A: If God does not exist, then Life is absurd.
C: Consequently God exists.
To see why A is true, suppose that you are camping and that lions are about to attack your camp, so you dress up as a ballerina and dance the tango with a twig in your remaining moments. That would clearly be absurd, but if God does not exist then there is nothing that we can do to avert the extinction of all that matters to us. We will not be remembered as who we knew ourselves to be, for all that we inhabit a world that is surely as we think it is, rather than as, say, the ancients believed it to be. Were the ancients just as they thought they were? Of course not. So, consider what will ultimately be known of us by the alien language-users of the future: we might be little more than twigs to them. And however they remember us, they too will inevitably perish.
To see why it follows that God exists, note that either atheism is true, in which case truth is relatively unimportant compared to practical considerations, or else God exists, and further note that if atheism is true, then we probably evolved to be well-behaved members of religious tribes. And after all, even if there were unnatural events, scientists could hardly accept any evidence for them as more probable than its deceptiveness, whence the absence of scientific evidence could hardly imply the non-existence of the unnatural. Furthermore, I have yet to discover why saying that finding no miracles amounts to finding evidence that this Universe has no Creator is not like saying that finding no typographical errors would indicate that some string of words had no intelligent author.
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I don't think that the initial proof works. A valid chain of inference would be: i) If ~P then Q. ii) But Q is absurd; c) ~~P, (so P). But your Q is actually "Life is absurd." [We can't let Q be "life" because this isn't a statement with a truth value.] So what you want to show is the absurdity of Q-- i.e. the absurdity of life being absurd. This will be quite a task.
ReplyDeleteOr (i) ~P, but (ii) ~P implies an absurdity, so (iii) an absurdity, whence (iv) P.
ReplyDeleteThat (iii) absurdity was only illustrated analogically, so I take your point. But an equally difficult task would be to show the absurdity of 1 = 0. We assume that it is not the case that 1 = 0, and I assume that it is not the case that life is absurd. I could give you some reasons for that assumption, e.g. pragmatic ones (of course).
Analogically, Descartes and Wittgenstein asked us to consider whether or not a god or demon could be fooling us about 2 + 2 = 4. If so, then absurdities would abound. And so not so. Maybe that is just wishful thinking? Anyway, that is also how I feel about the absurdity of life: maybe life is absurd, but maybe 2 + 2 = 5. We can hardly act on the assumption that 2 + 2 = 5, and I can hardly act on the assumption that life is absurd.
That is, I doubt that I could act rationally under the assumption that 2 + 2 = 5; and similarly, I doubt that I could act rationally under the assumption that my life, along with everything else, was absurd, that my life (and all its aspects) essentially concerned nothing more than the temporal persistence of certain patterns of chemicals (not unless I redefined ‘rationally’).
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me as if your second paragraph is an attempt to exploit the human desire for a feeling of safety, in order to convince them that a deity will swoop down from the sky and save them when this planet crumbles.
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