Assailing the Ineffable

God is often referred to as unknowable, infinite, omniscient and ineffable. Ineffable means to defy expression or description or too sacred to be uttered.

Following a conversation here, led to my thinking more of the place of the ineffable in Christian apologetics.

Arguments for the ineffable take the basic form: we cannot fully describe God because He is unknowable and infinite (and we are mere men), so God can neither be fully described nor disproven (on the basis of our inability to account fully for His Nature).

"Clever", huh!

What are the possibilities?

• There is a God. This God is an all-round impressive God: supernatural, infinite, and beyond description; so failure to describe this God is actually to describe a property of this God's existence, and hence is to support the notion that this God has actual existence (usually undefined). Because this God is ineffable, it is difficult to account for His mysterious behavior and purpose, though He typically seems utterly indifferent.
  
• There is a God. This God is definable: fickle, vain, demanding, cruel, vindictive, punitive, jealous, etc. (as depicted in the Bible). Because this God is fickle, it is difficult to predict His mysterious behavior and purpose, though He typically threatens to act like a Punitive Parent.

Depending on the particular religious beliefs, One of the above Gods, and it's not always clear which One, has taken the trouble to interfere to some degree with the Universe and with Life on Earth. Could it be both of them rolled into one? "But they are so different!" you say.

Examining just one Brand of Godhead: Whichever God was so interested in His Special Creation that He sent his Son, perhaps Himself, down to Earth via Immaculate Conception. He, Who can arrange any miracle that He chooses, arranged for the Crucifixion and Resurrection of His Son or Himself. Why go to all this trouble? He wanted to offer us Salvation in exchange for our worshipping Him and for behaving like good, obedient little children – or else we'd be punished for all eternity. How do we know this? His Son or He told someone who told someone who wrote it all down in differing versions. How else? Certainly not through non-circular evidence.

• There is no God. This absence of the supernatural leaves the purposeless universe at the mercy, and sometimes benevolence, of mostly measurable, testable, physical forces. These natural forces operate on the basis of a hierarchy of mechanisms that operate on different scales – from the subatomic to the cosmic. Some 10 billion years after a rapid expansion of spacetime, a planetoid formed within the arm of a galaxy at the edge of the universe. Within 500 million years of that planet's cooling, life had spontaneously appeared on the planet.

Complexity emerged within those life forms, ultimately generating one species with a thirst for answers, but not necessarily for accurate explanations. For psychological reasons, this species invented the increasingly complex conceptualizatons of supernatural mechanisms to 'explain' inexplicable phenomena. One of these philosophical lineages led to the invention of the Christian God.

Eventually, some members of this species began to investigate and investigate and investigate how the world really works, and this knowledge led to doubt about the supernatural invention. Some members of this species were particularly emotional thinkers and chose to faithfully retain the old beliefs and promises, some rational thinkers looked at the evidence and decided that the supernatural only appears ineffable because God does not exist.

Thus the notion of an ineffable deity, which began its conceptual life as an attempted explanation for the inexplicable, ultimately served double duty as an excuse for theological inconsistencies in Christian apologetics.

In God, Distrust

The New York Times has run an interesting book review entitled, 'In God, Distrust'. The reviewer takes a mostly positive position on Christopher Hitchens, author of 'God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' (307 pp. Twelve/Warner Books.) I think that the book's title is a little over the top.

Certainly religion has been associated with some terrible atrocities, but these outrageous acts were committed by men [sic] in the name of man-invented-religion. That is, man [sic] invented creation myths, deities, bigotry, and xenophobia. The problem, as I see it, has always been human nature, and that, in its turn, results, if anything, from the rationality-blind failure of human biological evolution.

The NYT provides an excerpt of Hitchens' first chapter, which includes the following statements with which I wholeheartedly agree:

“We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.”

“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”

Quo Vadis?
...section index...

Agnostic vs Atheist

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”
~ W. K. Clifford (1879)

Those of religious bent and the fantasy prone choose to believe what they choose to believe. Such individuals seem to select whatever opinion provides most emotional appeal without regard to logic or empirical evidence.

Religious types come in various levels of dogmatism and subscribe to different human-invented creeds. Most are theists, whereas others believe in equally nutty nonsense like the so-called "Science of Mind" that has zip to do with science.

Creationists of various ilks deny our close relationship (more than 98% shared DNA) with the chimpanzee in order to protect their illusion of Special Creation.

Technically, an agnostic holds that the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural deity is unknowable. While this is philosophically rigorous, what is the point of copping out by leaving room for the indeterminable supernatural?

As soon as a supposed supernatural entity has interacted with the physical, then that purported supernatural agent has entered the realm of the physical and has abandoned supernatural status. Those religions that include creation myths necessarily make a claim that the formerly-supernatural has interfered with the physical. This creation-interaction must, by definition, reduce, or elevate, the supernatural to the physical. Goodbye special supernatural status.

Agnosticism can take the position that the possibility that whatever claimed teapot or deity actually exists is vanishingly small, but agnosticism allows some wiggle room for the vanishingly remote possibility that any particular candidate-claim has validity.

Whereas agnosticism carefully perches on the fence, atheism expresses more certainty than to say, "we just can't know". The small "a" atheist simply says, "I don't believe that God exists", wheras a capital "A" Atheist is certain that, "God does not exist." Philosophical purism aside, all the evidence indicates that the God of the Bible does not exist.

Christians, my prime targets in this expose-stupidity campaign, hold that their supposed Creator did indeed interfere in the physical up until 2,000 years ago, since which time God appears to have understandably grown bored with Christians. Of course, Christians keep this conditionally-loving God on hand for their supposed afterlife, aka death.

Bertrand Russell was a famous debunker of religious nonsense and said in Is There a God?, “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

Russell, as ever, makes a good point. Any fantasist can concoct any fanciful story, padded with a layer of non-falsifiable protection, and can insist that the story is accurate by virtue of the glitch that it cannot be disproven. Such a claim, of course, commits the logical error of argumentum ad ignorantiam. If the claim was first made in antiquity, it is imbued with an undeserved veneer of credibility.

The invention of supposed prophecies did not, of course, end with Jesus. Supposed prophets have been popping up with dismaying regularity since Jesus' preachings.

The problem for creationists, particularly for YECs, is that Genesis does make falsifiable physical claims that do stand disproven by science. Somewhere along the way, some creationist has comprehended enough science to realize this major problem and the era of Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies was ushered in. The fact is, creationists promulgate ignorance and falsehoods in support of what they mistakenly call "Truth". YECs lie about the actual age of the Earth, while believers in pseudointellectual intelligent [sick] design theory accept the actual age of the Earth, but lie about the identity of the supposed-designer, and distort science ranging from cosmology to evolutionary biology.

Considering the ubiquity of invented religions, evolution clearly has not expanded our intellectual capacities to a sufficient degree for humans to justifiably designate our species as "sapiens".

Quo Vadis?
...section index...

Dei Non Existent

Considering that atheism is the most logical position based on empirical evidence, the fact that so many are so deluded as to insist on the existence of nonexistent deities indicates the psychological and social urges that impel the deluded to believe the unbelievable.

While it is impossible to disprove the existence of purportedly supernatural deities, there are many good reasons to be certain that no such deities exist.

Why, when we are embedded in and impacted by the physical world, should we believe that supernatural deities exist? And even if some deities did exist beyond the physical of what interest could they be to us? As soon as any influence impacts the physical, then that influence is no longer supernatural but has entered the realm of the natural, physical world. This means that the supernatural is, excuse the pun, immaterial to us.

Of course, the supposed supernatural offers appeals to the many timorous, credulous creatures amongst. The most attractive of these supernatural myths comprises unfounded claims of eternal life after death. There is absolutely no good evidence for any existence-after-death since our very consciousness is inextricably tied to the operations of a live brain. Descartes tried to prove otherwise and he failed.

One of the more stupid taunts of believers are that there are "no atheists in foxholes". This is utter nonsense particularly because the atheist has less to fear from death than does the gullible fool who fears that his sins will be punished in hell.

This raises another of the favorite taunts of believers, namely that atheists will get their just punishment for disbelief when they are sent, with all the taunters enemies, to suffer eternal damnation. This wishful "you'll be sorry" thinking of believers ranks along with their other illogical, unfounded beliefs. Such an argument, although it may satisfy the malevolence of the believer, is no good reason to take Pascal's Wager.