Belief in God
Of the five fundamentals of religion, belief in God is certainly the most important, because if there be no God, then miracles can’t happen, there being nobody to make them happen. After-life could not be considered, and prayer would be a waste of time, for there would be nobody to pray to. Inspired books would not exist for nobody could write them. Clearly then, if there be no God the whole fabric of religion falls to the ground.
All the arguments for God yet launched fall into five categories.
- The Aristotelean argument of First Cause.
- The Universality of belief in God.
- The Teleological or design in Nature.
- The Moral or Ethical Argument.
- Arguments built on the gaps in science.
Those who affirm God on the grounds that there must be a beginning to the Universe, to Life and to Man, argue that there' must be or has been a prime mover who started it all, and who set the wheels of the universe working.
Of course there either was or was not a beginning. If there was a beginning then there was a beginning of everything including God. But those who hold this First Cause idea find it difficult to theorise or postulate the beginning of God. God they argue always existed, which contradicts their own argument. If one thing never had a beginning, and upon this everything else rests, then the whole argument is put out of joint Materialists have consistently claimed that matter always existed and always will exist because you can neither make nor destroy matter, so we have no problem to explain how something that always existed came into existence. Therefore we can dispense with God in the first cause idea.
The Universality argument postulates God on the supposed universality of belief in his existence. This appeared true in the Middle Ages when man’s knowledge of the world was limited and there were vast tracts of unexplored territory. When Australia was first discovered, it was found that the aborigines had no ideas about God or gods, and the same with the Tasmanian aborigines (now extinct). Then the first contacts with the Eskimos revealed that they had no God or gods. In other parts of the world where primitive people had lived in comparative isolation and not been contaminated by missionaries, many of them remained agnostic.
The teleological or design in nature argument is still very popular. Those who champion it find God in the marvels of nature, the human eye, the beauty of the rose, etc. They never find God in the tape-worm with its tiny hooks so that it can hook itself into the lining of the human intestine and so prevent one’s food from washing it through the system. The tape-worm also has glands along its body which secrete a strong alkaline fluid which neutralises the gastric juice, and so prevents it from being digested or killed. Did God think out all these marvellous things, so that his masterpiece—man—could have harmful parasites sucking his very life blood from within? Those who find God in the healthy child never find God in the child born blind, deaf, dumb or an imbecile; and yet if he made the one he made the other. Whoever made health, made disease, the diphtheria bacillus, the cancer tumour and the plague, etc. The planless nature of the universe puts the teleological argument right out of bounds.
Those who find God in the moral and ethical issues proclaim that because people on the whole strive to do good and to live a just life, that there must be a God regulating their conscience. But what happens when people do wrong or act against God? As Mark Twain observed the Devil rules about three-quarters of the world and has a much larger following than any God ever had. As Socialists we know that moral and ethical problems are largely the result of economic conditions. A Bishop faced with no alternative but to starve or to steal some food, would choose the latter. Most people have little more choice than this in what they do, and are far more influenced by economic factors than they appear to realise. All moral and ethical questions are conditioned by or even changed by their social environment, and the ideas of one country or epoch are frequently the opposite to those of another.
Lastly the gaps in science. Why the rainbow, the tides, the rising and setting of the sun and the phases of the moon? To-day we know the answer to all these phenomena but primitive man didn’t know, and many don’t know to-day because of their absence of elementary knowledge of science. Such questions got people guessing and they found their answer in “God made them,” or “ God does it,” or “God controls it,” all of which mean that the whole thing is beyond their comprehension.
To-day we know full well that the rainbow has nothing to do with God once having flooded the world and put the sign in the sky to show that he was sorry for having done such a wicked thing. The rainbow is purely a physical phenomenon not needing the help of a supernatural to explain it.
There are a lot of things about Nature which we do not know, but there is no need to postulate God because of our ignorance. To primitive man storms at sea and pestilence were signs that the gods were angry with him, but as mankind's knowledge has improved, God has disappeared from the cosmos. With the growth of intelligence God has retreated. God, who could reveal himself at any moment, has now to be searched for.
We have examined the arguments for the existence of God and found that none of them will hold water, and must therefore conclude in the absence of being able to prove a negative, that no God or gods exist. There is perhaps a little difference between what has come to be the critical atheist’s argument against God, as outlined above and what could be called the materialist’s approach. The latter is content with the fact (or rests on the basis) that one can neither make nor destroy matter, so therefore has no need to look into the pros or cons about God, but lets him sleep undisturbed except for the enquiries of the secularists, freethinkers, rationalists and the like.
Horace Jarvis
(To be continued)
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