Last Sunday I went to church. It’s not somthing I normally do, but I did it to spend time with my grandmother, a highly devout Southern Baptist.
I’ve never cared for organized religion; it works well for some people, but not for me. I’d rather celebrate the beauty found in this world than try to figure out how it came to exist. Though, like a good philosophy major would do, I couldn’t resist coming up with a counter to a really bad argument that the pastor gave during the sermon on Sunday.
During the sermon, the pastor asked his audience, "What if an atheist comes up to you and questions your belief in God?" He continued by telling his audience to "ask the atheist how much knowledge she knows out of all the knowledge there is to know in the entire universe." Eventually the atheist (if she were humble) would admit to knowing a minuscule amount of all there is to know. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the atheist says that she knows about one one billionth of a percentage of all there is to know in the universe.
The next step in the argument, as the pastor explained, is to say, "You mean to say that out of all the knowledge there is to know in the entire universe, you yourself know so little? How can you be absolutely certain that there is no God when you know so little?"
Then the pastor’s audience on Sunday erupted in clapping and cheering.
All the while I kept thinking to myself: these pitiful fools! They take everything the pastor says as the truth even when his own argument is in fact self-defeating!
Ask yourself: how much knowledge does the pastor know out of all the knowledge there is to know in the entire universe?
You’d be correct if you said, "More or less the same amount of knowledge that the educated atheist knows." They both speak one language, know how to work a computer, know that the sun comes up every day, and so on and so forth. The Atheist probably knows more regarding his particular field of study than the pastor and vice versa, but in reality they probably know around the same amount of information as the other one does. So given the extent of what they know and all that there is to know in the universe, the pastor’s knowledge would be around one one billionth of a percentage.
So now the educated atheist responds to the pastor, "You mean to say that out of all the knowledge there is to know in the universe, you yourself know so little? How can you be absolutely certain that there is a God when you know so little?"
The main problem with the argument isn’t that the atheist can reverse it to make the pastor look as if he too cannot be certain of God’s existence, but rather the main problem is, in theory, a person can know barely anything and also can be certain that God exists.
Suppose God himself came down from heaven and proved to Jill, who hardly knows anything, that he exists. Jill would still know very little, but she would definitely know that God exists.
However, using the pastor’s argument, one would question Jill’s certainty of the existence of God because how could she be certain of his existence when she knows so little about the universe? In other words, it’s not how little or how much we know that matters. Rather, it is the close examination of the reasons we have for believing God’s existence that makes the belief so compelling.
I’m not trying to preach or anything. I don’t even know whether God exists and to be honest, I don’t even believe that the knowledge of his existence is what makes life meaningful in the first place. My point is, that pastors try to use these pathetic arguments to make non-believers believe in their religion when, in fact, upon further analysis, it makes them look quite silly.
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