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Dec. 14, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:41
13 Proof, Disproof and Deities
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Thank you so much for taking the time to download and listen to this, my 13th podcast.
This is called God, Proof, and Deities, and it's actually a tasty little rerecording of the original podcast, which I did in a food court in Washington DC on December the 15th, 2005.
I was down in Washington.
To present at a conference, and I got the urge to testify, so I went for it.
And of course, the resulting audio quality from my notebook speaker in a public food court replete with background sneezings, coughings, clatterings, and a siren at 1.2 proved to be too much for my aesthetic sense to bear.
So I did a little re-recording, and I tried to stay true to the original ideas behind the first podcast, but I think this is going to be a little bit easier to listen to.
So again, my name is Stephan Molyneux.
I'm at www.freedomainradio.com and this is the podcast number 13 called God, Proof and Deities.
Thank you so much for listening.
Now, the idea behind the goal towards empirical morality or rationality or the fundamental opposition to fantasy, the destruction of fantasy, must always and forevermore run up against the problem of religion.
I would submit that it's impossible to be a logical and rational human being if you believe in religion or supernatural phenomenon.
And this is not, you know, I'm not anti-religious people, I am just anti-falsehood.
And the problem, of course, is that you simply cannot have a rational view of the world and have that rational view include any sort of deity.
The arguments against the existence of God are so many that it's only worth touching on a few of them here, and the reason that I think it's important to talk about these is that it really is impossible to get rid of the state if you can't get rid of God.
The state and religion, or institutional violence and abstract deification, are two sides of the same coin.
Ayn Rand, of course, pointed this out a number of times in her essays, but I think it's worth exploring here, just so that things can be a little bit more clear about what's at stake when it comes to opposing the state.
We really should not fool ourselves that we can end up in a free society if we continue to allow religion to have any intellectual or moral legitimacy.
And I know that a lot of people are pretty favorable towards religion, and some religious charities do nice things and so on, but that really doesn't matter.
It really doesn't matter what religious people do, how nice they are, how nice they aren't.
The only thing that matters is, is it true?
That's the proposition that God exists.
Is it true or false?
And of course it's not.
It's not true at all.
And that's evident from a large number of things.
I'll start off with just a few of them.
If I define to you that something called a fubar exists, and I say that fubar is a small geological formation you can kick with your toe as you go down the street, composed of igneous rock or quartz or something like that, you wouldn't have much difficulty figuring out that fubar was in fact a rock or a stone or something like that.
However, if I say to you that something named FUBAR exists, and you say, what is it?
And I say, well, it's all-powerful, and it's all-loving, and it's invisible, and it's this and it's that, then you say, well, all you've done is describe it.
You haven't actually proven that something called FUBAR exists.
One of the reasons that religion is so suspect when it comes to truth verification is that religious thinking, for want of a better word, is in no way or has no ever proven the existence of any sort of God.
All that religion does is describe God in emotional terms to children, and it preys on the natural human desire to be watched over, to be looked after, to be taken care of, and none of this has any legitimacy when it comes to determining truth from falsehood.
Thus, to describe a religious empiricism, or a religious epistemology, like God is love, God died for your sins, God watches over you, God is good, God created the world, all of these things are just nonsense, because they don't actually prove that anything exists.
All they do is describe, in somewhat mealy-mouthed and abstract terms, An entity whose existence remains suspect by the very fact that all you can do is create emotional terms around it rather than prove that it exists.
I mean, if I wanted to prove that some invisible particle existed to a physicist, I wouldn't say that that invisible particle was omniscient and composed of pure love and knew everything and saw everything.
Well, the physicist would probably recommend me to a psychiatrist because it would be a pretty nonsensical way of trying to prove that something exists.
So, let's take a swing at some of these ideas around a deity and see if we can't make some sense out of what is actually being said here.
I guess one of the first things is the contradiction involved in the very existence of a deity.
And I don't mean a contradiction like it's consciousness without physical form, because that never exists in reality.
I'm talking about even if you take a religious premise, the contradictions become evident pretty immediately.
So, for instance, if I say God is both all-powerful and all-knowing, then I've created a contradiction.
A being which is all-knowing knows everything that has happened in the past, everything that is happening in the present, and everything that's going to happen in the future.
But a being which is all-powerful can change what is going to happen in the future, and in some weird science fiction way perhaps can change what has happened in the past.
And therefore you have a contradiction between all-powerful and all-knowing.
The two cannot coexist in the same entity.
All-knowing means a perfect knowledge of everything that has been and will be, and therefore an inability to change what will be.
Because if you can change it, you invalidate your knowledge of what is going to happen.
And therefore, if you have the ability to change the future, you cannot know the future.
If you know the future, you cannot have the ability to change it.
And that's what I mean by the basic contradiction between all-powerful and all-knowing when in the same entity.
Now, another way that people justify or claim that they know the existence of a god is to use the argument from causality, or first cause argument.
In other words, the universe exists, therefore something must have created.
That which exists must have been created by something.
And therefore, because the universe exists, we can assume that a god created it, because something can't just appear out of nothing.
It's a perfectly valid argument, very common in the Middle Ages.
Aquinas talked about it quite a bit, but unfortunately it just didn't make any sense, because if that which exists must have been created, then God which exists must also have been created, any gods which exist.
If you allow the eternality or the eternal existence of a deity, then surely you can also allow for the eternal existence of matter.
Of course, to allow for the eternal existence of a contradictory, illogical, weird, strange deity is far less irrational than saying, well, based on the second law of thermodynamics, Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, simply transferred from one form to another.
Therefore, it seems perfectly logical to say that since the universe has existed eternally, it did not need to be created.
But even if you believe that the universe did need to be created by something, you still haven't solved the problem of God.
You have simply said that everything which exists needs to have been created, which gives you an infinite chain of causality back to eternity, which doesn't really solve the problem at all.
So saying that God created the universe and that's how it came into being in no way answers the problem of creation versus permanent existence.
Now another way that we know that there's a problem with religious theology is that there's no negative proof for religion or for the existence of a deity.
This is kind of the smarmy corner of intellectual paralysis that theology throws its sort of cloak over and paralyzes people through indecision and doubt.
So you may have heard the argument, well you can't prove that there is a God Well, you can't prove that there isn't a God, so I'm just going to straddle that foggy fence right there in the middle and split it down the line and call myself a spiritualist or an agnostic or what have you.
However, the burden of proof is not on the atheist.
The burden of proof is on the person who claims for the existence of a non-empirical entity.
So, to take an example, let's say that I walk up to you and I say to you, Dude, I have this invisible spider on my head.
Do you believe me?
And you say, well, I can't see it.
I got that.
You said it was invisible.
So let me try and touch it.
And I say, no, no, no, no.
You can't touch it, man, because it's also non-corporeal.
So you can't see it and you can't touch it.
And you say, OK.
Kind of a tricky curveball.
How about this?
How about I bring my infrared device in and look for the heat signature of the body?
And I say, no, no, no.
You see, you also can't measure its heat.
It emits absolutely no heat.
Neither does it emit any coldness.
It's perfectly transparent infrared rays.
And I continue basically blocking every criteria for proof that you come up with, and then I say, no really, do you believe that I have this invisible spider on my head?
At some point, you're probably likely to say, you know, there's just no way to tell, so I've gotta tell ya, no.
And that really is the relationship of atheism to religion.
Religion posits the existence of consciousness without form, eternal life without sustenance, and so on.
And then they say, well, try and disprove it.
And then when you say, well, here's the negative proof, then they say, well, that negative proof doesn't count.
Right?
So I had an argument with a Christian once when I brought up this omnipotence and omniscience thing, which we talked about just a minute or two earlier.
And she said, well, but God is outside of time.
It's like, okay, so basically every time I come up with a logical contradiction, you say that it doesn't apply.
It's scarcely scientific and, of course, completely illogical.
But it is not up to the atheist to disprove the existence of God.
It is up to the theist to prove the existence of God.
We actually don't have to lift a finger.
I just think it's important that you understand the perspectives that we're coming from so that you can make your own decision with sort of informed opinions from both sides.
Now of course there are invisible entities which exist like black holes which cannot be measured directly and are only detectable through their effects on matter or reality or gravitation or light waves around them.
And that's a perfectly valid approach to take when looking at the existence of a deity.
So if a religious person comes up to me and says This God exists who listens to prayers, who responds, who loves you, who's going to do this, who's going to do that, who you have a relationship with, and so on.
That's great!
Now they have put forward a criteria by which we may prove or disprove the existence of this deity because now an effect is being claimed for that deity.
In other words, if I pray for X then I should have a higher likelihood of receiving X if I'm a pious and good person or whatever.
And if a million Christians all pray for a hurricane to not hit New Orleans, then if that hurricane does not hit New Orleans when it was on its way to do so, then you would actually have some credence for believing in the existence of this deity.
Or psychic phenomenon.
We'll have to figure out which one it was.
But that's another very important criteria when it comes to looking at the existence of a God.
Because a God, particularly in which the religious people are supposed to have this relationship with, and conversations with, and ask them for something, and get something, and so on.
You actually have a criteria for proof there that's very interesting, and of course there's absolutely no proof for it whatsoever.
So the relationship that God is supposed to have with worshippers in no way affects material reality in any way whatsoever.
So you can pray for what you want, you can not pray for what you want, you can have a control group of a hundred thousand Muslims praying for this, and a hundred thousand Christians praying for that, and a hundred thousand atheists praying for an end to praying, And no group is going to have any effect whatsoever on material reality.
Therefore, if you can't measure the effects of something that is incorporeal, or if you try and measure them, it's exactly the same as if this incorporeal thing were not there, then clearly, that incorporeal thing does not exist.
Now the argument that consciousness exists in the absence of matter is also a very interesting argument.
It's sort of like arguing that a rock exists in the absence of a rock or gravity exists in the absence of matter or mass.
Because consciousness is a directly measurable effect of matter.
Consciousness is your biochemical energy, neurological energy, electrical energy that resides within your brain.
that we can call a mind or consciousness, but it is always a directly observable effect of matter, and it requires certain energy to be present.
There's certainly no such thing that's ever been measured which is consciousness without a brain, let alone consciousness without matter at all.
So creating something called consciousness and divorcing it from the physical requirement of consciousness is exactly like saying that there's such a thing called gravity that is completely independent of matter, has no effect on matter, and Can't be traced in any way.
Obviously that's an imaginary thing, as we found out in the 19th century when people believed in something called ether that existed everywhere in the universe, which was never measurable and so on, which was undermined and then finally destroyed by Einstein's theory of relativity.
So saying that an effect of matter, which is consciousness, exists in the absence of matter is simply taking an effect and stripping away the material basis for it, which you just can't do, logically.
So this is another way of knowing that the ideas behind religion are simply self-contradictory and therefore can be dismissed.
In a similar manner, claiming the existence of a living entity, which has no matter, requires no substance, was never born, and will never die, is simply mixing everything into a big contradictory whirlpool and hoping that the confusion will somehow stick with people.
Because you can't say that every attribute that comes off a material entity, like a living organism, can be divorced from that living organism and said to be still in existence is completely crazy.
I mean it's epistemologically unsound and biologically completely insane.
So you can't say that something is alive that has never been born and will never die.
That something is alive that requires no sustenance and no material form because things like alive, birth, dying, existence are all based on biology and material forms and therefore you can't just divorce all of those and say that they exist independently of the material entities.
It's like trying to spend the concept of money rather than any individual dollar bills.
It's a completely inappropriate aggregation of contradictions.
Now, of course, there's tons and tons of ways to look at the non-existence of God.
Like any contradictory concept, you can approach it from just about any angle and disprove it with relative ease.
These are just a few of them.
You can look up as many as you want and I'm sure you can come up with your own as well.
But those are some of the major ways in which you can disprove the existence of God.
And of course it only takes one.
I'm just throwing a couple in there for funsies, but it really only takes one to disprove the existence of a deity.
Now once you've had a look at the existence of God, you can also, if you like, and if you want to go further into the discussion, you can have a look at the premises behind organized religion.
So most of the listeners here, and myself of course particularly, are probably more familiar with Christianity than with most other organized religions, so let's take a swing.
at some of the moral or ethical precepts contained within the New Testament and the Old Testament and within general Christian theology and see if we can't make any sense out of them.
Well, of course, the first thing that religious people say is that you have a relationship with God, and that to me is a very interesting question.
If you have a being that has no material existence, that cannot be detected using any material or logical or effects-on-matter methodologies, then you really do have an entity that, even if you grant that it exists, has absolutely zero effect on the world.
And so the question would be then, what would one's relationship be with an entity that could never be proven to exist, that showed up in no material form and had no material effect on reality?
Well, I think the only logical answer to that would be there would be no relationship to such a thing.
I mean, there would be no conceivable life decisions that you would make any differently in the case of such a scenario or in the face of such a non-existence.
I mean, if I said to you that you have an invisible wall or there is an invisible wall at the bottom of your driveway that you could never conceivably hit, that your children would never trip over, that your dog would never run into, that would never change its position and have no effect whatsoever on material reality and could never be proven to exist, exist or not exist, what would your relationship to that wall be?
Be kind of like, okay, so it's exactly the same as if there were no wall, because that's what would actually happen in reality.
So that's a very important thing to understand, that if a deity, even if we grant that it exists in this abstract odd world or realm, that the fact that this deity has zero effect on material reality means that to all intents and purposes, it's exactly the same as not existing, and therefore you're not going to it's exactly the same as not existing, and therefore you're not going to make any life decisions differently based on the supposed existence of this weird and contradictory supposed
This was sort of the position of what are generally called the deus in the 18th and 19th centuries which was they said okay well maybe there's a God and God created the universe and was present at the beginning of all things and then like a sort of blind watchmaker who winds the watch up and let it let's it run down nothing further in terms of intervention has ever occurred and there's no capacity for a desire for on the part of God to intervene in material reality And these people, of course, had a good deal to do with the separation of church and state in the founding of America.
So that's another position that you can take.
Yeah, okay, maybe there's a God, but doesn't interfere, so who cares?
Who bothers?
There's no decisions that we'd make any differently.
And so, to all intents and purposes, it's exactly the same as not existing.
I mean, if one additional crater were discovered on the dark side of the moon than was previously thought to exist, And I was never going to see it, and never going to trip over it, and never going to travel around it.
Would it really have any effect on my life?
Absolutely not!
Well, what we're talking about here is infinitely less material than discovering a new crater on the far side of the moon, because it's an abstract entity that cannot, or will not, or does not ever interfere in the material universe, and so, bah!
It exists, doesn't exist, really doesn't make a difference, who cares?
But let's turn to the ethics of organized religion, because of course generally you hear from people who are religious that God is good, which is a little hard to understand.
I mean, if God has no effect on the material world, it's kind of hard to understand how any ethical criteria could be brought to bear on the problem.
It would be sort of like wondering whether a person in a coma is good or evil.
Well, they have no capacity to act, therefore it's really hard to figure out whether they would be good or would be evil.
So, ascribing moral qualities to an abstract, contradictory, invisible, no-effect being or deity, and then saying, well, this is a good or evil deity, would be a pretty hard thing to sort of justify and logically understand.
So then, to save this problem, or to save the problem of an amoral deity, or a deity that would not be subject to any kind of moral criteria, religious people have to claim, logically, that God does have the capacity to have an effect on the material world, because otherwise there's no way that they can claim that God is good or evil.
So let's keep chasing this rabbit down the hall.
The wonderful thing about an irrational premise is you can continue to accept every single premise but the last one and the argument will still fall.
So let's say God exists.
God does have the ability to have an effect on the material world that magically can never be detected by science but which allows us to have an insight into the moral nature of God Absolutely great!
Let's accept all of that and just keep plowing along and see what sort of logical interest or interesting phenomenon we get out of this particular concession.
Well, of course, if we are asked to worship God as a perfectly good moral entity, we can only assume that the moral nature or the moral decisions or the moral capacities of God would be similar, let's say.
Ideally the same, but let's just say similar.
to those which would be exercised by human beings.
Therefore, generally across all cultures, it's accepted that premeditated murder or unprovoked murder is wrong, and rape is wrong, and theft is wrong, and so on.
So we would accept, or we would assume, that this deity would have a similar set of moral absolutes to human beings.
If this deity had a completely opposite set of moral absolutes than human beings, we would simply assume that God exists, God can interfere in the world, and therefore, because God does things that are the exact opposite of what human beings would consider to be the good, God exists, God can intervene, and God is evil, which maybe would take the shine off the worship thing a little bit.
The other thing that we could say, of course, is that God is morally neutral because God has a completely incomprehensible set of rules.
Like, send hailstorms every third Tuesday to the middle of the desert is God's moral good, which is completely incomprehensible to human beings, and therefore we'd say, worship?
I really don't know, because I don't know what on earth is driving this deity to do what he or she does, but I certainly can't call it good, because it does not conform with nor contradict any particular known moral theories or generally accepted moral theories for any human society whatsoever.
Now there would be a further difficulty, I do believe, if we accepted that God understood the moral rules for human beings, but did not obey those moral rules himself, or herself, or itself, or themselves, if you're talking about the Trinity, or the ancient pantheon of Zeus and company, then you would have an additional problem.
So if God acted completely contrary to generally accepted moral premises of mankind, then God would be evil.
If God acted in a completely random manner, then we would have no capacity to understand what God meant by morality, and therefore worship would not make any sense, of course, as it wouldn't in the evil situation either.
However, if in the third possibility God has moral standards that he accepts and propagates to mankind, or teaches to mankind, then it would sort of make sense to me to expect God to follow these moral precepts.
Because if God handed out particular moral precepts to human beings, but pursued the opposite course for himself, Then we do have an additional problem, which is called moral hypocrisy, the sort of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kind of mentality that we don't really generally respect in people very very much.
So let's take a look at a generally accepted moral premise for human beings, which is something like this.
If you have the capacity to help somebody who is facing dire harm or grave difficulties and so on, and it is no effort or virtually no effort to you, and you do not help that person, we generally wouldn't consider that to be a very good thing.
So, for instance, if somebody's drowning, and all I have to do is throw them a life jacket, and I don't do that but watch them drown, not only do I show up in a Phil Collins song, but also It may generally be thought that I'm not particularly a nice person for that kind of action.
In a more ridiculous and extreme example, if I'm sitting on my sofa and there's a little button on the armchair, on the arm of my sofa, and I could push that button and prevent the deaths of a thousand people, but I choose not to push that button, then again, it might not be thought that I'm a particularly good fellow.
Certainly not Somebody who would be a moral example that millions of people the world over should worship continually and so on.
Now, of course, even these two examples are far more effort than it would take, infinitely more effort than it would take for a deity that's all-powerful and so on.
to effect a change within the world and bring about goodness, which would make sense from a moral standpoint to make people worship him or her, it or them.
Now, given that it would be infinitely little energy for an all-powerful deity who can intervene in the world, and we've already granted that that deity can intervene in the world, otherwise we have no way of judging that deity's moral nature, It requires infinitely little energy for that deity to intervene in the world and to prevent, say, the rape of a child or the death of a child, and that deity does not do that, then clearly we have somewhat different moral standards, shall we say.
So for a human being, we consider it fairly bad for that person not to expend a tiny amount of energy to save A lie for a group of lives ought to prevent a crime.
Pick up the phone call and call the cops if you see something going on.
People who don't do that, not so good, right?
Given that we have that rule for a human being, but God does the exact opposite, wherein an expenditure of infinitely small amounts of energy would result in the creation of enormous, or avoidance of enormous evils, creation of enormous goods, But God does not do that, then let's just say that we're working with slightly different standards.
Now, since there is no historical, scientific, or physical evidence for things like a ghostly hand preventing a small child from wandering into traffic, or for some way to avoid a good man getting struck by lightning.
In fact, I wrote a poem somewhat related to this many years ago.
It's a very short poem called The Woods, and it goes something like this.
are both eaten by wolves.
And that sort of the amorality of nature is sort of pretty common in terms of our understanding about that sort of stuff.
That, you know, if you're a good man or you're a bad man, you're going to taste equally good to the wolf.
It doesn't really matter in terms of things like that.
But we can be fairly sure that if we're going to judge the moral nature of God, that God has to be able to intervene in reality in some manner.
Otherwise, it's a pure cipher.
We don't know if we can worship God if God is not perceived to be infinitely good.
And so God has to be able to intervene in reality, but God does not intervene in reality.
And I know that there are all these arguments of free will and so on, but there's lots of things which we would consider an evil, which have nothing to do with free will.
A child gets leukemia, or somebody dies because something falls on them while they're sleeping, and so on.
And things are nature.
People die when there's a storm.
Ships out at sea full of good Christians go down like ball bearings into the ocean.
So there's lots of things that don't have anything to do with free will, and that argument doesn't really matter.
And we also would have, within human life, even though human beings have free will and understand the concept of free will, we would still expect some sort of intervention if it was low effort and low risk for a human being to help save the life of another human being.
So we're still dealing with different rules, putting this screen of God gave us free will and therefore he doesn't have to intervene, doesn't really answer the logical or moral problems around this issue.
So the question then exists, well, maybe us and God are kind of working on different theories here.
And that's, of course, a particular possibility that needs to be explored.
So, I mean, we're conceding a whole lot here from an atheist standpoint or rational or scientific standpoint.
No problem.
Let's just keep going and watch all of these dominoes come down.
So let's say that it's possible that God is working with completely different moral rules from human beings.
Well, of course, one of the things that would then be the case is that it would not make much sense to worship somebody any more than it would make sense to take traffic directions from a schizophrenic, because they're just not dealing with the same reality that you are, so they may not be that great in terms of guides, and you certainly couldn't worship them as perfect moral beings.
So then the question is, does God have rules that he perceives as good, which he does not follow himself, which gives us a different category of moral hypocrisy, slash corruption, slash evil, depending on the degree of inconsistency.
So to take an example from, I think it's the New Testament, this example of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we can have a look at the kind of moral rules that at least the Christian deity hands out So, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, you have a guy from, I guess, Samarita, who's walking along the road in the old biblical times, and he sees a guy bleeding and burnt and broken and bruised, lying in a ditch.
Actually, I don't know if he's burnt, but definitely broken and bruised and bleeding.
And so he drags this guy up, and he binds his wounds, and he gives him water, and he takes him to a doctor, and that's the parable of the Good Samaritan, that if somebody is in distress, and you have the capacity to aid them, you should do so.
Now, the rule, then, that God gives to mankind is a rule around intervening, where you have the power and capacity to do so, in a situation where somebody's going to die otherwise.
Now, of course, the real question is, why wouldn't God do this, right?
If it's a moral rule for human beings, then it has to be a moral rule for God.
Because if we would consider a human being evil for not intervening when they have the power and capacity to do so, to prevent an evil or to promote a good, definitely to prevent an evil.
Then if God doesn't do it either, we can have some serious and logical questions about God's moral nature.
And the moral nature here that is revealed in this particular parable is one of extraordinary hypocrisy.
I mean, dare I say it, infinite hypocrisy?
Yes, I think I probably could logically say that.
Because God says, here's a moral rule which you should live by.
That's a good thing to do.
Help those in need, whatever, if you have the power to do so.
God, of course, has the power to do so, and has the capacity to intervene in human affairs, and absolutely does not do so.
And therefore, God could easily be said, and logically, perfectly logical to say, God is not following his own moral rules.
In fact, he's doing the complete opposite, which makes him not only kind of corrupt and evil, but definitely a moral hypocrite of near biblical proportions.
But hey, let's be really nice guys.
Let's be good Samaritans to the broken body of theology and rescue it as best as we can and see if we can't find any other issues that might occur within this body of thought, I guess you could say.
So let's accept everything so far.
God exists.
God is perfectly good.
Let's get rid of all the contradictions, the moral hypocrisies, any of the things which we've been talking about so far, and let's say that an invisible being exists who's perfectly morally good, who can affect the universe, and we don't care that he doesn't follow the moral rules, that he hands down to mankind, he's infinitely good, we should worship him, and so on.
Fine.
There's no logical reason whatsoever why, if you allow one of these entities to exist, why only one of these entities should be logically allowed to exist.
So, if you're going to allow for the existence of non-corporeal, non-verifiable, this, that, and the other, can't be figured out by science, can't be reasoned out through logic, has no effect on the world, and so on, there's absolutely no reason why only one of these should exist.
So, to go back to the invisible spider on my head situation, if I tell you that I have this invisible spider on my head, and you can't detect it in any way, shape, or form, and you can't reason it out, and blah blah blah, there's absolutely no logical reason why I should only claim to have one on my head.
There could be a billion, there could be one, there could be none.
There's absolutely no reason.
And of course, if you're going to allow for non-corporeal consciousnesses to exist, there's absolutely no reason why those consciousnesses should all be infinite, all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful, whatever.
You can have ghosts.
You can have fauns.
You can have fairies.
You can have pixies.
You can have imps.
You can have demons.
You can have leprechauns.
You can have anything that you want.
There's absolutely no reason, even if you allow for all of these beings to exist, or any of these beings to exist, why only one of them should exist.
There's no more logical reason to allow for the existence of a Christian deity, which is monotheistic, of course, despite the fact that there are about 8,000 saints and there's a Holy Trinity.
Let's just say that we'll take it at face value and it's monotheistic.
There's absolutely no reason why only one God should exist and there's absolutely no reason why the Christian deity should be allowed to exist or be perceived to exist any more with any more validity than Osiris or Zeus or the ancient pantheons of Roman religions or anything like that.
So even if we accept that God exists, God is all good, we accept all the contradictions, there's absolutely no reason to believe that only one of these imaginary beings exists.
So, as far as the precepts of organized religion goes, well, you have to accept that God exists, you have to accept that God is good, you have to accept that God can intervene but chooses not to, despite the fact that he tells us to.
Fine.
Accept all of that.
So they have to tell you that God exists, and then you have to believe that only their God exists, and only their God is good, and all other gods are false gods, and so on.
And this is really, really beginning to push it as far as logic goes.
I mean, it's illogical from the very beginning, but this part is just becoming really, really crazy.
So my imaginary perfect rock exists, and only one exists, and no other ones could conceivably... I mean, you're just making stuff up here in a really fantastical kind of manner.
So I remember having a discussion once with a Christian who was telling me that the divinity of Jesus Christ can be deduced by the fact that lots of people got crucified for the sake of his divinity, right?
So they must have seen something really cool or really miraculous in order to want to go and get themselves crucified and to suffer all of the physical torments That the Romans heaped upon them.
So, you know, you can sort of deduce the divinity of Christ from that.
And, of course, my response to it would be, or was, that you remember a couple of years ago there were these guys who thought that the comet that was coming by was the mothership to heaven or something like that, and they cut their testicles off and then killed themselves to join that comet.
Well, if you're going to say that Jesus Christ is divine because people died for him, then, of course, you're going to have to say that that comet is also divine because people died for that.
But let's plunge on and look at one other logical problem.
So, if you say, as somebody has said, that the age of miracles is over, and that God no longer directly intervenes in human affairs, or that maybe God never directly intervened in human affairs, then the question of course becomes, how do we know about the existence of God?
If God does intervene in human affairs, then of course he's subject to the problem of the Good Samaritan.
If God does not intervene in human affairs, then you save God's morality, but of course you don't end up with anything that you would logically be able to worship.
But the other problem that you have is, if God does not directly intervene in human affairs, then how on earth do we know about the existence of a deity?
So then religious people basically say, well, I had a dream, I had a vision, God told me when I was sleepwalking, I starved myself to death in a monastery for two months, and lo and behold, I had these visions.
I went without sleep for two weeks, and lo and behold, I had these visions.
Which, of course, indicates that God is reaching down into somebody's consciousness and affecting their thinking and revealing himself and saying, OK, write down these words, here are these commandments, here's this book, you should worship this, you should do that, here are these rules, here's my son, and blah blah blah blah blah.
And then what happens now that the Age of Miracles is over is, you know, God doesn't do that anymore, right?
There is no loaves and fishes.
There is no walking on water.
There is no burning bushes.
There is nothing like that.
And so it's sort of hard to understand why, if God did intervene, that he no longer intervenes, and if he didn't intervene, then how on earth do we know anything like God exists?
And, of course, the Bible is then perfectly false if God didn't intervene.
But then to say that God did intervene at one point gave us the Bible and this and that and the other, and now, when we can actually measure and verify God's intervention, miraculously, God has just sort of stopped intervening, that's a pretty important thing, logically, to have a look at.
And to me, it's part of kind of the insulting nature of religious belief, or of those who have religious beliefs.
When they talk about these things with atheists, who question them, and they say, oh yeah, well, see, there were all these miracles, right?
At a time when there were no video cameras, and no scientific method, and no way of verifying them, there were all these miracles, see?
And that's what made everybody religious, and made everyone believe in Christ, or Muhammad, or the Buddha, or whatever, right?
But now, now that we have science and recording equipment and video cameras and spectrographs and so on, now, miraculously and weirdly, the age of miracles is over and you can't any longer verify the existence of a deity through appeal to miracles, right?
If there were miracles all over the place, we certainly would think that there was a hand of something at work.
So, to say that we should believe in God because there were all these miracles, and now that we can actually detect and validate the existence of miracles to say, oh gee, you know, now there aren't any miracles, it's just kind of annoying.
It's kind of insulting.
I mean, I'm not sure what kind of intellectual capacities they think that atheists are capable of, but it's not a very high bar to get over to prove that all this stuff is the purest nonsense.
So, sort of to sum up, to say that God does not intervene in human affairs does safeguard from the moral problems of letting trees fall on babies and children die of leukemia and so on, but it also raises some pretty significant questions about how we know that God does exist if he doesn't interfere in human affairs at all.
Then somebody who phones you up and says, I've just had a vision and this infinite being has told me that he exists and what to do with my life and how I should spend my days and nights and particularly my Sunday mornings, Then that person is probably, well, actually definitely suffering from a delusion because God is not impressing himself on human mind or human affairs at all.
But if God does impress himself on human mind and human affairs to begin with, then you can say, yes, we have knowledge of God because this, that, or the other, but then God is perfectly willing to intervene and then force prey to the problem of the Good Samaritan non-intervention moral problem.
But okay, let's take even all of the above and scrub it and pretend that there's no logical problems with it at all, and let's keep plowing on into this sort of heart of darkness of religious derangement, I guess you could say.
Certainly illogic.
Now, people who are religious generally don't say, well, I like to be religious because that's how I was raised, that's what I'm used to, it's an opinion, like I like quail, or I like blue, or I like a particular kind of tattoo.
So they generally say instead that religion is true, that Christianity is true, that Christ did die for your sins, that Muhammad did do X, Y, or Z, that Buddha did do A, B, or C, and that's objectively and validly true, that it exists, and so on and so on and so on.
So it's not an opinion for religious people, it's a basic fact.
And so they say also, not that it's just true, but that it's better, that it's morally better, that it makes you a happier person, a better person, and so on, to believe in these things.
So in the same way that a doctor will tell you that if you take a particular course of action to remediate a medical problem, then that medical problem will get better, So, a prescription for action which is based on a moral certainty should have some measurably beneficial effects to society.
do a particular kind of dance or look at chicken entrails to figure out the future, you should just take the antibiotics, get some rest, so when you'll get better.
So a prescription for action which is based on a moral certainty should have some measurably beneficial effects to society, right?
So if religion is the medicine of the soul, as I believe moral philosophy is, if religion is the medicine of the soul, then where we have more religion, we should have better human conditions.
This would sort of make sense.
It would be a way of determining the effect of a theory, if not the truth of a theory.
So even if I prescribed antibiotics because God told me to, rather than I had any particular medical knowledge, you would still get better and we would at least have some correlation between that.
It wouldn't prove the existence of a God if everything to do with religion were better off, or everyone to do with religion were better off.
But it would at least say that there's some validity somewhere to religious theories.
Now there are two general areas that we can look at to figure out the value of religious precepts from a sort of social organizational standpoint.
The first thing that we can do is look at the past in the West and look at when Christianity was the dominant form of religion.
So you can look at sort of the fall of the Roman Empire from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Dark Ages through the Middle Ages, through the Quattrocento, to the later Middle Ages, and up to the Enlightenment, and so on.
Now, this is when religious precepts, religious philosophies or theologies were dominant within society, and the Church and the State were unified, just as you would expect to be beneficial, given what's in the Bible and given the logic of theology.
And we can sort of look at, well, were those societies better off or worse off than the societies that were more atheistic before and after?
Now, the religion in the Roman Empire is very complex.
We don't have to get into it.
I mean, there was a lot of lip service.
There were official gods, but nobody really believed.
We won't really get into that, because it's too complex a topic for this podcast.
But let's look at something like the rise of the Enlightenment philosophies that occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries, where, for a variety of reasons, Christianity was heavily questioned, heavily put under the microscope, and the separation of church and state was finally achieved in general in Europe across the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Fantastic!
So, where religious philosophies are more dominant, it would seem to me that there is an inverse proportion between that dominance and the very success of human life in those societies.
So, for instance, when religious philosophies were dominant, then society was really much worse off in the West.
In the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages and so on, life was a complete wretch-fest of horror, shame, degradation and early death.
And, of course, you had endless religious wars, you had the Inquisition, you had the corruption of the clergy, and God knows what happened to the altar boys, but I bet you it wasn't that dissimilar.
In fact, it was probably more prevalent than it is now.
So, in general, we can say that even if we accept all of the premises of theology, what we can actually do is compare societies where theology is dominant and look at the success of those societies in terms of even basic and objective measures.
We don't even have to get to subjective things like happiness.
We can look at things like infant mortality, longevity, nutrition, number of calories, amount of freedom, and all that kind of stuff.
Things which are objectively measurable.
So that's one thing that we can look at into in the past, and sadly, but predictably, based on the logic of theology, we find that the greater dominance that theology has in the world, the more that human beings are miserable, the worse off they are, the less freedom they have, the less food they have, the less mobility they have, the less life in terms of longevity the less food they have, the less mobility they have, the less life in terms of longevity and infant mortality they have, and I think we
So we can look at that sort of lab of history, but we can also look in the present, in the sort of second option, we can look in the present and look across the world and compare societies where theology or religious instruction dominates the society, and we can also compare that to other societies where religious indoctrination or theology is not dominant within society, at least from a statist kind of level.
So, if we look over at our Muslim friends to the east, we can see that where Sharia law and Muslim theology is the dominant form of legality or state coercion, then we can see that things pretty much are not that great for the average individual.
There's no freedom.
There's incredibly brutal legal systems.
There's no rights for women and no conceptual rights for children.
There's a uniformity of belief that can only come about through bullying and coercion, especially of the young.
And we can generally say that these societies are pretty badly off.
And of course the only way that they're not completely destitute as they were before the Second World War is because we're lack of the oil.
And of course they didn't even invent the oil, they just nationalized it from Western concerns.
So I think it's fairly safe to say that if we look in the modern world, where you have a dominance of theological beliefs within society, you have a pretty wretched state of affairs.
Now, you can also talk about communist societies or heavily socialistic societies, especially those based on these sort of religion is the opiate of the masses theologies.
Sorry, oops, a bit of a slip of the tongue there, although it's not that far off.
Economic philosophies and political philosophies and Marx and Engels and so on.
Well, these societies, of course, came out of strongly religious societies without going through a separation of church and state.
In fact, I can't think of a single example of a country that had the separation of church and state that ended up as a communist entity.
It always goes from a heavily theological society to a heavily communistic society.
As you look in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, and you look at Cambodia, and you look at Russia, all the other sort of communist societies, such as Cuba, you go from heavy religion to heavy communism.
And communism is a subset of religion where you have the state in the center instead of God.
We can get into that another time.
But basically, both communism and theology are subsets of irrationalities and collectivism, and so it would not be surprising that those societies dominated by irrationality, or irrational absolutes in particular, enforced through the power of the state, the universal power of the state military, generally tend to be the worst societies in the world to live in.
So I think this is another way of looking at the effect of religious philosophies compared to their stated goals.
So religious philosophies or theologies say, if you believe you'll be happy, if you believe you'll be great, And, of course, the Bible perfectly says that your leaders are anointed, that you give render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and so on, so it has no problem with secular authority.
In fact, it has no problem with secular authority in the church being one of the same.
And when you follow this philosophy in society, you end up with particular wretchedness, a peculiar and horrifying kind of wretchedness, that only the separation of church and state seems to diminish, or at least alleviate.
To some degree, until the born-again Christians end up ruling the United States.
Oh wait, I think they almost are at the moment, which is sort of why we have a war.
But anyway, we can get into that topic another time.
Therefore, to say that God exists and that that existence of God and belief in God is beneficial to human beings is directly contradicted by the experiences of both history in the West and modern examples in the Muslim world, and therefore if you have a supposed cure for an ailment called unhappiness, which is religion, which actually produces and exacerbates more unhappiness, then it's kind of like a medical procedure that you claim is going to help people, which actually kills people.
And so I think that you could generally say, if that were the case consistently, both in history and across the world in the present, that this supposed cure actually makes everybody worse, That there's something kind of wrong with the theory of the cure, which of course I would point out, and many other atheists would point out, is just the irrationality of it at its base.
And the fact that it's false, of course.
Now, to get into the homestretch, and of course, thank you for listening so far.
I hope this has been of interest to you.
To get into the homestretch, let's look at how one goes about developing knowledge within reality.
Well, there's sort of two approaches, right?
The first approach is to sit down and pray for it, like if you want to discover the nature of reality, or whether there's such a thing as atoms and so on.
You can either sort of sit down and pray and hope for the answer to be revealed to you in a sort of blinding flash of biblical insight, or you can create theories, subject them to experiments, reproducible experiments, submit them to peer review, present them at scientific conferences, basically to use the scientific method of logical construction of theories, followed by empirical validation of results.
And those are sort of two methodologies of approaching truth.
Now, if you look at the sum total of human knowledge that was developed during the Dark Ages and the Early Middle Ages, compared to the sum total of human knowledge that was brought into being after Francis Bacon and others began to propagate the idea of the scientific method in the 17th century, then you can really see the difference between these two methodologies for gaining information about the world.
So when religious theology is a dominant, human knowledge stagnates and in fact declines.
In fact, if the Arabic world or the Arabian world had not hung on to all of the ancient treasures of literature and philosophy that came out of Rome and Greece during the Middle Ages, but had allowed the Catholic Church to burn them, we'd probably still be stuck there.
But the sum total of human knowledge increases very little to none, and in fact generally can be said to decrease enormously.
When theologies are in charge of intellectual development, the world, the universities, and so on, however, when the scientific method is in charge of things, human knowledge rises asymptotically enormously.
There's no ceiling.
There's no limit.
It's absolutely fantastic what can happen.
I mean, just think of all the technology that's involved in you hearing my voice right now.
So, if you subject these two methodologies of knowledge to the scientific method, you can find that one of them produces no knowledge.
In fact, it could be said to be producing negative knowledge, in that it actively inhibits the progression of science.
All major scientific advances that occurred in the West were enormously opposed by the Christian Church.
So, given that the scientific method is a perfectly valid, in fact, the most valid method for determining the value of contributions to knowledge, Then theology must itself be subjected to the scientific method in terms of the value of its contribution, which is found to be neutral at best and probably negative at worst.
So this is another way of knowing that the theory is false, that the practice is false, that the ideas are false, that it's all just nonsense that people are spouting, because it does not produce any value when you look at it objectively in terms of human knowledge or human progression, both Economically, materially, intellectually, logically, it does nothing but inhibit and withhold the capacity of human beings to advance themselves in any material form, and I would also argue in any non-material psychological form, happiness, and this kind of stuff as well.
So that is very important to understand.
When we're looking at a theory, like theology, we can actually measure the effects of that in the past in the West and the present in the Muslim countries, and see the effects of theology when put into practice, all uniformly negative, all uniformly horrible, and so this is another way of knowing that theory is false.
And finally, to wrap it up, in the area of dispute resolution, religion can be seen to be an enormous, enormous cost and brutality in human society, the generation of endless amounts of violence, destruction, and death.
And the reason for that is quite simple.
If you and I are both scientists, and I have a theory which says a ball, when thrown at the ground, bounces yay high, and you have a theory which says a ball, when thrown at the ground, bounces two yay highs, then how is it that we resolve our disputes?
Well, We get a ball, we throw it at the ground, and we measure how high it goes, and either one of us is right or both of us are wrong.
We can't both be right because we have contradictory answers, but we can easily resolve our disputes through appeal to the scientific method, to measurement, to peer reviews, to all of that kind of good stuff, and we really don't have to worry about any personal conflicts getting in the way of us just sort of making our minds up about these things based on external evidence.
However, when you have irrational absolutes, like divine commandments, like shoulds and have-tos that are perfectly backed up by infinitely good, all-powerful absolutist deities, then you have real problems solving conflicts within human societies.
How on earth can you solve disputes between religious people?
They either agree to disagree or they go to war.
There is no possible other way of having religious people resolve their disputes within society because there's no capacity to externally measure any of these ideas.
To measure the logic, to measure the effect, to measure the empirical effects, to measure the effects on the senses.
There's absolutely no way to measure these effects.
So there's absolutely no way to resolve disputes between religious people.
Which is why religious people either kind of stick apart, they don't really hang out together if they're from different sects, or they go to war.
And the real difference is the separation of church and state, as we can see from our friends over there in the Middle East, who don't even have a word for secular, let alone for the separation of church and state.
So if one group has an absolute vision that women should be worshipped, and another group has an absolute vision that women should be slaves, and another one has an absolute vision about something else, how on earth are they going to resolve their disputes?
You simply can't do it in any way shape or form, which is why when religion dominates a society, human conflict is unbelievably high.
And it's either resolved through forcing everyone to be the same in a top-down dictatorial manner, in a theological manner, such as Iran, Or you simply have endless civil wars as you had in the European communities in the sort of mid to late Middle Ages.
Because, of course, there is no such thing as a God.
And because there is no such thing as a God, whenever people are getting these crazy impulses or these crazy visions, all they are is crazy visions.
They're all specific to the individual.
They're all based on whatever history, both in terms of mental distress and mythological exposures that they've had.
But there's no truth in any of it.
It's exactly like a waking dream, and instead of these people looking inward and saying, Oh, I've had an impulse to do something that's very interesting.
I've had an impulse to invade Iraq.
How should I look at that?
That's kind of a weird thing.
What they do is they believe that those impulses come from an eternal and perfect and omnipotent and absolute deity.
So how are they going to question these things?
They don't view them as their own impulses.
They view them as coming from outside.
And to be psychologically precise, when somebody prays and asks God for what they should do, if they get a response, it's obviously not from God, because such a thing doesn't exist.
What they're getting is a response from that part of their own psychology that believes that it is God.
So it's their own megalomaniacal impulses that are responding to them, which they're taking as absolutes.
This is really not a situation for good mental health.
So obviously there's an enormous amount to say on this topic, but I'm not going to try your patience.
I'm already over 52 minutes.
So please feel free to drop by the website freedomainradio.com.
Feel free to drop me an email.
My name is Stephan Molyneux, of course, and I am at freedom at freedomainradio.com.
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