What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

Christopher Hitchens simply dismissed as “theo-babble”: religious or spiritual words strung together purportedly describing “God” that have no actual meaning or coherence when pondered for more than thirteen seconds.

      And so, whether we are talking about the traditional notion of God (the all-powerful, all-knowing creator being who performs magical feats and reads our minds and watches our every move) or the indefinable, theologically “sophisticated” notion of God (e.g., “God is being-itself”¹¹—thanks, Professor Tillich!), both score a zero on the proof-o-meter. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams in 1820, “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial is to say that they are nothings . . .”¹²

      Ever since the Polish Lithuanian nobleman Casimir Liszinksi wrote his treatise De non existentia Dei (On the Nonexistence of God) in the 1670s—for which he was brutally tortured and then burned to death—a vast array of books, essays, and pamphlets have been written effectively pointing out the glaring lack of evidence for the existence of God. I don’t plan to restate all their arguments here, but I’ll quickly convey the basic highlights.

      Below are some of the most typical theistic claims put forth in attempting to prove God’s existence, with the standard skeptical rebuttals.

       The Creation of the World

      Theistic Claim: Just look at the world! Look at the universe! Look at aardvarks, birch trees, zinc, stalactites, onions, smallpox, and Jupiter! How did all these wondrous things get here if there is no God to create them?

      Skeptical Response: This is no proof at all for the existence of God. It is simply known as the “argument from ignorance” or “appeal to ignorance,” which is a typical fallacy of informal logic that tries to establish a claim based on the fact that we actually don’t know enough about something, or don’t possess enough knowledge about something and—in our ignorance—are then mistakenly expected to accept the claim. But the claim has not been proven.

      Let me give a quick example of the appeal to ignorance at work.

      Suppose you and a friend decide to fly to Beijing. On the plane, your friend leans over and says to you, “The pilot’s name is Rootbeer.”

      You are skeptical: “Rootbeer? Really? That can’t be right.”

      And then your friend asks, “Well, do you know what the pilot’s name is?”

      “No,” you admit.

      “Aha, so then it must be Rootbeer!”

      Pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, your friend hasn’t proven anything. Just because you don’t know the pilot’s name doesn’t mean that your friend does. And your admitted ignorance of what the pilot’s name is doesn’t mean that your friend’s unusual claim is then automatically correct. What you would need in order to believe that the pilot’s name is in fact Rootbeer is some compelling evidence to convince you. But lacking such evidence, your denial of “Rootbeer” as the pilot’s name is fully justified.

      Now let’s try the same conversation, only this time about God.

      You’re flying on a plane to Beijing, and your friend leans over and says to you: “Whoa, look at the sun beams coursing through those clouds out there. Check out that vast sky. It must have all been created by God.”

      You are skeptical. “God? Really? A magic deity created all this? That can’t be right.”

      And then your friend asks, “Well, then, do you know who or what created it all?”

      “No,” you admit.

      “Aha, so then it must be God!”

      Your friend’s claim has not been proven. Not even close. He’s just basing an entire argument on ignorance. And as atheist writer B. C. Johnson states, “our ignorance of alternative explanations does not justify acceptance of the theistic explanation, because ignorance does not justify explanations—only knowledge does.”¹³

      When it comes to knowledge of how the universe came to be, we are clueless. We remain agnostic. As leading American atheist Sam Harris has so soundly expressed, “no one knows how or why the universe came into being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the birth of space-time itself. Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists.”¹⁴

      But surely we know that everything has a cause, right? Religious philosophers, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and my recent Uber driver, have long reasoned that the universe couldn’t just exist on its own—something had to cause it to come into being. That cause, theists assert, is God. But by the very logic of this assertion—that everything has to have a cause—then God would also need to be caused. If the theists insist that God need not have a cause, then they are being blatantly illogical by their own standards.

      To insist that God is somehow the great, single “uncaused cause” is, in the phrasing of American anthropologist David Eller, “word-magic at best and a malignant anti-answer at worst.”¹⁵ And besides, if God can in fact be miraculously uncaused, then so too could the universe. Or anything. Again, believing that the universe must have been caused by something else—something supernatural, no less—is not supported by any evidence. It is simply guesswork embedded in magical thinking, peppered with illogical fallacies, and wrapped in the tinfoil of faith. To account for the mystery of the existence of the universe by saying it is all the inexplicable work of an uncaused creator god gets us nowhere. Again from A. C. Grayling: “to explain something by invoking something itself unexplained is to provide no explanation at all.”¹⁶

      Thus, the reasonable, rational position to take—when it comes to fathoming the incomprehensible existence and wonder of all of creation—is to remain in ignorance and simply admit that we don’t know its origin or cause, or if it even has an origin or cause in any imagined sense of the ways in which we employ such words, and humbly leave it at that. As Charles Darwin wrote concerning the ultimate origins of creation, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”¹⁷

       Complexity and Design

      Theistic Claim: The natural world is full of profound complexity and deep design. Consider the intricate composition of the human eye or the complex components of a cell. Surely these things couldn’t just occur accidentally or by chance. Their intricacy and complexity obviously point to the conscious, deliberate handiwork of an intelligent designer. That intelligent designer is God.

      Skeptical Response: First off, as Richard Dawkins explains in his book The Blind Watchmaker, and as Philip Ball further reveals in his book The Self-Made Tapestry, mind-blowing complexity and functional intricacy can and do arise without a designer, and the natural world abounds with patterns and designs that all have natural, undesigned, unwilled causes.¹⁸ Just look at snowflakes. Or evolution by natural selection, in which genetic information encoded in DNA changes and is modified by haphazard mutations.

      Secondly, what we’ve got here is just another appeal to ignorance: because the world is full of complex organisms, it is claimed that this must be evidence for an intelligent creator god. But that’s a fallacious leap. It is more rational to just humbly scratch our heads at this mind-blowing complexity and accept it as mysterious and as yet hard to explain, rather than lazily accept “God” as the answer.

      Third, to explain the apparent inexplicable origin of something deeply mysterious—like the complexity and intricacy of the natural world—by saying it was created