A Philosophical Issue

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Does God exist? Most people who don’t believe in God or the supernatural say the reason is because there is no evidence, or they simply see no evidence, that suggests that a God exists. However this is simply not true, nor is it a reasonable conclusion to make.

Disbelief in God, or lack of belief in God, is a matter of a philosophical viewpoint, not scientific evidence. You would have to have all knowledge of the universe to come to a scientific and logical conclusion stating that there is no God, because this is a negative claim. Even if you are someone who says you simply lack belief in God; that is, you just don’t even think about it or consider it; your “lack” of belief has still been influenced by a philosophical world view. Therefore if your opinion is that there is no God, you still hold a position here. To have an opinion is to hold a view, belief, or position, even if that opinion is a negative, the nonexistence of something. So the issue here is not a lack of evidence, it is a matter of what you have already presupposed to be true in your mind. If you don’t believe in God, it’s much better to hold a neutral position; a simple “I don’t know,” rather than a “no”. Ironically, most people who claim there is no evidence for God have never bothered to really take an honest and unbiased look at the subject and research to see if that is really the case. They simply come to their conclusion because their presupposed worldview simply does not allow for the supernatural to exist.

If you have already decided in your mind that the natural world is all there is, then there is no amount of evidence that will convince you otherwise, regardless of whether your view is true or not. Even if you were wrong and God does exist, it would be impossible for any amount of evidence to convince you of this, because anything supernatural which might serve as evidence for the existence of God would simply be explained in terms of natural causes, or would simply be labeled as an "illusion" or "hoax", such as the resurrection of Christ and the miracles He performed. In the scientific method, and the typical atheist mind, everything is explained through natural causes, not because we know that everything has a natural cause, but simply because the materialistic worldview does not allow for a God to exist, so the supernatural isn’t even considered. This is called the presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, which is a philosophical opinion, not a logical conclusion. It is a belief which requires a lot of faith.

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” (Dr. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 31).