Over the last several months, a lot of ink has been spilled in the ongoing debate between self-declared atheists and self-proclaimed Christians. This back and forth has taken the form of books, TV debates, correspondence debates, and who knows how many blog streams.
My concern in this here is with what appears to be one typical Christian-response to atheists—”I can prove God’s existence.”
Take, for instance, a recent example. On ABC, the 1990s TV star Kirk Cameron was joined with author and preacher Ray Comfort. They debated the existence of God with two members of the Rational Response Squad, a group of loud, self-proclaimed, and aggressive atheists that try to persuade people to denounce theism, record the confession and put it online.
Pastor Comfort opened his defense of God with these words:
“I believe God’s existence can be proven absolutely, scientifically, without even mentioning faith.”
A few points to consider:
1) In this formulation of God, any possibility of mystery is closed down. God is fashioned into a knowable and rationally explicable phenomena, like any other “scientific“ account. The very possibility of God is boxed in and well managed by Pastor Comfort.
2) Evangelicals arguing in favor of God are struggling to wear the mantel of “science” as a way of legitimating their claims. I think this appropriation of “science” into the Evangelical tradition of argumentation is a response to the exile of fundamentalist Christians after the Scopes monkey trial and their eventual resurgence after WWII. Appropriating “science” was an adaptation to the political and social circumstances at hand in the United States.
3) A desire for mastery and control exudes around this opening claim. Comfort wants the debate to be as controlled as God is manageable.
4) In our time, in large part, “science” is imagined to be the final arbiter of truth. Interestingly, as some Evangelicals see it, “science” can prove God; and, as many of the atheists argue it, “science” shows that evolution and life can form without God and that God is an irrational and superfluous idea. “Science” and its legitimacy as an arbiter of truth is the greatest beneficiary of this debate.
5) If the “rationality” or “irrationality” of faith is not of significance to you, then its probably the case that being able to explain God with “science” is not all that important either. To some people, while they may have a close, experiential and very personal relationship with God, God is ultimately ineffable. God is bigger than “science” and “rationality,” they might say.
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely
The day we “scientifically” prove God’s existence is the day we also prove God does not exist. That’s my opinion. Paradoxical, huh?
Re: Proving God Exists
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely: The Atheists vs. Christi
About that word “faith”….
It seems to me that we suffer from using an anachronistic definition of the word “faith” in conjunction with Scripture.
Is it not fair to say that the current definition of the word “faith” (“belief in something out of proportion to the evidence for the belief”) was assigned to that word in the 18th century by anti-Christian writers of the Voltaire variety? And that it was so assigned specifically as an insult to the word, a straw man easily attacked?
Looking at the Bible, I see no evidence for such a concept. I think it far more supportable (to borrow from another thread in these forums) to argue that the Bible discusses “homosexuality”, than that Scripture advocates “belief out of proportion to the evidence” as something virtuous.
Throughout Scripture, God seems invariably to insist that human beings be “faithful”; i.e., reliable and loyal. The picture is closer to that of a well-trained dog than of a closed-minded preacher, and an even better (and far more Scriptural) comparison is with that of a faithful friend, or a faithful wife.
This has everything to do with loyalty and with promise-keeping and with firm alliances. In such a usage of the word, “faith” has nothing to do with accepting creeds on dubious grounds.
And in instances where belief — where acceptance of particular propositions in the thought-life of a person — is praised or rewarded by God, is it not spectacularly obvious that the person in question had astoundingly good evidence and experience on which to base his belief?
“Abraham believed God; God credited it to him as righteousness.” Abraham (then Abram) had apparently experienced personal conversation with God for some time at this point; I can’t know how audible or tangible the experience was but if it were anything comparable to his later vision of the firepot and torch, or of the visitor(s?) predicting the birth of Issac, then Abram was not merely a an amateur philosopher ruminating about the existence of a God he did not know, but a person choosing to place his trust in the character of Another Person who he personally knew. “Knew,” not in some theological definition of the term, but “knew” as I know the fellow who cuts my hair.
Were my barber to promises to do me some great favor (which I knew to be within his power) at some point in the future, I would believe him on the basis of my knowledge of his reliability with promises. I would, if you follow me, “have faith” in his “faithfulness.” But this would be based on my prior knowledge of the man.
And so similarly was Abram’s faith: God made Him a promise; Abram knew the Person who’d made him the promise; he allowed no cynicism, nor the bitterness of hopes deferred, to color his judgement: He chose to trust the most utterly trustworthy Person he’d ever known. Can anyone say this judgement was unsound?
And “doubting Thomas?” This man had been with Jesus. He knew Jesus’ character. He knew Jesus’ miracles. He knew what Jesus had said. He knew the allusions Jesus had made to His being dead, and then rising. (He may not have recognized their significance at the time, but apparently when the resurrection actually happened, the other disciples/apostles recognized it as the meaning of Jesus’ earlier allusions.) He knew that the other disciples had seen Jesus risen, and knew to what extent their testimony could be trusted (presumably to a very great extent). And he knew Lazarus had risen at Jesus’ command.
Given all this, Thomas says, “I don’t care what you — my friends with whom I have sweated and prayed and traveled and striven — say, I don’t even care what I used to think about Jesus. I won’t believe He’s alive until I can see and touch the wounds.”
Then Jesus comes and Thomas believes, and Jesus says, “blessed are those that didn’t have to see Me to believe.” Is this really a rebuke of a person for not believing a proposition for which there was insufficient evidence? That seems to me a horrible mangling of the text: These were not a couple of guys debating philosophy over coffee! The circumstances beg, rather, for a different kind of rebuke: “Thomas, you should have trusted Me. I gave you every reason. In fact, you could have trusted the testimony of your brothers; there was no good reason not to.”
I’m willing to be corrected, if anyone thinks they can prove that God’s idea of faith is that we should believe things without sufficient reason. Please, show me the Scripture; give me the argument.
But I think that definition of faith is just an anachronism we’ve carelessly imported into our own discussions. Perhaps we should abandon that notion altogether, and focus instead on (a.) believing that which we find trustworthy and (b.) being loyal (and therefore trustworthy) ourselves. I can think of no better way to be “faithful.”
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely: The Atheists vs. Christi
Faith being trust…sounds good to me. There is nothing about trust or faith that proves God’s existence absolutely. That’s the point of faith. We can’t prove God’s existence. We trust.
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely: The Atheists vs. Christi
I don’t think science can prove the existence of anything. In most applications the phenomena under investigation are a given, observable in the world, whereas science is invoked to explain the phenomena. So a science that "proves" god would either have to provide a technology that allows an observer to detect god as an empirical phenomenon, or it would have to offer a "god hypothesis" where god is a demonstrably valid theory for explaining phenomena we can detect. Finally, modern scientific method operates on a principle of falsifiability: do the findings demonstrate that a particular theory is probably an inadequate explanation of the phenomena under investigation? Scientific method can never prove that any theory is true.
Do you think it’s okay for a believer to acknowledge that s/he can never be absolutely sure that God exists, but that s/he considers it to be more likely true than not?
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely: The Atheists vs. Christi
I don’t think science can prove the existence of anything. In most applications the phenomena under investigation are a given, observable in the world, whereas science is invoked to explain the phenomena.
I agree. Or I should say, not all scientific methodologies aim to achieve an "accurate" or "truthful" correspondence between word and world. Pragmatic social sciences, for instance, aim to produce useful knowledge, which isn’t necessarily truthful knowledge.
To me, the very notion that God is provable is sort of repugnant. It reduces God to a rationalized hypothesis that is predictable and controllable. For me, the notion that God is provable is just another way of trying to control or manage the infinite possibilities of God.
God or gods or evolutionary naturalism or how ever one believes the world IS, are all matters of faith. We are all believers of some kind, just not everyone believes in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Do you think it’s okay for a believer to acknowledge that s/he can never be absolutely sure that God exists, but that s/he considers it to be more likely true than not?
As far as I’m concerned, for a believer to assert an unqualified certainty about God is to demonstrate to me that they have knowingly or unknowingly capitulated to a "modernist" world view. They have conflated truth with objectivity and this conflation rests on the presumption that God is not a matter of interpretation. A key example of the kind of apologetics that this "modernist" worldview gives rise to can be found in Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict. As far as I’m concerned, to assert that our interpretation of God is not an interpretation but objectively true often translates into a political practice called imperialism and colonialism.
Re: Proving God’s Existence Absolutely:
As both a scientist and a theist I have spent time on both sides of this issue and I believe RC’s comments regarding the definition of “faith” are very well made.
The current debate between science and faith is at least falsely framed as a purely epistemological one. That is fine for science because science claims to be an epistemological system. Faith is not however, a purely epistemological phenomena. I have always favored an understanding of faith such as that expressed in the Augsburg Confessions of Luther (no, I am not a Lutheran, though I believe Luther to have been a devout and spiritually insightful man). Faith there is always being discussed in the context of the question of good works and the role of the latter in “justification”. Luther reminds us there that Faith is not just knowledge, but is something more. Knowing God exists (through Faith) is life changing, it inspires actions. It is not a static piece of knowledge.
Knowing the second law of Thermodynamics is in no way akin to having faith in the existence of God. God, or at least the God of the Bible, is a profoundly personal God. He strives at great length to have a deep personal relationship with us. Belief in God is therefore of necessity also personal and active. It reaches beyond mere knowing and carries with it action. For a Christian Faith is a profoundly personal, changing, activating experience. The “knowledge” of God that a Christian has, is far beyond the acknowledgement of some fact. It is actually the establishment of a relationship.
Consequently, I think the debate on the existence of God between a scientific atheist and a person of faith is doomed from the start because the language of each is (and should be) radically different. “Faith” is a word that occurs in the scientific vocabulary within the context of verification and verification in science has a very clear meaning that at the least includes sensory experience and cross validation by other observers. The goal in scientific knowing is to remove as far as possible the influence of the subject and the “personal”. Faith-knowing, i.e knowing that God exists through faith, involves a profoundly personal encounter with God and you can not remove the personal aspect from it without stripping away all that is a hallmark of that thing we call “faith” in God (by which we claim to know the existence of God).
Possibly a more interesting question than whether we can “prove” the existence of God using instruments of science (which to me is almost a non-sensical question)is to ask, should someone limit their modes of knowing to a single template? Science strives to look at things from the perspective of sensory verification and objective validation. This is excellent when used where it is most useful— in the explanation, understanding and manipulation of natural phenomena and objects. But is success there a recommendation for using science as a universal, complete epistemology? After all, reality is complex. Selecting a single perspective can get you some things, but it necessarily excludes other things, by definition. Choosing the position that all knowledge must meet a standard of sensory and objective validation and then stating God does not exist by this standard is like deciding that a house can only be understood from the perspective of the tools that made it and therefore, there is no such thing as a home.