You Can’t See The Wind
The other day, I got an e-mail from a Christian claiming that I should believe in God even though I can’t see him. After all, I can’t see the wind either and yet I surely believe in the wind, right? As absurd as this argument is, it is not the first time I have heard it. Not by a long shot. It is almost embarrassing that I actually have to talk about this, but Christianity is an embarrassing belief system.
First, as a point of fact, human beings have five senses, not one sense. Sometimes, as a slang use of the term, people use “seeing” to represent all five of their senses. With that in mind, yes we can “see” the wind. We do have sensory experience of the wind. We don’t have any sensory experience of a god let alone a particular god.
Second, even if we had no sensory experience for something in the natural world, that doesn’t mean that we should automatically reject its existence. We also have a sixth sense (and no, I am not talking about psychic powers). We have our capacity to think. Using this “thinking” sense, scientists have developed tools which allow us to sense more than our senses allow.
Any one who has even a small degree of scientific knowledge should know that the human eye can only see a very small part of the light spectrum. The human ear can hear only a small part of the auditory spectrum. But through technology, we are able to see and hear far more than our eyes and ears normally allow. This has enabled us to know more about the universe than our five senses alone permit.
Even though we can experience more using this sixth sense of thought, we still have no sensory data which would even suggest the existence of a deity let alone the particular deity of the Old and New Testaments. This isn’t to say that such a deity can’t exist, but it does say that we have no valid reason to even suppose that it does exist. In fact, all the “effects” that were once attributed to gods and a god are now attributed to things in the natural world which science has allowed us to experience or “see.”
Science has pushed the effects of God into the gaps of understanding. In other words, what science has not yet explained has been deemed the work of God. Unfortunately for God, scientific understanding is growing at a pretty fast rate and that means that the work of God is shrinking at a faster and faster rate. This “God of the Gaps” as he is called is losing. The more and more science is able to explain and allow us to experience, the less and less God is needed to explain those things which humans can not experience. God quite simply is now defined as what can’t be experienced through our sixth senses (five senses plus thought).
The only sense that can seem to experience any type of deity is the “Faith Sense” which is to say that you should just not worry about your five senses and just not think too hard about it either. Just believe blindly on faith. That is the final gap that God is relegated. No sense points to god. No reason can reason god. Instead, theists (those who believe in a deity) claim that we should just believe for no reason. All they can say is that we need to have faith and not think about it. That’s pretty weak.
Filed under: anti-intellectualism, faith, god of the gaps, Religion, science
