A POWERFUL PRAYER FOR OUR TIMES

The word ‘prayer’ troubles me a bit. I neither believe nor disbelieve in God. The belief-disbelief spectrum forms no part of my worldview or mindset, so even agnosticism is not an option for me. Besides, the traditional concept of God is contradictory, and I reject, as totally untenable, all notions of there being some all-powerful Creator to whom we can talk and who supposedly listens to, and will answer, our prayers. So, not surprisingly, I reject all forms of theistic, petitionary prayer.

However, there are many forms of prayer including affirmations of various kinds. We all pray, in our own way--even the atheist. In the words of an old hymn, ‘Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.’ Thus, if you really want good health for yourself or some other person, or world peace, that is your prayer.

Does prayer work? Well, if sincere, a prayer can change the pray-er, and if he or she changes for the better, change may occur elsewhere as well. It all begins with the individual.

Here’s a prayer of sorts that was written by Dr Annie Besant [pictured above right] in 1923. I have made very slight changes to the original wording in the interests of gender inclusiveness:

O hidden Life, vibrant in every atom;
O hidden Light, shining in every creature;

O hidden Love, embracing all in Oneness;

May all who feel themselves as one with Thee,

Know they are therefore one with every other.

What powerful words!

We start with ‘life’--the fact of existence itself. Life is everywhere. It is omnipresent. In a very profound sense, life is omnipresence itself. Is it ‘hidden’? What is hidden about life? Well, we do not really see life itself. What we see is the out-picturing—the outpouring—of life. Life takes shape in innumerable forms. What we see are living things living out their livingness from one moment to the next. However, the essence of life—the very ground of being itself—is invisible to the eye. The dynamic, creative, inexhaustible and ineffable life-principle animates and sustains all living things—including you and me—but it cannot be seen. Yet it is ‘vibrant in every atom’.

And this word ‘Light’. When life becomes visible, in the form of innumerable living things living out their livingness, it is right to describe it as ‘light’. What is hidden about light? Well, as with the word life, the real light cannot be seen. It is in the nature of pure consciousness itself. Consciousness is non-physical, immaterial, and spiritual. A spiritual substance is something which, although real, is not perceptible by the senses. We only know 'it' by its effects. We cannot see electricity, but we see the light emanating from the light bulb. This inner light shines in every creature, including you and me, and it radiates outwards in a visible manner.

‘Love’. What is love but the givingness of life to itself so as to give rise to more life. The self-givingness of life. All around us we see the effects of the self-givingness of life in action, but the self-givingness itself is invisible to the eye--hence, once again, the use of the word 'hidden'. We see the phenomenon at work everywhere, whether it is in our garden or in the maternity ward of a hospital. This love does indeed embrace all in oneness. I am not advocating monism or pantheism. When I say that life is one, I am trying to say a couple of things. First, a single logic applies to all things and how they are related to other things. Secondly, all things exist on the same order or level of reality, and on the same ‘plane’ of observability. Call it the ‘interconnectedness of all life’ or, if you like, ‘InterBeing.’ The latter wonderful term comes from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh [pictured above left]. I love that word ‘Interbeing.’

The bottom line is this. There is only one life manifesting itself in all things and as all things. The one is constantly becoming or giving birth to the many, but the one is inexhaustible. It is both manifest and unmanifest. Visible and invisible. Yet it embraces all multiplicity in oneness. In the words of Alan Watts, 'Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe.' And not just every individual, but every thing in existence.

The ‘Thee’ referred to in the invocation is not in the nature of a personal God. Annie Besant certainly did not believe in a God of that kind. She rejected all notions of an anthropomorphic God. And so do I. ‘Thee’ is not something or someone to be petitioned in the hope that He/She/It will answer our prayers. However, if you chose to believe in such a God, that is your business. The ‘Thee’ referred to in the invocation is the ‘Hidden Life’, the ‘Hidden Light’, and the ‘Hidden Love’. Those three things are a triplicity of sorts—different words for the same ‘thing’. The ‘thing’—actually, it is not a thing at all as we ordinarily understand that word—is the livingness, consciousness and self-givingness of life. When we come to feel—note that word ‘feel’—ourselves as one with that dynamic, creative life principle, in time we come to ‘know’—this is no intellectual knowing—that we are therefore ‘one with every other’. 

This ‘feeling’ is no warm and fuzzy thing. The word ‘feel’, as opposed to ‘think’, is used to denote a choiceless awareness of what is. There is no judgment, analysis or interpretation. Just choicless awareness. It’s the same with that word ‘know’. As I just said, it is not a matter on book knowledge or reasoned analysis. This knowledge is transrational. Not irrational, but transrational. As we read in The Voice of the Silence, ‘The mind is the great slayer of the Real.’ There is a place for the use of reason in our lives—a very great place—but the use of reason can never bring us to an understanding (again, not an intellectual thing) of what is truly ‘real’.

We live in a very troubled world. Has it ever been any different? We see politicians—well, some of them, at least, who are very much in the news at the present time—who seek to divide and pit one group of persons against another. That is not the way to world peace and harmony. It never was the way. I see plenty of division and conflict in our world but I also see plenty of evidence of an ever-growing group of people who, recognizing their common humanity with all other people, are working for the good of all and for the very survival of our damaged planet. They are the ones who rail against bigotry, racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination. They are the ones who think deeply before following their nation’s call to take up arms against other peoples of the world. They are the ones who believe that climate change is real—which it damn well is—and who are advocating for climate change action at all levels. They are the ones for work for justice and equality for all, including refugees and all displaced and homeless persons. They know the truth of Dr Besant's prayer, even if they have never heard of her or the prayer the subject of this post.

Yes, these are the people who, often without any connection to formal religion of any kind, are ‘praying’ this prayer. They are praying in the only way that really matters—with their lives.

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THE NATURE AND POWER OF MINDFUL PRAYER

LIVING MINDFULLY IS THE ANSWER TO THE ABSURD

‘If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.’
Thomas Nagel.

Life is absurd---and I will hear nothing to the contrary.

The Christian, as well as others with religious faith of one kind or another, will tell you that life, although at times unfair or seemingly unfair, is ultimately just and meaningful because, so they assert, there is a Supreme Being in charge who will, so it goes, ensure that all things are ‘squared up’ in the fulness of time. Thus, it is said that those who appear to have suffered unfairly in this lifetime will be compensated in the supposed life-to-come, and those who appear to get away with their wrongdoings in this life will be punished in the life-to-come.

Well, that is a nice myth, and quite comforting to some. I must say that I derived some comfort from it for many years. I no longer do. The myth ‘died’ on me not so much when I came to the view that there were not only no good reasons for believing in the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God but also good reasons for not believing in the existence of such a Being. No, the myth really died on me when I saw, in all its horror, the presence everywhere of what is known as gratuitous evil and suffering. Evil or suffering is gratuitous (that is, pointless or unnecessary) if, in the view of reasonable persons, the world would be improved by its absence and when no greater good can result from its existence as opposed to non-existence. True, some people do appear to be ennobled by suffering but I hardly think that makes the suffering right or necessary. You see, all too often too high a price is paid for the experience, and all too often the experience happens at the terrible expense of the innocent, the helpless and the powerless such as children or mere bystanders.

Actually, it is virtually impossible to provide a totally satisfactory definition of gratuitous evil and suffering. Many Christian theologians seize upon that in an attempt to show that there really is no such thing as gratuitous evil and suffering. They will stop at nothing to avoid blaming or otherwise implicating God for or as respects the existence of evil and suffering of whatever kind. As I see it, the difficulties encountered by reasonable persons only serve to highlight the absurdity and irrationality of the phenomenon --- as well as its terribleness and unacceptability.

Here’s just one example of the phenomenon of gratuitous evil and suffering. I could give you many. A cousin of mine died at the age of ten from incurable brain cancer. That is as good an example of gratuitous evil and suffering as any. What did my cousin do to ‘deserve’ that? Now, I know that question is perhaps not the ‘right’ one to ask, and maybe not even a ‘good’ question to ask. For starters, the question implies that disease or suffering is the result of wrongoing on the part of the sufferer. However, the very fact that we ask such a question, as most if not all of us will do at some point or other in our lives, points to the very existence of ‘the absurd.’ We ask the question---but we get no satisfactory answer at all. None whatsoever. No 'voice' answers back. Not even the voice of reason. There is just a huge void before us. (The Christian theologian's 'answer', namely, that God suffers in and with His creation, is far from satisfying. That may satisfy some but, I suspect, not most people.)

The philosophy of absurdism, together with its first cousin existentialism, is closely associated with the writings of the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus [pictured right]. His writings have played an important part in the development of my own philosophy of life. Camus wrote that, on the one hand, we have this insatiable yearning for life to make sense, that is, have purpose and meaning, yet on the other hand we find, if we are rigorously honest with ourselves, that life does not have any innate or intrinsic purpose or meaning. ‘The absurd,’ wrote Camus, ‘is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.’

We must be careful here. The human being is not absurd, nor is life itself absurd if we see it as it really is---the natural and inevitable outworking of a sometimes orderly but at other times quite disorderly and even chaotic interplay of forces and events most of which are outside our conscious or personal control. Life is what it is. Terrible though it is, children dying of brain or bone cancer is precisely what one would expect to find in a world that has no innate or intrinsic meaning or purpose. However, when we place our desire for meaning and purpose and all our other hopes and expectations alongside this world which is totally oblivious to all our desires and even to our very existence, well, that’s when we get the absurd. Says Camus, ‘The absurd is not in man or in the world but in their presence together … it is the bond uniting them.’

Camus’ answer to the existence of the absurd is this---rebellion … revolt. Yes, we must rebel, even revolt, against the absurd. That will not make the absurd go away but we must live as if there were meaning in our every act, thought and word. Yes, we will ultimately die and in a very real sense all that we did will come to naught, but we can invest life with a certain meaning and purpose if we live fully, are true to ourselves, and commit ourselves to some noble cause beyond ourselves. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy,’ Camus wrote in his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. (Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology, was condemned to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill, only to have to watch it roll back down again. Camus compared what he saw as the absurdity of our lives here on earth with the fate of Sisyphus.) We must open ourselves to ‘the gentle indifference of the world’ (Camus' words) and be able to say, as did Meursault, the anti-hero in Camus' great philosophical novel The Stranger, near the very end of his life, ‘I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.’

We do have choices in life. Perhaps they are not ‘real’ choices, for I think there is much to be said for the view that the choices that we make are necessarily determined by matters (eg our genes) that are beyond our personal or conscious control. Even our seemingly 'free' choices are largely determined by our temperament, our likes and dislikes, and the choices we've made previously. Be that as it may, we can still choose to be happy---no matter what. We can still choose to live mindfully. And we can still choose to make every moment of our finite existence here on earth count.

Yes, living mindfully, one moment at a time, is the 'answer'---in the sense of being the most appropriate response in all the circumstances---to the existence of the absurd. No, mindfulness cannot make the absurd disappear. Nothing can accomplish that feat. However, living mindfully can invest every moment of our wakeful and at times fitful existence with purpose and meaning. The purpose and meaning is in the doing, that is, in the living of our days … mindfully.

The great Persian philosopher, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyám wrote, ‘Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.’ How true that is! This present moment, which as I write those words has become the next moment and the one after that, is all that we have. Our life here on earth is a succession of life-moments each one of which is an instant of time in which we live, move and have our being. The choice which is yours and mine is this---will we choose to live each life-moment mindfully or mindlessly?

Rebel against the absurd. Revolt. Choose to be happy. Act as if your every act, thought and word had meaning and purpose. Embrace the delicious irony that in the overall scheme of things nothing truly matters at all in the sense of having any eternal lasting significance. But I urge you to do more---live nobly and, above all, mindfully … in the face of an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world.

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OMAR KHAYYAM AND LIVING MINDFULLY

NOTHING’S REAL--EXCEPT REALITY ITSELF

Life, as Allen Ginsberg so powerfully put it, is ‘a question/ of realizing how real/ the world is already.' 

No matter what you believe, or don’t believe, it’s how well you live your life, and how well you cope ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ that determines the true measure of your success in life and the quality of your life experience. You may pride yourself on having what you think is a logical, rational philosophy of life but if it doesn’t help you deal with the problems of everyday life, it’s next to useless. If a religious or philosophical life stance is to be of any use, it must help to explain, and help you and others cope with, the ‘broken shoelaces’ as well as the bigger tragedies of everyday life. 

There’s a Zen kōan entitled ‘Nothing exists.’ I think it powerfully illustrates the point I’m trying to make.

A young student of Zen visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku, a famous Rinzai rōshi who became abbot of Shōkoku-ji. Desiring to show his attainment, the student said: ‘The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.’

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked the student with his bamboo pipe. This made the student quite angry. ‘If nothing exists,’ inquired Dokuon, ‘where did this anger come from?’

A Christian may affirm, ‘God is light and love, and in Him there is no darkness at all’ (cf 1 Jn 1:5), and exclaim, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me’ (cf Mt 19:14; Lk 18:16), but try saying that to parents who have just lost their son or daughter to some childhood cancer after many years of pain and suffering. Now how helpful is that? Does it relieve their suffering? Does it have explanatory power? 

And the militant atheist who believes in no-god, and who has no time for those who pray to an 'imaginary friend,' may pride themself on the fact that they have, as they see it, repudiated all superstition and supernaturalism, having adopted a rational life stance, but unless they have real insight into their own behaviour and mind they know very little indeed.

Listen to these insightful words from the American spiritual leader and author Vernon Howard whose books and talks have helped me greatly over the years:

To be right, just be real. Reality is everything. Now you think about that. What is actual, what is true, what is real is right. Trueness is always right.

In nature, you can see rightness, because nature is what it is. A rose is real, a rose is right. No question about that. No rose ever goes to a psychiatrist.

In short, there is no substitute for what is. Life, reality, actuality, rightness, truth---those words refer to the same thing. If we align ourselves with what is, and don't resist or fight against it, and always speak the truth to others as well as to ourselves, we will know peace ... but not otherwise.

The truly spiritual (and I don't mean religious) person has no creed or article of faith at all, and their only liturgy is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment reverence for and acceptance of the beauty and the ugliness of life as it unfolds unceasingly yet wondrously. Their only ‘god’---if they choose to use that word---is a sincere desire to learn, know and understand as opposed to simply believe or not believe. The just-believer---as well as the mere non-believer---never knows or understands. Seek to learn. Seek to know. Seek to understand.

In the words of another master, ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (Jn 8:32).

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GOD IS NOT ABOVE LOGIC

I have engaged in some prominent debates with Sydney Anglican (read Episcopalian, if you're American or Scottish) bishops and the like at various universities over the years on such important topics as the existence of God and whether Jesus physically rose from the dead. One of the bishops I debated in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney was Dr Glenn Davies [pictured below] who is now the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. At least I found him to be a real gentleman. He was also no dill, although I didn’t find him to be much of a debater, nor apparently did a number of his Christian supporters---including some prominent members of the Sydney University Evangelical Union who organized the debate---who wrote to me after the debate saying that even they thought I had ‘won’ the debate. Of course, that neither proves nor disproves anything at all. Important issues of the kind in question are not truly resolved one way or the other by formal debates governed by the rules of debate.

I was the ‘atheist’ in these debates. Well, I wasn’t just play-acting for I reject all forms of traditional theism. If there is a ‘God’ that God is certainly not the crude anthropomorphic ‘being’ in whom my opponents believed. Atheists do not necessarily reject or deny the existence of God, rather they simply lack theistic belief (Greek áthe (os) god-less + -ist). Most, if not all, agnostics, are really ‘soft’ atheists, for they too lack theistic belief and, like atheists, live their lives as if there were no God, which may well be the case in any event. In other words, agnostics, by virtue of their lack or absence of theistic belief, are for all intents and purposes what are known as 'practical atheists,' as opposed to those who are metaphysical or philosophical ('hard') atheists. Forgive me, I digress (as usual).

Now, in the debates in which I participated I would seek to demolish the traditional, classical so-called ‘proofs’ for the existence of God. My opponents, knowing full well that those ‘proofs’ are all fundamentally flawed and have been found wanting by those 'evil, atheistic philosophers,' would invariably seek to rely upon what is known as presuppositional apologetics. A presupposition is an assumption that is taken for granted. That is, they would take for granted God’s existence---yes, Christian presuppositionalism presupposes the existence of an absolute God and temporal creation---because their a priori Christian beliefs would not allow them to proceed otherwise. 

You see the Christian presuppositionalist's 'reasoning' is derived from their basic presuppositions from which they refuse to budge no matter what counter-reasoning is presented by their opponent. They take for granted the truth and reliability of the Christian Scriptures and assume from the beginning the supernatural revelation of the Bible as the ultimate arbiter of truth and error. They then try to show how belief in the Christian God, Jesus, the Bible, the 'miracles', etc, is supposedly more reasonable than non-belief in those things. Amazing, really. You see, in light of their presuppositions about things metaphysic they see all thinking on such matters---well, at least their thinking---as being wholly receptively reconstructive of their (note this---narrow, emphatic evangelical) interpretation of what is set forth in the Bible as supposedly being God's Word (that is, God's thinking).

My Christian opponents’ arguments rested almost entirely on an absolutist belief in the Bible as the source of truth because the Bible is supposedly inspired by God, in whom, so we are told, we can believe because the Bible affirms it, and the Bible is the source of truth. ('Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.' Well, the Bible must be right, mustn't it? Because the Bible is the Word of God. It says so. So it must be right. Etc, etc.) This sort of reasoning is entirely circular and tautological, and is little more than fideism, which asserts---in its strongest form---that belief in the existence of God cannot be established by reason at all, but must be accepted or rejected wholly upon faith. 

In at least one of the debates in which I participated my opponent told the audience that, given my rationalistic worldview, I was simply incapable of entertaining any worldview of a 'supernaturalistic' kind. In other words, he was accusing me of presuppositionalism---of a naturalistic, rationalistic kind. Not so. I do not start with any such presupposition. My present position is simply that the physical world in which we live yields no credible or reliable evidence of 'supernaturalism.' This is not a naturalistic bias on my part at all. Not at all. I repeat, I do not start from any naturalistic or rationalistic presuppositions. For example, believing that there are no good reasons for believing that God exists does not necessitate that God does not and cannot exist since mere belief is not proof that God either exists or doesn’t exist. Although I lack theistic belief my mind is not closed to the possibility of God existing, although I think that’s most unlikely. My mind is not foreclosed to reason, counter-argument or evidence to the contrary. I fear, however, that my Christian opponents' minds were foreclosed. Their theistic presuppositions could not under any circumstances allow them to rightly determine God’s non-existence from evidence. Their basic presuppositions compelled them to always interpret all evidence in a manner consistent with those absolutist presuppositions.

With Bishop Robert Forsyth, the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney,
whom I debated in 2005 at the University of Technology, Sydney

In these debates---as in my various writings---I tried wherever possible to rely on reason and its principal ‘tool’, logic. (I must be honest. I would from time to time also employ some ridicule and theatrics well.) Now, when I use the word ‘logic’ I am referring to traditional Aristotelian logic. My opponents would then retort, ‘God is above the rules of logic.’ Really? That can’t be right. Now, for the sake of what follows, let’s assume that there is a God of the kind my learned clerical opponents claimed made the world, is watching attentively over it, and so on. How could this God be ‘above’---whatever that word means in this context---the rules of logic?

First, the assertion that God is above logic is not an a priori proposition. Where is the theist’s proof for this assertion? In fact, the theist, although rejecting the applicability of logic, always ends up applying logic, albeit wrongly. Theists tend to do that, and they end up tying themselves into knots of their own making.

Secondly, what is the point of reasoning about God if the principal tool of reason---that is, logic----is inapplicable or unreliable. Never forget that logic is about things, not thought, and about how things are related to other things. It is always a case of … what is.  As the Scottish born-Australian philosopher John Anderson [pictured below left] pointed out, there is only one order or level of reality such that a single logic applies to all things and how they are related to each other. There can be nothing ‘above’ or ‘below’ the proposition---not even God. Anderson was a realist, an empiricist, and in more recent times I have come to see that idealism and realism are not really in conflict with each other. Indeed, they need each other, and they even complement each other. Irrespective of whether or not you accept Anderson’s strict realism, I think what he said about there being only one order or level of reality is true, even if one embraces monistic idealism.

Thirdly, and most importantly, if there were anything above logic we simply could not trust our senses at all. All our attempts at fact-finding, determining what conclusions and inferences can be drawn from any given set of facts before us, and drawing appropriate conclusions and inferences from those facts, would be futile---and we know that is not the case. We can reason---and we must ... if we are to know our true bearings and 'navigate' our way successfully through life. With our eyes open, and wide awake, I mean.

Fourthly, if God were above logic there could be no interpretation (logical extrapolation) of God’s Word or Christian apologetics. For example, the various arguments for the Trinity would collapse. They’re pretty weak in any event, but that’s another story.

Fifthly, the theist does in fact use logic when expedient, that is, when it suits their purposes. Take, for example, the law of non-contradiction (viz that anything with a contradictory nature cannot exist). The theist affirms that God cannot contradict Himself. Thus, God cannot create a rock that God can’t lift. God cannot create a round square. God cannot make the immoral moral. God may be all-powerful but God is still constrained by logic. If that were not so, then there would be nothing to stop God from creating a rock so heavy that God could not lift it and then in the next moment lift it. In short, a God ‘above’ logic doesn’t make sense at all. It is inconsistent with the very attributes that are said go to make up God (reason being one of them). Reason and observation tell us that nothing can be done by anything---including God---that is not otherwise part of its capabilities.

Finally, assuming, for the moment that the God of traditional theism does in fact exist---something which, in my opinion, is highly unlikely indeed---that God would not be above logic nor below it. As with morality or goodness, reason would have to be an integral part of the nature of God. It would not be a question of God ‘submitting’ to logic nor could it be truly said that God arbitrarily created reason. In short, reason, a fundamental human capability, would have to be seen to be part of God’s nature and, once again, as the theist keeps on telling us, God does not and cannot contradict His own nature.

Of course, all that assumes that the God of traditional theism does in fact exist. I have written and spoken elsewhere on that matter.

WHY THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPT OF GOD IS CONTRADICTORY

I hope to show in this post why the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of God is inherently and irredeemably contradictory. 

Now, at the outset I need to make one thing perfectly clear. When we speak of the ‘traditional' idea of God we are referring to the supposed and presumed existence of a 'supernatural,' 'infinite' and 'immortal' personal or superpersonal being who is said to be all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), all-loving (omnibenevolent) and everywhere present (omnipresent), and who, at least according to the traditional interpretation of the Christian scriptures, is said to have taken human form uniquely in the person of Jesus Christ, who traditionally is said and held by Christians to be both fully human as well as fully divine. One more thing---this infinite God is said to be entirely separate from His [sic] finite creation, even though it is asserted that it is possible for us to 'know' this God.

Here’s one reason why the traditional theistic concept of God is inherently and irredeemably contradictory. In the course of this post I will give you some other reasons as well. If a supposedly supernatural God had an existence or presence before reality, that is, before the supposed creation of all that which is, then that God must be ‘unreal’, and therefore not God. Why? Because it is impossible to postulate a reality before it was present. That’s right. 

Christian apologists and other theists postulate the existence of some ‘atemporal’ reality, but that is a meaningless proposition. Why? Because action implies multiple states, and multiple states in turn require some form of time. Now, it is asserted that God exists ‘outside’ of all time, but the God of the Bible and the Qur'an is supposed to both think and create. ‘“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD’ (Is 55:8). ‘Your thoughts are of great worth to me, O God. How many there are!’ (Ps 139:17). ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen 1:1). ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things’ (Is 45:7). ‘That is Allah, your Lord; there is no deity except Him, the Creator of all things, so worship Him. And He is Disposer of all things’ (Qur’an 6:102). ‘Allah is Ever-Knowing, Ever-Wise’ (Qur’an 8:71).

How, please think about all this for a moment. Thinking and creating (making) things are both time-related activities. In other words, God is supposedly timeless but also causally efficacious, that is, God can affect material objects (the latter being a time-related concept).  However, the only truly timeless things that we know are abstract objects---for example, numbers and sets---and they have no causal properties. But, God is supposedly abstract as well as having causal properties. That is a contradiction, and nothing with a contradictory nature exists or can exist. So God---at least the traditional theistic God---cannot, and therefore does not, exist.

The well-known Christian apologist William Lane Craig [pictured right], in his book Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (2002), states that ‘outside of time, God is eternal; and with creation, God has entered time’.  Well, if Craig is right, it means that God must have changed, but God, so we are told, is supposedly immutable. Now, if God is not subject to time, having entered the natural world from ‘outside’ (whatever that means, for it is impossible to conceive of anything existing ‘outside’ the universe), God can no longer be said to be supernatural or infinite.  Why? Because it is impossible to speak meaningfully of the supposed infinite acting in the finite, the supposed non-temporal acting in time or entering into time.

Here’s another contradiction that cannot be resolved. I ask you this---why would a supposedly supernatural God (again, how can we conceive of anything being ‘supernatural’) bother to create a ‘natural’ universe, assuming for the moment that the universe was ‘created.’ Did God feel a lack of something? Did God want company, or something? If so, then God was not perfect in Himself/Herself/Itself. You see, so-called creationism and perfectionism---God is said to be both creator as well as a perfect being---are mutually exclusive.

Of course, there is no such thing as the 'universe.' That's right! You see, the word 'universe' is just that---a word. It simply means the sum 'total' of all there is, with the totality of all things being what is known as a 'closed system.' Each 'thing' is a cause of at least one other 'thing' as well as being the effect of some other 'thing,' so everything is explainable by reference to everything else. End of story. 

Hence, all theological talk of the supposed need for some 'first cause' is, well, nonsense. As the Scottish-Australian philosopher Professor John Anderson [pictured left] pointed out, 'there can be no contrivance of a "universe" or totality of things, because the contriver would have to be included in the totality of things.' (In any event, the entire notion of a supposed 'Being'---the 'contriver'---whose essential attributes [for example, omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience] are non-empirical is unintelligible and inherently contradictory. In any event, why would a supposedly supernatural 'contriver' bother to 'create' a natural universe, assuming (once again) that it was created?

Here’s another inconsistency, assuming you're still 'with' me. God is supposedly blameless, yet there is the supposed reality of divine punishment, hell and eternal damnation. Those two ideas don’t sit comfortably together. I much prefer the Buddhist idea that we are punished by our 'sins,' not for them. Further, the existence of gratuitous evil and suffering in the world is incompatible with the notion of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. Evil or suffering is gratuitous if, in the view of reasonable persons, the world would be improved by its absence. Now, an omnipotent God would be perfectly able to create human beings that were genuinely free but who never used their freewill to do evil, but only to do good. However, it is said, at least by Christian apologists, that God knowingly created human beings who, God knew in advance, would use their freewill to do evil. I am sorry, but such a God is then morally responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world that has in fact ensued. Why? Because, as I have said, if God is all-powerful, God could have created human beings that were genuinely free, but who only used their freewill to do good. For example, a recovering alcoholic, who wishes to stay sober, chooses not to drink, one day at a time. Yes, he or she could choose to drink, but they consistently choose to exercise their freewill not to drink. If human beings can do that, then surely any decent God, who was all-loving and all-powerful, would want to create people like that. 

In any event, the God of traditional theism is far from attractive. According to the Bible, God deliberately killed every living thing on earth (Gen 7:20-24), murdered innocent children (Ex 12:29), murdered over 50,000 people because they dared to look into the Ark (1 Sam 6:19), murdered infants and ripped fetuses from the womb (Hos 13:16), and supposedly commands the death penalty for adultery (Lev 20:10) and the murder of homosexuals (Lev 20:13)---and that's just for starters. Not a very nice person, to say the least. The God of the Qur’an can be just as unlovely. Unlike the Judeo-Christian God, who is said (except by some stupid and ignorant Christian fundamentalists whose God hates 'fags' [see picture above]) to ‘hate the sin but love the sinner,’ Allah loves only the ‘good’: ‘Allah loves not transgressors’ (Qur'an 2:190); ‘He loves not creatures ungrateful or wicked’ (Qur'an 2:276); ‘Say: 'Obey Allah and His Apostle;' but if they turn back Allah loves not those who reject Faith’ (Qur'an 3:32); ‘Allah loves not those who do wrong’ (Qur'an 3:57, 140); ‘Allah loves not the arrogant, the vainglorious’ (Qur'an 4:36); ‘Say, if ye love Allah, follow me; Allah will love and forgive you your sins’ (Qur'an 3:31). All I can say is, thank God for the great Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick who famously wrote, ‘Better believe in no God than to believe in a cruel God, a tribal God, a sectarian God. Belief in God is one of the most dangerous beliefs a man can cherish.’ (I once spoke those words of Fosdick at a debate at the Sydney Town Hall at which Dr William Lane Craig was present. However, the organiser of the debate, St Barnabas Anglican Church, Broadway, Sydney, shamefully edited out those words from my speech in the video tape of the proceedings. The truth hurts.)

Now, if the existence of certain state of affairs is logically incompatible with the purported existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God, or if it is intrinsically improbable that those states of affairs would subsist in a universe with such a God and more probable than not that they would subsist in a universe without such a God, then there are more than good grounds for believing that such a God does not exist.

Here’s another contradiction or dilemma.  (I could give you many, many more, but that's for another day---and post.) Does God have a body? If so, where can we locate that body? You see, if God does not have a body, the alleged properties attributed to God (for example, that God is powerful, loving, good, and just) are totally misleading. Why? Because all such predicates apply to bodies whose behaviours are publicly observable. They do not apply to so-called ‘disembodied minds.’

In this post I have tried to use logic. Now, when I debate Christian apologists, they invariably assert that God is ‘above’ logic. That cannot be the case. God---or at least any concept of God---cannot be ‘above’ logic, whatever ‘above’ means. You see, the assertion that God is above logic is not an a priori proposition. Where is the theist’s proof for this assertion? In fact, the theist, although rejecting the applicability of logic, is still applying logic, albeit wrongly, in their arguments for the existence of God. The theist is tying themselves into a knot of their own making. What, I ask you, is the point of reasoning about God if the principal tool of reason---logic---is inapplicable. Never forget this---logic is about things, not thought. Logic is about how things are related to other things. In logic it is always a case of … what is. As philosopher John Anderson pointed out many times, there is only one order or level of reality such that a single logic applies to all things and how they are related to each other. There can be nothing ‘above’ or ‘below’ the proposition---not even God. If anything were above logic we simply could not trust our senses. That’s right---if God is above logic there can be no interpretation or logical extrapolation of God’s word, nor could there be any system of apologetics. For example, the various arguments for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity would immediately and totally collapse.

The theist is often a hypocrite. Theists do in fact use logic when expedient, that is, when it suits their purposes. Take, for example, the law of contradiction (that is, that anything with a contradictory nature cannot exist). The theist affirms that God cannot contradict Himself [sic]. Thus, God cannot create a rock that He [sic] can’t lift. God cannot create a round square. God cannot make the immoral moral. God may be all-powerful, says the theist, but God is still constrained by logic. If that were not the case, then there would be nothing to stop God from creating a rock so heavy that God could not lift it and then in the next moment lift it. 

In short, a God ‘above’ logic doesn’t make any sense---not that a God subject to logic does either, as I’ve tried to show. Be that as it may, the idea of a God ‘above’ logic is inconsistent with the very attributes that go to make up the traditional theistic concept of God. Reason and observation tell us that nothing can be done by anything, including God, that is not otherwise part of God’s capabilities.

Assuming, for the moment that the traditional God of theism does in fact exist, that God would not be above logic nor below it. As with morality or goodness, reason would have to be seen as part of the very nature of God. Yes, any sensible concept of God would have to accept that God does not ‘submit’ to logic nor arbitrarily ‘create’ logic. Reason would have to be seen to be part of God’s nature. A sensible believer would also have to accept that God cannot contradict His/Her/Its own nature.

Are there more sensible concepts of ‘God’? Indeed, there are. Here is a previous post of mine that may be of interest to thinking---as opposed to believing---people.

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