Hi Joe.

There is no doubt this argument is a very strong one, and cannot be readily refuted. But it is still, logically, not a definitive disproof of God. It is a very high inductive probability, but not a deductive certainty. There still remains, as the writer admits, a faint, remote possibility of belief in God.

In the Jewish world, after every senseless pogrom, and particularly after the Holocaust in WW2, this painful question was asked and never was any convincing answer ever found. Yet believing Jews continued to hold onto their faith in God - not only in His existence, but in his omniscience, omnipotence and perfect goodness. Perhaps the only explanation for that is our felt psychological and social need for God. Belief in God can have (though it does not always or necessarily have) a beneficial effect on the human psyche, on human behavior, on social cohesion, and so forth.

My personal position is that this issue of theism versus atheism cannot be resolved by science or philosophy, by observation or logic. This does not imply that agnosticism is the right course. The reason is that what we choose to believe or to not believe has an impact on one's thoughts and actions. There is no escape from this consequence of belief. The fence-sitting of agnosticism cannot escape the practical issues. Choices must be made in thought and action.

Again personally, like many others, I advocate that belief in God is not a matter of empirical and logical certainty, but requires Faith. It is, as we say now, faith-based. I think such belief in God is good for me and can be good for others. It is not always good - some religious beliefs, tenets, behavior patterns, are certainly horrible; some stupid and useless; and so forth. But many are good and do good. What is the standard of value here? Life. What is beneficial for one's physical and spiritual life, and the life of others too, is good; what is somewhat bad is proportionately bad.

Returning to the above atheistic argument. A fact that I find more impressive is how minuscule we are in relation to the immense universe we are in. We humans are tiny in space and in time in comparison to the planet Earth that we inhabit. But our planet is tiny in our solar system, and our solar system is a mere speck of dust in our galaxy, and our galaxy is a mere speck of dust in our universe. And maybe moreover, our known universe is a mere speck of dust in a larger multiverse of which we have no evidence but which we consider quite possible.

Where is God in this immensity, I ask myself? Of what possible interest can our tiny fates be to Him if He exists as the creator of and therefore greater than all that immensity? The answer I give myself is the following. The apparent immensity and tininess are PHYSICAL aspects of existence. The physical is the realm of science as we know it today. But our life experience has a mental, more precisely SPIRITUAL, aspect which is also undeniable, yet not taken into account by current physical scientists.

We have consciousness, volition, values - we have souls. It is as souls that we have these powers which are inexplicable by any physics or chemistry formula. The physical cannot explain or erase the spiritual. The spiritual must be taken into consideration at its full significance - and this the scientific community has on the whole failed to do until now. Within this larger perspective, we and our fates may indeed be unimportant in the space-time physical domain - but in the spiritual domain we may collectively be very important indeed.

Returning to God and the argument above - our physical existences may well seem filled with meaningless suffering; but our tragedies could well be the mere backdrop of much higher, grander and very beautiful spiritual events. The latter must be taken into account when judging the former. This is hypothetical, to be sure - it requires faith. But one thing this hypothesis does, which the opposite hypothesis you have quoted does not, is to at least take into account the spiritual dimension of humankind, and indeed all life on Earth, and not exclusively focus on the physical dimension.

Something about you (optional) logician-philosopher

Hi Avi,

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Your third paragraph struck a particular chord with me because I really need to get off the fence and take a stand one way or the other; I've been wrestling with the issue for some time - no doubt it's been exacerbated by the covid pandemic - too much time with my own thoughts!

I do find many of the classical arguments for God quite compelling, particularly the Aristotelian "unmoved mover" argument and similar ones from Aquinas. What's impressive about these types of argument is that they start from very basis premises which no-one can reasonably doubt, such as the fact of change, potentiality and the existence of certain causal series, and from those modest metaphysical assumptions then deduce the traditional attributes of God such as perfect goodness, omniscience, omnipotence, etc. They can't tell you which of the organized religions have the truth, but it's at least a start.

The fact of evil, though, is the sticking point. But you're right; logical arguments can help but in the end it's a matter of faith.