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Last Updated December 6, 2003
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Logic and Faith are Mutually Exclusive
Again, I'm not trying to drive Christians, Hindus, Moslems or anyone else away from their faith. I'm trying to get them to see that their faith cannot be based on logic, nor can logic be used to reinforce faith. If you are religious, at least be honest, and admit that your beliefs hold no logical ground at all. No one's do. Being illogical and having faith does not make you a bad or ignorant person. After all, how irrational and illogical are human emotions, particularly love? Have you ever been in love with someone who didn't love you back, and, yet, you continue to torture yourself with your feelings for that individual? How logical is that? We all do illogical things, like believe in religion and fall in love. It's simply a matter of which of these illogical things we believe are worth throwing logic out the window for. I, personally, don't believe that faith is worth tossing logic for, but I also believe that love is. That said, let us examine some of the most oft-repeated (at least, in my school) "logical" arguments for the existence of God.
Why don't you have faith in God? Every morning, when you wake up, you have faith in that you're not going to be killed that day. Everyone has faith in certain things, why can't they have faith in God?
This was one that was repeated many times in Catholic high school. Unfortunately, repetition doesn't make it valid or logical. It assumes that, since you have faith in one thing, you must have faith in everything. There two faiths, however, are completely different.
If I didn't have faith in my living through the day unscathed, I'd be a horribly-depressed, pessimistic and unadventurous person. I'd isolate myself in a room and avoid all contact with anyone else, because they might kill me. In other words, I couldn't live my life without this faith.
However, faith in God is completely optional. I don't have faith in God. Millions of others in America don't. We all live ordinary, normal lives. We get up in the morning, confident that a semi won't ram into us in the middle of the street. See the difference? If faith in God was necessary to live a normal life, all the atheists of the world would be severely-abnormal people.
All this being said, I live in a fairly low-crime neighborhood. I'm a safe driver, and I have quick reflexes. Logically, the chances of me dying in a given day are slim enough to merit me actually going out and facing that day.
In Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas makes a logical case for the existence of God. Everything has to come from somewhere. You can't trace events back forever. There must have been a beginning, or an "uncaused cause" which started everything. That is God.
This argument kept me clinging to theism all throughout my senior year of high school. It is, indeed, a very powerful argument to overcome. It seems very logical, but it's so incredibly easy to refute it when one looks at the actual path that the proponents of this argument take to get to God as their "uncaused cause."
Put simply, they are defying Occam's Razor. They are introducing an unnecessary element into an explanation. The conclusion "God" is not an option in logic, because "God" is something so overly complex that we cannot possibly understand its working mechanisms, or prove its existence. In other words, "God" is the most complex and unnecessary term one can introduce into an explanation. Now, to the actual refutation.
Let's say we take a look at a very short cause-and-effect path. Tree comes from seed. Seed comes from other tree. Other tree comes from the Earth. The Earth comes from the Universe. The Universe comes from God. Therefore, God is the initiator. What is wrong with this conclusion? It skips the Universe as a candidate for an initiator. Why can't the Universe be the uncaused cause? Why can't it simply be eternal? This is a much more logical conclusion than "God," because we know the Universe exists! Therefore, the Universe is the uncaused cause. It simply is, and has always been.
An intelligent thing means an intelligent designer. Humans just couldn't have popped into existence by chance. The probabilities are just astronomical. The only explanation is God.
This argument can be turned around to say that someone must have designed God, too. You can't just magically stop applying logic to a situation when it suits you. If you want to apply the "designer logic" to prove the existence of God, someone must have designed God, using the same reasoning. This also grossly misrepresents the atheist stance. Theists often like to pretend that anyone who doesn't believe in God believes that the Universe and all life came into being by "random chance." This is simply false. I don't believe the Universe ever "came into being." It simply always was and always will be. This is a far more logical conclusion than God will ever be. We have no reason to assume that the Universe had a "creation point." There is no reason to assume that there was a time when the Universe didn't exist. We have no evidence of such a period. Thus, to believe to is wholeheartedly illogical, and it violates all physical conservation laws, especially Conservation of Energy. If energy can be neither created nor destroyed, then the Universe couldn't have "come into being" from nothing via any process.
As an aside, I could use that logic to prove that Man is God. If he wants to say that God designed Man, but no one designed God, I can just as easily say that no one designed Man, and it makes more sense. We know that we exist, after all. We don't know that God exists.
But you can't explain the human brain without a creator. You can't explain the beauty of the human intellect. Without a creator, life has no purpose. It's depressing, and anyone who believes it leads a sad and empty life.
This is one of the most insulting and arrogant "arguments" for the existence of God. People actually do argue this, and they actually tell people like me that we lead "empty" lives. This only goes to show what an empty life those people lead. If you truly believe that no one can find a purpose for life without faith in a God or creator in their head, you lead a truly sad life, because you can't give yourself a purpose. Moreover, if you truly believe that there is logic to your faith, you're just being hypocritical an delusional. Zen-Buddhists have the right idea. They believe that, in order to find enlightenment, you must think illogically. They don't pretend that their unsupported belief in Nirvana makes logical sense. They accept is for what it is, illogical, and practice their faith along those lines.
But, so many of the Bible's predictions have come true! It's predicted the downfall of every country around the Israel area! Those words must have been inspired!
Frankly, predicting the downfall of nations doesn't impress me. No nation or state in the history of the planet has ever lasted forever. All nations will eventually crumble. This is simple historical fact. Furthermore, none of the verses in the Bible making these "predictions" give any specifics. They don't give a time or a manner. They simply say that the nation will fall.
Furthermore, even if there are predictions that the Bible makes that are somewhat accurate and specific, how does this prove the existence of God? How do we know that the person in question wasn't lying about the manner with which he arrived at his prophecy? Nostrdamus' prophecies are certainly interesting to study due to their accuracy, but they certainly don't lend credence to the theory that there is a God. They are very intriguing, but there's no way to prove the mechanism through which he got his prophecies. If a psychic reveals my future to me, and it comes true, am I to immediately "accept the light of Christ?" I should hope not.
The only reason anyone is an atheist is because they don't want to accept the supreme authority of God and follow his laws. They want to be sexually promiscuous and walk away guilt-free, and they can't do that without denying the love of Christ in favor of the sin of physical pleasure.
Also an insulting and bigotous claim. It really has nothing to do with proving God's existence, but I thought I'd put it in here because people actually say stuff like this when an atheist backs them into a corner with his Satanic logic. If you actually think that the only reason every atheist believes what he or she does, then you are a Christian fundamentalist who probably believes that the Universe is a paltry 6,000 years old and that we are all the products of a vengeful and cruel God who made everything is six days, and that your unsupported religious views are better than everyone else's. You need to castrate yourself and remove yourself from the gene pool right away.
Sexual morality is covered in my section on sex and homosexuality.
Logic simply doesn't support religion. That's all there is to it. Logic and faith are totally incompatible. This doesn't mean that they can't live together. It simply means that one can't enter into the other. Logic can't enter into your faith, because, if it does, it will destroy it. Faith can't enter into logic, because faith is illogical. Again, as individuals, we choose what we will leave to logic and what we will leave to faith.
On a related note, this is also why science and religion are not compatible. Science is based on observation and logical deduction. Religion is based on blindly believing. The two are opposite philosophies. Rather than looking at them as two opposing forces, struggling for dominance, it is more optimistic and more helpful to our sanity to look at them more as Yin and Yang. They are two opposing forces, but they are in equilibrium, with neither dominating the other. As individuals, we must look for a personal balance between the two, that is comfortable for ourselves. If one allows faith to rule his life, then he is bound for disappointment and a life of blindly following whatever may come his way. If one allows logic to rule his life, he will miss out on all the wonderful experiences that human emotions have to offer, i.e. joy from being loved or loving someone else. Of course, human emotion carries with it a price, the bad side. We've all been there, but I suspect that most humans wouldn't disown the negative side of emotion if it meant, too, disowning the positive side.
