1.  Introduction: Does God Exist?
=================================
I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother
Goose.
  -- Clarence Darrow, _Speech at Toronto,_ 1930

A childhood friend in Turkey once told me there was a large stone 
suspended in mid-air above the Arabian desert; this miracle testified 
to the truth of Islam and the power of God.  I never discovered the 
origin of the story---it does not seem to be part of any real 
tradition---but somehow it stuck with me.  The popular gods seem to be 
magical beings, surfacing in that which is mysterious, unfathomable by 
puny human devices.  Through the eyes of religion, the world often 
looks like a fairy tale which is nonetheless true.

Every story must have a villain, or at least a pesky skeptic; I told
my friend I didn't believe him.  He was sure, however, that somewhere
along the line there was impeccable testimony to his suspended stone.
It was not just a fairy tale.  So our gods come with arguments to ward
off skeptics.  A businessman once told me to look around his office:
everything had an owner.  Everything _must_ have an owner---including
me, he said---and this owner was God.  He might have had a verse from
the Qur'an in mind: "Whosoever is in the heavens or the earth belongs
to Him."[1] But maybe he was just being a businessman.  Philosophers
like to think everything has an ultimate cause and this is God; maybe
it came naturally to a businessman to think of an ultimate owner.

Of course, there are more interesting arguments out there than stones
hanging in the air, or everything having an owner.  Or at least
arguments with more footnotes.  After all, plenty of accomplished
scholars, scientists, and philosophers are convinced there is a God.
They believe we inhabit a deeply personal reality; that beneath
surface appearances, we can come to see a God who touches just about
everything in our lives.  The idea of God holds their picture of the
world together, including fact claims, moral ideals, and feelings of
devotion and dependence.  Their religious beliefs give them community,
a dramatic story to set their lives in, a tradition in which they can
talk about what they believe and how they act.[2] And so the existence
of a God becomes not just another fact, but a reality fundamental to a
whole way of life.

Such a God is a very attractive idea, since it promises to make sense 
of so much in our lives.  Maybe there is a subtle magic in the world, 
even though God has a way of getting tangled up in superstitions like 
suspended stones.  Still, there are skeptics.  Some of us have come to 
believe even the subtle gods and demons are fictions.  God used to be 
an obvious reality in our cultures, no more a matter of dispute than 
the existence of trees.  A few philosophers toyed with doubt, but 
mostly the way they questioned trees as a prelude to a metaphysical 
proof that trees do in fact exist.  Today, godless infidels are 
commonplace, especially among people with a philosophical or 
scientific background.  Even as a social force, religion is no longer 
what it used to be.  The devout believe in very different versions of 
God, and many people are apathetic, accepting religion as part of 
their social background but nothing more.

So we have an argument on our hands.  And a fascinating argument it 
is, precisely because a spiritual reality is not supposed to be an 
ordinary fact.  We do not argue about whether there is a God the way 
we debate the Loch Ness monster---God is not just an entity in 
addition to others in our world; our very picture of the world is at 
stake.  All our knowledge comes into the argument; natural science, 
history, psychology, even our theories about how we learn about the 
world.

I join the argument as a skeptic.  Being so obsessed with the idea of 
God as to write a book has made me appreciate religion as an 
expression of human hopes, even, at its best, as a work of art.  Yet I 
remain among the godless infidels.  I do not think there is any 
spiritual reality over and above the material universe.  Our world 
does not look like it was created for any purpose; indeed, I believe 
we understand it best when we see it as an accidental world.  As far 
as I can tell, our world is not the manifestation of any deep 
principle, moral, metaphysical, or theological.

It is not obvious that the world is a godless, accidental place.  This 
idea looks crazy from the perspective of many intellectual traditions, 
it goes against common sense, it even denies many claims people accept 
as facts.  So I have a long argument to make.  Which is just as well; 
I don't trust knock-down disproofs of God any more than proofs.  And I 
want to build up a naturalistic picture of the world, as well as 
criticize religious theories.  This means I will lean heavily on 
science, though not, I hope, without being aware of the frailties of 
our science.  In this, at least, I will be in good company.  Infidels 
have usually embraced modern science, while religious thinkers have 
often had to make excuses for why God and creation do not seem to show 
the expected harmony.  With science, it seems we have stumbled upon an 
excellent way of learning about the world, and the best of our 
scientific knowledge consistently undermines our hope that there is a 
God.

1.  Sophisticated Gods
----------------------
How, then, do we argue about God, science, and the way to best 
understand the world?  Our religions do not always encourage skeptical 
questions.  Perhaps to the truly faithful, God must be a basic 
assumption which comes before everything else.  On the other hand, 
religious people also speak of a God who is obvious to human reason, 
so that when we ask how we know there is a God, we meet with 
overwhelming proof.  The Christian apostle Paul thought our world was 
clearly created and sustained by a divine power:

    For all that can be known of God lies plain before their eyes;
    indeed God himself has disclosed it to them.  Ever since the world
    began his invisible attributes, that is to say his everlasting
    power and deity, have been visible to the eye of reason, in the
    things he has made.[3]

Apparently, though there may always be those perverse enough to deny 
God, there are plenty of signs in God's creation to convince the 
honest skeptic.  The Qur'an speaks of these signs, telling us

    It is God who raised the skies without support, as you can see,
    then assumed His throne, and enthralled the sun and the moon (so
    that) each runs to a predetermined course.  He disposes all
    affairs, distinctly explaining every sign that you may be certain
    of the meeting with your Lord.  . . . In these are signs for those
    who reflect.[4]

In fact, both Paul and Muhammad seem so certain of their Gods, they 
declare that dissent from what is so clear to reason must be a result 
of willful blindness or obstinate rebellion.

Our long-standing religious traditions and philosophical theologies
also claim God as a fact we can argue about.  We should at least come
to see that a God exists, that reality is ultimately spiritual, even
if our merely human reasoning can never encompass the full mystery of
divinity.  The Catholic Catechism instructs us that reason and science
never truly contradict faith, "because the things of the world and the
things of faith derive from the same God."[5] God is a fact, a being
we can speak of in statements like "God is the most perfect being,"
"God created the universe," or "God brought the Israelites out of
Egypt." It is not just a metaphor expressing Israelites' joy of being
released from slavery or the wonder we feel when gazing at the stars.
A most perfect divine power is actually responsible for Jewish history
and the night sky.  The existence of a God is supposed to _explain_
things.

Unfortunately, old-time religion runs into trouble here, since its God 
was obvious only in a world we can no longer believe in.  Before we 
had an idea of astrophysics, we might have thought God hung the stars 
on the firmament, maybe even did the whole job in six days a few 
thousands of years ago.  Before modern science and history, we might 
have trusted scriptural testimony about Noah's flood or the plagues of 
Egypt.  But today, conservative, magical, scripture-waving religion 
has become, to the well-educated person, obviously false.

Of course, the old-time religion is still very popular.  Throw a brick
in a crowd, and chances are it will hit someone who believes the
stories in the Bible or Qur'an.  Turn on a TV or radio, and it will
not take long to find a preacher who not only proclaims the faith of
his fathers, but say his scriptures are free of all error.  Some of
them will even argue God's Word miraculously anticipates modern
knowledge.  Apparently "Can you dispatch the lightning on a mission
and have it answer you, `I am ready'?"(Job 38:35) is an "anticipation
of radio."[6] Henry M.  Morris, a leading creationist, reads the Bible
as a physics textbook:

    . . . Ecclesiastes 3:14: "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it
    shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken
    from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him."  This
    striking verse actually anticipates the great principle of energy
    conservation . . . The only way of accounting for the infinite
    reservoirs of energy in the universe is "God doeth it."[7]

Popular Muslim apologists also like to claim the Qur'an exhibits
knowledge far beyond what was possible in the 7th century, when it was
revealed.  For example, 51 Adh-Dhariyat 57, "We built the heavens by
Our authority; We are the Lord of power and expanse," supposedly
speaks of the expanding universe, while the seven heavens or skies
mentioned in 78 An-Naba' 86 and other verses refer to parallel
universes or cosmic structural hierarchies: solar systems, galaxies,
and so on.[8]

Now, I don't intend to spend time refuting such claims; they are too 
blatantly wrong, and God does not stand or fall depending on whether 
the Bible knows its physics.  We have more sophisticated Gods, who are 
not so fragile as to fall apart when we discover an error or 
contradiction in a holy book.  The God of most liberal religious 
people does not dictate inerrant scriptures; what we have are human 
records of encounters with divinity.  This God does not create the 
universe in a matter of days and then fashion the first human out of 
earth, but starts up the universe with a cosmic explosion and then 
directs long ages of evolution to produce intelligent creatures.  And 
we are as likely to find such a God within, in mystical experiences, 
as in the glory of creation.  These versions of God are defended by 
scholars and philosophers, not televangelists.  Skeptics must wrestle 
with such sophisticated Gods, not just the fundamentalists' Big Boss 
In The Sky.

However, the old-time God is important, at least as a starting point.  
After all, traditional ideas of God have important strengths.  If the 
world was as we once imagined it to be, we could not honestly be 
scientific naturalists.  We would best understand our world as a 
cosmic drama with God as the leading character.  And in traditional 
religion, God is not a vague, content-free idea.  God takes on 
concrete meaning within a network of religious fact claims telling us 
our world is dependent on a divine power.

If we don't keep the virtues of the traditional God in mind, our new
and improved version will risk becoming nonsense.  This has happened
before.  When Judaism entered the Greek intellectual world, its
beliefs often looked philosophically ridiculous.  Sophisticated Jews
retooled their ancestral religion the same way Greeks allegorized
their myths.  If Zeus's rape of Ganymede was really a metaphor for how
the soul was enraptured by its encounter with divine power, then also
"Adam was revealed to stand for Reason and Eve for the labile part of
the soul and sensory component of the mind which, if distracted by
lower things (the snake), will pull even Reason down with her."[9]
Many Christian and Muslim philosophers would eventually do the same;
God became the remote incomprehensible One of the Neoplatonists,
emanating lesser divine entities like Existence, Reason, and Soul,
producing the "intelligible" realm of which our "sensible" world was a
mere echo.  This prevented a lot of embarrassment; if scripture talked
about a human-like God sitting on a throne, well, this was merely an
allegory to be explored for its Platonic meaning.  But within all the
metaphysical song-and-dance, what happened to God as a fact?  I am
inclined to think adopting Platonism turned an honest mistake into
complete drivel.  Conservative theologians rightly avoid allegory
unless it is clearly appropriate, since they want to make real claims,
not produce infinitely flexible verbiage.

A religion with a sophisticated God must still set forth a picture of 
the world, and show how God is central to it all.  Creation does not 
have to take place in six days, prophets can record their religious 
experiences without acquiring immunity from error.  But God still must 
somehow be an explanation for our world.  Perhaps spirit pervades all 
physical existence, there is a purposive pattern in human history, 
paranormal and mystical experiences let us see into a fundamentally 
personal reality, or our moral behavior originates in a God.  We can 
argue about claims like these, and if they succeed, discover that our 
world is, underneath its material surface, dependent on a supernatural 
personality.

But this also means we cannot defend God by denying modern knowledge 
is relevant to religious questions.  Among believers of all stripes, 
it is a commonplace that science is unable to answer ultimate 
questions about human origins, meaning, and destiny.  This is at best 
an overly narrow view of science.  In fact, I shall argue we can say 
quite a few things about such questions without the benefit of 
religion.  We come from accidents, not design.  Our lives have no 
cosmic meaning.  And our destiny is dust, not immortality.  Many of us 
find such answers profoundly unappealing.  Nevertheless, I believe 
they are most likely true.

2.  A Road Map
--------------
In a long argument, the fun is in the details.  But since I am trying 
to draw a broad picture of what the world is like, I should give a 
road map to where I want to go with my argument.

First of all, I want to do something different than the usual style of 
philosophical debate.  Philosophical theists have a way of trying to 
establish the reality of God with only minimal reference to the world 
as we see it.  For example, they may observe that there is some order 
in our world, or simply that something exists, and then say a God is 
the best explanation for these facts.  They talk about necessary 
beings, basic beliefs, and Very Very Important Deep Questions.  
Atheist philosophers join the fray by saying the theists' proofs are 
actually very bad arguments, and go on to argue there cannot be a God, 
again based on some very minimal, obvious facts.  Their old favorite 
is the problem of evil: how can a benevolent deity who is presumably 
not afflicted with a warped sense of humor create a universe as nasty 
as ours?

Now, I think the atheists do a good job of discovering the flaws in
philosophical arguments for God.[10] But God should be a concept
fundamental to the way we understand the world, so it seems strange
that so much of the debate has so little to do with what we have
learned about our world.  Plus I must admit to a prejudice; immersing
myself in the philosophy of religion has convinced me there is
something very wrong with traditional philosophy.  The God of an
ordinary believer is, I think, a mistake, but I have come to suspect
the God of a philosopher is sheer lunacy.  So while I have much to say
about traditionally philosophical issues and arguments made by
philosophers, I try not to give philosophy center stage.

In chapter 2, I start out by looking at philosophical arguments about 
God.  I pay special attention to the classical theistic attempts at 
rational proof, since while these do not succeed, they still are 
important for our concept of God.  I also argue that philosophical 
arguments against God only refute overly ambitious theologies.  
Traditional philosophical analysis does not take us very far.  I then 
try to outline how we can make sense of God by drawing a picture of 
the world in which God is the central actor.  This, of course, will 
shift the debate away from philosophy and towards science.

Chapter 3 is about evolution, an obvious example of replacing God with 
a natural explanation.  Creationism is a perfectly fine supernatural 
theory, making real claims which would be good evidence for a God if 
they were true.  But the complexities of our world do not require an 
intelligent designer; accidents and blind mechanisms do the trick.  
Even sophisticated arguments for the compatibility of Darwin with God 
founder on the fact that modern biology relies entirely on 
purposeless, accidental explanations.  God begins to retreat from 
explaining our world.

Physics seems more fundamental, and so perhaps closer to God than 
biology.  Modern physics features often in today's arguments that 
science reveals a God.  Chapter 4 is where I criticize claims that 
cosmology shows the universe has been designed for us, that the Big 
Bang was an event of divine creation, and that quantum physics proves
consciousness is central to physical existence.  I also point out how 
we can understand the laws of physics not as expressions of a divine 
will, but as frameworks for accidents.  Physics fixes us more firmly 
in a purely natural world.

We usually believe not in a generic God that might emerge from natural 
science, but in the God of Abraham revealed by history, scripture, and 
prophets.  In chapter 5, I explore Jewish and Muslim history, and 
argue that our religions are very human creations, reflecting 
particular historical accidents.  The authors of our holy books gave 
us stories shaped by theology, not reliable accounts of our past.  
History is continuous with natural science, giving us no more support 
for supernatural revelation.

Christianity's turn comes in chapter 6.  Jesus is still central to 
liberal Christian theology, but the little we know about the 
historical Jesus does not help God.  We discover hints of an 
apocalyptic prophet, a teacher who started social experiments, even a 
magician or spirit-possessed healer---but no Risen Lord, not 
necessarily even someone who was uniquely close to a God.  In the end, 
all we get out of history is that some people have religious 
experiences and that religions are in part built on supernatural 
interpretations of these experiences.

Miracles and paranormal events could be the kind of religious 
experience which would establish a supernatural realm.  Chapter 7 is 
where I look at strange phenomena and hints of mind over matter which 
suggest the existence of a soul.  But psychical research gives us 
nothing but dubious anecdotes and very small and uncertain effects 
coaxed into sight by statistics.  As far as I can tell, we live in an 
unmagical world, our minds are a product of nothing but our brains, 
and there is no such thing as a spirit or soul.  

Mystics often say their experience, indescribable and beyond all 
concepts, directly acquaint them with a divine power.  Some tie their 
visions to elaborate Platonic philosophies.  In chapter 8, I argue 
that modern psychology and artificial intelligence research helps us 
explain mystical experience without anything outside of our brains.  
Spiritual interpretations of mysticism and philosophies like 
mathematical Platonism are all most likely false.  Science, our most 
successful way of learning about the world, depends on detailed 
theories, not direct contact with deep reality.

Our religious traditions are very much concerned with morality.  The 
natural world contains no binding moral principles, so if there are 
such things, they may be rooted in God's will.  In chapter 9, I deny 
there is any special moral reality beyond our preferences, interests, 
and the social enterprises we are a part of.  We do not need God to 
explain morality, and God always runs into trouble when trying to 
explain the evils of our world anyway.  However, secular morality 
often has difficulty going beyond rational self-interest.  We are 
still not quite sure how to sustain morally engaged communities 
without supernatural guarantees.

If I do a good job, we will have come a long way towards exorcizing 
God from our explanations of the world.  But I rely on a scientific 
style of argument, and postmodern philosophy thinks science is 
overrated.  Perhaps I arbitrarily chose presuppositions that led me to 
trust science, and a religious person can take God on faith the same 
way.  So chapter 10 is here to defend science against relativist 
philosophizing.  We do not have transcendental assurances behind our 
ability to reason, and science is very much a social activity.  But it 
still is our best way of learning about the world.  God cannot be 
pulled out of a philosopher's hat.

Chapter 11 is my concluding musings.  Though I think we have excellent 
intellectual reasons to disbelieve in God, religion seems to have real 
advantages in sustaining culture and community.  And I think the 
stories our religions tell are fascinating.  They may be fictions, but 
fiction can tell us a lot about ourselves.  God does not belong in our 
explanations; still, godless infidels have a lot to learn from 
religion.

Notes
-----

[1] 21 Al-Anbiya' 19.  I use the Qur'an translation by Ahmed Ali,
1984.  This is often a mistranslation which serves to interpret the
Qur'an according to modern scientific and moral sensibilities, so I
err on the side of giving the Qur'an the benefit of the doubt.

[2] I am, of course, using "religion" so as to require a belief in
some sort of God.  This seems to be almost always true, even beyond
the Abrahamic religions which are my defining examples; see Stewart
Elliott Guthrie, _Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion_
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.  19-20.  In some
contexts, it is of course perfectly legitimate to call certain
non-supernatural attitudes religious, for example, if someone
identifies with Judaism as a tradition and culture without accepting
God.

[3] Romans 1:19-20.  The New Testament translation I use is the
_Revised English Bible,_ 1989.

[4] 13 Ar-Ra`d 2-3.  See also 30 Ar-Rum 20-27 for a list of signs from
the natural world.

[5] _Catechism of The Catholic Church_ (English translation, Montana:
Liguori Publications, 1994), par. 159.

[6] Harold L. Fickett Jr., _A Layman's Guide to Baptist Beliefs_
(Michigan: Zondervan, 1965), p. 16.  For the Tanakh or Old Testament,
I use the Jewish Publication Society translation, 1985.

[7] Henry M. Morris, _Biblical Creationism_ (Grand Rapids: Baker
Books, 1993), p. 108.

[8] See Taner Edis, "`Qur'an-science': Scientific miracles from the
7th century?," _Free Inquiry_ (forthcoming) for examples of the search
for miracles in the Qur'an.  The best English-language example of this
sort of apologetics is Maurice Bucaille, _The Bible, The Qur'an and
Science_ (Paris: Seghers, 1982).

[9] Paula Fredriksen, _From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New
Testament Images of Jesus_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),
p. 15.

[10] If I had to pick one example, it would be Michael Martin,
_Atheism: A Philosophical Justification_ (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990).

