There is no evidence, whatsoever, that Jesus Christ ever lived, or, in fact, that any of the key biblical stories ever happened.
I have done some research now, after the ongoing raging debate sparked by my post “Why the atheists are just plain right” posted about a month ago. With just less than 100 comments, it’s certainly one of the more debated pieces on this site.
And so, perhaps, it would predictably be. Religion is one of those topics, and I’ve been less than polite on the subject. Ndumiso Ngcobo even wrote a long response piece of his own, which I perhaps too vehemently assaulted in the heat of the moment.
There are basic questions that have arisen in the course of this long and interesting discussion:
1. Does God exist? (Part one, in this article.)
2. Is the Bible true? (Part two, in a second part I will publish in a day or two.)
I will address these in turn.
1. Does God exist?
If there were such a thing as an enduring question for the human condition, it might be this. The real question might actually be: Does life have meaning, why are we here, is it all an accident or meaningless natural phenomenon, or is there some purpose to our existence? Or, do anygods exist?
No one — no atheist, no Christian, no Muslim, no scientist — can authoritatively answer this question. Not only can they not answer it now, but it may in fact be a completely intractable question to ask. From the inside of our existence, in which the only true source of knowledge is reason, we can know nothing beyond a shadow of doubt. And that means believers will always be able to point to some evidence in favour of God’s existence, and non-believers the opposite.
We just can’t know.
If believers think this is a meaningful concession on my part, however, they are wrong. For this agnosticism, to which any reasonable person should subscribe, allows only the slightest sliver of the God that the religious folk want to let in the room. It allows for the possibility that the universe is a directed phenomenon, caused by some force or entity that is its author. It does not permit the Bible or the Qur’an or the book of Mormon or the Kabbalah. It also, for that matter, doesn’t definitively exclude Zeus and Apollo, the Tooth Fairy, ghosts, UFOs or any other phenomenon that is not conclusively provable either way.
And, as someone alluded to in the discussion last week, we can’t even conclusively prove that the desk in front of us exists beyond all doubt. So this argument quickly leads us into an epistemological quagmire from which we cannot, maybe ever, escape. Whether it’s a limitation in our minds, or whether we are inside some Matrix-like context that inherently limits our knowledge at its borders, the fact is we are trapped into agnosticism of the grandest sort.
But also the least interesting sort. Since we exist and operate on a daily basis, we must assume, as a necessity, that what we directly experience and generally accept is true, and that metaphysical questions are fundamentally beyond our grasp. We are free to believe whatever we like in this context, and I wager we all believe something on this account (even if that belief is that we cannot answer the question), but we all equally knownothing.
And I mean this quite fundamentally: you tell me you have a connection with the universal consciousness like some Buddhists might, or you’ve spoken to God, or Allah told you to blow up a bus in Tel Aviv. Fine. But you can’t prove it, not to me, not to anyone. Have your faith, answer the intractable question this way if you wish, but you could never, ever, ever provide me with any incontrovertible proof.
If you find that comforting, you probably shouldn’t. Believing something in the absence of any objective proof is known by many names — delusional being among them. But, you will say, we are all delusional in the strong epistemological sense above, so who am I to throw stones? And so fine. This is why philosophers start off being good dinner guests and end up having to be forcibly ejected at 2am, having bored the rest of the party past the brink of tolerability hours earlier. Everyone is up for a good problem, but no one likes hearing there is no absolute solution.
If you’re puzzling over why this God’s existence doesn’t in any way support the Bible or Jesus’s existence, it’s because “god” in this sense does not mean the God you’re thinking of. It’s not Jehovah or Allah or Jah. Again, yes, it’s possible that one of these ideas of God is true, but only in exactly the same weak sense as the Tooth Fairy. The deity that generically cannot be proven not to exist is just a vague, general concept. This concept listens to no prayers and swallows up no enemies into the earth.
Sorry for you.
Which brings us to question number two: Is the Bible true? Did Jesus live?
There are not matters of faith, as it turns out. As I will argue in my next post.
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