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I find talking about religion tedious. Humanity should be focused on much more important
issues than bickering about some two-thousand- year-old books.
However, since so much of our global society is still entangled in religion, it seems to
be a necessary burden of our times to address this hurdle, before permanently moving on
to others. I feel like every argument has been addressed
somewhere on YouTube and therefore I probably won’t be addressing religion too much; I
feel like others are doing an excellent job at it.
But I do want to make this one video about a thought I had.
The basic claim I’m about to make is that God is necessarily dependent on us, which
leads to atheism; or at least to making the whole concept of God nonsensical.
But to make it more fun, I’m not merely going to say “Our thoughts created God,
or that God is in our thoughts, and therefore he is dependent on us” – I’m going at
it from a completely different angle. And when I say God, I’m generally referring to
the God of Abraham, although this argument can be formed against any omnipotent being,
interacting with the world. To say that God – a self-proclaimed omnipotent
and omniscient creator of the Universe – thinks, wants, answers, sees, judges, etc., anything
is to say this being is lacking. It is to say God is not at the top of the
ladder. Judging by his actions and not his claims,
God actually turns out to be impotent. To say that God does anything presents a serious
problem with the claim of his omnipotence. And to say that he created something – because
he saw it was good – makes him even more lacking.
That is, if God is a thinking being - which claims of him seeing, wanting, answering,
judging and acting suggest - this reveals a clear weakness in him; the inability to
do without thinking; that is the inability to do without a certain process which is
a priori of the wanted end result. Thinking is always a priori to the act. Therefore,
for example, if God needs to think about a square, in order to get a hold of the idea
of a square - or to create it - this process of thinking includes in itself a weakness
that doesn’t fit in with the claim of omnipotence nor the idea of a perfect being: God is unable
to reach the idea of a square without some intermediary – for example the thought or
the square in itself – and therefore he cannot be independent of the square or the
thought of the square. That is to say God is necessarily dependent
upon other things than himself. And this, of course, is not good news for
God, since this makes other things more important than him.
Without the intermediary God would vanish. Therefore, God is not at the top of the ladder,
but that of which the process of thinking consists of is.
This problem can be solved by one of two means:
1) By saying God is synonymous to Cosmos; or the Universe.
That is, God is equivalent to the things of which he is dependent upon; which is everything,
including the thought of himself. God is dependent on everything, including
humans and everything else in the vastness of space and time.
This, of course, begs the question: Why call it God?
Why not call it Cosmos or the Universe? There is nothing left of the traditional notion
of God, so why try to mix it with the concept of Cosmos, which is much more univocal and
not dependent on any subjective old book.
2) By saying God doesn’t think, want, judge, do, create, act, or anything.
Which begs the question: What is left of God?
It could also be said that God is just pure motion of action, not including or simultaneous
to thinking, which raises the same questions as one and two did.
In any case God is no longer omnipotent nor above everything else, but he is subject to
the process of thinking. God is no longer the “greatest thing that
can be conceived”, as Saint Anselm put it, but thought is.
The conclusion is refreshing: God is second to thinking.
And if we are to say “no, God created thinking” – we already applied thinking to God, and
the same problem follows. And if we are to say “well, God is equivalent
to thinking”, then we’ve just abandoned the idea of God and, ironically, replaced
it with thinking.
I think this argument is the closest to a theological argument I can ever go, only that
it supports atheism. And while being alike to what I call a theological
argument, it also underlines the general rhetorical silliness of the type of arguments apologetics
usually use.
The real trick here, of course, is to see that this argument is very much like a theological
argument, in that it takes concepts outside of our sphere of every possible experiment.
It merely plays with concepts and words, by rhetorical means, without anything concrete
to hold onto. It takes an anthropomorphic approach to the
Universe and runs with it. It may be convincing in that it actually applies
some science of neurophysiology behind it, where as theological arguments apply none,
but nonetheless it illustrates the problem with the kind of arguments theology makes:
it’s an argument, and that is all that it is; it has said absolutely nothing about the
true structure of reality, which achievement can only be obtained through scientific experiments.
The general problem in most – if not all – cases of God hypothesis is that in essence
it is always an act of anthropomorphizing Nature and the Universe.
It nearly always comes down to that.
And of course, as Carl Sagan put it: the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider
comfortable or plausible.
But while we’re at it, for the last time, let the good news go forth: The idea of God
may have been predominant in the old world, but he is dethroned by thinking.
Let the wordship begin.