One of the arguments that skeptics bring against God is that if he really wants us to believe in him, he ought to make it clearer that he exists.
BY Melinda Selmys
June 10-16, 2007 Issue |
Posted 6/5/07 at 8:00 AM
One of the arguments that skeptics bring against
God is that if he really wants us to believe in him, he ought to make it
clearer that he exists.
He
should, for example, manifest himself in the skeptic’s living room to toss
ideas around over coffee, or present himself for scientific testing in a
prestigious university laboratory.
Such
suggestions, however flawed, give us some ground on which to talk seriously
about why God demands a leap of faith.
The
God in these scenarios is something less of a God than the one we believe in.
Consider
the slipper-clad God with a pipe in his hand defending his existence against a
professor of modern philosophy. Such a God so closely resembles the professor
himself that he becomes laughable as an image of divinity.
More
importantly, though, he is a conqueror, not a courtier. Imagine a young suitor
who arrives seeking the hand of a princess. After a period of exchanged glances
and slain dragons, she invites him to visit. And so he does — bearing a
three-volume tome detailing the reasons why she is compelled, by reason and the
threat of eternal unhappiness, to love him.
Our
initial reaction to this man would be laughter, but if, for some reason, we were
forced to take him seriously, we would consider him a presumptuous, unromantic
jerk.
The
God of the laboratory is less conceited, but is even more unconvincing.
Like
a trained dog, he comes and demonstrates a bevy of miraculous powers in a
measurable scientific fashion. He will have to do this not only once: The
scientific method depends on the duplication of results. Thus, he will have to
come every time a man of science wishes to make further tests of God’s reputed
omnipotence.
Apart
from the fact that this would grant so much power to scientists that science
would quickly come to resemble medieval sorcery, it would also cause God to
cease de facto to have any free will. This scientifically
quantifiable God would lack any personal characteristics, and science would
almost certainly conclude that he was not a personal creator at all, but a
little understood phenomenon of the natural world.
The
problem in both cases is that God is treated as a proposition to be proven
beyond the shadow of doubt, or rejected as fancy. Each fails to realize that
God is a person, and ignores his relationship with us as Father and Bridegroom.
In
Dostoevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov, there is a sequence in
which the devil appears to the atheistic Ivan, dressed “as a well-dressed sponger.”
The consequences of this bizarre visitation illustrate perfectly why the sort
of encounter the skeptic asks for would ultimately be ineffective.
Ivan
simply does not believe it. The devil pontificates about his own existence, and
Ivan replies, “It is I, I myself who am talking and not you!I’m going
to dip a towel in cold water and put it on my head, and perhaps you’ll
disappear into thin air.”
Numerous
people have witnessed the supernatural, and have rationalized it away. Faith
cannot be founded on the miraculous. If it is, it can only be sustained by a
constant infusion of miracles. If God forces himself on the human mind, he must
continue to act in an intrusively supernatural way to prevent the relationship
from floundering.
This
is analogous to a relationship in which a woman marries a man for the trinkets
and fancy dinners he buys her. The husband must perpetually provide more and
more valuable baubles, or lose his wife — but he will never really have her.
Her love is not for him as a person, but for the things which she craves, and
which he gives her.
For
the skeptic, the thing craved is certitude.
If
God were to sit on the skeptic’s sofa, drink his coffee, and philosophize with
him, he would have unanswerable arguments to support his new-found belief. He
would not have to risk being wrong. Furthermore, having been so graced, he
would likely do what Ivan Karamazov does when faced with the devil: decide that
the being who appeared is not God at all, but a figment of his own imagination;
an outward manifestation of his own subconscious genius.
In
fact, we already know what would happen if God brought himself down to our
level, spoke with us and ate our fish. He did so — and the majority of the
people who saw him, saw only a man.
Others
despised him enough to want him crucified, and when they had their way the
skeptics stood about taunting him to come down from the cross and prove his
divinity.
Next
week, we’ll look at the sort of proof that can be provided, and how to make it
convincing.
Melinda Selmys writes from
Etibicoke, Ontario.
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