I have never heard of the Evangelical pastor and Internet “celebrity” Joshua Feuerstein, but I read tonight that he has set a challenge to atheists. Prove or provide evidence that God does not exist and he will pay out $100,000! That is not as easy as it sounds!
Now I am not certain that there is no God. How could I be 100% certain? If someone came along with proof and evidence of God’s existence, I’d be surprised, but proof and evidence is a fair way of confirming whether or not a supernatural being is in control of our creation and our destiny. I’d have to accept that evidence, but so far I have not been shown any. And in the absence of evidence, I have come to the conclusion that there is probably no God. When I say probably, I mean probably, but in my mind I am utterly convinced that there is no celestial dictator, no supernatural being, and that “He” has been the figment of people’s imagination going back to a time, as Christopher Hitchens put it, when no one knew what was going on.
So in theory, anyway, I am as sure as sure can be that we are Godless, thank God, as they say. But Feuerstein wants me to prove there is no God. That’s a tricky one. Now, I cannot prove, beyond doubt, that there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden. Nor can I prove there is no Loch Ness monster. I cannot prove there is no such thing as a UFO. I cannot prove that the likes of Psychic Sally and Derek Acorah do not possess psychic powers. But, isn’t the onus on those who believe in these things to prove that they actually have the powers they claim to have?
No one has yet found any trace of Noah’s Ark, for example, which is odd since palaeontologists have managed to come up with countless fossils going back many hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps we should all visit the barking mad Noah’s Ark creationist zoo south of Bristol, where they tell us the world is only 6000 years old. But why do they say that? A bunch of creationists who ignore enormous banks of evidence and deny the fact – the fact – of evolution. The very people who call for atheists to “prove” God does not exist pronounce, in the face of mountains of evidence, tell us the world is 6000 years old, an opinion that flies in the face of all the evidence.
This is the trouble with “faith”. Faith is believe without evidence and yet faith is total. The fact of evolution, which essentially demolishes the threadbare arguments in favour of God(s), has come about through science, by permanently experimenting and seeking the truth. And for many, it is the truth that hurts.
I just don’t understand why people who are far better educated than me go down the religious route. I would like to live forever, for sure, preferably as a permanent twenty-something, in between a beach, a brewery and an army of nymphomaniacs who all look like Natalie Imbruglia and the 1970s version of Deborah Harry, but I know it’s not going to happen. Shame.
Mr Feuerstein’s $100,000 challenge is a nonsense because no one can prove that what isn’t there isn’t there, but it probably, almost certainly, isn’t. I am 99.9% sure there is no God. That’s the limit of my doubt.
One day, the world will look back on these days and wonder what on earth we were thinking about when it comes to religion. It’s a by-product of a time gone by when people were ill-educated and easily persuaded. A time when, as we say, no one knew what was going on.
We do know what’s going on now and the smartest minds tell us, without exception, that we did not arrive on this planet because of a God. I can’t prove that, personally, but science can. Science, always changing, always probing, always experimenting. Religion, stuck with same tired old texts from 2000 years ago, never changes, in the face of all the evidence.
The Godwhackers can’t prove there is a God, the rest of us can’t prove there isn’t. But in the immortal words of Loyd Grossman, let’s look at the evidence. And for God, there isn’t any.
