If you could prove God didn't exist...
la vie en rouge
Purgatory Host, Circus Host
in Purgatory
I've just finished reading Marc Levy's novels Le Premier Jour and La Première Nuit (I read them in French but they've been translated into English as The First Day and The First Night).
(MASSIVE SPOILERS) The story is about an archeologist and an astrophysicist who together make a discovery that shows that the origin of humanity is radically different to what is currently thought. A shadowy organisation is trying by all possible means to stop their research because if it was published it would essentially prove that God doesn't exist. They eventually decide to keep their research secret because of the suffering they think this knowledge would unleash on the world.
So, in a hypothetical world where you could prove the non-existence of God, would you publish your findings? Or do you think that religion improves people's lives enough that it would be better to leave them in a state of blissful ignorance?
(BTW, I'm not intending this as a discussion of whether the existence or non-existence of God is actually provable. It's a thought experiment about what would happen if it was.)
(MASSIVE SPOILERS) The story is about an archeologist and an astrophysicist who together make a discovery that shows that the origin of humanity is radically different to what is currently thought. A shadowy organisation is trying by all possible means to stop their research because if it was published it would essentially prove that God doesn't exist. They eventually decide to keep their research secret because of the suffering they think this knowledge would unleash on the world.
So, in a hypothetical world where you could prove the non-existence of God, would you publish your findings? Or do you think that religion improves people's lives enough that it would be better to leave them in a state of blissful ignorance?
(BTW, I'm not intending this as a discussion of whether the existence or non-existence of God is actually provable. It's a thought experiment about what would happen if it was.)
Comments
Fundamentalists have already shown themselves to be adept at evading object facts when it's necessary for the maintenance of their cognitive constructions. And non fundamentalists can bend their sense of "God" into all kinds of patterns that don't necessarily require the existence of God. Jesus-followers or somesuch. I'm not sure that'd be good or bad for religion, but I'm not sure it would even change much on the surface.
I'm not sure publishing a set of findings would change much, between religious people who can bend their theology any which way and religious people who are so inured from reality that they can deny any and all scientific evidence.
But I can’t see how avoiding truth is ever the best thing to do in the long run, or even in the shorter run, really.
I know there are so many reasons that that wouldn’t make sense theologically from a Christian perspective. I also haven’t read the end of Pullman’s His Dark Materials and I don’t know much about Gnosticism (not that Pullman is a gnostic), so I can’t compare this thought experiment to whatever may be similar from those sources.
Critical question: Do you mean proving that the monotheistic notion of God as held by the Abrahamic religions doesn’t exist, or that any possible deities (polytheism, for example), souls, the supernatural, etc. don’t exist*? Because to me those are two extremely different things.
* To this I’d also add intrinsic, non-human-created meaning, morality, etc., as opposed to ideas of “meaning” and “goodness” that human beings simply made up.
Um… no. Why? I’m assuming something close to the Christian understanding of God as the Source of all goodness and love, as well as the Creator of all that is, of course. And ending the existence of those souls sounds vastly worse than them being in Hell, at least to me. But again this presumes a universe with intrinsic meaning, genuine good and evil that is not merely human created, including justice (and mercy), and that—hard though it may be to grasp in this hypothetical—those in Hell deserve it and will not accept mercy.
Oh hell yes.
I think Gods existence or otherwise is not something that is subject to empirical proof - which is what this is talking about. I think the nature of the divine is fundamentally other than empirical.
But, putting that aside - I would publish the information I have found, and the conclusions I came to and let others deal with it. There are many (as others have said) who seem quite happy to reject other empirical truths if it suits them, so they would be unaffected. And may grow stronger.
There are many for whom an empirical truth of the existence of God is not fundamental to their actual faith. And so they would adjust.
I would worry about those - and there are many, I believe, for whom the generic existence of a divinity is a comfort. People who believe that their family members are in heaven. People who find peace in a belief that there could well be some reason for it all. Especially those who have no other sense of truth or relief.
I also worry that some of those like Dawkins would be far too gleeful and have a resurgence in popularity. And that there would be violence against religious groups. That the militant atheist brigade, who are generally not nice people, would be empowered.
Only natural since (it seems to me) we created God him.
To the OP, however, yes -- and here I find myself aligned with @Lamb Chopped insofar as I'd prefer the truth of this to prevail. Being liberated from religion's impositions is an important and necessary step in humanity's continuing evolution. Who knows how many generations will continue to labor under those restraints.
I think the converse is rather more likely.
Those waiting for the death of God would just shrug or have a party, and then get on with their lives.
But among God's adherents, I foresee denial and anger - much of it aimed at religious institutions - and the other stages of a long, drawn-out grief. Maybe (in a historical vein) something like a Thirty Years' War psychodrama.
Is it better to believe a comforting lie or to accept an uncomfortable truth?
Empowered to say... burn people at the stake? Blow others up with suicide bombings?
Send people to the Gulag or re-education camps?
Good point. My Buddhist friends would shrug or smile, and focus again on their meditation.
If it could be proven that God actually existed but humanity was better off without religion would you disseminate the proof?
Contrariwise, if it were proven that humanity was all things considered better off with religion, but you had no more reason to believe in God than you do now, would you try to spread religion?
In the novel, the persuasive argument for keeping the secret is this: for millions of the world's poorest people, their religion is about the only thing that gets them through the day. I do think this is an interesting point. So far I think the responses on this thread have focused on the higher income parts of the planet.
Well, at least we agree that truth is paramount. We'll have to wait on the rest of it.
Still asking… to me that’s really critical about what I would do.
Marxism-Leninism is the classic example of an atheist millenarian belief system, but since you can have all kinds of belief in spirits, energies, manifestations, etc., you can have institutions arise that resemble religious bodies today even among an atheist population.
I’ve never heard of Marxist-Leninist thought allowing for spirits at all. There was one comics character from the USSR who would occasionally exclaim “Lenin’s ghost!” when shocked, but that’s it…
One of the difficulties with truth is that it's Out There. If you have the ability to prove God's non-existence, presumably others will eventually figure it out. I'm reminded of the estimate various Americans made in 1945 of how long it would take the Soviets to develop atomic weapons. The security folks estimated it would take twenty years. The scientists estimated that it would take about five, because you can't hide the laws of nature behind a "Top Secret" stamp.
I think you could argue that Karl Marx had an eschatology, with Communism being his eschatological vision, an End of History point. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need," humanity gets to live happily ever after.
That might be what's referred to as "millenarian belief system."
I also know a lot of secular agnostic folks who believe in various kinds of "woo," for lack of a more respectable word for it. I don't think disproving God will lead to a jettisoning of the numinous. We'll just find new ways to frame it.
I think secular agnostic is different than actual anti-supernaturalist, though. One could be open to all kinds of things that the latter might shut out.
What was trying to say is that if that list of things that I gave above turned out to all be illusory and all we had was an empty materialist universe made of atoms and nothing else, no God or gods or spirits or souls or afterlife, and in which all ideas of human goodness and right and wrong and love and meaning were merely human created rather than actually perceived as a real thing, other than taking the Puddleglum option of hoping against hope that that was not true and trying desperately to find that meaning and goodness and make it to Aslan‘s country anyway, I would see no reason to go on. As for publishing it, if goodness and right and wrong and truth and falsehood are meaningless and we do not have a moral duty to the truth – if that’s merely a human invented idea and not an actual real thing (and yes, I think those are our two options) – I wouldn’t have any moral obligation to do that. Or, indeed, anything else. Technically both suicide and staying alive, being kind or being a serial killer, saving the world or eating ice cream while it all burns, would all have equal moral “weight”—which is to say, none at all.
But I don’t believe this, not even for a second, and I hope the paragraph above does not tempt anyone down a self-destructive or any other kind of negative path.
I disagree with this idea. Plenty of human invented ideas are actual real things. Take parliamentary democracy, for example*. Totally artificial, a "human invented idea", and yet it's also "real".
* There are other examples, like polyphonic music or the 40 hour work-week, if you'd prefer to think of them.
Yes, but that doesn’t make those ideas intrinsically morally better in and of themselves—not unless there is a real, non-invented moral standard that says that the 40 hour work week is better than cruelly working people till they drop. If all right and wrong* and meaning, every last bit of it, is merely human-invented, rather than a reflection or response to some kind of genuine right and wrong and meaning that’s intrinsically true, then we could just as easily have decided that cruelty is better than kindness (as some ghastly people seem to believe, but no one on the Ship), and it would be equally “valid” (or “invalid”). Even if someone says that this behavior is the kind best equipped to preserve humanity in the long run, that’s irrelevant unless we have a transcendent moral standard that holds that “humanity ought to be preserved.”
* Technically I’d actually say that there is a real “right,” but that “wrong” is just broken “rightness.” Dark being the absence of light, not a thing in itself, etc.
But I’ve made whole threads in this (objective, transcendent meaning, etc.) before, so I don’t feel like debating it all over again is going to change anyone’s minds, and I don’t want to shanghai this thread.
To me, absolutely, if everything is just a mechanical dance of atoms, without meaning or goodness beyond what humans have invented, then that’s not a world worth living in.
Again, I don’t want to tempt anyone who believes in anti-supernaturalist materialism to take that path. I always worry that I’ll say this and someone will. But I can’t pretend I don’t think that’s the horrible, logical conclusion of that worldview.
When I say "I would worry for those for whom a generic divinity is a comfort" - that is real worry, that they would no longer have comfort in their difficult times. That it would have been snatched away from them. That there may be nobody to provide comfort. It would prove devastating. And yes, sometimes it is better to believe a lie than face the truth, at least for a period. Don't we all?
As for the atheists and Dawkins - I have no argument that the church has done far worse things. Or that the religious right would continue to do such things in their ongoing denial of reality. It is just that there might then be a strong, violent opposition as well.
But my first point is the crux - that I don't believe an existence that is not empirically constrained could be empirically disproved. Everything else is pure conjecture.
Which seems like moving the goalposts from "are human invented ideas real?" to "are some human invented ideas intrinsically morally better in and of themselves than other human ideas?" You say you don't want to get into the debate about whether the existence of a divine lawgiver is required for "meaning" to exist, but I've always been very suspicious of moral systems that demand people turn off their thinking faculties on the grounds that a superior intelligence has already figured it out much better than they could themselves. Those systems always seem to unerringly support the status quo of whatever society they happen to be in.
Now this is moving the gateposts from whether morality is independent of human beliefs about it to whether a superior intelligence has already figured it out better than humans have.
There is a sense in which the laws of physics are like polyphonic music a human invention, and a rather different sense in which we can change the laws of polyphonic music and cannot change the laws of physics. The question is which of those morality more closely resembles.
That's true. I think that it's possible to be millenarian without being a supernaturalist. You just have to think that history arcs toward justice because of some sum total of entirely natural forces, maybe like Isaac Asimov imagined in The Foundation series. I think Marx, at least in rhetoric, argued that way. If I read him right, Communism is - to him - the inevitable conclusion of human history. You don't need spirituality for that.
What I was trying to say was that Marxism- Leninism is an atheist philosophy that has many resemblances to a religion, and that other atheist philosophies and institutions are possible and probably already exist that incorporate explicitly supernatural beliefs, which Marxism-Leninism does not.
This. I’d say the laws of physics, as one can guess from my comments here and elsewhere.
I’ve not thus far encountered atheist beliefs that incorporate supernatural beliefs. Agnostic, sure, but actual atheists believing in ghosts or magic or fairies, or some kind of supernatural afterlife… not thus far, at least. There might be some atheists who believe in what are called residual hauntings, in which there’s some kind of imprint on a location that replays periodically but without an actual human soul or other kind of spirit involved, but I’ve never even read about anyone holding that view. (But even then I think they’d be likely to say it’s some kind of science we don’t yet understand.)
Aren't there strands of Buddhism that conceive the Bardo, reincarnation, karma etc as real things without requiring any divine direction? They're often described as atheist.
That’s true, yes.
I’m not sure I’d put them in the atheist category per se. And I’m including polytheism as part of theism—monotheism isn’t the only theism there is, after all. (Though of course one can believe in a kind of animism along with monotheism as well…)
Maybe a kind of it?
Percy Shelley, the poet, would be an example of an atheist who I believe had various non-materialist beliefs.
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was a Scottish philosopher who combined atheism and idealism, believed that the world was composed of nothing but souls as well as in immortality and reincarnation.
What you see as a reason for not going on looks to me like an opportunity to be embraced.