American Enterprise Institute: Tim Tebow and the Atheist's Dilemma [View all]

[Bolo Boffin]

Oh, bruddah.

http://www.american.com/archive/2012/january/tim-tebow-and-the-atheists-dilemma

Silverman’s argument could easily be made by someone who actually believes that there is a “Creator of all that.” Indeed, in the history of Western thought, there have been a number of philosophers who firmly believed in God the Creator, but did not think that their august God could possibly be interested in such a trivial matter as a football game. The great theistic philosophers Leibniz, Newton, and Malebranche would have seen eye to eye with Silverman on this point. But Silverman, as an atheist, is not making the argument that God does not concern himself with such minutiae. Instead, he is saying if there were a God, He would not stoop to involve himself with the outcome of forward passes. This statement is true only if we accept Silverman’s concept of God. But if Silverman is assuming that his concept of God is the only concept in town, he is simply and quite badly misinformed. Which brings us to the atheist’s dilemma.

When an atheist says, “I don’t believe in God,” he must first define the God in which (or in whom) he is not believing, i.e., the God he has in mind when he denies His existence. Prominent atheists are fond of saying that they don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, elves, or God. But the difficulty with this approach should be quite obvious. We all agree on what Santa Claus would be like if he existed; ditto for elves and the Easter Bunny. They are very well defined imaginary objects, like Sherlock Holmes or Hamlet.

We all have the same concept of Santa Claus, but do we all have the same concept of God? Not in the least. Mormons believe that God has a body and a wife and that what God once was we one day will be. In sharp contrast, the Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that God was pure thought, blissfully unaware of the contemptible universe that aspired to approach His perfection. The great iconoclast philosopher Spinoza believed that God was the totality of all that is and that everything was perfect. Leibniz, who strived to refute Spinoza, believed that God was the Supreme Monad (whatever that means) who created the best of all possible worlds, but certainly not a perfect world. The French deists, like Voltaire, imagined their God to be a celestial engineer who constructed our universe and then left it to go its own way. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that God was immutable—what is perfect cannot change except by becoming imperfect, and thus God could not change. Alfred North Whitehead, in contrast, argued for a God that was in process, always representing the possible best Being at any given state of the universe. On a less intellectually exalted scale, there are those who think that God is an old man with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne floating somewhere above the stars. Or a witty old codger smoking a fat cigar, like George Burns.

When an atheist says he doesn’t believe in God, which God is he talking about? Obviously, he can only reject the idea of God that he has in his own mind—or, more likely, the various ideas and concepts of God that he has encountered. But how can he know for sure that he has encountered every possible conception of God? It is easy, as we have seen, to make up our mind about the existence of Santa Claus. But God is much trickier. For how is it possible to be certain that you would reject every possible candidate for Godhood until you have thought about them all—and even then, how can you ever know that you have thought about them all, even if you had spent your entire life reading every work of philosophy or theology that touched on the subject? What about the concepts of God that are still waiting in the wings of time?

The same thing goes for a monotheist, of course. How could a believer in Jesus know that his God was the only real God unless he or she had thought about them all, past, present, and future? The "atheist's dilemma" collapses easily into the monotheist's as well.

And Tim Burton would beg to differ on this supposed uniformity of belief in Santa, for one...