Atheism

This is an unpolished essay I dug up from a high-school debate. The question: Is man the creation of God, or is God the creation of man? It assumes some prior philosophical knowledge, but nothing Google won't quickly provide.

Descartes wrote in his famous Meditations, “There are only two ways of proving the existence of God, one by means of his effects, and the other by means of his nature or essence.” While I can’t prove this premise, I’m going to work from it. After all, the best atheists can do is refute traditional arguments for the existence of God. As many failed attempts (most notably and convincingly, the argument from evil) have proved, it’s hard—if not impossible—to demonstrate absence. I cannot prove to you that no unicorns exist, though I can demonstrate that there is no logical necessity for the existence of unicorns and no evidence of their existence. Similarly, I will try here to prove the lack of logical necessity for the existence of God and refute the two ways Descartes provides “evidence” of his existence.

The second way, “by means of his nature of essence,” it easiest to refute, so I’ll start there. This is the famous “ontological argument” proposed by Saint Anselm and hundreds of philosophers since (including Descartes). It runs something like this: God, by definition, is the greatest thing which can be conceived. Everyone can conceive of a greatest thing. And the greatest thing can’t be imaginary, because real greatest things are greater than imaginary greatest things. So God must be real.

This argument is, unsurprisingly, terribly unconvincing. It falls into the same trap as most of Aquinas’ arguments and the arguments from perfection—namely, it tries to prove God exists by defining God as something that exists. This circular logic leads to the desired conclusion, but obviously fails to be cogent. Kant refutes this argument by pointing out that the philosopher who employs it is proving the existence of God from his own a priori knowledge of God’s nature. It remains to be seen whether God’s existence can be proved a posteriori, and that is what counts.

On that note, we will tackle the most common attempt at an a posteriori argument for God’s existence—the argument from effect. This has been phrased a lot of different ways. My favorite is probably Voltaire’s simple insistence that a watch needs a watchmaker. Descartes is trying to prove God from two principles, namely, “I think” and “I am.” So he offers two arguments for God’s existence, which correspond to these premises.

From “I think,” Descartes reaches a new premise, “I think about a God.” Specifically, “A supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things that exist apart from him.” He then argues, “I recognize that it would be impossible for me to exist with the kind of nature I have—that is, having within me the idea of God—were it not the case that God really existed.” This is perhaps the weakest way to state this idea. Why cannot Descartes’ idea of God be a combination of his ideas of knowledge, power, goodness, and mortality (or lack thereof)?

Descartes’ other argument from effect is stronger, as it argues from his own existence. This is the equivalent of Voltaire’s watchmaker argument: I am here because of some cause. The next—faulty—line of reasoning is generally, my cause must be greater than myself. Evolution disproves this—chance and natural selection allow for the more perfect to emerge from the less perfect. Even “mind” can come from mere matter and motion.

Descartes doesn’t go any further, but I anticipate two main arguments from all of you. First, if more perfect can come from less perfect, where did less perfect come from in the first place? That is, our cause is not God, but our cause must have a cause and eventually the First Cause is God. Second, what about the laws which allow for things like evolution, life, etc.? Surely God created those laws?

Recent discoveries in science provide answers to both these questions. In quantum mechanics, effects can exist without causes and objects can move without movers. (Sorry, Aquinas!) Indeed, this is how the Big Bang happened. Of course, even without this scientific discovery, there is logical inconsistency in First Cause and First Mover arguments. Who caused or moved God? (Hume proceeds to ask, Supergod? Then who created him? Or did God create himself? How did that work? Don’t ask!). If you answer that God, by definition, does not need a cause, you commit two logical flaws. First, you invalidate your premise that every effect requires a cause and second, you argue God’s existence from your own definition of God—a definition which necessarily implies God’s existence.

At this point, we are reduced to God’s role as a lawgiver. Everything happened without God’s interference, we reluctantly admit, but surely God structured things so that it all could happen. Once again, I can’t prove that it’s impossible that God exists in this capacity. It is not, however, logically necessary. Under an expanding/contracting universe model, this could be the ten-billionth universe ever and the first one with rational life. Sure, the probability of life occurring by chance is small, but with enough tries, it’s bound to happen. Other scientific models, including that of an infinite number of coexisting quantum universes, make it so that the specific laws which allow our existence are the product of good luck and a lot of tries—not God’s divine design.

There are hundreds more arguments for God’s existence (though most of them follow the basic lines of the ones I’ve outlined), and I’m not going to try to refute them all. Instead, after this demonstration of the faults with Descartes’ reasoning, I’m going to move on to answering the question. It probably won’t surprise you that I think God is a creation of man. The arguments to the contrary are weak, at best, and my logical mind will not accept logically inconsistent or weak arguments on “faith.”

The question then comes up: why did man create God? This can’t be answered definitively, but Marx’s and Freud’s explanations are both good. Namely, the idea of God kept people obedient and afraid. And it allowed them to pass the responsibility for everything to a greater “father figure.” It allowed people to diminish or aggrandize their own worth, depending on the spirit of the age. It also allowed people to explain what was, for a long time, otherwise inexplicable. But God is no longer needed to explain the inexplicable, and we ought to be brave enough to leave off blind obedience to religion and mature enough to take responsibility ourselves. God was a creation of man. Perhaps he was a necessary creation, but he was our creation all the same. And that creation is getting outdated.

Post script: thanks to Daniel Dennett, my favorite philosopher and the source of most of my refutations of Descartes’ arguments. Thanks also to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a concise summary of the ontological argument.