told me that Yahweh revealed one of those facts to them and correctly conveyed that information to me, I would find that to be compelling. I would also be compelled to believe if I perceived a being communicating with me (even if it was only through my own thoughts) and that being conveyed information to me that I know I could not have known or come up with on my own, like the great works of art, music, and literature that I know I do not have the ability to produce, I would find that compelling as well.
People frequently tell me that Yahweh that loves us unconditionally more than any other person. They tell me of a relationship with this being. If that is true, it seems completely reasonable to expect that this being would reach out to me/us in such a way as to be undeniable and firm.
The other issue related to this is love. If I love someone, I want to communicate with them as clearly as I can. If I was omnipotent and had no limitations as to how I could communicate, I don't think I would leave it up to a book that was cobbled together in dead languages, hand copied (poorly) several thousand times, and have that be the "perfect revelation" for the world. If Yahweh could produce a disembodied hand to write on the wall in Nebuchadnezzar's palace, why can't he leave us an original
There are people who will claim that Yahweh couldn't be that direct because we wouldn't have free will since the evidence would be so compelling that no one could not believe. This argument fails because the Bible says that even the devil believes that Yahweh exists (James 2:19). So you can obviously believe and have free will to sin and rebel.
The only other reason I hear people give is that it is somehow "better" for Yahweh to withhold that kind of direct interaction, and we're too dumb to comprehend it. This seems no more than the same kind of rationalization used to excuse the injustices in the Bible. In any other context, you would not accept this rationalization and you would be completely justified. This nothing more than a safeguard against having to actually admit that there is no good reason to believe that there is a deity in existence that fits the description given in the Bible.
____________________________________________________________
There are other things that would also convince me that the god of the Bible was real, but I think this list encapsulates some of the more important evidences that I would accept. Basically, if you were to sift through the posts that I have made that explain the reasons that I came to disbelieve and change the negatives to positives (eg, if the Bible WERE moral, if there WERE evidence for divine intervention in the world, if people in the church were generally more virtuous than people outside the church, etc) you could piece together a decent picture of the things I would accept as evidence for the existence of the god of the Bible. The more of these kinds of evidence I could find, the stronger the case for the existence of Yahweh. The fact that none of these seem to be manifest in the world, as far as I have seen, makes a pretty strong case than no such being exists.
In the original post, I began with the disclaimer that belief in the existence of a being called Yahweh is distinct from the belief that this being is good or just or worthy of devotion and service. It was the lengthy disclaimer at the beginning of the article that I believe made it unclear and worth revisiting. However, I still believe that it was an important idea to express. If I did come to believe that Yahweh was a real being, I would need further and extensive explanations as to why we should believe that Yahweh is moral when he seems very immoral.
Thanks for stopping by. I have about 3 other posts in the works in the short term. They will probably take a while and I have resigned myself to just write here as time allows and publish when I feel like the content is ready. All that is to say, subscribe or stop back every so often if you are interested in what has been brewing in my mind.
Please comment or leave any feedback.
Cheers,
Gavagai
I was there in sistine chapel couple of weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteI saw this fresco with my own eyes. it was a great experience.