The Problem with God

Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong

Peter Steinberger

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535205
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Whether people praise, worship, criticize, or reject God, they all presuppose at least a rough notion of what it means to talk about God. Turning the certainty of this assumption on its head, a respected educator and humanist shows that when we talk about God, we are in fact talking about nothing at all—there is literally no such idea—and so all of the arguments we hear from atheists, true believers, and agnostics are and will always be empty and self-defeating.

Peter J. Steinberger's commonsense account is by no means disheartening or upsetting, leaving readers without anything meaningful to hold on to. To the contrary, he demonstrates how impossible it is for the common world of ordinary experience to be all there is. With patience, clarity, and good humor, Steinberger helps readers think critically and constructively about various presuppositions and modes of being in the world. By coming to grips with our own deep-seated beliefs, we can understand how traditional ways asserting, denying, or even just wondering about God's existence prevent us from seeing the truth—which, it turns out, is far more interesting and encouraging than anyone would have thought.

1

THE PROBLEM WITH GOD

Late one night in the summer of 1969, sitting at a red light on the corner of Webster Avenue and Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, I had an epiphany.

Now traditionally an epiphany is a kind of religious experience. For example, there’s something called the Feast of the Epiphany. You may have never heard of it, and if you haven’t you’d hardly be alone, but in certain Catholic circles it’s actually a fairly big deal. The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the moment when the Magi—the three wise men—suddenly realize the divinity of Jesus. That was their epiphany, in Palestine. My epiphany, in the Bronx, was different. It wasn’t a religious epiphany. It was the opposite. It was a rational epiphany, an epiphany of reason. But an epiphany nonetheless.

So there I am, sitting in my beat-up Plymouth Valiant, waiting for the light to change, surrounded, front seat and back, by the Archives—meaning all the old newspapers, maybe three months’ worth, maybe even six, that I hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. Even though it’s two or three in the morning, it’s still really warm. And humid, very humid. The air-conditioning isn’t on, because the Valiant—it’s a ’63—doesn’t have air-conditioning. So the windows are rolled down, all the way. But there’s no breeze. And the Bronx, at least on that corner, is a ghost town. Nobody there, nobody at all. No cars. No people. Utter silence. Kind of spooky.

But then I notice that in fact I have company. On the sidewalk, across the street from the driver’s side, leaning against a lamppost, there’s an old guy. Just leaning there, all alone, looking at me. I look back at him. And I realize that he is—as we used to say—a bum. There’s a bum on the corner at three o’clock in the morning in the Bronx, just standing there. And in fact—the Bronx being the Bronx—there’s really nothing too surprising about that.

But this turns out not to be your ordinary bum. Because he looks at me, our eyes meet, he straightens up, points his finger, and intones across the roadway in a raspy voice: “Repent young man! Kneel down before God and pray!”

He has scraggly gray hair, a thick, scruffy beard, and no teeth. He looks like Gabby Hayes. Now for those of you who are a lot younger than me, Gabby Hayes was, after a fashion, a star of the silver screen. I was actually one of his fans. That’s because I loved old Hopalong Cassidy movies—there were dozens of them, and as a child I watched them on television most every Sunday morning before anyone else was up, right after “The Modern Farmer”—and Gabby Hayes was Hopalong’s comical sidekick. In those days, every cowboy had a comical sidekick. Gene Autry had Pat Buttram, Wild Bill Hickok had Andy Devine, and Hopalong Cassidy had Gabby Hayes—a grubby, gnarly, utterly toothless old cowpoke with sore feet, a quick scowl, and a sheepish grin, though also a tough enough customer when the chips were down. Gabby had a signature phrase: “You’re darn tootin’, Hoppy.” That’s what he would say. He said it every time he agreed with Hoppy, which was pretty much all the time. And then, after he said it, he’d munch on his gums once or twice, just for emphasis.

I remember, when I was still a little boy, seeing a photograph of Gabby Hayes in Look magazine, attending some kind of Beverly Hills gala. He was wearing an Italian three-piece suit, exquisitely tailored. His hair was perfectly combed, the beard was trimmed, his teeth were in, and there was a large diamond ring on his finger. A dapper fellow, indeed. Even though I was just a kid, I suddenly realized that Gabby was making good money in Hollywood. Of course he was. Probably had a nice home in Bel Air, drank martinis poolside, dined regularly at the Best Places. I think that’s when I understood, really for the first time, the difference between an actor and a role. A mini-epiphany.

Anyway, there’s Gabby’s twin brother standing on the corner under the streetlight. Only he’s not wearing a three-piece suit. He’s wearing something closer to rags. “Kneel down before God and pray!” he says. “Pray for forgiveness!”

I laugh. I decide not to respond. Why would I? But then, for some reason, I change my mind. “Aw, c’mon,” I call out—good naturedly—into that otherwise silent night. “God’s dead. You know it and I know it.” I’m twenty years old, you see, and had read Nietzsche. Well, at least I’d read a little Nietzsche.

His face immediately brightens—like some old shipwrecked guy, all alone on a desert island, who suddenly sees an ocean liner on the horizon, heading his way. “That’s to you,” he says, not unreasonably. And then, perhaps just a bit tentatively, “but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I laugh again. “Maybe so,” I say cheerfully. “But let’s face it, pal, you don’t know what you’re talking about either.”

He blinks. And then he munches on his gums.

As I drive off and make my turn—this was not the road to Bethlehem, it was the road to 238th Street and Van Cortland Avenue West—it occurs to me, rather to my surprise, that I’m actually right. Neither of us knows what the heck we’re talking about. And believe it or not, I feel pretty good about that. It wasn’t often in those days that I felt I was right about something, and so it feels good—even if being right meant I didn’t know what I was talking about.

And then it hits me like a ton of bricks. Right there. In the Bronx. A ton of bricks. Neither of us, neither me nor the bum, knows what we’re talking about because, in fact, we aren’t really talking about anything at all.

I see it clearly. The world suddenly opens up. I understand. We don’t know what we’re talking about because neither of us is talking about a darn thing. I mean this quite literally. When we’re talking about God, we’re talking about nothing at all.

That was my epiphany. Might not seem like much to you, but to me it was staggering. And really, you should think about it. Because if I was right—and if I am right, since I haven’t changed my mind—then it turns out that an awful lot of people have been barking up the wrong tree for an awfully long time.

When we’re talking about God, we’re talking about nothing at all. That was my epiphany. That was my thought. And ever since then—sometimes in the back of my mind, sometimes in the front—I’ve been trying to work it out.

And by George, I think I’ve got it. In fact, I know I’ve got it.

Human beings—all human beings except small children and maybe some insane people—think about the world in terms of cause and effect.

Once we understand this simple fact, we can see that the question of whether or not God exists is literally a non-question. It’s a question that’s not really a question at all, because it’s not asking anything that makes any sense. It’s simply unintelligible—and there’s no interpretation, no line of thought, no intellectual strategy that could possibly make it intelligible.

I’m not saying here that the question of God’s existence is an incredibly difficult one. I’m not saying it’s very, very complicated, maybe too complicated for any one person. I’m not saying it’s something about which people will always disagree, or that it’s too bound up with our emotions to allow for clear thinking. I’m not saying that the crucial evidence is lacking and will always be lacking, or that the evidence, such as it is, will necessarily be inconclusive so that those who believe will never convince those who don’t believe, and vice versa.

I’m saying something very different: it is literally, utterly, completely, entirely and eternally impossible even to conceive of what a meaningful answer would look like.

The structure of ordinary human thought—the way that the everyday human mind, yours and mine, operates and has always operated—is such that it will never, ever make any sense to say that God either does or doesn’t exist. It’s literally impossible for ordinary human beings at any time and in any circumstance ever to imagine the existence of God, and equally impossible for them at any time and in any circumstance ever to imagine the non-existence of God. We will never, ever be able either to entertain or to deny God’s existence. These are thoughts that no ordinary human being can possibly have, because there literally are no such thoughts.

Theism, of whatever kind, must therefore be dead wrong. At the same time, atheism, however formulated, must also be dead wrong. And strangely enough, agnosticism must be wrong as well.

The argument is, in a sense, breathtakingly simple. Deep down—and sometimes not so deep down—it’s an argument we all know. We don’t say it out loud very often, we don’t make it explicit, we don’t often share it with our friends, but we know it. By the way, I’m not actually sure why we don’t say it more frequently or more openly, even or especially to ourselves. Maybe it scares us. Or maybe we just don’t remember it. Maybe we’re distracted. After all, we’re busy people. But things would be a lot better in all kinds of ways if we owned up to it—if we permitted ourselves to say out loud what we already know.

It is impossible—literally impossible—for us to imagine anything existing in the world that wasn’t caused to exist by something else. Everything that you see, touch, feel—every object, without exception—is an effect of a cause or set of causes. No object could exist unless it had been brought into existence by something other than itself. Nothing appears simply and entirely out of thin air, from nowhere. The idea of something appearing out of thin air is an idea we can’t have.

So for example: I wouldn’t exist if my parents hadn’t—well, you know what. But more, it’s impossible for me to imagine my existence without my parents having done the thing that caused me to exist—or at least without something functionally similar having happened, perhaps involving test tubes and embryo cultures and other scientific stuff. After all, I’m here. Sitting right here at my computer. Writing this book. That’s a fact. But the fact that I exist is a fact that needs to be explained, and the explanation has to be a cause. The explanation of my existence in the world has to be that something (or some number of things) caused me to exist. If nothing caused me to exist, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—exist. And so too for, say, the computer I’m working on. It wouldn’t exist if someone hadn’t made it. How could it possibly exist if it hadn’t been made to exist? It couldn’t. Or yet again: the rainstorm outside my window wouldn’t exist—and couldn’t possibly exist—without the atmospheric conditions and processes that produced it. Nothing exists, at least not according to our lights, that wasn’t the result of something else. It’s impossible to imagine something arising out of absolutely nothing.

Of course, things that cause other things to exist are themselves things that were caused to exist by still other things. If my parents caused me to exist, my grandparents caused them to exist; and my great-great grandparents caused them to exist. The tools that were used to make my computer were themselves made by other tools, which were, in turn, made by still other tools. The atmospheric conditions that created the rainstorm outside my window were the result of other, previous atmospheric conditions, which were the result of still other, previous atmospheric conditions, and so on.

In all of this, by the way, notice one important fact. For each and every case, without exception, the cause precedes the effect in time. The cause comes first, the effect comes later. Maybe only slightly later—maybe only a split-second later, maybe only a nano-second—but later nonetheless. Has to be. That’s part of what it means to be a cause and an effect. It can’t be the case that I was created before the act of sex that caused me to be created. The act came first. Of course, I would guess that my parents did have sex after I was conceived—and after I was born. Probably more than once. Not, I should add, a thought that I care to dwell on. But however that may be, those subsequent acts of sex didn’t cause me to exist. The one that caused me to exist occurred—had to have occurred—before I came into existence. Similarly, it can’t be the case that the tools that made my computer didn’t exist until after the computer came into being. How could those tools have made the computer if they didn’t already exist in the first place? Or, to put the same point in a different way, how could the computer have been made if the things that made it only came into existence after the computer had already come into existence? The cause has to come first. To deny this is to be profoundly dysfunctional, indeed utterly and completely out of touch with reality.

Now all of this seems straightforward enough, but there’s a problem. If everything that exists is preceded in time by something other than itself, by something that caused it to exist, then there must—absolutely must—have been something that existed before everything else, something that got the world going, some First Thing that caused the second thing and thus launched the whole process. It’s impossible for us to imagine that the world didn’t start. Something must have caused the world to exist. We must believe there was a beginning. We must believe that the world was caused by something other than itself. Remember, no thing comes out of nothing or from nowhere. Everything that exists was caused to exist by something else, and this applies as much to the world itself as it does to me or my computer. It’s just impossible for us to think that the world sprang up from nowhere.

And why is that a problem? It’s a problem because if we must believe in some First Thing that got the whole process going, then we must also believe that this First Thing existed; and if everything that exists must be caused by some previous thing other than itself, then the First Thing, like everything else, must have been caused by some previous thing other than itself—in which case the First Thing cannot have been the First Thing. We can’t think otherwise. No thing springs up from nowhere, not even the First Thing. So if something caused the First Thing, then we must, absolutely must, believe that there was a Pre-First Thing—or a Really First Thing—that caused the First Thing to exist. In which case, of course, the First Thing wasn’t really the first thing at all. It was the second thing, not the first. The thing that caused it to exist must have come first. But of course, the Pre-First Thing or Really First Thing must also have existed, hence must have been caused by something prior to it—a Really, Really First Thing. And so on, ad infinitum.

Think of dominoes.

Every year around Christmas, the big—and now-defunct—department store in my old hometown would set up a long column of dominoes. Hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand, all lined up like soldiers, one right next to the other, in a twisting, looping, labyrinthine path that snaked around and through a miniature winter wonderland. Each afternoon, at the appointed hour, they’d knock them down. The whole chain reaction, from the first falling domino to the last, took about thirty seconds. At night, they’d set them up again for the next day. Pretty neat watching them fall, especially if you’re, say, five.

A sad day it was, by the way, when that old store went belly-up. I don’t know what caused it to go under. I know something caused it to go under, I’m just not sure what. That store had, among other things, the best Santa—and as you’ll see, I’m actually pretty big on Santa.

In any case, there they are, the dominoes, all in a row, standing at attention, side by side, ready to be knocked over, one after the other. Now we know—assuming atmospheric conditions are right—that the very last domino will not and cannot fall until the one right next to it, the second-to-last domino, falls, knocking the very last one down. The fall of the second-to-last domino causes the very last domino to fall. And we know as well that the second-to-last domino won’t fall until its neighbor, the third-to-last domino, causes it to fall. And so on. But none of this will happen—no dominoes will fall, no five-year-olds will squeal with delight—unless and until the very first domino falls. The very first domino has to start the process by falling. There has to be a beginning, otherwise no falling dominoes. And so there you have it: the first domino—we might call it the First Domino—is what causes the whole thing to happen. But no, that won’t do. Because, of course, dominoes don’t fall by themselves, not even the very first domino. So if the very first domino falls, then something or someone—the wind, an earthquake, my friend Vivian—must have caused it to fall. Which means that the very first domino didn’t really start the process. Something or someone else did. Now let’s suppose the culprit was Vivian. With the casual flick of a finger, Vivian knocked over the very first domino, which in turn knocked over the second domino, and there they go. So it’s really Vivian who started the whole thing. Vivian’s the cause. But then we naturally have to ask: where did Vivian come from? Because Vivian herself didn’t appear out of nowhere. Something caused Vivian to exist. Of course, Vivian’s pretty much like me. She came into existence—she was caused to exist—by something her parents did; and they, in turn were caused to exist by something their parents did; and so on, ad infinitum.¹

But this “ad infinitum” stuff is no good. Because—and now let’s forget about domi...