It’s still March. Technically. I’ve been thinking about how to do this for a while. I’ve read this idea of few times recently, and I wanted to address it a little. There is an idea that you should be able to empirically test the existence of God. It’s a rather attractive idea, which is why I feel the need to actually address it.
Before we start, I feel it’s best to tell you right now that I’m a theist. If you want to ignore anything I’ll say on the basis that I’m clearly biased thanks to my evil religiosity*, that’s fine. There are plenty of people who’d do exactly the same if I’d said I was an atheist.
Are they gone? Yes? Good. I hated those people. They weren’t witty, intelligent and devastatingly handsome like you are. OK then, onto my actual argument. The way I’ve seen people use to try and test the existence of God are varied, but the most common are probably prayer and near death experiences. Let’s be clear here, I won’t necessarily defend either prayer or near death experiences even under theistic worldview. There are some pretty serious problems with the idea of both of those things. I’ll do a dialogue on prayer one of these days, actually. But that’s irrelevant to the point I’m gonna try to make. I don’t want to prove that specific tests of God’s existence don’t work, I want to prove that trying to do the test using the scientific method is inherently unworkable.
Let us examine the nature of God for a moment**. Assume that He exists. In such a case, there exist four possibilities: He wants us to know that He exists, He wants us not to know whether He exists or not, He wants us to think that He doesn’t exist. Let us examine these possibilities in turn. The first is clearly ridiculous – if God wishes to convince people of His existence, he’s probably gonna be able to do it. If nothing else, the actual discovery of Russell’s teapot would probably convince even Dawkins, especially if it had ‘yes, Dawkins, I do exist’ written on the side. The second and third are functionally identical for the argument I’m about to make, and I’ll be arguing that one of them must be true, so I won’t try to refute them here. Which leaves the fourth. I… actually can’t deal with that one using pure definitions. Yeah, it seems somewhat silly that an omniscient, omnibenevolent God should genuinely not care, but He is ineffable, so it would be premature to rule it out. However, it doesn’t’ fit either with my argument, or with any traditional conception of God. It’s just weird. So let’s assume that the omnibenevolent, loving, caring God actually cares. Probably not too much of an assumption
So we’ve concluded that if a God does exist, He must either want us not to know whether or not he exists, or want us to think he doesn’t. Any empirical test, therefore, that He knows you’re running to test whether or not He exists, he’s going to make sure that you don’t get any evidence suggesting that He exists, isn’t He now. And since He’s omniscient, you’re probably not going to get around Him – if He doesn’t want you to know He exists, you’re probably not going to find a way around that one.
So if God exists, He either doesn’t want us to know whether he exists or not, or He actively wants us to think He doesn’t exist. One question remains: Why? Why on earth would an extant God randomly decide to hide His existence? Isn’t it simpler just to assume that He doesn’t exist at all? Well, now seems a good time to introduce you to the concept of epistemic distance, an idea belonging to, in my opinion, one of the greatest philosophers ever, John Hick. Let’s look at the nature of God, shall we? Almost everyone, no matter how sociopathic they might be, follows the law when they know that a policeman is looking directly at them. You can make a pretty good argument that anyone who doesn’t is totally insane, since they’re quite obviously acting against their own self-interest****. Now let’s assume that God exists, and you know it. Obviously, you’re going to do everything humanly possible to please Him – anything else would be seriously against your own self-interest. It’s similar to the ‘religious believers are in some way less good, since they can’t divorce their thinking from the idea that by doing good they’ll be rewarded later on’ argument. If you know God exists, your free will is reduced, and you can’t really do good, since you can’t really choose to do other than as you do – in the words of Kant, ought implies can.
So if God exists, He has a good reason to keep his existence from becoming a matter of fact, to preserve epistemic distance and thus preserve free will. The Universe is entirely consistent with a God who does this, and any testing is pretty much gonna be pointless for proving either way. I’m not expecting anyone to convert from this argument – I’m not arguing that God exists (I’m a theist for completely different reasons), I’m arguing that He doesn’t necessarily not exist, and that science and religion really shouldn’t interfere with each other.
*Apparently, that actually is a word. Huh.
**I am here assuming the traditional omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. As you’ll see, my arguments don’t really work for other kinds of God***.
***Which handily deals with the ‘we are both atheists...’ argument. What luck.
****Or they think that they’ll be able to escape, but…
