Philippine Atheists

What is god?

God is a being. God is a concept. God is a metaphor. God is nature. God is the sum total of our collective ignorance.

In short, god means different things to different people. Oftentimes, God means different things to different people of the same faith. So what really is god? Can we arrive at a universal definition of god? Much of the roots of misunderstanding in a god debate is that god is not well-defined and atheists usually suspect that because god exist only in the mind of its believers. For any dialog to continue, there must be a common ground where points of view can continue coming back to - a concept that should work as the pivot of the discussion. Specially in a god debate, god should not be left undefined or unbounded. Otherwise, the debate will most likely just go limbo. So what are some definitions of god? Recently, I came across a possibly new definition of god. Richard Dawkins says god is a scientific hypothesis. By this he means that the god hypothesis is in the realm of scientific inquiry and hence can be empirically verified or falsified. He is referring narrowly to a certain flavor of the god of the Abrahamic religions. I call this scientifically verifiable-falsifiable god the Dawkinsian god. This god is the god that is micro-managing the lives of some believers as the born again Christian would say “surrendering their lives to Jesus.” The Dawkinsian god is a god who is meddling with the natural world by influencing its events and outcomes by, presumably, its actions. Another attribute of this Dawkinsian god is that it’s hypothesized by the Creationists and Intelligent Design camps as The Creator, a designation shared by the Deistic god. According to orthodox Dawkinsian thinking, since god is the intelligent designer, and since ID hypothesizes that the irreducible complexity is the proof that there is an intelligent designer, i.e., god, this can be falsified by showing that the irreducible complexity is nothing but a failure of venturing further to really honestly find out what other natural cause or mechanism produced the apparent complexity.

What is your definition of god?

In an intelligently designed uiniverse, where is the giant centipede in the scheme of things? A giant centipede eating a bat or a mouse or a tarantula. That’s not only intelligently designed, it’s wicked and sick! The intelligent designer sure was creative.

As it turned out, it was the 197th anniversary of Darwin’s birth yesterday, February 12th. I would have totally forgotten about it if not for that article on Slashdot about Christians celebrating it as their own. Nothing really wrong or bad about it, but I wish they can be more vocal against their co-theists - the fundamentalists - and help stop the demonization of science in general and this person in particular, who in one fell swoop unified the many but disparate life sciences of his time - biological sciences, social sciences, anthropology, et cetera, and made it fit snugly and in complimentary fashion with the other theories of the non-life sciences of his time by discovering (Alfred Wallace discovered the same theory at about the same time) his theory of Natural Selection as the main driving force of speciation as put forth methodically in his landmark book Origin Of Species first published in 1859. Continue Reading »