There’s an argument that gets made a fair amount by religious believers. It gets made by more thoughtful theists and by, shall we say, less thoughtful ones; it gets made in forms that are marginally clever and forms that are laughably bad. But none of the versions are ultimately very good, and none of them are convincing unless you already believe in God.

The argument:

God is magic, and he can do anything.

Here’s the more fleshed-out version of it. Phenomenon (X) currently has no natural explanation. Given our current understanding of the physical world, Phenomenon (X) can’t have a natural explanation. Therefore, the explanation must be supernatural. Or, at the very least, it’s reasonable to think that the explanation is, or might be, supernatural.

In other words: The physical world is bound by immutable laws of cause and effect. But God, by definition, is not bound by immutable laws of cause and effect. God is magic, and he can do anything. Therefore, if we don’t currently understand the laws of cause and effect governing Phenomenon (X), the best explanation, or at least a marginally reasonable assumption, is God.

Example. In the physical world, effects have to have causes. Things can’t bring themselves into being, and things can’t just have existed forever. But the universe itself must either have (a) always existed, or (b) somehow come into being from nothingness. Therefore, the universe must have been brought into being by an entity that is not bound by the natural laws of cause and effect. In other words — by God. God is magic, and therefore he can have created himself or always have existed, and he can have created the universe out of nothing but himself and the void.

It is, in my opinion, a terrible argument. I want to talk about why.

1: Sez who?

Who says that Phenomenon (X) — say, the very existence of the universe itself — can’t possibly have a natural explanation?

Just because we don’t currently have a natural explanation for it, does that mean we never will?

I’m going to make a point that I’ve made approximately 90,690 times in this blog (so my apologies to people who are getting sick of it, I promise I’ll move past it in a moment): Look at history. Specifically, look at the number of times that we thought Phenomena (A, B, C, D, E) had supernatural causes. Had to have supernatural causes. Could not possibly have been caused by anything other than the supernatural.

And look at the number of times we were wrong. Look at the number of times that supernatural explanations for phenomena have been replaced by natural ones. It’s thousands. Tens, or even hundreds of thousands, depending on how specific the phenomena are that you’re talking about.

Now, look at the number of times we were wrong in the other direction. Look at the number of times we thought Phenomenon (Y) had to have natural, physical causes, and wound up being wrong about that. Look at the number of times that unexplained phenomena have been carefully, rigorously studied, and all the best evidence pointed to the cause being spirits, or metaphysical energy, or God.

It’s exactly zero.

The question of “Where did the Universe come from?” (or “Did the universe just always exist?” or “Why is there something instead of nothing?”) is currently an unanswered question. But that absolutely does not mean that it’s an unanswerable question. In fact, it’s a question we’re trying to answer. It’s a question that’s being looked into. Physicists and astronomers are working on an answer as we speak.

Now, if and when they do come up with an answer, it may boggle our tiny little minds. It may completely rewrite our way of thinking about the world — much the way that heliocentrism and evolution and relativity did. It may even make us completely re-think the very concepts of cause and effect. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be real. It doesn’t mean it won’t be right. And it doesn’t mean it won’t be an entirely natural, physical explanation.

The fact that we do not currently have a natural, physical answer to this question does not prove — or even imply — that no such answer exists.

Some people will probably argue that this response shows a faith in science that is identical to a faith in God; that it’s essentially saying, “I don’t know what the answer is, but I trust that the answer will prove to be a natural/ scientific one,” in the same way that religious believers say, “I don’t know what the answer is, but I trust that the answer will prove to be a spiritual one.”

But it’s not.

It’s not a response based on faith. It’s a response based on evidence: the evidence of history. It’s not a blind faith in science; it’s an observation that, when it comes to unanswered questions about the world, the answers have always wound up being natural and physical… and that therefore, given any currently unanswered question, the existence of a natural, physical answer is an immeasurably better bet.

2: The universe just doesn’t look that way.

Let me put it this way. If the universe were created, and intervened with on any sort of regular basis, by a being who was magic, a being who was completely unrestricted by the natural laws of cause and effect and who had no limits to his magical power… wouldn’t that just be obvious?

Would there be any arguments at all about his existence?

Wouldn’t there be violations of the natural laws of cause and effect on a regular basis? Heck, would there even BE natural laws of cause and effect?

That’s not what the universe looks like. The universe operates by laws of physical cause and effect… laws that are remarkably consistent. Phenomenally consistent. “Insert superlative of your choice” consistent.

Claims of miracles — i.e., supernatural interventions that violate the natural laws of cause and effect — consistently fall apart on closer inspection. They just don’t happen.

Given that this is the case, we have one of three options:

A: There is a God, but he not only intervenes in the physical universe: he intervenes in our perceptions and our understanding, making us think that the universe operates by consistent physical laws when really it doesn’t. Otherwise known as the “Matrix” option, or the “stoned college sophomore discovering solipsism for the first time” option. Theoretically possible, but not very plausible. It’s also not falsifiable or testable one way or the other, and is therefore useless as a hypothesis.

B: There is a God, and he created the universe, but he does not intervene in it in any way, shape or form. Since he created it, he just sits back and watches as it unfolds according to the laws of cause and effect. This is the Deism option. Also theoretically possible, and kind of hard to argue against, since the effective difference between a Deist God and no god at all is zilch.

But for that exact reason, it’s also not falsifiable or testable in any way, and is also useless as a hypothesis.

And, more to the point — it’s completely irrelevant. Again, for that exact same reason. If there is an infinitely powerful magical being who brought the universe into being, but who never intervenes in that universe in any way… why should we care? What difference would it make? The effective difference between a Deist God and no god at all is zero. What reason is there to believe in him, or to act as if he exists?

Or… and this is the one I’m going to go with, if for no other reason than Occam’s Razor…

C: There is no God.

Julia Sweeney said it best, in her amazing performance piece “Letting Go of God.” After a long, arduous journey of spiritual searching, starting with her original Catholicism and going through New Age spirituality and vague beliefs that “God is nature” or “God is love,” she came to this conclusion: “The world behaves exactly as you would expect it would, if there were no Supreme Being, no Supreme Consciousness, and no supernatural.”

The world does not behave as if a magical being who could do anything were running the show. The world behaves as if it operated, entirely and 100%, according to physical laws of cause and effect.

3. There’s just no evidence for it.

There’s a point Ingrid keeps making, and it’s time I brought it up. She points out that every scrap of “evidence” that there is for religion comes from human beings. It comes from parents and religious teachers, from prophets and from sacred books, from just sitting around in your room thinking really hard.

And the “God is Magic” argument is exactly the same.

The “God is Magic” argument comes dangerously close to Anselm’s famously crappy ontological argument. That argument, for those who aren’t familiar, goes roughly like this: “I can imagine a completely perfect being, i.e. God. But an aspect of perfection would have to be actual existence: if something didn’t actually exist, by definition it wouldn’t be perfect. Therefore, God exists.” (No, really. Stop laughing. I am not making this up. I actually had to learn this when I was a religion major, as one of the classic arguments in favor of God’s existence.)

The “God is Magic” version of this essentially goes, “I am defining God as that which can always have existed and can create universes out of nothing. This magical God would provide a very neat and tidy explanation for any unanswered questions we might have. Therefore, God exists.”

But the fact that you can imagine and define such a being does not provide even one scrap of evidence that he actually exists.

I realize that atheists sound a bit like a broken record when we say this, but it’s important and it’s true: It is not up to us to prove that God does not exist. It is up to theists to prove that he does: to prove that God is the best explanation for why things are the way they are, or even a plausible explanation that we should seriously consider.

Example: If you believe in theistic evolution — the theory that evolution is a process created and guided by God to create life and people — you can’t just say, “It could have happened that way. You can’t prove that it didn’t.” You need to show some evidence for why that’s a better hypothesis than evolution just happening as a natural process. You need to point to structures or processes that could not have evolved naturally, or to transitions in the fossil record that show unmistakable signs of intervention. (The intelligent design crowd has tried to do this, with laughably bad results.)

And if you believe in a God-created universe, you have to show some evidence for why that’s a better explanation for the existence of the universe than, for instance, the idea that universe has simply always existed. You can’t just say, “Well, we don’t know how it happened, and it had to happen somehow, and God is as good an explanation as any.” You can’t just say that the universe is impossible, define God as that which can do the impossible, and call that an answer.

The “God is Magic” argument is really just another version of the “God of the gaps”; the God that is the answer to whatever gaps there currently are in the body of scientific knowledge; the blue crayon that gets used to fill in all the empty spaces in the coloring book… despite the fact that blue has never, ever proven to be the right color.

And it’s not actually an explanation. It doesn’t offer any clarity about why things are the way they are — a magical God could presumably have made things be any way at all, and the answer to why would ultimately just be, “God’s whim.” And it doesn’t offer any predictive power — ditto.

It’s not actually an explanation. It’s just a way of getting around the necessity of offering an explanation.

In yesterday’s post, I offered the first half of a list of The Top Ten Reasons I Don’t Believe In God. Here is the second half.

6: The physical causes of everything we think of as the soul.

The science of neuropsychology is still very much in its infancy. But there are a few things that we know about it. And one of the things we know is that everything we think of as the soul — consciousness, identity, character, free will — all of that is powerfully affected by physical changes to the brain and body. Drugs and medicines, injury, illness, sleep deprivation, etc…. all of these can make changes to the “soul.” In some cases, they can make changes so drastic, they render a person’s personality and character completely unrecognizable.

And death, of course, is a physical change that renders a person’s personality and character, not only unrecognizable, but non-existent.

So given that this is true, doesn’t it seem far more likely that consciousness and identity, character and free will, are some sort of product of the physical brain and body?

With any other phenomenon, if we can show that physical forces and actions produce observable effects, we think of that as a physical phenomenon. Why should the soul be any different? Whatever consciousness and selfhood and the rest of it turn out to be, doesn’t it seem overwhelmingly likely that they are, in some way, a biological process, governed by laws of physical cause and effect?

More:
Why I Don’t Believe in the Soul
“A Relationship Between Physical Things”: Yet Another Rant on What Consciousness and Selfhood Might Be
A Ghost in the Machine, again by Ebon Muse on the Ebon Musings website. I know, I keep citing the Ebon Musings website. What can I say? Dude can write. Dude can think. Dude has a really well-organized site map that makes it easy to look stuff up.

7: The complete failure of any sort of supernatural phenomenon to stand up to rigorous testing.

Not all religious and spiritual beliefs make testable claims. But some of them do. And in the face of actual testing, every one of those claims falls apart like Kleenex in a hurricane.

Whether it’s the power of prayer, or faith healing, or astrology, or life after death: the same pattern is consistently seen. Whenever religious and supernatural beliefs have made testable claims, and those claims have been tested — not half-assedly tested, but really tested, using careful, rigorous, double-blind, placebo- controlled, replicated, etc. etc. etc. testing methods — the claims have consistently fallen apart.

I’m not going to cite every one of these tests, or even most of them. This piece is already ridiculously long as it is. Instead, I’ll encourage you to spend a little time on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer websites. You’ll see a pattern so consistent it boggles the mind: Claimants insist that Supernatural Claim X is real. Supernatural Claim X is subjected to careful testing, applying the standard scientific methods commonly used to screen out both bias and fraud. Supernatural Claim X is found to hold about as much water as a sieve.

(And claimants, having agreed beforehand that the testing method is valid, afterwards insist that it wasn’t fair.)

And don’t say, “Oh, the testers were biased.” That’s the great thing about the scientific method. It is designed to screen out bias, as much as is humanly possible. When done right, it will give you the right answer, regardless of the bias of the people doing the testing.

Plus, here’s a point that defenders of the supernatural never effectively address when they accuse scientists of anti-religion bias: In the early days of science and the scientific method, most scientists did believe in God, and the soul, and the metaphysical. In fact, many early science experiments were attempts to prove the existence of these things, and discover their true natures, and resolve the squabbles about them once and for all. (Not God so much, but the soul and the supernatural.) It was only after decades upon decades of these experiments failing to turn up anything at all that the scientific community began — gradually, and painfully — to give up on the idea.

Supernatural claims only hold up under careless, casual examination. They are supported by confirmation bias (i.e., our tendency to overemphasize evidence that supports what we believe and discard evidence that contradicts it), and wishful thinking, and our poor understanding and instincts when it comes to probability, and our tendency to see pattern and intention even when none exists, and a dozen other forms of weird human brain wiring. When studied carefully under conditions specifically designed to screen these things out, they vanish like the insubstantial imaginings that they are.

More:
A Lattice of Coincidence: Metaphysics, the Paranormal, and My Answer to Layne

8: The slipperiness of religious and spiritual beliefs.

Not all religious and spiritual beliefs make testable claims. Many of them have a more “saved if we do, saved if we don’t” quality. If things go the believer’s way, it’s a sign of God’s grace and intervention; if they don’t, then, well, God moves in mysterious ways, and maybe he has a lesson to teach that we don’t understand, and it’s not up to us to question his will. That sort of thing. No matter what happens, it can be twisted around to prove that the belief is right.

That is a sure sign of a bad, bad argument.

Here’s the thing. It is a well-established principle in the philosophy of science that, if a theory can be supported no matter what possible evidence comes down the pike, it is a completely useless theory. It has no power to explain what’s already happened, or predict what will happen in the future. The theory of gravity, for instance, could be disproven by things suddenly falling up; the theory of evolution could be disproven by finding rabbits in the pre-Cambrian fossil layer. These theories predict that these things will not happen; if they do, then the theories go poof. But if your theory of God’s existence holds up no matter what happens — whether your friend with cancer gets better or dies, whether natural disasters strike big sinful cities or small God-fearing towns — then it is an utterly useless theory, with no power to either predict or explain anything.

What’s more, when atheists challenge theists on their beliefs, the theists’ arguments shift and slip around in an unbelievably annoying “moving the goalposts” way. Hard-line fundamentalists, for instance, will insist on the unchangeable perfect truth of the Bible; but when challenged on its specific historical/ scientific errors and moral atrocities, they insist that you’re not interpreting those passages correctly. (If the book needs interpreting, then how perfect can it be?)

And progressive ecumenical believers can be unbelievably slippery on the subject of what they really do and do not believe. Is God real, or a metaphor? Does God intervene in the world, or doesn’t he? Do they actually even believe in God, or do they just choose to act is if they believe in God because they find it useful? Debating with a progressive believer is like wrestling with a fish: the arguments aren’t very powerful, but they don’t give you anything firm to grab onto.

Once again, that’s a sure sign of a bad, bad argument. If you can’t just make your case and then stick by it, or genuinely modify it, or let it go… then you don’t have a very good case. (And if you’re making any version of the “Shut up, that’s why” argument — arguing that it’s rude and intolerant to question religious beliefs, or that letting go of doubts and questions about faith makes you a better person, or that doubting faith will get you tortured in Hell forever, or any of the other classic arguments intended to silence the debate rather than address it — then that’s a sure sign that your argument is totally in the toilet.)

More:
A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside
Why Religion Is Like Fanfic
What Would Convince You That You Were Wrong? The Difference Between Secular and Religious Faith
The Problem of Unfishiness: Religion, Science, and Unanswered Questions

9: The failure of religion to improve or clarify over time.

Over the years and decades and centuries, our understanding of the physical world has grown and clarified by a ridiculous amount. We understand things about the world and the universe that we couldn’t even have imagined a thousand years ago, or a hundred, or even ten. Things that make your mouth gape open with astonishment and wonder just to think about.

And the reason for this is that we came up with a really good method for sorting out the
good ideas from the bad ones, the more accurate theories from the less accurate ones. We came up with the scientific method: a self-correcting method for understanding the physical world, which — over time, and with the many fits and starts and setbacks that accompany any human endeavor — has done, and continues to do, an astonishingly good job of helping us perceive and understand the world, predict it and shape it, in ways we could not have possibly imagined a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten years ago.

(And the scientific method itself is self-correcting. Not only has our understanding of the world improved by ridiculous leaps and bounds; our method for understanding it is improving as well.)

But our understanding of the metaphysical world?

Not so much.

Our understanding of the metaphysical world is exactly in the place it’s always been: hundreds and indeed thousands of sects, squabbling over which sacred text and which set of spiritual intuitions is the right one. We haven’t come to any sort of consensus about which sect has a more accurate conception of the metaphysical world. We haven’t even come up with a method of deciding which sect has a more accurate conception of the metaphysical world. All anyone can do is point to their own sacred text and their own spiritual intuition. And around in the squabbling circle we go.

All of which clearly points to religion, not as a perception of a real being or substance, but as an idea we made up and are clinging to. If religion were a perception of a real being or substance, our understanding of it would be sharpening, clarifying, being refined. We would have improved prayer techniques, more accurate prophecies, something. Anything but people squabbling with greater or lesser degrees of rancor, and nothing to actually back up their belief.

More:
The Slog Through the Swamp: What Science Is, And Why It Works, And Why I Care
“A Different Way of Knowing”: The Uses of Irrationality… and its Limitations

10: The complete and utter lack of solid evidence for God’s existence.

This is probably the best argument I have against God’s existence:

There’s just no evidence for it.

No good evidence, anyway. No evidence that doesn’t just amount to opinion and tradition and confirmation bias and all the other stuff I’ve been talking about for the last two days.

And in a perfect world, that should have been the only argument I needed. In a perfect world, I shouldn’t have had to spend the last month and a half collating and summarizing the reasons I don’t believe in God, any more than I would have for Zeus or Quetzalcoatl or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

As thousands of atheists before me have pointed out: It is not up to us to prove that God does not exist. It is up to theists to prove that he does.

In a comment on this blog, arensb made a point on this topic that was so ridiculously insightful, I’m still smacking myself on the head for not having thought of it myself. I was writing about how theists get upset at atheists for rejecting religion after hearing 876,362 arguments for it, saying, “But you haven’t considered Argument #876,363! How can you be so close-minded?” And here’s what arensb said:

“If, in fact, it turns out that argument #876,364 is the one that will convince you, WTF didn’t the apologists put it in the top 10?”

Why, indeed?

If there’s an argument for religion that’s convincing — actually convincing, convincing by means of something other than authority/ tradition, personal intuition, confirmation bias, fear and intimidation, wishful thinking, or some combination of the above — wouldn’t we all know about it?

Wouldn’t it have spread like wildfire? Wouldn’t it be the Meme of All Memes? I mean, we all saw that video of the cat trying to wake its owner up within about two weeks of it hitting the Internet. Don’t you think that the Truly Excellent Argument/ Evidence for God’s Existence would have spread even faster, and wider, than some silly cartoon video?

If the arguments for religion are so wonderful, why are they so unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t already believe?

And why does God need arguments, anyway? Why does God need people to make his arguments for him? Why can’t he just reveal his true self, clearly and unequivocally, and settle the question once and for all? If God existed, why wouldn’t it just be obvious? (See #2 above, in yesterday’s post.)

It is not up to us to prove that God does not exist. It is up to theists to prove that he does. And in the absence of any genuinely good, solid evidence or arguments in favor of God’s existence — and in the presence of a whole lot of very solid arguments against it — I am going to continue to hold the null hypothesis of atheism: that God almost certainly does not exist, and that it is completely reasonable to act as if he does not exist.

So. What do you all think? Atheists — are there arguments against God’s existence that you think are more convincing than these? And theists — do you have any thoughts on these arguments? I don’t promise to debate every one of you ad infinitum, or indeed any one of you; but I’m curious to hear what you have to say.