Merry Christmas Eve to all, and the not-exactly-Volokhian pace of blogging will no doubt slow down a bit over the next couple of days, and then our ensuing trip. But here's something to puzzle over for a while: can you prove that God does not exist? This Slate article sums up the arguments.


An anonymous message board respondent going by A-bierce (what makes Slate so great are the anonymous message board respondents) correctly makes the most obvious argument against the author (who seems to generally argue that atheists have no more logic on their side than men of faith do), which is what I like to term the "invisible pink elephants argument". I posit that small flying (silent!) invisible pink elephants loom above your head but dart out of the way when you try to touch them. This is possible; you cannot prove that it is not. Nobody who reads this will ever, under any circumstances, believe that they exist, however. Why? As Philosopher A.J. Ayer wrote, "it is a mistake to demand a guarantee where it is logically impossible to obtain one." This is true here as well.


This brings me to my two major complaints about Holt's argument, which is that he is too quick to dismiss the two most solid arguments (other than raw antifaith) for the athiest. The first is the logical positivist point of view above. Since, by hypothesis, there is no scientific way of determining whether or not God exists (I knew a Sunday School program here that argued that all of the archaeological evidence of the age of the Earth was consistent with their belief that God created the earth a mere 6000 years ago, since he could have just created the fossils and such to give the planet the illusion of age. Sheesh.), it's almost senseless arguing about it. To say that there is no way of testing whether God exists or not is to say there is nothing that must necessarily happen because he does or fail to happen because he does not. So in that sense, a logical positivist who thinks that the question "is there a God?" is about as a meaningful (what would it *mean* for God to exist or not exist?) as the question "is there a flumph?" declares himself an atheist. Fine.


Holt also rejects out-of-hand without explanation the argument that the standard definition of God gives rise to irreconcilable paradoxes. He spends some time describing the so-called "Problem of Evil" (my essay on the subject is here), but none describing the most basic paradoxes of God:


Omnipotence: Can God create a rock he cannot lift? If not, he's not all-powerful when it comes to creating things, is he? If so, he's not all-powerful when it comes to lifting things, is he? If God creates an immovable wall and an unstoppable force, what happens when he crashes them into each other? It is sometimes held that God can only do things which it is logically possible to do, but this hardly gets us out of the problem. When God tries to create the rock, which is the impossibility? Creating the rock, or lifting it?


Omniscience: If God knows everything, this does away with free will. To quote Tom Stoppard:

Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its positions and direction and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

Though philosophy is carried on as coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of “irrational” or “having the worse arguments,” he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief. He will be trailed, of course, by the philosopher furiously hurting philosophical imprecations: “what do you mean you’re willing to be irrational? You shouldn’t be irrational because. . .” and although the philosopher is embarrassed by his inability to complete this sentence in a non-circular fashion– he can only produce reasons for accepting reasons– still he is unwilling to let his adversary go.

George: To begin at the beginning: is God? (pause.) I prefer to put the question in this form because to ask, ‘Does God exist?’ appears to presuppose the existence of a God who may not . . . To ask, ‘is God?’ appears to presuppose a being who isn’t, . . . and thus is open to the same objection as the question, “Does God exist?” . . . but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel-drive but not, as it happens, existence.