Cancer 95

The non-existence of god. As I sit here and feel the immediacy of dying, my views about death have still not changed. I have talked about this in my earlier blogs, but I am allowed to be repetitious. It’ll stop soon. I have had my diagnosis of cancer for a year this month (congratulations!) and my terminal diagnosis for 10 months, this should be long enough for me to have made adjustments to the way I think about death and dying, but there have been no real changes. I am pleased that since the age of 7 I have essentially thought the same way about god, death, and the non-existent afterlife.

I often wonder how, in the modern world, there are still people who genuinely believe that there is a god and some form of continued existence after death. There are several problems with this kind of belief, and we can turn to Descartes, a good god-fearing chap, to examine them briefly. We first need to embrace two important scientific ideas, doubt and evidence.

One problem with the concept of god is biological. Assuming god is linked to some idea of soul, which it often is, there is no rational biological argument for – there is certainly no evidence for – a soul that is separate from our bodies. I have only written this because Descartes made the absurd claim that the linkage between the mind soul and the body was via the pineal gland. He just made that up.

Descartes was a classic anti-scientific god-fearing philosopher, which leads us to another problem with the concept of god. Descartes rightly described the need for doubt, and ended up doubting everything except god. He doubted his senses, the existence of others, and so on. He did not doubt the existence of god because, he claimed, if god doesn’t exist then the world cannot exist. So from the basis that god must exist, Descartes reconstructed the universe. If god exists then why would he con me into believing there is a world when there isn’t? So there must be a world. If god exists then why would he con me into believing that people exist when they don’t? So people exist, and in this way Descartes rebuilt the world and everything in it.

Why we still think highly of Descartes I have no idea. To doubt, to challenge, to question, is a good thing. Without it science would not exist, but to doubt every single thing except the existence of god demonstrates an incredible naivety. If you are going to have doubt, which you should, then you have to doubt god. Put this with another pillar of science, the need for evidence relating to knowledge, as there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of any god then our doubt about god’s existence is, under current knowledge, not only possible, but necessary, which suggests that we should not be living our lives as though a god exists.

While my scientific mind must doubt my understanding of the world, I base the way I function on the available evidence, and also recognising my own limitations regarding understanding the world. If I lived as though god exists then I would – like many religious people – live a very strange and inauthentic life.

I know some may disagree….