Every reasonable person with a brain can imagine a universe without a god. [View All]

[BurtWorm]

Because that is exactly what meets our senses--a godless universe.

Some may say they see and hear God, but do we want to call such people reasonable? Do most people who believe in God experience it with their material senses? Do they believe god is visible, or audible, or palpable, or scented? (Let's leave aside the question of whether eucharist wafers and wine are god.)

Perhaps someone in this forum could defend the position that god is materially sense-able. But wouldn't most reasonable people agree that to have an experience of god requires using the mind alone? Isn't god supposedly transendant of matter?

All right, then: why is it so difficult for those who believe in god to accept that the universe that meets the senses may be all the universe there is? That god may be nothing more than wishful thinking for a superhuman behind the curtains of an oftentimes frightenignly indifferent-to-humans universe? In other words, why do so many theists believe that the default position for every reasonable person is an unreasonable position? (I have my own suspicions, and they involve two words: cognitive dissonance.)

These questions are not intended to attack or undermine or convert those who believe in god. They are intended to elicit thoughtfulness about a theist idea about the unsoundness of atheism that I see all over the place. For example, in a book I've just read--a yet-to-be-released Iraq war memoir called Joker One by Donovan Campbell--the author, after losing one of his most beloved platoon members, undergoes a crisis of faith. He ultimately concludes that to disbelieve in God is intellectually untenable, because it means there's no point in living or dying. The universe without god, he implies, is meaningless and purposeless. That just can't be, he concludes. It's irrational to think so.

This struck me as wrong-headed on the face of it. Just because we don't want our loved ones or ourselves to die for no reason, it doesn't follow that we must, therefore, die for good reason. War, in fact, is an excellent example of people's lives being wasted for no good reason *on earth.* So some of us have to assume that there must be a good reason "beyond" earth. It doesn't make it so, however. That should be obvious to any reasonable person.

So again, why is the default position--that the universe that meets our senses, for better or worse, is all there is--the untenable one for theists? Do they *honestly* believe that their position is more reasonable?