Henry Imler May 17th, 2008

Danny, over at Personman, claims that God is imaginary.  He points his readers to this site which outlines 50 reasons why God is not real.  Danny then takes two examples that be believes demonstrate that the God of the Bible is not an actual God.

The first line of reasoning concerns the body of Jesus - but not in a manner you would expect.  The Bible says that God was once in human form and then withdrew into the heavens.  Humanity has spent quite a bit of time looking in the heavens - no God to be had up there.  We have been to the moon and have peered light-years into the past, yet no we have seen “gold-plated kingdom floating up there. We see only the vacuum of space. But now God and Heaven have moved to ‘another dimension’ or ‘outside of space and time.’”

The second line of reasoning examines prayer.  Quoting Mark 11:24 and John 14:14, Danny establishes that if the Bible is true and there is a God, then prayers must be answered. Given this, the effects of prayer in human lives should be verifiable. However, Danny lists three scientific studies that demonstrate that it is not - Study 1, Study 2, Study 3.

Because prayer does not work and God, through the Bible says it will, and the Bible describes Jesus as physically going up to heaven and there is no physically visible heaven, then God is imaginary.

Danny issues a challenge to his readers at the end of the post - and this is the strongest portion of the post.  He says that if you cannot come up with concrete proof that our God exists, then “can you claim that your beliefs are any more rational than Islam, FSM or Scientology?”

I have a few problems with his arguments.  Firstly, he is operating from a purely empirical and rationalist standpoint.  We posit a spiritual God that is hidden.  Because of this, setting up a falsifying experiment (looking for a physical Jesus in a physical heaven) that does not test for what you are looking for is just bad reasoning.  Secondly, the prayer experiment does not test for a God, it only shows a non-positive correlation between two phenomena - outcomes of heart surgery (as in the last study) and prayer for that outcome to be positive.  It really does not show anything about God from an existential standpoint.  Lastly, and this is the most important point, if, on the one hand, you assume from the beginning that God does not exist the studies only confirming what you already think is the case; if, on the other hand, you assume beforehand that it does exist, then all you say is that it is not easily swayed to act as humans want it to act and that the study has wrongly interpreted those two naked sentences from the Bible.

Why does a presupposed spirit God have to be physically observed? I submit that we see indirect evidence of God everyday.  Wondrous mountains, the fibonacci sequence in nature, beautiful star factories, and the eyes of my niece all serve as indirect evidence of God’s hand in the world.

“Does God exist” is an unanswerable question from a purely empirical standpoint. We can interpret the observable phenomena as evidence for a creator/God or as natural and random processes.  What it comes down to is that Danny’s interpretive framework does not allow for a god who hides himself - mine does. It is a difference in framework.

What remains is Danny’s last challenge - why the God of the Bible?  To quote my good friend JR, “We have the best story.”  When I consider what I can see, what I can deduce, what I can reason, the story found in the Bible is the best one.  Buddhism has a nice one, but I don’t have their givens.

What do you all think?  I highly encourage you to respond to Danny at his blog.

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