God's Gravediggers: Why No Deity Exists

By Raymond Bradley

Few can offer a more experienced view on religion than Ray Bradley. Having been raised as a 'winner of souls for Christ' in the 1940s, he spent the next 40 years as an atheist professor of philosophy and an outspoken critic /debater of religion.

Revered for his work in logic and his meticulous approach to debate, God's Gravediggers is Bradley's coup de grâce to religion. A career's worth of work on a subject that could hardly be more important. Approaching the moral, logical and scientific arguments - using rich analogies, rational arguments and examples that non-academics would understand - he explores not only whether God exists, but also what damage the concept of God does. A timely book in an age of religious fundamentalism, hatred and conflict.

"Bradley does not gloss over difficult points of logic and reasoning. A pleasure to read."
Professor Graham Oppy, Chair of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy

"From a young person's rejection of Christianity, to a mature philosopher's cogent critique of all religions. This compelling defense of atheism is a brilliant read."
Professor Robert Nola, University of Auckland.

"Bradley's forte is logic and he brings that to bear throughout the work. It is well-written and thoroughly absorbing. I have nothing but praise for his project."
Theodore Drange, Professor Emeritus, West Virginia University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ockham Publishing
• Release date: Jun 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781910780091

Book preview

PREFACE

Upon reading the title of this book, GOD'S GRAVEDIGGERS: WHY NO DEITY EXISTS, you might find yourself asking, Which God is he referring to? If so, then you've already embarked on the sort of questioning that led me when young, from the constraints of fundamentalist Christianity to the joys of being a Freethinker. My own questioning began with puzzles about Santa. How many Santas were there? Were any of them real? If so, which? These questions had parallels in the sphere of religious belief: questions about rival religions and questions about the different gods they worshipped. It was in pursuit of these questions that--motivated by a desire to understand the foundations of my faith--I launched into a study of theology, tangled on the way with a couple of leading Christian intellectuals, and emerged by the age of eighteen as a self-confessed atheist.

Chapter 1, From Fundamentalist to Freethinker: It All Began with Santa tells my personal story. It sketches my early encounters with virtually all the issues addressed in the other seven chapters. It sketches the sorts of reasons that eventually led me to conclude that core Christian doctrine was both morally obnoxious and intellectually dangerous, and that supernatural religions more generally deserved to die in Nietzsche’s sense.

In Chapter 2, The Logical Rivalry of the Gods: Choices of a Spiritual Pilgrim, I deal more fully with the issue of why different religions compete with one another, not just on the battlefields, but for the hearts and minds of believers over matters of doctrine. I argue that Scottish philosopher, David Hume, was right when he claimed that the distinctive doctrines of different religions also compete with each other logically: that they are, in a strictly logical sense of the word, contrary to one another. Taking this occasion to lay the foundations for a better comprehension of the logical issues that are at stake throughout the book, I engage in a couple of Logical Interludes that explain some very basic concepts of logic, including modal logic. An understanding of these really helps if you want to wrap your mind around contemporary discussions in Philosophy of Religion. (Don't worry, though. I think you'll find these interludes both comprehensible and helpful.) I show how Hume's analysis supports the conclusion that it is highly probable that no religion, or any evidential claim adduced in its support, is true. And I go on to argue with respect to gods, that there’s a near zero probability that any of them actually exist.

That brings us to Chapters 3 and 4, which lie at the very heart of my book, expanding as they do on my reasons for giving it the title GOD'S GRAVEDIGGERS. If you haven't time to read much else, read these chapters. An overview of the perspective that I eventually came to adopt, these chapters explain why I am an atheist, not a mere agnostic, about the gods: all gods. Thus Chapter 3, Why God Deserves to Die: Intellectual and Moral Indictments, concentrates on charges against the biblical god: the god God belief in whom is supposedly common to all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

And Chapter 4, Trying to Resuscitate the God Concept: Philosophical Arguments, discusses the sanitized God that many philosophers try to erect in place of the ugly gods of traditional theism. I deal with some of the standard arguments such as the ontological, the design, and the cosmological arguments (including the now fashionable fine tuning argument) and show that none of them succeeds in rescuing God from the grave. But issues regarding morality, not just reason, logic, and science, loom particularly large.

They loom larger still in Chapter 5, The Moral Argument for Atheism: a Logical Quandary for Theists. My moral argument for atheism is an argument for the nonexistence of any sort of revealed god, such as the Christian God in particular.

Chapter 6, The Logic of Hell and Damnation: Another Logical Quandary, narrows the focus of moral indictment. It demonstrates that the concept of the Christian God, as characterized by orthodox Christians including leading theologians and philosophers of that faith, is self-contradictory. It leads to the conclusion that the existence of such a god is not just wildly improbable but logically impossible.

That brings us to Chapter 7, The Impossibility of an Afterlife: The Cheshire Cat Fallacy. I don't deny that it is logically possible that we humans should survive our bodily deaths and go on to an afterlife in a supernatural world. God might not be there, but we might. Might, in the logical sense, that is. But is there any good reason to suppose that the real world is such a world? I concentrate on rebutting standard philosophical arguments in favour of the idea of survival, and then go on to argue for an ontology--my own version of Emergent Materialism--according to which survival is metaphysically impossible. The existence of a soul or mind after one's body has died, I argue, is as fanciful as Lewis Carroll's idea of the Cheshire Cat's grin existing after its body has gone.

All this stuff about a supernatural world inhabited by God, gods, devils, and the souls of the departed, is anathema to some Christians: not to the conservative majority but to some of a more liberal persuasion. The God they like to talk about is the god of theologians who belong to the tradition of Paul Tillich: those for whom God is something like the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being. If you're tempted by this sort of stuff then bear with me while I treat you to another little story from Lewis Carroll: that of Alice and her exchanges with Humpty Dumpty. Hence the title of the final chapter, Chapter 8: Gobbledygook Gods: Playing Humpty Dumpty with Words. As I see it, the pseudo-theistic God of liberals isn't worthy of the name.

This book presents a sustained argument for its conclusion: that belief in God--any god--deserves to die. Its chapters are best read in sequence as many of them presuppose an understanding of what's gone before. Nevertheless, I've tried to make provision for those who will read them out of sequence by incorporating in each just enough repetition to make each chapter comprehensible in isolation from its fellows.

Most chapters evolved from simpler origins. With one exception (Chapter 7) they had their beginnings in oral presentations to live audiences: to undergraduate students; to seminars with colleagues; to public audiences; to conference attendees; to members of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists; and the like. And despite the fact that they've all undergone substantial revision and expansion since then--sometimes incorporating material from other papers I've written over the years--I've sought throughout to preserve the cadences of ordinary speech rather than adopting the usual scholarly tone characteristic of academic writing. Thus I've aspired to make my arguments stand on their own feet and be accessible to the general reader by virtue of their clarity, conciseness, and cogency. And readability.

In this respect I've been much helped by my late partner, Juliet Fisher, who has a good ear for such matters and who has read, or listened to me read, everything in the book at least a couple of times. So, too, with my son Brett and my brother Murray, both of whom share her critical acumen and have commented on whole chapters of the book in manuscript. Next up in the list of persons I want to thank are three friends at the University of Auckland, philosophers Robert Nola and Fred Kroon and physicist Ron Keam, each of whom has vetted (but is in no way responsible for) what I've written about probability, science, and mathematics. And then there are all those other people who have helped in one way or another: persons who have read parts of what I have written; persons whose positive comments have encouraged me--despite setbacks occasioned by strokes over the past three years--to resume my project and carry it through to completion. Chief among these are Australian philosopher of religion, Graham Oppy, who first prompted me to put together a collection of my writing on religion and then stuck by me during the vicissitudes of finding a publisher; also the American neurophysiologist, Yonatan Fishman, who prompted me to elaborate on some unclear points in Chapter 7. Other names are too numerous to mention, or for me to remember. You will know who you are and I say thanks to you all.

1

FROM FUNDAMENTALIST TO FREETHINKER

IT ALL BEGAN WITH SANTA

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (St. Paul, I Corinthians 13:11).

In some ways I'm glad that I was brought up as a Christian fundamentalist. Not because fundamentalism gave me moral values that I cherish. On the contrary, many of the values I hold most dear were developed in contradistinction to those found in the Bible. My burning sense of justice, for example, arose out of abhorrence at the behavior of the Old Testament God, and revulsion at the doctrine of hellfire preached by Jesus in the New Testament. And my strong sense of compassion grew from thinking about those who have suffered in this life and who, if Christian doctrine were true, would suffer even more in the next life for the simple sin of non-belief.

Why then my gladness? Because the fundamentalist beliefs of my early years gave me something tough to chew on, something to cut my teeth on intellectually. The gummy mouthings of liberal preachers, dishonestly clothing the wolf of fundamentalism in the softer semantics of liberal theology, was not for me. Their evasive, obfuscating language could never satisfy my passion for truth. At least the fundamentalist sect in which I grew up knew what it stood for: that the Bible was the word of God, that mankind needed to be saved, that God had provided salvation through belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, that we'd go to Hell if we didn't believe, and so on.

What I discovered, as my critical powers matured, was that the fundamentalist beliefs of my family and forebears were almost totally without warrant in reason or experience. As I put it when I was about thirty one years old, in my first public debate, I came to the conclusion that many of their beliefs, the beliefs central to traditional Christianity, were both morally obnoxious and intellectually pernicious.

Strong words, those. So I'll say more to justify them in a while. For the present, it is enough to say that I doubt whether I would have come so readily to these conclusions had my starting point been that of an unchallenged, and unchallenging, churchgoer in a more liberal tradition.

Fundamentalist Roots

My starting point, I have said, was that of a Christian fundamentalist. To be more specific, it was that of an earnest young Baptist. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 1930, I was the firstborn in a family of ardent Baptists, with a maternal grandfather--Guy D. Thornton--who was a much-revered Baptist minister and evangelist, with a set of forebears on his side of the family that stretched back to such Christian notables as Robert and Mary Moffat, parents-in-law of the renowned David Livingstone.

One of my earliest memories is of an event that helped shape my childhood. It was Wednesday, 13 June, 1934. I was just over three-and-a-half years old. My parents had been summoned to the deathbed of my grandfather, and I went with them.

For twenty years he had suffered grievously from a tropical disease, chronic bacillary dysentery. Contracted soon after he became the first chaplain of the Anzacs in Cairo in 1914, it was caused by one of those creations--the Shigella bacillus--that God, according to the book of Genesis, thought to be very good. Now it was taking its final toll. My grandmother, however, explained it differently in her biography of her late husband:

A loving Father was not willing that His child should suffer more, nor was He "willing that he should be so far from Him any longer." [Her italics]¹

Before he departed, the good reverend found time to pronounce a benediction over both his grandchildren--my younger cousin Sibyl and me--expressing the hope that we might, if it were the will of God,

Tread the dark places of the earth to carry to those who sit in darkness the light that was lighting his own feet through the valley of the shadow.²

He concluded, in my case, by saying that he was casting [his] mantle over me.

So it was that I felt destined to follow in my grandfather's footsteps. And follow I did. In keeping with the Baptist belief in full immersion, I took the plunge in my early teens, engaging wholeheartedly in scriptural and theological studies and church activities. My mind was filled with reflections on the foundations of my faith. My teenage years were filled with church activities: Baptist Harriers (cross-country running) on Saturday afternoons and the Young People's Social on Saturday night; then, next day, Sunday School or Christian Endeavour before the morning service at 11:00 am; back for Bible Class at 2:00 pm; evening service at 7:00 pm; and the hours in between discussing theological problems on street corners with a handful of friends who also took their faith seriously.

Nor did my holidays afford a break. There were Bible Class camps at various retreats around Auckland at which I competed in, and won, several sermonette contests. I'm told that I even won several souls for Christ. There were annual Christian Crusader camps out on Ponui Island, during which Dr. Sam Martin preached about the sin of masturbation, which he called self-abuse, a sin which (by innuendo) he identified with the sin against the Holy Ghost: the sin that will not be forgiven neither in this world, nor in that which is to come (Matthew, 12:52). And there were the monthly meetings at the Bible Training Institute of the Young People's Missionary Fellowship, which I had helped found. Even my days at Mt. Albert Grammar School were infused by religion, especially when, at age fifteen, I became Secretary of the Christian Crusaders, the junior version of the Evangelical Union.

My exposure to religious indoctrination was about as total as that of a Muslim child in a madrassa or a Jewish one in a yeshiva. Not much rote-learning, perhaps, but the same suppression of critical examination; the same substitution of faith-based reasoning for evidence-based reasoning and the same elevation of unquestioning faith to a place of paramount virtue.

Yet being exposed to the disease of religion isn’t the same as being infected. And, even from my early childhood, I seemed fairly immune to it. Not that I was untouched. It took years for the scars to fade. My continuing aversion to all forms of faith-based reasoning, those in politics and economics as well as in religion, has its roots in personal experience of the harm I’ve seen it do to others as well as to myself.

Some children seem gifted from birth with artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities. I was not one of those. But I was fortunate enough to have had the sort of mind that couldn’t curb the impulse to question, and the ability, from childhood, to detect ambiguities in words and fallacies in arguments. In short, I was an unpopular possessor of what is popularly called a critical mind. That soon marked me out from my peers in the Baptist community, making me a heretic, someone needing religious re-education at the hands of pastors and theologians. Parents looked askance and steered their offspring away from close association with me. Only two of my teenage friends stuck with me during that time. But neither of them--so they subsequently said--had the moral courage to follow me into unabashed atheism. Not until decades later. Societal pressures as much as intellectual timidity kept them in the closet of Christian conformity. For years, both preferred to think of themselves as agnostics. As for the rest of the friends of my youth, most of them became deacons, ministers, or missionaries, as did their own offspring in turn.

Does my own resistance to religious indoctrination prove it to be less dangerous than any other disease? Of course not. As with other plagues that have wrought havoc on humans, killing, crippling, or curtailing the development of most who are exposed, there have always been some whose immune systems sooner or later kick in and offer them some form of protection. That doesn’t make any plague the less to be feared; so too, with the plague of religion. I escaped the worst of its ravages. But most don’t. A world-wide campaign to eradicate it--along with smallpox, polio, and other scourges--is as desirable as it is unlikely.

Philosophical Predisposition

So how did I manage to break free from the Baptist belief system and emerge as a freethinker? Basically by asking questions and not being satisfied with evasive answers or spurious reasoning. That's a simple way of explaining it. But I can fairly say that from very early on I displayed many of the dispositions that later characterized my career as an academic philosopher. Among other things, I had a desire for conceptual clarity and a nose for the implications of beliefs and for any inconsistencies between them.

My atheism was, so to speak, home grown, not a function of having been seduced away by other skeptics. Because I’d become preoccupied with secular philosophy rather than religion after taking up a career as an academic philosopher in my twenties, I knew little of the writings of agnostics or atheists until my fifties; and that was some thirty-odd years after I'd staked out my own independent rejection of Christianity and all other forms of religion. I was seemingly born with an inability to accept beliefs on faith, an ineluctable determination--of the kind that David Hume extolled--to proportion the strength of my beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them.

The Demand for Evidence as a Basis for Faith

For me when young, there was no escape from the demand for evidence. Have faith, I was told. But faith in what? I wanted to know. Why have faith in this rather than that unless there's stronger evidence for this rather than that? Why should I be a Baptist rather than a Catholic, a Christian rather than a Jew or a Muslim? These were questions that came to me in early childhood when I first became aware of the diversity of religious faiths and the diversity of sects within each. They couldn't be answered by recourse to faith alone. They required an examination of the credentials of each of the rival faiths and of the beliefs of those who embraced no faith at all.

But, some would object, if you turn from theism to atheism, haven't you abandoned one 'ism' for another, one faith for another?

No. My belief that there is no God, like my belief that there are no fairies, is based on a combination of good reasons: the absence of good evidence for the existence of such entities, together with an abundance of compelling evidence for their nonexistence. I am, as it were, an atheist--not a mere agnostic--about both. Indeed, I'm an atheist about both for many of the same reasons that Christians are atheists--not agnostics--about the whole panoply of heathen gods: Baal, Zeus, Isis, Osiris, and the hundreds of other gods you'll find listed in a good book on comparative religion.

My belief that no such supernatural entities exist, however, isn't an intransigent belief. If the heavens were to open tomorrow and remain open with God revealing Himself to us daily by speaking to all humans and exercising his much vaunted powers and goodness by putting an immediate end to disease, warfare, injustice, and the whole realm of human and animal suffering, I might consider revising my beliefs.

Woody Allen, I’ve heard, would be content if God would reveal himself by making a large deposit in Woody's bank account. That would make me happy of course. But I'd want a lot more evidence than that: a clear and unambiguous display of the supernatural powers that the theist's God is supposed to have, something like the instant transformation of Earth into the Heaven that he could have created in the first place. Maybe then I'd embrace theism once more.

But not before I'd asked him some pretty tough questions. Which theists' God was he? The Judaic God, Yahweh, for whom Moses was chief prophet and Jesus an impostor? The Christian God who supposedly revealed himself two thousand odd years ago to a handful of people in a minor province of the Roman Empire? The Allah of Islam for whom Mohammed was chief prophet?

And if he declared himself the God of the Christians, I'd want to know his doctrinal affiliations. Was I right in supposing him to be the God of the Baptists? If so, why hadn't he made it unequivocally clear to rival Christian sects that we were indeed the true believers? Or was he, in fact, the God of one of these other sects?

I'd want to ask him: Why did you wait so long to make your existence indisputable, to display your awesome powers, and to deal definitively with the problems of disease, disaster, and suffering, to the solution of which compassionate mortals have dedicated their lives throughout the centuries? More importantly, I'd want to ask him: Why did you create such a mess in the first place when you obviously could have placed us immediately in a heavenly world? And most important of all, I'd want to ask him: What are you going to do about all those people who never heard the name of your son, Jesus, or who--having heard--found no good reason to believe him to be your son? What are you going to do with apostates like me who, according to your son, are doomed to spend eternity suffering the tortures of the damned?

I couldn’t then and I can't now, conceive of any satisfactory answers. God might, perhaps, urge me to have faith in his wisdom, justice, and mercy. But these three qualities, together with the epistemological presupposition of faith itself, are precisely what I am calling into question. Have faith is the last resort of those who have abandoned reason for an easy way out.

To be sure, religionists often speak of faith as some sort of third way of knowing recourse to which can lead one to truths beyond the reach of human experience and reason. But faith, I came to think, is nothing more than firm or confident belief. And religious faith is usually intransigent belief: closed-minded belief, resolutely impervious to evidence of any kind. That sort of faith compromises intellectual and moral integrity. I wanted nothing to do with it.

My Pilgrim's Progress

In order to tell the story of how I became an atheist, I will depict my early years as ones in which I undertook a journey along a difficult and sometimes daunting path. And I will now revisit certain of its more salient vantage points, commenting on the incidents and episodes that occurred along the way, and pausing to reflect on the vistas that opened up as I journeyed onward. You may, if you wish, think of my journey as a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, though one that took a different direction John Bunyan's hero.

Childhood: a Period of Questioning

It all began with Santa. In hindsight, I see that it was questions about Santa that primed the pump of critical inquiry for me. Up until the age of six or seven, I believed in Santa just as fervently as I believed in Jesus and the nativity stories. I believed in Heaven as a place from which my grandfather, in the company of God, watched my every move; and I believed in Hell as a place where the bad people go.

If anything, my belief in Santa was even more vivid, and more compelling, than these other beliefs. After all, I'd actually seen and talked to Santa every Christmas when we went to the Farmers Trading Company on Hobson Street. And sometimes I'd seen him, half an hour later, in Milne and Choyce on Queen Street. Santa was out and about in so many shops in Auckland.

But soon I started asking questions. How many Santas were there? If, as my parents explained, the Hobson Street Santa and the Queen Street Santa were only pretend Santas, where was the real Santa? Was there, in fact, a real Santa as well as the pretend ones? If so, where did he live? How did he manage to visit all of the children in the world on the very same night? How did he get down our chimney without getting covered with soot, or visit my bedroom without leaving visible footprints? It seemed to me that his ability to do all these extraordinary things made him something of a miracle-worker, a bit like Moses and Jesus.

More worrying were some ethical questions. Why did Santa discriminate so blatantly by giving rich kids things like bicycles when my stocking contained nothing other than trinkets like lead soldiers, a bag of sweets, and a few pieces of fruit? Why did he reward some of the nasty kids that I knew more than he rewarded good little boys like me?

I was troubled even more when I discovered that some of the kids at school didn't believe in Santa anymore. They said it was my parents who'd filled my stocking.

When finally confronted with the whole package of my perplexities, my parents confessed that Santa stories were just pleasant make-believe. But that, too, troubled me. They had misled me, I insisted. So how could I trust the other stories that they told me? And how could I trust my own beliefs if in this instance they had proved to be false? How much of what I believed was myth? How much was based in reality? I resolved never again to believe just on the basis of someone else's say-so. Many of my questions about Santa later found clear parallels in questions about religious matters.

Many Santas, Many Religions and Gods

My questions about how many Santas there were, and which if any, was the real one, found an echo in problems about the diversity of religious sects and the question of which, if any, was the true one.

This first thrust itself upon me when I was eight and wanted to play with the Kelly kids who lived just opposite. My mother objected vehemently. They were Roman Catholics, she explained, followers of the whore of Rome. But, I asked, didn't they believe in Jesus? Weren't they Christians, too? Yes, she replied: they believed in Jesus, and they were Christians alright, but they weren't true Christians.

But if there were true religions and false religions, I reflected, how could I be sure that my one was the true one? If I'd been brought up as one of the Kelly kids, wouldn't I have been a Catholic too? Did I share the beliefs of my parents and grandparents only because I'd been brought up as a Baptist? Might not all the religions I'd heard of be fakes like the different Santas I'd seen in the shops? Was there in fact a true religion at all? Or a true God? Might not the Bible stories be just pleasant make-believe, like stories about Santa?

Religious Experiences: Genuine or Spurious?

My childhood reflections on the rivalry between religions had other implications. We born-again Baptists believed we had a special relationship with God. We spoke to him in prayer, and he spoke to us in return, sometimes providing vivid experiences of his presence in our lives. We believed that we were doing God's will. Yet sincere believers of contrary faiths also believed that they were doing God's will. They had religious experiences different from, and sometimes contrary to, ours. I was almost envious, for a time, of the Kelly kids' claim to see visions of the Virgin Mary. Why didn't God reveal himself to Protestants that way? Why were the miracles of Lourdes reserved for Catholics? Were they deluding themselves? Might I not have been deluding myself when, aged fourteen, our minister plunged me under the baptismal waters and I felt the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? What with the church choir singing, Where he leads me I will follow in tones of deepest solemnity, it was all very moving.

Then I learned how, throughout history, competing armies--often fired up by religious conviction--would both claim to be fighting in the name of God. And I heard, during World War II, that many German Christians believed God was fighting on their side, not ours. It seemed to me that only the most churlish believers could claim that their own religious experiences alone were genuine. Could it be that none were?

I came to question the status of religious experiences for other reasons as well. Evangelical crusades sometimes took place in the Auckland Town Hall, and I would be there in the midst of the massed choir arrayed behind the evangelist, sounds from the massive pipe organ reverberating through our bodies. Each night I watched the newly converted--often in paroxysms of guilt and grief--as they gave themselves to Jesus and were shepherded off into the wings for counseling. I could hardly doubt their sincerity. Or could I? What was I to think when some reappeared the next night, to be converted again, and sometimes still a third time? How much store could be placed in the intensity of such religious enthusiasm? I was embarrassed; then uneasy; then skeptical of the evidential worth of subjective experiences like these, including my own.

Formative Reading and Unintended Consequences

One of the consequences of my parents' religious exclusivism was that