Irreligion (Book review)

     John Allen Paulos Irreligion (2008) Paulos examines the usual arguments for the existence of  a god, and demonstrates all the ways in which they fail. It’s worth reading for that alone, especially if you are one of those who has an itch to prove that a god exists. Paulos, unlike some of the more strident arguers against a god’s existence, accepts that spirituality is a human trait. I don’t know if psychopaths lack it; if they do, it would suggest why so many people tie good and evil to a god. Paulos admits that he has never had religious feelings, hence he doesn’t want to discuss spirituality more extensively. But his demolishing of the proofs of any god’s existence should comfort those who believe, as I do, that “God exists” is not a theorem but an axiom. What matters is what you derive from that and related axioms. The record of religionists is not good; their attempt to prove the existence of their god(s) doesn't help.
     There is of course a question that Paulos doesn’t deal with: What would be the (theo)logical consequences of a valid proof of a god’s existence? I think it would make that god contingent. The general form of the proof would be, “If this Premise is true, then 'God exists' is true.” But that would make that god’s existence logically dependent on the truth of the premise. Ontologically, that makes that god's existence contingent on the existence of whatever the premise asserts. That should give the God-provers pause.
     I think that we tell stories because that is the primary human mode of making sense of the world. Cause and effect are abstractions based on narrative structure or plot. Stories are models of what happened or what could happen. We demand that they have the ring of truth. Just as the smith knows the quality of the steel by the sound it makes on the anvil, so we know the quality of the story by how it feels when it collides with our experience, our sense of how the world works.
     Science is a communal story, created by the method of hypothesis testing. At any given time, the hypotheses we are capable of proposing are suggested and constrained by what we already know, ie, by what we understand of previous hypotheses tested and found robust enough to pass that test of truth. Our knowledge of how the world works is thus always limited. I believe it will always be limited.
     Myth is also a communally created story. It arises out of our sense that knowing how the world works is not enough. We want a satisfying answer to why.  Myth too must have the ring of truth. It must satisfy our sense of what it feels like to live in the world. We want to feel at home. We want to feel our lives have meaning and purpose. At any given time, our apprehension of a myth’s meaning is conditioned and constrained by our sense of the pattern of our life. This apprehension of meaning is limited. I believe it will always be limited.
     Read Paulos’s book if you want to free yourself from the trap of literalism and simplistic logic. ***