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Theistic Claim: Well, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist—so there!
Skeptical Response: The fact that I can’t prove that God doesn’t exist is not an argument that he does. With that kind of fallacious argumentation, just about anything and everything that anyone anywhere has ever claimed to be true could ostensibly be true. Check it out:
• “There are tiny, imperceptible leprechauns running around in space, singing Peruvian folk songs. You can’t prove that there aren’t!”
• “All plants were created by Plantomina, an all-powerful, supernatural witch who flies around the universe creating plants on various planets. You can’t prove that Plantomina isn’t real!”
• “Every time I play The White Album, a goat in Bolivia feels melancholy. You can’t prove that it doesn’t!”
And so on, ad infinitum.
It’s a wretched way to establish a claim as empirically true. In fact, it’s not establishing any truth at all—it’s just avoiding having to prove one’s assertion by turning the tables and making the skeptical doubter bear the burden of proof. But the skeptical doubter isn’t making any claims. She’s just doubting the supernatural claim—in this case, the religious claim that God exists. And any time someone makes such a claim, especially an amazing, highly miraculous claim like the existence of a magical deity—he or she bears the burden of proof; it is his or her job to prove it true, not the skeptic’s job to prove it false.
And furthermore, when the theist claims that the atheist can’t prove that God does not exist, that raises the question: Which God? Are you demanding that Zeus be proven not to exist? Thor? Ra? Hachiman? Amenhotep? Inti? The God of the Jews? The Heavenly Father of Mormonism? Allah, the god of Islam? And are these all distinct gods—each which must be individually disproven not to exist—or are they all the same god? But even if we stick with the, you know, most popular “God” that American Christians claim to believe in—no one can ever offer a clear, objective definition of this most generic of gods. Everyone has their own understanding of Him—some traditional, others personal, some metaphorical, and still others psychedelic. And then, just to shoot more distracting confetti into the court room, the theist will regularly claim that the God she believes in is incomprehensible, indefinable, ineffable, and unknowable! But to say that God is incomprehensible is to frankly acknowledge that any clear definition of God cannot be offered—for how can you define what cannot be comprehended or grasped?
When the atheist is asked to disprove the existence of God, she faces a never-ending shell game, where the target is ever shifting, the subject impossible to pin down, and the matter under question ultimately one big dynamic sleight of hand—or sleight of mind, in this case. But at least in a real shell game, the manipulator knows where the ball is hiding. When it comes to theism, even the religious believer in God is peddling something ultimately unknowable, inscrutable, ineffable, invisible, undetectable, indefinable, imperceptible, indiscernible—or more succinctly: not there.
Ye of Lots of Faith?
There are countless additional ways in which religious people try to prove the existence of God. None work. None hold up to any sort of evidentiary scrutiny. And that’s when they inevitably, and conveniently, turn to faith in defense of their claim that God exists. Thus, the final “argument” for belief in God is not based on any verifiable evidence or sound logic but rather faith. And as Mark Twain rightly quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Or as Twain’s contemporary and fellow wit Ambrose Bierce put it, faith is “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”29 Or as the much less humorous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, faith is nothing more than “the will to avoid knowing what is true.”30
While faith may certainly be comforting, and it may be inspiring, and it clearly holds a place of value in most people’s hearts as they navigate the challenges of life, it is, nonetheless, an inherently poor way to establish the truth of anything. For, as American philosopher George Smith asserts, the essence of faith is “to consider an idea true even though it cannot meet the test of truth . . . faith is required only for those beliefs that cannot be defended.”31
Even Paul, the true founder of Christianity, honestly articulated the meaning of faith nearly two thousand years ago, which he defines in Hebrews 11 of the New Testament as confidence in what is hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. That is, faith is believing in what one wishes and hopes to be true (not what is true) and being convinced of things even without evidence of their empirical reality. And this is exactly what the theist does: hangs the entire corpus of her morality upon faith in something that doesn’t even exist.
And this will not do.
Morality and ethics are far too important to be based on some fantastical deity that can’t even be proven to exist. Morality and ethics are far too immediate and imperative to hinge upon mere wishes, hopes, and illusions. Morality and ethics—the underlying bases for how we treat one another and how we seek to structure society—cannot stand if they are based on the ephemeral, inscrutable claims of religious theism.32
The fact that God has never been clearly defined or proven to exist is enough of a reason to dismiss—or at least be highly dubious of—any ethical system based on theism. As American philosopher Michael Martin has argued, “unless the concept of God is shown to be coherent, theism cannot possibly be thought to be an ontological foundation of morality.”33 And yet, as we know, most people do believe that God exists—regardless of the glaring lack of evidence. And many of these theists base their morals on their faith in God, which spurs their love of pepperoni and dismissal of vegetarianism, bolsters their antipathy toward homosexuals and their opposition to gay marriage, and helps them justify the hitting of their children.
But wait—that’s not quite fair.
Not all theists share these views or predilections. Many people who believe in God support vegetarianism, are in favor of gay marriage, and oppose corporal punishment. The fact of the matter is that God-believers hold many different views, harboring a wide diversity of values on a variety of matters of ethical importance. No doubt. But while this impressive diversity of viewpoints among theists is perhaps something to be welcomed and celebrated, it is—at root—yet another significant reason as to why morality based on belief and faith in God is so problematic as to be manifestly untenable.
The Insidiousness of Interpretation
One night about twenty years ago, I was lying in bed watching TV, clicker in hand, flipping through channels, when I came across an episode of the show 20/20. John Stossel, one of the lead reporters, was doing an investigative story on polygamous families. He went to some region of Utah where Mormons still practice what they call “the principle of plural marriage,” which entails one man having multiple wives. Stossel and his TV crew hung out with these pious, polygamous men and women for a few days, spent time in their homes, attended their church
