I'm going to start with the idea that God is supernatural, and so beyond Nature. This argument is strange in many ways that may not seem obvious because the language used is so common. Some of the words used don't have meanings that are as clear as they may seem. For example, what exactly is 'supernatural'? It is supposedly anything that is beyond the natural, a different reality, where the rules are different and magic is possible. It is the subject of our dreams and poems, the realm of religion. It seems such an obvious idea, and yet when looked at closely, it becomes increasingly elusive.

People have been exploring the world since the origin of our species. Throughout most of history the way we have explored the world is through our human senses and imaginations, and the combination of our brains and our ability to communicate ideas through language has given us a detailed and reasonably accurate awareness of the world we evolved in.

However, as we looked beyond the world we live in to realms we could not reach we were left with only our imaginations as a way of finding truth. The richness of the human imagination filled the seas with monsters and the skies with gods. Our frustrating inability to investigate these distant worlds led to a new strategy for the exploration of the unknown: theology. We can't reach the heavens, but being sure that God is there, we can try and understand His nature. The division between the natural and the supernatural seemed clear. This imperfect and often hostile place we live in is Nature; the unreachable and hidden places are domains of magic – the supernatural.

But, only a short time ago, in recent history, new technologies were developed to extend our senses, and new strategies developed for focusing human thinking in ways that correct for our prejudices and over-active imaginations. This combination of science and instrumentation has, over the centuries, not just expanded the reach of our senses beyond what we could have imagined, and has also expanded what we can imagine beyond measure. The increasing strangeness of the reality revealed by scientific investigation shows how limited our imaginations have been in the past, and how insignificant our concept of the natural world has been for almost all of human history. For almost all the time people have been present on Earth, we have had no idea at all of the true nature of the universe in which we live. Ask a priest from a thousand years ago about the limits of Nature and he would have described something like a small universe only a few Earth diameters across. Beyond that, was God's heaven. But, when Galileo revealed the moons of Jupiter and Newton described the mechanics of the cosmos, heaven vanished. Conveniently, heaven was then shifted into some other place, location not on any map of the Earth and skies.

No matter where the supernatural may be, there is supposed to be evidence for its existence within the natural world around us. There is no need for me to go into details about how the supposed evidence for theism has been more than adequately dealt with by science and reason, but a brief summary is in order:

The existence of miracles to support theism can be dismissed because of the fallibility of our minds, the known skill of illusionists throughout the ages and the insoluble problem of classifying evidence of an event as not being of ultimate natural origin.

The appearance of design in living things and in the universe can be dismissed because we know how apparent design can be generated in physical and chemical and biological systems. As Hume pointed out, once we have seen that one case of apparent design (such as the sculpted beauty of a snowflake) is no such thing then the argument from design fails as evidence for a creator. Darwin magnificently proved this point with his discovery of Natural Selection.

Ontological arguments for the existence of God fail because they either deal with concepts that we know scientifically make no sense (such as the idea of a personality not based on a physical system), or they lead to some concept of a creative essence so vague that it barely exists, and is certainly not a 'being'.

Arguments from beauty (“the world is so beautiful it must have been designed”) fail because we know that the experience of beauty is subjective and evolved.

Arguments from morality (morals from God) fail because there are good evolutionary explanations of why we have a moral sense.

I could go on, but the message here should be clear. None of the evidence for theism stands up.

So where does this leave the idea of a supernatural realm? With no location and so no foundation. Continuing to insist that it is beyond nature is not good enough when what we understand as nature has changed so dramatically and still keeps changing. Nature has moved on from a world surrounded by crystal spheres containing the stars, from the deterministic clockwork universe of Newton's mechanics, and it will also at some time move on from the strangeness of Einsteinian relativity.

None of these moves have been predicted by supporters of the supernatural, and yet if the supernatural is some domain that supporters of the idea believe really exists then these supporters should have been able to make such predictions. The supernatural becomes nothing more than an endless shifting of goalposts, a continual desperate refrain of “no, it's not that” when science discovers yet another mind-stretching aspect of the universe. The same lack of coherence applies to the claim that God is outside of the universe, beyond space and time. How can that idea make sense when we are still exploring the nature of space and time? What does it even mean to be beyond the relative space and time of Einstein?

It should now be clear the phrases “God is beyond Nature” and “God is beyond time and space” are really just words arranged so as to produce a feeling in the minds of theists. They are nothing more than bad poetry.

Does God exist? We can't say no, because our empirical exploration of reality can't prove a negative. But if there is a deity, what a strange god it would be. Existing in some undefined place It would not have interacted with the world we experience, and certainly not human minds, in any way that we can detect. There is no need for it to have directed evolution, or formed the stars, and indeed no mechanism we know for it to have achieved this. We have no idea where it is, and no evidence for it having done anything at all. Whatever this being might be, it is certainly not the god of theists.

And yet, the idea of this God is often used by those defending theism, in the strange argument that a belief in God is reasonable because science can't prove a negative. This is truly a bizarre position to hold. It comes close to insisting that absence of evidence is evidence for existence.

This argument is so often made, I want to examine it in detail by analogy.

Supposing someone really believes that Luke fought Darth Vader in a galaxy far, far away and long, long ago. There is a question that they have to answer: How did George Lucas know? Was there some ancient and abandoned starship discovered somewhere on Earth within which some documents were found, revealing the tale after years of decoding of Luke Skywalker and his family? There needs to have been such a discovery because no matter how much faith there is in The Force, there needs to have been some reason for that faith in the first place, and some ongoing experiences of the world that keeps faith going. When asked why they have faith, a believer will give some sort of “because”.

But now imagine that there is a strange group of Jedi followers who strain the credibility of theists and atheists alike. They insist that there was a galaxy pervaded by the Force but refuse to name it, or point to it in the skies. They won't point to any ancient scripts that Lucas must surely have discovered. “Star Wars is just a story” they insist “you can't prove it isn't true – it is beyond the reach of any telescopes”, even if George Lucas insisted that he had no scripts from the sky. The comparison with theism should be clear. Luke's galaxy is God and Lucas' denial of an alien message is the scientific refutation of the evidence in nature for theism. Would anyone sane deny the absurdity of these Jedi Theologists? Is there any question that they should be considered cranks (albeit probably harmless)? All it takes is the film-maker's rejection of the message for us to consider the truth of Star Wars to be proven false. We should surely take the same approach with theism.

[As aside, I admit to being mystified why so many people I respect, including significant supporters of science and reason, are, to persist with the analogy “Jedi Accommodationists”. They insist that people who declare their belief in the goodness of Luke Skywalker should have a special role in helping us understand reality (in subjects other than psychology). They insist that evolution need not deny the role of the Force, and that biochemistry does not rule out the effects of the midichlorians that give the Jedi their power.]

My conclusion is this: science has explored the natural and all signs of the activities of gods have been found to point nowhere. Science has explored the regions that have been previously labeled as supernatural, and found them full of wonders but empty of gods. The discussion should be over. We should not accept further craven attempts to hide gods outside of space-time or beneath the quantum. Absence of evidence certainly is evidence of absence when what has been called evidence has turned out to be absent.

We have as much proof as we need to be able to state that theism is false, and that science shows atheism is true.

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Posted by Steve on 02 December 2009 22:28:00 GMT #