Great logical argument for not believing in God

Why should someone believe in God? Any god. Or gods. Going further: why should someone believe in any metaphysical, spiritual, mystical, or other-worldly hypothesis?

Usually people don't give much thought to these questions.

Most of humanity is religious in one way or another. They've fallen into some faith by virtue of birth, culture, conversion, or a leap that was taken without much (or any) of a logical underpinning.

Yesterday I started reading a book by Greg Craven, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" It's subtitled A rational response to the climate change debate. Which it is, judging from the four chapters that I've read so far.

Craven's approach also holds promise for being a rational response to the religious debate. This image is from his web site. 

On the left, we see rows for "false" and "true." At the top, columns for "yes" and "no" -- whether to take action on the issue, which in this case is global warming.

The beauty of this grid is that someone doesn't have to put all of his or her decision eggs into one truth basket. As it should be, because nothing is certain. Not in science, not in religion, not in anything.

We have to make decisions based on imperfect and uncertain information. For example, should I follow a particular religious or spiritual path? What are the consequences of doing so, or not?

Here's how Craven describes the marvel of discovering this decision grid:

It was suddenly clear that we were deadlocked because we had been asking the wrong question, one that relied on eliminating the uncertainty about whether dangerous human-caused global warming is real or not before making a decision about what (if anything) we should do about it. The amazing thing is that the grid allows the issue to be decided despite the uncertainties. 

I was stunned. It was a weird "How come I've never heard of this?" sort of moment, because with the grid there was simply no need to decide which side of the debate to believe. It was like a Magical Grid Machine that took uncertainty and turned it into confidence almost effortlessly.

The debate was over not because I'd found a way to show which side was right but because I'd found a way to show that the debate itself was moot. The real question about dangerous global warming is not, Is it true? but, Is it worth doing anything about, just in case it's true?

Substitute "a religious belief" or "belief in God" for "dangerous global warming" and the decision grid works just the same. This is what Pascal tried to do in his famous wager.

He argued that if eternal damnation is the consequence of not believing in God, and heaven is the reward of believing, then a person should bet that God exists. Acting like a true believer isn't that tough, so the possible rewards way exceed the nasty consequence of hellfire, forever.

However, Pascal's approach suffers from the same problem that Greg Craven's students (and others) pointed out to him after he unveiled version 1.0 of his decision grid: if the bottom right box -- "true" and "no action" contains a horrible consequence, then as he says, this argues "for action to guard against any potential danger, no matter how ridiculous the threat or how expensive the action."

Craven uses the example of giant mutant space hamsters. They could destroy the Earth! So we need to put orbiting rodent traps into space!

Obviously that's ridiculous. The reason is why religious belief is ridiculous. Craven says there are two factors that determine which column ("action," "no action") is preferable:

The likelihood of the rows (probabilities)
The contents of the boxes (consequences or risks)

These factors are difficult to estimate with most worldly problems. They're impossible to come up with for religious problems, because there is no demonstrable evidence to back up estimates of either the probability that a metaphysical belief is true, or what the consequence is of not acting in accord with the belief.

Who knows whether Jesus is the Son of God? Who knows whether Muhammad is God's messenger? Who knows whether this guru or that guru is God in human form? Who knows whether yogic meditation will lead to a merging with God?

Pascal assumed that there is only one choice: whether to believe that God exists. But which God? God comes in hundreds, if not thousands, of different forms -- many of them mutually contradictory.

Some religious (or quasi-religious) faiths don't believe in God at all, Buddhism and Taoism, for example. I talked about this in a post about my Anti-Pascal's Wager.

One refutation is that even if God exists, we have no idea what God's nature is. So how is it possible to believe in an entity about which, or whom, nothing is known? The belief would have to be without content – an acceptance of raw existence without attributes. 

Thus the probability of any metaphysical belief system being correct obviously rests on the existence of a realm of reality beyond the physical. What are the odds of this?

Whatever you think the probability is, the next question is more important: What are the odds that your particular metaphysical, religious, spiritual, or mystical belief system is true?

Remember: there are thousands of these belief systems. And as I said in "You're religious, but are you right?" something else entirely and none of the above are two additional choices that must be seriously considered. 

By “something else entirely,” I mean that God—using this term in the most inclusive and open-ended fashion—does exist, but is utterly unlike any conception found within the teachings of any religion or spiritual practice. By “none of the above,” I mean that the cosmos contains no God—again, extending this term to encompass any possible form of spiritual reality—so there is nothing more to life and existence than what materialists claim: matter/energy and impersonal laws of nature.

So our focus should be on the consequence of believing in God (or some other divinity) if, as seems to be most likely, none of the world's metaphysical belief systems is true. The way I see it, there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by being an atheist or agnostic.

If our human life on this physical planet Earth is all there is, it's crazy to waste our one and only existence on the pursuit of what doesn't exist: God, spirit, soul, heaven.

Yes, we can't know this for sure. All we have are likelihoods, probabilities, best guesses.

We need to weigh the probability that a particular metaphysical belief system is true, and the consequences of not acting in accord with it, with what is gained by preserving an open mind and accepting that evidence is lacking for the truth of any religion.

As I said before, and am pleased to say again:

A big benefit of living life without religion is that it commits you to living in the here and now, rather than the there and then. You don't have one mental foot in an imaginary after life, which causes believers to be unbalanced in earthly reality.

...Pascal's Wager is founded on a belief that we can know God's payoff. The anti-Wager is a more honest bet: nobody knows what will occur in the next life, so we need to make the most of this one.

Comments

[Steven Sashen]

The other problems with Pascal's Wager are:

a) If you decide that believing is the better choice, can you *really* MAKE yourself genuinely believe in something when you know you're doing it with an ulterior motive? And;

b) Wouldn't the divine being know that you were disingenuous and, therefore, not give you the valuable bonus prizes?

[Brian Hines]

Steven, great points. They further reduce the odds of a winning religious bet.

[Rain]

When I went to make a comment here, I learned more about the insidiousness of facebook which I joined last year and might come to regret. Anyway to comment without being typepad signed in seems to work fine but if I use it, I connect whatever I say elsewhere. facebook is becoming very invasive.

Anyway to the comment, I thought what your above thinker thought-- you can't fake it and if this is a game to fool people into choices that they don't really believe in, we cannot win. We have to live honestly whatever that means. No way to fake it out. In the case of believing in a god, I think it is separate from religion. Religion requires an action, believing in god might not. It might be fine to believe and continue to live a life as truthfully as we know. Religion is the one that puts out these threats. Since I think all religions can be shown to be going bad directions, the question of what to do seems pretty obvious until some new piece of information comes to change it-- live true to oneself and if that means not believing, then that's just how it is. If it was believing, then comes what to do about it but it's a different question.

[Pranati Banerjee]

We should accept that we don't know everything about the creation of the universe.

Since science has this honesty to declare that it is yet to unravel all mystery, it has strenthens our trust on it.

It is ludicrous that religions, which lack basic knowledge of geography, talk about our
Creator.

[tAo]

My comment is not directly related to the topic of the post, but its very important information that i would like to get out there and share with readers. [and please pass it on if you like.] so i hope that Brian will permit it to stay up. i am posting it at other sites as well.

Also, regarding belief in God... we had better damn well hope that God exists and can help us out of this one, because the world is in a hell of a pickle this time...

My friends, we are on the brink of unimaginable disaster, if not indeed over the edge already. The effects of the oil well blowout may quite possibly be nothing short of devastating on a global scale, unless we can somehow mitigate it. The engineers and other workers are doing their best, but hope is faint and the clock is ticking. If ever we needed a miracle on this planet, this is the time.

--please read more here:

The Murder of the Gulf and the Death of the World -- A Knife in the Planet's Jugular:

http://moonslurpies.blogspot.com/2010/05/murder-of-gulf-and-death-of-world.html

--and especially here:

Oil Rig Gusher is a Disaster of Great Magnitude -- detailed information on the mind boggling oil disaster:

http://donzurdo.blogspot.com/2010/05/oil-rig-gusher-is-disaster-of-great.html

[Suzanne]

"God" is just a concept...like any other. I suppose some label "God" one concept, and others, another concept. All concepts are relative, and inherently liable to be false...although it's endlessly diverting to indulge in them!

[George]

the greatest arguement for not believing in god is surely the theory of evolution.

the evidence for evolution is just far too great to even be debatable and from so many different sources.

and the problem with evolution if its understood deeply is that it shows we are merely one of many lifeforms and animal species on one planet. the traces of our ancestry are found in the fossil records, in vestidual remnants of our bodies and in our molecular DNA.

why then do we associate our own species as somehow having its own god, when we are merely another animal, without a particularly long-lived history, and given sufficient time will evolve into something quite different.

I just it strange that if there were a personal god having some great plan for each and all of us, why he's gone to such great lengths to make evolutionary development appear so unintelligent and so poorly designed.

We, and all the others remnants, all have these anatomical vestigual remnants that are of no use often hinder us, but they still exist and as such they indicate how we've evolved not by some great design but on an ad-hoc basis.

So why would a god who is capable of intervening or controlling our affairs, setup a system which looks so unintelligent and random?

[Brian Hines]

George, I heartily agree. I suppose there are theological explanations for why a divine creator would go through 14 billion years of universe big bang "evolution" and some 4 billion years of earthly life evolution to arrive at...us!

But it sure seems that we aren't special. Americans like to think we are, though. Consider yourself fortunate that you don't live in a country where a politician actually campaigns by accusing his opponent that he doesn't believe in evolution and the inerrancy of the Bible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJG-7s1e5eM&feature=player_embedded

I've heard that this wouldn't be a big vote getter in Europe.

[Brian from Colorado]

"....it's crazy to waste our one and only existence on the pursuit of what doesn't exist: God, spirit, soul, heaven."

On the other hand, "wasting" one's rare and fleeting time exhorting others to adopt your personal worldview might seem every bit as crazy to others...

How do you know the endeavor is a valuable use of your time? In an utterly meaningless and accidental cosmos, how does one reliably assign a value to ANYTHING, much less hold any reasonable expectation that any of the other accidental lumps of temporarily animated matter ought to share your transient and pointless beliefs as well?

Oh, oh, I just used all caps. That's not a good sign, is it?

[Brian Hines]

Brian, you ask some good questions. Here's one answer: one ALL CAPS word per Internet entry is acceptable to the cosmos. (I decided to tempt fate by using two; if I die in my sleep tonight, you'll know the reason why.)

All I do on this blog -- because it's all any of us can do -- is express how I see things. Someone else's results may differ. Results aren't guaranteed.

From my point of view, which for some reason makes a heck of a lot of sense to me, exhorting others to spurn religion seems like a worthwhile activity because I know that (1) I exist and (2) my exhortees exist.

So at least I'm engaged in an activity involving two existents. People who pursue God, spirit, soul, and heaven don't know if what they're seeking even exists. Running after a chimera strikes me as less satisfying from chasing down a reality.

But, hey, each to his own. I can't even get my dog to fetch a stick reliably, so I'm under no (or at least not much) illusion that this blog is making lots of people drop religiosity.

[George]

Brian,

yeah you guys have some mad buggers, but then again so does everyone, they dont get much madder than the hitler after all, produced by the europeans.

[VashObmen]

The suffering and pain are always obligatory for wide consciousness and deep heart

[ryan]

check this debate out http://theresurgence.com/2012/01/17/the-great-debate-does-god-exist