Most people believe because they have been taught to do so

(Continuation from last issue)

The idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver stems from the confusion that has arisen between natural and human laws. Human laws are commands that command you to behave in a certain way, and you can decide whether to behave that way or not. But natural laws are a description of how things really behave.

It cannot be claimed that there is someone who told them to do so, because if we assume that someone exists, we are faced with the question: "Why did God bring those natural laws and not some others?" If you say that he did it for his own pleasure and without any reason, you understand that there is something that is not subject to the law. If you say, as the more orthodox theologians say, that God had a reason to create those particular laws and not some others - you are actually saying that that reason is to create a better universe. But when you take a closer look at the universe, it would never cross your mind. If there were a reason for the establishment of laws that God created, then he himself would be subject to them, and therefore there is no advantage in introducing a god as a mediator. You actually have a law outside and before all divine laws, and so god ceases to serve your purpose, because he is no longer the ultimate lawgiver. In short, the whole natural law debate has nowhere near the force it once had.

In considering these arguments, I move through time. Arguments for proving the existence of God change over time. These were initially solid intellectual proofs, which embodied well-defined misconceptions. As we approach the modern age, they become less and less intellectually respectable, and more and more nebulous moralizing.

Proof of expediency

The next step in this process brings us to proof of purpose. Everything in the world is arranged exactly as it is necessary for us to live in this world. If the world were even an iota different, we wouldn't be able to live in it. It is proof of purpose. He sometimes takes strange forms; it is claimed, for example, that rabbits have white tails so that humans can aim at them more easily. I wonder what the rabbits would say to this. It is not difficult to make a parody of this evidence. We all know Voltaire's famous remark that the nose was apparently made the way it is so that spectacles could be put on it. That kind of parody, it turns out, hits the mark more directly than in the eighteenth century, because since Darwin's time it is much clearer to us why living things adapt to their environment. It is not that the environment is made to suit them, but that they adapt to it. There is no plan in it.

When we think a little about the evidence of purposefulness, it is amazing how people could believe that this world, with all its flaws, represents the best that the omnipotent and omniscient could produce over millions of years. I really can't believe it. Imagine being given omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years to perfect your world. So would you produce something better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? If you accept the laws of science, you must assume that human life and life in general on this planet will eventually disappear. It is only a phase in the disintegration of the solar system. At a certain stage of this decomposition, temperature conditions were reached suitable for the development of protoplasm and the appearance of life in one short period of the existence of the solar system. On the Moon you can see what the Earth is going towards - it is something dead, cold and lifeless.

They tell me that this view of things is devastating and that if people believed in it, they would not be able to live. That's nonsense. Nobody cares what will happen to people in a million years. Even if some people think they care about it, they are fooling themselves. People are always worried about something specific, like indigestion. No one is seriously unhappy at the thought of something happening millions of years after them.

I agree that it is a bleak thought that life will die out. Although when I see what people are doing, the fact that we are going to die out almost seems like a comfort, rather than something that makes my life miserable.

A moral argument

We now come to the later stage of the argument for the existence of God, which I will call the Age of Intellectual Decline. This is the proof put forward by theists, and it is called the moral argument for the existence of God. In ancient times there were three intellectual proofs for the existence of God, all of which were rejected by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Mind. But as soon as he got rid of these proofs, he invented a new, moral proof. He was like many other people: skeptical in intellectual matters, but ready to literally believe in morals the maxims he had sucked with his mother's milk. This illustrates what psychoanalysts talk about - that we are most affected by the earliest influences, not the later ones.

Kant thus invented a new, moral proof of the existence of God, and it was popular in various forms during the nineteenth century. One version of it says that there would be no right or wrong if there was no god. At this point I don't care if there is a difference between what is right and what is wrong. What I am interested in is this: if you are quite sure that there is a difference between what is right and what is wrong, you are faced with the question - is this difference the fruit of God's decision or not?

If the difference between good and evil exists by God's decision, then for God himself there is no difference between what is right and what is not. Then the claim that god is good ceases to be true. If you want to say, as theologians claim, that God is good, you must say that right and wrong have some meaning independent of God's decision, because God's decisions are good, not bad, independent of the very fact that he made them. created. If you say that, then you will have to say that right and wrong came about not only through God, but that they logically preceded God by their essence. You could, if you wished, say that there was a higher deity who commanded the god who created this world, or take the view held by some Gnostics, which I have often found acceptable, that in fact this world as we know it was created by the devil at the moment when god wasn't watching.

Argument of righting injustice

There is an unusual version of the moral argument, in which it is said: the existence of God is necessary for there to be justice in the world.

The part of the universe that we know is ruled by great injustice, and often the good suffer and the bad prosper, and it is difficult to say which of the two bothers man more; but if we imagine the cosmos as a whole as justly organized, we must assume that there is a future life that will bring balance to life here on earth as well. That is why it is said that there must be a god and a heaven and a hell, so that in the end there could be justice. That is a very unusual argument.

If we look at it from a scientific point of view, we will say: "I only know this world. I don't know how it is in other parts of the universe, but if it can be discussed at all, it could be said that this world is a pretty good sample of the universe, so if there is injustice there, it is to be believed that there will be injustice elsewhere as well". Suppose you opened a crate full of oranges and saw that the top layer was rotten. You wouldn't say, "The lower layers must be good, because that's how balance is established." You would say: "Probably the whole shipment is bad", and that is how the scientist concludes about the nature of the cosmos. He would say: "There is a lot of injustice in this world, and therefore there is reason to assume that the world is not ruled by justice, and then there is a basis for a moral argument against God, not in favor of him." Intellectual arguments of this kind are not stimulating for believers. What prompts people to believe in god is not any intellectual proof. Most people believe in god, because they were taught to do so from early childhood and that is the main reason. A strong reason, I think, is also the desire for security, for a kind of feeling that there is an older brother who will take care of you. This significantly encourages people's desire to believe in god.

(Continued in the next issue)