Do the Scriptures Refute the Case for God?

Do the Hebrew Bible and New Testament provide grounds not only for abstaining from believing in God but, further, for affirmatively believing that God does not exist? I think so.

The list of moral outrages detailed in the sacred texts is so long that it ought to prompt believers to engage in the intellectual process that Auburn University philosopher Roderick T. Long (adapting John Rawls's phrase) calls "reflective equilibration." This is the procedure (used by Socrates) in which a person who encounters a logical disturbance in his web of belief undertakes to adjust at least one of the constituent beliefs in order to restore equilibrium to the web. Equilibrium, which will likely be temporary because new evidence in empirical matters can always arise, consists in the constituent ideas not conflicting with one another; they need not affirmatively support one another, but they must not conflict. This is "negative coherence," and it seems to be the best way to acquire knowledge about the world. Since infallibility and omniscience are foreclosed to us, those cannot be the standards for any proposed epistemological method. It's precisely the fallible, and not the infallible, who need reason and logic.

How then shall we apply the procedure to the question at hand? A person who believes 1) that the Abrahamic God is real and 2) that he is all-good, -knowing, and -powerful ought to see a problem in the chronicle of atrocities that constitute the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. (I remind those who think the New Testament is free of atrocity to remember its most distinctive innovations: vicarious redemption and eternal damnation. In his earlier incarnation, God simply annihilated sinners.) That chronicle's conflict with God's billing ought to create a disturbance in a Jew's or Christian's or Muslim's web of belief. It is something that screams out for reconciliation. After all, if "logic fills the world," a contradiction in one's belief system indicates something is awry.

Some try to rationalize the sacred texts or interpret their way out of the corner, but I think that has got to fail. The accounts of genocide, small-scale murder, intolerance for all sorts of Others, slavery, and much more are too clear.

A believer might try to restore equilibrium by rejecting the scriptures; they are not the word of God. Okay, fine. But then how does one know God exists or anything about the Almighty? One might invoke the philosophical "proofs" for a creator, but that gets you no further than deism, a creator who's been on holiday for four-and-half billion years. I don't see how you get to God or Jesus.

Another route would be to adjust the concept God. Maybe he isn't really all of those great things. But how many believers would be willing to say that God is actually all-bad or at least not all-powerful? Not many, I venture to guess. Another possibility is that God is actually a committee of fumbling gods, some well-intentioned and others not so much. (H. L. Mencken playfully suggested this, I recall, and it has a certain appeal) I don't see this idea catching on. At any rate, the Abrahamic religions would be kaput.

That leaves one last alternative, as far as I can see. (If I've missed something, please let me know.) That is, rejection of the god idea altogether and the full embrace of reason and naturalism. At the very least, the God of the scriptures and his exploits are utterly implausible, as any reader of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great knows very well. But more fundamentally, the idea that something outside of reality can be said to be real is contradictory (or else a confession that one does not speak English fluently). It is more than reasonable to accept, à la Spinoza, that all that exists is nature in all its grand variety, and the natural world, unlike the alleged supernatural realm, is intelligible, that is, open to rational minds engaging in rational discourse. 

Ah, sweet equilibrium.