THE LAST DITCH
Discussing my last post with a religious friend, I listed various things I would want to say to God were I to find myself mistaken in my atheism. Mostly they were complaints, most prominently to do with my late wife's unecessary suffering. Smiling, she asked me what I thought God might want to say to me at that imagined meeting. I laughed as these three words came to mind;
Get over yourself.
What do you think, if God exists, He might want to say to you?
“Thanks for not believing in me”
(I like to think that given the dearth of evidence, any God both good and rational would have more respect for those of us who doubted his existence than for those who took it on faith)
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Perhaps to answer the question we should put god or gods into perspective. It is safe to assume that any god or gods that the human minds have managed to create images of over the millennia are purely that figments of the imagination. For an atheist in which I count myself one of them a god or gods cannot be totally discounted as science has yet not been able to establish why or how our universe was created. If a god or gods exist then the question is who created that god or gods so we run up against infinity. So we have two problems one is that there are infinite answers to what god may say and the other is that we are an infinite time away from the point where we would understand the answer. However in the spirit of the question you ask I suggest that god would say to me “you live and die according to the strict laws of nature that if you did not you could not exist at all”.
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I hope he say’s something like- well, you tried your best
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I think God would say “Try harder next time son”
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next time ?
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“Your logic does NOT make any sense….”
He’d probably be right too.
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He has said it already – and to you too!
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I think God would be pleased that we are trying, as scientists, to Know What Is In His Mind. I’d approach his with my scientist’s hat on, and ask him if we were right about how it all seems to work.
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He has been pretty reluctant to give up that data so far, no? Worth a try, I guess. The question is, what response would you expect?
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48 hours on, I am still struggling with that paradox. Are you by any chance an ancient Chinese philosopher? 🙂
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🙂
It doesn’t strike me as paradoxical, but perhaps I didn’t phrase it very well. Here’s a quote attributed to Galileo, which covers the same idea:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
I suppose it comes down to what you mean by God. If The Creator is a hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional being who values truth and reason, I don’t think he’s going to be especially concerned about whether he’s loved by some ape descendants in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. To the extent that he regards us at all, I think he’d appreciate rationality.
If by God you mean Yahweh, then I agree that it’s unlikely he’d thank me for not believing in him. He strikes me as neither good nor rational. Based on what I’ve read of the bible, this description by Dawkins doesn’t seem unfair:
“””
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
“””
If he exists, Zeus help us all!
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I think there’s also a famous quote from Bertrand Russell …
If God were to to confront him at the Pearly Gates, and ask why he didn’t believe, Russell’s planned reply was reportedly
“Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”
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Christopher Hitchens had a variation on that one
“Sir, why did you go to such trouble to hide yourself?”
and for myself “Look god I know you are probably a busy man and if the bible was right you are probably pissed at me right now, but Where is my father?”
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think God would be pleased that we are trying, as scientists, to Know What Is In His Mind. I’d approach his with my scientist’s hat on
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think God would be pleased that we are trying, as scientists, to Know What Is In His Mind. I’d approach his with my scientist’s hat on
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And you are?
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Or…
So you felt it necesary to invent your own moral code and commandments – edited adapted and plagirized mine and then you couldn’t even stick to them. Sigh
You do realise your going to have to do it all again until you get it right don’t you?
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If I’m wrong in my absence of faith I suspect it will not be God that I have a conversation with, but the guy with horns and a pitchfork in the other place.
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I like that! More honest than having huge doubts and just engaging in arse-kissing!
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Jobrag if you end up there for doubting then the system is rigged. Probably you would have doubting Thomas there with you.
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Ha! You bumptious little bunghole! Where’s your logic and reason now eh?
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“You do understand this is lineball – it’s not a foregone conclusion at all.”
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“Don’t listen to all the crazy old men who wear dresses – they’re nothing to do with me.”
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As I’m an atheist, I rather suspect that I would hear (if one may paraphrase Rowan Atkinson’s “Devil welcoming the new intake”) Him say “Well, I reckon you’re feeling a right charlie!”
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Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.
Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.
He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that
“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
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The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
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