Why I assume a god

Note: This is posted to another blog of mine on wordpress: coincidencelog.wordpress.com about “coincidences” in our lives versus miracles. But I wanted to post it here to since I don’t know that I’ve ever put into writing these thoughts.

We all have different reasons for assuming a god. Mine personally are numerous, but briefly, they include:

  • The knowledge that if the universe and this planet were a fraction of a fraction different, life would not be supported here.
  • And, the realization that, unless you assume a god, anything is permissable. Without the assumption of a god, we become nothing more than chimps. Learning a little along the way, yes, but still relegated to live and die and make room for another generation who will invariably do the same ad nauseum. Law and moral codes become of no use. Yes, without a god, men would establish them because civilized man needs order for life to make sense, but laws without the assumption of a god are based on what? Nothing. If there is not god, there is no moral framework. Even atheists proclaim the golden rule of, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” While an atheist certainly didn’t utter that phrase, many certainly live by it. Some would argue that conscious is dead. I would argue that without the assumption of a god, conscious is even deader, for what is there inside of me that is good? Not one thing. At my core, I’m a selfish, lustful liar. Children are no different, and we have to teach them many ways to be nice to people and to be more selfless. But why do we teach them? Why do (some) strive to be better people? I believe it’s the moral compass that we all share and the ascertainment of something better and higher than ourselves. Without the assumption of a god, we would be attempting to pull something from nothing, and we might as well cash in our chips and go home.

Just imagine waking up one day and finding out for 100 percent fact that God does not exist. Would people feel liberated or desolate? Under such a discovery, I personally believe hope itself would cease to exist. You will eventually get cancer or have a heart attack and your life will be over. Your days are ticking down and even if you wouldn’t have believed in him anyway there is no god to save you. So you might as well live it up. Burn through your credit cards, amass thousands of dollars in debt and go fly around the world. See Athens, the Louvre and London. Go skydiving. Swim with the fishes. Buy a yacht and beach house in the Keys. Have sex with that goddess from work you’ve been eyeing. What difference does it make? And when the last tickle of pleasure leaves your body, what are you left with? Emptiness and less days on your life than you had before.

Without the assumption of a god, what else is there to believe in? Humanity? That’s funny. If you haven’t been paying attention the last 4,000-plus years, man seemingly loves destroying himself with holy wars, political wars and failing to care for the sick and hungry. Believe me, humanity is not worth believing in, dying for … and it’s certainly not worth living for. After all, what’s so special about us? We’re all just really intelligent, cognitive chimps, right?

7 thoughts on “Why I assume a god

  1. Exactly! well written. We would be hopeless if we discovered that there’s no god. But its non sense to say there is no god when the whole manifestation is god!

  2. These are pretty common things Christians are taught about atheism, but I have to say: none of them really hold up to scrutiny.

    I don’t believe in a God, and I don’t feel like “anything goes” or that life isn’t worth living. So how can what you are saying would hypothetically happen be accurate, when I’m a real example, and it hasn’t happened to me?

    As for your specific points:

    1) The fine tuning argument is bogus. We simply don’t know if anything could have been different, and what, and by how much. We can’t even tell if it’s amazingly unlikely that life exists or if it’s amazingly unlikely that so little life exists. No one knows these things, and we may not ever be able to know. So they can’t be a valid basis for metaphysical beliefs.

    2) I’m not sure what you mean by “make sense” or “worth living,” because for both cases, you’ve failed to specify who it makes sense to, or who it is worth it to. Certainly life is worth it to me, and I daresay that it’s probably worth it to you too, even if you’ve embraced a sort of nihilism about life itself. Whether something is worth it is judgment, not a fact, and the only relevant judge of your own life is yourself.

    If you really think life without God isn’t worth it, then I feel sorry for you, because that means that you find no worth at all in the love and experience of your family and friends, any hobbies or past times, moral feelings, and so on. I find all of that very hard to imagine, which is why I don’t think you really even believe what you’re saying when you say this.

    There’s a real myth perpetuated by theists that somehow if life doesn’t last forever, then it’s worthless. But this makes no sense. If any finite amount of life is not worth living, then an infinite amount cannot be either. 0 times infinity is still 0.

    3) I’ve never understood how this conclusion follows either. Even with a God, nothing about the existence of a God makes anything more or less moral than it would have otherwise been. Rape is either wrong or it’s acceptable: the opinion or existence of God wouldn’t have anything to do with whether it was or not.

    And it’s true that if a God existed, it might not permit certain things. That wouldn’t really change morality any, but it would mean that there were disincentives to bad behavior and restrictions on evil actions. But we live in a world where clearly, all manner of horrible things are, in fact, permitted. So if there is a God, then it’s already permitting everything in the first place, and everything is permissible WITH God too.

    The fallacy here is again, failing to recognize that “permissible” is not a concept that exists all by itself: it has to refer to a specific person permitting something or not. And with or without a God, I don’t want to permit, say, rape. I want to stop it.

    You forget entirely that people do have values, again, utterly independent of God existing or not. We care about others: we have empathy. We don’t “burn up” our life savings because we have lots of different values and goals that aren’t just about short-term selfishness.

    I’m not saying you shouldn’t believe that there is a god if you want. But these reasons don’t seem to be good ones.

  3. @Bad – Thanks for the reply. First, no one taught me anything about atheism. I teetered on agnosticism for quite some time in my life and concluded, after viewing the lives of other nonbelievers, friends of mine who are by all accounts good people, like you describe, that there must be something more Or this life is an utter tragedy. My friends would go to work day in and day out, enjoy life and seem to be fairly happy. Yet, I just had a gnawing sense that they were just living … for no rhyme or reason or purpose. Sure, they were living to enjoy their family, friends, etc., but I started asking myself if that’s all there is. Family. Friends. Careers. Entertainment. Food. Death. Maybe I am a bit of a nihilist (if you don’t assume a god), but this seems terribly bleak to me if that’s all that matters in life. Animals enjoy most of the basic things we do, but they aren’t burdened with knowing they will one day die or with conscious or with philosophical thought.

    In my point about the “anything goes” mentality, I wasn’t suggesting that atheists live as if that’s true. They don’t. They are good people too. I was suggesting that If there is no god, not just atheists, but all of us, might as well live it up. But perhaps this proves one of my points. The fact that atheists don’t go on a moral free-for-all, and the fact that there are certain moral principles that transcend all cultures, like say, raping young children, points to the possibility that there exists some basic set of values held by all. Where did these come from? Societal codes passed down? Where did they originate?

    I suppose if I was an atheist, I would adopt Sartre’s philosophy: He said: “The existentialist…thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori of God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible. That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.

    So the theory that life without a god is pretty bleak isn’t just perpetuated by Christians to “win” folks to their cause. It’s perpetuated by other atheists. Sartre also said “man is a useless passion,” and I agree with him on that point too, if you assume no god, which he did of course. I am just trying to grapple with what truly keeps people getting out of bed every day. I probably went overboard saying: “The realization that, unless you assume a god, life a) doesn’t make much sense, and b) isn’t worth living, even if it did make sense.” This may suggest that people should begin killing themselves en masse if they don’t believe in a god. I certainly don’t want to suggest that at all … just that if we knew for 100 percent fact there was no god our existence would be a bleak picture.

    I don’t know if I made anything clearer. Thanks for the thoughtful post.

  4. Maybe I am a bit of a nihilist (if you don’t assume a god), but this seems terribly bleak to me if that’s all that matters in life.

    I really, honestly don’t understand why. And I guess, more importantly, I don’t understand in the least how the addition of a God to this scenario would change anything: make anything more or less bleak.

    There are lots and lots of values and ideals that are bigger and greater than ourselves, but which don’t involve positing extremely out there factual claims we can’t possibly prove.

    I was suggesting that If there is no god, not just atheists, but all of us, might as well live it up.

    Again, it’s like you’re reasoning in incomplete sentences here. why might we “as well” live it up? The reason we don’t “live it up” is that we have reasons, good reasons, why we ultimately don’t want to. Things like caring about each other and so forth.

    Again, you can bring a God into this picture, but I don’t see how it provides any of the answers you seem to think it does. I can ask “why care about what God wants” just as easily as you can ask “why care about what other people feel.”

    Where did these come from? Societal codes passed down? Where did they originate?

    There are lots of possible answers to this question, all of which undermine the reasoning that it must be because of some sort of supernatural edict.

    And yet again: if there was a God, how would that answer the question of where moral standards came from. Saying that they came from God would basically make them incoherent. Why does God consider rape to be wrong? If God has a good reason, then that good reasons exists independent of God’s existence.

    Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.

    As I pointed out though, the statement that anything is permissible doesn’t really make sense. You claim there is a God, but at the same time, everything IS permissible, so what’s the difference? Saying that it’s just because we are on the “plane of men” doesn’t really answer the question of how no God is any different from God in this regard.

    So the theory that life without a god is pretty bleak isn’t just perpetuated by Christians to “win” folks to their cause. It’s perpetuated by other atheists.

    The two statements aren’t contradictory though. Sartre doesn’t speak for all atheists (no one does, really, any more than “non-baseball players” have an official spokesman), and you’ve got to admit that in order to emphasize the problems their ideology solves, Christians really DO have an incentive to promote a nihilistic attitude towards anything other than God having any inherent meaning and worth.

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  6. Why must there be A singular "God" or even a pantheon in order for there to be something more in the universe than what we perceive? Why can't there be both relative insignificance and greater meaning without religion of any kind? Christianity is built on trading belief, obedience, devotion, reverence, whatever.. for promise of a better afterlife. How can this afterlife "guarantee" the cessation of suffering but the persistence of the individual ego awareness? Why is reincarnation any less valid if no matter can be destroyed just transmuted? How can atheists be so sure that their's is the only correct view just because so many religions mislead people? All we really know is that we can't know. We can theorize and debate and analyze the 'evidence' but the nature of existence and what happens when we die is ultimately a mystery. Strange how there is so much resistance to this ambiguity that people vehemently defend one view to the point of hating or killing others.

    • Good questions. Your wise to withhold ultimate judgment about that which is probably unknowable. The claims about the afterlife can't guarantee anything but wishful thinking and hope to people who are afraid to think that this life is all there is. In "The God Delusion," Dawkins proposed a scale by which people can gauge how confident they are in the existence of God or not. A staunch atheist, Dawkins was at 6 out of 7 or something like that. His main point was that while you will find few, if any, atheists claiming with 100 percent certainty that there is no god – and I'm certainly not there either – you will find plenty of believers who are 1 on the scale and who say they know with 100 percent certainty that there is, all without a stitch of evidence.

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