On proofs of the existence of God
I used to think of proofs of the existence of God as basically attempts to compel assent to a particular religious doctrine through a sort of sleight of hand:
- Prove, based on reasonable-seeming general axioms, the existence of some sort of ultimate entity.
- Name this entity "God."
- Conflate this with the particular God-based model of the world and right action embedded in your own religion.
While in many cases this may actually be the motivation, I now see a totally different thing people might have been trying to do with such "proofs." In many cultures at many places and times, people have talked about right action, or the nature of reality, with reference to some sort of ultimate entity that seems to have some sort of human-like agency or preferences, an Ultimate Lawmaker or Ultimate Actor of some sort. These systems often have good reasons for particular claims they're making - they often constitute a workable strategy - but saying it with reference to an ultimate agent is frequently an embarrassment.
A natural criticism of such framings is that the ultimate entity seems like an extra hypothesis of which we have no need. Why not just describe everything literally? Why attribute moral principles to the will of an ultimate agent? Why attribute the existence of the universe to the same thing? There are plenty of perplexities associated with this. One of the most popular is that while we'd be happy to follow the advice of an omniscient omnibenevolent agent, it's hard to attribute the existence of the universe to the same omnipotent agent, given how obviously suboptimal many things are locally.
(Evidence: sometimes we improve things, and we're not even omniscient or omnibenevolent, much less omnipotent. Evidence: the need for such advice in the first place. The Bible mentions both these problems.)
The reason why God gets posited is that systems are simple not because they posit few objects, but because they have a short message length. A compact set of axioms and rules of inference is an example of this. For instance, Euclid's Elements allows the construction of an infinite variety of shapes and proof of a very large number of statements, but is based on a comparatively small set of assumptions, definitions, and rules of inference mostly stated at the beginning.
Given this, proofs for the existence of God can also be construed as an argument that, in some frameworks that are reasonably natural to work with, we can't help but posit a God if we carry them to their natural conclusion. The Prime Mover or Greatest Possible Existent occupies a position somewhat similar to the Axiom of Choice. So, not attributing things to God means either abandoning those frameworks entirely (which may make some important true things much more difficult to say), or refusing to follow them to their logical conclusion (epistemic motivated stopping, not an especially rational practice), or affirming a contradiction.
These proofs don't prove anything else about God - they don't, for instance, say anything about whether any particular religion is true - they only serve to identify the question "does God exist?" with the question of whether we find it helpful to use the particular axioms and modes of inference involved in the proof.
I think that most such proofs still fail, in part because the people engaging in them are somewhat confused about what they're doing, but they fail a bit more sympathetically than I used to think; they're not explanations for why everyone should buy into their system, they're explanations for why their system can't help but talk about God, despite the obvious problems this presents.
This post inspired by my recent reading of Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
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Your post strikes me as a fairly roundabout way of saying the above.
Eventually, cartographers discover that magnetic north is not true north, the Santa story seems increasingly implausible, and people dismiss the barber / candy cane pole description as absurd. But we still read and engage with old accounts of where things are that make reference to a single north pole, since they're using it as a reference point. Some people try to carry on the progress in those terms instead of engaging in the massive translation effort necessary to say the same things as efficiently without making reference to the single "true" north. When the "true" northers first encountered serious criticisms of their framework, they felt the need to engage in some apologetics to try to explain why they used the concept.
These apologetics ultimately turned out to be kind of unfruitful compared to just directly describing what works about their system, but it's at least a plausibly honest confusion that could lead them to trying to "prove" the existence of the true north instead of tearing apart all their maps and starting over, the perceived alternative.
I hope it's obvious that I don't think either of those options is right, though.
With the army example, we might well say that the clouds are (not is) raining, since clouds actually are potential rainers full of rainstuff before they actually fall upon us - but sentences like “it’s raining” are perfectly intelligible without any shared prior reference of anticipation based on threatening clouds. It - whatever it is - simply rained. (The singular verb also makes reference to clouds implausible.)
It’s tempting to rescue the singular verb and say that the sky is raining, but this is also silly - the sky is a place, it doesn't do things, things in the sky do things, the composition of the sky changes, but the sky does not fall down on us in little drops.
The *sentence* depends on “it,” and it [sic] would be awkward to avoid referring to the undefined “it” in common speech. It does little harm, since we know perfectly well what it’s raining means. But it would be absurd to say that our “belief system” depends on “it.”
I’m saying that God often occcupies a place analogous to the unspecified “it” in “it’s raining.”
Our language helps create/reinforce concepts. I think that's part of your point. Some of our common assumptions attribute life to God. This also means, though, that it can be hard to spot and unpack these assumptions unless we already have the alternative non-God concepts/language with which to do it. A tool is not going to break itself or make itself obsolete. Only a stronger tool will do that. We need a diamond to cut the rock.
I recall this bit of dialogue from the 10-year-old film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed!":
Ben Stein: "Who created the heavens and the earth?" Richard Dawkins: "You beg the question—" Ben Stein: "Well, then, how did it get created?"
Here, the very concept/word "creation" is question-begging, but unless we already have a different concept/word, we can't see it. We'll keep trying to validate the same assumption about "creation" until something disrupts that assumption. To me, it's debatable whether the concept or the word needs to change first. They (the concept and the word) are tightly packaged together.