Nietzsche Was Probably Right

By Steven Malinak

For a variety of reasons, recent literature that focuses on the rationality of belief in God and the viability of the Christian worldview fails to stimulate critical thinking in the general population of believers. Nietzsche Was Probably Right succeeds where many of these other works miss the mark. It educates rather than coerces; it focuses on issues critically relevant to the vast majority of Christians; most importantly, it does not “preach to the choir,” but instead offers a balanced, objective, comprehensive overview of the issues. Its tone and inclusive, unbiased approach welcomes nonbelievers and believers into this important conversation, offering a perspective that will satisfy anyone seeking a critical understanding of the Christian faith and its deity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312318489

Book preview

Nietzsche Was Probably Right

Nietzsche Was Probably Right

A Postcritical Assessment of the Christian Paradigm and Its Deity

Steven M. Malinak

Copyright © 2014 by Steven M. Malinak

All rights reserved.  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

ISBN 978-1-312-31848-9

To Deborah Ann and Emma Marie

Thank you for blessing me abundantly,

for saving me, and for bringing

an incomprehensible joy to my life.

Because of you, I am complete.

I love you, with everything that I am.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The Approach

Chapter 3: Laying the Foundation

Chapter 4: The Scientific Way of Knowing

Chapter 5:.Origin Narratives

Chapter 6:.Biblical Inerrancy

Chapter 7: The Contingency of Natural History

Chapter 8: Original Sin

Chapter 9: Sin and Morality

Chapter 10: The Concept of God

Chapter 11: Compelling Cases

Chapter 12: Conclusions and Consequences

Bibliography and Suggested Readings

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

_________________________________________________________

Please join me in a little thought experiment.  I will offer a series of three-word sentences, and you mentally note your response to each.  Here we go.

Zeus is dead.

Jupiter is dead.

Osiris is dead.

God is dead.

Unless you actively maintain faith in ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian deities, my guess is that the majority of you simply acknowledge these first three sentences as facts.  Important to these ancient cultures as each deity may have been, most of you assume that they are artifacts of history that have long since been replaced or forgotten.   

But what of the fourth sentence?  In 2008, the Pew Research Center published the results of a survey on the religious landscape in the United States, which indicated that 78.4% of Americans are Christian. (p. 5) If you are one of these believers, your emotional response to the final obituary may have ranged from anger to incredulity, maybe even pity for those who would even ponder such a question.  To you, God is very much alive.

Nevertheless, focusing on Christian believers raises an interesting question:  If we say that, in the West at least, God is the god of this era, what leads one to so resolutely defend the existence of God while maintaining that the gods of bygone eras are little more than constructs of the mind or distortions of truth?  The answer could be that humans have always sought God, the deity who really is out there, but that we couldn’t begin to know Him until He revealed Himself a few thousand years ago to a small group of near-Eastern nomads.  We just did the best we could prior to that revelation.  In that scenario, Zeus or Osiris or any other dead god was simply replaced by God.  Another possible answer is that the majority of us are in fact still worshipping an entity that we constructed.  Like Zeus and Osiris, perhaps God just isn’t a viable entity.

Under what circumstances would God, or more precisely the concept of Him, die?  I can think of only two.  It is possible that some other deity with a more compelling worldview, perhaps a god currently worshipped in non-Western cultures or a god not yet known,  could replace God just as God came to replace Zeus.  It is also possible that at some point enough will be understood about the world and how things seem to work that all personal gods, including God, will be explained out of the picture.  He won’t be replaced by another; rather, the plausibility of any entity like Him existing will simply diminish to nothing. 

Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for writing that God is dead.  Regardless of what he thought or intended, his claim taken at face value obviously does not reflect consensus opinion in the United States.  But He may be dying: the same Pew survey also reports that the "biggest gainer in the religious competition" is among those not affiliated with any particular faith (Pew Research Center Publications 2008 p. 5, emphasis mine), and it is widely known that Europe and Canada are becoming increasingly secular.  What does this increasing lack of conviction suggest?  There are many possible answers to that question, but after reflecting on the relevant information available to us in the 21st century, my conclusion is that Nietzsche was probably right.

I did not come to that conclusion lightly.  Despite once being a conservative Christian – the thought of God being dead, or even dying, was laughable to me – hindsight indicates that at the time I had a precritical understanding of Christianity and God.  According to Vande Kappelle, a precritical understanding is an early state in which children accept whatever significant authority figures in their lives tell them to be true as indeed true.  While most children live with the ambiguity, others feel the need to resolve the tension one way or the other.  (Vande Kappelle 2012 p. xxiii)  I was in the latter group.  I could not live with the ambiguity and tension between what I accepted as a child and what I experienced living and learning in the modern world.  In an effort to resolve that tension, I went through an intense period of searching and challenging and evaluating until I felt I could approach my faith from an informed perspective.  I then entered a postcritical stage of assessment.  Contrary to what many may think, opening oneself up to modern knowledge – commentary on the historical Jesus, evolution, Biblical scholarship, etc. – does not automatically lead to atheism.  Indeed, many scholars of religion, including Vande Kappelle, beautifully articulate what a postcritical Christianity might look like; their postcritical assessment leads them to a faith they hold with conviction.  That said, others feel that Christianity and the God that inspires this worldview become unviable in light of such knowledge, as I currently do.

In the end, whether one emerges from his postcritical assessment a believer or a non-believer, both have one thing in common: they have an informed perspective.  Alas, in the world we currently inhabit, an informed perspective on faith is often lacking.  Yet it is urgently needed.  I think it is a problem when a person makes decisions for others based on what that person believes to be true, if those beliefs have not been carefully critiqued or are too narrow in focus.  It is clear that in today’s world, many lives are directly impacted in a negative or terminal way by irrational and irresponsible acts carried out in the name of faith and our commitment to God.  I concur with Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, that one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns…in ways that are not flagrantly irrational.  Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we afford religious faith. (Harris 2006 p. 87)

I do not mean to suggest that religious thinking is entirely irrational and worthless.  Certainly, many acts of compassion and generosity result directly from reflection on the divine, to say nothing for the personal comfort and group cohesion such reflection offers.  If believing in God assists you as you navigate the challenges of life and death, so be it.  If those beliefs lead to a better life for everyone, all the better.  But if your beliefs require you to exploit, alienate, terrorize or victimize any other human who does not share them, perhaps questioning the existence of the god requiring such atrocities is essential to the future of us all.  And by atrocities, I am not limiting myself to suicide bombings.  Stem cell research, abortion, gay rights…many people, solely on the basis of what they believe, will knowingly, willingly and sometimes aggressively estrange other human beings over such issues.  When it comes to the well-being of others, you owe it to them as well as yourself to challenge beliefs that inform your views.  No idea, no matter what its origin, should be immune to challenge.

Let me continue to paraphrase Harris.  Unlike previous eras, accumulated human knowledge has reached a point where an informed discussion about faith and reason is possible.  For instance, not so long ago it was arguably rational to condemn and kill people for the practice of witchcraft, simply because the true source of the calamities facing people – illness, crop failure, etc. – were poorly understood.  Today, we know that such calamities are not due to anything other than natural phenomena that can be explained without referencing the supernatural.  Thus, in light of available information, it would now be irrational for us to look for witches when one catches a cold or loses tomatoes to blight.  Unfortunately, for a significant group of people in the world today, faith still trumps reason, even in areas where accumulated knowledge seems to suggest that naïve faith is irrational.  This becomes seriously problematic when faith-based decision making leads to horrific results.  Indeed, modern-day witch hunts can be found in abortion clinics in the United States, in the streets of Baghdad and Jerusalem, and elsewhere.  In light of 21st century knowledge, there is good reason to argue that they are irrational and should no longer be occurring.  Many people assume that those who participate in them – including some Jews, Christian, and Muslims – have got it all wrong, blaming the irrationality on the inaccurate assumptions made by the perpetrator and not on the religion itself.  However, many authors, including Harris in The End of Faith, make a strong case that such witch hunts actually depend not so much on the followers’ interpretations of the religion but on the core beliefs of the religion itself. 

I therefore challenge everyone who has not already done so to move into the critical phase of your faith.  The stakes are so high that to consciously remain in the precritical phase is irresponsible.  The process requires a fair bit of legwork.  That is where I come in.

This book is largely a transcript of a course I designed and routinely teach through the religious studies department at Washington & Jefferson College, called Human Origin: Scientific and Christian Perspectives.  The course looks critically at modern knowledge that is relevant to the questions we should have as believers, and assesses conservative and liberal expressions of the Christian paradigm in light of this critical understanding. 

What always amazes me is how little my young charges understand about Christianity, beyond the superficial assessment offered through religious education or regular attendance at worship services.  One could quickly dismiss this ignorance as the product of youth and inexperience, but ask yourself honestly, how many 80 year olds know any more about their faith than the typical 18 year old?  Not many, as suggested by a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2010.  Commenting on religious knowledge in the United States,

Atheists and agnostics…are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.  (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life 2010 p. 6)

Out of 32 questions on the survey, atheists/agnostics answered 20.9 correctly compared to 16 correct answers for Protestants and 14.7 for Catholics; on the subset of questions dealing specifically with Christianity and the Bible, atheists and agnostics answered more questions correct than Protestants and Catholics, albeit narrowly. (p. 6-7) Whether or not these differences are statistically significant need not concern us here.  For our purposes, what I find most interesting are those factors that appear to correlate with knowledge about religion.  The survey revealed that educational attainment…is the single best predictor of religious knowledge, and since Jews and atheists/agnostics have high levels of education on average, this could in part explain why individuals in these groups are generally more knowledgeable about religion. (p. 10) Along those same lines, college graduates get nearly eight more questions right on average than do people with a high school education or less.  Having taken a religion course in college is also strongly associated with higher religious knowledge. (p. 10) If you want to truly know about your faith, beyond what other practitioners tell you, education seems to be the key. 

What I find even more disturbing is how little my students know about other relevant information available to us.  Who wrote the Bible, God or man?  Where do we get the better assessment of where we came from, Genesis or evolution?  Can we know anything about who Jesus was without relying exclusively on the four canonical Gospels?  Where do we find material to help us answer these types of questions, and how do we assess all of it once we find it?  Does it just come down to a choice, perhaps based on faith alone, or do we have tools available to help us make informed decisions?  It is this type of critical, inclusive analysis that takes place at the college level and beyond, where the goal is to own and synthesize knowledge, not simply regurgitate it.  Again, education is key.

If we want to assess the Christian paradigm in light of 21st century knowledge, we have to acquire that knowledge, critique it, and then apply it to the questions at hand.  One of the reasons I am writing this book is to do exactly that.  While there are many books written by the so-called New Atheists on one extreme and Christian apologists on the other, it is hard to fully engage with them, for two reasons: they tend to speak with an overt bias, and they tend to presuppose the reader is prepared to enter the discussion.  This book will first educate those who read it, presenting and critiquing relevant material from diverse sources and perspectives, not just church and not just the classroom, and then allow them to enter into what I intend to be an objective discussion on the existence of God and the viability of the Christian worldview.  The conclusion I come to is not one I want to be true; it simply seems very difficult to refute. 

Accomplishing these goals is actually quite a bit more challenging in the 21st century than it needs to be.  We find ourselves at an interesting moment in history, when ridiculous amounts of information are readily available.  When we have a question, we find an answer very quickly, and often times, if it is the answer we were looking for, we end our search.  We do not do much else, like critique the source, or look for other opinions from other perspectives.  And even if we did, assessing those sources can be a challenge.  Gone are the days when people understood the difference between Time and The National Enquirer, when a person knew that the quality of information coming from a library was different from what you might get from a guy passing out leaflets on the street.  Today, the guy on the street and the PhD can both present their opinions on the Internet.  Both presentations can look equally impressive, equally professional, and so we often lose sight of the fact that different opinions are not necessarily equally valid – the expertise of the one offering the opinion, the validity of the presented facts, consensus among many experts…these things should matter.  People decide to listen to actors rather than doctors and scientists on the question of whether or not to vaccinate their children.  On the issue of climate change, the blog written by the non-scientist can carry more weight than the near-consensus opinion offered by trained scientists with advanced degrees.  And yes, people listen to their pastors or other religious leaders on the question of God’s existence but often do not care much about perspectives offered on the topic by philosophers or religious scholars.  That is not necessarily to say that the actor, the non-scientist, or the pastor do not have a perspective to offer.  Indeed, in some cases, that perspective might be an important one.  The question is simply how we weigh that perspective against others.  In a democracy, where the course of action a nation takes directly or indirectly depends on the vote of its citizenry, it seems critical that the electorate be informed, and yet the ability to critically assess information seems to be increasingly lacking, particularly in Americans.  The profound questions that face us demand a thorough search for responsible answers, because the decisions one makes could easily affect the lives of many others for generations. 

If Harris is right, we are at a turning point in history, where the religious beliefs that perhaps served us well in the past are now doing more harm than good.  Perhaps it is true that the only way for us to progress as a species is to begin to rationally question our religious beliefs.  To do so, we cannot look at our faith from the inside exclusively.  We must be willing to search broadly, to understand the perspectives offered not just by our pastors and our own ruminations on the sacred, but also from scholars – scientists, literary experts, historians, archeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians among them.  Such a broad consideration of relevant information may strengthen your faith.  It may challenge it, as it did mine.  Either way, isn’t it much better to be informed, especially when the decisions you make can affect so many?

And in the end, the perspective I offer in this book is just that: my own.  It is shared by many others, but not everyone.  While I am confident in my conclusion, like any good scholar I must admit that I may be wrong.  And if I am, further searching will reveal that.  And I continue to search, as all good scholars do: As already mentioned, Robert Vande Kappelle, who happens to be my friend and colleague, wrote an exception book called Beyond Belief: Faith, Science, and the Value of Unknowing, where he also assesses the wealth of information available in this postmodern era and arrives at a conclusion very different from my own.  Aspects of his worldview I find enlightening and, at a certain level, quite compelling.  I take great pride in being able to say that, because it convinces me that I practice what I preach.  Being open to learning and being willing to engage with a wide range of perspectives leads to personal growth, which translates into responsible action.  Those who know the answer and refuse to openly engage with other perspectives or entertain other possibilities reveal their ignorance, for no complex question is easily or unambiguously solved, and acting on incomplete information can be problematic for many.  I do not know whether God exists, and no one ever will.  But I openly embrace the search and objectively assess the perspectives I encounter.  I ask you to do the same.  It is the responsible thing to do.

CHAPTER 2

THE APPROACH

_________________________________________________________

I have always been troubled by how casually many people take the question of God’s existence.  If you are buying a car, you do some legwork to find the best option at the most affordable price, as well you should: a car is a big investment.  One’s soul must be infinitely more valuable than a vehicle, yet few people do much in the way of critical assessment when it comes to their beliefs.  That’s true across the spectrum: at one extreme are people who feel they already know the truth and don’t bother questioning it, and at the other extreme are those who don’t care enough to even look into it.  Both groups risk a fair bit.

I once belonged to the first camp, nominally at least.  I was (and perhaps still am, depending on how God assesses conviction) born again – that is, I asked Jesus to be my savior, thereby becoming dead to sin and alive to God in Christ (Romans 6:11) – when I was quite young.  I prayed often, and certainly can attest to a sense of comfort that I experienced as a result of this meditation.  I loved attending church and seeing my closest friends there.  I read at least one chapter from the Bible daily.  Since God was watching, and I was to honor my father and my mother (Exodus 20:12), I avoided many of the temptations that can lead teenagers astray.  Many who knew me thought of me as having a charmed life – good grades, decent athlete, generally optimistic and upbeat – and I saw all of this as a blessing from God.  I was reaping the benefits of the choices I was making, which reinforced my conviction.  Yet despite all of this, I knew that something just wasn’t right.  In hindsight, I realize that the life I was living was not genuine.  True, I did what I was told I should be doing, and I lived among the saved as one of them, but I never developed a deeply authentic conviction.  I was simply a product of my environment, too young and inexperienced to have any real basis for questioning anything.  I was in the precritical phase of my faith. 

Hindsight also reveals that I tentatively entered the critical phase of my faith quite early, because I vividly recall being a healthy cynic from the beginning.  Growing up, I saw people speaking in tongues, sharing what were deemed to be prophetic words, convulsing after supposedly being touched by God, shouting Amens and Halleluiahs, and actively witnessing to other people not in the fold.  Despite being immersed in this culture, I never had such experiences or felt such callings.  Indeed, I was rather skeptical of those who had.  I wondered why some people seemed to be emotionally wrapped up in this stuff, while I wasn’t.  Of course, having been told that I belonged to the group that understood the truth, I figured it would all hit me some day.  But deep down, the tough questions started to form.  What if it never did hit me?  What if, no matter how much I prayed or studied the Bible or tried to embrace the faith, these other believers were wired in a way that I wasn’t? 

The doubts grew in college, not because my alma mater subtly influenced me with its atheistic agenda; like all secular colleges and universities, my alma mater simply exposed me to a world that is much more diverse and more complex than most young adults have reason to comprehend.  Among the best courses I took were three through the religious studies department.  For the first time, I learned about other religions in the world and was struck by an amazing observation: people of all faiths think they know the truth, and they’ll make personal sacrifices much more extreme than I or the people I knew would be willing to do.  In church and at home, I was taught that all non-Christians were deceived.  Jesus said He was the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6) and established Christianity as the first and only missionary religion – from a Christian perspective, apparently there is only one way, and all should be told about it.  But how could non-Christians with such strong convictions and the sincerest of intentions not be justified by their faith?  I also took classes on the Bible.  Scholars look at the Good Book in ways that are very different from how my pastor looked at it, and generally derived a clearer, more informed, and more interesting understanding of the text.  Again, these professors were not anti-Christian.  Far from it; in fact, one of my more influential professors was an ordained minister.  These learned men simply presented relevant factual information that I had never encountered or considered before.

In general, that’s what a broad-based education provides: informed perspectives.  Some of these are incongruent with others, and so the learner is required to assess each objectively in order to make sense of things in a responsible way.  For instance, I once knew that humans were specially created by God, in His image, for a special purpose.  It is a perspective, but not the only one.  It may even be a rational and reasonable perspective, though that conclusion cannot be objectively made until others are considered.  I initially had no basis for questioning the Genesis account of our origin – not only was it the only narrative I knew, but thanks to the uninspiring athletic director who taught my only biology class in high school, I elected not to study biology in college, and indeed never heard anyone talking about evolution.  It was only when I entered the critical phase of my faith that I began to explore human evolution; my college education gave me the ability, desire, and perspective to do so. 

You can see how my precritical understanding of God and Christianity was being challenged in subtle but very real ways.  Despite such challenges, I did not immediately abandon my faith.  The evangelical argument is very compelling, and it was all that I knew.  Besides, who is to say that my doubts were not a test from God, or perhaps even a strategic move by Satan himself to deceive me?  To turn away from the truth could literally mean relegating my soul to eternal damnation – not a decision to take lightly.  Nevertheless, in light of an abundance of seemingly incongruent information I was encountering, the viability of the very conservative, fundamentalist version of Christianity that I espoused was being challenged in ways that I could not simply ignore.  

A significant moment in this critical period occurred in April of 2000.  At the time, I was just finishing my first semester as a visiting assistant professor at Albion College.  The keynote address at Albion’s annual student research symposium that spring was given by Stephen Jay Gould.  Dr. Gould was a paleontologist at Harvard University.  While he is respected for his contributions to modern evolutionary theory, he is also known as one of the most gifted science writers of the 20th century, particularly adept at sharing scientific insights with the general population.  For me, it was Stephen Jay Gould who first articulated the cosmological implications scientific models have for the fundamental questions of who we are and what our place is in the universe.  As naïve as it sounds in hindsight, I never really considered addressing the questions I had about God and Christianity from outside of the faith prior to Gould.  I wasn’t finding the answers I needed through faith alone – as you’ll soon see, even the more liberal expressions of Christianity failed to address relevant challenges – but Gould suggested an alternative that proved to be informative and deeply satisfying.  It provided the basis for a perspective I am still exploring, a perspective so compelling and awe-inspiring that nothing I ever saw in church could rival it.

At this stage in my journey, I am an atheist-leaning agnostic.  While my beliefs are now very different from what they once were, I am more comfortable with them because, for me, they make sense of everything in a way that evangelical Christianity alone did not.  I want to share this perspective with you.  I will do so in a way that is honest and objective and provides a thorough review of relevant information.  Engaging with both sides of the issue will strengthen your beliefs, whether or not they change in the process.  As a result of the search, you will likely grow a new-found respect for those who don’t agree with you, for you will have taken the time to understand who they are and what makes them tick.  Connecting in such a way inevitably leads to compassion, something that is notoriously missing from this debate, and sorely needed in our world.

Why am I atheist-leaning as opposed to a true atheist?  Well, I am not willing to definitively say that there is no god.  And it’s not because I am maintaining a shred of belief just in case the god of my previous faith is out there keeping score.  Please.  If God really does exist, I must assume He knows who really means it and is judging accordingly.  The real reason: Those that profess atheism also believe something without concrete evidence.  Nothing I or anyone can say can refute the existence of all possible gods.  I along with atheists maintain that a personal god, one that cares about humans in the ways most world religions demand, does not (or at least is very unlikely to) exist.  But no one can claim with certainty that a non-personal prime-mover god does not exist.  Humans need not care about such a god if it does not care about us, but the fact that such an entity may be out there, whose existence cannot be confirmed or refuted, makes atheism an untenable option.

That said, if I was a betting man, and had to lay my chips on the table and choose one way or the other, I would put my money on God not existing.  Yet, I would not make that bet based on absolutely definitive concrete evidence, because in my view, such evidence likely does not exist.

Where would we even look for such evidence?  I can think of only three places.  We could begin by looking to personal experience and faith in revelation like the Bible.  Unfortunately, such information is not objective or verifiable.  I don’t deny that many people have very compelling reasons for believing what they believe.  One of my friends went from being a drug addict to being clean and sober within the stretch of a few hours, due to Jesus coming into his life (as he describes things).  That is truly amazing, and I am glad for him.  But it proves nothing.  Many people change addictive personalities in many different ways.  Most take time, but there are plenty of people who can quit cold-turkey, and God may or may not be a part of it.  In general terms, any personal encounter with God cannot serve as proof unless there is some way we can definitively show that there is not a natural explanation for it.  Healings, visions, trances, hearing voices in your head, coincidences that seem too miraculous to be mere coincidences – these may be unambiguous proof for you, but all of these can be induced by any number of psychological states or statistical likelihoods and hence cannot serve as proof to the outsider.  More later.  Much more…

If your life was dramatically changed, and you credit God or your faith for that change, you won’t readily agree with any of that.  You might claim that anyone who had really experienced God for themselves could not dismiss such miracles so casually.  That could be true, save for the fact that both the God-inspired and atheist-inspired worldviews seem comparably seductive.  Anthony Flew spent the better part of his professional career making plausible arguments in favor of atheism.  Then he wrote There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.  But there are just as many testimonies from previous believers who have become atheists.  Two that are on my bookshelf are Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity by John W. Loftus and Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists by Dan Barker.  Apparently, even the convinced on both sides of the argument can have their minds changed, regardless of what experiences their lives threw at them.  I am in good company.

If we cannot use personal experiences and faith-based revelation to confirm God’s existence, where else might we look?  While there are many ways humans come to know about the world, probably the two areas that are most directly applicable to the God question are philosophy and science.  That is not to say that other ways of knowing about the world are irrelevant in this context – certainly fields like anthropology and sociology can help us understand group dynamics as related to religion, the arts can help us understand how humans express their feelings about the divine, history can help us understand beliefs of the past and how they have changed, and theology can help us understand how humans contemplate the divine – but if we are hoping to proceed in as systematic and objective a way as possible, we can limit our focus to philosophy and natural science.  Alas, both are also limited in their ability to provide us the type of absolute confirmation we seek.

Science exists to address questions about the natural world.  Scientists rely on their senses to acquire data and on their ability to objectively assess that data to derive explanations for how things in the natural world behave.  We cannot use our senses to explore a being that exists outside of the natural realm, or propose explanations for natural phenomena that are inherently untestable.  Thus, science cannot provide proof of God’s existence or activity directly.

That being said, some maintain that since God would interact in the natural world, He should leave some trace in it that science could detect.  Victor J. Stenger sets out to find these traces in God: The Failed Hypothesis.  Stenger offers a model of God, which includes most of the attributes typically associated with Him: He is the designer, creator, and preserver of the universe, morality and life, where humans enjoy a special relationship and have been endowed with souls.  Stenger then goes on to show that there is no observable evidence that supports such claims.  He adequately reviews relevant physics in claiming that the universe does not need God as an explanation for its origin and sustainability.  Likewise for humans and morality.  He also shows that there is no evidence for a soul or miracles that might clearly indicate the presence of a supernatural being.  I agree with Stenger for the most part.  The flaw in his argument for me, and I think many others, he actually volunteers himself:

The existence of the Catholic, evangelical, extreme Muslim, extreme Judaic God who hides himself from all but a selected elite cannot be totally ruled out.  All I can say is that we have not one iota of evidence that he exists and, if he does exist, I personally want nothing to do with him. (Stenger 2007 p.240)

Stenger’s argument therefore has little relevance to most Christians, at least 60% of whom are Catholics and evangelicals.  Besides, if God wants to remain hidden, that’s His call.

Isn’t a hidden God actually more in line with the God we know from Christianity anyway?  Recall that Jesus, commenting on what it took to receive and enter the kingdom of God, spoke not of intellect or evidence, but of the faith of a little child (Luke 18:17), interpreted  to mean teachable humility in the footnote in my New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible.  To doubting Thomas, the follower of Jesus who would not believe that He had been resurrected from the dead until he saw for himself the wounds from the crucifixion, Jesus says, Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. (John 20:29)  Jesus seems to say that if you are looking for proof, you’re missing the point.  Stenger is right in claiming that there is little empirical evidence for God’s existence, but that alone does not prove anything definitively.  Besides, a hidden God is actually more conducive to the whole free will thing anyway: from first principles, if the data actually supported the existence of God, wouldn’t worship become an obligation for all but the bravest of souls?  Worship out of obligation is not God’s goal.

One could go further and say that evidence actually does exist for God in the natural world, but that evidence alone doesn’t seem to matter much anyway, even to those who accept that He exists.  If you have read the Old Testament of the Bible (and accept it at face value), He revealed Himself many times to the Jews during their time in the desert – providing food and water, leading them in battle, parting the Red Sea, all of which are directly observable – and the Jews still turned away from Him.  God supposedly revealed Himself through Jesus, and not all accept that, not even Jews who may have been actually looking for a Messiah at that time in history.  Even with the evidence, many have rejected Him at every opportunity.

Objective, empirical, scientific evidence alone, then, does not bear directly on the question of God’s existence – more later.  Can we turn to philosophy to provide rational arguments that prove God must exist?  Alas, no.  Philosophers have been presenting arguments for and against the existence of God for centuries, and the jury is still out.  Consider that Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, provides 36 philosophical arguments for the existence of God – it’s not just a clever title – and easily refutes them all.  We’ll eventually look carefully at what I consider to be one of the more compelling philosophical arguments supporting the existence of God, offered by Richard Swinburne.  His argument is not only compelling, but it is somewhat of an antithesis to what I will be discussing here, and so it demands our attention.  In general, though, it is safe for us to assume that philosophy offers no 100%, iron-clad arguments for God’s existence.

So, since science and philosophy cannot provide definitive answers, it seems as if God’s existence is very much an issue of faith.  If you believe, based on some personal experience or conviction, that is a wonderful thing.  Indeed, there are times when I am envious.  But such experiences do not constitute objectively-verifiable proof of His existence.  And because God is characterized as a hidden god, the fact that we can’t readily detect Him does not somehow prove that He does not exist.  Why, then, have I placed my money on the conclusion that He does not exist?  Well, like any gambler, I do not place that bet on absolute knowledge, but on probability.

The following examples are simply to remind you about a general principle of probability: if you want to determine the probability of a certain outcome that depends on the consequences of other specific events, you can determine the probability of that outcome by multiplying the probabilities of these specific events together.

Consider a regular deck of 52 cards.  What are the chances of getting three-of-a-kind, being dealt only three cards?  That is easy to calculate.  The first card can be any of the 52, so let’s just say it’s the five of Hearts.  For the second card, we need it to be the numeric match from one of the remaining three suits.  There would be three chances out of the remaining 51 cards to get that.  Likewise, the third card would need to be one of the remaining two fives from the remaining 50 cards.  So, the probability of getting the three-of-a-kind you want is:

1 x 3/51 x 2/50 = 6/2550

Approximately 0.2% of the time – 1 chance in 500 deals of three consecutive cards.  Doesn’t seem like great odds, but if you’ve ever played poker, it certainly seems to happen often enough.

Now, say you want to know the chances of being dealt three fives in a row out of a standard deck, when one of the four fives had been removed.  For the first card, you have three chances in 51; for the