a study from 2010 found that the more strongly Christian an American is, the more likely he or she is to consider spanking to be a good method of disciplining children; a full 85 percent of Christian fundamentalists believe in spanking their kids, compared to only 57 percent of nonreligious Americans.3 Another study, from 2012, compared secular parenting literature with Christian parenting literature; the former was critical of corporal punishment, while the latter was much more positive and supportive of it.4 And given that a solid body of research reveals the extent to which corporal punishment is damaging to children—psychologically, emotionally, and physically5—this divergence in secular versus religious views over corporal punishment is no mere matter of opinion; the effects are of explicit moral concern.
The list of things the Lord commands of us is long: what to eat or not eat, who to have sex with and not have sex with, how to dress, how to tend crops, how to trim our facial hair, how many witnesses to procure in order to prove a crime, what day to rest on, what gender ought to be in charge, and so on—and these commands are taken to be imperatively true and ethically binding by billions, thereby significantly shaping the personal morality of countless believers, who then go on to shape so many aspects of our world.
But here’s the rub: there is no evidence that this God even exists.6
No Proof
My wife’s former colleague insists that God wants us to eat meat—and yet she has no rigorous evidence that this God even exists. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic fundamentalists who deny homosexuals the right to marry, adopt children, or to simply live—depending on what country we’re talking about—do so by insisting that it is God’s (or Allah’s) will that homosexuals be oppressed. And yet they offer no compelling evidence that this supreme deity is actually real. The parent who hits his children because he believes such abuse is what God wants offers no empirical evidence of this magical being’s verifiable reality.
And thus we arrive at the first, most basic critique of religiously ensconced theistic morality: it is based on faith in something that has never been positively proven to exist. The manifest failure of God-based morality is that its underlying basis, its central pillar, its muscle, its heart, its engine, its raison d’être—God—has never been shown to actually be real. The traditional theological claim that there is an almighty, all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural being who creates everything, gives commands, and performs miracles, has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Or even a pithy smidgeon of doubt.
Now, some may object that this traditional theological description of God is rudimentary or unsophisticated; not everyone who believes in God conceives of God as an almighty, all-knowing, fatherlike being. True enough. Most contemporary theologians will point out that there are much more intellectually sophisticated and dynamic theological explications or descriptions of God out there.
To which I reply: nonsense.
All such so-called “sophisticated” theology is nothing more than psychedelic poetry propped up by pretentious, pseudointellectual gobbledygook signifying absolutely nothing; it is heady, mind-bending verbiage cloaked in a costume of respectable erudition that doesn’t actually mean a thing—and certainly cannot be substantiated empirically, let alone logically defended. Consider, for example, prominent theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of being.”7 Hmm. And that means what, exactly? Nothing at all. According to theologian Hans Küng, God is defined as “the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute in the relative.”8 Nice words. Poetic and ethereal—especially if you are high. But they don’t actually mean anything concrete. Deep Christian thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead—along with his process theology progeny—declare that God is “permanent . . . fluent . . . one . . . many . . . actual eminently . . . immanent . . .”9 Got that? You sure? Such “sophisticated” theology amounts to little more than what American philosopher Patrick Grim rightly criticizes as “refuge in vagueness,”10 or what the famous atheist writer 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
