An Open Question to Atheists
If God did exist, what would you want Him/Her/It to be like?
posted by Geoff at 4:34 PM
Thursday, June 07, 2007
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1 Comments:
An excellent question. And after I answer it, I have one for you.
I’ll start by saying what I would NOT want God to be like: the god of the bible. I’m not a bible scholar by any means, but pretty much everything I know about the bible suggests a god who is very immature even for a human much less an omnipotent deity. I can elaborate on this if you want, but in general I refer you to The End of Faith by Sam Harris, which provides many examples of God’s childishness and cruelty drawn from the bible.
Another thing I wouldn’t want is anything that reduces down to God using us for some purpose not our own, for example, if God and Satan are having a contest to see who can capture the largest number of souls, or if they will be using us as soldiers in some war.
What I do want boils down to two things: knowledge and freedom.
If there is a god, or an afterlife, or something akin to that, here’s the first thing I would want. Even if I’m subsequently going to lose it, I would want to retain my consciousness of my life on earth long enough to be aware that I’ve died and ideally to be advised on what’s coming next. We have in this life certain memories and experiences, a sense of what it’s like to be us. If we lose that sense upon death, then from the point of view of being who we are, it’s just like dying and losing consciousness forever. The person we were on earth no longer exists in both cases. It doesn’t matter, in terms of continuity of experience, whether it has ceased to be or taken a different form. (It matters greatly in the context of existence, of course.)
Next, I would want justice/fairness and compassion to be God’s way. (Ideally, in a way that I agree with.) The notion of sending someone to hell for eternity for any earthly behavior at all seems mercilessly cruel. Even people like Hitler and many despots before and since, for all the human suffering they’ve caused, should have at most a finite sentence. Or perhaps to be destroyed permanently as defective souls. But how does even mass genocide warrant eternal punishment?
Crazier still is the notion that some baby born in the desert who never had a chance to eat a meal let alone understand God, or even a person who uses his gift of reason (God-given in this hypothetical, ironically) to determine that the evidence for God’s existence is sorely lacking and, therefore, that he doesn’t exist, should be punished for all eternity as a non-believer.
And to me, inherent in the very concept of fairness is not to interfere with one’s right to choose their own course, which is just a pompous way of saying freedom. So I’d hope there are some choices to be made in the afterlife.
Of course, if there is an afterlife, I will be transformed in some way as I enter it, so by then I may want something completely different.
Now my question for you. Imagine that there is no god. Imagine that there really was a big bang that started the universe as we know it, that there really will be a big crunch to end it, and that it’s all part of a cycle that just happens, without intent, without purpose, with no deity or entity pulling the ropes. Imagine that the laws of nature lead, every once in a while, to the evolution of intelligent life, and that creatures that become aware of their own mortality before they understand their origins (which would be true of any evolving intelligence) tend to feign a deeper meaning by creating mythologies. Just step back from it all, let that concept sink in, and imagine that it’s true. Imagine that God is no more real than Zeus or Thor or Santa Claus.
Would you want to know? Or would you want to go on believing the mythology for the rest of your life? Why?
Or to put it another way, is there a benefit to believing in God even if there truly isn’t one? If so, what is it?
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