“Who is God?” would have been the appropriate question preceding my title but since the issue of the discussion on the subject of God sadly (and almost always) begins by assuming who God is, I have decided for my title to be rather catchy than truer to the point. Sometimes you don’t even know where to begin disproving that God doesn’t exist. For if you have to prove the non-existence of something then you can’t help but feel that infinitely many nonexistent entities are (in effect) qualified for making the same demand of being dis-proven. For this particular reason not only is it legitimate to prove the nonexistence of God, but also the nonexistence of everything that doesn’t exist!
As an atheist, if I am, for example, asked to disprove that God doesn’t exist the right way to approach the issue for me would be to weigh the evidence brought by those who claim that God does exist and decide accordingly. If, in this case, the evidences are not sufficient then I would decide that God doesn’t exist, or, perhaps more candidly, that the question of his existence is not decidable. The issue I am trying to tackle here is easily guessable by anyone who has spent some time on the debate between theism and atheism. I am, of course, here, trying to shed light on whether the burden of proof should be shared by both contending parties or by theism alone. I am personally convinced that the burden of proving the existence of God should solely reside on those who claim that he/she/it in fact exists. In this post I will try to point out that burden of proof resides on the believers and that it is logically absurd to ask of any one to prove to you that “X” does not exist.
Let me explain by giving a hypothetical example, here. Suppose you are standing in an empty room with nothing inside it (nothing at all except you, the walls and the roof above.) Then a stranger comes in and joins you and claims that he sees a chair inside the room and he tries to convince you despite your stand to the contrary. Now, would it be sensible if the stranger asks you to prove to him that the chair doesn’t exist? He can ask you to do so and you might proceed to prove the non-existence of the chair simply out of decency. But your success will depend not on the facts on ground but on your friend’s intellectual sanity or insanity for that matter. You can bring all sorts of material evidence to prove to him that there is no chair in the room, but then he can claim that the chair is neither visible to the naked eye nor detectable by the senses (it is spiritual, whatever that might mean!). Moreover, he tales you that its very nature is transcendent, that it is not convenient for commonsensical or scientific proving. What do you say to such kind of a person? There is no difference between his chair and a chair that doesn’t exist; nonetheless he is consoled by the effort he has exerted in his arguments to render his entity non-refutable. What an intellectual moron!
There is a basic correspondence between the example entertained above and the idea of God and the effort that has been made to prove his existence. God (in whatever way you like to define him) is an alien to our pragmatic world and His introduction to humanity normally requires explanation. No matter how satisfactory the explanations might have been, historically the burden of proving was on those who first came up with an idea of some sort of God or gods. From the ancient tribal societies to Judaism to Christianity to Islam, the concept of god was propagated by bringing “proofs” that God exists and not by arguing that the evidence to the contrary was absent. Atheism was therefore a reactionary movement in the sense that it questioned the imperatives of religious ideologies and claims. I am not saying that because the historical trend was such and such and that it should remain such and such. No! Rather, I am pointing out that commonsense dictates that the burden of proof always resides on the one making imperative claims and that the course of religious history is in some sense a testimony to that. As long as theological explanations are not convincing in demonstrating that God exists then God should, at least for practical reasons, be regarded as non-existent. Otherwise the very fact that an atheist cannot prove the inexistence of God (or any imaginary being for that matter) lends no credibility whatsoever to the theist’s case.
The question of whether something exists or not can be handled at a level of complexity where commonsense would suffice to settle the matter. It has, however, been the trend in theological circles to stretch simple issues to their metaphysical ends so as to postpone, if not escape, refutations.
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