Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi there, it's Stefan Molyneux again. Thank you so much for tuning back in for a quick
sprint through a philosophical analysis of religion.
When people talk about the existence of a deity, they're usually not talking about the
existence of some utterly abstract being that lives in some other dimension, or even possibly
permeates our own space or dimension, but that does nothing to intervene or to communicate
with or to respond to human affairs, human desires, human obedience, human virtue, human
wishes, human prayers, etc. So they're not talking "God" like an invisible being that
never interferes with human affairs whatsoever. Usually what people are doing when they speak
about God is they're talking about a deity who created the universe, who is moral, who
intervenes, who listens to prayers, etc., and I just wanted to run through some of the
stages of belief, and a few of the critiques that we might bring to bear upon these stages
of belief, based on the analysis that we have been putting forward over these last half-dozen
or so videocasts.
The reason that I'm doing this is not to pick at people's religious beliefs — I'm probably
doing a little more than picking at them — but, the reason that I'm doing this is because
I really want to show how a rational and focused and logical and empirical, philosophical understanding
can answer some pretty major questions in life. We don't want philosophy to be really
about esoteric or abstract arguments (What is truth? What is beauty?) — there's nothing
wrong with those things, but fundamentally, what we want is for philosophy to be able
to answer the fundamental questions that we have about nature, the universe, society,
man, women, virtue, vice, good, evil, etc., because if philosophy can't do that, then
it's kind of like a hobby, like stamp collecting or something like that.
The reason that I'm bringing these topics that we've developed to bear on a topic as
large and controversial as religion, is because I really want to show that what we've developed
as principles here are very applicable to some very fundamental beliefs that are very
common in society.
I could have picked the state, I could have picked classes, I could have picked particular
economic theories, and we could have applied the same kind of rigorous empirical logical
philosophy to those beliefs, but I chose religion because I want to go to Hell.
I'm going to run through a few of the stages of reasoning that have to be fulfilled in
order not for the question to be "Does God exist?" but "Is religion valid?"
I've got a couple of notes here because this is quite complicated and I don't want to ramble.
The first thing, of course, is that God has to be proven to exist, and as we talked about
in the last videocast, there are some significant problems with putting forward the proposition
that God exists. But let's accept that God does exist for the moment. One of the wonderful
things about philosophy is that it doesn't matter when the premise is illogical what
you accept; every single following premise will be illogical as well. You can accept
that God exists and still not end up with religion. Because it certainly could be the
case that God exists but religion is not valid, and what that would mean is that God exists
but really does live in some other dimension, has no capacity, willingness, or desire to
intervene in human affairs, doesn't listen to prayers — you know, this Deist idea from
the 18th century, the blind watchmaker, just winds up reality so to speak, and watches
it tick down and doesn't move to intervene any more than you move to intervene to make
your computer process stuff. You don't get up in there and push electrons around.
Even if we accept that something like a deity exists, it still doesn't lead us to the conclusions
of religion, of changing one's behavior. If I said that an invisible being lived on the
far side of the moon, that knew everything but was never going to communicate with everyone,
and could never be detectible by any methodology, then you would say, "Okay, that's nice I guess,
but what does it really have to do with me, and how would it conceivably affect anything
that I do in my life?"
So even if we accept that God exists, then it certainly doesn't translate into any particular
change in your behavior, because if this being is never gonna communicate with you, never
going to intervene in human affairs or in the world in any way, shape, or form, then
to all intents in purposes, existing for a deity like that would be exactly the same
as not existing.
First of all, we have to say that God exists. If we're trying to put forward philosophical
truth — and as we've talked about before, every time you put forward a proposition,
you are also, by the very nature of propositions, including principles in that. So a physicist
cannot say that a rock exists, because that's a very specific thing. A physicist can't just
pick up a pair of sunglasses and say "My physical theory is that these sunglasses exist," because
that's not a physical theory, that's an observation of a discrete physical instance. It's not
a theory.
2+2=4 is a theory. A bunch of apples on a desk is not a theory, it's just an empirical
manifestation of a theory.
Whenever you put forward a proposition like "God exists," what you're really doing is
not putting forward a proposition that says "God exists;" what you're doing is you're
putting forward a proposition which says "Consciousness exists without matter or energy... and lives forever, and knows all things and
has all power," and we'll forget about the contradictions in those for the moment. What
you're doing is not saying "This exists," but "This type of thing can exist." You're
not saying "These sunglasses exist," what you're saying in the equation here, is that
"Sunglasses exist, of which this is an instance." You can't just make up a rule that says "God
exists." What you're saying when you say "God exists" is infinite, all-wise, all-knowing,
all-powerful, benevolent, virtuous, perfect consciousness can exist without material form,
without sensual evidence, with no energy traces or anything like that.
Now if you do put forward that as a proposition, then if you accept that it's true that consciousness
can exist without matter or energy, without any biological constraints, then there's no
reason in the world to believe that only one of those things exists. That's a very important
thing to understand.
If you say as a principle that consciousness can exist without matter or form, and blablabla,
then there's absolutely no reason to believe that only one of those things can exist.
The first thing that you have to accept is that God exists. The second thing that you
have to accept is that only one god exists.
The third thing that you have to accept is not only that gods exists, but that only one
god exists, and also that only your god exists, the god that you were taught about — Krishna
or Set or Osiris or Zeus or the Christian deity or Yahweh or the Islamic deity — that
only the god you were taught about as a child and grew up with, that only that one god exists,
and that all the other gods are false.
This is a pretty heavy series of propositions to stomach, just looking at this from a standpoint
of rational, objective and empirical philosophy. That's quite a lot to ask a philosopher to
accept: that consciousness can exist without matter, a contradiction to all the biological
and physical facts of reality, and against all principles of logic, and that only one
of them exists, and that the one that I grew up with and was taught about in Sunday school,
or the madras, or wherever you learned about your religion, that only that god exists and
that's completely correct and everybody else's definition of the deity is completely incorrect.
And of course, atheists are even more incorrect.
The fourth thing that you have to believe in order for organized religion to be valid
(because if God exists, only one god exists, and only your god exists), there's still absolutely
no reason for there to be such a thing as organized religion, because you can just sit
and have a chat with your god, or believe in your god, or do whatever.
The next thing that you have to believe is that God intervenes in the world. Because, going
back to our invisible, omniscient elf on the dark side of the moon, you might have a vague
distant regard for such an entity, but you wouldn't get up early on Sunday to go sing
songs and pray because this deity would be completely unresponsive, and would never interfere,
intervene, or ever be traceable in any way, shape or form, would never dream of calling
you up a mountain and handing you a bunch of tablets, would never imagine burning bushes
or turning water into wine, or any of the things that you read of in certain religious
books, would never dream of, in the Greek mythologies, raping a mortal and putting forward
a half-divine, half-mortal entity. There would be no possibility whatsoever that this deity
would intervene. In order for there to be such a thing as organized religion that you're
willing to follow, then you have to believe that this deity intervenes in human life.
Of course, once you start to believe that kind of stuff, then you get into even more
logical difficulties, because if a deity is going to intervene in human affairs — answered
prayers, burning bushes, Jesus driving the pigs off a cliff or healing the lepers, etc.
— then you have a deity that is willing to alter the behavior of matter and energy
at will, and to some degree, at whim, it would seem, and now this deity has moved from an
undetectable agency to a detectable agency. Now we're beginning to have a null hypothesis,
if a deity is going to intervene in the affairs of the world, then we are going to begin here
to have a null hypothesis.
So to take an example, if Zeus was not the thunder god, but just, I don't know, some
white-headed guy sitting somewhere, then there's no null hypothesis really, in this particular
instance for Zeus's existence or nonexistence. But, if you say "Zeus causes the lightning,
he rides in a chariot and hurls his thunderbolts down from his chariot," then you begin to
have a null hypothesis for the existence of a deity. So if you say that Zeus rides a chariot,
hurls his thunderbolts, and that's where the thunder comes from, well, then you're starting
to get somewhere, because then, once you develop the technology or whatever, you can then examine
the clouds through infrared spectrography, or you can fly a plane up there with whatever
sensing devices, and if you did in fact find a guy up there with white hair and a flowing
beard, hurling his thunderbolts down upon the unsuspecting masses, then obviously that
would be a pretty good argument for the existence of a deity. 'Cause this deity is now intervening
in the physical world, and so you can measure the effects of that intervention.
If you said "Zeus causes the lightning," and you go up and find that it's just electrical
charges built up in clouds zapping down to the earth, etc., then that's a disproof, since
the proposition is that Zeus creates lightning, then the disproof is that, No, Zeus doesn't
create the lightning, since built-up electrical charges in the atmosphere causes the lightning.
Once you have a deity that intervenes in the world, you're starting to put together a measurable
criterion for whether that deity exists or not.
So if you have a belief — and we'll get to this in a minute or two — that God answers
prayers, etc., well that's great! Because now you're saying that the behavior of God
is dependent upon the supplications of the faithful. Fantastic, now we're starting to
put a hypothesis together which we can actually prove. We have a whole bunch of people who
can then sit there and pray for something, and a whole bunch of people who can sit there
and pray for the exact opposite, and then a whole bunch of atheists (we want all our
control groups) who pray for nothing and wouldn't even imagine doing such a thing, and then
a whole bunch of random people doing whatever they're gonna do, not even knowing they're
part of the experiment, and you would see, between these four groups, Christians praying
for one thing, Christians praying for the opposite thing, atheists not praying for anything,
and a bunch of people who are just going around doing their daily lives, you would then see
because you're saying that God responds to prayers, therefore the prayers versus the
non-prayers, you would have a testable hypothesis to test the theory. The moment that a deity
touches one atom, then you have a testable hypothesis. If a deity does nothing to intervene
in human affairs, in the state of nature, in physical laws, in anything like that, then
you don't have a testable hypothesis, and the deity even if it exists or doesn't exists,
it makes no difference. You may have a deity, you may believe, who knows or cares, but you
certainly aren't going to have organized religion or prayer or Sunday school or any of these
sorts of things, because there's no null hypothesis. There's no intervention. Once you get a deity
that intervenes in human affairs, then you start to have a null hypothesis.
You have to believe that God intervenes, and you also have to believe that even though
God intervenes, there's no testable hypothesis whatsoever to determine whether or not God
intervenes.
It's like those psychic experiments, right? If you're on the right side of the bell curve,
of accidentally getting right, then people go "Ooh, you're psychic!" and if you're not,
then it's because "Well, you didn't believe." This is the standard methodology of faith,
that God would say, if you put these four control groups together, "Oh, well I'm not
going to answer those people's prayers, because it's not genuine, it's just part of a scientific
experiment," or whatever.
The next thing that you would have to believe if you want to do something like support the
principles of organized religion as a valid conclusion, is you would obviously have to
go through the four that we've talked about so far, God exists, only God exists, only
your God exists, and God intervenes.
Then what you would have to do is believe that God is moral — this is sort of two
sides to the same coin — and God wants something from you, and in return for that he or she's
going to provide benefits.
The question of whether God is moral or not is an ancient, ancient question; it goes all
the way back to the pre-Socratics, but just to take an example from the Christian theology,
if I put forward a particular moral proposition that says "Thou shalt not kill," and then
I go around killing people, it could be said to be a little bit hypocritical, right? Or,
if not hypocritical, at least it could be said that the morality that I represent or
claim to represent might be just a little bit in question. It would seem to be a fairly
sensible approach. If I say you shan't kill anyone, you must not kill anyone, killing
anyone is the ultimate evil, and then I go on some sort of stabbing spree, it may be
fairly questionable about whether or not I am the most perfect, moral human being in
existence.
God, of course, gives commandments (and I'm just talking about this Old Testament-New
Testament stuff) that God regularly breaks:
Thou shalt not kill, God wipes out the whole world except for Noah.
Thou shalt not kill, He wipes out *** and Gomorrah.
And in a more specific example that's closer to this question of intervention, God says
through Jesus: there's this guy walking along the road who gets beaten by a bunch of robbers
and thrown into a ditch. A Samaritan walks past and does not just sort of say "Hey, guy
in a ditch," and walk on; he actually stops, binds the guy's wounds, takes him to a doctor,
reads him a bedtime story, and this is considered to be the parable of the Good Samaritan, it's
a very good thing that this guy did. He saw suffering, he had the power to change it,
he changed the suffering, and therefore it's good. It's good if you have the power to alleviate
suffering, to alleviate that suffering.
But this is the problem: God himself clearly has the power to alleviate suffering, and
not all suffering is caused by free will, so we can dispense with that argument for
the moment. But God does not intervene to prevent suffering, although God both a) has
the power to intervene in a way that is far less consuming of his resources than the Good
Samaritan's, 'cause for God who is infinite, all-powerful, it's not even a finger-snap
to solve all of the evils in the world, but the Good Samaritan has to take a day, and
bind the wounds, and pay the money, etc., so it's infinitely less resource requirements
for God to alleviate or prevent or get rid of evil, and God says that it's a moral thing
to do for human beings, but God himself obviously not so much with the prevention of evil. And
yes, you could say that — and of course this is the standard argument that you'll
get in response — "Yes, but God gives human beings free will, and won't break that by
intervening," etc., but God has already intervened in human life. We know, for instance, that
the Old Testament deity, the deity that founds the three biggies, Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, that this deity has no problem intervening, continually! Not only does he
intervene by having people write down his holy words in these books, etc., but he sends
prophets, he sends saints, he sends Jesus, he does miracles, he goes down and talks to
people, he argues, he debates, he blows people up, he gives other people benefits, he tells
this person "Go sell your child into *** slavery," and then he sets fire to this town...
Constantly intervening, so you can't really logically make the argument that God won't
intervene to prevent human suffering because God doesn't like to intervene. The whole story
of deities in all religions is that they intervene, because you can't get religion without a God
that intervenes!
Just as I'm not gonna found a successful religion based on the principle that Ibu the invisible
elf lives on the far side of the moon, knows everything, but will never talk to you, or
do anything on your behalf. There's nothing for me to sell.
This question of the ethics of God or gods is a very important one, because you can't
worship someone who's evil. You can obey them, and the big question is, Do you obey God because
God is good or because God is powerful? It's a very important question, we won't be able
to get into it quite a bit here, I've done a podcast or two on it. If you're interested,
you can have a look for those.
But you definitely do have to believe that God is moral, despite the fact that God puts
forward moral commandments which God himself or herself does not fulfill. This is what
would be known as hypocrisy, and certainly not anything that you would admire in your
average human being.
By God's own moral standards, God is not a good entity.
You have to believe that God intervenes, you have to believe that God is good, and you
also have to believe that God wants you to perform certain actions. So God has a need
for you to pray, to give money to the poor, to give money to churches, to kneel, to pray
to Mecca X number of times a day, to cut the *** off your baby boy, that God wants
you to do a whole bunch of things. And in return for you doing those things, you get
a variety of benefits: wealth, prosperity, life after death, Paradise, 72 virgins, whatever.
I'm just trying to build all of the steps that are actually required for organized religion
to be considered valid from a philosophical standpoint. You can get into arguments with
theologians and get all different kinds of answers. I'm just talking from a purely rational,
logical, empirical, philosophical standpoint, for this is what philosophy has to offer.
So far I'm just doing a bunch of breaking down, I am aware of that, and this is not
the end of the road. We're not just breaking things down here, I'm certainly no nihilist.
We are going to aim to actually build a shining city on the rubble of historical error, but
we are going to make sure that we do it carefully, because I don't want to be putting forward
anything that doesn't have a fair amount of rigor to it (because that would just be theological,
rather than what I wanted to achieve, which was some sort of philosophical rigor).
God wants praise, God wants obedience, God wants particular and specific actions which
usually involve the transfer of time, money, or resources from one human being to another,
i.e. from you to your local priesthood, etc., and you have to believe that. So God wants
something from you, and in return for you doing those things for him, he will give you
certain benefits. So it has to be a reciprocal relationship (laughs) but of course, at the
same time, you have to believe that God doesn't intervene [anymore]. Good luck with all of
this.
The next thing that you have to believe for organized religion to be valid is that God
himself speaks to others a whole lot more than he speaks to you. Fairly important. God
speaks a whole lot more to others than he does to you. A little bit of a case of the
emperor's new clothes, if you've ever read that story (it's very good).
You, at least I hope, are not the kind of person who is going to email me and say, "Stef,
while you were doing your podcasting there, dude, God sent this text scrolling across
saying 'See? He dresses in black, he's stone evil,' and God told me this, it was scrolling
right there like a little CNN text at the bottom of your screen there." No, that's probably
not what's happening to you in your relationship with God if you are a religious person. God
is not sending thunderbolts, God is not making your barren wife fertile at the age of 70,
God is not allowing you to live to 500 or 1000 years like Methuselah, God is not smiting
your neighbors or your competition in business, God probably is not doing a whole lot of interventionary
stuff for you, and if you feel that he is, medication would probably be the correct answer.
But the fact that you don't have any direct communication from a deity that you maybe
will get some odd impulses or feel better after you pray, which I fully respect and
understand, and I believe there are good psychological reasons for that, and it's not that meditation
or prayer or introspection don't have any benefit; they do. You just don't want to confuse
them with the existence of an external deity. You kind of have to believe that God at some
point, either in the past, or maybe in the present, but not to you, has really opened
his heart and had quite the presidential sit-down powwow with a bunch of people, just not really
you so much. So when God caused people to write the Old Testament, you hope that the
Big Guy was whispering in people's ears and getting them in on the translators, and the
people who mistranslated the Hebrew word for "young woman," got confused for "***,"
so you end up with the *** Mary, and a whole bunch of messed up Italian men. You
hope that God was whispering in their ears saying "Write this next, no you misheard me
on that one, go back and erase that. That's the wrong word, do it like this, do it like
that. You know, I changed my mind, it's a *** birth, so just go with that and we'll
figure it out." Then you hope that God was saying all of these things and it wasn't just
a bunch of visions that people were having, but God was actually communicating to them
directly about what to write, and so on, all the translators, and all the lost texts, and
all this that and the other that God was kind of there as the editor-in-chief for the whole
process, and that people really did see ('cause it's written in the Bible, so you gotta believe
it) burning bushes, lepers being healed, water turned into wine, and like real, honest-to-goodness
miracles.
You really do have to believe that God spoke a whole lot more to other people in the past,
than he is speaking to you right now, and that God is, if you're in organized religion
with central religious figures (priests, rabbis, imams, etc.), if you believe that God speaks
more to those people than God does to you... So if you're a Catholic, you can't take Communion
without a priest, because God speaks a whole lot more to the priest than he does to you,
despite the fact that you're all human, and you're all created by God, and all this kind
of stuff. You have to believe that somebody out there has a PhD, direct red phone line
to God, and you have to then go to that person to get God's opinion. You can't just sort
of go straight to the deity. You can't really go straight to the source, you have to go
to all these other areas.
You also have to believe that the holy books are accurate, and not only that but you also
have to believe that they're the product of divine perfection, and that all of the inconsistencies
within the holy books, of which there's tons and tons of information on the Internet, you
can discover it if you want (I've done podcasts on it, you might want to have a look at, I
can't remember the number. It's early on, and it's called Ten Questions to ask your
Religious Friends), but you are also going to have to believe that the books are perfect,
divine, correctly interpreted all the way down to the language that you're currently
speaking, as it happens to be ancient Aramaic, and also that all of the inconsistencies in
the books don't exist.
Basically, you have to have some belief that you understand what God wants, and that you
can provide what God wants, and that God is gonna provide you all these benefits if you
give money to the priests, etc. etc.
Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point too too much, but let's just go over our blinding
recap of the things that you have to believe, all of which are completely irrational, problematic,
not proven by any sense evidence, and, which we won't even get into: which have considerable
motivation for falsehood on the part of the people telling you this. So the priests will
tell you "Give me some money, because of all these things," there's a clear financial benefit
in that for the priest. I mean, look at Vatican City, these people aren't exactly poor.
So not only are there an enormous number of falsehoods that you have to swallow in order
to accept something like organized religion, but there are clear, clear financial and political
power benefits or motivations for the people to tell you these lies. So we have an intellectual
crime called lying, and we also have a motive called financial, material, political gain,
etc., so, for me the case is clear. You can certainly let me know what you think.
Gotta believe:
God exists Only one God exists
Only your God exists God is moral, despite all the evidence
God both intervenes in the realm of telling you all this stuff about himself, blowing
up cities, and drowning the world, and also that God doesn't intervene, because if God
could intervene but didn't, then he or she would be immoral
that God wants something from you, he wants praise, obedience, money, resources, time,
wants you to wake your kids up early on Sunday that God also speaks a whole lot more to other
people than he does to you, and so you've gotta go to these people and sort of buy knowledge
from them by giving money that the holy books of organized religion
are accurate despite constant mistranslations, inconsistencies, error, problems, lost books,
etc., and that you understand what God wants, and
that God will reward you for providing it.
And that's just a sample, there's a whole ton more that you would actually need to accept
in order to accept something like organized religion as a valid and appropriate way to
live your life.
I think that philosophy has just a little bit more to offer people.
I think that philosophy has just a little bit more to offer you in terms of a more rational,
healthy, happy, joyful way to live your life and to make the decisions that you need to
make in your life. The fundamental moral, productive, loving, genuine, wise decisions
that you need to make in your life. I think philosophy has a whole lot more to offer than
that pack of nonsense, and I'm sorry to put it so (dare I say it) baldly, (laughs) but
I just want to sort of point it out, because philosophers for many years have been tiptoeing
around religion, and I think that it's really a bad idea.
I don't think that you want to tiptoe around religion, I think that we need to point out
that it's full of the most egregious errors, contradictions, exploitations, evils, catastrophes,
subjugations, and falsehoods, especially those taught to children, which I think is extraordinarily
destructive to the mind of a child. And I think that philosophy has, and I think I've
stated some good reasons why, an enormous amount more to offer you in terms of helping
you to organize your thoughts and live your life in a productive and happy manner than
listening to a bunch of people who want to exploit you and take your money and take your
obedience, and frankly, cut up your children. I think that philosophy has a whole lot more
to offer you than this superstition and falsehood, and all this kind of nonsense that comes out
of religious ideas.
I will continue to make that case, though not in the realm of religion. I'll let that
sort of sit for a little bit, because what we need to talk about a little bit next is
to begin to build the case for philosophical ethics for a system of morality, because we
don't wanna just pull a Nietzsche and get rid of organized religion without putting
anything in its place to help people to make ethical decisions. So the next thing that
we'll do is we'll start to begin the most exciting part, for me at least, of this journey
that we're on, and thank you once more for joining me on it. We are going to start the
process of building ethics from pure reason and from pure scientific knowledge and from
pure empirical observation and logic. Seems like the ultimate card trick? Maybe it is,
but I hope that you'll join me as we take a swing at it, and let me know if I connect
with anything or not. Thank you so much for listening as always, I'll talk to you soon.