In today’s Salon, Laura Miller reviews a couple of books that take very different positions on the role of religion in contemporary society. The two volumes are Alister McGrath’s “The Twilight of Atheism” and Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith”. After a reasonable and balanced assessment of each, she spoils it all with a final paragraph that provoked me into writing a letter to the editor. Just in case it doesn’t get published, this is what I wrote. (If it is published, I’ll replace this with a link.)
Laura Miller concludes: ” I have to agree with McGrath (and Stephen Jay Gould) that, ultimately, the existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven by means of conventional empiricism.” But the problem isn’t one of existence – it’s definition. To my theist friends, I say “define your god and I’ll tell you if I believe in it.” Spinoza’s god has little in common with that of the “Left Behind” novels. There is no coherence to what “God” is, and without such coherence talk of “existence” is pretty meaningless. And just to make it worse, she tosses in “proven”. What does this mean? Legally proven? Mathematically proven? Scientifically? Proven as a matter of logical necessity? Proven beyond a reasonable doubt? This is just a recipe for rampant equivocation.
I trimmed down what I’d originally written in order to increase the likelihood of getting it published, so let me clarify one point. The various notions of “God” that people espouse are manifestly inconsistent, often incoherent (contradictory), and even absurd (Credo quia absurdum, as Tertullian said). But people don’t acknowledge that and talk about “the existences of Gods”. They assume that everything can be collapsed into a singular “existence of God” question.
For theists, I imagine that each believes that their own definition is The One True meaning, and that everybody else’s is either a distorted view of the One True God or simply false. For secularists, such as Laura Miller, I can only assume that she gives everybody the benefit of the doubt and wraps them all up in some vague, woolly uber-God.
And don’t get me started on “proven”…..