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Quite a lot of people have a belief in God as the creator of the universe. It is a very common belief among people today and was even more common among the intelligentsia of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These people believed that the complexity of existence was too big a problem to put to one side as a problem to be worked upon by those qualified to do so but they had no desire or intention to accept the lies and dogmas of organized religion.
I cannot work up any great antipathy towards deists. The position that deists hold is surely equally valid scientifically to the atheist position. We lack simple evidence which conclusively proves that a god does or does not exist.
I am an anti-theist as well as an atheist. I see the concept of a god who interferes in human affairs as a sinister idea. If such a god existed it would be our duty to abolish him. But I am not an anti-deist. If there is or was a god who created the universe in a way which was especially favourable to the existence of life or a god who blew on the first embers to start off life and then just let it burn and then just sat back and abandoned magic or wished himself out of existence I have no antipathy to such a god. But such a god would probably not care very much either way about me, so I'm cool with that. I do not respect a god who creates people with a will and then judges them on how they use it, maintaining them as undead zombies in order to punish them or keep them as eternal pets to glorify him. That is despicable in the highest degree.
The Islamic concept of paradise is clearly a cheap bribe, cheap because you can write any figure you want on a cheque that can never be cashed, a bribe because it is given in return for total submission. But at least the Islamic paradise has some form of attraction. Good Muslims get to fuck in paradise. In the Christian heaven there is no marriage and so we have to assume also no sex. No marriage? All eternity with no special relationship except the one to God. Why does anybody ever consider that this is something to look forward to and yet at the same time do everything in their power to postpone?
Deists reject notions of prophecies, sons of god, prophets, revelations, miracles, reincarnation, afterlife, scripture, prayer, absolute and embodied good and evil. If there was or is a creator that is a fact of physics, the ultimate fact. It is not a matter that requires or is impacted upon by faith any more than mathematics requires faith. Two plus two is not a matter of opinion, belief or faith. No matter what you believe and whatever organ you think is doing the believing or whatever setting you think it is set to and whatever acts of violence you are prepared to commit or endure the answer is four. The existence or non-existence of a deity is surely a fact of the same kind.
Rules, laws, rights, borders, countries and adverbs are in a different category. These things exist when people agree that they do exist. But actors, that is people, animals, gods and the like are different. You can't create actors by believing in them. Not in reality. You can create fictional characters, non-real actors, by defining their characteristics. Father Christmas, Homer Simpson, James Bond, Uncle Sam and The Joker have been thought up and now have some kind of existence, but they are not real. They exist only in the imaginations of people. I see various versions of God, various versions of Jesus, various versions of Mary and other imaginary characters in the same light as I see the various versions of James Bond or Doctor Who.
Believing in a god no more makes that god real than being capable of imagining Homer Simpson talking in your head makes him real. It is exactly the same process. I can easily imagine at least a dozen people in my head. I can imagine the characters of real people, cartoons and fictional people talking in my head. Recently I have read God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. The week before I heard him read one of the chapters from this book on a YouTube video and I watched several other videos of him presenting arguments in debate and using very similar material. As a result of this experience I know possess what is in effect a self-reading audiobook. I can imagine Christopher Hitchens in my own head, at will, reading the entire book to me, with his vocal style and mannerisms, as I read the words on the page. I can also get him to speak other words. Right now I am having difficulty blocking him out, he's sat in the back of my cranium with a whisky glass in hand voicing all my thoughts. Any moment now I can imagine he's going to start using my cerebellum as an ashtray. The only thing I can't get him to do is to tell me something, anything, that I don't already know.
Of course the real Christopher Hitchens is older than me, highly educated and very experienced. He knows things that I don't know. I know things he does not know. But the Christopher Hitchens sprite inside my imagination cannot give me any new information. I can voice my thoughts through his voice in my head, I can get him to pontificate about people the real Christopher Hitchens has no knowledge of. But he can't tell me anything that I did not already know. In this respect he is just like a god. He likes that.
Gods don't live on Olympus or in the sky. Gods live in the human imagination. It is the only place they have ever lived. All gods are equally imaginary. A fantasy does not cease to be a fantasy simply because many people describe similar fantasies. A fantasy does not cease to be a fantasy because it makes people feel good, gives them hope or makes their life feel worthwhile.
What would it take to make Superman real? How many people believing in him would do it? If 20% of the world's population believed in him, trusted him, dedicated their lives to him and used capital letters when they referred to Him would that be enough? Belief cannot change certain realities. The existence and non-existence of deities is one of those facts which is not open to interpretation, popular opinion or the power of wishful thinking. If Thor exists he exists and he exists for everybody not just those who want to believe in him in exactly the same way as Gordon Brown and Vladimir Putin exist for everybody not just for those who want to invest something of themselves in believing in them. The existence of gods is the same category of fact as existence of people. If people act as if a particular person does not exist that behaviour does not make that person not exist, it might drive them insane or even drive them to kill themselves but on its own pretending a real person does not exist will not change the reality of their existence. In exactly the same way gods cannot be imagined in and out of real life existence.
If somebody tried to pretend I didn't exist I would make a point of proving my existence to them, I would start with reasoned argument and if they continued to pretend I wasn't there I would resort to direct action of increasing severity and violence. The idea that I would just accept that they were ignoring me and wait until they died would not be part of my action plan. Why would any god behave any differently? Why would a god prove his existence to people who already believed in him and yet fail to demonstrate his existence to those who didn't? Such behaviour is bizarre in the extreme. If it pains Our Lady not to be believed in quite as much as she would like to be by the Irish, Portuguese and Mexicans sufficiently that she decides to appear to them why doesn't she reveal herself in all her splendour at Mecca or Beijing? If angels can appear to shepherds outside Bethlehem and Emperor Constantine can get a sign why can't angels appear to people like that in modern times? What about the full angelic host appearing to Stalin and his Politburo just after Hitler's invasion? If the plan was to save souls for Christ can you think of a better time and place to do it?
Never has a god revealed to mankind any new information which is really useful. Prophesies have been rather tame and dull. Temples will be built and knocked down and rebuilt. When the temple was built lo and behold the description of what the temple will look like matches the account of what it did look like right down to the last pomegranate. Well dur. That's hardly a big surprise is it? There are two ways prophesies can be fulfilled. First the prophecy is well known and written down, in which case people make sure events and structures match the descriptions in the prophecy. Secondly the vague notion of a prophecy is known and after the fulfillment the prophecy is polished to match what actually happened. Both these methods were common in biblical prophesies.
The faking of stories to match the expectations contained in prophesies is quite blatant. Try reading Matthew's Gospel with an open mind to see what I mean. The author even leaves his notes in place so you can see his thinking! Matthew, chapter 2 verse 23
And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets. He shall be called a Nazarene.
So the sole reason Joseph moved his family to Nazareth was to fulfil some hint of a prophecy. A likely story. But it isn't even fulfilling a prophecy because nowhere in the Old Testament is the Messiah prophesied as being a Nazarene. There is a prophecy about a child born to be a nazarite
Nazarite // n. (also Nazirite) hist.
a Hebrew who had taken certain vows of abstinence; an ascetic (Num. 6).
[Late Latin Nazaraeus from Hebrew nazir, from nazar ‘to separate or consecrate oneself']
and this prophecy refers to the birth of Samuel, which is clear because it doesn't come to life until the Book of Samuel is written. A nazarite grows his hair long, hangs out in the wilderness and doesn't drink wine. John the Baptist was almost a stereotypical nazarite. Jesus was no nazarite, the best he could manage was forty days and nights in the wilderness and a pledge not to drink wine anymore, a pledge he is seen to keep for about a day, and then it kills him.
Look also at Matthew 2 16 - 18. One of the greatest libels in human mythology invented in order to demonstrate a prophecy fulfilled. If any Jewish puppet king really had done such a barbaric thing as to slaughter all infant boys in his kingdom the Jewish and Roman historians would have picked up on it. King Herod was not exactly short of literate enemies who would gladly tell the world of his bad deeds, somehow they missed this little episode.
I have just finished reading the entire old testament and I did not spot a single clue or prophecy that Palestine was about to come under the thumb of a city-state located far to the west, the prophets never saw past Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Ethiopia, the land of the Chaldeans (Babylon, modern Iraq) and when stretching their geographic knowledge to breaking point Persia (Iran). They quite missed out on Greece and Rome, which was a bit of an oversight for an all-seeing god don't you think?
Of course any real prophet would easily be able to foretell something as big as an invasion and centuries of foreign occupation. Also a real Jewish tribal god with the capacity to create prophets might be expected to have had something rather clear and unambiguous to say about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, the Final Solution and the establishment of the State of Israel. When you think about it wouldn't a mere two minutes worth of angel time in 1890 have paid off more than all the last twelve same old same old books of the old testament?
“A great evil has been born into the world. A child born this year will be the greatest scourge of the tribe of Judah.
The world will be torn apart by war on a scale never seen before by mankind. And when the world thinks it has put war behind it war will come again even more terrible. After that the shadow of war will make men afraid for many years. Man will fear death from the clouds.
Within the lifetime of children alive now my chosen people will return to the land I promised to Israel and set up a land without need of any king. Furthermore mankind will walk upon the face of the Moon and see the Earth as a shining jewel far off in the heavens. And man will look upon the whole Earth and find it good.”
Now that would have been a prophecy! But that would also have been impossible because it would require new information, genuine knowledge about the future. Prophets don't do that. Prophecies are always vague about what will happen and what the timescale will be.
What is the purpose of prophecy? Most old testament prophets gave information about the outcomes of battles and wars. But this was not holy espionage, the equivalent of “I'd make sure the carriers weren't in Pearl on Sunday morning, if you catch my drift...” it was simply stating who would win. I suppose hearing that you would win a battle would be welcome news, good for morale and all that. But there is no way of knowing who is a prophet and who is a false prophet. The miserable Jeremiah was not by any means the only prophet of his era, the biblical account is clear that there were men making contradictory prophesies, predicting a comfortable victory for Judah against the armies of Nebuchadrezzar (sic) king of Babylon but Jeremiah the quisling was giving a different message. Prophets don't give valuable information, they don't give tips and you can't tell in advance if they are real or fakes. The only point of prophets is to give the illusion of prophecy. Even if the story a prophet gives fits with what comes to pass that does not prove they have a private channel to God, it is just one prediction which matches events, when looked upon in the right light. Predicting the outcome of a war should be simpler than predicting the outcome of a football match and prophets rarely go in for predicting the half-time score, who will get the first goal or even the actual full time score, just whether it is a win, lose or draw.
What exactly is a prophecy? Is there a formal way of registering prophecies? Was there ever? In the universe of Harry Potter the Ministry of Magic makes a formal collection of prophecies but they are kept hidden away. Prophecies are dangerous because they are “information” about the future.
No doubt you are entirely familiar with the concept of the danger of time travel and what kind of calamities can arise if you have knowledge of the future. Ignoring science fiction and thinking about another genre of fiction think about what a danger a prophecy can cause if somebody sets out to thwart it, the mythical massacre of the Holy Innocents fits in here. But thwarting a prophecy is absurd, if the prophecy says a child has been born who will be king of the Jews killing babies is not going to thwart the prophecy because a real prophecy would see that coming and would send the child away somewhere safe, hide it in bulrushes or soften the heart of one of the killers. Anybody who knew anything about the Hebrew god would know he could be sneaky like that.
If prophecies are in the public domain misguided people will try to thwart them or encourage them along. Even now there are Christians and Jews conspiring together to start sacrificing a pure red heifer in order to found a third Jewish Temple (on top of Islam's third most sacred site) and so speed up Armageddon and the end of the world. I see that as a tad more irresponsible than buying a Hummer. And these people demand respect for their views, not just the fact that they have views but even the content of those views. Utter madness.