Michael Mitchell: Archive

When I think of God, I know it's imagination, that not only can I not prove God exists, His existence is impossible when considered with everything else I know. That's not a guess. I have zero doubts. There is no God. And that's the end of the issue for me. I'm an atheist.

I can't prove to you God doesn't exist, though. No one can. There's no proof of nothing. Therefore, there's no argument for atheism. It's not a belief, not even a false one. It's the absence of one. There are no "atheist arguments".

If you can't accept the fact your idea of God is completely arbitrary, if you need a contradiction in reality to reject the idea of God in your mind, then simply look at literally everything you know exists. God is nothing like anything else. Everyone agrees with that. That's neither an atheistic nor a theistic argument. It's not an argument at all. It doesn't prove anything. It actually disproves something, that not only does God not exist, He can't. He's beyond existence.

That's what you believe in if you believe in God. That's faith, believing in something without proof, without facts, without logic, without reason. If you're a true believer, then you won't even attempt to make an argument for your belief. You know God can't be pointed out or reasoned, that any attempt to logically prove His existence is a weakness in your faith.

(God bless Thomas Aquinas.)

Religious leaders won't admit it, but science, specifically modern technology, has really fucked up religion. It's very difficult to believe in a "higher power" while playing Minecraft on our cell phones. However, that's just the natural world, and even if we can't prove God physically exists, He was always "more" than that from the beginning.

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"God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist." -- Mahatma Gandhi

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Ayn Rand has a metaphysical principle: the primacy of existence. It means we can't be conscious of nothing, that first something must exist before we can be conscious of it. We're conscious of things that exist, but things must exist before we can be conscious of them. Existence has primacy over consciousness.

Consciousness isn't merely seeing something, however. It's differentiating between things, and for humans it's identifying them, not merely reacting to them instinctually, like bugs and animals. If all we could see was a clear blue sky, for instance, we wouldn't know we were seeing anything, not even the color blue.

Self-consciousness is differentiating what we see from the fact we're seeing it. It's not a thing; it's an action. It's not something we have; it's something we do. Consciousness is to our brains what running is to our legs or what boiling is to water. We can call it our "soul" or "spirit", which are merely different perspectives on it, but all it really is is awareness of reality, including itself, if it's human.

Existence, therefore, has to come first, obviously really, but more importantly, we have to always remember it, because we're in control of our consciousness and therefore fallible, capable of thinking of things that don't correspond to reality, that aren't true. It's easy if a truck is about to run our ass over. We're getting the fuck out of the way. We wouldn't think for one second that our consciousness of the truck created it, that we could just think it into and out of existence or imagine it's a cloud or whatever, but that's exactly what we think God can do, our explanation for how things came to be and are the way they are and act the way they act, how existence exists.

God is a consciousness that can control existence with His thoughts alone. We can't do it, and we know of no other form of consciousness that can do it, but somehow God can, by no means whatsoever. No matter how we think of God, he/she/it is always supernatural, above and beyond nature, something we can't possibly know, something we know can't possibly exist, yet somehow still does, in no way whatsoever, and somehow we still know it, by no means whatsoever.

Any attempt to identify God always leads to the impossible or the unknowable -- not the unknown, the unknowable -- which is the very reason why we invented him. To explain the unknown we accepted failure and imagined something -- a being or a power or whatever -- that is unknowable. We can't know God. So when we think of God, what are we really thinking of? We're thinking of pure consciousness, like boiling without water or running without legs, action without an actor: God's will. We know we can't transform a truck into a cloud with our minds, but somehow we believe God can think a tornado to rip our houses apart.

That's the primacy of consciousness, the opposite of Ayn Rand's principle. Most of us simply can't accept the fact that shit just is what it is. We need to believe a consciousness greater than our own is ultimately in control of everything. We need to know why a tornado ripped our house apart. Isn't that a good reason to reject the idea of God, though? If He exists, then He rips homes apart with tornados.

The "problem of evil" is not a problem for atheists. They don't believe in God, much less an evil God. The idea that the burden of proving God makes or allows evil things to happen is on atheists is absurd. A tornado is neither good nor evil from a universal perspective. There is no universal perspective. Shit just happens randomly, not without cause, but without reason, without any conscious purpose or intent. It's evil, not because some higher power is angry or whatever, but because it can hurt people, because it can destroy homes, or worse.

So what do we still need God for? The universe makes sense to us now. We've discovered laws it follows without failure. We've used science to explain things so well we can fly to the moon and farther. If there was a consciousness that could change reality at will, then those laws would be subject to change without warning, everything that exists would be just as unknowable as God is.