The problems that God is supposedly the answer for
Believers hold that God gives meaning to life not just their life but life. Life
has a plan. What you think or want to think is the plan does not matter. You
need to line up to the real plan.
God gives answers to the quest for meaning in two ways:
1 - Value Based Questions About You. Tells you what you are here for and what
you are etc.
2 - Questions About Other Big Facts - about how we can know and believe in the
important truths just for the sake of knowing them. They are not about your
value but about the most important things outside of you.
THE VALUE BASED QUESTIONS
Attempts to see the importance of meaning in life and how to obtain that meaning
hover around four questions. The answer to the questions can be understood as a
breakdown of what meaning in life means.
1 IDENTITY – WHO AM I?
2 VALUE - AM I AND MY HAPPINESS IMPORTANT?
3 PURPOSE – WHAT AM I ALIVE FOR?
4 AGENCY – HOW DO I MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
What happens if we try to rate the four questions in order of importance?
The first thing we have to realise is that each question is not open to a simple
answer. You have several fluid identities some of which you care little for. To
pick out one and emphasise that at the expense of the rest is a form of
self-objectification.
Your happiness cannot be important unless you have one or more identities that
orientate towards wanting you to be happy.
If enough of your identities that you cannot change reject God's supposed plan
for you then what?
With how you can make a difference sometimes you cannot and sometimes acting is
only a waste of time for the difference does not last.
THE OTHER QUESTIONS
1 The beginning of the universe
God supposedly made all things not out of anything. The error here is in
assuming time is about three separate tenses, past, present and future. In fact
time is more blurred than that. The universe did not start with the big bang.
There was something before that to explode. The way time is not tensed means
that the past and future can be one. If that can happen then nothing can turn
into something or something has turned into the universe.
2 The fine-tuning of the universe
If there is fine-tuning it is not truly good in the sense that for all the
designing the maker of the universe did, he failed to be truly good and to make
a truly good universe. The fine-tuning is not so great now then! The perfectly
fine-tuned hospital is badly fine-tuned when you realise its morality is based
on a bad motive. What if say it is so good just because the maker wants to be
seen as a good god when he is not good? Fine tuning is not much of a help in
relation to faith in God when we have no case for a creator God who made all
things from nothing.
The fine tuning argument ignores luck. If something is already very impressive a large serving of luck can make it seem almost miraculous. And you cannot measure luck. It just happens. You expect the unexpected.
A universe that is too much about randomness and suffering and less about helping us be kind is not fine-tuned for us so if you admit fine-tuning it is hardly very religion-friendly or Jesus-friendly.
Just because it seems fine-tuned up to now does not mean a law is
about to take effect that leaves it as un-fined-tuned as you can
imagine. You need more than the past to decide if there is
fine-tuning going on.
3 The laws of nature
They are not literal laws. They are just things acting as if they have rules. A
blind force is a thing so it will act like a thing. A rock being unable to pass
through a wall does not mean it's a law doing it - it is regularity not law.
Order can just happen and can be accidental and then seem to take a life of its
own. Order can build on order.
4 The laws of logic
If there were no God or nothing, it would remain true that a cannot be not a in
the same way at the same time.
5 The laws of mathematics
2+2 = 4 no matter whether anything exists or not.
6 Information (the genetic code)
Related to the fine tuning argument.
7 Life
God is not life himself in the way we are so God is irrelevant in this matter.
He does not eat or breathe or even struggle with choices.
8 Mind and consciousness
God is not a mind at all for how can there be a mind without a body?
9 Free will
10 Objective morality
11 Evil
FURTHER ANALYSIS
Everything hangs on the last three. All the creating and fine tuning in the
world cannot mean anything without them. They cannot mean anything for the
believer in God.
The best way to handle the last three [Free will, Objective morality, Evil] is
to show how God is useless for the core moral issues.
If God is not good then it follows that he did not give us free will to choose
or reject him and is bad if he did. It is like a trap. It is a trap for choosing
him is choosing evil. The alternative is also evil. As for morality, God fails
to make it valuable or important or true. If it is true then it is true
regardless of what he thinks. Indeed he is only in opposition to it and offers a
counterfeit.
The notion that evil suggests there is a God is interesting. The idea is that
God and goodness are in a sense the same thing and evil is good that is in the
wrong place and time. Evil is not real but a lack. For evil to exist a greater
good must exist. God must exist if evil exists. If evil were real and not just a
lack or absence of what should be there then the reason why God cannot exist is
that he cannot create evil. But what if hypothetically he did not make it but it
was there? So we see the problem is not with evil being real but with the idea
of a perfect creator of all things making it. That is as immoral as saying
terrorists should have nuclear bombs as long as they don't make them! But if
evil just exists then that is not God's fault.
Naturalism – is the idea that nothing in the universe cares about right and
wrong but just does what it does. The moral person is in reality just the
product of amoral nature. The trouble is even if there is a God and there is
something like original sin the universe could have broken with him and he says,
“Go and have it your own way” so that it functions as if there is no God. It is
not true that God is essentially a safeguard against naturalism. Sam Harris
argues that wellbeing and morality are one and the same thing – a view worth
thinking about as at the end of the day the potential to be well and healthy
maters more than anything else. What good is love if health does not matter
first and foremost?
Purpose -
Abortion – if my finger started growing by itself into a kind of person with a
brain I would have the right to cut it off even if just to have a normal life.
The woman's body is treated by nature as life support for the baby and she must
have the right We can agree with abortion though seeing it as a grave but
necessary evil. Nature has inflicted that evil on us.
Forgiveness – that is about leaving the past in the past for the bad person
cannot go back and change it. God has nothing to do with this. Bringing him in
is a sign that you don’t really know what you are doing – you are not truly
forgiving. If forgiveness is a duty as Jesus said then it is a cheerless thing
that you don't deserve praise for.
Marriage – even God cannot really obligate two people to stay together as
spouses. If he can then how come death ends the obligation? The obligation is
relative.
War – once a war starts it is happening not because of justice but because it is
now unstoppable. A just war is a myth. You can only have a just declaration of
war but not a just war. Whoever says they do not warmonger cannot boast for they
do the one thing worse than making war: lying in such a way as to enable war.
They insult the victims by calling a war fair. They insult the civilians and
even their own soldiers who fight in such a sordid cause. It is a very cold and
vicious lie. Only those who declare a war have a chance to know if it is just.
The soldiers who obey them do not know. They are as good as guessing. Soldiers
are hardly heroes of the battlefield for they have no choice from that point on
but to kill. Making them out to be heroes is just glorifying their evil.
Religious freedom - no God religion tells people why they should join it or
should stay away. The prospective convert only hears one side of it and when it
looks like God wants it that way that is hardly any incentive to respecting
religious freedom. We know that chances are that we would not be in a particular
religion if we really had a free choice - a truly free choice is a correctly
formed one!
Suicide – if nobody who is fully healthy or well commits suicide then morally
speaking the suicide is never a bad person. Morality cannot be trusted or used
to lessen suicides. Suicides believe it is wrong but that does not stop them nor
do they feel it is that simple. It is luck not morality that keeps us alive for
morality is no help in such a foundational matter. Plus even if most suicides
are deliberate we cannot know that and have to assume they don't know what they
are doing fully. That encourages people to commit suicide for it is too soft but
what can we do?
If you steal from x you could return the money to filthy rich x or you could
give it to some child whose need is huge. Reason cannot tell you what to do.
Thinking will not help.
All these problems show that as God fails to support morality and is only its
enemy that we cannot say that logic and maths are grounded in God. Morality is
to be about the practical and it is less practical and relevant than you would
be lead to believe. As we have seen it is close to useless. That is a good
reason for dismissing the argument that you need God to believe in morality.
So?
The answers individually fail and fail as a whole.
