The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [96]
Despite the fact that virtually everyone labels me an atheist, I prefer to call myself a skeptic. Why? Words matter and labels carry baggage. When most people employ the word atheist, they are thinking of strong atheism that asserts that God does not exist, which is not a tenable position (you cannot prove a negative). Weak atheism simply withholds belief in God for lack of evidence, which we all practice for nearly all the gods ever believed in history. As well, people tend to equate atheism with certain political, economic, and social ideologies, such as communism, socialism, extreme liberalism, moral relativism, and the like. Since I am a fiscally conservative civil libertarian, and most definitely not a moral relativist, this association does not fit. Yes, we can try redefining atheism in a more positive direction—which I do regularly—but since I publish a magazine called Skeptic and write a monthly column for Scientific American called “Skeptic,” I prefer that as my label. A skeptic simply does not believe a knowledge claim until sufficient evidence is presented to reject the null hypothesis (that a knowledge claim is not true until proven otherwise). I do not know that there is no God, but I do not believe in God, and have good reasons to think that the concept of God is socially and psychologically constructed.
The problem we face with the God question is that certainty is not possible when we bump up against such ultimate questions as “What was there before time began?” or “If the big bang marked the beginning of all time, space, and matter, what triggered this first act of creation?” The fact that science presents us with a question mark on such questions doesn’t faze scientists because theologians hit the same epistemological wall. You just have to push them one more step. In my debates and dialogues with theologians, theists, and believers, the exchange usually goes something like this for the question of what triggered the big bang, or the first act of creation:
God did it.
Who created God?
God is he who needs not be created.
Why can’t the universe be “that which needs not be created”?
The universe is a thing or an event, whereas God is an agent or being, and things and events have to be created by something, but an agent or being does not.
Isn’t God a thing if he is part of the universe?
God is not a thing. God is an agent or being.
Don’t agents and beings have to be created as well? We’re an agent, a being—a human being in fact. We agree that human beings need an explanation for our origin. So why does this causal reasoning not apply to God as agent and being?
God is outside of time, space, and matter, and thus needs no explanation.
If that is the case, then it is not possible for any of us to know if there is a God or not because, by definition, as finite beings operating exclusively within the world we can only know other natural and finite beings and objects. It is not possible for a natural finite being to know a supernatural infinite being.
At this point in the debate my erstwhile theological opponents typically turn to ancillary arguments for God’s existence, such as personal revelation, which by definition is personal and thus cannot serve as evidence to others who have not shared that revelatory experience. Or, theists will invoke facts and miracles peculiar to their particular faith, such as Muslims as the fastest growing religion, or Judaism as the oldest religion that has survived millennia of attempts to eradicate