How Religion Hides from Reason

Religious ideas hide themselves in cloaks of obscurantism, ignorance, and incredulity.  Here's how:

When asked what the word 'god' means, a religious person will usually appeal to other similarly vague ideas like, a "higher power," "love," "an immaterial mind," and, equally nebulous, as I suggested in my last post, a "creator of the universe." (This is not an exhaustive list)

Also, the subject will often shift to perennial philosophical questions to which god is supposed to provide some explanation like, "Is it rational to be moral?", "What should our purpose be?", and, "What should we value?"

This is how religion hides under a cloak of obscurantism.  None of these questions are necessarily affected by there being a god.  To explain, I can imagine a god who is amoral.  I can also imagine a god who is indifferent.  I can imagine a god who used to exist and no longer does. If we prove tomorrow that there is a god it will answer no other question than the question, "Is there a god?"


Or the subject will swiftly and almost imperceptibly switch to the gaps in our current scientific knowledge like, "How do you get life from non-life?", "What caused the big bang?", "Why is there something rather than nothing?", and, "How do we explain consciousness?"

This is how religion hides under a cloak of ignorance.  The person who begins exploring the meaning and truth of religious claims ends up confronted with some of the most interesting questions we know how to ask.  If they are not very careful, they become diverted from the fact that these questions may not be affected at all by the claims of the religious; and many fall into the trap of thinking that ignorance is a way to argue the truth of something.

i.e. Premise 1: God is that which explains the unexplained.  Premise 2:  There are things that are unexplained. Conclusion: God exists. 

or Premise 1: We don't know how to get life from non-life.  Conclusion: God.

The formal problem with these is called the argument from ignorance.

I've often heard apologists say something like, "I just can't imagine there being no intelligence behind it all." This is an argument from incredulity.  It should be pretty clear to most that this is not a sensible form of argumentation.

What I'm advocating here is that we be clear about our terms, and that we argue logically.  If god is logical then I'm sure he would appreciate it.  If not, he's not worth my time anyway (which there's some chance he would appreciate since he wouldn't be logical).  Let's discuss one topic at a time instead of heaping all of our ignorance and incredulity onto the table.

What created the universe?

In response to the question, "What created the universe?" which is usually the end of a series of such causality inquires and meant as a 'you-can't-explain-that,' from Christian apologists.

Setting aside for the moment that the point wouldn't get us anywhere even if it made sense, let's illustrate the inanity of this question first by defining our term.

Universe: the set of all things that exist.

This is the way I use it. If you don't agree with that definition then we need to find a term we can agree with to proceed.

If you ask the question, "What created the universe?" with this definition in mind, you can clearly see that the question no longer makes sense. The word 'what' must refer to some 'thing', and would therefore belong in 'the set of all things that exist.'

What's more, time is a thing. We are looking for a creator or causer of time. But these concepts don't make sense either. The word 'create' is meaningless outside the context of time. And even if you can somehow force yourself to believe that some 'thing' 'created' time, doing so requires you to ignore the problem of causality which was the very problem we were trying to fix in the first place.

In my view, it is deeply mysterious. Either some thing always existed, something came from nothing, or causality itself can be broken. Each of these seem ridiculous and are impossible to believe, yet, here we are.