ON THE CONVENIENCE OF THEISM
June 23rd 2001 2001
The next issue, Number 61, will appear on July 15th 2001.
We regret the failure to publish No.60 on June 15th - because of software problems
A Puerto Rican reader has identified two reasons why the idea of God has always been so widely accepted. The reasons he gives are (in my words, ES) - 1) that the God idea is a response to the question "why does anything exist; why is there not simply nothing whatever?" and 2) that the God idea is a means whereby some people can tyrannise over others. My correspondent has asked me to comment on what he has written.
Briefly, I agree with what he has written - but there may be more to it than the two points he makes.
It is a matter of historical record that various learned people have expounded proofs of the existence of God while other learned people have dismissed the perceived proofs as unconvincing. Some attempts have been made to prove the non-existence of any god but these proofs too have never been established as conclusive. It is a much easier task to demolish any particular god-belief than to demolish the whole category of such beliefs. One famous theologian of the twentieth century was able to say, in this connection, that "we cannot know what God is; we can only know what He is not." Another famously safe bet was laid by another such person who wrote that "God is the Wholly Other."
The upshot of all this is that intellectual arguments about the existence, or otherwise, of god in general are stalemated and sterile in respect of the main question they purport to address. The importance of such arguments lies in the gross intellectual evasion and dishonesty whereby they are often expounded and the knock-on effect of debasing human opinion generally. As a somewhat simplistic headline in one of our secularist journals put it ..... "Religion Rots Reason". Anyone who doubts that religion can rot reason may care to ask believers, personally and face to face, how does the customary church service relate to Matthew chapter 6 verses 5-8 inclusive? (See POSTSCRIPT below).
The simple fact is that religions command the adherence, or acquiescence, of millions upon millions of people because of the manipulative indoctrination of children by the family and the wider culture in which they live. That is how religion survives. The 'cradle-believers' far outnumber the converted ...... a fact that is consistent with the idea, floated above, that head-on intellectual disputation about the core belief is a sideline even though disputation about the practical consequences of specific beliefs is often critically important.
Religious belief is effectively an inherited trait not by way of physical genes by way of inheritable cultural constructions. Dawkins has called such constructions 'memes'. Memes survive and multiply for the same basic reason that genes survive and multiply ...... because possession confers (generally unacknowledged) advantage upon the possessor. Religion survives and often flourishes because, crudely speaking, religion is convenient. Religion is a convenient meme to possess.
We are now becoming accustomed to convenience foods - foods that are bought ready prepared to eat without any culinary skills needing to be exercised by the consumer. The craft of cookery is being lost; it is being swamped by factory production of the instantly edible. Religion is the convenience food of the mind - 'produced' beyond the control of the individual 'consumer'; it undermines the craft of critical thinking among the mass of the people.
Wherein lies the convenience of religion and to whom is it convenient? The rest of this article is an outline attempt to answer these questions.
Consider the question 1) "why does anything exist; why is there not simply nothing whatever?" It is obviously convenient to answer this question ... "because of a creator who made it so". The convenience of this answer lies in the fact that it can stand whatever the state of our knowledge of the ways of the universe. If that knowledge is very slight and largely mistaken (as in the case of very primitive scarcely human people) then "because of a creator who made it so" is the most credible answer. The convenience of this answer remains unchanged even if we have developed highly sophisticated models of the past - such as a Big Bang arising from quantum fluctuation followed by the evolution of more and more complex living systems by natural selection. The BB and E by NS can simply be seen (by anyone who so wishes) as the creator's chosen methods of work. There is neither more nor less evidence for the existence of a creator than ever there was. There is no way of testing the creator hypothesis and so there is neither truth nor falsity in holding to it; it is a mental dead-end.
How about item 2) - that the God idea is a means whereby some people can tyrannise over others. Surely the point made in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph means that the creator idea can only be put on display and never used (like an antique artefact). Not so! Somebody (was it Stendahl?) once said something like "God may not exist but god is used".
The god-idea can be, and often is, used by those who wish to exercise power and to control other people. The method is always the same ...... 'We all believe that there is a creator-god; we must all do His Will; I am an expert on His Will so you had best do what I tell you to do and think what I urge you to think'.
This has almost always worked because it is convenient for almost everyone. Human society does seem to need an ordering guiding influence of some sort and what more beguiling guidance can there be than that which is seen as flowing from the creator Himself? Priestly power is human power dressed in god-clothes.
So the god-idea is convenient for rulers. It is also convenient for the ruled; it exempts the ruled from the effort of thinking for themselves. It enables them to enjoy the certainty of faith, the uplift of worship and the excuse of submission.
If religion is so universally convenient then why should we question it and possibly reject it? The justifications for religious scepticism are 1) that the supposed certainties are not certain at all - they are not indubitable and 2) the collisions between rival spurious certainties generate human disorder and strife - in which the more or less innocent believers of this or that religion harm one another quite needlessly. To embrace religion is to make a classic Faustian bargain - long term disaster for short term gratification.
POSTSCRIPT
I assert that the problem that MAT 6, 5-8 poses, for churches that conduct public prayer, is one that cannot possibly be solved in any way that is compatible with basic Christian beliefs. To test this assertion, I asked four serious Christians a question along the following lines 'How do you reconcile the practice of public prayer with the explicit teaching set out in the Gospel According to St Matthew (6; 5-8)?'
Three of those questioned simply did not answer; the fourth refused explicitly to offer an answer. So, putting myself in the role of Christian believer, I asked myself what my answer would be. I identified four possibilities
a) it is permissible simply to accept parts of the Bible that you agree with and dismiss the parts you disagree with. To do this is simply to deny that the Bible is God's inspired word; it is to adopt the secular view that the Bible has no special status - that it is just another part of ancient literature.
b) Jesus did not teach as reported in the verses in question; he has been misreported. This would mean that God has been very careless in His inspired word and so the general reliability of the Bible must be in doubt.
c) Jesus did teach as reported but he was wrong about this matter; whatever Jesus may have said, public prayer is in order. This won't do - a religion based on the word of a mistaken founder is simply not acceptable.
d) it is always possible, when faced with unacceptable passages in scripture, to dismiss literal interpretation and to see the passage in question as allegorical. Most modern Christians dismiss the Adam and Eve story as not being a matter of historical fact. Modern Christians see the story not as fact but as telling comment on the human condition generally. There is something to be said for such a an approach to some parts of the Bible; indeed you can hardly do anything else with much of the Book of Revelation. But not even the most ingenious word-play can make MAT 6 ,5-8 into a statement that public prayer and private prayer are equally valid Christian practices.
At this point, my even imagining myself to be a Christian leads me to pause, fold my tent and steal silently away. I am glad I am not in the shoes of any of the four people whom I questioned. Perhaps there is Christian justification for the practice of public prayer? Any offers?
HOME PAGE