My gut reaction to theistic arguments, I’ll admit, can come off as shallow and insufficiently philosophical. I don’t like diving into the nuances of high level symbolic logic or Bayesian reasoning because I’m not formally trained in those tools (outside of an undergraduate philosophy degree), but also because they aren’t the main way I communicate my beliefs.
I’ve come to realize that the reason I don’t believe in God is not out of stubborn cultural liberalism or a sinful heart or because I find a specific logical flaw in theistic arguments, but because the God of classical theism and Christianity would annihilate my understanding of the world,
When I say that, I don’t mean that I have one theory of how the world works and Christianity has another and I just ignore all data points supporting Christianity so I can go forth and eat, drink, and be merry. No.
Rather, I mean that the Christian hypothesis doesn’t fit the world I observe around me. If you were to phrase this in the perverted Bayesian language that oversaturates philosophy of religion discourse, my life experience puts my priors on the God of Christianity, as it’s explained to me, really low.
This is not a typical argument about the Problem of Evil. I’m not saying that evil or suffering is incompatible with the God of theism, but rather the Christian God of classical theism, as it’s explained to me, is not something I believe to exist.
God Would Want Us To Be Happy
I believe an omnibenevolent God would want humans to be happy.1 He would make acceptance or acknowledgement of Him generally lead them to happiness, and have His teachings or religious institutions reflect that.
In this way, an omnibenevolent God would not make his religion revolve around rigid orthodoxy (holding the right beliefs). He would not create a system where His religion causes social division, psychological harm, or ultimately violence as we see it in our world.
I believe this about God because of my experience dealing with loving people and competent creators who want to minimize harm and maximize happiness. They create systems, rules, and policies in anticipation of how they will be received and used. When those systems, rules, and policies are inevitably used to create more harm than good, they are changed. God being omnibenevolent and omnipotent, would be like these people, but much better.
Dogmatism And Orthodoxy Are Bad
But this is not the system of religious observance set up by the God of Christianity!
For example, the doctrine of the Trinity is seen as an unsolvable mystery that is still true, as opposed to a possibly false teaching that can be revised or discarded. Many Christian churches preach that one’s eternal fate rests on their position on a factual proposition, which they may not have enough information to accept (See: John 3:16). Others preach that one’s eternal fate also rests on whether they had water sprinkled over their head as an infant during a baptism.
The harms of Christianity in this way are the harms inherent to orthodoxy and dogmatism, the institutionalization of rigid beliefs that cannot be updated, revised, or reformed. These teachings often have nothing to do with ethics or science, but metaphysical claims beyond human verification.2
Orthodoxy and dogmatism are problems because humans have a hard time agreeing on many things, as we come to different conclusions about what is true for various reasons. We see the world differently, have different personality types, have different experiences, levels of intelligence, emotional maturity, and much more. Because of these differences, humans will always question, contradict, and disagree. We will conclude that different beliefs are true, and as a result of living those beliefs, live vastly different, yet similarly happy, lives.3
Now, it’s okay to have personal dogmas (for instance, I live by the dogma that my Mother loves me and that the ground won’t disappear beneath my feet), but the problems arise when dogma is institutionalized or collectivized through an institution like a church, where people socially enforce dogma on others and enculture it within small children.4
Things get even more murky over time, as ideas that may not be explicitly taught by dogma become assumed because of stigma, black-and-white thinking, and fear of evil.5
The Quick Argument
In this way, I believe that dogmatism has endogenous effects on human society, given our psychology and group dynamics. Those effects include, but are not limited, to social division, psychological harm, and violence. These effects are bad and unconducive to human happiness. So, here are my two argument (one builds off the other), as best I can formulate them:
An omnibenevolent God would not create a religion that imposes dogmatism on humanity.
Christianity is a religion that imposes dogmatism on humanity
Therefore God did not create Christianity
And secondly:
If God did not create Christianity, Christianity is untrue
God did not create Christianity
Therefore, Christianity is untrue.
Final Thoughts
One could deflect this criticism and say that the problem is humanity. Maybe Christianity is true, but humans, with all their neuroses just can’t handle it. But this is exactly the problem! Either God messed up in creating humanity to not be sufficiently receptive of Christian religious teachings or He messed up his religious teachings to be insufficiently effective and persuasive.
If you’ll notice, the truth/soundness/validity of this argument doesn’t tell us if theism is true or not, it just tells us Christianity is untrue. For people such as myself who were raised Christian, that will make little difference, as the truth of Christianity is what most westerners care about.6
Still, it could be the case that theism is true and Christianity is false. But we’re still left with the Problem of Evil: Why did an omnibenevolent God create a world where a false religion would imposed dogma on its followers, and thus cause needless suffering?
Circling back around, I don’t believe in Christianity because if it were true, it would annihilate my understanding of the world. My entire perception of what being loving, good or well-designed would be so wrong that I’d have no idea what any of those words even mean. It would be like someone walking up to you at a parent’s funeral and them telling you that your parent secretly hated you, even though you experienced nothing but love and warmth from them.
In this way, my sense perception is the foundation of how my brain formulates beliefs and models reality. From that sense perception, I come to understand goodness, love, and craft.
The existence of the Christian God would thus be worse than radical skepticism. I wouldn’t just be unsure I could know anything, I would actively know nothing and that everything I perceived was wrong on a fundamental level.
It doesn’t make sense for a loving God to that. From here, I simply conclude that either God isn’t loving, or He isn’t God (i.e. he’s not real).
But now we’re drifting into Axiology. That will be the topic of another future post.
When I define happiness, I’m not even talking about a utilitarian sense, but in a general Hedonic/Epicurean sense of feeling the absence of suffering.
What makes this tragic is that religion often causes psychological distress among adherents. Think of the countless Christians who lost sleep at night terrified that they or their loved ones were not truly saved.
Perhaps I’m being high and mighty, but I think it’s wise to realize that most people’s disagreements have much to do with arbitrary personal factors, not truth or falsity of certain claims.
I’m not pushing the Richard Dawkins position that teaching kids about Hell is child abuse here, so much as, say, telling your children homosexuality is wrong when they may be gay can create that harm. Even if it’s done so lovingly! I’m sympathetic to the position that some religious beliefs/dogmas facilitate abuse. At the very least, they needlessly cause unnecessary psychological distress.
For example, many Christians think gay people are also pedophiles because homosexuality and pedophilia are so stigmatized in their subculture that they never interact with gay people, and so they associate the two stigmas together (and also other countercultural groups like Satanism and Antifa).
No one in the west is lining up to convert to Islam or Hinduism
Great post. I really like that you added “The existence of the Christian God would thus be worse than radical skepticism.” I’ve thought about pretty much that exact thing before! That Christianity is incompatible with so much of my understanding of the world that IF I twist my brain and imagine what I would be wrong about if it were real, it would be everything.
The world would have been specifically designed to deceive me. Statistics wouldn’t mean anything (if prayer works, someone would’ve noticed!). I would be fundamentally wrong about what “good” is and the entirety of morality (if you asked me to personally torture someone forever, with scalding brands, I’d turn you down). History wouldn’t mean anything (The Church has been wrong so much and they were so anti-science, that I guess having previous wrong predictions doesn’t matter). People used to believe all of the things in the Bible, instead of treating them as vague metaphors! Faith would mean truly ignoring statistics, science, reasoning, human progress, and logic to me. Faith really could be correct! But it’s directly against all of these.
This is why I think people who say faith and science are fundamentally at odds are more internally consistent than people who try to mesh them together. If Christianity is real, I think I might as well be a creationist for how many bullets I’d have to bite with the metaphorical view that many take today. And I mean that! I think setting science and faith completely at odds, and creationism actually being real somehow, is less of a bullet to bite than somehow mixing them.
(Note: this is specifically Christianity and not some sort of theism unrelated)
The dogmatism arises from the fact that, if you put enough effort in to think theology through, there seem to be some pretty clear things we aught to be doing. I don't see how that's at odds with a Christian God.
The Christian, Omnibenevolent God chooses to let human beings make their own decisions, though. If the Church is not a perfect reflection of what it should be (e.g. loving, non-harming), that doesn't reflect on the consitution of God, that reflects on the failures of man to enact God's Will (God's Will being human fulfillment). As a Catholic, I have no issue conceding that Christians are generally quite bad people and use their religious beliefs, and sometimes the Church directly, to cause harm to others. I estimated that about 85% of Christians don't understand what it means to love God (which is the greatest commandment). That can be a failure of the people in the Church to inform others meaningfully, but it does not have to be a failure of God to reflect in the physical world. You might grant that Jesus' teachings for how we should live are perfect (it's not hard to), but just because the teachings are perfect and even if the communication of them is ideal, that should not mean that everyone who hears about Jesus was/is compelled by perfect rationality to become a good and loving person following dogma strictly. If the argument was perfectly rational, we wouldn't have the genuine free will to choose anything else, and that wouldn't be free will.
Also, when Christians say God is Omnibenevolent, they originally meant that all existence is good because it is preferable to non-existence, and God is the substance and source of existence so God is all good. I actually don't have a convincing argument at the moment to connect that rationality of good to "love," but the New Testament and personal spiritual practice pretty clearly demonstrates that God is also perfectly loving. Just wanted to clear up a potential conflation of (common) good and what theologians mean by "God is Good."