I’m Over You, Jesus.

Posted by Max on Oct 3, 2011 in Rude.Notes | 4 comments

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?  Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?”

- Epicurus

The idea of a higher power is one of the long-standing traditions of human arrogance.  People have the funny idea that they can dream up an Omnipotent, unfathomable being and then fathom that being’s Will.  They then proceed to explain God and his/her/its Plan For Things.

Then they pass the hat.

As a boy I was always taught to believe that God created Man – and the Heavens and the stars – because He had a plan.  We were part of His plan.  Things all happened for a Reason.  Divine Purpose.  Furthermore, anything that didn’t go according to plan, or God’s Word or Will (or whim, I would come to find out) was sinful and punishable by an eternity in Hell.

God is Omnipotent.  He is all-seeing and all-knowing.  Nothing is beyond His Power.

As such, God knows all that is or was, he knows the Truth.  God is the Absolute Authority on Good and Evil.

. . . Or so I was told.

There was a part of my brain that wanted to accept God.

It wasn’t the part that liked to sleep in on Sunday morning . . .

The idea of an all-powerful Benefactor can be tremendously comforting.  When your life goes to shit, you humble yourself before God and pray.  If you truly believe, as only fools and children can, then there is no feeling that can match putting your burden up to God.

Except maybe a head full of acid on a sunny afternoon . . .

Unfortunately, even children have the capacity for logic.  Eventually I put together some of the glaring inconsistencies in the God story.

I’d like to introduce you to the Omnipotence Paradox.  You may have heard this one:

If God is all-powerful, can He create a rock even He can’t lift?

Whether or not this logical inconsistency is a valid test of God’s existence is up for debate.  The philosopher Thomas Aquinas argued that God’s omnipotence was so omnipotent that even logical inconsistencies couldn’t stop it.

Omnipotent omnipotence, if you will.  They have a pill for it now.

Rene Descartes acknowledged this logical paradox, but then completely ignored it and tried to use logic to prove God’s existence.  First he came up with something philosophers refer to as the cogito (cogito ergo sum):

I think, therefore I am.

In his Meditations, Descartes attempted to explain God something like this:

a) Somewhere in my imperfect brain is the idea of a Perfect Being.  Since my brain isn’t perfect, it cannot fathom a Perfect Being.  Therefore, the Perfect Being must have put it there!

b) So if God is Perfect, He has to exist.  If He didn’t, He wouldn’t be Perfect.

c) If God is Perfect, He would never deceive us.  Therefore, the world as we know it is real (and not a lie created by an evil demon).

Descartes had this thing about the Evil Demon.  He was afraid that if there was no God then an evil demon was filling his mind with a false reality.  This is the quintessential epistemological problem – one that the Wachowski brothers’ also wrestled with when writing the script for The Matrix.

The Wachowskis, of course, believed that enlightenment comes from a bossy chick in leather and latex, who works for a black guy in a long coat . . .

Descartes solved this problem by just assuming that there was a perfect God making things work because there had to be!

In a way, this is not far from the truth.

The reason the idea of God is so attractive is that people want Absolutes.  If God exists, and is Perfect, then he knows Good and Evil.  God is the source of moral authority.  Without God, or some “formal cause”, there can be no good and evil – we would degrade to the level of dumb beasts beating each other and taking things at will.

Man would never choose not to live under such wild conditions simply because they’re fucking unpleasant, would he?

So The Many Faithful believe that there must be some kind of absolute moral authority.  They willfully invent the idea of God to fill this gap.  People seem not to want to believe in the possibility that mankind is not only capable of doing horrible things, but that in a lawless (Hobbesian) State of Nature he will not be punished for doing them!

The idea of God as a moral arbitrator lets people believe in their social constructs.  It lets us ignore the possibility that underneath our laws and technology and “reality television” we live in an uncaring, amoral world.

God knows Good and Evil.  He watches from On High, and He will reward me for my virtues and punish the wicked who trespass against me.  Through God we can come to know Good and Evil, and with that knowledge we can abhor Evil and serve God (who is ultimately Good).

. . . But there is a problem with this.  According to His Word, Man was never supposed to have knowledge of Good and Evil!

God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, but instructed Adam not to eat from the tree.  Adam then instructed Eve not to eat of this tree.  You don’t need to know your Old Testament to know how this story ends.

If God placed the Tree in the Garden with no intention of letting Adam eat of its fruit, why did he place it there?  Furthermore, if God is all-knowing then he KNEW Adam would eat from the tree and therefore be cast out of Paradise.

If God is Perfect and omnipotent, then God deliberately set Adam up for failure.

You could argue that Eve is to blame for this – she listened to the Serpent and then coerced Adam to eat of the tree.  However, any omnipotent God would have seen this coming.  Hell, any married man would have seen this coming.

You can blame Adam for exercising Free Will.  But . . .

Being a good Heavenly Father, who walked with Adam in the Garden, God could have explained to His son:

“You asked me for companionship and I provided you with Eve.  I kept telling you that they’re more work than they’re worth, but now she’s here.

“I want you listen to what I’m going to tell you Very Carefully . . . Never trust a word she says, or I will throw your ass out of the Garden.

“Got it?”

This isn’t an isolated incident, either.  Later, in the Book of Job, God takes an even more malicious turn.

Job is known as a righteous man.  God rewards Job because of his righteousness, and so Job is a rich and prosperous man.  Satan challenges God, saying that Job only loves God because God gives him things.  God accepts the bet, and lets Satan torment Job.

God sits idly by while Satan ruins Job’s fortune, destroys his home, strikes Job with leprosy and kills Job’s entire family.

Being a righteous man, Job never curses God.

Eventually Satan relents, saying “[No shit, he really is one righteous motherfucker.]”  God restores Job’s fortune, his health, and gives him a whole new family!

What a swell guy.

Even though God is all-knowing, therefore KNOWING that Job will not curse him, God allows Job to be tormented and his family slaughtered!  Why?  To win a bet.

As Epicurus points out above, more eloquently than I can, if God isn’t omnipotent then he can’t be the source of moral authority.  If God is omnipotent, then he is a fucking asshole . . .