Atheism — The Divine is a scientific hypothesis
Posted by astrivian on February 28, 2011
I have been editing this entire series for a month now. I have to just post it.
The concept of “belief” does not apply to things we know are real. You don’t “believe” the sun exists, you know it exists. Belief, by its very nature, is therefore not logical and is antithetical to knowing. If you know something exists, you don’t need to believe it in any more. Therefore, believers in the Divine have nothing they need to prove to atheists. The existence of the Divine cannot be logical proved, and those that try to do so end up sounding silly in the end.
For this reason, positing the existence of the Divine as a scientific argument is inappropriate. Belief is not scientific in its nature. How one believes and why we believe can be investigated by science, but that we believe does not depend on scientific evidence for the believer. I say “scientific evidence” because the evidence offered by the mystical texts of various traditions say that evidence for the Divine is “spread on the Earth and people do not see it.” Any evidence that supports one’s belief in anything (the Divine, one’s country, your school, or even in your feelings for your spouse), is never interpreted scientifically. The interpretations of this “evidence” is idiosyncratic; what convinces one person may be laughable to another. (FOOTNOTE: belief does not just apply to religious and spiritual things, we “believe” in our country, for example.)
Anyone who has read any mystical texts (most atheists i know have read none) know they rarely make logical statements. If the existence of the Divine could be logically proved, then the Prophets would have used logic and reason. Instead, they used riddles and parables (“Let those who can hear, hear”). To use logic when discussing the Divine is to miss the point. Belief comes from the heart, not the head. A translation of the Tao te Ching says it best: “The more you know, the less you understand.” C.G. Jung makes a similar assertion: “In view of the fact that in principle, the positive advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of understanding, the judgment resulting therefrom is likely to be something of a paradox” (The Undiscovered Self, 10).
I saw an interview with Dawkins once where he said that a universe with a “supernatural god” is very different than a universe without one. Since our universe is what it is and we cannot compare it to another, I find this to be an untenable position. The universe IS. Arguing what the universe would look like “if” something that we cannot prove one way or another is a futile exercise in philosophy that cannot yield any useful conclusions.
The best work i have read discussing the nature and characteristics of the Divine is the Corpus Hermeticum. i suggest atheists pick up a translation of this text and read it for themselves. See some of the quotes on the page “The Divine.”
