Cancer 13
Notions of god have never played an important part in my life. Having a life challenging experience such as the one I am currently going through has made no difference whatsoever to my views. As I have said in an earlier post; you don’t exist, you exist, you don’t exist. That’s it.
I have my narrative of the rejection of Christianity, with its two critical elements, crying so much at the age of 3 that I had to be taken out of church, and walking to school down the croft (a field on the way to school, now covered with houses, some of which I helped build in a previous career) at the age of 7 and suddenly realising, once and for all that there is no god, that it is just a made up story.
My reasoning may have become a little more sophisticated since then, but I have never doubted my atheism. I have never been to another church service apart from weddings, funerals and the like since that day when I was 3. I don’t like churches. I find them unpleasant. They smell with a lingering sense of the obscenity of faith, despair and hopelessness. After all, what hope of life is there for a person who simply looks forward to paradise after death? Live now as there is no tomorrow.
Many philosophers have made their name through discussion of the possible existence and nature of god. Descartes, in his Meditations, argued for a system of doubt as a means of understanding the world. He progressively doubted (nearly) everything, arguing thathe could not be sure of the existence of an external world as his senses might be deceiving him. In the end he doubted everything except the existence of god, and through this rebuilt the world as he assumed that a kind and loving god would not deceive him about the world, so therefore it really existed. Descartes’ method of doubt is sensible, until he found he could not doubt god, and then it falls to pieces. For the system to work he had to doubt everything, including god, but if he doubted god he was left with nothing. He would then have to build up the world through evidence. He would probably learn to trust his senses and realise that the world existed, other people existed, but he would find that there is no reason to not doubt god’s existence, so he would have to conclude that god does not exist – which did not fit his world view.
If you really want a god then you could try Spinoza’s god. Spinoza argued that the universe consists of only one substance, an infinite substance, that he called both god and nature. These terms are interchangeable, so god is nature and nature is god. The problem with this is why both with god? There is one substance, nature, so why give it another name, god? Pretty pointless really.
It was the Enlightenment that saw the separation of god and philosophy, with the latter based on reason and the former on faith. Kant argued that while we cannot prove the existence of god with empirical knowledge we cannot prove his non-existence. Fair enough, but then why bother with the concept of god if it stands outside our ways of thinking? Nietsche did not actually say god is dead, but he rejected belief in god as unrealistic, weak and untenable. God had never lived so how could he die? For Nietsche, god is irrelevant. For Freud, god is a projection of the mind, a kind of wish fulfilment. I like this idea, that of god as being an extension of the self, basically a weak form of mental illness where people refuse to take personal responsibility for their actions, ‘It wasn’t me it was the extension of my self that is god.’
In our modern world we are told to have respect for the various religions. I am unable to do so, basically because religions are silly and childish. I can respect the person but not their religion. Religions are the cause of so much of the harm in the world. I work in science. I do not see how someone who genuinely believes there is some sort of bearded fairy in the sky who created us all out of magical clay can be a real scientist. That is back to Descartes’ failure to doubt the existence of god. We are trained to be skeptical, to disbelieve, to argue against matters of faith and present evidence for the structure of the world and our understanding of the way it works. We have a fair understanding of many aspects of the universe, though there is still a lot to learn, and we have become much better at engineering the world to make it a better place to live. We have made plenty of mistakes, but if we are to advance our knowledge and make life better (whatever that is) we are going to make mistakes. Some bridges fall down, but most enable us to cross from one point to another in safety.
With regard to my cancer I prefer to put myself in the hands of trained and competent scientific medical practitioners who have a good understanding of the nature of cancer and how it can be treated than the imaginary bearded blunder that many people think is responsible for the world. If my treatment goes badly wrong then I die, which I will do anyway in the next few decades. If, as is much more likely based on the science, it works, then I get to live for a while longer. When I do die, whether it is sooner or later, I will cease to exist. As Bertrand Russell said regarding death, ‘I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.’
Dr Nigel Hunt 
I do agree with Kant. While one cannot use empirical means to prove the existence of God (however he is described), they cannot use same means to establish his (if a male) non-existence. Bottom line, both believers and non-believers have no clear evidence. I’d like atheists to prove the masses wrong, but until then, believers are not as completely stupid as some far right atheists would like us to believe.
Atheists, unlike agnostics, like to be bold enough to dismiss God’s existence by primarily relying on logic and reasoning (what ever those terms mean to them). Agnostics, like myself, would rather take a more cautious approach. Mankind, with all our discoveries and progress still know very little. If the God of the bible existed in the Universe (an idea most Christians reject) we still wouldn’t have sufficient knowledge and expertise to discover him.
While we currently have no evidence that aliens (if they are not what some describe as gods) exist, most scientists use logic and reasoning to conclude they do. To many scientists it just doesn’t make sense to have as many planets in the observable universe as grains of sand while only one is known to flourish with life. By their reasoning, there must be other “grains” out there somewhere also flourishing with life.
Those ‘lifes’ might look different, think smarter or may have defeated cancer, stopped aging, time-travelled, etc. We are looking for them in the observable universe, which only constitutes about 4% of the ever expanding universe. Assuming God existed in the universe but was ‘deliberating hiding’ (which some believers would have us think), would we ever find him? Is he more likely to be found within the 4%.
In a previous blog, you mentioned that religion has done some horrible things. That I agree, although I was expecting to also read the wonderful things religion has done. But I concede we all have biases. I don’t think there is much writing space here to begin discussing the merits of religion, even if I were to narrow it to mental health.
I don’t know for sure about God’s existence, but does anyone know for sure? Well, there is one thing I know for sure: The more mankind think we know the less we actually know. And the more we know the more we know we don’t know. Perhaps, this is why I am agnostic in the first place
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