Prove It

There are a lot of people out there who like to flaunt their superior minds by saying that they don't believe God exists because no one has proved it to their satisfaction. I had a similar topic a while back addressing the other side, and I felt turnabout is fair play. Actually, self-righteous atheism gets under my skin the same way that self-righteous fanaticism of any stripe does, and not least of which because I have a hard time spelling, "righteous."

To begin, let us first note that all these self-aggrandizing purveyors of "logic" fail to realize a fundamental truth of the method: there are some things which are true, some things which are false, and a whole mess of things which are unprovable. I don't claim absolute mastery of Gödel, but his theory is pretty waterproof. So for any system of logic, most intelligent people would posit that God's existence is one of those multitude of problems which cannot be proved within the system. There are elegant proofs, indeed, that there are things which cannot be proved in any system, but I'm too dumb to understand them, much less regurgitate them in this space. So the intelligent response to people who demand proof of God's rationality (which isn't the one given by most religious types) is that you can't prove it, but that doesn't make it false.

With that out of the way, let's address some more rational arguments (I use that term ironically). If you demand that everything be proved before you believe it, you probably believe in science, right? Most adherents of these ideals seem to. If not, disregard this section. But if so, you obviously believe, as scientists have told you (more on this later) that electrons exist. Well, I defy you to prove that they do.

How can I make this neat defiance without worrying about the results? Well, Heisenberg tells me (and I also don't claim to understand all things Heisenberg, let alone be able to spell his name without help) that I can't see electrons and determine what electrons they are. Well, to be fair, he just said that I cannot both determine an electron's position and energy simultaneously. So I'll accept that there is such a thing as an electron, but you can't prove that any given electron exists. I want to see it with my own eyes (and you can't really do that anyway). If I can see it, I can't tell which electron it is, and if I can tell, I can't see it. You see the dilemma this poses.

Not to mention the fact that there are lots of things we can only prove by their affects on other things (you could make a case that this is true of everything, but I'm not interested in being that deep). Why should I accept their existence any more than I accept a supernatural power? I can't demand to see them, so why should I demand direct proof of anything else? I'm not saying I shouldn't, I'm just saying that if I worship proof as higher than anything else, I'm out of luck.

Then there is my favorite argument: taking things for granted. Note that I don't mean forgetting things exist; I mean the literal taking of things as truth without proof. We do this all the time and it doesn't affect us. If we demanded absolute proof of everything we experience, we would quickly go insane. So we accept certain things as truth without ever proving them to ourselves.

So I ask you, people who want proof of God, "Do you believe in Pluto?" It's not an idle question. You can't see it without a telescope, and even then it's a bit dicey. Mostly, scientists believe in Pluto because of its affect on other things. But no one has ever been there. So why do we believe in it? Because we've seen conclusive proof? Or because someone told us and we accepted it as truth.

And suppose you have seen conclusive proof. Suppose you've seen the photos of Pluto, or seen the abnormality of Neptune's orbit. That proof is based on other assumptions, and if you prove those assumptions you will find that they rest on further assumptions. Eventually they work back to assumptions everyone takes for granted. And occasionally, one of those assumptions that everyone takes for granted turns out to be provably false. And then where are you?

So am I saying you should never seek proof? Far from it. Examining your assumptions is a very healthy thing to do. But even great logicians realize that some things are conclusively non-provable one way or the other. So stop using the lack of proof for something as an argument against that thing. It's tedious and intellectually lazy. Instead of trumpeting lack of proof, you should have to prove that it's false. But then you fall into the topic previously mentioned, about how difficult proving something really is.