By Vincent Bugliosi
When we talk about God, it is in the context of a 2,000-year-old conversation in which nothing significant has been brought to the table for a great many years. I had read the Bible and done much thinking about God and religion in earlier years, but I decided to go beyond this and completely immerse myself in the subject seven days a week, approaching it in the same way I would investigate a major case ─ objectively look at and draw powerful inferences from the evidence to see if almost universally accepted, centuries-old religious beliefs had any merit to them. What I discovered is startling.
Before I get to theism, let me briefly discuss my fine-feathered friends, the atheists, whose arguments have only convinced me of the embarrassing indigence of their thoughts. Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur. Certain of evolution (that bacteria actually evolved into a Mozart), they then argue that this eliminates God as the creator of the animate world. But this non-sequitur presupposes that God did not create these original life forms, and evolution took over from there. Leading atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris completely embrace the non-sequitur that if they can slay the dragon of organized religion, an unworthy opponent, they have slain God. But the opposite of God is no God, not no religion. Polls have shown that millions of people reject religion but are still firm believers in God. The world’s most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, actually believes (I am not making this up) that God doesn’t exist because the universe is extremely complex, and God, to have created it, would have had to be even more complex, which he finds too “improbable” to believe. You mean you can dispose of God that easily (and vacuously)?
The fundamental weakness of theism is that inasmuch as no one has seen God, a belief in him has to be based on faith; the very definition of faith is that it is a belief in the unknown, a belief in something without proof. But why should we have so much faith in something for which there is no proof? And why, in so many ways, should we want to see by faith what the eye of reason rejects?
We can know that the Christian God cannot exist. If he is all-powerful and all-good, as Christians maintain, there would not have been, for instance, the Holocaust and the many other horrors and atrocities throughout the centuries. Being all powerful and all good are two irreconcilable virtues. So if Christians insist on having a God, they can do so, but if they have any respect for logic they’ll have to redefine who God is.
Because the Christian God cannot exist does not mean, however, that there is no God who created the universe. We can eliminate through simple logic Christianity’s main non-biblical support for such a God, Intelligent Design; but the other principal argument for God’s existence, First Cause, is very difficult to get around and goes in the direction, though not conclusively, of a Supreme Being.
But there are many shaky pillars of theism. Without a belief in free will, Christianity (and Judaism) could hardly exist, since God’s justice in punishing evildoers could not be explained without it. But contrary to popular belief, when we look at the Bible, not only don’t we find any scriptural support for free will, we find, astonishingly, the exact opposite, that the Bible supports no free will. For example, Isaiah 63:17 says, “Why, Lord, do you cause us to stray from thy ways?” Some free will.
Romans 11:32 goes so far as to say that “God consigns all men to disobedience so he may have mercy on them.”
Another shattered pillar is that in view of the physical mortality of the human body, if the soul isn’t immortal there is no life after death. And if there is no life after death, what else would Christianity have to offer their millions of followers (life without end in heaven with God) or hold over their heads as a threat (suffering without end in hell)? Nothing. So Christianity needs the soul to be immortal. But, again astonishingly, there is no scriptural support for the immortality of the soul. It turns out that it all started with Plato, who employed four foundationless presuppositions to conclude the soul is immortal, and Judaism and Christianity accepted without question this doctrine that has greatly affected the lives of billions of people.
Most startling of all is the alleged birth of Jesus. The notion of such a birth first appears in Matthew 1:18. Matthew 1:22 expressly says this virgin birth was a fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy by the Hebrew prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 7:14. The enormous problem is that when we go to Isaiah 7:14 in the Hebrew Bible, there’s no reference to a virgin birth. Isaiah speaks of a child, a boy, being born to a young woman. He used the word almah, Hebrew for young woman. If Isaiah meant to say virgin, why wouldn’t he use the Hebrew word betullah, meaning virgin? Why use a word, almah, that he knew did not mean virgin? When Isaiah 7:14, whose words in Hebrew started it all, falls, so does Matthew’s virgin birth of Jesus, since Matthew bases his virgin birth on Isaiah 7:14 to support his assertion that Jesus was born of a virgin.
It should be noted that Isaiah did make a prophecy in 7:14, but it had nothing to do with a virgin birth. He prophesized that before the boy was old enough to know right from wrong, the kings of Israel and Syria would be dead, and the kings (Pekah of Israel and Rezin of Syria) in fact died around 730 B.C., which was close to 800 years before Jesus was even born. This conclusively proves that Isaiah’s prophecy had absolutely nothing at all to do with Matthew’s alleged virgin birth of Jesus 800 years later.
What’s the fallout from all of this? It couldn’t possibly be more devastating to Christianity. If Jesus was not born of a virgin, than he was born of a mortal man and woman ─ here, presumably, Joseph and Mary, and by definition, was not the Son of God. And if he was not the Son of God, the Christian doctrine that God had his son die on the cross for our sins goes out the window, too, in effect ravaging much of Christianity. I would love to hear what the Vatican’s response to this is. My guess is that it would rather stare into the noonday sun than address itself to this matter.
I believe the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension. Thus, my agnosticism. As Albert Einstein, who was an agnostic (so was Darwin), put it: “The problem is too vast for our limited minds.” But even if it were not, doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth, thereby opening the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. And as knowledge increases, faith recedes. Even though I don’t feel that a belief in God (theism) or disbelief in him (atheism) is unintelligent, I do feel that a certitude about either of these two positions, even a strong belief in them, which is so extremely common, is, perforce, unintelligent. Put another way, since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God. I have always liked Clarence Darrow’s observation about the existence vis-à-vis non-existence of God: “I do not pretend to know what ignorant men are sure of.”
The whole matter of God can perhaps be distilled down to this. Is there a God who created the world? Or is God merely a word we use to explain the world? In either event, God should only be a question.
