GOD’S
UNLISTED PHONE NUMBER
Jerry
Harkins
There
is no God. Maybe there once
was. I have this vision of a
two-year-old boy named God Almighty playing with matches in the kitchen. Just possibly there was an accident and
the Big Bang got ignited. There are
other scenarios. For example,
maybe it wasn’t an accident. In
any case, there was a perfect explosion.
It wiped out everything that preceded it so poor little G.A. did not
survive. Whatever may have been or
not been on the other side of Point Alpha, the truth is that right now there is
no uncaused first cause acting in history. While I’m at it, there is no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy
and, while there was a Saint Patrick, he did not expel the snakes from
Ireland. If any of this
comes to you as depressing news, I apologize.
Thomas
Aquinas disagrees with me and devotes the first 43 questions of the Summa Theologica to the existence and
nature of God. He begins by
telling us that the statement “God is” is not self-evident but that it can be
demonstrated by unaided reason or logic.
He then proceeds to attempt such a demonstration at excruciating
length. Now this is the
elaborately defined God of the Christians he is dealing with, so his job is not
an easy one and it is not surprising that he fails. What is surprising is that his failure involves a logical
train wreck. Logic, after all, was
his forte. But he commits a basic
fallacy when he sets out to prove something that he already believes is beyond
dispute and to do so by proving a negative—that is by inferring God from what
cannot be. He says that, given the
world as he sees it, God cannot not
exist. Where some see chaos,
Thomas sees order and he thinks order can only come about through design. This is known as begging the question. If you already believe that the earth
is flat or that it is 6,000 years old or that the moon is made of green cheese,
you can easily prove it to your own satisfaction and that of your fellow
believers by saying it cannot be otherwise. Your logic, unlike that of Thomas, may be elegant and even
valid but it still won’t hold water.[i]
The
angelic doctor makes another error which is even more interesting. If the existence of God is, as he says,
not self-evident, no amount of logical pettifoggery can prove that God does
exist. When Thomas Jefferson
wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” in effect he was saying that
he would not debate them. Of
course he wouldn’t. The entire
history of the human race up to and including his own little piece of it at
Monticello argues persuasively that those “truths” were anything but true,
never mind self-evident. All men
may have been created equal but throughout history, some men owned other men
known as slaves. Tom himself owned
slaves, 130 of whom were auctioned off by his estate to pay his debts. What he had meant to say in 1776 was
these truths should be
self-evident. Why? Because I say so. That, my dear King George, is the way I
define the universe. It is an
appeal to authority, to do-as-I-say, not to logic, evidence or reasoning.
But,
you say, practically everyone who has ever lived has believed in God so it must
be true even if it is not self-evident.
Indeed Aquinas himself uses “universal acclamation” as one of his
arguments for the existence of God.
But belief, however widespread, is not evidence of truth and believing
something does not make it so.
Sophie Tucker to the contrary notwithstanding, fifty million Frenchmen
can be wrong and frequently are.
Then
there are all those miracles.
Didn’t Jesus feed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two
fishes? All four evangelists claim
he did. Didn’t he raise Lazarus
from the dead? Well, so says
John. We have actual
testimony. The problem is that
eyewitness testimony is evidence of the least reliable kind and the authors of
the gospels were not eyewitnesses.
They were reporting hearsay decades after the event.
Or to
take a more recent example, over a period of months in 1917, the Virgin Mary is
said to have appeared to three shepherds, ages 7, 8 and 10 years old, six times
near the town of Fatima, Portugal.[ii] The testimony of these uneducated
youngsters about the lady’s prophecies, threats and demands was extensive,
detailed, consistent and persuasive.
It caused a media frenzy and a firestorm of public piety. On the last occasion, the sun “whirled around”
and gave colorful emanations. A
crowd of 70,000 persons witnessed this and some number of them swore to
it. Pope John Paul II was
convinced that this same “Lady of Fatima” intervened to save him from an
assassin’s bullet in 1981. He
recovered the bullet and had it placed in the crown on the head of the Fatima
statue. Can 70,000 Portuguese
possibly be wrong?
Yes. Easily. Bear in mind that only three of them actually saw the
Virgin. Bear in mind also that
some of the other 69,997 apparently saw a large coronal mass ejection during a
solar storm. Of course, it is hard
to look directly at the sun and, for most of the audience, the event was only a
rumor. The audience wanted to
believe and it comes as no surprise that their desire was accommodated by their
imagination. There was no Lady of
Fatima no matter what three impressionable children said they saw and
heard. Indeed, there has never
been a virgin who gave birth to a child, barring such mortal sins as in vitro
fertilization. I regret this
because the Virgin Mary is an elegant, brilliant metaphor speaking to the unity
of the human and the divine. But
virgins do not produce offspring.
An
awful lot of people will disagree with the foregoing which is okay with me but
probably not so okay with them.
These people would rather believe the latter day prophets who claim to
have God’s unlisted phone number, people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson,
Osama bin Laden and the Roman Popes.
One of these clowns (it happened to be Robertson but it could have been
any or all of them) recently challenged an audience with the notion that, since
the existence of God cannot be disproved, the non-believer has an obligation to
be humble in the face of faith, that is, to hedge one’s bets. I agree. The belief in the sacred shared by billions of people
throughout history is indeed an awesome force if for no other reason than when
people believe something it doesn’t make any difference whether or not it
happens to be true. Reverend
Robertson is right. I cannot prove
that God does not exist. What’s
more, I don’t want to. In fact,
I’m ready to admit that the idea of God is
God, and that human society as we know it could not exist without that
idea. This is not so far from
John’s claim, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
God was the Word.” The Greek logos means the word but can also be read as the idea. Words and
ideas are powerful but they have no independent existence. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are
ideas that influence our culture and our values but, as Jean Paul Sartre might
say, they have no thingness. And there’s where we get
into trouble. If you base public
policy on the existence of the Tooth Fairy, your policies will be embraced by
many six year old children because it is in their pecuniary interest to do
so. The policies may be good and
wise and productive on their own merits but if they are derived solely from the
will of God, they cannot be right
legally, technically or morally and you have no business making such a claim or
forcing me to accept it. “What
would Jesus do?” is no way to run a railroad.
Or a
nation. Which brings me to the
point of this essay. We are told
by many devout believers that freedom of religion does not mean freedom from
religion. In America, we hear this
from Christian fundamentalists in the context of their understanding of the
First Amendment. They are often
joined by Roman Catholic bishops and other traditionalists who still oppose the
landmark 1965 declaration of Vatican II known as Dignitatis Humanae. In
Israel, we hear a similar argument from the Haredim and, in the Muslim world,
from Islamists and other conservative Muslims. The agitation is always passionate because advocates are promoting
what they claim to be attitudes and
rules of conduct dictated directly by God.
In
America, the Constitution says in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The second part is clear enough: I can worship however I want and follow
whatever religious precepts I deem appropriate as long as they do not impinge
seriously on the rights of others.
If I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph of this essay, these
same words also mean freedom from religion. Free exercise means freedom not to exercise; no other construction is possible.
Suppose
for a moment that there was a verse in 1 Corinthians that said “You must never
abort a fetus because it is a human being from the moment of conception and
sacred in the eyes of God.” There
isn’t, of course, but only because Paul didn’t know a lot about reproductive
biology. If, however, on the basis
of such a command the United States Congress passed a law against abortion, it
could not survive a first amendment challenge. Might it do so on some other basis? Perhaps. There is no telling how the Supreme Court might view the
issues but it has been receptive to a variety of state laws limiting access to
abortion. In virtually all such
cases, it seems obvious that the state legislatures were applying a thin veneer
of legal respectability over their basic religious motivations. Well, perhaps not so obvious to the
majority of the current Supreme Court.
On one
thing, everyone can agree: all
over the world, religion is losing ground. Ironically, it is this slippage that is largely responsible for the rise
of religious extremism. The
extremists will ultimately lose the battle, perhaps at great cost. It is difficult and a little
frightening to imagine a world without the divine or to speculate as to how
humanity might replace it. It will surely seem like the end times to some who will no doubt refer to it as The Apocalypse. To others it will seem like the Birthday of Freedom.
[i] Valid means
formally correct, but not necessarily true. For example:
All pine trees speak French.
This is a pine tree.
Therefore this tree speaks French.
A perfectly valid syllogism but don’t try it on your botany final.
[ii] 1917 was the mid-point of 16 years of severe
political instability in Portugal, an era in which it had a Provisional
Government, a Republic and a constitutional Junta, 8 Presidents and 38 Prime
Ministers. At the time of the
apparitions, there was the civil war that substituted one right wing
dictatorship for another, that of Sidónio Pais a traditionalist who came to power with the support of
the church two months after the final appearance of the Virgin.
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