Rationalistic view on the concept of God

We can believe or disbelieve in a God only based on how the concept is defined. If ‘God’ just means a ‘two-legged being’, then surely, humans exist as two legged beings and therefore God in that sense certainly exists.

However, if ‘God’ is a word that means a ‘square with five edges’, then God definitely can’t exist. Let us see what can be the necessary attributes of any God.

Primitive societies assumed that forces of nature such as rain, lightning, wind, etc. were Gods. But the modern society does not treat them as Gods, because we know that they are not conscious. That means mere mindless energy or power does not represent divinity; God should have sentience and intelligence. Further, humans and many animals too are sentient and intelligent, and still, they are considered different than the concept of God. An animal’s or a human’s sentience, intelligence and other abilities still obey the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. So in addition to sentience, intelligence and power, any God candidate is also required to possess abilities that do not appear mundane and are inexplicable by science. This fourth attribute is the most important in identifying a God, and it has two variants.

The first variant is known as the ‘God of the gaps’. Arthur C Clarke had said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In such a thinking, an entity can be considered as divine as long as some new laws of science are not discovered to explain how the abilities were not miraculous at all. A highly evolved alien can qualify to be such a God, even though it will still be bound by the hitherto unknown laws of science.

Such a fallible, mortal and mundane God can be seen by humans similar to how a lab rat would see its human observers/experimenters. We can only be extremely agnostic as to whether such a ‘worldly’ God really exists or not. We can’t deny its presence with 100  per cent certitude; we can’t be atheists about such a God. But there is nothing ‘out of the world’ or ‘Godly’ about such a God, because humans can still hope to demystify and conquer the new laws of science that enabled such superpowers for that God.

That leaves us with the second variant of the God concept. A true God possesses abilities that science shall never be able to explain. This God’s abilities are ‘true’ miracles. 

To understand why science will never entertain such a claim, it is necessary to understand how science operates. In science, it is never valid to claim to possess the definitive knowledge. All scientific claims are temporary, subject to what currently appeals to be a logical conclusion based on currently available observations. And currently available observations are always finite. It can be shown that any number of finite observations are not sufficient to reliably confirm an observation as a true miracle. This thought was described by Laplace and can be summarized as “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. ‘N’ number of observations can always be explained in at most ‘n’ mindless rules. In that manner, science can always manage to explain any observations in terms of some existing or newly proposed laws, instead of acknowledging the observations to be miracles.

This might sound as a cop-out but such is the philosophy of science.

Occam’s Razor argues that, out of any competing alternative descriptions to explain a set of observations, one should always vote for the simplest one, in absence of any reason to believe otherwise. It makes no sense to believe in existence of some entity, merely owing to the fact that the entity seems possible to exist somewhere in the universe. If we see an empty patch of land, in absence of any compelling direct or indirect evidence, it is sensible to treat it merely as an empty patch of land, instead of assuming it to represent a pasture such that the grass is not visible because a cow ate it, and the cow is not visible because it moved on after having eaten the grass. 

(The author is a MBBS, M Tech  and has done Biomedical Engineering from IITB)