God and Fairy Tales

Underappreciated Oxford theologian Alister McGrath asks very bluntly if atheism is not in fact a delusion about God. This came at an appropriate place: the concluding sentence to his anti-Dawkins manifesto, The Dawkins Delusion? The book isn't spectacular, but this point is decidedly pertinent. Too many non-theists who criticize religion have skewed concepts about God, even if their attacks on religion are warranted. My favorite infamous example: well, there may be no evidence against the existence of God, but neither is there evidence against unicorns or leprechauns, so what's the point, man? The pulse behind this claim isn't rational, but purely rhetorical. And you'd be surprised at how prevalent this opinion is, almost always in the hands of non-philosophers, and that's good enough reason to investigate further.

The problem is that unicorns and leprechauns, and all other make believe fantasies, carry with them emotional tags that lead one toward incredulity to begin with. They're invented entities, and that's why. Nobody believes in leprechauns not because there is no evidence for them, but because they're fairy tales to begin with, and nobody sane juxtaposes fairy tales with serious metaphysical possibilities. Without secretly begging the question, of course. Substituting fairy tales with purely possible phenomena that haven't been validated but don't evoke incredulity is more appropriate. There is no proof for extraterrestrials, but the expansiveness of the cosmos provides plausible ground for its possibility. Not surprisingly, folk like Dawkins et al. hold this very position.

Analogously with God. There is no proof for Him, but the metaphysical conditions of existence make Him fair play as a possibility. What matters is fittedness, or how well a claim explains an overall picture of reality. And so far as this is the case, God is as good or better a claim than an eternal universe without Him. There is no evidence, correct, but metaphysical claims don't coincide with evidence. They look before evidence. They constitute the ground on which sensory conclusions rest. To ask for evidence for God carries no better substance than asking for evidence of evidence.

The real problem is religious presuppositions, and given that religion deals to a degree with falsifiable claims, any claim it makes that is knocked down by science should be knocked down. Part of the reason why God is in eclipse (as Buber claimed) is because too many religious individuals are ignorant of where science stands and how strong its claims on certain subjects are (including their own falsifiable ones), and they childishly confuse a religious experience as proof of God that they think legitimizes their contempt for non-religious worldviews.

So the unicorn-based rhetorical hogwash is somewhat appropriate, even if it's ultimately fallacious. It's just as fallacious to say that God exists because there is no proof against Him. All the same, non-theistic counterarguments need to keep the ground free from hidden question begging with imaginatively constructed examples. The most logically feasible approach to any theistic standing is silence. When presented with the question "why" in view of God's existence as a metaphysical starting point, the only ground to tread is personal experience, which itself entails assumptions as well (notably the validity of intuition). Grace, if there is such a thing, draws through a reflection off of the heart, not the insatiable intellect.