Why There Is No God

Scientists have done an amazing job of working out how the world works.  This knowledge has enabled us to do both good things and bad things.  Eliminating smallpox has to be a high point.  Nuclear weapons would be about the lowest.  These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that there is still so much we don't know.  Most of the universe is unobservable in principle and we still don't know where most of the dark matter is.


So I think there is plenty of room left for God to be in there somewhere.  And in any case, even if we thought we had all the answers - a claim no scientist would make - it would still be possible that we had got it wrong and that He was just beyond what we are able to know.  So I am not impressed by any rational argument against God.

Equally, one of the things we are certainly able to do is to spot consciousness.  We know without any doubt that other humans are rational beings and that rocks are not.  We don't need to understand much about a being to know it is conscious.  We can't discuss the weather with a baby or a cat but we know that there is something going on there.

So when someone says that they are aware of a conscious supernatural being, it seems to me that they are making a perfectly believable claim in principle.  There could be such a thing, and an awareness of Him is all the proof you need.

The trouble is, if He did exist then the testimony of all the people who encounter Him would be the same.  If everyone, or if even a large proportion, made the same claim I'd be obliged to believe it even if I hadn't myself experienced it.  But as it is the story is all over the shop.  Accounts of the supreme being vary so widely that they can't possibly be the same being.  And even a single individual can't keep a consistent story over their life.  They even have what they call crises of faith. I have never had a crisis of lack of faith.

So although it is never easy to prove a negative, and the concept of God is one that is particularly difficult to disprove, it is the believers themselves who demonstrate that there is no such thing.



 Photo credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center via photopin cc