I hang out on IRC (DALnet, #ChristianDebate, among
others) as "FrSam". About once every other week, some young
Atheist, full of Evangelical Sound and Fury, comes tripping into the
chat room and invites everyone to "Prove God"!!!!
In most of the "christian" rooms, this is enough to
get the Fun_DUH-mentalists into a foaming fury of Verse-posting.
They produce various arguments (some bad, others worse), which the
graduate of the Little Atheists' School proceeds to reject, one after
the other.
After a few of these had gone by me, I started
reflecting on just what was going on. It's a rhetorical trick --
not an honest question/challenge.
The (unannounced) premises of this scame are:
I) God can be proved logically.
Roman Catholic Scholastic Theology
claims to be able to do this -- the results vary between unsatisfactory
and ludicrous. Fun_DUH_mentalists are nowhere as sophisticated
logically as Jesuits, so they do an even worse job at handling this
premise.
God is not a logical proposition.
God is not a subject to be scrutinized scientifically and subjected to
empirical proof.
Any positive statement about God is
woefully inadequate, and thus, effectively, false. We can say
with confidence what God is _NOT_. but beyond the simple affirmation
"God IS!" we are skating on very thin ice indeed.
The graduate of the Little Atheists' School, and the
Protestant alike, being children of the Enlightenement, demand and
believe that all things are subject to logical examination and
proof. This is hubris -- and dangerous hubris, as the sequelae of
the French and Russian Revolutions clearly demonstrate -- paraniod
schizophrenia is relentlessly logical -- and boundlessly and insanely
cruel.
God is the Ground of Being -- upon Whom
all of reality depends. He is not a created thing, has no mass or
wavelength, displaces no space, takes no time. Faith is the
experience of God. From this experience flows visualization,
ideation, and conviction -- the will to do.
That "faith" which pretends to be
intellectual assent to a series of propositions is fatally weak.
Undermining any of the propositons or premises leaves no basis for that
sort of faith, and the devotee wanders in a nihilist empty hell, until
another set of propositions comes waltzing along. The intellect
is very good at putting simple blocks together, but miserable at
evaluating values.
The intellect likes simple decisions --
"Yes" or "No"; Black or White; One or Zero. The world,
however, comes in infinite shades of grey -- as well as every color
from infrared to ultraviolet.
Linear, bi-valent logic is useful for
very simple problems, or very restricted universes of discourse (same
thing :), but in the larger universe, the only iron-clad "proofs" that
logic provides are trivial.
II) You have to prove God by _MY_ rules.
This one is such an obvious shuck, that
I don't think I need to spend too much verbiage on it. It is
relatively easy to define a set of axioms and propositions that leave
one's rhetorical opponent bound hand & foot -- and with a
metaphorical sock in their mouth.
. . . and the truly sneaky and underhanded premise:
III) You need to prove God to _MY_ satisfaction.
This is, in actuality, totally
mendacious. Whatever argument. "fact", or supposition the
Fundie brings up, the Evangelical Atheist simply denies it. The
Fundy then goes a little farther -- and the atheist denies.
This continues ad nauseam, until the
Fundy starts foaming at the mouth, or gives up in despair. It is
also nasty and a lie -- there is _NO_ argument or fact which the
atheist will ever accept, under any circumstances. So the whole
game is calculated to bait and infuriate Fundies. It is a shame
that so many of them are so poorly educated that they bite on the hook.
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Whenever one of these Evangelical
Atheists tries that on me, I reply that I will be happy to try to prove
God, if he/she/it will be willing to disprove God. This
usually gets me a lecture about "extraordinary claims require
extraordinary proof" (a Carl Sagan quote, IIRC), to which I reply that
atheism, in historical terms, is an extraordinary claim, putting
the ball back in their court.
I have even been able to get certain
individuals to do a creditable imitation of a Foamin' Fundy -- sometime
cursing and swearing and going on like a madman. I consider it a
good payback for the willful harassment they inflict on intellectually
defenseless Fundies.
=========================================
God is an experience, not a proposition
-- some people have the experience, some do not. For those who do
not, the agnostic (I know not) position is the only intellectually
respectible position to hold. The atheist, like the believer,
makes a flat-out metaphysical statement about God -- each on the
basis of no provable rational basis.
The experience of God makes a change --
we say "a change of heart", to distingiush it from a change of mind --
and inward, intuitive, and emotional change. This is
"metanoia" in Greek -- the transforming experience of the Gospel,
of the Eucharist.
There are various verbal expressions if the Faith --
but the only true and authentic expression is in the depth of the human
heart.
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