God and religion. One man's understanding.
I appreciate the attraction of a belief in God and the Bible. But the empiricist in me finds the lack of verification and far too many contradictions and inconsistencies to buy into it.
I’ve been trying to find a way into writing a Pancake on God and religion for quite some time. It goes without saying (yet here I am saying it) that it’s a delicate topic. Religious beliefs are highly personal. My aim here is not to convince anyone of anything. Rather, it’s to explain one point of view—mine—and why I find a belief in God irrational.
I certainly understand humans have a strong desire to believe in an all-powerful force or supreme being that looks over us, can intervene if we pray enough, and presides over an eternal heaven we may get to if we live our lives appropriately. I also understand that this trust in God is largely a “leap of faith.”1
Over the years, my many occasions for discourse with believers tend to end in a similar place: that for those who accept God and all that follows from that, there is absolutely no argument, no evidence, no science, no philosophy that can undermine that acceptance.
It’s rational that mythology arose in primitive societies of some types of gods or anthropomorphized forces that could account for otherwise unexplainable phenomena, such as lightning, fierce winds, fire, or even illness. It shouldn’t be surprising that before science could account for so much of nature, creating these sources of explanation answered otherwise unanswerable questions of why. How?
The evolution from polytheist beliefs to monotheism took place over centuries—even millennia, varying from society to society. Nor was it in a straight line. As early as the 14th century BCE, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten established a cult devoted only to the sun god, Aton. Matthew Chalmers, a theorist of religion at Northwestern University, notes that it took centuries for the disparate Israelite tribes to accept Yahweh as the one God, and centuries more before this belief became cemented in Judaism.
It is beyond the scope of this modest entry to probe the development of organized religions out of the early spiritual beliefs of isolated tribes. Keep in mind that societies were geographically dispersed, with little or no actual contact with one another. They developed at different times, with a set of beliefs and then practices all aimed at a similar end, first to explain the unexplainable and, in more recent history, to try to overcome what science claims.
In short, the transition from loosely organized spiritual practices to formal religions typically occurred alongside increasing social complexity. Early hunter-gatherer societies generally had animistic or shamanistic practices without extensive institutional structures. As agricultural societies emerged with larger populations, greater social stratification, and resource surpluses, more formalized religious systems developed with dedicated temples, priesthoods, and complex theological systems.
Different religions developed distinct organizational structures based on their historical contexts. Some, like Christianity and Islam, spread through missionary activity and political expansion, while others, like Judaism and Hinduism, evolved more gradually within specific cultural contexts.
Can science bolster the believability of God?
In Believe, Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist, argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally conceived, is true. He doubles down, adding that it is true despite the rise of science. In his New Yorker review of Believe, Joshua Rothman writes that Douthat’s “most surprising, and perhaps reckless, assertion is that scientific progress has actually increased the chances that ‘religious perspectives are closer to the truth than purely secular worldviews.’ ”
David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher known for his pursuit of empiricism, believed that supernatural experiences were more common among “ignorant and barbarous nations.” His expectation was that, as science created a more rational world, people would have no need for supernatural experiences.
Douthat contends this has not been borne out. He cites a 2023 Pew Research survey in which a third of Americans “claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing.” In that survey, a surprising (to me) 83% of U.S. adults say they believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. Drawing on a survey of speculative ideas in physics, neuroscience, and biology, Douthat further contends that a “convergence of different forms of evidence” actively points toward the existence of a traditional God. I couldn’t disagree more.
My story
I consider myself Jewish, the way one might consider themselves Italian, or Irish, or Japanese, even if they had never been to the country of their forebears.
I was raised in a nonobservant Jewish household. For three years leading to my Bar Mitzvah at 13, I half-heartedly attended after-school instruction in Yiddish and Hebrew, with a smattering of Torah study.2 I did this as a favor to my mother and her parents.
Judaism is a very difficult religion to be fully observant in. There are the 613 commandments (mitzvot) outlined in the Torah that are considered the core of Jewish law. They specify what prayers to say when waking up, before going to sleep, and much of the day in between. Some mitzvot are easy today, e.g, “not to worship idols.” Others have changed in difficulty over the centuries, e.g., “a man should contractually marry a woman before living with her.” Still, others require interpretation, e.g., “at the risk of forfeiture, not to eat of diverse seeds planted in a vineyard.”
Many Jews, however, feel it important to follow some customs and traditions that connect them to the millennia of similar customs followed by their forebears, even as they were driven from place to place following the displacement from Palestine by multiple conquerors. These are secular Jews: those who identify with Judaism primarily through its cultural and national heritage, rather than religious observance or belief. They may want to maintain a sense of connection to the Jewish community, even without practicing Judaism religiously. This is me.
Similarly, I assume that there are many secular Christians who might not be able to accept the idea that Jesus actually rose again on the third day, while also accepting religious rituals, rhythms, and attitudes can enrich their life and connect them to others.
My father, on the other hand, had no interest even at this level of Judaism. And from him, I suspect I assimilated a skepticism of the role of organized religion, not just Judaism, but all institutionalized religions.
Why I am a religious skeptic
As I said at the outset, I am writing here to present why I hold my beliefs. I’m not here to convince any believers that they are wrong. I’m quite certain true believers will have a rejoinder for each of the following.
Although I had not read vocal atheist Richard Dawkins and developed my skepticism independently, I find some overlap with Dawkins’ viewpoints, which find religion intellectually absurd. Dawkins is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.[6] He wrote The Blind Watchmaker (1986), in which he argues against the watchmaker analogy, sometimes promoted as evidence of the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any sentient designer.
Take the structure of the human eye. Its origin has long been a cause célèbre among creationists and intelligent design proponents. It is a “prime example of what they term irreducible complexity—a system that cannot function in the absence of any of its components and that therefore cannot have evolved naturally from a more primitive form.”
However, science leads to just the opposite conclusion:
… our kind of eye—the type common across vertebrates—took shape in less than 100 million years, evolving from a simple light sensor for circadian (daily) and seasonal rhythms around 600 million years ago to an optically and neurologically sophisticated organ by 500 million years ago. More than 150 years after Darwin published his groundbreaking theory, these findings put the nail in the coffin of irreducible complexity and beautifully support Darwin’s idea. They also explain why the eye, far from being a perfectly engineered piece of machinery, exhibits a number of major flaws—these flaws are the scars of evolution. [Italics added]
The Skeptic: Let me count the ways
At this point, I should organize the areas of my skepticism into six somewhat overlapping buckets.
At the top of my list is the problem of evil.
The existence of evil and suffering in the world seems to be incompatible with the traditional Abrahamic conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent deity. If such a God exists, evil should not exist, or at least not to the extent observed.
This is addressed by Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. “One of the ways in which people have tried to make sense of the world’s suffering,” he says, “has been by assuming that we deserve what we get, that somehow misfortunes come as punishment for our sins. For example, the story of Job. Or this:
Tell the righteous it shall be with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their deeds. Woe to the wicked. Disaster is upon them! they will be paid back for what their hands have done."(Isaiah 3:10-11) .
Kushner quickly rejects this approach. Rather, he answers this with a form of theodicy, the theological construct that attempts to vindicate God in response to the problem of evil that appears inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. It is an answer to the question of why God permits evil.
Kushner squares the circle in suggesting that God is benevolent but not all-powerful to prevent evil. God does his best and is with people in their suffering, but is not fully able to prevent it. That may help some believers cope with the contradiction. I ask if this God is not omnipotent, omniscient, etc., is he (or she) really worth going all in on the church-going, praying, living-your-life-by?
The problem of pain and natural suffering may be viewed as collateral to the problem of evil.
The prevalence of pain, disease, and natural disasters raises questions about why a benevolent and omnipotent God would allow such suffering to occur. This includes not just moral evil (caused by human actions) but also natural evil (such as earthquakes and diseases) that seem gratuitous and unnecessary. On multiple occasions, I have heard a grieving parent whose young child was tragically killed by a terrorist/mass murderer/natural disaster show their faith by rationalizing their grief with some variation of the thought that “God must have wanted my little girl or boy.” I regularly talk back to the video tube when I hear that. How can they maintain allegiance to a God who is so selfish as to inflict such pain and grief for His own need? I don’t buy, “Well, we mortals cannot comprehend the ways of God.” Please. If God is benevolent, he shouldn’t be toying this way with us uncomprehending humans.
The lack of observable, verifiable miracles.
The consistent failure of prayer to produce physically impossible outcomes (e.g., regrowing amputated limbs) mitigates against the belief of an interventionist God as described in the Bible. These stories are incompatible with the notion of a perfectly good and loving deity, or a deity that should command my unquestioning devotion.
The dearth of empirical evidence is central to the divide between those who accept God and the Bible purely on faith and those of us who require much more verification. In the absence of concrete evidence, I want to apply the same standards of evidence as I would for other extraordinary claims.
Reliable sources are generally based on authors who were eye witnesses to an event (i.e. it is a primary source). Since any particular source may be fabricating their story, multiple independent sources are usually required for confidence. Establishing the lack of author biases, including religious motivations, is also necessary if a work is to be read at face value. The Bible satisfies none of these requirements.
Hebrew Bible examples
There is no reliable evidence of a global flood or an ark, apart from the Bible. There are no archaeological remains of the Tower of Babel, and, in any event, it fails to explain linguistic patterns. 3
The story of the tribe of Joseph being held as slaves in Egypt and wandering in the Sinai for 40 years, led by Moses, as told in Exodus, has no archeological evidence or contemporaneous back-up. There is also no evidence of the ten plagues. Archaeologists now consider the lack of evidence to be overwhelming, and further searches for evidence are "a fruitless pursuit."
New Testament examples
There is hardly any independent evidence for the biographical details of Jesus. If the events described really occurred, we would expect firsthand accounts. Despite thorough searching, none have been found, and it is likely that first-hand accounts do not exist.
The Bible says that when Jesus died, there was an earthquake, and the dead rose and wandered into Jerusalem. We would expect firsthand accounts of such extraordinary events. However, there is no evidence they occurred apart from the Bible.
Authorship
I understand that the foundational force for belief is faith that what was written in the Bible or Koran or similar works is true—or even the word of God—a leap far too great to me. The Bible is replete with verbatim quotes of what God supposedly said or other conversations. But who was here to record any of this? How could anyone, let alone Moses, know what the conversation was between God and Abraham on Mount Moriah when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac? Moses, the supposed author of the story in the Torah, lived roughly 430 years after Abraham, according to many Biblical scholars.
The gospels are not primary or even second-hand accounts but more likely many times removed from the original events. The earliest books of the New Testament were likely written five decades after Jesus, the last books a century later. Were there transcripts of Jesus’s words and stories? The parable attributed to Jesus of the Good Samaritan is conveyed in Luke 10:25-37. Luke, a physician, was born after Jesus died. His stories are, at best, second-hand. Yet he “quotes” Jesus in the dialogue with the lawyer, ending with the parable:
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers….
Who was there who could recall the verbatim discussion? How accurate could it have been when written decades after the fact? Maybe over the years, a story someone else first told was, in the telling and retelling, attributed to Jesus. The point is, while the Bible may have good advice and engaging stories, given the proclivities over the years to exaggerate or among ancients to create explanations for what at the time seemed unexplainable, by itself, it does not provide proof of either God or the many miracles or wonders attributed to this deity.
The many inconsistent religious claims.
I again emphasize that I am far from being a scholar of the scriptures. Those who are, however, identify the diversity and contradiction among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam descriptions of God, challenging the credibility of any single religious account, including the biblical one. If a singular, all-powerful God existed and wished to be known, there would not be such a wide array of conflicting beliefs and scriptures.
As one example, consider the matter of redemption and salvation. Judaism focuses on fulfilling the covenant with God through observance of the law and ethical behavior. Islam believes in achieving salvation through submission to God's will and performing good deeds. And Christianity emphasizes salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice.
Then there are the logical contradictions or paradoxes in divine attributes.
Consider, for one, the "omnipotence paradox." It asks whether an all-powerful being could create a stone so heavy that even it could not lift it, suggesting that the very concept of omnipotence may be incoherent. Other logical challenges I could include are the compatibility of free will with divine foreknowledge and whether a being can be both perfectly just and perfectly merciful without contradiction.
I rest my case
As I hope I made clear at the outset, my goal here was not to disabuse you of your belief. I wanted to explain how I came to mine. You may agree or strongly disagree. I would expect many in the latter category. There is a cottage industry of formal and informal theologians who have tried to address every one of my points with an explanation that supports the Biblical version.4
I thought I found in Kushner’s take on why bad and evil can co-exist with a traditional view of God, a possible reconciliation with at least that piece of the fuel to my skepticism. God is benevolent but not all-powerful to prevent evil, though He can imbue individuals with other power to cope with and recover from the bad. However, that still implies there is an entity that is omniscient and can intervene on an individual’s behalf. I can’t go there.
Among the versions of God that might come closest to one I could accept would be the basic explanation of Baruch de Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish heretic.
Spinoza argued that whatever exists is in God. The divine being is not some distant force, but all around us. Nothing in nature is separate from Him: not people, animals or inanimate objects. Today, the view that God is synonymous with nature is called “pantheism,” and this term is often retrospectively applied to Spinoza.
For Spinoza, God is not a personal or anthropomorphic entity, but rather the one, infinite substance that comprises everything. This substance is both infinite and necessary. He was not the creator of the universe. Spinoza rejected the idea of divine providence, where God actively intervenes in the universe. Instead, God is the cause of everything that happens, not through intervention, but through the necessary unfolding of his own nature.
To the extent I buy into Spinoza at all, I nonetheless part ways with much of his complex philosophical formulation. Spinoza believed in a deterministic universe, meaning that everything that happens is a necessary consequence of the nature of God. Spinoza's philosophy does not allow free will or arbitrary action. I can’t go there, either.
Spinoza was excommunicated. I guess I’ll have to take my chances.
“Leap of faith” is closely associated with 19th-century Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. I had to deal with him in college philosophy. Kierkegaard did not use this term in any of his writings. He did discuss a “qualitative leap,” which I suppose may be expanded to a leap of faith.
The Torah is the first five books of what we used to call the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Today, reference to the Hebrew Bible seems to be made. The authorship had long been attributed to Moses, but is far more likely to have been written by many authors over centuries.
William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?, 2001
See, for example, a response to the many inaccuracies in the Bible from the Third Millennium Ministries.
Like Jeff, I became a non-believer when I learned about the Holocaust. Nothing since then has caused me to change my mind. As for organized religion, the less said the better. Thanks, Ben, for a thought-provoking post.
I couldn't have said it any better. Thanks for thoughtful, well-written analysis.